Asimov's SF, December 2011 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Short Story: THE COUNTABLE by Ken Liu

Ken Liu has worked as a programmer and a lawyer. He lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and their daughter. More about Ken can be found at kenliu.name. The author's stories have appeared in F&SF, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, among other places. His first story for us draws inspiration from pure mathematics and . . .

This is what most people would consider a rational moment, David thought.

The interrogation room looked the way it did in TV shows: grey everywhere, bare except for the table and folding chairs, harsh, bright fluorescent lights. But on TV they never mentioned the smell of antiseptic floor wash, trying but failing to cover up the lingering odor of all the desperate, sweaty bodies that have passed through the room.

The lady lawyer on the other side of the table was talking to his mother, who was sitting next to him and crying softly. His mother probably thought what they were discussing was very important and the lawyer's advice sensible, but David wasn't terribly interested in what she had to say. From time to time, bits of their conversation fell into his awareness, and he let them drift along, like leaves on a pond.

. . .psychological evaluation. . .keep him in the juvenile system. . .

He didn't look at the lawyer's face. He seldom found anything useful in people's faces. Instead, he was interested in the buttons on her blue blazer. There were three large buttons, all black. The top and bottom ones were round, the middle one a square.

. . . a little odd. . .quiet, shy, gentle. . .

He was not anxious. He hadn't been afraid when the sirens grew louder and louder and his mother opened the front door and the flashing lights from the beacons spilled into the living room, where he was sitting on the couch, waiting. His mother had been terrified and confused, and the baby, sensing her anxiety, had begun to cry again. He had cradled the baby, and tried to explain to her that there was no reason to cry. Most moments were not rational, he whispered to her, and this moment was no different.

. . . undiagnosed. . .high-functioning. . .pattern of abuse. . .

The designer had probably intended the square button to be the same size as the circular ones. That's an old problem: squaring the circle. He wondered if the design was meant as a joke, but doubted it. Other people's humor had always confused him. Perhaps the designer was interested in the problem the same way he was, as a statement about the beauty of math glimpsed through a veil.

. . .petition. . .pretrial hearing. . .justifiable defense. . .expert witnesses. . .

It was not possible to square the circle, of course. To do that you needed the square root of pi. But pi was not rational. It was not even merely irrational. It was not constructible. It was not algebraic, so it was incapable of serving as the root of some polynomial snaking about the Cartesian plane.

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