Pythagoras? No, not here, that one informed, in a hushed and very secretive manner, when Harry’s dead-speak broke into his centuried thoughts. He is elsewhere, waiting out his time.
‘His time?’
Until his metempsychosis, into a living, breathing man!
‘But do you converse? Are you able to contact him?’
He will occasionally contact us, when a thought has occurred to him.
‘Us?’
The Brotherhood! But I have said too much. Begone. Leave me in peace.
‘As you wish,’ Harry had told him. ‘But he won’t thank you that you turned away the Necroscope.’
What? The Necroscope? (Astonishment, and awe.) You are that one, who taught the dead to speak out in their graves, so enabling them to talk to one another as in life?
‘The same.’
And do you seek to learn from Pythagoras?
‘I seek to instruct him.’
That is a blasphemy!
‘Blasphemy?’ Harry had raised an eyebrow. ‘And is Pythagoras a god, then? If so, a painfully slow one! Consider this: I have already achieved my metempsychosis. Even now I embark upon a second phase, a new . . . condition.’
Your soul is in process of migration?
‘I may say that a change is in the offing, certainly.’
And after a while: If I speak to our master Pythagoras on your behalf, and if you have lied to me, be sure he willdamn you with Numbers. Aye, and possibly me with you! No, I dare not. First prove yourself.
‘Perhaps I can show you some numbers.’ Harry had contained his impatience as best he could. ‘As a member of the Brotherhood, I’m sure you will appreciate their importance.’
Do you seek to seduce me with your puny figures? What, the work of a mere lifetime? Are you suggesting that in the two thousand years and more which have passed since I was lain to rest here I’ve dreamed no numbers or equations or formulae of my own? Necroscope or none, you are presumptuous!
‘Presumptuous?’ Harry’s anger had been aroused. ‘Equations? Formulae? Why, I have formulae such as you could never dream.’ And he’d displayed the computer screen of his mind, and covered it with the endlessly mutating algebraics of Möbius mathematics. Then he’d formed a Möbius door, and let the other gaze a moment upon the nowhere and everywhere across the threshold.
Until, gaspingly: What. . . what is that?!
The Big Zero,’ Harry had growled then, letting the door close on itself. The place where all numbers begin. But I’m wasting my time. I came to talk to a master and ended up chatting with a mere student – and a middling one at that. Now tell me: do I get my audience with Pythagoras or don’t I?’
He … he is in Samos.
‘Where he was born?’
The same. The last place anyone would think to look for him, he thought . . . And then, frantically: Necroscope -plead with him for me! I have betrayed him! He will exclude me!
‘Rubbish!’ Harry had growled, but without scorn. ‘Exclude you? He will elevate you – for you have gazed upon the secret mathematical door to all times and places.
You don’t believe me?’ (And he’d shrugged). ‘Well, it’s your choice. My thanks anyway – and farewell.’ And conjuring another Möbius door he’d stepped through it –
– And out again on Samos, twenty miles away, where Pythagoras had spent his childhood two and a half millennia ago, and to which his bones had been returned in secrecy when at last he died. Pythagoras, however introvert, secretive, diffident, could hardly escape or ignore the Necroscope’s deadspeak probe at such close range. That thought in itself had been deadspeak and as such the recluse (in death even more than in life) had heard it. And answered: What is your number?
‘Any you choose for me,’ Harry had shrugged, homing in on the mystic’s mental whisper. And when he’d located him definitely, one further Möbius jump took him from a deserted, wooded shoreline straight there: to a small olive grove on a terraced hillside above a headland with a tiny white church. Down the coast a little way, scarcely glimpsed through pines and wind-warped oaks, Tigani’s harbour glinted turquoise, blue, silver; music from a taverna came drifting on the bright summer air.