Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 23

"What about frequency?" Yael asked.

"Frequency is also energy. How would you stop it getting washed out?"

"We can focus it with your airsuit technology," Wildchild ventured. "It keeps microwaves within a region of space."

"Excellent idea, Samothea, but it won't work. The frequency of the signal from the Beacon stays in synch until the information is read, then it jumps bands randomly."

"Oh," said Wildchild.

"But it shows you're thinking along the right lines, both of you. In fact, you're right to say that the forced move in the new technology must be a mathematical phenomenon, a statistical effect. You've given me an idea. I'm going to look at stochastic resonance to stop the signal getting scrambled."

After she explained what stochastic resonance was, Danielle went to work. Soon she was lost in a relativistic universe filled with hyperspace plumes, lossless signals and forced moves.

The girls settled down to study the equations. Despite being bewildered by the complex mathematics and the strange new physical concepts, Wildchild and Yael were alert and ambitious, grasping at any nugget of information that made sense to them. One thing was certain: they were hooked on physics. They would never give up trying to understand.

Danielle got no further with the problem that day or in the next few days, when other members of the Project Team got involved.

******

It was mid-afternoon on Friday and the Science Institute closed early for the weekend before the summer exams, when there would be no more lessons.

Danielle had wracked her brain for two weeks solid, looking for the forced moves that would make the Beltway Junctions work with the new technology. Having failed, it was a good idea to let the problem lie fallow for a few days.

In her flat, Annela was playing with Freya on the floor. They'd been to the park so Freya could run around with Charlie the dog, as she did every day, while Annela had a pleasant chat with Edgar Fanshaw, who'd quite perked up in his hundred-and-thirteenth year from the attention of his young friends from Samothea.

Ezra was dozing in an armchair, physically exhausted by Annela, who had no compunction about waking him up five or six times a night to make love.

Roger was home early from the library, preparing for his Friday evening videolink to Madam Gloria and her advisory council on Samothea.

Ed and Rod had gone to Rod's family cabin to revise for their exams for the last time.

Hazel was sitting on the window seat, reading a geology text-book. Yael pressed affectionately against her with a physics book.

Danielle took her computer tab and invited Wildchild to join her on the couch. She began a maths program. Intrigued by Wildchild's abilities, Danielle wanted to test her young friend properly.

No one had any plans, other than to relax.

There was a knock at the front door and Freya ran down the corridor to answer it. She ran excitedly back, crying out: "It's Aunt Joan and Kelly."

Sure enough, Joan Mayfield and her daughter entered the living room.

"We're going shopping," Joan said. "Who wants to join us?"

"I do!" said Yael, jumping up. Hazel and Freya were also keen.

"Annela?" Joan invited.

"Thanks, Joan, but I've got a full day at the medical centre with Cassie tomorrow, so I need to be with Ezra tonight."

Annela enjoyed shopping but she knew the shoppers would end up at a restaurant and be late home. She also felt that her sexual needs were getting stronger, rather than slowly abating, as they were supposed to do. If she were to spend an entire day as Doctor Leighton's guinea pig tomorrow, then she needed Ezra to give her an exceptionally good shagging tonight.

Joan hadn't expected either of the men to come shopping but she hoped she could entice the maths students on the couch.

"Danielle, Samothea?" she said. "How about you?"

"No thanks," they replied in unison.

"Jinx," said Yael.

"What do you mean?" Danielle asked.

"You can't talk, Aunt Danielle," Freya remonstrated. "Yael jinxded you!"

"But, I ..."

"You can't talk," Freya insisted. "Yael's got to say your name."

"I might say the name of my lovely hostess ... and the other girl," Yael kindly offered, "if they agree to come shopping with us."

Danielle only smiled and shook her head while the other girl answered with a gesture in their sign-language. Hazel laughed but Yael replied in a prim and proper tone:

"That's very rude. I'm not sure I'll let you speak at all now. Come on Freya, let's go."

As the women collected their bags and prepared to visit the mall to waste Joan Mayfield's money, Wildchild signalled to Yael again.

Hazel drew in her breath and Yael stifled a laugh.

"Really!" she said, turning on her heel. "There's a child present."

As the shopping party reached the door, Yael said over her shoulder:

"Besides, it wouldn't fit!"

Wildchild's attempt to use profanity to get Yael to say her name didn't work but it amused Danielle that Wildchild kept to the rules of the Jinx game.

She decided to try something. The girls from Samothea were not the only bright women there, gifted with good memories, curiosity and alertness. Danielle had often observed the girls using hand-signals to communicate.

She began signalling to Wildchild, hoping that what she gestured meant: "Let's talk in signs."

Wildchild was enchanted. She understood pretty well what Danielle tried to say and took hold of her friend's hands to show her the correct signs. It was lucky they wanted to talk about maths because they could write down equations and symbols that didn't exist in the sign-language.

Pretty soon they were working through the maths program, interrupted by occasional laughter from Wildchild when Danielle got a word hopelessly wrong. Finally, Danielle broke the jinx rules to say:

"Don't laugh at me just because I speak your sign-language with an accent!"

******

Next day was Saturday and everyone went their separate ways.

Annela visited the Medical Centre for a full day of tests under Cassie Leighton.

Roger was researching in the library.

Ezra had a surprise for Hazel and refused to say what it was.

After staying overnight with Joan, Peter and Kelly, Yael and Freya joined them on a family trip to a riding school. Kelly usually had riding lessons in Fanshaw Park but, as a special treat, they drove to a stables about twenty miles north of Arts City, where there was wild countryside to hack around.

Danielle and Wildchild went on a visit to continue the previous night's maths lesson with the help of one of the galaxy's best mathematicians. Shortly after breakfast that morning, Danielle and Wildchild sat in the living room of Professors Dorothy and Max Martlebury, with cups of tea in their laps.

Dorothy Martlebury had hardly changed since she shared a platform with Danielle at the 'Women in Science' conference at Caltech, many years previously, when she'd supported Danielle's anti-feminist argument. She was grey-haired, inclined to wear tweed suits, was devoted to her husband and three adult sons, and had the sharpest intellect of anyone that Danielle knew.

Her husband, Max, was also a mathematician. He was portly, jolly and famously absent-minded, often looking for the glasses that he had pushed up to the top of his balding head, but friendly enough for someone who seemed not to have the faintest clue who Danielle was, though they had known each other for years. His powers of concentration were very great, however, so he didn't mind the chatter going on in the other room, as he worked at a sort of lectern in a book-lined study.

"I've brought Samothea to see you, Dot, because I want your opinion on her mathematical abilities," Danielle said.

"Do you enjoy maths, Samothea?" Dorothy asked.

"Yes, very much, Madam."

"Do you want to be a mathematician?"

"I don't know, Madam. I like physics as well, but my bedmate and I plan to be Planetary Prospectors."

"You like danger and excitement?"

"Yes."

"There is little danger in maths but a good deal of intellectual excitement. Do you think that would compensate."

"I don't know, Madam. I don't know enough about the world or what there is to learn. I'm just starting."

"The girls of Samothea have little formal education," Danielle explained, "but they are very practical and they are all very good mental mathematicians."

"I understand," Dorothy said. "So let's see how Samothea's mind works."

Professor Martlebury took her computer tab and projected a fearsome-looking equation onto a screen. It had numbers and symbols and seemed to be in four parts. Danielle smiled to herself and began trying to break it down in her head.

"What do you think this equation means, Samothea?" Dorothy asked.

"Please, Madam, tell me what this symbol is?"

"It's a function relating the real part of the equation to its imaginary part."

"And this symbol?"

"It's a measure of dimensionality."

Wildchild looked at the equation and frowned.

"Won't it be a fraction?"

"Exactly so. A fractional dimension or fractal."

"Oh! I need to think about that," Wildchild said.

With a short lesson on fractals and one on mathematical tricks with integration, Wildchild gave her verdict.

"I looks like a surface to me, or a funny kind of solid, but it undulates so much that you can't say what its shape is at any point."

"Very good, Samothea. Danielle, what do you say?"

"I see it as pin-cushion graph and I agree with Samothea that it has no slope."

"Also good. My husband, Max, would say that it is a series of number-lines, cutting each other at various points. Herman would look at it as a matrix, as I do. Young Rosa would agree with Danielle and try to use calculus."

"So, it's a trick question?" Wildchild asked.

"It's a question I designed it to have multiple revealing answers."

"What does it reveal, Madam?"

"It reveals how a mathematician thinks. Max is a pure number theorist. Rosa and Danielle try to see fields or waves everywhere, functions they can perform calculus on. Herman and I want to think in discrete steps, dividing the world into particles or algorithmic sequences. And you, young lady, you're a topologist. You think in surfaces, solids and dimensions."

Dorothy projected a hologram of a solid shape, a bit like a bent sausage, with different coloured dots on its surface. She asked Wildchild to say where the dots would be if the sausage was bent at different angles or rotated about its axes. Danielle had to work out the answers, tracing the movements with her fingers, but for Wildchild, the answers just popped out. She could see the final positions of the dots intuitively.

Dorothy went on to knots and, again, Wildchild was intuitive, understanding how a knot tied in three dimensions would naturally unravel in four dimensions. This got her onto dimensions again, which she grasped easily.

After impressing Professor Martlebury, Wildchild took home books on topology, dimensions and knots. She had much to learn and think about.

******

The riding school was half-an-hour away by ground car, amid farms that stretched out northward to wild craggy hills. In between the hills were long swathes of grassy meadow, speckled with yellow, pink and white flowers, fringed by mature woodland and cut by sparkling rivers with pebble beds.

Yael was overjoyed at the sight of the lush riding country. She hugged Freya as the girls looked out of the window.

What the girls liked most was the mud. In their home in the forest on Samothea, there was mud everywhere: in the meadow; on forest paths; on the river banks; and in the gullies around the walls of the huts, where the heavy night rain lingered in the mornings before soaking away during the day.

By contrast, the streets and buildings of Arts City and the Science Institute were clinically clean. The streets were constantly swept by small solar-power cleaning drones. Gardening machines trimmed the bushes and hedges, transporting away the clippings. Grass-cuttings were sucked up and even leaf-litter from roadside trees was carefully collected, mulched and dug back into the roots of the trees or into the flower-beds, keeping the pavements free of rotting vegetation.

The girls delighted as the ground car weaved along country lanes with tall hedges, crossing bridle paths churned up by hoofs. They were ecstatic when they turned the final corner into the yard and saw the stables and paddock. They rushed out to meet the horses, led around the paddock by stable-girls.

Kelly had enjoyed riding lessons for years now and was quite proficient. Yet she caught the excitement. She skipped after Yael and Freya.

As the girls wandered through the riding school, wanting to pet all the horses, Freya made a discovery. She was the right height to see under a large black horse, about seventeen hands, taller than the biggest horse on Samothea. Freya pointed and said "What's that?"

Yael bent over to look at what Freya had seen under its belly.

"It's a cock," Yael said. "It must be a he-horse."

"A he-horse?"

Freya was thrilled. A fan of everything male, she looked around and saw the person to ask.

There was a stout lady, middle-aged and tweedy, with green Wellington boots and flame-red hair, the same shade as Freya. She stood leaning against the fence with one foot on the bottom slat, calling out orders to the riders in the paddock.

"Come on, girl," she barked at a rider who trotted past her. "Put some spirit into it. He's going to sleep."

Freya knew who was the boss. She ran up to the big woman and tugged on her skirts.

"Please, Madam, can I ride your he-horse?"

The women looked down at Freya and frowned.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Freya Annelasdaughter Woodlander."

"Well, Freya Whatsitsname Woodlander, a 'he-horse' is called a stallion. Which one do you mean?"

Freya pointed at the big horse standing in the courtyard.

"That's Jasper. He's too big for you," the woman said.

Freya looked so deflated that the woman was touched.

"However, because you have a sensible hair-colour, I will let you ride Jasper if someone will ride with you."

Freya had the answer. She ran over to Peter, calling to him as she ran.

"Uncle Peter, please will you ride me on Jasper?"

"Who's Jasper?"

Freya pointed.

"That carthorse?"

"Please, Uncle Peter. He's a he-horse."

Encouraged by Joan, Peter relented and helped prepare Freya with a riding hat. Besides, someone else had eyes on the horse Peter wanted to ride.

It was an English Thoroughbred. Chestnut with a black mane and tail. Strong, agile and spirited. Yael was transfixed. A hot-blooded hunter, even standing still and snorting, he looked faster than any horse Yael had ever ridden, faster even than Solange's feisty mare.

While Kelly mounted a pony and Peter took Freya for a trot around the paddock to get her used to the carthorse, Yael approached the boss lady and asked to ride the English hunter.

"How many riding lessons have you had?"

"None since I was a little girl, Madam," Yael said.

"That's no good. You can ride one of the training ponies."

"But I can ride well, Madam. I was born a Miner but I grew up a Herder and rode every day of my life until I was fourteen, and lots of times since."

"I don't know what you're talking about, girl."

"Yael is from Samothea," Joan Mayfield interjected.

"Never heard of it. Is it in the south?"

"It's a planet," Joan said. "A planet of women, including a horse-riding tribe."

The boss woman didn't seem impressed but she was good-natured despite her gruff manner.

"All right, girl, show me what you can do."

She ordered a pony brought up and Yael prepared to mount it.

"Where's your hat?"

"Here, Madam," Yael said, turning around. Her wide-brimmed leather hat, made by Judith, her Herder mother, hung on her back, over her long golden hair.

"Are you mocking me, girl?"

"No, Madam!"

Yael was shocked. The woman sounded angry at her. Yael was not used to being disliked, not since she was a child, when some of the Herders had bullied her. Since then, as the friendliest girl in the galaxy, she'd only ever met friendliness in return.

Tears pricked her eyes.

"She means a hard hat, Sweetie," Joan said. "Come on, use mine."

Prepared with a riding jacket and a hard hat, Yael approached the pony. She introduced herself to it and hugged it around the neck. When it accepted her, she mounted and found a problem.

"Excuse me, Madam. How do I steer?" she asked.

"What do you mean? I thought you could ride?"

"I can, but I've never ridden a horse with a saddle before."

"How do you ride on Smaothea, or whatever it's called?"

"Samothea, Madam. We sit on blankets and help steer with our knees."

"Well, here you'll ride in the regular way."

Yael was a quick study and was soon trotting around the paddock, steering with her toes in the horse's ribs and a pull on the reins.

"Faster," commanded the woman.

Yael sped up. She was solid in her seat and delicate with her instructions to the horse, which obeyed her happily. She cantered, weaving in and out of the other riders.

Just as Yael passed her for a second time, the boss lady shouted: "Stop!"

She pulled on the reins and stopped about ten feet past the woman.

"I meant here," the woman said.

Yael was not sure if she was meant to go around again or turn and go back. Turning back would get her in the way of the other riders and going all the way around again might anger the boss lady. Yael made up her mind. Her horse was a hack but intelligent and well understood her rider's commands. Yael tried something.

She pulled the reins as if to go right but pressed with her toes to go left. She leant forward on the horse's neck and tapped its shoulder, whispering in its ear some words in the Herder horse-language: "Arrente, dellesere, arrente. Go backward, good horse, go backward."

Sure enough, the horse shifted its weight to one side and moved a leg back. Yael tapped the opposite shoulder and pushed with her right toe. The horse understood and moved its weight to the other side, moving its legs in diagonal pairs.

More encouragement and repeated commands and the horse was moving backward at a slow walk.

The boss lady was impressed.

"You know horses, I see. You can ride Electrum, my English hunter, but you're not to jump him."

"No, Madam. Thank you, Madam."

"Off you go. Give him a good run."

Yael introduced herself to the hunter, cuddling its neck and whispering into its ear the soft-sounding words the Herder Tribe used to calm their ponies: "Acushla, acushla, metsuyan, dellesere."

Yael pulled herself up onto the horse. She trotted it once around the paddock, to prove to the boss lady that she was in control of her mount. The woman waved her on. Yael pointed Electrum at the wide-open field where Peter was trotting with Freya halfway down the meadow toward an avenue of willow trees beside the gleaming river. Kelly was cantering to catch up with them. Yael kicked her horse into a run and galloped out of the paddock.

It was a bright sunny day. The meadow-grass glistened with the remnants of the morning dew. Larks sang in the meadow as they chased one another up and around. Yael ate up the furlongs in pursuit of Kelly. She quickly caught Peter as well and shot ahead, leaping the river and speeding up the other side of the valley to the hedge at the top of the hill, where she was just a speck in the distance.

She turned and galloped back to join the others, who were barely past the river.

Joan Mayfield leaned against the fence next to the boss lady, watching Yael streak away across the meadow, leaning on the horse's neck, her long hair flying behind her.

"Your niece?" the boss lady asked.

"My son's girlfriend."

"She'll do."

"Yes, she will."