Mr Q gave me an odd glance.
“Are we moving?”
“Moving?” he asked.
“Rotating, maybe?”
“No,” he chuckled, but the whole building does increase in height about two centimeters every decade or so— hardly discernible.”
“You’ve got quite a few books here,” I said, looking around. Everything seemed precise and correct, nothing was out of place. The walls were interspersed with large abstract paintings, though none of them could be described as portraits or landscapes. I also noticed several rolling blackboards parked against a far wall; they had been scrupulously erased. “All this reminds me of the Library…”
“Oh, it’s not quite as grand as Madeline’s, but I do enjoy reading.”
“Is it the same here?”
“In what sense, Mr Jardel? There’s no electricity of course, but the plumbing is excellent.”
“I meant the flow of time.”
“As I mentioned, the higher you go, the slower time passes.”
“How slow is time going at the top?”
“In the observatory? It’s anyone’s guess. Even Lothar hasn’t calculated it properly. All I can say is the days and nights go past in less than the blink of an eye.”
“Wow. So, if you spend the day up there, a hundred days pass on the outside, in proper time.”
“Your math is incorrect, but yes, something like that.” Mr Q walked across the room and opened the curtains. “As you can see, the tower was built with the windows facing inwards. It’s most disconcerting to see the sun racing across the sky… especially while trying to eat lunch.”
“How fast is time moving in this room?”
“You mean how slow?”
I nodded.
“In the study, here on the second floor, the ratio is about five to one. For every hour we sit, five pass on the outside. Of course… as you ascend—”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Well, we’re able to preserve things in slow time: food and equipment that we might need, including…” Mr Q paused. “Though we’ll go no higher than this room, if you don’t mind.”
“How do you like living in slow time?”
“It’s relatively pleasant,” Mr Q replied and lowered himself into a comfortable chair.
I sat opposite in a plush sofa.
He took out a pipe and began to stuff it with tobacco. “Though, it’s a terrible thing to doze off in one of the upper rooms and find a whole century has passed you by…” He paused to light his pipe. “But one adapts…” he said between puffs. “I suppose it can be quite convenient as well. I might spend some time in the observatory to see how the future unfolds, then I jump back to the past and live it all over again.”
“How do you travel back?”
“It is something of a chore. We’ve first got to journey to eastern Australia… using conventional means.”
“A logistical nightmare,” Lothar added. He just seemed to appear out of nowhere, carrying a tea service and a plate of gingerbread men. I watched him pour out three tiny cups from a miniature teapot. “How do you take it?” he asked pleasantly.
“One sugar and milk, please.”
When he handed me the cup I realized it was quite a normal size, at least in my hand. He passed around the plate of gingerbread men, which were well proportioned but enormous, nearly a foot in length. I started to nibble on an arm.
“We were just beginning our discussion about the quantum of events. Mr Jardel is particularly interested in how tiny fluctuations can add up to a causal cascade.”
The Quantifier had put words in my mouth, though he wasn’t far from the truth.
I nodded. “These are delicious by the way…”
“Patrick here has lost his good friend Mr. Fynn. Do you recall him, Lothar? The three of us went picnicking on the beach in Normandy a number of years ago…”
“Oh yes, I seem to have a dim recollection. Didn’t we see all those airplanes flying overhead that day?” The giant had squeezed himself into a chair and sipped his tea delicately, almost absurdly, and drained the cup forthwith.
“What do you suppose the odds of finding him in the past would be?” Mr Q asked.
“When did you say Mr Fynn went missing?”
“A week ago, Friday,” I answered.
“Oh… well, I’d calculate you have a zero point three chance of finding him at all,” the giant said and bit the leg off a gingerbread man.
“That’s not very encouraging.”
“Sorry.” Lothar made a face. “I might give you a more hopeful number if I knew how many timelines stood between you and your friend.”
“How could I know that?”
“Lothar has devised a wonderful series of equations that might tally this very thing, though we’ve yet to test them thoroughly.”
“You’re almost being too kind,” Lothar replied with a beaming smile.
“How?” I asked.
“Fractal algorithms,” the giant said and took a deep breath. “I could explain it to you, if you’d like.”
“There may be an infinite number of timelines, but that is not to say there is no structure,” Mr Q intervened. “Nature devises patterns, and fractals seem the best way to describe them.”
“Ha…” The giant gave a startling laugh and said, “Fractus Fynn!”
“Oh, that’s rather funny, Lothar…”
“What kind of structure are you talking about?”
“Your friend Fynn likens it to a growing crystal, some bits end abruptly, others veer off in all directions… though at the heart of things, are thick branches of inevitability.”
“Like a snowflake,” Lothar added with a grin.
“Of course I see the structure differently,” Mr Q announced. “To me it’s much more like a Jackson Pollack painting.” He glanced over to the far wall.
I stopped to remember the artist and looked over at the huge abstract canvas of dribbled and dripped paint. “But that’s total chaos, completely random stuff.”
“Not at all… Things may appear chaotic and we may label them as random, but usually this is just our own perspective, our own bias.”
“You’re trying to say there’s a pattern in his paintings?”
“In his paintings, yes, and in the nature of reality. If you look closely enough, or from far enough away, they are both complex fractals…”
“So, Jackson Pollack was painting the nature of reality?”
“We can only create a model of this supposed structure with mathematics. I imagine reality as a kind of frothy mixture, always roiling and changing.”
“Frothy?”
“Of course, in constant flux, constant motion… Consider that even atoms are ninety-nine percent empty space and always moving about.”
“Not much of a structure,” I almost muttered.
“Timelines are not particularly fragile, quite the opposite. In my experience, I’ve found them very resilient, and this has to do with inevitability.”
“Inevitability?”
“Ah, the first thing we must learn to accept.” Mr Q paused and sat back in his chair. “Inevitability is on a spectrum of course, from absolutely certain on one side, to extremely unlikely on the other.”
“Like a rainbow,” Lothar added.
“Can you give me a for instance?”
“Of course… let’s say, someone had to invent the telephone sooner or later— eh, Mr Jardel? Such a thing was nearly inevitable. The future is a very probable place. It’s when things are improbable that I worry.”
“I might have an example,” I said, and this seemed to get their interest. “How could a timeline change so everything is exactly the same, except there’s no coffee?”
“Coffee? I’m not sure I’ve heard that word.”
“Cafe… It’s a very popular beverage where I’m from.”
“Maybe from the Arabic qahwah, or the Turkish kahveh,” Lothar supposed.
“What they say about you is true
after all then. You can recall drinking this beverage and yet no one else does. Quite extraordinary that you can remember such a tiny, insignificant detail.”
“It’s not insignificant,” I bristled. “How is the world exactly the same except for that? And it’s not a little thing, it’s a big thing. Everything should be different, all of history.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, it just should. Import-export, national economies, agricultural policies, coffee plantations…”
“There’s no reason to get so upset about it.”
“No, I guess not. I just feel a little frustrated.” I paused. “Doesn’t this qualify as one of your causal cascades?”
“Apparently not… I can think of many millions of people throughout the world who would not notice the difference between these two timelines.”
“Like who?”
“Tea-drinkers,” Mr Q said. “Or, perhaps for every cup of cafe consumed in your timeline, a cup of coco was consumed in ours.”
“Seems unlikely…” I considered and swallowed a piece of ginger cookie.
“It sounds much more like a case of encapsulated causality,” Mr Q observed.
“What?”
“Encapsulated causality describes a sequence of events with a verifiable outcome— that said— the relevance of any given outcome is wholly dependent on your perspective.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Not at all. Perspective is only a matter of your relative location: whether one is viewing that outcome from either the past, the present, or the future.”
“That actually makes sense,” I said, and felt a smile cross my face. “Something from the past might affect me, something in the present might be changed, and something in the future doesn’t matter yet.”
“There— you’ve got the gist of it. Understand that when you travel between timelines, the distances must be quite short. You most often arrive at the closest one. Nature is economical, it would seem. One doesn’t go galavanting across divergent histories. From my experience, one stays close to what’s familiar. And among the infinite realm of possibilities, surely there is a timeline which is identical to yours except for this— what is the word? Coffee.”
“I guess…”
“Admittedly, it’s not very likely. Sounds a bit forced, artificial, I might say.”
“Who could do that?”
“I don’t believe anyone could do such a thing. It’s improbable.”
“But not impossible?”
Mr Q thought for a moment. “Only someone with extraordinary skill and an excellent knowledge of history…”
“Mortimer?”
“You might have caused this situation yourself.”
“Me? How?”
“By your actions. I cannot know what you’ve done or haven’t done.”
“It might be the cane that caused all this,” I offered.
“As far as I understand it, Mortimer’s cane is nothing more than an elaborate astrolabe. The cane itself doesn’t cause you to travel, it merely guides you with astonishing accuracy.”
“I’m not so sure… I think it does more than that.”
“What makes you say so?”
“Like I mentioned, I met my very own future self.”
“Yes… well now, that is an unusual occurrence… to find one’s own doppelgänger waiting in the future.”
“I’m beginning to think using the cane doubles you in some way, creates a duplicate when you jump.”
“Quite inexplicable.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Who told you all this?”
“… Edmund,” I lied outright.
“Edmund Fickster, you say. Well, who told him, I wonder? Must have been Pavel.” Mr Q looked over at Lothar.
“I know this cane compensates for velocity and inertia, magnetic declination… and has a guide for directional vectors… As for free fall duration, the mechanism is tuned to a—”
“Yes, yes, I’m not at all interested in the technology of things,” Mr Q interrupted. “What’s important here is that Patrick has used the cane and can still recognize the smallest details between timelines… You, Mr Jardel, seem to remember all these wanderings— most do not.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“You’ve not been told what this implies… Why, between your talents and the cane, think of the endless tasks we could accomplish,” Mr Q said a bit too excitedly.
“Um, I really should be going…”
“You should stay, work with me. We could be partners.”
“I’d really like to find Fynn.”
“I could insist,” Mr Quandary said and glanced at his giant. Lothar who had been generous with his ginger cookies, now looked oddly menacing.
“Perhaps you might lend us the cane then?”
“I’d like to, if I could.”
“I can guide you to your past and everything will be as it should… more or less.”
“Okay, thing is, I don’t really have it.”
“What are you saying?”
“This is a counterfeit.” I held it up.
“Where is the real cane, Mr Jardel?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“You can’t say you’ve forgotten, because I will not believe this.”
“Um, I lost it.”
“Lost it? Where?”
I just shrugged. “Kind of a long story.”
***
Mr Q cut me off, “I’ve come to agree with Fynn… the man is a menace.”
“Mortimer, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Anyone with an agenda is a menace to my mind.”
I stopped to consider: doesn’t everyone have an agenda? I said nothing though.
Mr Q packed his pipe again and set it alight. I watched a trail of smoke slowly ascend through the cozy room to an upper level. “On the other hand, you may have allied yourself with the wrong man.”
“What?” I chafed. “Should I be friends with Mortimer? To my knowledge he’s killed quite a few people, and inflicting pain on others seems to be his favorite hobby.”
“I can’t argue those points. Nor do I deny his brutality. I will only say Mortimer has an eye for the big picture… society, politics, the fate of humanity.”
“And Fynn doesn’t?” I could feel myself growing angry.
“Fynn is much the opposite, he cares less about politics. He is only a humble policeman seeking small truths, righting small wrongs, and gaining but small bits of justice here and there…”
“Noble as that is,” I added.
“Indeed,” the Quantifier said then paused. “I will compliment you on how well you’ve dealt with Mr Drummond. It was an ingenious strategy… To find his origin and convince him not to jump in the first place. Very effective.”
“Maybe not.”
“How so?”
“I’ve heard rumors that his daughter is… well, on the prowl.”
“I wasn’t aware he had a daughter.”
“Neither was I, until recently.”
“Who told you such a thing?”
“Zalika for one, and Pavel Mekanos.”
“And I wonder who told them?” Mr Q considered.
Lothar spoke up, “I told Pavel.”
“Did you? And where did you hear it from?” He glared at Lothar.
“Lillian mentioned it,” the giant replied.
“Did she?”
“Do you know Lilly?” I asked.
“Is that what she’s calling herself these days? Or is it Chloe? Yes, I know her quite well. But not as well as Lothar, apparently.”
“I was good friends with her father,” Lothar said. “He taught me everything I know about logic theory. A brilliant man.” Lothar searched through his pockets for a moment. He pulled out a tarot card and handed it to me: The Magician. “She left this behind on her last visit.”
“Can she be trusted?” I asked.
“In
what regard?”
“Does she tell the truth?”
“A difficult question to answer unless we can define what the truth is. Yours may be different than mine.”
“Does she have honor?” I tried a different tack.
“How quaint…” The Quantifier smiled but it didn’t last long. “I can say, she is rather singleminded.”
“About what?”
“The books of course.”
“The Voynich manuscripts.”
“As you call them, yes.”
“Can you tell me more?”
“Oh, the manuscripts. There are those who think them an elaborate hoax, a forgery of some sort.”
“Do you?”
“I like to keep an open mind… though thousands of people have pored over the texts and drawings, and so far, none have come up with a wholly satisfying explanation.”
“You mean real or fake?”
“I do. Even Lothar has applied certain algorithms to the symbols, the individual letters and words as they may be… and he can draw no firm conclusions.”
Lothar nodded with a smile.
“There are others who say that they were written by someone who lives very far from our timelines, on a different branch of the crystalline structure, Fynn might say.”
“The crystal?” I asked.
“Oh, like a snowflake,” Lothar said again. “Each forming in time, each the same and yet each completely different.”
“Like Carlos and his Viking overlords?”
“What?” Mr Q laughed. “Carlos lives closer to us than you might expect. No, I’m meaning very far away, even a different snowflake, to use Lothar’s analogy.”
“And the manuscripts?”
“Well, it makes them quite interesting and valuable… They may offer a unique perspective on things. They might give us a very broad view on how events branch off, how different the world might be.”
“History, you mean?”
“History, yes, but perhaps even more. Imagine, traveling to parallel worlds that are so distant, the word parallel hardly applies. Fascinating.”
Lothar let go a strategic cough.
“Oh yes,” Mr Q continued, “Some claim the manuscripts were written by one of the builders.”
Low City: Missing Persons (A Tractus Fynn Mystery Book 3) Page 19
