The touchdown area was a school’s field. The school was a low-slung brick thing, a century old, abandoned for decades and reopened by force majeure, judging from the gay paint job and the banners, the solar skins and wind-sails on the roof.
Tam squinted at it, remembering her own school, built on the same template but run by a private services company that shut down half the building to save facilities costs, putting steel shutters over the windows and leaving it to glower at the paved-over play areas.
“Nice, huh?” The girl was not more that sixteen, cute as a cute thing, round face and full, purplish lips. Tam thought she might be Vietnamese or Cambodian. She had a bit of acne. Her jet-black, straight hair was chopped into artful mess.
“This your school?”
“It’s our everything. Technically, it belongs to a bullshit holding company that bought the town out of bankruptcy. Happened when I was little, we got a special administrator everyone hated, next thing, it’s bankruptcy and they were shutting it down, putting up fences. Final straw was when they stopped the water. Town went independent automatically after that. Kids did the school.”
“Cool.” Tam enjoyed the girl’s obvious pride. “You go to classes in there?”
The girl grinned. “Don’t believe in ’em. We do peer workshops. I’m a calculus freak of nature, got a group of freaklings I’m turning into my botnet.”
Tam nodded. “Never got calculus. That lady over there with the little boy under each arm is a hero of mathematics.”
The girl bugged her eyes out. “Duh. No offense. Why do you think I’m here? Chance to meet Gretyl? Shit. Biggest thing to hit this town since forever.” She stared intently at Gretyl. “Her proofs are so beautiful.”
“Want to meet her?”
The girl crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, so perfectly adorable it had to have been practiced at great length. Tam barked a laugh, covered her mouth and, to her hard-bitten horror, giggled.
“She’ll like you,” Tam said.
“She’d better,” the girl said, and took her arm.
Gretyl lost her grip on Jacob as they neared and, sensing the tide, released Stan to tear-ass after his little brother and bring him to the ground. Tam waved her down. “Yo,” she said.
Gretyl dramatically face-palmed at the kids’ retreating backs, then smiled at Tam and the girl.
“Gretyl, this is—”
The girl, who had blushed to the tips of her ears, murmured Hoa.
“Hoa. She’s a fan. Loves calculus. Came here to meet you.”
Gretyl beamed at the girl and threw open her big arms and enfolded her in a hug. “Pleasure to meet you.”
The girl’s blush was all-encompassing.
“It’s nice to meet you, too, Gretyl. I use your calculus slides in my workshops.”
“Glad to hear it!”
“I made some improvements.” Her voice was a whisper.
“You did?” Gretyl roared. The girl shrank and might have run off if Gretyl hadn’t caught her hands. “I insist you show them to me, right now.”
The girl lost her shyness. She shook out a screen and took Gretyl through her changes. “The kids kept getting mixed up when we did derivative applications at the end, because without applications when we did the rest of it, limits and derivatives, it was going in one ear and out the other, just rote. When I started to mix in applications as we went, they were better at putting it together at the end.”
Gretyl’s jolly-old-lady act slipped away. She brought down her huge eyebrows.
“Aren’t applications without theory confusing? Without theory, they can’t solve the applications—”
The girl cut her off with a shake of head, crazy hair all over the place. “You just need to be careful which applications you choose. You see…” She produced charts showing how she’d assessed examples with each group. Tam could tell Gretyl was loving this. She was also sure the girl was right about everything. She liked this town.
“Ready to go?” Seth said. He’d tightened the straps on the cluster and wore a speaker on a necklace for Etcetera to use. Tam made herself not stare at it—it was tempting to think of that as Etcetera’s face. But his visual input came from thirty vantage points.
“Soon.” She pointed. “Gretyl’s got an admirer.”
Etcetera made an impatient noise. “That’s great, but we need to hit the road. It’s three, four days’ walk from here, assuming we don’t get bikes or a ride.”
“I know. We still have to say good-bye to the Gil, hello to these people, and good-bye to them. It’s called sociability, Etcetera. Accommodate yourself.”
Seth snorted. Etcetera was silent, possibly sulking. Tam imagined that he was saying unkind things about the living in his internal monologue. She recalled his on-the-record statements about Limpopo’s choice to live as a house spirit. She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out, and heard Hoa and Gretyl laugh and turned to see them looking.
She gave them the face, making a Harpo googie of it. Hoa responded with her own, and rubber-faced Gretyl made one that put theirs to shame.
“You win. You two made the world safe for calculus yet?”
“Done.” They grinned.
“When do we start?” Tam looked at the boys, now in a relatively zeppelin-free corner of the field with some local kids and some aerialists, kicking a ball around in a game that involved a lot of screaming and tackling and possibly no rules.
“You’re covered,” Hoa said. “We’ve got bikes coming out of our assholes here.”
“Sounds painful,” Seth said. Hoa made her face.
“We’re into deconstructed bikes, minimal topologies.”
Tam saw Gretyl and Seth nodding. She suppressed her irritation. She tried to understand the attraction of minimal topology, but it just looked … unfinished. The drive to reduce overall material volume of mechanical solids had been a project in both default and walkaway for decades, minimizing feedstock use in each part, getting better at modeling the properties of cured feedstock. Familiar things grew more improbably gossamer. Everything was intertwingled tensegrity meshes that cross-braced themselves when stressed, combining strength and suppleness. It was scary enough in bookcase or table form, everything looking like it was about to collapse all the time. When applied to bicycles, the technique nauseated her with fear, as the bike deformed and jiggled through the imperfections in the roads.
“Great,” she managed.
Hoa nodded. “We’re ahead of everyone else. I did one last month that only weighs ninety grams! Without the wheels. You’d get seven hundred kay out of it before it flumfed.”
That was the other thing about minimal topology. It had catastrophic failure modes. A single strut giving way caused a cascade of unraveling chaotic motion that could literally reduce a bike frame to a pile of 3D–printed twigs in thirty seconds. People swore the bike’s self-braking mechanisms would bring it to a safe halt before it disintegrated. But if they could model the cataclysmic collapse so well, why couldn’t they prevent it?
“Great.” She caught Gretyl and Seth playing sarcastic eyeball hockey. She glared at them and Seth gave her a squeeze.