The Woman Who Died a Lot

He folded up the paper and put it back in his pocket. “No. I’m still studying the implications, since it renders two of Euclid’s axioms entirely fallacious. Much of the planet’s mathematics will have to be completely restructured.”

“Then you’re good? Really good?” asked Landen.

“Good? I’m the best. Euclidean, Riemannian, polytrop, differential, twenty-seven-dimension mapping, Advanced Nextian geometry and even Expectation-Influenced Probability. Tuesday did the groundwork, but I took it further.”

Landen and I exchanged glances. This sounded promising.

“What about a value for U_c?” I asked.

“Ah!” he said with a smile. “The ever-illusive Unentanglement Constant. I’ve been doing some initial work that looks promising, but I was distracted by the need to expand and catalog my collection of pornographic magazines.”

“How long would it take?” asked Landen.

“Alphabetically, about a week. If I do it by my favorites, then a lot longer.”

“Not the porn, the Unentanglement Constant.”

“Oh. A workable solution to U_c? About a month.”

Landen and I got to our feet.

“We don’t have a month. We don’t even have twenty-four hours. Come with us if you want to work with Tuesday.”

After some hunting we found Tuesday at the Anti-Smite stand, where she was chatting to some Americans who were keen on buying the system, due to one or two smitings that they’d so far managed to disguise as “another Barning Man that got out of hand.”

“Gavin?” said Tuesday, looking at him and then us in a quizzical manner. “What’s going on?”

I quickly explained what Gavin had told us and how he might possibly have the answer to the U_c. Tuesday looked doubtful.

“Listen,” she said, “only six people on the planet claim to understand Madeupion Quantum Unentanglement Theory, and five of them are mistaken.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Gavin. “It’s between six point four and six point six quintillionths of a second, right?”

“I never had it that accurate,” she replied, looking at him suspiciously, “and I’ve been working on the problem for two years.”

“Yes, but you’re a donkey,” remarked Gavin. “Look here, it’s obvious.”

He brought out a copy of Big and Bouncy from his jacket and started to write a long equation on the cover in felt-tip. Landen and I stared at each other, unable to comprehend what was going on, as Tuesday and Gavin were talking in an odd language full of Greek words and out-of-context nouns and adjectives. Tuesday was wary at first, expecting this to be one of Gavin’s tricks. But the explanation continued onto the next page, and the next, and soon to the letters to the editor, several trade ads for odd-looking devices, a lengthy dissertation on friction coefficients and most of “Readers’ Spouses” were covered in Gavin’s spidery algebraic notation. He and Tuesday argued at length, with Gavin often lapsing into insults and Tuesday hitting him hard on the side of the head when he did so. While this was going on, I, Landen and one of the Anti-Smite reps simply stood there and talked quietly about the weather, and the defense shield, and how Smite Solutions’ Sin Magnet was so stupendously brilliant in every single way—except for the bit regarding murder.

We had to wait forty minutes before Gavin finally declaimed with a flourish, “You see? Obvious!”

Tuesday stared at him, then at the notation, then at us, then at the mockup of the anti-smite tower.

“That’s . . . brilliant,” she breathed, giving Gavin one of those dreamy sixteen-year-old girl looks that can spell big trouble. She grasped him by the ears, pulled him toward her and started to kiss him, right there in front of us and thirty or forty MadCon delegates. We all looked away, hoping they would stop, but they didn’t, and after Landen had suggested a bucket of water and I had glared at him and mouthed “Do something,” he tapped Gavin quite hard on the shoulder and told him to cut it out.

They disengaged, and Gavin turned to Landen with a scowl on his face. “What is your problem, man?”

“My problem? My problem is this: An unwashed lout with a foul mouth and an unhealthy porn obsession is snogging my daughter, that’s what.”

“And . . . ?”

I almost thumped him, but it was Tuesday who intervened.

“Oh, Dad!” she said. “Don’t be so hideously old-fashioned. Gavin is a genius. Do you know how lonely it is on this planet if you have an IQ of two-forty?”

“Yeah,” agreed Gavin, “so back off, dorkwad.”

“Steady, angelcake,” said Tuesday, laying an affectionate hand on Gavin’s cheek. “You will apologize to my parents. If you don’t, I will never speak to you again—genius or no genius.”

Gavin thought about it for a moment, then hung his head and mumbled, “Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Parke-Laine.”

We told him it would be okay but to mind his mouth, and Tuesday told us that she and “Gav” could probably sort out the U_c problem by morning. We gave them money for a cab, and they trotted off excitedly, Tuesday hanging on to Gavin’s hand and telling him how he would eventually meet her sister, Jenny.