The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [21]
What am I supposed to say? Alan thought. That Zindel was coming close to re-creating Wolfram’s translation formula? He had a sudden vision of his brains splattered all over the chalkboard, smearing Zindel’s brilliant proofs. “It’s definitely… definitely Aetheric Geometry. I mean, you don’t . . . don’t see anything like this in . . . in standard cartographic or engineering applications.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes.” He pointed to a formula. “See that? That’s using…” Too much. Don’t tell them too much. They’ll kill you if they find out. The certainty of that danger clutched at his belly. “Well, uh, I don’t know the word for it, obviously. But in standard cartography we usually use a twin-variable axis. For holographic cartography, a triple variable. My father once built a transformative map that could use a quaternary variable grid, but this . . . if this is right, he’s trying to describe something using a nine-dimensional system.”
The old coroner nodded. Skinner remained silent, but Alan found his eyes unconsciously drawn to her. She had very smooth, pale skin, he thought, and wondered what it would be like to touch her cheek.
Beckett cleared his throat, and Alan practically jumped out of his skin. “Why?”
“Why, sir?”
He gestured at all the formula. “Why all this? What’s it for?”
I don’t even know how to describe it with regular words. I could only explain it with math. Math that I’m not allowed to know about. “What…what is Aetheric Geometry ever used for?” Careful. “He was trying to break the translation barrier.”
Alan swallowed hard, as Beckett gave him a long look, but the coroner abruptly grunted and turned away. “All right. Take off your gloves.”
“Sir?”
“Psychometry, boy. I need you to check the scene.”
“Oh.” Whew. “Right.” Alan pulled off the special vellum gloves. His fingers, stained black with Mapmaker’s Ink, tingled immediately. He could now feel the tiny variations in temperature, miniscule changes in air flow as the three of them drew breath. “Where…I mean, what do you want me to check… for? First?”
Beckett shrugged. “How good are you?”
Alan considered that for a moment, then went out into the hall. Very gently, he touched the bust of Harcourt Wolfram..
Sensory overload came almost immediately. He could feel hundreds of thousands of textures from a hundred years of hands all vying simultaneously for his attention, grease and oil and dead skin and whatever they’d been touching last, all jittering through the nerves in his fingers and up his arms and into his brain…
Focus. Alan closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. Just the last week. Feel the freshest textures. “Three people have used this door in the last week. One woman. I can feel the residue from her perfume. It’s . . . it stings a little…” A half a dozen other sensations crowded in at that point, what Alan suspected were different varieties of perfume. He blocked them out. “The two men…I can feel the chalk, so I assume at least one was Herman Zindel. The woman . . . her skin is not as dry, less…” Not enough words. There are never enough words for texture. “Young. She’s younger.”
“Probably his wife.”
Alan nodded. “I think I could recognize them again, if I had to.”
“Anything else about them?”
Focus. Find the texture, trace it. What else besides skin did it leave behind? What did it touch last? “Chalk. And not a lot of dirt. Gentlemen, then. One of them . . . the other man, had expensive gloves. Soft tarrasque-hide, I think.” Alan took his fingers from the doorknob, and the sensations immediately subsided. “That’s all I can get from the door, I think.”
“Downstairs, then.”
Alan followed Beckett down the narrow stairs of the Zindel house, with Skinner’s hand on his shoulder. At the bottom of the stairs was a framed kirliotype of Herman Zindel, his wife, and their children. They were all looking very somber, because it was hard to smile for the five minutes required to effectively expose film.
“Have you ever seen a corpse before, Alan?” Skinner spoke quietly in