Roman opened his mouth and clamped it shut.
Anapa turned to me. “And you helped them both, stuck your nose where it didn’t belong, set the other furballs on me, and made my life difficult all around. I can’t move around the city, because there are two of your kind following me like a tail follows a dog. And half of the time, one of them is a cat. Do you have any idea how much I despise cats?”
Anapa took a long, calming breath. “Right now, Apep’s cult has the staff, the fang, and likely at least a few descendants of the Saii, the four priests who engaged in that creative gastronomy. So the question is, what are we going to do about it?”
“What happens if Apep is resurrected?” Raphael asked.
“Well, let us review.” Anapa leaned back. “He is the god of darkness, chaos, and evil. Let us agree to put aside philosophical concepts of evil and good, as they are subjective. What is evil for one is good for another. Let’s talk instead about chaos. Chaos, as our priest here will tell you, is an extremely powerful force. Do any of you know what a fractal is?”
Roman raised his hand.
Anapa grimaced. “I know you know. Here.”
A dark equilateral triangle ignited on the floor.
Anapa waved his hand. A smaller equilateral triangle appeared in the middle of the darker one, its corners touching the sides of the original triangle.
“How many triangles?” Anapa asked.
“Five,” I said. “Three dark, one light in the middle, and the big one.”
“Again,” Anapa said.
A smaller light triangle appeared in the middle of each dark triangle.
“Again. Again. Again.”
He stopped, pointing at the filigree of triangles on the floor. “I could go on to infinity. In basic terms, a fractal is a system that doesn’t become simpler when analyzed on smaller and smaller levels. Keep that in your head.”
A system that can’t be broken down to basic components. Okay, got it.
Anapa leaned forward. “To understand chaos, you have to understand mathematics. A lot of your civilization—most of any civilization, really—is built on mathematical analysis, the guiding principle of which is that everything can be explained and understood, if you just break it into small enough chunks. In other words, everything has an end. If you dig deep enough into any complex system, you will eventually unearth its simplest parts, which can’t be broken down any further. That sort of thinking works for a great many things, but not all of them. For example, the fractal. It doesn’t end.”
I felt like I was back in the Order’s Academy at some lecture. “This is surreal.”
“The fractal?” Anapa asked.
“You. Explaining this.”
Anapa gave a long-suffering sigh. “What do you know about me?”
And now I’d been singled out of the class. “You are the deity of funeral rites.”
“And what else?”
Umm…
“Medicine. The exploration of biology and metaphysics. Knowledge. This is my primary function. I impart knowledge. I teach. One can’t just give man fire. It’s like giving a toddler a box of matches—he will burn the house down. You must teach him how to use it.” Anapa shook his head. “Back to the fractal. It can’t be explained by mathematical analysis, so humanity, as it so often does, declared it to be a mathematical curiosity and swept it under the rug. Except the fractal occurs again and again.”
An earthworm appeared on the floor of the office.
“A line,” Anapa said. “So simple.”
He sliced the air with his finger. The earthworm divided in two. Two became four, four became eight, eight became sixteen, more and more. A swarm of worms roiled and writhed on the floor.
Anapa pondered the knot of bodies. “Left to its own devices, nature defaults to a fractal. A human settlement is a fractal. It is a complex system with randomly interacting components that is adaptive on every level. The pattern of the evolution of a single cell to complex organism is a fractal. The way man approaches his quest for knowledge is a fractal. Think of it: biology, the study of living things. A simple concept.”
A straight line appeared on the floor.
“As man accumulates knowledge, the volume of information becomes too much. He feels the need to subdivide it.”
The line split into three branches marked with labels: zoology, botany, anatomy, then split again. Botany grew horticulture, forestry, plant morphology, plant systematics. Zoology splintered into zoological morphology and systematics, then into comparative anatomy, systematics, animal physiology, behavioral ecology…It kept building and building, splitting, growing, branching, too fast, too much, overwhelming…