by Felix Gilman
“But, now, that’s the problem; my fellow citizens, and too many of my fellow scholars, try to understand these forces by entering within them, within their manifestations. You might as well study hornets by sticking your head in the nest. It makes us mad. We must study them at one remove, through their traces. A science of signs. It takes patience, but it’s the only way.”
Olympia affixed a thin black cigarette to her holder. Without looking, Holbach skidded a brass ashtray toward her.
“For example. You must be aware of my success in predicting the Bird’s return to our city. There were many significant signs: for instance, white doves appearing in Kanker Market, in place of its usual pigeons. A sign of pressures within the city, welling up; the very same pressures that form and are the Bird itself. Prefigurations and intimations of its return. You might do something similar with, say, Lavilokan, whose signs often manifest on the stage, as be-fits a mirror-god.
“So, I might see myself as a natural geographer. One might also see the city as a machine, the tectonic forces within being like the pressures or charges that build up in an engine and move its parts. I have even, at times, believed that they may be more by-products than essential forces, like the heat the engine gives off. An engine, I do not dispute, of enormous complexity. I have been accused,” he said, warming to a digression, “of simplifying the complexity of the city and its, ah, presences. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider my rivals’ schools: take Dr. Lodwick, for example, and his Extrapolations. What I have described as tectonic forces, he persists in seeing as gods. He sees them as meaning something, you see, as having something to say to us. So he reads as signs things that are only, ah, happenings. Events. Eructations. It makes him see simple rules and regularities where there are none. Do you see?”
“Ah…”
“To him it’s a conversation, like we’re having now. He thinks that they mean to mean something to him, to us. To me it is a matter of natural processes, which, not being intended for our understanding, are immensely obscure in their operation. Prediction and control of such forces is an art as well as a science.” Holbach slapped the table. “And that is my point, you see. A man who understands the operation of the engine and the placement of its levers may put it to work, harness its forces. As I did with the Thunderer. Whatever may become of it, however it may be used, I’m afraid I can’t regret its creation. It represents the promise of science. An all-seeing, all-mapping eye. My promise to posterity, to our future.”
It sounded like an applause-line. Arjun tried to look impressed. It was very foreign to his way of thinking: the Choir had never worried about the future, or sought to harness the Voice, only to echo it back and forth until the end of time. He supposed they were not great thinkers.
“So you see why I was interested in you. Your, ah, Voice. A god from outside the city, one that you believe may have been drawn here. Is that possible? I’d like to know. And I know nothing of the gods outside these walls. I should learn more. It’s all an intriguing problem. We must talk, soon, perhaps.”
In the pause that followed, Arjun said, “I would think the city would hate you, Professor. The mob outside the Observatory, for example. Would they love you any better than Shay? Wouldn’t they call this talk of forces and engines blasphemy?”
“Certainly, if they heard it. Though many others would cheer me on. As always, we of the city are complexly divided against ourselves. In any case, I don’t publish this sort of talk where the mob can see it, or the censors. At least not under my own name.”
“Nicolas did,” Olympia said.
“And look where it got him! Silenced and exiled; lucky to escape with his ears uncropped. Braver than me, yes, but gone, while I am still here. No, this talk is for the enlightened. I can adequately publish my research without betraying my deeper thinking. I can translate my work into the language of the knee-benders. I let them call the Thunderer a blessing from the gods, rather than a triumph of human reason. It is safest.” He deflated. “I suppose, for the time being, the Thunderer is only a promise to myself, one that cannot safely be shared.”
Arjun rubbed his brow. He tried to ask whether any of this mattered; if everything Holbach had to say could be equally well said in the language of worship or in the language of science, was the difference real? He wasn’t sure. He stumbled over his own sentences and Holbach, he thought, missed his meaning.
“Well,” Holbach said, “not to worry. You don’t need much of a grasp of theory for the work I have in mind. At least you’re not shocked, which is promising. Your work: let’s discuss it.”
Holbach led Arjun round the shelves, stopping to pick up a variety of books: a pamphlet the color of dead skin, two thick tomes bound with black leather, a twine-stitched bundle of typed papers. He heaped them into Arjun’s arms. “Your work is to translate these for me. Now, you know what I’m interested in. The Tuvar were, by all accounts, great or at least prolific theological scholars. Together let’s bring their science back into the light! Ah yes, take this, too. And, ah, yes, this.
“These are all very old, of course—nothing has been written in Tuvar in this city for, oh, gods only know—but it’s surprising how little theological science has progressed. Now this,” he said, slipping a slim journal onto the pile, “you should start with this. If the references to it in Varady’s Letters are accurate, this records an important series of studies on the Black Bull. It should interest you; the Bull is a potency that no longer exists, a god that has abandoned its post. We’ll talk later, see how you’re doing. For now, my lunch appointment beckons. Then I’ll be yours for the rest of the week; I’m afraid my other engagements have been canceled.” He gestured sadly toward the door behind which the soldiers stood watch. “I rather think people are afraid to be seen with me. Olympia will talk to you about your salary. A pleasure, again.”
Holbach tried to shake Arjun’s burdened hands, then patted his shoulder instead. He turned and disappeared between the shelves. Arjun heard a trail of conversation start in the next room: “Good morning, Corporal. How is your boy’s inflammation?…Oh dear, I am sorry, perhaps I know someone who may be able to help with that, let me think…. And your wife?”
I n the hallway outside, Olympia leaned against a marble bust of a bushy-bearded thinker and said, “Congratulations. Welcome to the fold. You’re not the strangest person ever to work for the Professor, but you should be interesting anyway.” She drummed her fingers on the bust’s bald head. “Holbach has no idea what money’s worth these days, so he usually pays his translators—”
“What did Brindley die of? Holbach said there was a canal engineer who worked with you. Who wrote about the canals for you? What did he die of?”
“Oh, that’s before my time. Some sort of disease. Black lung? Shudders? Langshaw’s Disease? The canals are nasty places to go poking around.”
“Can I read what he wrote for you?”
“Ah. Maybe. We’ll see. Holbach may have been a bit indiscreet, actually. Do you mind if we don’t discuss this further? I suggest you keep yourself busy and put the canals out of your mind. Nasty places! Now I have somewhere to be, so we should talk about your work. You’ll be paid…”
A coach brought Arjun back to the Cypress.
“Not dead, then?” Haycock said. “Very fetching gown, though. Mad, is it?”
“I was sick for a while. Now I’m getting better.”
His room was gone, rented to a Mr. Lovage, who opened the door only a crack and avoided eye contact. “How was I supposed to know you were coming back?” Defour snapped. “And you left owing a week’s rent, I might add.”
Haycock had sold Arjun’s books. “An easy mistake to make,” Haycock said. “Under the circumstances. I’ll make it up to you. Discount. We’ll talk about it, all right?”
As an afterthought, Arjun asked after the envelope under the bed. “What envelope?” Lovage asked.
“Never mind,” Arjun said.
T he salary Holbach had promised
was generous. With Holbach’s letter of reference, Arjun rented a place in Stammer Gate, south of Foyle’s Ward, not too far from Holbach’s house. His new neighbors were students, scholars, priests of no particular denomination. His flat was in a stone tower, once the bell tower of some dismantled church. The windows overlooked a graveyard.
He made no effort to furnish the room. There was a bed and a desk and a chair; that was enough. He pushed the desk up against the window, where a cold draft reminded him of home. There was a chandler on the corner of his street, in a waxy little burrow of a shop. Arjun bought a crateful of candles. He emptied it out, and turned it upside down to make a side table on which he could rest a bottle of black ink and a jug of wine.
There was some dusty contraption hanging on the wall, a thing of mirrors turned on each other bound with wire and snakeskin, hung with bells and teeth and roof-tile. Was it one particular god’s icon, or a mishmash of many? Whatever it was, he took it down and folded it over, then slid it under the bed.
He placed the book Holbach had told him to start with on the desk, piling the others at his feet. He opened out a sheet of paper next to the book, and dipped his quill. He spent the first evening staring out over the graveyard, probing the cold riverbed of his mind for what remained of the passion that had brought him to the city, the ink going dry on the pen’s nub.
G ravity began pulling at Jack as he floated over a strange ghetto.
It was a close circle of tall, curved buildings, their spires curling in like a gently closing hand. He sank closer, accepting a compromise with gravity; he did not know how to fight it yet. He let the ship dwindle in the distance.
As he got closer, he could see that the spires rippled with strange valleys and ridges, like running wax. In the moonlight, the circle was like the hand of a ragged corpse. He settled, and sat cross-legged, his dirty hair falling into his face.
The surface was uncomfortable. The ridges he had seen from the air repeated themselves on a smaller and then a smaller scale, fingertip etchings. He ran a tired hand over it, marveling at the work that must have gone into it.
He’d flown. It was hard to look directly at the thought. There was an unbridgeable shadow between the rational mind that was sitting on the roof, wondering how to get home, and the entity that had moved on the wind. The sensation was strange.
One night, he remembered—staring at the back of his hand, his flexing fingers—one night when he was still quite new to the House, he had been herded into the lecture-room on the fourth floor, and sat in the shadows while Mr. Coil ranted.
“As for the presences: it is our solemn duty to be patient and quiet and open to their messages for us; as my colleagues say, without them, we are without meaning. Tiber in particular, of course, of course, of course, Praise Be. Without them, what would we be, what would this city be, but little clockwork figures moving in our tracks to no purpose? So much is familiar. But now, ratlings, we are to discuss the latest scientific discoveries. As we once might have done in the salons of Nicolas Maine, for those are the heights from which I am fallen.
“The philosophers have opened the brain, rat-boys, cracked the skull with knives, broken the backbone and torn away all the bloody tissues that wrap you so snugly. Apes first, then thieves, such as your filthy selves. The brain is your thinking-meat. The way in which they have proved this is interesting, and again involves deviants and criminals, but I will spare your tender sensibilities, for am I not a gentle shepherd? A lump of matter in your sloped skulls does your thinking for you.”
He’d gestured with his hands. “Roughly so big. Full of winding streets. They’ve found charges of electrical force running across and through it, prodding the meat into motion. Do you understand electricity, hatchlings? Imagine fire; how it crawled and sparked along the grain of the wood when your drunken, shiftless father was reduced to burning your furniture. The sparks run here and not there, and in consequence of that motion, the will forms in you to break this window or steal that purse, and on such motions our fates depend.”
Coil had struck the table with the palm of his hand. “So! We may see the presences of the city’s streets as being like the pulses of force that travel the paths of the brain. It is their motions that bring meaning to the city. We may see our city as an organ to house them, and to read their messages for us.”
Coil developed the analogy at greater length, but Jack had stopped listening. The notion that his thoughts were the product of motions and twitching in the meat in the head disturbed him. Was he not the source of his own intentions? He spent several nights sitting on his cot, holding his hand out in the dark, flexing and unflexing his fingers, trying to feel the moment at which the decision to move was made; was he acted upon or acting? He couldn’t tell.
It was something he had grown out of and stopped worrying about. Now he felt it all over again. It made him feel severed from himself. Flight was an impossible potential, which could not be under his will, but apparently was. He felt around inside himself for the power’s trigger. He could not find it.
There was a dark plain in front of him, a few streets away. Fires burned out on it. He thought he could see beasts, moving in their pens, but perhaps they were just shadows.
He tried to figure out what he could be sure of. First, whatever power he had—and he could not pretend anymore that it was not some more-than-natural power—must be all of a piece with the speed and grace he had displayed in thieving, in fighting, in racing over the roofs. And second, it was obviously the result of the magic he had worked with the Bird. But he had expected only to borrow the Bird’s flight for a moment, enough to escape. How had the power become fixed in him? Was it for some obscure purpose of the Bird’s own?
As Coil would have put it, that was all that could be reasoned from first principles. The rest would have to be a matter of experiment. Third, then: the power had limits. Or he did. He could not remain in flight forever, at least not yet. It drained him; gravity could not be defied forever.
On hands and knees, Jack inched out on a carved ledge, thrust out like a formless fist. It was too dark to see the street below, which was probably for the best. He tried to remember what it had been like when he had launched himself off the roof of Barbotin. Holding that memory in his head, he leaped.
A rjun’s work started slowly. It had been a long time since he had last tried to read Tuvar, and it was a difficult language. Of all the tongues he had learned when he was younger, he liked this one least: so much depended on subtle shifts of tone, and it troubled him that he had so little idea how it should sound. Its music was always beyond his grasp. Still, for the time being, he had no better notion of what to do with himself.
The thin red book Holbach had told him to start with was called Journal of the Bull’s Year. It seemed to be the record of a series of—it was hard to know what to call them; Arjun was not sure whether they were experiments, in Holbach’s sense, or religious rituals, or perhaps artistic statements. The word the journal’s author used was related to the verb to act, so for the time being Arjun just wrote activities.
There were twenty-three such activities. The author, sometimes alone, sometimes with numerous associates, would go out walking in complex patterns across the city. Sometimes they fasted for days; sometimes they used drugs; in one case, if Arjun read right, they underwent some sort of skull-surgery. They made certain changes to the city: performed acts of petty vandalism or charity, played music, started fires, painted or moved things, took things away, left them behind. It was all aimed at encouraging or delaying or altering the manifestations of a god called the Black Bull.
It was hard to read. It was a private journal, full of abbreviations and cryptic, personal allusions. After a week’s work, Arjun put the book to one side and started on another; he would come back to it when he knew more about the Tuvar. When he went round to Holbach’s study to explain, Holbach distractedly told him, “That seems reasonable,” and “Of course, I’m hugely grateful for your efforts,” and usher
ed him out.
He decided to start with one of the volumes bound in black leather. From the look of the page, it was an epic poem, the work of many hands, annotated by what seemed to be a generation of scholars. It told of the diaspora of the Tuvar people.
They were from cold and rainy plains to the north. An empire had fallen, to their west, following the failure of a royal marriage, loosing barbarians across the plains. The Tuvar took down their tents and folded them across the backs of their oxen, and set out in every direction where the barbarians were not. After many adventures, including a period of slavery, working the giant wheels of some great steel machine, and an incident of temptation by nymph-spirits as they passed the shore, a group of them came to Ararat.
This was all centuries before the poem was written, and the poem itself was centuries old, and even the paper on which the book was printed was yellow and brittle with age. Arjun copied it out, copied great tranches of it out, in journals and scrap-paper; he carried it around to cafés to work on it; his desk and his floor and his pockets filled with scribbled paper.
It seemed that the Tuvar had settled in a northern quarter of the city, near the slopes of the mountain. They had found a place that had been burned over after a plague and returned to the weeds, and set about cultivating it. Then, in the second volume, the poem shifted from stories of the heroic trek, and began to describe endless legal and economic conflicts with their neighbors in the city. Prophets and explorers gave way to a succession of priests and mayors. Some of them made a lot of money in the fabric trade. And then there was a long, strange episode involving a conflict between their first leader and a native of the city, who was his mirror image and shared his fate and tried to steal his life. They had to fight for the one soul, they believed; they could not share the city. One of them died. It was not certain which one. The poem’s authors described that incident as a typical example of the city’s mazy treachery.
