The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [74]
“Alan,” Skinner said, as his footsteps reached her ears. “What are you doing here?”
“I…” The young cartographer found his voice caught in his throat. “Uhm. I need to talk to Beckett.” He pulled out a sheaf of papers from his knapsack, the formulae that he’d been unluckily unable to forget. “About Zindel’s mathematics.”
There was a sudden growl from behind him, and Beckett stumbled into the room. He was not wearing his coat, but he still had the red scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose. He had no gloves, either, and his right sleeve was pushed up. Alan could see that the tips of Beckett’s fingers were invisible, and there was a livid, glistening blood-red spot on the inside of his elbow where the skin had become transparent. Beckett tugged the sleeve down as he entered. “Why?” He grunted. “I told you to forget about all this.”
Alan took a deep breath. “I can’t, sir.” He opened his satchel, and took out all of his papers. “I remember everything I see. Almost everything. When it comes to math, anyway. And I wasn’t completely honest with you when I told you what I saw in Zindel’s home.” He spread the papers out on a small coffee-table. “I know what the equations were. I mean, I didn’t know a hundred percent, at the time. But I know a lot about Aetheric Geometry. I mean, a lot. I can do the math. And I’ve figured out what these equations mean.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Beckett said. “I don’t want to hear that. You know what I have to do, don’t tell me…”
“Arrest me,” Alan said. Tears welled up in his eyes again, and he heard his voice quavering. “Execute me, if you have to. I know, don’t think I don’t know. I know exactly what . . . you have to kill me. I used to do equations like this, I found them in Principles of Mathematics when I was a kid, and I never thought anything of it. I figured no one would ever find out. But last night I realized that I have to tell you. I can’t keep it a secret anymore, because it means the safety of the entire Empire. This is more important than me.” Alan was weeping openly now; salt tears dripped onto his formulae. “So if you have to execute me, then you have to, but let me tell you what I found out.”
Beckett was silent for a long moment. Then, “All right.”
Alan sighed, and began to explain. With each word, he drew farther away from his fear and into the simple science, the pure mathematics with which he had always been most comfortable expressing himself. “Zindel’s equations are the mathematical schematic for a translation engine.”
“We know,” Beckett said. “The Excelsior.”
“That’s what I thought,” Alan replied. He knelt down and spread his papers out on the floor. “But it’s not. See here? This matrix, that’s the arrangement of those six numbers, that’s using a triple-pronged stabilizing system, when the Excelsior only used a double-prong. I think it has to do with the way the coordinates are expressed in our space. The Excelsior disaster happened because the engineers that built her engines were only accounting for her transition into real space in two dimensions. It’s a catastrophically stupid error, when you think about it, but I guess it must have been easy to overlook at the time. Since they didn’t imagine they’d be going up or down, they must have figured that two coordinate pairs would be enough. But this…”
Alan gently spread the pages out, until he found the one he was looking for. “See, here’s where Zindel was going to rebuild a different kind of interlocutor, with a three-prong stabilizer.”
“So, Zindel and his partner were designing a new kind of translation engine?” Something was nagging at Beckett, now. Was it Valentine’s story that bothered him? Was it his own memories of the kirliotypes in Dangers of Heresy, of the hideously-malformed bodies that had been the victims of the Excelsior’s launch?
“That’s the bad part. That’s why I had to come to you.” Alan found another page. “See this? These columns of numbers? This is data. And it’s not data that he made up. It’s too precise, it all fits together too neatly. This is experimental