Caliph could still remember the banal demonstration Morgan had put on for his freshman class: the way he had dropped that book. It had hit the ancient desk with a dusty thud and at that moment had revealed a simple yet extraordinary idea to his young students: the book must travel half the distance to the desk and then half of that distance and so on, somehow going through an infinite number of divisive repetitions in a finite period of time. Although he had solved this mystery for them with simple mathematics, holomortphy, the Unknown Tongue, was the key to understanding the endless reptition of the spiral, the key to the ancient problem of the cirle, the key to unlocking the universe.

Numbers became symbols. Symbols compiled words. "Language shapes reality," said the philosophers and linguists. So the maths of the Unknown Tongue deconstruct reality; form new realities -- whatever realities the mathematician desires.

She rolled the horse blood into a hemofurtive equation, testing the new concept she'd learned in parliament's basement, and laid a jumbled trail of numbers in her wake.