A novella.
She was a rider like no other... Floating in the amnion, she entered
unmapped territory; she was a speck, a ship lost in vastness, a rider on
waves of maxima and minima, an explorer of a space that, but for her, would
remain only guessed at. She entered this mathematical country as an
explorer would enter a new land: she looked for singularities, skated over
manifolds, sketched out the abstract, mountainous terrain of bizarre
mathematical functions; she sought branch points and branch cuts and hidden
territories bearing algebraic surprises. She took the esoteric world of
the sthanas and made it her reality.
Distances, a story of science, art, and deception, is fascinating
far-future science fiction, set in a far-future desert city. For Anasuya,
mathematics was experiential, a sixth sense that bared before her the
harmonies, natural and artificial, that formed the sub-text of the
world. So when mathematicians from the planet Tirana,
18-light-years-distant, ask Anasuya's help in solving a series of
equations, she finds the new geometrical space they present her with
intriguing. But as she explores the new space, she soon comes to suspect
that it represents an actual physical system, and that the equations she is
being asked to solve have a significance the Tiranis are concealing.
