Vienna (23 page)

Vienna tried to clear her mind, but succeeded only in noticing a faint oscillation in the vacuum roar of the engines. The jet sailed through the gathering night, as smooth as a leaf on a lake. The oscillation was actually two separate wavelengths transposed on top of each other.

A discrete Fourier transform is used for analyzing differing waveforms …

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was orphaned at the age of nine. His father had been a tailor.…

 … where Hans Christian Andersen wrote
The Emperor's New Clothes …

The discordant sound seemed to grow louder.

Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.

Vienna pulled the blanket over her head, as if it would save her from the crash she was certain was only seconds away. In the darkness she saw the image from Justine's laptop.

123456712345671234567123456712345671234567123456712345

MOEEEXLHWTCIESXKQTKTTHTIOEKRBZIQVAM
the
APMCXVJCMSHMLSFW

671234567123456712345671234567123456712345671234567123

YUKKICXA
the
WTKZOYWSHID
the
WPEDE
the
XIMSNYIDWFAKAATXT
the
W

456712345671234567123456712345671234567123456712345671

FRMNWPRELQOKKICSR
the
TWEZEMZEYHMLPHCDEE
the
TWEZEMZQZZQOG

234567123456712345671234567123456712345671234567123456

LXZQQALBVPHUSMHRNIANXASXIMSNYIEMYEBUXSIOIMFSQXTEPOMEII

712345671234567123456712345671234567123456712345671234

AESWOMPMXUIDAQAKAMPWFAKVJSSDULHVZYZDAPWYIOKAPWASIEKPWZ

567123456712345671234567123456712345671234567123456712

YDSWVASEFTAVYHMXTILENINRHALPVEAGKWTWFEKZFPPUEOLEWPYIZO

345671234567

XMIYAWLPPZQL

Possible keyword: the***a

Vienna compared the changes Justine had made with the memory of the original. Why was it so hard to see the patterns? She struggled with a trick that one of her first doctors had tried to teach her:
focus on one thing at a time.

Whenever “MOI” originally appeared, it was under the numbers “123.” “TAL” appeared under the numbers “712.” Justine had replaced both with “the.”

A new geometry laid itself out before Vienna. Letters shifted like cascades of sand down the face of a dune. Given a loop of alphabets, “T” appeared nineteen letters before “M.” Shift every seventh letter nineteen spaces.

She saw it behind the numbers. The Star of Memphis. But there were too many choices. She felt her heart racing in the hollow of her throat. Alphabets sliding with each set of seven letters, taking parts of her mind with them. Nauseating dislocation.

“Vienna.”

A modulo twenty-six series reeled across Cartesian coordinates.

“Vienna.”

René
Descartes was born on March 31, 1596. The impact he was to have on Western thought, particularly in the fields of …

“Stop.” Justine's whisper was soft but intense. She pulled the blanket from Vienna's head.

“Britain was still using the Julian Calendar in 1596,” Vienna said. “So that date wouldn't be right for London.”

“Vienna.”

The grid of letters collapsed. “It was there!”

“Shh. What was there?”

“The code. Why did you stop me?”

“Because ladies sketching on their seat trays when they have no pen chip their nails.” Justine gently held Vienna's left hand. Vienna saw the nail on the index finger was broken.

“I saw your computer screen. The pattern isn't so hard.”

“It is for me.” She used a clipper to trim Vienna's broken nail. “You stopped chewing your nails.”

“You told me to.”

“Was I the first?”

“No.”

“Good.” Vienna felt the dissonance of Justine's pronouncement, but Justine was already back to the encryption.

“Too slow,” Vienna said. “Give it to me.”

Vienna let her finger move across the keyboard. She lost herself in the mechanics of motion, not daring to think over the changes that appeared.

th
EEEXl
o
WTCIE
se
KQTKT
to
T
e
OEK
ri
Z
e
QVA
mthe
APM
ce
VJCMS
hte
SFW

Y
ur
K
e
CXA
the
WTKZ
of
WSHID
the
WPED
ethe
XIM
su
Y
e
DWF
ar
AATXT
the
W

FRM
nd
PRELQ
or
K
e
CSR
the
TWEZ
et
ZEYHMl
w
HCDEE
the
TWEZ
et
ZQZZQ
on

e
XZQQ
as
BVPHU
st
HRNIA
ne
ASXIM
su
Y
e
EMY
ei
UXSIO
it
FSQXT
ewh
MEII

al
SWOMP
me
U
e
DAQ
ar
AMPWF
ar
VJSSD
us
HVZYZ
dh
PWYIO
kh
PWASI
er
PWZ

YD
sd
VASEF
th
VYHMX
tpe
ENIN
ro
ALPVE
an
KWTWF
er
ZFPPU
eve
EWPY
igh

XMIY
ade
PPZQ
l

“That's amazing,” Justine said.

“By which you mean amazing for anyone not an autistic savant.”
Why does she piss me off every time she speaks?

Justine smiled. “I'm not so sure. You created an algorithm to solve the problem on the fly. Savants often have issues with such things.”

Vienna shrugged. “Twenty-six modulo algebra. The first element is shifted by nineteen, while the seventh has no shift at all. Surely you saw that when the ‘T' in the sequence ‘T-A-L' remained unchanged in the word ‘T-H-E'.”

“Obviously,” Justine said in that weird voice she sometimes used. “Although it still doesn't look like much.”

“You're wrong and not very smart.” Vienna let the letters spill through her. She could track patterns almost in the same way she could track whole words. But now the choices had been narrowed to the point where she could see options without getting tangled in them. She was startled to see two words emerge from the chaos. “Look at the sequence at the beginning of the second line.” She pointed at the screen and retyped the letters, replacing the unknown ones with spaces:
_ur_e_
“How many words have this pattern? I see ‘burned,' ‘buried,' ‘burden,' ‘cursed,' and ‘curved.'” Vienna shifted in her seat. “‘Nurses' also fits … ‘purred' too, I guess.”

“Maybe it's a code for cats,” Justine said.

Vienna looked at her. “Or a starfish collector seeking pure echinoderms.”

It took several seconds for Justine to see the pattern. When she got it, she seemed genuinely delighted, leaning over to kiss Vienna's right temple. “I bow to your wisdom.”

Vienna sighed. “Can we be serious again? There is one other word that has a ‘UR' in the middle and then an ‘E.'”

“Murder,” Justine said.

Vienna blinked, feeling that Justine had manipulated her. “You knew?”

“I may not be broken, but I'm reasonably bright.”

Vienna let it go. “The “HTE” that appears just before it is an odd combination of letters, yeah?” she said. “I can think of only two words that fit in the nine-letter space we have. One is ‘tightened,' which makes no sense.”

“And the other?”

“Righteous.”

“Righteous murder,” Justine said.

“I think so.” She gave the laptop back to Justine. “I don't like your code.”

“I don't either.”

“Where do you think Sinoro found it?”

“I don't know. But ‘righteous murder' sounds like something an anarchist would threaten.”

Vienna saw words from a poet named Yeats.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
She didn't say them out loud because they'd always scared her, and she didn't think poetry was supposed to be scary.

The steward stopped at their seats. “I'm sorry, miss, you have to shut off the laptop. We're close to final approach. Please stow your tables.”

“I can get more of it,” Justine whispered as she folded the laptop closed. “You have to promise me not to think about it.”

“Okay.”
She's afraid I'll go eppy before landing.

It was dark by the time they stepped from the Keflavík airport into the SUV limo waiting to take them to Reykjavík. Justine gave the name of the hotel to the driver, another Radisson SAS.

“Pierre-Esprit Radisson's explorations of Hudson Bay in 1668 formed the impetus for the Hudson's Bay Company,” Vienna said. The words came as the thought did—something that seemed to happen with Justine.
Because I'm not ashamed when she hears?

“More important, they have a good restaurant.”

The car drifted through sparse traffic. Vienna saw little from the windows, except that once outside Keflavík there were few lights breaking the night. A series of isolated crofts, calling out their presence. It seemed unnatural after the yellow-white brightness of London and Brussels.

Estimating the car's speed from highway signs, Vienna saw that their car traced bases of shifting triangles that reached to each light. Distances and angles flooded through her. Calculus as perfect trigonometry. She closed her eyes tight, but she was so tired and her thoughts were trapped.

“I'm here, Vienna.”

“Do you see the sliding triangles? Distances in the lights, derived by speed. That's all there is.”

Justine reached into her bag and pulled out what looked like an oversized phone with a large screen. She turned it on. “Show them to me.”

“You're supposed to say they aren't real. That's what my doctor in London always said.”

“I'm betting your doctor was wrong.” The screen lit up and a map appeared. Vienna realized it was a GPS.

“One of Grant's old toys,” Justine said, showing a half smile that vanished as soon as it formed.

Vienna looked at Justine. “If you can't see them, how do you know they're real?”

Justine pointed to a distant glow. “How far away is that light?”

“It will be easier when we're even with it.”

“Tell me when we get there.”

Concentrating on a single light, Vienna found the pain receding. When they were level with it, she said, “One-point-three kilometers. Assuming our speed hasn't changed and the road has been straight and the land is flat between us and the light. I'm using that bright star for a background, so I suppose its apparent movement caused by the Earth's rotation should be taken into account.”

“Miles, hun.”

Vienna found a conversion table. “Just under point eight—but it's probably way off! I need more time to get it right.”

Justine smiled. “The GPS shows a structure zero-point-seven-four miles away. How can I say your triangles aren't real?”

Vienna felt calmness enfold her. A trick Justine could somehow turn, even when doctors could not. The triangles faded, as if they had nothing left to prove. “It's flatter than I thought it would be,” she said.

“There's a delta on the southern coast so flat that you can't tell where the land ends and the sea begins. Ships used to run aground there.”

“How did they fix it?”

Justine laughed. “They put up a lighthouse.”

Vienna blushed. “That was a stupid question wasn't it?”

“It was a delightful question.”

“But the answer is obvious.”

“So is the fact that pickles come from cucumbers.”

Vienna thought that over but could make no sense of it. “What?”

“I didn't realize pickles came from cucumbers until I was nineteen. Until that moment, I assumed there were pickle bushes.”

Vienna found herself laughing before she could help it. With a start, she cut it off. “That was mean.”

Justine shook her head. “It's a secret lovers share.”

Why would you purposely embarrass yourself in front of someone you loved?

“Anyway, Miss Almanac, I need your help.”

Vienna let the jab go. She was building a new idea wherein being in a relationship meant ignoring some of the things your partner said. Or even most of the things. “Yes?”

“I need a seven-letter word that begins ‘T-H-E' and ends in ‘A,'”

“Does this have to do with the code?”

“I've been thinking about the keyword—a shortcut that might make the path easier for us both. We almost have it.”