The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(70)



Or pretentious, Philip thought of saying but didn’t. He was thinking of that ridiculous condolence letter she’d sent him.

“The day I came up here,” he said, “why bother with the whole ruse? What was the point of bringing me here if ‘Mr. Lyons’ was never going to show?”

She pursed her lips in an effort to contain her own amusement. “I knew that if I got you comfortable enough, I could find out whether you knew where your father’s work was hidden. I could find out without Mr. Lyons ever having to arrive.”

“I told you I didn’t know.”

“It was slippery of me. But you see, after a while, my twin identities have become second nature. In fact, I rather enjoy being Ms. Stone.” She sighed wistfully as she tamped the espresso grounds. “This was all so much easier pre-internet, of course. These days, everyone demands to know everything instantly.”

“Did my father know?”

She nodded. “He was one of the few I told who wasn’t working directly for me. It was a risk, but I loved his work, and I trusted him. He, unfortunately, in the end, didn’t trust me and backed out of our agreement.”

“By dying, you mean.”

“By betraying our understanding,” she said coldly. “I do have a business to run.”

He shouted above the steaming milk. “How can you be sure I’ll keep your secret?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s time for Ms. Stone to retire. Besides, gone are the days when she could use her feminine charms to get what she wanted. That kind of cheap persuasion doesn’t work for me like it once did.” She poured the espresso and foam into two cups. “Funny, that may be the last time I tell that story to anyone. I hope it clears everything up.”

“Well, not everything.”

“We’ll get to your father’s work soon enough,” she said, handing him his cappuccino. “What did you make of Cavet?”

He looked down at his cup, at the Mandelbrot pattern she had fashioned in the foam. “What about him?”

“I recruited him from the London School of Economics in the nineties, where he was doing some startling work on the fractal nature of African villages. Before Cavet, no one had bothered to look at the architecture of these settlements from above. He realized that they are remarkably self-similar, the form of the entire village repeated in the form of the neighborhood, the block, the house—”

“I’m familiar with how fractals work.”

She ignored him and continued. “Turns out his research applied not only to villages in Africa but also to settlements all over the world. If one knows what the outside of a town looks like, one can anticipate the interior. The military has been using Cavet’s techniques in the Middle East for years, when soldiers enter areas without satellite images.”

“But fractals don’t get you killed,” Philip said. “Guns and bombs do.”

“Exactly,” she said with emphasis. “Death is unexpected, isn’t it, no matter how well we plan for it? Cavet’s method is merely a tool. And where his methods end, your father’s work begins.”

She signaled Philip back into the hallway. Drinks in hand, they clicked down the tile to another set of double doors, where Nellie turned to him with a barely suppressed smile. “I guess I didn’t realize how much I was looking forward to showing you this.”

“His mathematics, you mean.”

She nodded. “Can you think of anything more exhilarating than the realization that the future is, in fact, knowable?”

And with that, she pushed open the doors.

*

Some time later, Philip sat in a leather bucket chair, picking his way through figures on a wall. He was aware of Nellie breathing in the darkness beside him, her respirations loud enough to make him feel as if his own breathing had stopped.

The equation was of some length—so long, in fact, that its projected image spilled from the wall onto the concrete floor. Was his heart still beating? He couldn’t feel it. It was as if his body had gone into a kind of torpor so that his brain alone could barrel ahead. It was a familiar sensation that he’d experienced the few times he had a particularly exhilarating idea in his own work. At such moments, he imagined that his brain was approaching the speed of light, while the variables in front of him slowed to a standstill.

It might have been five minutes since Nellie had flicked on the projector, or it might have been twenty, but he had needed only a few seconds to identify the equation as his father’s. It bore all of the signature refinement, the dedication to the graceful, the spare, the clean-swept. But here and there, erupting out of tidy, almost unassuming passages, was a mathematics of such delight and strangeness that it seemed to Philip to be almost a new kind of logic, created elsewhere, extragalactically—as if Isaac Severy had been chosen to introduce this brand of math to Earth. Even if this equation meant nothing, even if it were just delirious ramblings, it was beautiful.

But toward the end of the equation, something happened. The numbers took a sharp turn, as if rebelling, and the accompanying symbols seemed to stick out their Greek tongues. Had he missed something? Was this, in fact, over his head? Bewildered, Philip asked Nellie to scroll back to the beginning.

She didn’t seem to register his confusion.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” she asked in the same way she had about the lioness trophy in her office. “Of course,” she continued, “I’m no mathematician. I had to have one of my guys explain the more arcane pieces. But then it was this feeling of exaltation, like a portal opening—”

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