Mind Webs - Sword Game

Welcome to a half hour of mind work, short stories from the world's expected

Anavila Award Stories 4, a collection edited by Paul Anderson. This is Sword Game by H.H. Hollis.

Late in the afternoon of an ugly fall day, a 40-year-old topologist employed to teach mathematics

at a university despised, bored by students and frightened that he had done everything

of significance in his life that he would ever do, blundered head down into a group of students

handing out flowers and hand-bills. Before he could retrieve his dropped book bag and move

on to continue composing in his head a memorable letter of resignation, his eye had fallen

on a grubby teenage girl, and he was hopelessly entrapped. Thinking to break the spell, he boldly

said to her, and he heard you in my class an elementary topology. She licked the raspberry

snow cone she was holding and said without a trace it was mild.

You must be mad. I'm not a student just a wandering gypsy fortune teller. He had a place

we could go and I could tell you fortune.

The mathematician knew she was no gypsy for your modern urban ruminine never allows himself

for herself to be as dirty as she was. He was certain she was putting him on, but his

mood of desperate boredom was such that he said, crazy gypsy, fall up to my pad and

tell fortunes and other lies to each other till the world melts. They left hand and hand

under the eyes of forty witnesses. Within their own subculture however the rubble students

conformed to a rigid code, they would have died rather than give information to the fuzz

or even to the dean of faculty. So the professor's absolute breach of propriety and picking

up a student went unremarked and unreported.

When he had taken off her clothes the girl was every bit as dirty as she appeared to be,

but this only made him more determined to take advantage of her. Later he persuaded her

to shower by promising to bathe with her and she looked when she left with her rum-colored

hair in too long plates like a fresh scrub girl scot. The crust turned out to be her equivalent

of the makeup squares used. When he came past the common the next day she was as delectably

grimy as ever and she held a fresh snow-cold purple with grape syrup. The two joint hands

and went directly to his apartment. The young woman hardly spoke until late in the evening

after the shower together. She was tolling her hair and the information came indistinctly.

I went to the provost office today and told him about us.

The professor was so uncharacteristically content. He contemplated the ruin of his academic

career with pleasure. All right big mouth, are we going to live?

I'm not really a gypsy, but I was really in a carnival once when I ran away before. I

know how to dodge swords in a sword basket. Could you be an East Indian sword magician?

We could take up a show somewhere and travel right along with him.

By God I can do better than that. It's been a long time since I did any engineering work,

and I have a little laboratory curiosity that'll just fit the bill. Come with me to the

animal house on the basement of the psyched apartment. I'll show you something new who won't

believe.

Rimey baby, you'd be surprised at what I can believe.

They were paired to the noise and cages in which the experimental animals were kept, and

the professor is secured a sturdy mouse. Selecting the few strips of clear plastic from

Iraq, he led a burner, and uncorked a container of plastic adhesive. In a few minutes the

topologist had cobbled up a container which defied the eye to define its exact shape,

but which most often seemed to be a lumpy cylinder. In a trice, he thrust the mouse in and

clapped the square top down. The mouse could be seen through the plastic, but he seemed

to be in a single fixed position floating in mid-air with his paws and tail extended

just as when he was inserted. Heeding the pointed rod, the professor pierced the hole

first in one side of the bulgey cylinder, and then in the other. In a moment when the

long pin had cooled, he introduced a sharp point through the hole again, and having located

the mouse properly, skewered the rodent through the heart so that the point of the sharpened

rod came out the second hole. Swinging the cylinder over the girl's hand with a little

shake, the professor deposited a tiny drop of bright arterial mouse blood on her wrist.

As she looked at the crimson drop, tears appeared sparkly on her eyelids.

Big deal, big man. Mouse murder. I don't think a wild mouse would walk into that plastic pipe,

do you? Hard of my heart, it's not a pipe. It isn't even a cylinder and it certainly

isn't a mouse trap. This is a tesseract, as you'd know if you'd ever read a popular work

on topology. Oh all right, I know what a tesseract is, an expanded cube, a cube with a cube

on each face. That mouse cage doesn't look like six cubes surrounding a cube to me.

No, no, otherwise our mouse would be dead all over. See, this is a tesseract, which is

a temporal illusion. A temporal illusion. Yeah, baby, a temporal illusion.

The apology teaches us that mathematical properties can be quite independent of a parent

shape. A circle is still a circle, even though it looks like a scallop pie crust, as it may

if it's drawn on a wavy surface. Now this mouse cage is a cube cage, which is partly

displaced along the dimension of time. That's why it appears formless and shifting here,

feeling. Sure enough, to the touch it was solid enough. A cube with a cube on each face.

But even when held in the hand and sensed by touch, the object still appeared to be a

rippling cylinder, and the mouse still appeared to be stock still. This mouse looks dead,

yeah. Bethleh, you're the topologist, withdrew the tiny sword, pried off the top and shook

Mr. Mouse out in his hand, with a charming little fellow at once set up on his haunches and

waved his four paws as if demanding cheese. How did you do that? Well simple really, the

exterior flickers in and out of this moment of time because of the subtle twist I'm part

of the shape when I made it. But the inside is fixed in time because much of the internal

mass is stretched all the way around the very large, but finite continuum of space and

time, which is our universe. This little rascals time has passed so slowly that the powerful

regenerative and repair processes of his body have worked as if instantaneously, and the

apparently mortal wound I dealt him. I was no more than a pin brick. You think you could

get into a large tesseract like this one and let me run a rapier through you knowing it

would do you no harm? Oh yes, lover. That'll be much more of a mind-buster than some

old wicker basket that everybody knows I dodged the sword in. So they hide themselves to

a plastic supplyhouse and thence to a dog and pony show that was in the neighborhood. And

for a long time, everything went like a guided trip with Tim Larry. Audiences were transfixed

by the girl's beauty. She was considerably cleaner under the difficult circumstances

of carnival trupping than she had been or soap and water were conveniently to be had. And

when the topologist drove a sharpened fencing foil through her lovely body, clad his lightly

as local ordinance allowed, the crowd's gasp. When the box was rotated to show the point

of the sword in carnivine, strong men fainted. Later they would press forward and play

a dollar apiece to examine the tiny wound as it closed up and disappeared, usually made

way up her delightfully articulated rib cage. Trooping the carnival together wasn't

a idol. Still, even if 40 years is not old, neither is it young. And the doctor of mathematics

at the last realize that he was bored again. The girls vocabulary never enlarged itself

appreciably, and the snow cone remained her favorite confection. The difference in their

ages was sufficient for their basic sex attitudes to be irreconcilable. For him, a certain

overtone of the forbidden gave carnal love its highest emulation, but for her sex was

just another natural function like perspiring or excreting so that the level of their

love-making remained at mere technical proficiency. After the fashion, her generation had adopted

she was faithful. There might be others later. Her manner implied by its playfulness,

but for now, she did not share her favors out. He was denied even the sourish advice

of jealousy. At the end of very last appearance each evening, she was often wearing only transparent

pantaloons and a shiny little brief. And when they had walked back to their quarters,

she would hold up her arms and stamping her naked feet softly like a herm dancer say,

help me get ready for my bath, lover. If he approached and began to roll down the waist

band of her sateen pants, she would drop her arms and begin to undress him too. Later

they would bathe each other. They had almost no other conversation. At last the idol

became an enslavement to the professor. He found some respite when he learned that a

Hindu torture man, their neighbor in the show, slept on nails, bored boiling lead in his

eyes, and so on, was a failed MA in mathematics from the University of Wall of Pindi. By talking

to him, the topologist was able to keep from going quite mad. Still, he was a little

off. He loved the girl and dreamed only of what he would do when she left him, but

she would not leave and continue to raise her arms to him and stamp her feet, as exquisitely

irritating as a kitten, which continues to claw one sock after one is done, playing

with it. He began to do everything badly, even their turn in the show, which had never

much interested in after he put the big testor act together. Once he missed the hole with

his thrust and the plastic deflected the point of the foil into his toe, this was a real

wound. In real time, not spread along the spacetime continuum and was extremely painful

for a week. Each time he limped, the pain made him more resolved to be quit of her, until

it last his fertile topological minds on the way. He had a regular armor-ware store of swords

with which he made play in their act, and one evening, he laid handy next to their bed,

a very possible imitation of a Roman short sword. And the day that design had been a great

technological breakthrough for the weapons makers, and was beautifully shaped for destructive

stabbing. When they came in that night, he skimmed off her tawedray cape with a flourish,

and as she lifted her round arms and stamped one foot, he peeled the bottom of her costume

off, and one extravagant gesture, and then gave her the pleasure of chasing him and tearing

off his garments. As they were tolling each other after their ritual coupling and bathing,

he kissed her tender, but preoccupied as it were, and said, my dear, would you mind letting

me practice that last pass in the act? I just don't seem to be putting that foil home

right. She was so pleased to have him pleasant again that she scampered into the spared

tesseract they had in their quarters. A few drops from the bath still glistening on

one flank. She turned her face up to him with a grin that almost made him reconsiderly,

a reversible act he had planned. Then he remembered the months of boredom and hardened his

heart. Besides the way he tapped the top home, without a tremor, he put the Roman short

sword as nearly into her heart as he could judge its locations with a subtle time shifting

on the plastic. With that, he snapped off the blade so that the sword also was within

the spread, slowed effect of the moving time field, and gave the construction a knowledgeable

kick or two which caused it to collapse into itself. Instead of a knobby cylinder, as it

had appeared when it was an expanded cube blurred by time, it now appeared to be a single

cube about six inches on the side with an abstract pattern in each face. The collapsed

cube was much heavier than it looked, but not nearly as heavy as the girl. For a substantial

part of her mass was distributed along the hull of the cylindrical, spherical, space-time

continuum. As he gazed at the mirror like surface of one square face, and eye and eyebrows

slowly spread flatly across the plane. But there was neither panic nor recognition as

he stared into it. He realized that to the occupant of this peculiar box, his movements

were so fast and appearances to be a mirror blur. Whistling the professor packed the weighty

cube into his bag and strolled off the lots, casually remarking to his old Hindu neighbor,

so long we're jumping this flee circus. And by changing into one of his winkled natural

shoulders suits at the bus station, he simply disappeared. As cracks, the swordsman of time,

his carnival billing, and reincarnated himself as a topologist of considerable talent who had been

vaguely unsubbatical for a while. The frustrations that had so nearly consumed him before his

adventure seemed to have been burned and perched away. He settled with pleasure into a new

academic routine and became expert in its execution. Once in five years, perhaps he had a really

promising student, but the scarcity no longer bothered him. As he advanced up the ladder of

academic tenure and performance, he was able to place a few brilliant people about himself,

and life was as good he now knew as it was ever going to be. The heavy cube was a paperweight on

the desk in his apartment. No one else ever recognized the shifting abstract patterns in its

silvery sides as the apologized contours of a dead human being. At great intervals,

there would drift across one face or another, the prism some recognizable and atomical feature

with which the professor was intimately acquainted. He would feel a vague regret for his act,

and the light stirring as of the ashes and cold great of his appetite for the one

the adventure of his life. He would stuff his pipe during the pages of the journal of topology

and immerse himself once more in the calm, sweet life of the university.

When he was sixty years old and almost bald, there appeared in his classes the

student of his dreams who understood everything he said in his arcane, especially,

and applied with fresh and elegant insights into the intuitive sort of math in which they both

delighted. Objectively, he knew the boy was neat and trim rather than handsome, yet subjectively,

and privately of course he was very proper now. He always felt the boy was good looking.

This feeling puzzled him until one day had a move of stackable old college annuals,

and browsing as one will he suddenly came upon his own senior picture.

His best student was enough like his youthful self to be a double, or at least a younger brother.

Shortly after that, the professor can find the story of his escapee to the boy. He could not have

said why he did so, and it was certainly not wise, but the student was beginning to betray the same

weird talent the professor had for translating topological abstractions into hardware that

did peculiar things, and somehow the tale just told itself. It became very fond indeed of his

disciple. The boy, who affected the total aim orality which was the fashion of his generation,

was nevertheless shocked, but he was also intrigued. He picked up the box and shook it.

Hey, maybe she's alive. After all, inside it's only been an instant. Let's unlock it.

I don't mean you're ridiculous. The professor said taking a cue back and setting it on his desk

in the deathlet manner. In the first place, he's not alive. Well, she's in the construction. There's

no evidence of the crime. And second, if she were alive, she might go to the police. Her wish yet,

she might expect me to take up that dreadful boring liaison with her again. And in the third place,

we can't unlock it. That was a whole point of breaking the sword. Acubes, a closed system now,

and no part of the interior is available to this aspect of time and space. Eventually, she'll be

equally distributed through the entire universe. Oh, absolutely not. I forbid you to think about it.

Why not you're going to give me that paper on topological re-intervertebrates?

Conversation language. The student shortly took his leave. A day or two later, the professor

found the boy affideling the edges of the cube with a device made of mirrors, and they had a genuine

quarrel. The gradually they fell back almost into their former sympathetic teacher's student

relation. One day, the student appeared in the professor's apartment with a tiny,

glittering piece of metal in his hand, the shape of which was extraordinarily hard to see.

The whole thing seemed to flicker in and out of the mathematician's sight.

What the hell is he got there? That's a chrome-plated self-powered retractable,

inverted universally jointed and fully-gurgitated, mobious strip. The professor laughed.

Every schoolboy knows a mobious strip is a band, one end of which has been given a half twist

before joining it to the other end to make a circuit. The consequence of that little twist,

triad, is that the mobious strip is a geometric figure, which has only one side and one edge,

no common sense. Looking at it can plainly discern two sides and two edges. However, a pencil drawn

down the center of one side will meet its own mark, and it will be then seen to be aligned,

drawn on both sides, because there is only one side, you see. But every schoolboy knows that

all a mobious strip is just a curiosity. Anything else you can do to it, it changes it from being a

mobious strip. So it can't be improved by a chrome emits or a powering it or anything else.

That professor appointed all this out to a student in a rather overbearing manner,

he finished by saying, and I suppose you're going to tell me it has some practical application.

Yeah, it has. And before the professor could stop him, he had reached across the desk,

penetrated into the shiny cube with one half of the glittering mobious strip and fished out

the shattered remnants of a short Roman stabbing sword. In an instantly old familiar bulgy

cylinder was present on the desk full-shaped, and in another a completely naked young woman

had leaped out of its under the floor. In superfaction, the professor saw a pink three-cornered

scar, obviously just healing on a ribcage, and noticed there were still drops of water glistening

on her flank. Sweetheart, what was that butcher knife? I had a dodge like crazy. And she engulfed

the student in a squid-like embrace. A moment later, she saw the professor and recoiled.

Who is this bald-headed old creek? I draw the line of warriors, honey.

And with a wink and a nod, she and the student dumped the professor into the expanded cube

and collapsed at about him. Even in the endless instant, which is the inside of his device,

time has begun to seem long to the topologist. He knows the girl and the student are long

since dust and the whirling kaleidoscopic world outside. He's beginning to be transparent,

so he knows his substance is slowly plating out along the entire cylindrical spherical space-time

continuum. He has realized that when he is fully distributed, the universe will be at an end,

and he has composed a most astounding paper in his head, explaining the whole phenomenon.

His only regret is that he will never be able to send it to the Journal of Depology for Publication.

That story was sword game by H.H. Hollis. It appears in nebula award-winning stories

for edited by Paul Anderson. Vicky Smith, read with us this time, Michael Hanson speaking,

technical production from Mindwebs by Leslie Hilsenhoff. Mindwebs comes to you from WHA Radio

and Madison, a service of University of Wisconsin Extension.