Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

Gary helped them unload a large wooden table with a broken corner. The ungainly piece had been fitted into the van with difficulty, and getting it out wasn’t easy either. More gashes were added in the process.

Daphne looked at the table, at the inside of the van, and at the men doing the lifting. “Nothing to worry about,” she told them. “You can hide that with a little shoe polish.”

Gary panted under the weight of the table.

“Nice table,” Daphne said to Margot. “It’ll be just right for the dining room.”

“I got it at Morley’s. It was on sale, because it’s damaged.”

The other woman, Jutta, dropped a flowerpot with a ficus, and soil fell out. Swearing, she gathered the broken pieces and the soil and threw them in the garbage can. She stuffed the ficus in too, breaking its stalks.

“Fucking plant,” she said, out of breath. Her faded jeans were tight on her powerful thighs. When she bent over, the pants seemed close to splitting open. Gary could practically hear the seams rip. But the pants held.

I’ve calculated the time of staying in a Land for the world of Linda and Jack (where n = 4). It’s 3 8/9 years, or 1,419 days. Another piece in the puzzle.

Daphne stepped out of the bath and put on a gray bathrobe. Its color went with her hair, which she wrapped in a striped towel.

Even the hot water hasn’t relaxed her, Gary thought, seeing her frown.

She fell into an armchair. Her few physical charms showed through the bathrobe. Her cleavage was covered with freckles. Gary handed her a beer.

She choked on the first swallow. But with the second, her gaze steadied.

“Sometimes, Gary, you’re as self-possessed as a corpse,” she said.

“Huh?” He blinked, with the pink irises of an albino.

“You didn’t say a word when you were carrying the Bolyas’ table.”

“Ah… right.” He was slow. “I thought so.”

“No doubt about it. I saw the manufacturer’s mark.” Her dark eyes fixed on Gary.

“What does this mean?”

“I thought about that in the tub. The green tunics are mafia. They kill the people who move and take their things, and the border guards of Tolz look the other way. There’s probably an accomplice among the guards.”

“It makes no sense. Why keep the evidence?”

“Greed.”

“If you’re right, this is awful. We should tell the police.”

The police didn’t take Daphne’s story very seriously.

For the next job, Gary was unable to park his rig in front of the building: there was a new red Amido there. Jutta and Margot were washing the car. Sudsy water ran along the gutter.

It was the Bolyas’ Amido, down to the broken headlight, broken turn signal, and chipped paint.

“How do you like our new purchase?” asked Jutta. “We got it at Morley’s.”

Gary examined the car.

“It was in an accident,” Daphne couldn’t help saying.

“Yeah. We’re cleaning it up,” said Margot, rubbing at a bloodstain with her rag. “Because of the blood, we got it for even cheaper. I was spooked, but the boys talked us into it.”

“It’s a mess, all right,” agreed Jutta. “Look at that upholstery.”

“Use a strong detergent,” advised Gary, taking his cue from Daphne.

“If we can’t get the stains out, we’ll replace it. It’ll still be worth the trouble,” said Stack, joining the conversation. He wore a green tunic.

Gary and Daphne went to the police again, and again the police dismissed the story. They were seen by the same officer as before. This time he wore a T-shirt with the words Municipal Police. On the back of the chair hung a uniform jacket that had his name sewn on: Lieutenant Benjamin Cukurca.

Cukurca was old and completely gray. When he was agitated, his eyes watered, and he stroked the sparse hair plastered across his pate.

“Impossible,” he said, his glassy eyes bugging even more than usual. “The Bolyas are in Tolz. A report came in yesterday.”

He wouldn’t even listen to their arguments. Why should he waste his time?

Between the pages were two index cards with Zef’s writing.

Today I put down the two formulas I worked out, one beside the other:

The number of Lands = (n + 2) 2.

The number of Significant Names = 144 × 12 (n - 1).

I left out the number of versions of Nest of Worlds as well as the time of staying in a Land, since so far no pattern suggests itself. So far.

I dislike the inelegance of the second formula. If this is supposed to be a fundamental law governing the nested worlds, every constant that appears in it (every number, Dave!) should mean something. I think I have too many (there are three: 144, 12, -1) for a basic relation, and the first two are too big.

How to simplify? Intuitively I feel they should be reduced to small constants like 1 or 2, factored down.

The pattern for number of Lands doesn’t look bad: only one constant, 2.

And the second card:

I returned to this problem after an hour break. I have the feeling that if I keep digging into my head (through one nostril or another), there will be some harvest soon.

We need to look differently on these patterns. The number of Names in a given nested world equals:

144 × 12 (n - 1)

I must have had one heck of a froze not to have seen that this is also:

12 × 12 × 12 (n - 1)

Or simply: 12 (n + 1)!

Much prettier. Do you see how superior it is to the one before? I got rid of one of the numbers, and at hardly any cost: replacing a -1 with a +1.

This is how one does science—tracking down nature’s bright ideas. Some lightbulbs did go on in my skull before, but lately I’ve been unfocused, distracted, because of the deaths.

Dave, no doubt you’re bored to tears with this cogitating and number juggling, this replacing of one constant with another. Well, maybe you’re right, and it’s all silly, just the mental contortion of a science nut playing with a book. And yet this is good exercise, staying in form, because in science first you find the relations that join fact to fact, and then you try to simplify those relations as much as you can, in order to see the deeper sense in them…

Dr. Nott suggested that he see for himself what Ra Mahleiné looked like inside. First, for comparison, she allowed him to look inside herself. She opened her mouth wide and tilted her head back. He peered in. The interior resembled the hall of a great factory.

Strong, elastic tendons joining massive muscles crossed space like stairs, like bridges; reddish belts of muscle, vein, nerve went in different directions. All this machinery of flesh moved rhythmically; one could hear the muffled beat of a distant, powerful engine. From the slight gaps in the joints among the pulsing vessels, drops of blood or colorless juices seeped. Seen from inside, the hanging double chin of Dr. Nott resembled a mountain slope covered not with rocks but with yellow-orange bladder spheres in a spiderweb weave of tubes that carried blood. Gavein thought that turkeys had such air sacs in their wattles, and that was why they tried to fly. He dared to look up: the ceiling was lost in darkness, and below it hung, like gigantic icicles, tongue-pink protuberances. He also saw the tonsils: yellowish, bulging, potatolike. When he strained his eyes upward into the darkest gulf, there loomed the enormous surface of the brain, smooth as a ball, a deep-brown honey color. It slowly dripped into a huge funnel that was suspended on pink membranous ropes and ties. From this funnel flowed a mixture of red blood and a yellowish fluid.