The Time Roads

Her eyes widened slightly. Síomón waited, hardly daring to breathe. His patience was rewarded when, at last, she whispered, “Twenty-nine.”

Keeping his voice calm, he repeated the number.

Again, he had another long wait before Gwen spoke. “Thirty-one,” she whispered. “Thirty-seven.”

Síomón drew a pencil and the newssheet from his jacket pocket. Gwen immediately tensed. He waited, motionless, until she calmed.

This time, he initiated the exchange. “Seven.”

“Thirteen.”

“Seventeen.”

They repeated the sequence, Síomón writing down each number in the margins and empty spaces.

“… Thirty-seven. Forty-one. Forty-three.”

The third time through the sequence, Gwen stirred restlessly, her gaze flickering from Síomón’s paper to his face, as though she expected something more. He tried repeating the numbers, but she struck the pencil from his hands. Before he could soothe her, the attendants arrived and led an unusually pliant Gwen away.

Loisg escorted Síomón to the lobby in uncharacteristic silence. “You were right to come, sir,” he said, when they arrived at the front doors. “Quite right. We have made true progress today, you and I and your sister. Kindness—that is the key to your sister’s illness.”

Only part of the solution, Síomón thought as he walked along the sanitarium’s winding paths, between the stately trees and their rain of falling leaves. The true key was written on the sheet of newsprint in his pocket.

* * *

That night Síomón pored over Gwen’s numbers. He started by working through a series of basic formulae, each designed to expose any underlying patterns. When these proved fruitless, he applied the newer analysis methods discussed in academic journals. No success. Finally, on a decision based midway between frustration and whimsy, he turned to more fantastical methods—Lîvod’s color theories, Frankonia’s exploration into the electrical properties of numbers, the latest research from Egypt, Iran, and the Gujarat Empire.

Seven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Thirty-seven. Forty-one. Forty-three.

He found himself doodling numbers on his scrap paper—huge numbers interspersed with smaller ones. Their pattern echoed Gwen’s patterns and recalled his dream of numbers burning like stars across the night. Numbers whose voices sang to him, the notes changing as he transformed them through calculations.

He had Garret brew a pot of strong tea, then requested privacy for the evening. Garret, ever deferential, withdrew to his own room.

Síomón pulled out a well-thumbed primer on mathematical history. He skimmed the sections on Pythagoras, with his belief in mystical properties; on Fermat and his seemingly logical theory on primes, which had proved false; on Fermat’s correspondent, the monk-conjurer Mersenne, and Euclid, who had posited that the list of primes was infinite, and therefore led to immortality.

I wanted my name written in the same list, Síomón thought as he turned the page. An arrogant wish, but arrogance seemed a prerequisite for mathematicians, especially those who put forth unpopular theories, such as his own. Ó Deághaidh had mocked him. Ó Dónaill had tried to discourage him, but Síomón knew the proper sequence of numbers could transform lives. He distinctly remembered …

Cold washed over him. Slowly, he laid down his lead stick and stared at the open book on his desk. The scrap paper was gone—possibly now another crumpled ball upon the floor. Instead, the once-empty margins of his book were decorated with a tapestry of miniscule numbers. When had he written them?

He reached out to shut the book. Paper crackled inside his breast pocket. Síomón stopped, hand hovering over his desk. He’d emptied all his pockets before the assembly—he was certain of that. Just another bit of foolscap, he told himself. He was always storing bits of paper about his person. He’d simply forgotten about this one.

He was still making excuses as he felt inside the pocket. His fingers met a rigid square—completely unlike the usual crumpled note. Hands trembling, he plucked out the object and let it fall onto his desk.

It was a thin packet of stiff brown paper, its edges sealed and one flap folded over to make an envelope. Síomón examined it, searching for any kind of mark or label to indicate what hid inside. When he flipped it over, the contents hissed. Like sand or sugar, he thought. He tore off one corner and poured out the contents onto his desk.

White powder streamed out to make a perfect pyramid. He stared at it warily. Not sugar. Definitely not sand. The grains were too fine. Where had he seen its like before?

You remember. You and Evan …

He wet his forefinger and touched the substance, making a slight dent in the pyramid’s smooth surface. After a moment’s hesitation, he transferred a miniscule amount to his tongue.

A strange taste filled his mouth, bitter and sweet at the same time. Within a moment, his tongue went numb. Cocaine. He and Evan had experimented with the drug one night, after reading texts from the addict philosophers of the previous century—another of those laughably regrettable incidents from their first year at the university. Síomón had forgotten the episode until now.

He closed his eyes. He had no memory of acquiring this substance, and yet he must have. But when?

Certain symbols have a mystical significance, Pythagoras believed. Our reality is mathematical. Our souls can rise to union with the divine.

Discounted theories from a long-dead mathematician, sometimes remembered as a genius, persecuted in his own time, whose secret society ended in bloody and violent suppression.