Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  With a sudden wrenching motion, he turned and seized two black folios from the wall; gripping each by their bottoms, he stood spraddle-legged, in the posture of Moses with the tablets. "My grandfather published this Bible in old and new testaments in Mainz, long before I was born. What finer prize could I offer?"

  Wagner staggered as they were slammed into his arms.

  "Now! Three works in four volumes, the round world contained in a squared triangle. Let us contend."

  "I stand ready."

  "Bravely said. There are, as William of Ockham has asserted, three sure sources of knowledge: the self-evident, experience, and Scriptural revelation. Would you agree?"

  "That is beyond denial."

  "We shall then begin with the Almagest. Ptolemy himself has said that astronomy is a form of mathematics. Hence it is a perfect exemplar of the self-evident. If there is a single flaw in an equation, the whole is necessarily wrong. Which being so, your measurements by themselves discredit him."

  Eyes shining, Wagner said, "Not so! For Ptolemy's observations have stood the test of time. Whereas my own could easily be flawed by reason of weariness or some lenticular effect of the atmosphere or some other cause beyond the capacity of my imagination to comprehend."

  "Surely, however, reason can correct any lack in your perceptions even as ground lenses can correct a weakness in optical vision."

  Wagner licked his lips. "But if the organ of rational thought be imperfect—as what man's is not?—then it can no more apply the logic of its own correction than a man may touch his elbow with the hand of that same arm."

  "If you cannot trust your senses, nor reason them back into coherence with the known facts of existence, it necessarily follows that truth is ipso facto unknowable to you. We must reject then the self-evident, commonsense interpretation of existence, for you lack the mental equipment to verify it."

  "Ah, but Ptolemy's judgment was infinitely superior to my own."

  "Was it?"

  "Yes."

  "How do you know?"

  "By the verification of a hundred witnesses and scholars."

  "There is a children's game—you have surely played it— where one youth whispers a sentence in a second youth's ear, and that friend whispers it to a third, and so on until it has passed through twenty ears and as many mouths. The last speaks his treasure aloud, and it has no relation whatsoever to the original. A true word enters through the river gate and by the time it departs down the road to Coswig, it has become a lie. The hearsay of hearsay is not admissible as scholarship." Faust sighed. "You are fallible because you are human. All men are fallible. Ptolemy was a man. Ptolemy was fallible. Quod erat demonstratum."

  He took the Almagest from Wagner's arms and slammed it down on the worktable. "We arrive now at the second leg of our triangle. Aristotle must stand in for those truths derived from experience. His Physics asserts that physical laws are determined by distinctions of qualities." He took that volume from Wagner's arms and leaned it up against the Ptolemy, so that together they made an inclined plane whose lower end overlapped the table's edge. Opening a chest, he rummaged within, and removed two fist-sized spheres.

  "Here are two balls of equal size but different composition, for the one is made of pine and the other of granite. The stone sphere, you will note, is significantly heavier. Their intrinsic qualities could not be more different. We will place each at the top of this ramp and simultaneously let them go. Which will hit the floor first?"

  "The granite one, necessarily."

  "So Aristotle would have you believe. And for most scholars that citation would suffice. We, however, will prove or disprove it from our own experience."

  He let go the balls.

  They rolled down the book, fell through the air, hit the floor as one. Faust raised his eyebrows.

  "So much for experience. So much for Aristotle. I have removed two legs of your triangle, Herr Wagner, and you are left standing uneasily on but one."

  "Truth," Wagner said boldly, though his voice wavered slightly, "springs from direct and divine revelation. Scientific inquiry, for which we have only the evidence of our own fallible senses, can be merely the calculated deception of Satan."

  "So." Faust laid Ptolemy and Aristotle to bed in the flames, then lowered his hands upon the twin folio volumes of the Bible. "We must put all our trust and faith in this one book, eh? This one divided book, which all devout men take to be the divine revelation itself, perfect and immutable, the sole and single source that cannot be contradicted nor contradict itself. Where all man's ways prove unreliable, revelation cannot fail us."

  "Yes!" Wagner cried. "Yes."

  "You will stake your all, your soul itself upon this book?"

  "I will."

  "Tell me, then. How many days did Noah abide in his ark?"

  "What?"

  "It says in Genesis, 'And the flood was forty days upon the earth.' That seems straightforward enough, eh? Then, but a few lines further down, 'And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.' Which one is correct? They cannot both be correct. And if one is a lie, what does that say about the purported author of the book?"

  "We—we do not know the length of days in those ancient times, and it is possible that the one citation gives that duration in the measure of our day and the other—"

  "Bah! Sophistry!" Faust flung the books atop the fire.

  With a wild cry, Wagner fled the room.

  "So much for the old white-bearded man," Faust muttered. "So much for the Creator and Preserver. Who was it hid the knowledge from human eyes in the first place?"

  Alone in the smoky room, Faust found himself staring at the front wall where the chimney formed a stone nose between the glowing rectangular eyes of two windows, so that he seemed to be standing within a human head. It was no common head, but that of a hero, large of eye and spacious within. The conceit came upon him that this study was a perfect simulacrum of his own brain. Here was his worktable, overflowing with scribbled charts and figures and glass retorts, there the lodestone wound thick with wire to multiply its potency, and overhead a stuffed alligator from the Orinoco quartering the room with excruciating slowness, a bit of mummery hung from the ceiling not so much to repel demons and negate their baleful influence on his experiments as to intimidate gullible clients. The skull of a whale (a small one) was propped up in one corner alongside a teaching device wherein a wooden roller in the form of two cones joined at the base could be made to seemingly roll up an inclined but diverging pair of boards. Nearby were the petrified thighbone of a pre-Adamic giant and an iron stone which he had with his own eyes seen fall from the starry sky. Each curio and device could be read as the visible symbol for some acquired skill or science Faust had crammed disorganizedly within his noggin. Each would greatly impress the ignorant. Yet they were but clumsy models for the real world outside, and however ably he might arrange and rearrange them, he could never bring that outside world within.

  Faint noises of commerce and flirtation arose from the street. Somebody was shouting. Children laughed. He ignored these sounds as irrelevant, distractions from the Gordian knot of logic he must focus his intellect upon. For, paradoxically, in his excited and despairing state he felt himself closer to a true insight into the ‘ universal essence than ever his studies had brought him, so close that all the world suddenly seemed insubstantial to him, no more than shadows cast on the back of his skull or the filmy membrane of a bubble so infinitely immense its center was everywhere, its interior unknowable, and its surface the phenomenal world.

  Without bravado, Faust held himself to be as learned as any man alive. Yet all he knew with any assurance was that he knew nothing. Therefore it was pointless to look for help from native minds; he must seek elsewhere, in realms greater or lesser than human. He must assume, too, that the knowledge he sought existed somewhere, else all his strivings were for naught. So, then. Where?

  Faust had no delusions of Heavenly aid. An involved and benevolent deity w
ould have helped him long years ago when, young, he had yearned for knowledge as achingly as now and with far fewer stains on his soul. So. He must deal with realms or domains or powers that might be devils or spirits or creatures that were neither but something beyond his merely mortal comprehension.

  Assuming such beings, they must necessarily be far beyond him, existing in realms unreachable by human effort. In his alchemical studies he had worked with athenors, alembics, and solutory furnaces, manipulating such mordants, caustics, and solvents as were employed in mining and in the dying of cloth. But he had also engaged in researches involving the exhausted bodies of prostitutes, both female and male, the sacrifice of animals, and the obscene deployment of stolen Communion wafers in black Masses and other unwholesome rituals. There were two traditions of alchemy, and he had sought out—and paid—exponents of each, not only metallurgists and assayers but wizards as well, mountebanks and teachers of the esoteric traditions, followers of Hermes Tris-megistus and worshippers of Saint Wolf alike. And it was all flummery. He knew for a certainty that none of them were in contact with such allies as he sought.

  These allies, therefore, must locate Faust, for he could not contact them. Which meant that—denying the possibility of failure, for that was folly and despair—they must be already searching for him, for otherwise the contact could not be made. Therefore he possessed some thing or quality these beings or forces desired, be it worship or service or his very soul itself. There must be ten millions of people in Europe alone. Beyond that? In Hind and Cathay and Araby, in Africa and the new Indies? Unimaginable numbers. What had he to offer that no one else in all these swarming legions had?

  One thing only: that he was seeking them.

  It took a rare man, a great man, to break free of the encrusted prejudices of his age, to cast his thoughts into the dark and silent regions where the minds of such allies awaited him. And awaited him anxiously. For surely a man such as himself was no unworthy prize.

  If they were seeking one such as he, and their thoughts touched his in the dark, then he and they could strike a bargain. He did not need the magical idiocy of diagrams or devices, of nonsense syllables or implements with evil histories. There was no need even to leave the room. He could win all, achieve all, here and now. It required only an act of will.

  He had but to offer himself up.

  A shiver—of anticipation or fear, he could not tell which— passed through Faust. The room felt unaccountably cold. Slowly, he spread his arms.

  A book fell off the burning pile onto the hearthstone and, falling open, burst more furiously into flame. It threw up smoke like a black flare, but Faust did not stoop to retrieve it.

  He stood unmoving, wondering at his own abrupt and incomprehensible inability to act. He did not fear damnation. Nor did he give a fig for the common opinion of Mankind. There was nothing to stop him but fear alone—fear that his reasoning was wrong. Fear that the offering would prove him a failure.

  For the briefest instant he stood irresolute.

  "Here I am," Faust said convulsively. "I open myself to you." For his part, Faust knew, he would gladly worship demons, willingly give service to monsters unspeakable, if that were what they wanted. Eat filth, murder children—whatever they required, that would he do. Whatever the price, he would pay it.

  The smoke swirled about him chokingly, dizzyingly. He could see nothing now, feel nothing. Afloat and lost in the grey smoke and ruin, Faust emptied his brain of all thought, all reasoning, all words, surrendering everything but ambition itself. He made himself first passive and then silent, ignoring the blacksmith-bellows pumping of his lungs, the tidal surge of blood in his veins, and finally the faint crackling that underlay thought itself, accelerating toward zero, until all that was left was unmediated will, and that will a hunger, an open mouth.

  He stood reduced to his essence, an uncarved block of marble awaiting the carver's hand, a palimpsest scraped clean of old ink and ready for the quill, as eager for knowledge as tinder for the flame. The noise of the fire rose up in his ears in a babbling roar like a million voices all joined together into a white surf of sound, flooding his brain, drowning the last semblance of reason. He fell into a perfect stillness.

  Cycling ever quieter in perfect silence without expectations

  falling into a timeless state outside his control

  where human thought ceased and

  nothing existed nothing

  but the void

  and

  From the heart of nothingness, a voice spoke: Faust.

  * * *

  REVELATIONS

  A puppeteer had drawn a crowd to the college street side of the market-square. Disembodied, locationless, Faust saw it all, the traveling horn-merchant's booth where gallants pored over tortoiseshell combs and boxes cunningly crafted to win the coldest female heart, the lean scrivener hurrying by with a bribe for the mayor, the bulldog woman with a stack of men's hats in either hand and another upon her head who could not speak but only bark yet was a shrewd dealer nonetheless, and the legless veteran of a Venetian warship with his begging bowl as well. A lesser mob clustered by the Jew street end, where a barber had set up chair and basin and was preparing to yank a festered tooth "within three pulls." He knelt heavily upon his apprehensive victim's thighs and nodded to his burly volunteers. Two of them seized the man's forearms while a third dug his fists into the hair and pulled back.

  The crowd surged forward.

  "Portugals! Portugals!" sang the orange-monger. Faust's vision was fragmented, as if he had a thousand eyes turned every which way, at now a scrannel dog slinking hopefully beneath the sausage-maker's glare and now a buxom townswoman buying a choicer cut of meat with a furtive kiss behind the butcher's booth. Tied to the whipping post at the center of the square was a Rostocker who, for selling bad wine, had been forced to drink a quantity of his own merchandise and endure having the rest poured over him. The man had puked before losing consciousness and pissed and beshit himself afterwards. Those who came close in order to benefit from the lesson of his example (and there were many such) either purchased oranges first, to hold before their noses, or else soon after regretted not doing so.

  The puppeteer was presenting the rascal tale of Old Vice, an edifying and uplifting play with enough shrieks and drubbings to satisfy the most demanding audience. The playboard was held over his head and a kind of curtain fell from it, was cinched at his waist, and then fell again to brush his boots. Children had pushed their way to the fore, but adults watched as well: housewives in their market-day finery, rough-faced farmers leaning protectively over their baskets of produce, an officer from the castle who sat back in his saddle with a smile and stroked his mustache, remembering a disreputable incident from his youth. A frog-skinner laughed, even as her nimble hands emptied one bushel and filled another. On the stage Old Vice howled as his little boat tossed on imagined waves, the puppeteer bending at the waist and swaying at the knees to simulate an ocean squall.

  A roar rose up from the far side of the market. "One!"

  The audience turned, craned necks, saw nothing. The puppeteer froze, his hero's crescent-moon boat canted over almost sideways. "One?!" Old Vice waved his stiff little arms hysterically. "One what? Oh! It must be a sea serpent come for me!"

  An aged fishwife leaped back as a passing cart-horse voided itself close enough to spatter her skirts, and began to vigorously scold the wagoner, who folded enormous arms and cocked his head in a bored manner. Neither noticed the young woman gliding by with a faraway smile on her lips and a tightly folded letter in her hands. Two angel-faced shoemaker's apprentices skipped past her, singing a glee in catches. One missed a note and his comrade playfully shoved him sideways against a confectioner's display, upsetting a tray of honeyed hemp seeds sold as a specific against women's cramps.

  "Two!"

  "Two sea serpents! Oh, woe!—what is to become of me?"

  A student burst through the crowd, running across the plaza barefoot and in his night
gown, flapping his arms like some extravagant great bird.

  "Help! Help!"

  Old Vice disappeared from the tiny stage and was replaced by the gawking face of his manipulator. The children were pointing and laughing at the hairy-legged student. "Please!" he cried, running from citizen to citizen without pausing long enough for any one of them to react. "Somebody must help the Magister! He's setting fire to everything!"

  "Fire?"

  At that dread word all laughter ceased. Brother Josaphat, a great bruiser of a monk, as wide as he was tall, and not at all a short man, stepped out of the crowd. He placed himself in the student's path and so stopped Wagner in his headlong flight. "Who is setting fires?" the monk demanded. "Where?"

  "It's Magister Faust, he—"

  "The astrologer Faust?"

  "Oh, no, no, no! The scholar Faust, good brother. He is a most learned doctor of natural philosophy who teaches at the ..."

  "Yes, yes, I know who you mean. Where is he?"

  "He's—he's—he's—"

  Brother Josaphat picked up Wagner by the shoulders and shook him roughly enough to restore sense to his head. Then he turned the student around and set him down again. "No more babbling. Lead us there and we will follow."

  The rescuers thundered up the stairs, some bearing buckets of water that sloshed as they ran, others with bags of sand kept convenient for such emergencies, and still others with axes and hooked poles for pulling down draperies and chopping out walls. First came Wagner, followed by the mountainous Brother Josaphat and several merchants, some farmers who had already sold their wares and found the free nature of this diversion much to their liking, along with neighbors, laborers, idlers, even a pair of white-bearded, black-clad Jews. And of course the children, impossible even with kicks and curses to keep them away, shrieking with excitement. The puppeteer, hung all over with his moppets like so many bunches of onions, brought up the rear, a gaping scarecrow of a man, all bright eyes and beak nose.