Resolution (28 page)

Kian had already won his place at Caltech’s Feynman Institute. Neither of them doubted that Dirk would pass the post-exam interview to gain admittance to St Hilda’s.

It had not escaped their attention that, nearly a hundred and fifty years before, Gus Calzonni had attended St Hilda’s before going on to teach and perform research at Caltech, where she discovered the existence of mu-space.

Earlier, a young woman showing Dirk around the college had pointed out rust-coloured stains on a crenellated wall, and related the story of the thirteen female students who had publicly and messily committed suicide when St Hilda’s had been opened to males in the previous century.

Dirk had grinned, believing the story but not the discoloration’s provenance. Then the woman laughed, as if he had just passed another test.

‘Little Trendy Street,’ Dirk said now, pointing, ‘is just down there. There’s a good place to hang out.’

‘What? Little
where?’

‘Only townies and bloody outsiders use the names that are on the map. Little Clarendon Street. There’s ice cream, in about thirty flavours.’

‘Well, Jesus Christ, bro. What are we waiting for?’

Four months later, Dirk and Kian were plunged into studies far tougher than they had expected. Life became a maelstrom of social activity and hard work, as they adjusted to their respective surroundings without neglecting to send each other daily h-mails when the time difference made realtime comms awkward.

At Halloween, both of them heard contemporary ghost stories of strange sightings nearby. Neither Kian nor Dirk remembered to mention the tales, which had been relayed to them as jokes by rational-minded fellow students aware that eerie phenomena normally owe more to known hysteria than unknown physics.

Neither Mother nor any other working Pilot (of the old school, their eye sockets plugged into their ships’ systems via ultra-high-bandwidth coherent-resonance i/o buses) had glimpsed a Zajinet since that strange sighting in a Zurich courtyard. Perhaps it
had
been a holo, after all.

In December, one night close to the end of term, Dirk was climbing the narrow staircase which led up to his cold room when he heard - not for the first time - stentorian breathing from the other bedroom on his floor. It belonged to Rajesh Mistry, whose main complaint about Oxford was that it was so much colder than Bangalore but who otherwise loved the place, and often delivered blistering insights during maths tutorials that left Dirk wondering just what kind of mind the fellow had.

‘More of those strange sexual practices, huh?’ muttered Dirk, as he unlocked his own door.

Rajesh’s door swung open. Dressed in singlet and shorts, he was drenched with sweat and breathing heavily. Behind him, the room looked unoccupied.

‘Dirk ... I thought I heard you ... old chap.’

‘You’re out of breath.’

‘Baithaks
and
dands.
Great exercise. Listen ... I have a favour to ask you.’

‘Um, sure.’

‘Kaufmannian transitions. Know anything about them?’

‘Of course. We studied ‘em at school. Didn’t you?’

‘Not part of our curriculum.’ Rajesh stood with hands on hips, his breathing coming under control. ‘Can we meet up in the Common Room, go through the basics?’

‘Yeah, if you’ll tell me one thing. What the hell are
baithaks
and
dands?
Did I say that right?’

‘Perfectly ... They’re what wrestlers in my country have been doing for centuries, and called combat conditioning in the west. Squats and cat-lick push-ups, with some other stuff, is all.’

Dirk looked at Rajesh’s muscles - Rajesh was bulky, radiating functional strength without any of the polished and injury-prone tightness of a bodybuilder - and Dirk made an instant decision. Anyone who knew the history of fighting arts was aware that Indian wrestlers had ungodly stamina, and could grapple forever without tiring.

‘Teach me the exercises,’ Dirk said, ‘and I’ll teach you everything I know on bio-emergenics. Deal?’

‘Absolutely.’

They shook hands on it.

That first night of studying together was intellectually uneventful, though Dirk learned a form of exercise which he would practise daily for the rest of his life. It would be springtime before Dirk heard Rajesh being called ‘a dirty wog’ in a snug pub (the ‘Bird and Baby’ in the students’ private nomenclature) located on St Giles and once frequented by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. (The racial epithet was unfamiliar; Dirk looked it up later.) The verbal insult was swiftly followed by a vicious right hook directed at Rajesh’s temple from behind.

The attacker was a drunken rugby player accompanied by three of his mates, and before Dirk could get close enough to help, Rajesh had already demonstrated that he knew more about fighting than just conditioning methods. When Dirk and Rajesh left, four bodies lay sprawled around the small dark pub where a gentle scholar once dreamed of hobbits and dragons.

‘Not bad, old chap,’ said Dirk. ‘Not bad at all.’

Meanwhile, in sun-drenched California, Kian’s study-buddy of choice was a copper-haired young woman with copper-coloured eyes, whose name was Deirdre (pronounced Dee-drè in the Irish fashion), with a ferocious intellect and an uncanny ability to stay upright on a surfboard in the wildest of conditions, who made Kian laugh and would have been a perfect soul-mate were she not, in her own words, ‘a goddamned dyke with attitude’.

They often worked together in Deirdre’s room, drinking endless cups of lemon tea while Rimsky-Korsakoff’s
Capriccio Espagnol
or Zimmer’s
M-I:2
played in the background. Or they would take their workpads down to the Conundrum Café and sip cappuccinos (or
cappuccini
as Deirdre insisted on calling them in the plural) while making up fictional biographies of passers-by.

So it went, until Deirdre chose to do a project on ball lightning and interviewed some people who had seen a strange shining shape over the Caltech campus one dry summer night. It reminded Kian of the students who had been frightened the previous Halloween with their tale of glowing lights.

‘Could’ve been the same phenomenon,’ said Deirdre. ‘Unusual time of year for it to happen, though.’

‘What, seeing ghosts and ghouls?’

‘Ha. You’ll be seein’ stars, pal, if you don’t— Hey, Kian. What’s up?’

‘Nothing. Just some weird coincidence.’

When Kian h-mailed his musings to Dirk that night, he knew that Dirk would take the sighting seriously.

You and me both, bro.

On second thoughts, Kian directed a copy of the message to Mother, which she would pick up as soon as she returned from her current voyage through mu-space.

At least we‘re keeping the insanity in the family.

Rain hissed on cobblestones in the quadrangle below Dirk’s window. He stared downwards, seeing nothing, then finally turned and shut down the holodisplay.

I
do
take you seriously, bro.

Because there had been another sighting, here in Oxford, that Kian didn’t know of, and that made three in all. Four, if you counted Zurich.

So there’s someone I can‘t put off seeing any longer.

A lone drop sailed down from a ceiling crack and plopped onto the desktop beside his elbow. Dirk ran his fingertip through the water.

‘Right then,’ he said to no-one. ‘Let’s get to it.’