by Felix Gilman
“I’m returning to my ship, Lemuel. Stay here for the fire or don’t; it’s all one to me.”
“Just think about it, Captain. Now would be a good time to travel. From what I’ve seen here today, life’s going to become very unpleasant in this part of the city—and sooner than you might think.”
L ater—as the fire crashed down and sparks and smoke poured up over the decks—Arlandes remembered shouting, No, Lemuel, no, leave me alone! but he couldn’t remember how he’d ascended back up into the ship, nor where or how Lemuel had gone.
W here did they go?” Holbach said, booming across his study.
“Our mysterious old friends the Tuvar. That’s a question I’d like to have answered. Rothermere?”
“I’ve never made much study of them. My line’s more, shall we say, mainstream history. The Tuvar were never very numerous, and they kept themselves to themselves, once they’d settled in. No one much noted their passing. I expect they just sort of interbred with the rest of us. So if that’s all you called me over for, I don’t think I’ll be much use to you. Your young chap probably knows more than I do by now. Arjun?”
Arjun leaned back and thought; as he often did when thinking hard, he tapped out a simple unconscious rhythm on the table’s black wood; the rhythm gathered speed and complexity until he spoke. “I don’t know. In the last days, when their god had left them—the second time, when the Black Bull vanished, and they were left alone in Ararat—some of their Hierophants despaired. Others searched for it. They went out all over the city. But there’s no book you’ve shown me that says what happened. Maybe they found it in some district far to the east or west, but they’d taken on a new name by the time they’d walked that far.”
“Any other Bull-worshippers around, Holbach?” Rothermere asked.
“Ha! Do you want a list? We’ll be here all evening.”
“But some stayed where they were, I think; their journals say that they searched the same streets again and again.”
“Running in circles?”
“I don’t know. The Hierophant Worora kept a journal; there’s a diagram in it of a, a spiral, going down into the city beneath their streets. And he said he kept walking the same streets every day, but sometimes, he thought they were different, he thought he could see different cities behind the one he knew; he said what the Bull had shown them was that Ararat was fertile soil, and that most of it was buried; and he thought they had further to go, to go inward, to follow their god. He thought the Bull was posing them a test. That was all he said; he said he wasn’t ready to say any more. That was near the end of his journal. And I think it’s the last of their books. Professor, does that mean anything to you?”
“Well, now, maybe. There are certain, ah, anomalies on the Big Map. If you’ll let me finish up with Rothermere for a minute, we’ll take a look and talk further.”
Arjun glanced at the little clock balanced on the edge of Holbach’s desk, like a gleaming brass dome atop a piled cathedral of books. Worora’s story made him uncomfortable; it made him think of Shay and his talk of secret ways, and he had no taste for the conversation. Besides, he recalled: “I can’t. I’ve an appointment. I promised Olympia I’d go with her to some exhibition in the Arcades.”
Holbach raised a bushy eyebrow. Rothermere smirked.
“Ah. Yes. I’m sorry, Professor. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
Y ou know, I’ve been wondering when you’d ask.” Olympia poured out the last of the wine, and held up the bottle, signaling to the waiter for more. “It’s no big secret, really.”
“I’ve had other interests,” Arjun said. “And it seemed like a secret. With all your whispering, and the code-words, and the locked ballroom upstairs, and all the lengths Holbach and all of you went to never to speak in front of Ilona’s soldiers.”
“Oh, it’s a secret from them, of course. But no one’s trying to keep it secret from you. You can’t be a spy. You’re too odd. I think the only reason Holbach hasn’t already told you all about it is that he’s forgotten you don’t already know. I think he thinks everyone already knows and cares intimately about all his projects. Genius can be like that.”
“Am I really that odd?”
“So this is what you’re working toward: the mighty ship of scholarship on which you are a sailor, which Holbach steers these days, since Nicolas was taken from us, and I try to keep off the rocks of gaol. Ha-ha. Sorry. Bit drunk. The Atlas, Arjun. Your work will be a part of the Atlas. Hadn’t you guessed?”
“Oh.”
“Oh? Is that all?”
“I’ve heard of it. A book of maps. Isn’t it banned?”
“Not just maps. Everything; where it is, where it stands, and what it means, how it’s ordered. And gods yes, it’s banned.”
“Should we be talking about it here?”
Olympia gestured around the café. At the next table, a group of unshaven young men and pale, glamorous women looked up. “These are freethinkers here. We are safe enough.” She leaned in and whispered. “Besides, Arjun, I was joking about the spies.”
“You don’t think you’re being spied on?”
“Oh no, I know for a fact that I am. But so what? They won’t learn anything. The censors know what we’re doing and who we are already. Do you think the Countess doesn’t know exactly what Holbach does with every moment of his day? No, we hide our names from the mob, lest we have riots at our doorsteps and the censors are forced to act. But the spies and the spymasters know what’s what, and know that we know that they know. So long as the common people remain ignorant, and I pay the right bribes, we are safe from the censors. They don’t want to make martyrs: there are those who support us, too, who would rally to us if they put us down. The censors will lock up the occasional printer or dealer, to frighten the others into line, and they exiled Nicolas, who was proud and would not hide his name, but our class of people are safe. More or less.” She leaned back and shouted, to no one in particular, “Isn’t that right?” She looked back to Arjun. “You look nonplussed.”
“I thought you were building a weapon. Like the Thunderer.”
“Some sort of giant-Bull-inspired weapon?”
“Ah. Yes, perhaps. I’m afraid perhaps I did.”
“We think the Atlas is more powerful. Let me explain.”
N icolas Maine began it. He was born into Chairman Cimenti’s family: the older one, the current Chairman’s father. He was raised to be a lord of Goshen Tor’s banks and mercantiles and combines, but he had no head for business. He bored too easily.
The Chairs of the Tor’s banks were always great patrons of the city’s arts and sciences. That became Nicolas’s life. But he was more than just a fund of money and a thrower of parties: he was himself an essayist, a thinker, a wit. He was full of a great passion for the city, and he inspired that passion in others, including Olympia, then the youngest daughter of one of the Cimenti families—a family of middling distance from the Chair, of solid but not magnificent prospects.
“I never knew him, you understand, though I sometimes managed to sneak myself into the salons to hear him speak. He was much older than me, and far above me anyway by birth: he might have been Chairman, had he cared. And then he was exiled before I was old enough and skilled enough to have anything to offer to him. But, if you’d ever seen him speak, Arjun—the most amazing energy and curiosity. No mind like his in all the city.”
He was no more than a student himself when he conceived the great work. It would be a great glory to the Cimenti family: he would bring together all the city’s scholars and create a single account-book, in which all knowledge would be tallied, all arguments resoved; all science reduced to a handful of axioms, all politics and philosophy, art and religion, filleted down to a volume’s worth of epigrams. Everything in the world in its place. He had pictured something that might fit in a gentleman’s coat pocket, to be referred to in the event of disputes. In later years he would talk about those naïve early ambitions at parties, just to get a laugh.
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br /> The real thing didn’t come into existence for twenty years. The city had no single school—nothing like the Choristry—to organize all its scholars. They were scattered in churches, in towers, in the banks, tutoring princes in palaces or starving in garrets. He had to bring them together, soothe clashing egos, fire up their passion for his dream. He had to learn enough about everyone else’s field of study to judge who was truly great, who was a hack or a lunatic. “Or at least weed out the worst lunatics,” Olympia added. “Scholarship being apparently only loosely compatible with sanity.”
And they needed teams of cartographers, explorers to go out into the city’s vast reaches, and they needed to arm them.
An encyclopedia, of sorts, and a map, the one map. No one, so far as they knew, had ever attempted to map Ararat in its entirety. The map stretched out across many volumes, far past the parts of the city Arjun knew, and out into strange places. Its entries dug back into the city’s history, and into its thoughts and dreams and gods. In the course of their studies, they found whole forgotten fields of thought, even new languages, new tribes, in remote parts of the city. “And the city changed under them,” Olympia said. “That’s why it took so long. It changes under us all the time, Arjun. With everything that we do—that’s the historians’ work to untangle—and with every move the gods make across our map. And it changes more the harder you look. A very uncertain geography. That’s what’s up in the ballroom—our work-in-progress. The Big Map, always being updated. You should see it sometime.”
When the first edition came out (named Atlas in honor of the long-dead ruler who had charted the Peaceful Sea), it was in twenty-two volumes. It mapped the city as far as Egolf to the north, Ambruton to the west, and the Puppeteer Council in the east. Further editions followed, interspersed with endless supplements, each bringing new districts or concepts within the Atlas’s scope, or capturing some shift in the city’s map. Olympia counted them off on her fingers: “It depends on how you count, but we’re at edition four now. At least, that’s what we’re calling it. The first new edition since Nicolas left.”
“People bought all of these? They wanted them?”
“Everyone who was anyone, anyone with the least pretension to scholarship or fashion.”
“So why was it banned?”
“It happened after the second edition. Their ambitions expanded; they wanted to change the city, not just to record it. They thought if everyone could see where everything was, how everything connected to everything else, it would mean an end to confusion and to division. To isolation and impotence. To fear and clutching for comfort at the familiar. And they wanted to tell the city how to do things better, how to stop being so stupid and so cruel.”
“Who would object to that?”
“Is that irony? Are you joking? That’s new. Well, different things upset different people. Nicolas had a sharp wit and he made unkind remarks about a lot of powerful people. Then there was the political material: essays on all the ways in which other parts of the world organize themselves. Better ways, not so arbitrary and cruel. And then just the thought of mapping the city angered its powers; they like us as we are, divided, lost.
“They—we—had to be subtle, of course; we couldn’t launch a frontal attack on anyone who counted; we had to make our attacks by implication, irony, sleight of hand. It made us a lot of powerful enemies, but so long as we kept it subtle, coded, there was nothing that the censors could prosecute. But then it was the gods that really ruined things, as always. The first edition had nothing unconventional to say about the gods: just names, portfolio, aspect. Nicolas wasn’t mad, not at first. But then we got more daring. And that’s where Holbach got involved.”
E lsewhere in the city, two days’ ride to the southeast, Holbach held forth for a group of young men leaning angularly against the fluted green glass walls of their meeting hall. They were impeccably dressed, with the most precisely judged element of the feminine to their clothing: estranged and rebellious kin of First Citizen Gull, of East Midian. They were potential sources of funding, maybe even a measure of protection, and rich enough to demand the attention of the big man himself. They looked at him covetously, like a fashionable new hat. He was tired and rambling, his charm stretched thin.
“Many people ask how I first met Nicolas Maine. I was not political, you know, in those days—and even now, my dedication is to truth, and no other cause. I was working in a garret, under a guttering candle. As in a hack painting or a poor play.” He laughed; they didn’t. “Ah. So, at the time, Nicolas was far above my head. I was poor then, and young. And I was thrilled by what he had to say. I recall his first edition’s entry on the regime of the Director Caulkot”—a safe target, now as it was when Nicolas first wrote it; the Directors had last held sway a century ago, and had no friends in this room—“and I believe I can still quote it: ‘Society should first of all be happy. To that end, it should be rational. To call oneself Director is to invite question as to one’s direction. Let us ask…’”
Holbach was dissembling. He had never been able to care much for politics, even when he was young. He meant well, distantly; that was the best he could do. It was not Nicolas’s political writings that had fired Holbach’s blood, back then; it was the promise of science, and truth, and a full and final understanding of the entities and forces that Holbach studied; their subjection under reason. And, yes, the thought that he might be the one to write those final words…. But that wasn’t what these pretty young wolves wanted to hear. This was: “A rational ordering to society. And to government. New leadership. I think we’ve all dreamed of that.” Their ears perked. Though gods help us if it’s you lot, he did not say.
“Ah, but perhaps you’re too young to remember how it was when the first edition came out. But there I was, sneaking out of my attic to read those dangerous volumes in my patron’s library. And I published my Critique. Merely a technical piece of theology,” he rambled to their blank, bored-again faces, “but it had some small success. And I was working under a pile of paper in the back of some temple, when a kindly old man—he looked old to me then—sat next to me and asked if I was Gracien Holbach. And he offered gentle criticism of my work, from the cuff, things I had never thought of, and then he told me who he was, and I fell all over myself to shake his hand. He told me that he needed men like me, that he knew the Atlas was weak on theology, and he said, ‘Every time I try to show the city how it could be, be better than it is, someone says, “The gods made it so, and they have their reasons.” But I don’t believe they do. I think they are walls in our path, and I need men who can strike at their foundations.’ Someone to track their paths across the city’s map; to chip away at their mystery, and bring them within our understanding. And that remains central to the great work today, though it has made us many enemies, and left us in dire need of friends, friends among the enlightened and those who love the future, such as I hope you may be. Which brings us, regrettably, to the vulgar matter of money.”
W ell,” Olympia said, “Holbach’s told you about his theories. You can imagine how people reacted to the third edition.”
“I suppose so. Not easily.”
“Well, then take my word for it. He rubbed their faces in their folly. There were riots. Outrage. Like a thousand Mr. Shays; worse, it was like a thousand rich and privileged Mr. Shays mocking everything the city held dear. Those who loved us were too quiet, too afraid, to act.
“It had been safe enough until then. It all went out under Nicolas’s name, you see—everyone else was anonymous—and Nicolas Maine was too close to the Chair to be easily challenged. But the third edition went too far. The churches were breathing fire; the scandal sheets were never silent. The censors broke our presses and strung up our printers, and the mob set fire to dealers’ stalls in every market in the city, but it wasn’t enough for them. And anyway, as I said, there were a lot of powerful people waiting for the right moment to move against Nicolas. Guess which of the Estates moved first. Guess.”
“Yes. An order of exile, to an island in the Peaceful Sea. Under certain humiliating conditions of confinement. Then the other Estates piled on, each one adding their own conditions—forbidding him this or that food or requiring this or that daily atonement from him. His life on that island is very strange, Arjun, and perhaps he may never come back. But they never stopped us. And later, when I’d completed my studies—which is a story in itself; the Chairmen don’t regard the law as women’s work, I’m afraid—I offered my services to those who still loved him, and now I spend a very great deal of my time fighting in all the city’s courts to have him returned to us.”
“I’m sorry it hasn’t worked yet.”
“Maybe I don’t expect it to anymore. And of course, while we wait, Holbach has been keeping us working. And I do what I can to keep us safe from the noose. And sometimes I swear they want me to be a fucking mother to a dozen grey-haired bachelor scholars, gods help me. But together all of us keep it in motion. Hence all the recent efforts: we hope to produce the fourth edition in the next months. Our first since Nicolas was taken from us. It will go out under no name and in secret, but it won’t be silenced. There are many people waiting. And more who’ll come round, one day.”
“So Holbach is your leader now?”
“He’s not our leader. Only, say, our central point. He’s brilliant, he knows everyone, he’s very rich: why not him? Lucky for you that he is who he is, or you’d never have found us.”
The bottle was empty again. Arjun considered it for a moment, then raised it up to signal for more. He smiled and said, “I suppose it is lucky.”
