Seven: The Pilgrim's Daughter

Her name was Nell, which in the tongue of the Blue Crescent Theorems, meant death.

She was the thirteenth child of a mother and father who were pilgrims traveling in the endless path of Father Tally, who was also known as The Mathematician.

Because thirteen was the number of death, and one of the sacred Prime Numbers, Nell's father made an announcement on the day of her birth.

"She belongs not to us, but to the Father," he said, in his most sonorous voice. "Her fate is for Him to decide."

It wasn't an easy thing being named for death, or growing up in the knowledge that you already have one foot in the grave.

Nell was a quick child and clever and tough, which was lucky because most thirteenth children born to Father Tally's followers were taken almost at once.

Cynics said it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, for followers of the Mathematician -- a poor sect to begin with -- rarely spared much care or food on kids like Nell.

"It is an odd thing," said her father, on Nell's fourth birthday. "Perhaps the Mathematician is busy with other affairs. Or could it be that something about the child displeases Him?"

Nell's mother, a sickly, half-starved woman, would only shrug and make the fatalistic sign of the Common Denominator.

In secret, the woman loved Nell and resented her husband for giving the child to Father Tally.

She had no great interest in numbers, or the secret symmetries they were said to contain.

She had learned early on that she couldn't fill her children's bellies with the mystical truths that could be derived from the formulae contained in the Blue Crescent Theorems.

She stayed with her husband only because she had married him long ago and they had traveled far over the Known Dream.

When she cast her mind back over the path they had followed, visiting the holy sites of Father Tally's cult, she could hardly remember her home world.

The only thing she had left was this fanatic of a husband, with his braided beard and his abacus and his endless preaching.

He wasn't an evil man. He was a good enough father to their other twelve children. The idea of being left behind terrified her.

So Nell's mother labored in secret to protect her daughter, slipping the little girl food whenever she could.

Twice in Nell's brief and rather tenuous life, the woman had given her a hasty, furtive kiss on the forehead.

Whenever the family was preparing to pick up and leave for the next leg of their pilgrimage, she would warn her little girl:

"You must be careful to mingle with your brothers and sisters and avoid being noticed," the woman whispered. "Only after we're aboard ship can you let yourself be seen by your father."

Nell learned to make herself very small. She took up less space then a large cat.

Once the dreamship made sail, she would emerge like one of the fragile flowers that shows itself for a day or two in spring.

Noticing her, her father would say, "Is that one still with us? Is death still part of our pilgrimage? I never calculated such a thing, but the Mathematician alone knows the final sum."

For nine years, Nell had managed this balancing act, with the aid of her mother and one or two of her kinder siblings.

She grew up hard-faced and skinny. She was a rather bitter, sharp-tongued girl. She was, after all, viewed by those around her as a kind of Undead.

In the parlance of her father's faith, she was a Remainder.

But in the curious way of such things, Nell was also something of a genius with numbers.

She would sit in the huddle of children around her father, her face averted, listening to his sermons. Much of what he said seemed like nonsense to her.

He claimed, for example, that angels existed within Prime Numbers, because Prime Numbers were infinite and could only be divided by The One and by Themselves.

He also said that the number Pi represented the perfect Spherical Order. He would chant the numbers of Pi past the decimal point until he fell into a kind of snoring trance.

Nell saw instinctively that the Known Dream wasn't ordered into perfect spheres at all. There were sloppy elipses and jagged hedrons.

Despite her girlish prayers, she had never seen an angel, numerical or otherwise.

And yet when her father posed a mathematical question, she always knew the answer before any of her brothers and sisters.

It took all of her will power to keep her silence while the others struggled and stammered.

Sometimes, when Nell was riding a dream ship, she would sit and look at the lines of rigging, the spars and yards and masts, and she could feel the numerical tension in their design.

She could see the inner mathematical truth of the ship, with its torque and its ratios of mass to thrust.

She could see the path the ship would have to take, given the angles of its sails and the force delivered by the wind.

There were times when she even saw that others had gotten their numbers wrong.

Her father would recite one of Euclid's Elements from rote memory, transposing two figures.

Or she would see that the flawed design of a ship's mast would cause it to yaw clumsily when tacking.

"Maybe I really do belong to Father Tally," she would say. "Maybe I know these things because of him."

But she didn't really believe it.

And so when her father decided that they would travel to the world called Nail, so that he could preach the Blue Crescent Theorems to the innumerate, she perceived no plan or design.

"I suspect," Nell said to herself, "that we are all Remainders. We are all Irrational Numbers."

So she stowed herself away once again with her family and made the fateful journey to the ugly, belching world where she would first lay eyes on the Blue Oriole.

Next: Losing Nell