A Slow Cold Death Read online

  A Slow Cold Death

  Published by Bitingduck Press

  eISBN 978-1-938463-38-9

  © 2012 Susy Gage

  All rights reserved

  For information contact

  Bitingduck Press, LLC

  Altadena, CA 91001

  http://www.bitingduckpress.com

  Cover image by Dena Eaton

  For Ozy, because sometimes denial really is a superpower; and for Skaludy, my first fan

  The balance sheet for the universe makes the crucial distinction between a universe that will expand forever into a slow cold death, or on the other extreme one which will fall back upon itself in the big crunch—Prof. John Learned, University of Hawaii

  Disclaimer

  None of these people are real, and none of these events actually happened, except the part about the mallard. Any resemblance to real people or events is a coincidence or a product of your guilty conscience.

  The Superior Technological Institute

  Prologue: 1991

  Jacob Silverman hated graduations.

  They made him feel like a piece of infrastructure, paraded around in a silly costume for the benefit of students who had bugged him for four, eight, sometimes as many as thirteen years in the case of his least-favorite PhD student. His gray and red academic regalia was sweltering, and at ten o’clock on this ninth of May in beautiful Pasadena, California, it was already over one hundred degrees.

  So while the campus of the Superior Technological Institute was being strewn with roses and computer cables for the big day, he strapped a water bottle around his waist, laced up his hiking boots, and headed into the foothills alone. The air grew cooler and cleaner with every mile, and there were no sounds besides the humming of insects and his own footfalls.

  When he was struck from behind, he thought at first of a landslide, raising his arms to protect his head. Then a second blow fell between his shoulder blades, accompanied by a distinctly human grunt.

  Tumbling over the trail’s edge to the chaparral below, he thought for a crazy few moments that he would survive. The sand was soft and welcoming and he dove into it hands first, images flashing in his mind of his family, then his mother, then himself marching into the police station to file a report. There weren’t very many people who would have interest in killing a physics department chairman, even if his department was the best of its kind in the world.

  But the sand was slippery on the steep slope, and he accelerated as he slid, grasping more and more desperately at cacti and manzanita trees that tore from their moorings under his speeding weight. His last hope was that the murderer’s identity would be as obvious to his colleagues as it should be, and then he broke through the underbrush to plummet two hundred feet to the canyon floor.

  One: Right Back Where I Started From

  “Maupertuis will tell you many things, but pay him little heed.” Alexander Kuznetsov’s too-formal English made him seem even creepier somehow. “He was shot in the chest on the freeway last year, and he hasn’t been the same since. He’ll die long before he gets tenure.”

  Lori recoiled instinctively from the terrible words, forgetting she was still wearing her rollerblades. She scrambled for balance, clutching the wall, leaving a streak of sweat on the department head’s beige paint.

  The last time she had stood in this room she had been sixteen years old, pursued by a reporter into Silverman’s office for some bullshit feel-good story about the youngest graduate of America’s best science university. Valedictorian, a single A- (organic chemistry) the only flaw on her record, three papers published as an undergrad. It should have felt like a triumph, returning to the place that had been her home and to one of the most coveted positions in all of geekdom. Only a hundred and fifty people in the world could claim the title of professor at the Superior Technological Institute. An even dozen could claim to be professors of physics in the department that had housed Millikan, Dirac, Einstein, and Feynman.

  But something had been wrong since the moment she arrived half an hour ago, and it wasn’t being number thirteen. The department she remembered so well had become a ghost town. The secretarial cube farm was closed and dark. Half of the rooms had no names on them. The only person here at nine-thirty on a Wednesday morning was the new chairman, who had skipped her interview out of pure spite and whose welcome sounded more like a death threat.

  She took a deep breath and tried to channel Silverman. Kuznetsov never would have been hired if his predecessor hadn’t died in a freak hiking accident, and she returned his sneer with one of her own. “In that case, is there anyone alive I should meet?”

  “We didn’t expect you until next week,” he replied coldly, as if her early intrusion were a personal insult. “I understand your research group will be joining you?”

  “Just one postdoc.”

  “We must talk.” He rose to his feet, brushed past her and headed down the corridor, not even giving her a chance to change her footwear.

  She half-marched, half-rolled after him, noticing that even with hundred-millimeter wheels she was a head shorter. Kuznetsov was a bit scary looking, clean-shaven and deathly pale with slanted gray eyes and a neat cap of silver hair. He wore a suit and tie and there was a trace of Russian in his voice, but so slight it sounded fake at times.

  He led her down two flights of stairs (she stepped sideways, clinging to the handrail) and across the tiny campus, past the thirteen-storey library that gleamed like mylar in the sun, and to a completely-remodeled bookstore with a café called the “H bar and grill.”

  The place depressed her. They had obviously tried to make it fancy, but it was a faux gourmet rip-off, with tiny portions and inedible baked goods. The new layout of the bookstore was wretched, too—there were no longer any books. Instead there were shelves of electronic gadgets and their assorted accessories, all branded and logoed and arranged by color-code for each of the four STI Undergraduate Houses. Lori felt as if everything she held sacred had been turned into a bauble.

  Slurping loudly on his four-dollar latte, Kuznetsov told her that she should fire her current postdoc and replace her with the incoming crop of his hand-selected superstars. Of the six first-year students, he expected her to support at least three, all of them string theorists. Now that she’d made her presence in town known, she was “invited” (no choice involved) to spend the weekend with them in Palm Springs at the new students’ retreat, where he would introduce these people to her.

  “As close as you are to your tenure review, stick with what you know,” he told her with a muffiny grin that showed decayed stubs of teeth, stigmata no doubt of outdated Soviet dental practices. He tried to convince her that trying to set up an experimental lab before tenure was too risky, that she shouldn’t even bother. Everyone else at the interview had said the opposite. Besides, if she was supposed to stick with what she knew, why abandon her Canadian postdoc? Fang Li was a theorist, and she was good, and Lori refused to have her callously jettisoned.

  “As you know, STI only allows postdocs to have that status for five years,” Kuznetsov pursued, leaving her no room to reply. “Your Canadian has but one year left, for her to leave her country would be unwise.”

  Lori groaned audibly. She had told Fang to make sure she had her green card—after all, she had done her PhD at Chicago: she knew the U.S.—but being the impractical flake theoretical physicists all were, she’d never done it.

  After all the grief of last year, Lori had wanted to leave Canada so much that she hadn’t stopped to wonder what STI really wanted from her. She had thought they were being generous when they gave her credit for all five years she’d spent as an assistant professor, offering to give her tenure after only one year if things went well. That was the ultimate
sign that she was so out of touch that she no longer understood anything that mattered. It was the first rule of this place—trust no one. But she had signed a contract, and now she was here, and had to avoid becoming a pawn for the losing side.

  She didn’t even bother to argue. Paying for his students was out of the question, no matter how brilliant they were, but let him entertain his silly hopes if that made him happy. The first thing she needed to do was to find out who was responsible for space allocations, and whether the experimental lab they’d promised in the letter of offer was real or a lie.

  He continued to chew with infuriating slowness, so finally she got up, excused herself without veiling her sarcasm, and skated out the door.

  All of her luggage was still on the moving van, which had left her this morning with the only means of transportation that could fit in a carry-on. Perfect for the flat bike trails of Montreal, her custom carbon-fiber speedskates were about as appropriate in the Los Angeles foothills as swim fins on a gymnast. The three-mile descent to campus had been terrifying, done mostly backwards and involving one face-first crash onto someone’s lawn.

  But the campus was smooth and flat, the only obstacles a few fallen fruit on the Olive Walk and string trimmers wielded by the eternally zealous campus landscape crew. She gave the gardeners the finger, sprinted past the cafeteria, twisted around the library, and flew up the wheelchair ramp towards the physics building. The tiny campus had been made entirely accessible five years before—she knew for whom, and she knew he’d graduated, so she truly wasn’t expecting a guy in a wheelchair to be in her way right at the top.

  Swallowing a holy shit, she turned a hard left (always easier) and bumped down the short flight of stairs to execute a not-so-nice front T-stop just in front of the rose bushes. She then had to grab onto them to keep her balance, and swore for real this time in every language she knew as the thorns tore through her wrist guards and she sat down hard on the pavement.

  There were too many people watching for this hour of the morning, and all of them were laughing.

  “Lori Barrow returns in style,” called a kid sitting on the library steps. “Nine point five.”

  “Nine point four,” commented the guy in the wheelchair who had spun himself around in a tight radius. “Deduction for cursing.” He sped down the ramp and over to where she was sitting. “Tabarnak de câline de binnes’?” he smirked, offering her his hand to pull her up. “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” His eyes sparkled with laughter, but his face looked tired and too old to be a student’s and his French was straight from the grandes écoles of Paris.

  “Crisse de tabarnak,” Lori replied, exaggerating her best Quebecois accent. “You must be Louis Maupertuis.”

  Two: The Most Logical Costume

  “Excellent! You say my name even better than Murray Gell-Mann.” Louis didn’t look as if he had any intention of dying young. He was tan and grinning, with sun-bleached curly hair and a T-shirt that read String Theorists Have P-Branes. His grip was strong as he pulled Lori to her feet in a single motion that was surprisingly graceful. “What’s it like being back?” His English was as casual as his French was snobby, without any trace of a foreign or regional accent.

  “Like being Rip van Winkle, that’s what,” she griped, sticking one foot behind her so she wouldn’t trip again. “Everything has changed, I recognize nothing, and I hate it all. The coffee shop employees are so mean they wouldn’t fill my cup.”

  “That’s weird, they’re usually very nice.” His bushy blond eyebrows knit into a scowl and he lowered his voice. “Unless you were with Kuzno?”

  His obvious loathing only made Lori’s vision of the department even murkier. She half expected him to say that Kuznetsov didn’t have long for this world. Instead he just explained, “No one will serve you if you’re with that son of a bitch. He’s abused all the waitstaff in a five-mile radius.” He glanced at her feet, then her head. “Why don’t you change your clothes, and we’ll go get some coffee somewhere else.”

  Lori was suddenly conscious of the immodesty of her skinsuit, her backpack stained with the mud of a winter that would never end, smelly wrist guards now splotched with blood, and the number “116” still stuck on her helmet from last month’s marathon. “Er, well…” she tried. “I don’t exactly have any other clothes. I’m not really at work today—I just came down here to check the place out and was hijacked by Kuzno.”

  Louis grumbled like a grouchy old dog. “Exactly what I was trying to prevent. You have to tell me what he said—but not here. The bushes have ears.” The way he glared at the nearest rosebush made Lori half expect it to reply, but it stayed stoic as he spun around and headed for the edge of campus.

  She thought she knew where he was going and followed eagerly. The first Peet’s outside Northern California had been on the corner a block from the geology building, and as long as it was still there, all was right with the world.

  “Is Kuznetsov evil?” she asked.

  “He’s more than evil,” retorted Louis, who pushed the way obsessed people walk, flying down the bumpy sidewalk with apparent disregard for fallen grapefruit and ficus pods. “He is the enemy.”

  Lori had never seen a wheelchair like that before, with a frame crafted with minimalist titanium simplicity like a racing bike, a really low back, and fancy expensive wheels of the same brand she used to have. “Nice wheels,” she remarked, “but I sold mine with that type of spokes. They’re really hard to true, and they break a lot, especially on a mountain bike.”

  He looked briefly surprised. “You’re right, actually. I paid a fortune for these, and they break all the time.”

  “I can show you what the national team guy taught me.” She hopped off the sidewalk and skated in the street, which was grapefruit-free and put her closer to Louis so she didn’t have to shout. “As soon as the moving van shows up with my truing stand, that is.”

  “You true your own wheels?”

  “Always. Usually in my office—it relaxes the brain.” She braked at the red light of Lake Avenue, scanning the unfamiliar storefronts. Cell phones and chic clothing, a fancy supermarket and a cheap department store—nothing to hint that they were two hundred yards from the greatest concentration of geniuses in the world.

  “Suddenly I feel like a loser theorist,” said Louis, who was about the best example of loser theorist she’d ever seen. Seriously, “P-Branes”?

  “Even a theorist can use a truing stand,” said Lori, without really meaning it. Most of them couldn’t handle a screwdriver, but she was an exception and she hoped Louis was too, in case she needed to recruit him for her new lab. “By the way, how did you recognize me like this? I was hoping to stay incognito.”

  He laughed. “Lori, you’re wearing your skinsuit, helmet, and a number in eleven out of the twelve images that appear under your name in a Google search.”

  “Do you realize,” she rattled off in a single breath as they took turns pushing the button for the green light, “that when I last left STI, the internet was just a bunch of physicists posting their preprints and half a dozen newsgroups of which I was a founding member of half? The computer lab on the library’s first floor had nothing but six amber-colored monitors and a printer for testing your LaTex because you couldn’t visualize it on screen. Can you imagine that there was no C++ standard? That the most common operating system on campus was MS-DOS?”

  “Wow, you should teach a class in Ancient Geek History. And I think I know who you were on alt.tasteless.” The light changed at last. “Where do you want to have breakfast?”

  The heat was oppressive and the air smoggy. It took her a moment to catch her breath as they slowed down to navigate the commercial center and another moment to remember what September was like in Montreal: Cold. Always cold. The only safe month in Montreal was July, and it was all alone, a sad pitiful little month standing up to eleven cruel others. “I don’t know. I think I want to go to Peet’s, unless it has changed. I know nothing anymore. Even the t
utu-man is dead!”

  It had changed—it was now part of a brightly-colored bagel shop that had certainly not been there before. There were a ton of people milling about and hogging the sunny spots, but Louis seemed to think it was worth the crowd and found them a place in line for both bagels and coffee. “It’s OK, Lori,” he said without any trace of irony. “We’ll make another.”

  “What? Another tutu-man?” Lori balanced on one foot and fought with the buckle of her skate. “You can’t just make them like, like—”

  “Like ice cubes? I choose my analogy carefully. There are simple ways of turning a sane, healthy physicist into a gibbering lunatic; it’s as well defined as a phase transition. First, he has to be appointed to a high-ranking position and then thrown out like an old rag.”

  Lori was starting to see the picture. “Second, he has to sue and be granted tenure.” Finally free of the first skate, she started removing the second. “Third, he has to then decide to spend the next eighty years hanging around campus wearing a miniskirt and swim sandals just to annoy the university, calling it ‘The most logical costume for males in a hot climate.’” She shoved the skates into her bag and took out her cheap rubber flip-flops, feeling the blood return to her toes one by one.

  “Now I wonder who is on stage one?”

  “I may be immature, Louis, but I am not stupid.” With the skates off, she was right at his eye level and gave him a steady glare. “I know perfectly well that string theory is for losers and that we were hired to drive Kuzno and his flunkies out.”

  They had reached the end of the line, but Louis appeared rather stunned, so Lori just stepped in front of him and ordered herself a breakfast sandwich on sesame and the largest coffee that they had.