Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett Page B

caught with the paper cup still at her lips. Was that a glare? He couldn’t figure out what was going on between them.
    “Welcome,” he said. And then, reluctant to lose Biancas undivided attention, “Will you join us?”
    “I can’t just now,” Rose said. “But Constance wants to know if you’d like to come over to the patio and have something to eat.” She thrust the platter toward his face. “The chicken’s great.”
    “Maybe later.”
    “Bianca?”
    “No,” Bianca said firmly; she seemed to be rejecting more than just the food. The sisters glared at each other for a minute—
children,
Krzysztof thought; then remembered Biancas earlier word.
No, prodigies. All grown up
—before Rose made a clicking sound with her tongue and walked away.
    Her mouth tasted of meadows and trees, Bianca thought. As if she’d been turned into a creature with hooves, suavely grazing in a dappled glade. The joint she’d smoked earlier was still with her but barely, palely; this warmth in her veins, this taste in her mouth, were from the splendid bison vodka. And this man, whom at first she’d felt saddled with and longed to escape, was some sort of magician. Now it seemed like good fortune that everyone else had abandoned him to her care. They rose from their chairs, on their way to join the crowd and examine the platters of food. But the voices on the patio seemed terribly loud and someone was shrieking with laughter, a sound like metal beating metal. Chased away, they drifted toward the Japanese fountain tucked in the shrubbery, where Krzysztof had earlier crouched until Constance captured him.
    “Isn’t this pretty?” he asked, and she agreed. Ferns surrounded one side of the fountain, lacy and strongly scented.
    She peered down into the basin and said, “We could just sit here for a bit.”
    “We could,” he agreed. His smile distracted her from the odd way his lower lids sagged, exposing their pale inner membranes. “If you wouldn’t mind lowering me down on this rock.”
    This time she knew just how to fit her hands into his armpits. “So what is it you do, exactly?” she asked. When he hesitated, she said, “I did a couple of years of graduate work in biochemistry, you know. It’s not like I can’t understand.”
    “I know that,” he said. “But I’m more or less retired now.”
    “What about before?”
    His whole long life as a scientist stretched behind him, inexplicable to the young. He tried to skim over it quickly. “In Kraków,” he said, “where I went to university, I was trained as a physical chemist specializing in polymers. I went to England, just before the Second World War”—he looked at her open, earnest face, and skipped over all that painful history, all those desperate choices—”and after I’d been there a little while I was recruited to work on a secret project to develop artificial rubber. Then I studied alpha helices and similar structures in polymers, and then did some fiber-diffraction work on proteins. Once I gave up running a lab I started doing more theoretical work. Thought experiments. Do you know much thermodynamics?”
    “Enough to get by,” she said. “But it’s not my strong point.”
    “I like to think about the thermodynamics of surfaces, and the folding of globular proteins. The buried residues inside the assembly and all the rest. There are a set of equations—”
    But Bianca shook her head. “Your bad luck,” she said. “I’m probably the only person here who can’t follow your math.”
    “I can show you something,” he said. “Something that will make you understand at once.”
    “Yes?” she said. She was, she realized, wonderfully, happily drunk. Her companion reached into his magic bag once more.
    “More vodka?” she said. “I could do another shot.”
    The paper cups were soft-edged and crumpled now, but he straightened them and filled them before delving again in his capacious bag. Sometimes, when he traveled to foreign countries,