“Authors and academics,” he would tell Gus at a later date, “are easily swayed by the promise of free drink or food.”
“Pavlovian conditioning,” she would reply. “And the desire to meet like minds: let’s be fair.”
The coffee house was teeming with energy. While the rest of the group went upstairs to stake out a claim on seats, Gus volunteered to help Ives carry the collection of cappuccinos, frappuccinos, tea-that last for old Crichton, of course-and lattes, which someone had pointed out was a bag of bevvies.
“I was hoping,” said Ives, leaning on the delivery counter, “to have a conversation free of maths humour, for a change.”
A “bag” was technically correct: a mathematical set where duplication was allowed but sequencing was irrelevant-both Jim and Maureen had ordered venti lattes, and it didn’t matter which of the two drinks either person took.
“No chance of that round here.” Gus was surprised at her own boldness. “If you want normality, head north.”
“Or just outwards, yeah. Town and gown. I love this old place.” Ives had chosen to wear a bright red tie, and he was now running his finger inside his shirt collar, and looking uncomfortable. “Less formal than I expected. I was doing some consultancy at a place in London, and everyone was wearing business suits.”
“You might as well take the tie off,” said Gus. “Visiting the empire’s last bastion must have misled you.”
“Right. Here, it’s just like home. I’m the only guy in this city who’s wearing one.” He tugged it, pulling the knot too tight, in his effort to undo it. “Damn. You know, I had to consciously work out the theory behind this, but I only modelled the putting-it-on operation.”
So much for an evening without maths humour.
“Let me.” Surprised again at her own actions, she reached up-aware of his close warmth-and undid the knot.
“Thanks. You realize there are more than 80 ways to tie one of these things?”
“Really?” Gus frowned in concentration, social niceties forgotten. It had become a technical problem, and that was interesting.
“A handy way to model knot topology,” Ives said, stuffing the discarded tie in his jacket pocket, “is to consider the knot’s context, the space around it.”
“Oh, yes. Model the not-knots. I’ve heard of that…”
When the drinks arrived, they carried everything upstairs, and found their colleagues gathered on wooden chairs and armchairs around a small table, discussing the constraints placed by Goedel’s Theorem on some branch of research which Gus had never heard of.
Do I really belong here?
It was a question she asked herself often. But then some maths or physics or computation problem-they were all the same to her-would crop up, and she would be lost in the joy of solving it.
I should get home, now.
“-your opinion?” Ives was asking her.
“Sorry. I was thinking of something else.” Gus put down the empty cup she realized she was holding. “I ought to be going.”
Ives looked at her for a moment. Just then, they were in an isolated bubble of silence while animated conversation sparkled all around them.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
How did you know? She was so used to hiding the details of her life.
“My mother… She’s not well.” Gus blinked. She had not told anyone. “They’ve examined her at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and they don’t know what’s wrong. Or they’re not telling us.”
“Oh.” Ives put down his own drink. “Where’s home?”
Gus told him.
“You’ve got a car?”
“No. We-” Gus shook her head. “We can’t afford one. And I can’t drive.”
“Ah, right.” Ives stood up and turned to the rest of the group. “I’ll be back shortly. Just going to run Gus home, is that all right?”
She had not realized he even knew her name.
“I’m parked in St. Giles,” he added. “Major achievement.”
He left with Gus, whether it was all right with the others or not.
In the car, as they were travelling, he told her about Seattle: “You’d love it. Friendly city, great campus.” He’d delivered various anecdotes about consultancy work for a software giant, during the course of the lecture and later. “Starbucks in the same building. When I was in the Games Division, the company took us to the movies, whenever a sci-fi or a fantasy came out.”
“Cool,” said Gus. And then: “You worked for the Games Division?”
“Yeah, for a while. I devised scenarios for Tokugawa. Devious politics and ninja fighting. What a hoot.”
“Really.”
“Hmm.” Gus flicked a glance at her, then returned his attention to the road. “You don’t like the game?”
“It’s great, actually.” With a shrug. “The martial arts were a bit exaggerated, but that’s par for the course, isn’t it?”
“You know about martial arts?”
Gus’s voice was quietly confident: “I train in jeet kune do.”
Big hand, grabbing in the darkness…
No one would ever mug her again.
In the course of a very long life, Gus would have only one occasion to use her art on the street-or rather, on a lonely El station platform in Chicago, late at night on the Green Line south of the Loop, where a big thug attempted to beat an old man senseless with his own walking-stick, while his laughing buddies looked on-but the difference it made that night was mortal.
She used a reverse-snake escrima disarm to send the stick flying to one side, before clawing the attacker’s eyes and breaking both his knees. The man’s six buddies, through alcohol-clouded senses, noticed that she was small and female, and did not process the ease with which she had taken the big man out.
The rest happened very fast.
In seconds she was spinning and circling, throwing kicks and elbow-strikes, firing everything she had been taught in a continuous blur of adrenalized motion. The last man was even bigger than the first, drawing a knife from his belt but too late, as Gus used the running side-kick which Bruce Lee had developed to blast her attacker right off the edge of the platform and onto the tracks, where he narrowly escaped fatal electrocution.
Beyond that one incident, the daily discipline of physical JKD training, and her later experimentation with neurolinguistic programming, were the keys-she always thought-to her longevity and success.
As for her mathematical intuition… she would never be certain whether such discipline helped or hindered in that regard. But when applied to emotional control and financial management, it would certainly make her rich.
Very rich indeed.
That night in Oxford, though, as Ives was leaving her house-having stayed to chat with Gus and her mother, and being polite enough to pretend he enjoyed the dark strong tea which Mother made-Gus reached up to kiss him on the cheek, but he moved back subtly and she subsided.
“I am single,” he told her. “But, you know… Most guys, at my age, are either married or gay.”
It took a while for that to sink in.
“Oh.”
Ives smiled. “Just so long as you know.”
He shook her hand then, while her cheeks flared red. Over the decades, it was only the first of many shared incidents they would have cause to chuckle over.
And that was the first night she dreamed of knots.
