Mud and Glass
an excerpt

Chapter 1: In Which Celeste Becomes Involved

Pace held the insect in a pair of tweezers, bringing it closer and closer to my face.
"See that blue patch on its head?" she said. "It's supposed to be shaped like a comma, not like a silhouette of President Kim-Hatton."
I tried, unsuccessfully, not to recoil from either the bug or the mention of the most anti-intellectual president we'd had in generations.
"Oh, Celeste, don't be such a baby," Pace snapped. Ordinarily we got along okay, considering that at one point I'd stolen her research and she'd tried to kill me; what are a few rough patches between lifelong friends? But today she was in a nasty mood. Mine wasn't much better.
"Pace, for God's sake, I'm a geographer, not an entomologist! If I'd wanted crawlies shoved at me, I'd have stayed in high school."
"Huh?"
"Never mind." Pace's high-school experience had been radically different from mine, even though we'd both attended St. Basilissa's (she's the patron saint of chillblains. No, really, you can look it up).
"So why is this bug's blue patch so important?"
"Because I don't know why it's changed in this generation, is why. What other reason do I need?"
In theory, Pace was a geographer too. But her curiosity was white-hot and all-consuming. I don't exactly trail meekly behind her -- I'm pretty smart myself -- but keeping up with her does add a certain spice to life.
We both teach at Purple Bay State University, an institution of somewhat faded glory. We don't mind so much: it's better than the old days, when literally anyone could go to college, no questions asked. These days, you have to really want it. This attracts a different sort.
Pace placed the bug gently back into its plastic box and lowered the lid. She picked up the one in the next box and peered at its head.
"What's that one, Kim-Hatton as well?" I said.
"No, a pasta machine. A teeeeeeeny tiiiiiiiny pasta machine. See the little crank?" She held this bug up to my face as well.
"Yeah, look at that, whaddaya know," I said, backing away after a swift, squinting glace at the bug. I turned back to my own work: poring over a hundred-year-old thesis on the Miraculous Mud Flats of Purple Bay. Rivers were my thing. I loved to think of them shy and tentative at the source, quick and angry as they roared through the mountains, having a sudden change of heart and moving with calm determination across the piedmont and down to the coastal plains, and finally meandering to the delta, mocking us fondly as they passed, like old folks catching a glimpse as they stroll of teenagers' furtive and slightly ludicrous antics in the bushes. All of these at once, was a river.
The Purple River was, in my opinion, the finest of them. The Miraculous Mud Flats alone were worth a lifetime of study. Miraculous because they shifted with each tide to make fabulous, otherworldly patterns that glittered when the tide was out. People came from across the globe to see it -- it was Purple Bay's only real industry, apart from a bit of fishing, and the university.
I was not immune to the beauties of the Mud Flats, but they fascinated me for many other reasons. Not least was the fact that they hadn't expanded into the bay by more than a few metres in a hundred years of observation. Meticulous observation at that -- Millicent Strudthorn, the author of the thesis I was reading, had been a brilliant obsessive-compulsive, and my own research was reaping the benefits. Clearly, something was wearing the delta away as fast as the river was depositing it.
"Hungry?" said Pace as she examined another bug.
"Are you offering me a snack?" I said. "I've sworn off eating bugs, ever since that time in tenth grade -- remember when Toni Comiski found a roach in her locker and --"
"Yes."
"Anyway, yeah, I could do with some lunch. What did you have in mind?"
Pace took a grocery bag out of her desk drawer and slid the tray of bug-boxes across her desk to clear a space. She took out a half-loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and two bruised apples. "How's this?"
I looked in my bag: no food, but five dollars I'd forgotten I had. I waved the bill in the air. "My dear Hypatia, today we eat like lords!"
"On five dollars? And don't call me Hypatia."
"Ice cream after the peanut-butter sandwiches, then."
"Deal."
The life of an academic, never lavish, was now frugal indeed.
"How are the Mud Flats going?" said Pace around a mouthful of peanut butter and bread.
"Okay, I guess. My buddy Millicent measured and tracked like a mad thing, but I can't see any patterns -- nor, consequently, any anomalies that might give me a clue. The data is all just...hissing static."
"Wasn't Strudthorne involved in some sort of scandal?"
"Huh?"
"If you look really carefully at the Gutierrez building, you can just make out the outlines where the letters for 'Strudthorne' used to be bolted to the wall instead."
"I know she had her issues, all right, but I never heard anything about a scandal."
Pace shrugged and focused on eating her sandwich. As always, her focus was intense, and the sandwich was gone in thirty seconds. She ate an apple while she waited for me to finish my own sandwich, then we left our windowless office and emerged into the spring afternoon.
"I don't get out enough," I said as the sun made my eyes water.
A moment later I wished we'd stayed inside. Jasper Smith-Fennel was running across the quad to catch up with us. At one point he'd been helping Pace with his research, but there'd been an unfortunate incident a while back where he'd come to the brutal realization that she'd never love him. Words had been said, and shots had nearly been fired. I blush to say that I saved the day, which is something that Pace usually has the monopoly on, so I suppose I should be grateful to the weedy little twerp. But Pace had decided not to press charges, and Kortnoz had gone along with her decision, so here he was, still -- and interminably -- working on his Ph.D.
"Hey, Jasper," said Pace wearily. I said nothing at all, which seemed to suit him.
"Halley over in Biology wants to know where her bugs went."
"Tell Halley that if she doesn't play with her toys nicely, they get taken away. Now if you'll excuse me...."
We started walking again. But the hint was too subtle even for a mastermind like Jasper.
"What do you need them for, anyway? You're a geographer."
"I'm an academic," she said. "I like learning things."
"Yeah, well, I'm an academic, too, but I don't go poking my nose into other people's research areas."
"Jasper, the day you learn that calling yourself an academic doesn't automatically make you one will be a happy day for us all. Now, go proofread your footnotes or something, will you?"
That was a bit mean. Jasper had a reputation for the appallingly inconsistent style of his footnotes; it was the cause of many a smug chuckle down at the pub preferred by those with Ph.D.s. But even insults could not drive him away.
"What about the project we were working on, you know, before? Are you just going to let that research languish?"
I'd had enough. I stepped between them and pushed my face closer, truth be told, than I wanted to get to his, but sometimes one must make sacrifices in order to pull off a dramatic moment.
"Jasper, if I were you I wouldn't remind either Pace or me of the day she decided to stop letting you help her. Maybe they don't want to press charges, but I can think of a dozen ways right off the top of my head that I could make your life very unpleasant. And I wouldn't hesitate for a femtosecond if I thought they were required. So don't make me think it, okay?"
Finally he caught on that he wasn't wanted. With a hissy little intake of breath, he flounced off.
"I don't get it," I said to Pace. "Usually you have all the charm and restraint of a Tasmanian devil. Hell's bells, Pace, you've been known to dangle people over lava pits. Why do you let him keep pestering you?"
"Yeah, well, sorry about the lava-pit thing, I was distraught. Maybe if you thought of it like I treated you to one of those fancy saunas...."
I waited a moment for an explanation about Jasper, then shrugged. You don't badger Pace. She says what she wants, and that's it.
The line at the ice-cream stand was long, as this was the first really warm day we'd had in a while. In front of us, two baby-faced undergrads were frowning as they talked.
"So I said, 'I can't believe you're actually asserting that the Franckholm Hypothesis applies to the acoustics of human speech,' and then he said, 'Just who's the professor here, Danny?' and then I said, 'Well, you're the one standing at the front of the room, I guess that's going to have to do.' And that's when he told me I'd been dropped from the course."
"You're kidding! That is so not fair! So, like, now what?"
"I don't know. I guess I can always transfer into Liberal Arts."
"Mmm."
Pace smirked behind their backs. True, it hadn't been that long since we were undergrads ourselves, but it seemed a world away.
We listened to the two kids talking earnestly about their futures, their love lives, their personal technology, and their choice of ice cream. Finally they wrapped up their transaction and it was our turn to order.
"A cup of macadamia-chili, please," said Pace. She liked her desserts to put up a fight.
"A cup of caramel-apple, please," I said. I didn't.
"Sorry, we're out," said the work-study kid behind the counter.
"Oh, go on, live a little," said Pace. "Have the macadamia-chili."
I bristled at the challenge in her voice. "All right, I will," I said. "Make that two cups of macadamia-chili."
We sat in the shade of a nearby tree, tears coursing down our cheeks as we ate the ice cream.
"Good batch," gasped Pace. I didn't think my throat would work anymore, so I didn't even try to reply.
It took a few minutes after the last mouthful for me to risk speaking. "I'm still not sure I see the appeal," I said as I dragged my sleeve across my still-streaming eyes.
"You know you're alive," said Pace.
"You know how I know I'm alive?" I said. "I ask myself: alive or dead? And every single time so far, I've answered: alive. Really, it's not all that hard to determine."