AN IVORY TOWER

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'The essential quality of a proof is to compel belief' ~ Pierre de Fermat

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"Sayuri Sedai," the knock on the door was soft, "Laras sent me up with some tea and toast."

Sayuri looked blearily up from the pile of scribbled papers to the little clock she kept on her desk. She could hardly believe that it was time for afternoon tea already, but the timepiece showed it was past three o'clock. She shook her head in disbelief. It seemed like only minutes ago that it had been morning and she had sat down to continue her research into transcendental equations.

Getting to her feet, she crossed the room to open the door. A young Novice smiled up at her, and held out a tray, "It's still warm, Aes Sedai."

Half-heartedly, Sayuri dredged her memory for a name to go with the girl's face, but she gave it up for a waste of effort. She had only seen the Novices on the day when they had been tested and formally welcomed into the White Tower. One of her Sisters had introduced them to her, she recalled, but their actual names had slipped out of her memory.

Taking the tray, "Thank you, child. You may leave me now."

The girl bobbed, "My pleasure, Aes Sedai."

With a sigh of relief, she shut the door on the Novice and returned to her desk, placing the tray beside her papers. The truth of the matter was that she preferred numbers to people. Numbers were so reliable, so orderly, so logical! She could work an equation a hundred times and it would come out the same way every time. People, on the contrary, were not as predictable. Even the simplest pleasantry - a 'how do you do?' or a 'nice day, isn't it?' - could elicit a multiplicity of responses. There were infinite variables and infinite outcomes involved in the equations of human relations, and she had never been able to grasp them, let alone manipulate them. So she simply avoided the problem.

She knew what the others thought about her. Even for a White - an Ajah notorious for shunning the world along with the worldly - she was considered reclusive and odd. At first, her sisters had tried to involve her in their activities. They had invited her to their bondings; sat next to her at dinners; joined her in the gardens; but she had shrunk away from their best efforts and their compassion had long faded to curiosity. Now, they simply wanted to know why she avoided their company. Some blamed it on a love-affair that had gone wrong; others whispered that she was moontouched. She sometimes wished she was. People left you alone when you were mad. There was nothing left about which to wonder, and she was tired of people wondering.

She dipped her finger in the cooling tea, and ripples spread out across the surface in concentric circles. She idly calculated their ratio to each other, making a sketch on a scrap of paper. Her desk was full of that sort of impulsive calculation - the exact ratio of each spiral of a snail's shell to the one that preceded it, the speed at which the sun crept towards her chair, the geometry of the path of a bird's flight through the sky. She pinned them down with numbers and collected them as another woman might butterflies.

One day, she would find a way to pin down ultimate truth in the same way. She had long ago realised that numbers were the only path to it. They were the only truth that remained true day after day after day. People changed with their moods, nature shifted through the seasons, history was a new lie every age. Only numbers were constant. And, through them, she would discover a means of looking upon the face of God.

She picked up a fresh sheet of paper from her pile, sucked the end of her pen thoughtfully, and began to build her stairway to heaven.

*

This is more a fanfiction vignette or a character sketch than anything else. I don't have too many plans for Sayuri Sedai. She was just a character who popped up into my head, and I wanted to get her down on paper.