Savant (5 page)

Pitu stood on the threshold to the office for several seconds, his mouth open. This was wrong, all wrong. Pitu was thrust back into his distant past to a time when disorder meant pain, to a time when he had been too young to understand the cruelty that was meted out to him. He wanted to cry out, as he remembered, for the first time in years, the beatings, the hunger and the neglect. Then he came-to, as if out of a trance.

He took hold of the button on the cord around his neck, and pressed, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, and not letting go.

Chapter Six

T
OBE LEFT THE
flat and made his way to his office, a wet patch still visible on the back of his robe from his dripping hair.

He let himself into his room and set to work. His hands flew as he crossed out equations on his wipe-wall, or linked them to others. Some equations got new brackets, or were swept away altogether with the swinging of the rag he held in his left hand.

Periodically, Tobe picked up
On Probability
, thumbed through it, and lighted on a page that seemed useful. He tore out the page, leaving more ink-smudged fingerprints on it, and licked the back of it, using his spit to stick the page to the wipe-wall.

Two hours later, the office shelves were beginning to look like a crone’s toothless grin, with volumes pulled out, apparently at random, and the remaining books leaning into each other, leaving black, triangular gaps.

An hour after that, the wipe-wall was full of cross-referenced workings-out, and brimming with formulae, old and new. Tobe stood in the middle of the room, examining his handiwork, as if he might have forgotten something.

He had forgotten nothing.

Tobe had a photographic memory for almost everything, but especially for mathematics, including all the work he had ever done. He could reproduce any solution to any problem that he had solved in his thirty-five years, including all the various dead-end pathways he had followed, and all the missteps he had made and erased along the way. If required, he could have reproduced any mathematical problem he had solved, with reference to the colours of pen he’d had on hand, and the ink smudges he had left behind in his haste.

The wall was full, all the reference was in place, and, still, Tobe had no solution.

“It was the same,” he said, looking from the wipe-wall to the tattered book in his hands, the cover barely clinging to the remaining pages, fewer than half of them left. He tossed the book onto the chair, its cover coming free as it sailed across the room. The remaining pages scattered across the floor, and the cover landed half-on, half-off the chair, its sky-blue book-cloth hanging over the edge of the seat.

Tobe got on his hands and knees on the floor, and began to collect up the pages. He stopped, and looked at the bundle in his fist. He pulled out one of the pages and skim-read it. He licked it and stuck it to the linopro. Then he looked around for something to write with.

T
HE CONTENTS OF
Tobe’s room had not changed since he had taken it over, almost twenty years earlier. One or two things had been added, notably, more books, wedged tightly onto the shelves, which now extended to the full height of the room, beyond anyone’s natural reach.

The top two shelves had been added five years earlier, and had caused a great deal of huffing and blowing on Tobe’s part. He had not been able to enter his office, alone, for several weeks. The little stepladder that he needed to retrieve the books on the top shelves had lived in the corridor outside his room for two Highs, and had finally been brought in by Metoo; it had taken all day for Tobe to decide exactly where they should live in the room. Tobe’s chair was the one he had inherited when he had taken over the room, and had, in its long life, had five replacement legs, two new seats, and a grand total of eight back-rests. The fact that it was, essentially, an entirely different chair to the one that Tobe had first used seemed lost on him.

Tobe seldom worked at his desk, preferring to use the expanse of the wipe-wall, and then print his work off to share it, or to illustrate his intentions to his students and other mathematicians that he corresponded with around the World. The contents of the desk drawers were constant, and the bottom drawer on the left still held the old-fashioned and obsolete mechanical drawing, measuring and calculating devices that he had collected and been obsessed by as a kid. The drawer also held a box of chalk, long sticks of dusty yellow that had probably not been used anywhere in the World for at least fifty years, and possibly more than a century, and a collection of various types of antique chemical inks.

Tobe opened the drawer, from his position kneeling on the floor, and took out the box of chalk. He turned it over several times in his hands, and then opened it. He took out the first stick of chalk, and then replaced it. He looked at the dusty residue on his forefinger and thumb, smelled it, and licked it. He took the same piece of chalk out of the box, again, and, tentatively, made a mark with it on the linopro. He looked down at the mark, and started to get off his knees to go to the wipe-wall. As he stood, he realised that he had smudged the chalk mark, not quite obliterating it, but fading it dramatically. He looked down at his robe, and saw a yellow smudge on it. He took the rag from its hook on the wipe-wall, and went back to wipe away the chalk mark. When he had finished, it was even less distinct than it had been when he’d knelt in it, but it could still be seen, as if the colour had faded from a tiny patch of the linopro.

For the next two hours, Tobe stood, bent double at the waist, working out his mathematical problem using chalk on linopro. He worked around his feet, and then moved them carefully to bare patches of floor so that he could continue his calculations.

A
S
M
ETOO WALKED
along the corridor, towards Tobe’s office, he emerged, closed the door behind him, and turned. She raised her hand in greeting, and they walked towards each other. Then she turned, took his arm, and walked with him back to the flat.

Her relief was palpable. Metoo rarely went to his office, unless Service needed her to, or Tobe asked for her, but he seemed not to think it strange to see her there. She had not known what she would find, or what to expect. Yesterday had been disturbing in so many ways, and Tobe’s actions this morning, entering the garden-room, had done nothing to alleviate Metoo’s concerns.

He had been gone since six o’clock this morning, starting work at least a couple of hours before his usual time, so she was relieved to see him leaving his office at his regular lunch hour.

Chapter Seven

T
HE
O
PERATOR HAD
been out for the rest of the previous day, being de-briefed. He could tell Service nothing that they didn’t already know. He had followed Protocol, and could answer for every decision. In fact, he had not made any decisions; he had simply done what was required of him. There would be no reprimand, or demotion, but neither had he done anything of note; he would not be hailed a hero. He would return to his Workstation at Service as soon as Code Blue was re-established, and maintained for a specified period, which had not yet been decided, but which would, undoubtedly, mirror the length of time that the station was in Code Green. His stand-down could be of any duration, but he did not expect it to be longer than a few days, at most, and he looked forward to the respite. No Operator was ever assigned to an alternate Workstation: one Operator, one screen, one Station.

Strazinsky, on the other hand, had a very full timetable. As the Named Operator coming into a crisis situation, with a Code change, he was required to see out the change. However long it took, Strazinsky must remain on-Station throughout the crisis, until all settings were restored and verified, or until the situation hit critical mass for a change of Code-status to Yellow. He had expected a long night. What he did not expect was ever to be relieved of his post because of a Code ramp-up.

I
N THE TWO
centuries that Service had been global, two extraordinary events had occurred, including the famous failure of one of the Colleges.

On that occasion, Code Red had been reached in less than thirty minutes, and had seen four changes of Operator, from Blue to Green and then on, in turn, to Yellow, Orange, and finally Red. The staff change-overs had not happened fast enough, and there had been a massive loss of life at the American College in the Old Mid-West. The College had not survived. More than decimated, it had lost almost three in four of its inhabitants. Death fell democratically across all ages and grades: a thousand Students, Seniors and Assistants died, along with more than a hundred Masters and Companions. Two Actives had also perished.

The event, known as ‘the Meltdown’ had happened because of a naive and fundamental mistake. The premier Active’s Companion, Abel, had been a charismatic, who had developed a religious cult, and placed his Master at the centre of it. His Master also happened to be, although it was not known within College, Active. Religious tolerance had been a basic tenet of global government since the historic struggles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and no thought was given to the elevated, God-like persona that was imposed on the Active. It did not appear to impair his work in any way, and it resulted in a docile College workforce, and a sense of purpose among the Companions and Assistants. Within two Highs, cult members were being recruited from the Drafted, and, within five, all Assistants and Companions were promoted according to their status within the cult, rather than their suitability for the job.

The religious fervour of the majority of the inhabitants of the College seemed to aid its smooth running rather than impair it, and Service, both Daily and Scheduled, worked virtually without a hitch.

Without the stimulus of personalities clashing and shifting, and, without the usual office politics, Service at the College became lazy and bloated. Shift patterns were regular, and Named Operators barely worked at all.

The Active, who was entirely benign in the venture, was considered elderly in terms of effective Masters, and was increasingly infirm, but his ailments had been kept from his followers. Service Central decided to maintain the Active as the figurehead of the cult, in his dotage, and introduce a new Active. That was when the problems began, and, although it was some time before the scenario played out, it was already beyond College Service to recognise or forestall, let alone prevent, the inevitable.

No one quite knew how, but Abel, the instigator and effective head of the cult, had somehow detected that his Master was Active, and he was also able to sniff out the new Active when he arrived, as a boy of fourteen, to replace a Master who was hospitalised for dementia at the end of High that year.

Selection procedures had changed and developed over the hundred and fifty years since, evolving into a system that was virtually flawless, and which, certainly, would never allow another Abel to be Drafted.

In the College’s final hours, Abel set about testing his influence over the Active’s disciples. It proved so widespread, so pervasive, and so utterly outside the control of Service, that he was able to mastermind an announcement, setting out the Messiah’s deathbed wishes, and instigating a mass suicide.

Service had no warning of the announcement, hearing it simultaneously with the rest of the College.

After that, everything happened very fast. In half-an-hour the event was over.

In the aftermath, when the situation was analysed from all angles, by experts in the field, new rules and regulations were set out. It took some time to formulate guidelines that would not restrict freedom of religious expression, but it was finally accomplished. A system was also initiated whereby rules and regulations were constantly tested and verified.

S
ERVICE WAS TWO
hundred years old. It did not run like clockwork, but no one had seen a Code Orange or higher for fifty years, and Service Central was proud to claim that it would never see another Meltdown.