Manuscript Tradition

by Harry Turtledove

  On the top floor was a room with special air-conditioning, fire suppression, and surveillance even by current standards. The Beinecke as a whole housed and protected rare books and manuscripts, as its name said it did. That room housed and protected the rarest of the rare. The DNA sniffer above the latch put the one on Feyrouz’s apartment door to shame.

  She knew just where in the room the manuscript she wanted lived. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been likely to name her cat Wilfrid. The Voynich Manuscript wasn’t very big: no more than twenty-five centimeters by seventeen. Scholars had been certain for centuries that its parchment cover wasn’t the one it had originally worn.

  They’d also been certain its 234 surviving pages (some—no one knew how many—were missing) dated from the early fifteenth century. Studies of bookbinding techniques and radioactive dating of vellum and ink led to the same conclusion.

  And there certainty ended, sloppy dead on the floor. Many of the manuscript’s pages pictured plants—plants portrayed nowhere else, plants resembling nothing people had ever seen anywhere else. The writing that presumably explained the illustrations was in an unknown tongue; the script itself also had no known duplicate.

  The Voynich Manuscript—named for Wilfrid Michael Voynich, a twentieth-century owner and researcher—came to the Beinecke in 1969 as a donation from the man who’d bought it from the man who’d inherited it from Voynich’s widow. It had been a curiosity, a mystery, for hundreds of years before that. It still was. Plenty of people claimed to have solved the mystery of its script. Nobody’d done so in a way that satisfied scholars.

  Feyrouz carried a pair of thin white cotton gloves in her belt pouch so she could handle delicate manuscripts without harming them. She put on the gloves before taking the Voynich Manuscript from the shelf and carrying it to a carrel. Eight hundred years separated her from the unknown author and artist, who’d almost certainly created the manuscript in northern Italy. She turned the pages gently and carefully.

  Her breath caught. There were the blue flowery things with the golden oval centers. A couple of paragraphs’ worth of incomprehensible text dodged past and among their stems. When she went a page farther, she came to the maybe-pitcher plant, again with something in that unknown script written alongside it. Above and to the right of the flower (?) with the candy-cane stalk was the number 35, in ordinary Arabic numerals. Most of the pages were numbered. Those numbers, with a few Latin-alphabet words probably not by the original creator, were the only decipherable bits in the manuscript.

  All of which meant … what? What could it mean but that whoever’d made the Voynich Manuscript had somehow known what plants on Faraday, forty light-years from Earth, were like? How was that possible? With the manuscript around eight centuries old, was it possible at all?

  “The idea’s insane,” Feyrouz said—again, where no one could hear her, though surveillance cameras in this secure room might pick up the words.

  It might have been insane, but all other possibilities struck her as crazier yet. The photos sent back from Faraday didn’t just kind of look like the illustrations in the manuscript. The illustrations were what a good artist—not a great one, but good, plenty good—would have turned out if he or she had been painting from those photos.

  And the pool or spa or whatever it was looked like the pictures of such things the artist had also included in the manuscript. There were several pages with such illustrations. In them, though, the pools had been full of water and were populated by rather chunky naked women. Or maybe they weren’t women, or not exactly women. Maybe they were the friends or family the artist had left behind.

  “Maybe my brain needs reprogramming,” Feyrouz muttered. But she didn’t think so. She also didn’t think she’d be the only person asking those questions for long. Someone else familiar with the Voynich Manuscript would make the same associations she had—would very likely not just make them but spread them all over the infosphere.

  Someone might well have started doing that already. Feyrouz didn’t fret about it. The wild urge to be first wasn’t a social disease she’d ever caught. Page by page, she went through the manuscript. The astrological diagrams, if that was what they were, had never made any Earthly sense. Would they in the context of Faraday’s sky and the other planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system? Again, she had no idea, but the question seemed worth asking.

  * * *

  The door to the special room clicked open. The small rumble of plastic wheels on carpet told Feyrouz it was a janitor making rounds. Probably Tony Loquasto; no one else from the custodial staff would be authorized to come in here. She hadn’t known he was, but it made sense. Even with no academic rank, he was as trusted, as reliable, an employee as the Beinecke boasted. And, while air filters ensured that the special room didn’t get dusty in a hurry, it did get dusty.

  Thanks to the noise from those wheels, Feyrouz kept an ear on where Tony was going. Somehow, she wasn’t completely astonished when he turned down the aisle that led to the shelf where the Voynich Manuscript usually perched. She also wasn’t astonished when the noise stopped right about there. She hadn’t expected the janitor to know about the manuscript, but one never knew, did one?

  She closed the volume, stood, and carried it back to its beige-painted metal case. Sure enough, there stood Tony, doing a not quite good enough job of pretending to dust.

  “Hello,” she said. “Were you looking for this?” She held up the Voynich Manuscript.

  He did a not quite good enough job of pretending he had no idea what she was talking about. Then he must have realized it wasn’t quite good enough, because he chuckled and shrugged and nodded. “As a matter of fact, Professor Hanafusa, I was.”

  “Have you looked at it before?” Feyrouz asked, her voice a bit tight. If he’d pored over images from it on the infosphere, that was one thing. If he’d got not just eyeprints but perhaps greasy fingerprints on the actual, irreplaceable physical book, that was something else again.

  He hesitated. Then he nodded. “The pictures, you know, they’re pictures of plants and stuff from, ah, Faraday.”

  “You saw that, too?” she said.

  `”Yeah, I did.” Tony Loquasto nodded again. “Which ones made you spot it, you don’t mind my asking?”

  She still had the gloves on. She opened the Voynich Manuscript and pointed out the plants. “This one … and this one. I saw them on a news projection this morning, and naturally I recognized them.”

  “Thank you,” Loquasto said, which baffled her. Then he nodded one more time. “The hadadband and the potta, hey? Yeah, them are a couple what stand out from the crowd, like.”

  “The which and the what?” Feyrouz was baffled again. “Do you mean the plants? Why do you call them that?”

  He sighed. By the look on his face, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Since he hadn’t, though, he needed to answer. “Why? On account of those’re their names.”

  “They are? In what language?” Feyrouz didn’t call him a nut right out loud. But no one had ever deciphered the Voynich Manuscript. Plenty of people had claimed they’d done it, but none of the claims held water.

  She might not have called him a nut, but he knew what she meant. “I don’t think I better talk about it no more,” he said. “You’ll send for the boys in the white coats with the straitjacket and the butterfly nets.”

  Not many people would have had the slightest notion of what he was talking about. Feyrouz had never heard anybody use the idiom he came out with, but she’d run across it in print once or twice—she enjoyed old books. “No, I won’t,” she promised, raising her hand as if taking an oath. “You’re the best janitor the Beinecke could have, and you don’t have to be sane to do the job. Maybe being crazy even helps.”

  He grunted laughter. “Boy, you got that right, Professor!” he said. But he kept quiet after that for some little while. “You really mean it? ’Cause what I got to say, I know it’ll sound screwy to you.”

  “There’s nothing about the Voyn
ich Manuscript that doesn’t sound screwy,” Feyrouz said. “So go ahead. What’s your take on it?”

  “I don’t got no take on it,” the janitor said. “I wrote the damn thing, that’s all.”

  Feyrouz giggled. She knew she shouldn’t have; a second later she pulled her face straight. But it was too late. She could tell right away. And when she said, “Did you?”, she knew she sounded like someone humoring a real nutjob. That careful neutrality in her voice meant the same thing the giggle did.

  “See? I told ya ya wouldn’t believe me,” Tony Loquasto said without heat. “But I did, yeah.”

  “Um, how is that possible?” Feyrouz asked. “It was eight hundred years ago, after all.”

  “We don’t die as quick as you. Rocked me back pretty hard when I seen how quick you people peg out,” Loquasto said. “We sent a starship here. Something musta gone wrong. Don’t ask me what. I was in cold sleep—the travel time wasn’t to sneeze at, even for us. When I woke up, the emergency pod’d already kicked free. All I could do was ride it down, so I did. I landed in Italy, like you’d guess. Learned the language, wrote the book when I could afford to. Best I could do to remember what the old place was like, y’know?”

  “Why haven’t there been more starships from Faraday, then?” Feyrouz did her resolute best to stay reasonable.

  “Probably on account of we had ourselves a big old no-holds-barred war,” Loquasto answered, his voice bleak. “Almost happened here a time or three. You guys’ve been lucky. I bet we weren’t.”

  “It could be.” Again, Feyrouz kept her voice neutral. He was one of those rational-sounding lunatics. She almost wanted to believe him. But that would mean believing he’d been on Earth since around 1400 and on Faraday for who could guess how long before that. Occam’s Razor said—shouted—he was a fruitcake. She tried another question: “When did you come to America?”

  “In—lemme think—1893, that’s when,” the janitor said. “I hoped it’d be better, and I guess it was. And after the Beinecke got the manuscript, I figured I oughta keep an eye on it. I been here since … I guess it was 1980-something when they hired me. I been sweepin’ up ever since, even if I had to change my handle and my style every so often to keep folks from gettin’ snoopy, like.”

  He still sounded rational. She was tempted once more to believe him. Vic Loquasto, from almost a century and a half earlier, had looked just like Tony now except for the haircut and the mustache and the funny old-time clothes. But if you started believing in a nearly immortal refugee from another planet, wouldn’t the boys with the butterfly nets and the straitjacket come for you next? And wouldn’t you need coming for?

  She held out the Voynich Manuscript to Tony. “Do you still want this?” she asked.

  “Nah, that’s okay, Professor Hanafusa. I’ll just go back to making my rounds. Gotta keep things neat, right?” The janitor turned his wheeled trash barrel around and headed for the door. He opened it and went through. It clicked shut behind him.

  Feyrouz didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath till she let it out in a long sigh. She put the Voynich Manuscript back on the shelf. So small, so nondescript—and so very, very strange on the inside. Shaking her head, she started back to her office.

  * * *

  Her administrative assistant jumped out of his chair—he almost jumped out of his skin—when she walked in. “Great God in the circuit diagram!” he exclaimed. “Where have you been?”

  “What’s the matter, Paulo?” she asked, blinking. He was usually the calmest thing on two legs. That was part of what made him good at his job.

  Not now. He gaped at her, goggle-eyed. “Check your messages. Check the news first, though. What have you been doing this past hour?”

  “Research,” she said, which even had the added virtue of being true. She walked into her sanctum and closed the door after her, something she hardly ever did. Only then did she address the air: “News, please!” On a hunch, she added, “Space news.”

  A headline appeared in the air in front of her: FARADAY CRAWLER DESTROYED! SEE SHOCKING IMAGES! Her nod, shaky though it was, meant she wanted to see the images, whether they were shocking or not.

  The infosphere obliged. The first photo didn’t seem particularly shocking, not to begin with. It was a shot of what might have been the base of a statue. If there’d ever been a statue on top of it, though, that was long gone. As bases sometimes will, this one had an inscription carved into it, commemorating what it didn’t hold any more.

  Feyrouz couldn’t read the inscription, of course. She wouldn’t have expected to be able to, not in a million years. But she could recognize its script. She hadn’t expected that, either, though later she supposed she should have. It was a cleaned-up, formal-looking version of the writing that filled the parchment leaves of the Voynich Manuscript.

  The next picture, which was also the last, showed a naked blonde woman carrying a big rock. No—a second look told Feyrouz it wasn’t a rock: it was a chunk of concrete, with rusty rebar stubs sticking out of it here and there.

  The woman was dirty and muscular, and slightly on the chunky side—like the women in the pools in the manuscript and, now that Feyrouz thought about it, quite a bit like Tony Loquasto himself. She didn’t think about it long. The way the woman was staring in the direction of the crawler didn’t exactly require one to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out why it stopped transmitting right after that.

  Probably on account of we had ourselves a big old no-holds-barred war. The janitor’s words echoed in Feyrouz’s head. So did other, older ones from Thomas Hobbbes, about the life of man in a state of nature: … solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If that blonde woman didn’t epitomize them, Feyrouz couldn’t imagine what would.

  But she didn’t have time to deal with any of that now. As Paulo’d warned her, a huge tsunami of messages had swamped her in-box. Some were from obvious nuts, some from Voynich Manuscript enthusiasts who might not be nuts, some from scientists who might be nuts, some from government officials and clergyfolk who were surely going nuts. She had to sort through them all to figure out which ones she needed to answer as soon as she could, which could wait, and which could be erased without answering.

  Lunch? She never got the chance. A video crew interviewed her for two thousandths—the most time she could spare—for the infosphere. Fame and notoriety were the last things she wanted. She never would have gone into library science had she wanted them. Want them or not, she had them now.

  It slid toward 7.08. Quitting time? She wouldn’t get the chance for that, either. Maybe Paulo or somebody could bring her food and coffee, lots more coffee. She feared she’d end up sleeping in the office tonight, leaning back in the chair with her feet on the desk.

  Thinking of quitting time did make her remember Tony Loquasto. She called his phone code. He didn’t answer, which surprised her. Bonkers or not, Tony was nothing if not reliable. She left a message, asking him to call her back. When he didn’t, she called the general custodial code.

  She got the number two custodian, who said, “He left this morning, Professor Hanafusa. Didn’t you know? Said he had a family emergency. I bet he did, too—he looked big-time green around the gills, if you know what I mean.”

  “Thanks, Olga.” Feyrouz disconnected and went back through her messages to see if she’d overlooked one from Loquasto. She didn’t find one, and she didn’t think she would have scrubbed one from him. In the madness today, though, she couldn’t be sure.

  Just then, she got a call from the governor of Connecticut. She had to deal with that, and it made her forget about the errant custodian for a while. And the urgent calls and messages kept pouring in. By the time 9.58—2300 in the old system—rolled around, she was fielding queries from early risers in Europe. She gave it another couple of hundredths, then said the hell with everything, shut down her messaging, and headed for home. Wilfrid deserved that much, didn’t he?

  It was dark and quiet, except for fire engines screaming like los
t souls off in the distance. She had to wait at the stop longer than usual; buses didn’t run so often once it got late. And she wished she had a stunner in her pouch as she walked to her building down poorly lit streets. She got there without trouble, and breathed a small sigh of relief after the security door let her in.

  Wilfrid wanted to know where the hell she’d been and why he was out of cat food. She fed him and petted him and took care of the fish, all more or less on automatic pilot. Then she said, “News.”

  “Big fire in West Haven,” the infosphere announced; the AI must have known she would have heard the klaxons on her way back.

  “Show me. Tell me,” Feyrouz instructed. Sure enough, it was a big fire: a house that, to judge by the ones nearby, would have stood there since the twentieth century. It wasn’t standing any more. By the enthusiasm with which it burned, whoever lived there might have used it to store acetone or mineral oil.

  No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than the voice-over said, “Public Information Officer Horowitz says the flames’ fierceness makes arson not just possible but probable. The residence, which has belonged to the Loquasto family since at least the 1980s, is of course a total loss. Heat and smoke have prevented firefighters from gaining entry. At this point in time, we simply have no way of knowing whether anyone was trapped in the house when fire engulfed it. Emergency calls were placed by neighbors.”

  “Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad!” Feyrouz exclaimed. She tried Tony Loquasto’s phone code again. This time, she didn’t get invited to leave a message. An antique artificial voice—you could tell it was computerized, a dead giveaway that it was antique—informed her that that code was not currently in service.

  She did some more swearing. What was it trying to tell her? Did the phone system already know Tony was dead, even if the rest of the infosphere didn’t? Or had he canceled the code himself? The police would be able to find out about that, but she couldn’t.