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The Life in Papers of Sofie K.
The Life in Papers of Sofie K.
The Life in Papers of Sofie K.
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The Life in Papers of Sofie K.

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When Sofie is a small girl, her Nanny teaches her nightmares. Witches, werewolves, the Black Death... Sofie is raised, screaming, on a surfeit of monsters. But when the monsters become real, brought to life and tumbled together into her own shadow-self, Sofie is forced to accept that she, with her unnatural precocity in mathematics, is a monster as well.

Part biography, part fantasy, this novella of maths and magical realism and monstrosity tells the story of the Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891).

LanguageEnglish
PublisherOctavia Cade
Release dateJul 17, 2015
ISBN9781310646508
The Life in Papers of Sofie K.
Author

Octavia Cade

My name’s Octavia Cade. I have a PhD in science communication, and I’m currently researching seagrass restoration, focusing on the New Zealand species Zostera muelleri.I’m also a writer – you can read my stories at Strange Horizons, Cosmos, and a number of other places. I mostly write short speculative fiction.I also do a lot of tramping, and most of the time I manage not to injure myself. My dream is to one day complete Te Araroa, a walking trail that goes the entire length of NZ. I’ve done bits and pieces of it, and it’ll probably take me another ten years, but one day – one day dammit! – I will finish the thing.

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    The Life in Papers of Sofie K. - Octavia Cade

    THE LIFE IN PAPERS OF SOFIE K.

    By Octavia Cade

    Copyright 2014 Octavia Cade

    Smashwords Edition

    Smashwords Edition: License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and didn’t purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Note on this edition: Cover design by Derek Murphy. Cover photograph by EricVega (istock).

    Table of Contents

    Introduction

    On The Theory Of Partial Differential Equations

    On The Refraction Of Light In Crystals

    Supplementary Remarks And Observations On Laplace’s Research On The Form Of Saturn’s Rings

    On The Problem Of The Rotation Of A Solid Body About A Fixed Point

    On The Reduction Of A Certain Class Of Abelian Integrals Of The Third Rank To Elliptic Integrals

    On The Theorem Of M. Bruns

    Bibliography

    About Octavia Cade

    INTRODUCTION

    I’ve always thought that there’s something in mathematics that is sympathetic to fantasy. Any discipline that traffics in imaginary numbers is bound to bump up against magical realism at some point. That’s my excuse, anyway.

    This novella is as much biography as it is fantasy. Its subject is the Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891). Its structure is her papers: Kovalevskaya wrote and published half a dozen of them, although the number is often counted higher when different versions of these are included.

    I have not presented these papers in the order that they were written. Instead, I have linked them thematically to aspects of Kovalevskaya’s life. Nor is the presentation entirely linear–in many ways this novella more closely resembles a collection of linked short stories. Events in one paper, or story, can occur before or after those in the following chapter. The third and fourth papers, especially, cover the same time period while focussing on different relationships.

    That, too, is not an ordered approach. But then this is a story of monsters as well as mathematics, and there is nothing orderly about monsters...

    ON THE THEORY OF PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

    I

    A differential equation defines the relationship between a function and all the derivations of that function.

    Sofie’s life begins in the nursery, listening to Nanny feed the monsters under the bed.

    She doesn’t mean to feed them, but story-crumbs drop down from the coverlet, from the blankets, and disappear under the bed to growling. Nanny doesn’t hear the growling, or she pretends not to. Who’s a silly thing, to have so many bad dreams, she says when Sofie’s mother questions the screaming in the night, the tears and tantrums of waking moments, the pleas not to be sent to bed. Don’t you know they’re not true here?

    Her stories are only true in other lands, in others times. They were boarded up in their own little houses, says Nanny of the plague victims, of the black death. And burnt all alive to stop the infection. But the black death and the burning wouldn’t happen to Sofie, oh no, and there weren’t any werewolves round here, nor were there snakes with so many heads that she’d lose count before she were bitten. There weren’t any witches in their chicken-houses, and there weren’t any sickly little children with ash around their feet and tooth marks in their throats.

    Sofie thinks of those children so often that broken dolls send her into screaming fits. Unfit, imperfect, she wakes in the night to run to the mirror, her feet bare and cold on the floor and Sofie so afraid, lest she stare into the glass and see her own head opened up like porcelain and the stitching unravelled, her arms ragged and falling from her body. Then when she sees herself, her face and head in one piece still if slick with fear and night sweats, she has to turn around and face the bed again, the linens pale in moonlight and doing nothing to hide the dim movements under the bed, the shape of teeth, the growling and the hot breath that smells of pestilence and of fire.

    Sofie watches the bed for a long time, her feet frozen beneath her and the nightdress thin around her. She waits until she can no longer feel her toes, and then runs for the bed before the numbness reaches her ankles and slows her running, weakens the final leap from the hard cold floor to the bed and the sudden silence beneath it. The silence that echoes in the bedroom after her body hits the blankets... that echoes still when those same blankets are pulled up over her head and kept there until Sofie’s breath turns the wool wet, as if it were breathing back.

    And still Nanny tells her stories. Sofie is often the only one she has to tell them to. It’s not as if she is an only child. There are others–a sister, older, and a brother, younger, and both spend more time out of the nursery than Sofie does.

    Your sister’s with company, says Nanny, of Aniuta. Aniuta is pretty and Aniuta is charming. The firstborn, the one trotted out for company and for pleasing, to be petted by the ladies and admired by the gentlemen guests with her golden hair all around her and smiles that please her parents. Aniuta never wakes screaming in the night; she scoffs at stories and scratchings and sleeps all through.

    Sofie adores her. Everyone does. That’s the problem.

    They want to see your brother as well, says Nanny. Five years younger than Sofie, Fedor is unextraordinary and therefore perfect. Come, Fedia, says Nanny, straightening little boy clothes and brushing little boy hair, hustling him out of the door, sending him off in his sister’s footsteps down into the parlour, into light and music. The pretty girl and the heir, and Sofie is left, dark and dark-haired and moping in a nursery that has no charms for her, too straight yet to dress for company and still too feminine in her straightness to be shown off before bedtime.

    Not you tonight, poppet, her Nanny says when they’re alone again, and it is no comfort to Sofie to know that here at least she’s the favourite, even if only as an audience. But don’t worry, my dove–stay with me and I’ll tell you all my stories. I know how much you love them.

    (She loves them enough to stay awake and think of them, to fall asleep and dream of them. To hear them under the beds and wait for them in every mirror.)

    Pretty sister, pretty brother, and Sofie in the nursery learning nightmares: twelve-headed snakes, broken dolls and broken houses, witches and werewolves and the black death.

    II

    Ordinary differential equations depend on one independent variable–like time, or motion, or decay.

    Sofie might not have been the first and she might not have been the favourite, but she is aware that she is spoiled, still. Indulged in her schooling, or in the lack of it, for what use is school to Sofie, who needs to be trained into dancing and music and French and that under Nanny’s care. But Nanny is slowing now, and was never too bright to begin with. Against Aniuta she has no defence, and the girls find themselves free with their days, mostly, and what little education they get filters through heads that are simultaneously critical and empty at once and is left to curl in corners like under-ripe fruit.

    It’s the fruit that is their downfall, that ends innocence and gives freedom. Not that ideas are left to grow inside them, to spread seeds like apples. It’s the fruit in the garden, as always. Spoiled little monsters they are, and left to run wild in those gardens–which has the benefit at least of filling them up with something, anything, that isn’t stale repetitions and smothering. The fresh air and exercise makes Aniuta even prettier, lets her romp golden in the gardens and Sofie

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