| This is another fantasy story in which mathematical formulae are magical spells which can summon demons.
It begins with the line
| (quoted from Two by Zero)
I, Orlen D’Hamilton, manifested an almost perfect category-three dark aspect early Friday morning, two days after the fourth full moon, in the year 1637 of the Twin Saviors.
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Orlen's undertook this sorcery to win the affections of a woman named Katherine whom he lusts after following some sexual encounters. And, the feat is achieved through the use of mathematics:
| (quoted from Two by Zero)
I rubbed my hands together for warmth and then scribed a line of numbers and symbols on a sheet of nubbly grey paper. If I embedded the summoning in apseudo-Riemannian [sic] manifold, the energies could be contained in a non-degenerate subspace.
|
However, his equations were less-than-perfect and things do not go as he had planned.
There is not much mathematical content to the story, but several references to mathematical concepts appear throughout the story. (For instance, near the end of the story Orlen makes use of "Penrose tesselations". I couldn't help wondering whether we are to believe that non-periodic tilings from darts and kites were discovered by someone named Penrose on this other world as well...)
A couple of things that may be of interest to some readers:
- Orlen is described as having black skin and being from "across the channel" as compared to the pale woman of his dreams. So, I guess one could argue that this is a story about a Black mathematician. Though, this fantasy takes place on some other world so these characters are arguably not humans at all.
- Katherine uses Orlen in that she has sex with him simply so that she could get pregnant and add some diversity to her inbred family's gene pool. Moreover, the encounter is described in rather racy language, akin to the "soft porn" one might find in the romance genre.
This story appeared in the September 2010 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. |
