Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  Falling to his knees, Brother Josaphat lifted his hands to the heavens and began loudly to pray against this violent rupture of the natural order. "Lord, send down your lightnings!" he cried. "Let avenging angels strike this blasphemy from the sky!" Among the still faces, one bobbed wildly up and down, the artist Cranach, sketching madly, head going from sky to paper and back as his hands flew across the paper. A stone flew, but fell short. The thrower was dragged to the ground by Fritz, Karl, and Hans. Fists rose and fell.

  Faust impulsively seized a ballast bag and emptied the sand over the upturned faces. He laughed as they squinted and scowled, waving hands like so many picnickers warding off wasps. "Stay upon your knees, Brother Josaphat!" he cried. "I will stay in my balloon. We'll see which of us reaches Heaven first!"

  A perfect stillness surrounded him, and he was filled with a fantastic elation. Looking down upon the dwindling people, he felt a mingled scorn and love for them all. The dear little people—they were like ants. He could throw down his shoe and crush them all! If he were to spit upon them, they would drown in his saliva.

  Wagner stood frozen at his side, clutching the edge of the basket. His eyes were wide as saucers. His face was pale with wonder.

  The balloon rose above the church steeple. The town and its streets were laid out below, clearer than any map. Then the wind caught them (but they felt no wind) and they were pushed over the castle. In the courtyard soldiers gaped up at them. It came to Faust that it would be the easiest thing in the world to drop rocks and even gunpowder bombs upon them, that fortresses and city walls meant nothing in the bold new world that was a-borning.

  "Well, Wagner," Faust said jubilantly, "do you still think me mad?"

  Wagner turned, all in one motion, and threw his arms about the scholar, burying his head in Faust's side. "Master!" he cried. "Forgive me for doubting you!"

  Not half an hour later, coming down in the fields five miles from town, the basket would tip over and send Wagner tumbling. The leg he would break was to be a small price to pay for having flown, but it would complicate the return to the city greatly. For now, though, all was perfect.

  "We have been through a long, dark winter," Faust said. "But now it is spring, and all Nature favors us and our work. All of Europe will lie at my feet. I see nothing but fame and riches before me."

  The next day Faust's creditors gathered at the town hall and collectively swore out a complaint against him.

  * * *

  FALSE DAWN

  In the hour before dawn, a chill and indirect luminance infused the cloudless sky over Wittenberg. A swallow, hunting mayflies, mosquitoes, and other riparian delights, swooped out of the light and into the shadowy town. Five great looping dives carried it over the dark and empty streets, past the warehouses and the church tower, over the university and the castle and into the light again. For an instant it saw two men in a cart down below it, and then it was out among the western fields and all the town, with its wealth and people and problems, dissolved to nonexistence in the all-abiding and universal solvent of the eternal now.

  In a garret room under the city wall, a student who had spent all the night and most of two candles struggling to translate ten pages of Cicero's immortal rhetoric heard the clop-clop of hooves and creaking of wooden wheels. His head jerked up and he stared numbly at the plastered wall, thoughts a jumble of Roman glory and memories of a long-ago journey to Paris. "Somebody's out early," he said aloud.

  The cobblestones were cold and damp. A rat fled from the cart-horse's hooves. It scuttled over a landscape of puddles and wagon-ruts, hoofprints, and scraps of brick, to a sheltered spot where a broken wheelbarrow and a rotting plank conspired to hide an opening to its lair. Pausing at the mouth of the hole, it looked back at the men, eyes glittering like mar-casite beads. In the distance a dog barked. With a disdainful flip of its tail, the rat turned and was gone.

  White-bearded old Methuselah, who lived rather like a rat himself, in an oaken barrel half-buried in the work yard of a kindhearted carpenter whose name he did not know, was next to see the wagon pass. Snug in his abode, crouching naked and on all fours, he turned his head as it went by, dragging his beard against the ground. His voice rose up in a howl: "Oh Lakedaimonians, breakers of splendid horses, violators of Hesychia!" he cried. "Your limbs are shackled to shameless hope; your brows wreathed in victory beside Alpheos' water. Ixion, fixed on his winged wheel, spun in a circle, cries aloud this message to mortals: Wide is the strength of Wealth; an end in all bitterness awaits the sweetness that was wrong— best of all things is water." He had been a scholar long years ago, before losing his wits through the memorization of ancient texts, and his mad recitations were still a popular diversion at student feasts.

  Hearing him, the young man grinned and dug into his purse for a scrap of bread to throw. His bandaged and splinted leg ached and throbbed with every jolt, and he shivered with the cold. But he felt oddly sure of himself, serenely quiet, willing to accept whatever might come. Each thing he saw, he looked at for the last time, and the twinge of fear this brought only made them all the more precious to him. "It's going to be a beautiful day."

  His dark-bearded companion grunted. He was, despite the season, winter-gaunt, and his heart was as disturbed as the younger man's was tranquil.

  Ahead of the cart, pacing it, unseen and unfelt by any but the older man, a dancing sprite of malice skipped nimbly over the town. His feet were two dark flames touching here the mossy lip of a well, there a thatched roof, now a door stoop, and again a window frame. His laughter sounded only for one set of ears.

  The wagon came to a stop in the plaza between the castle and its church. The western gate was still locked. To the east of town, outside the Rostock gate, where they could wait in sunshine instead of shadow, several garrulous old Slavic farmers would be sitting in their wagons, sharp-eyed to pick up the least scrap of gossip and loose-tongued to set it down again. Here, they had only the guard to get by, and the driver of the cart had been assured the guard this morning would be hungover and incurious.

  The bearded man was in the darkest of moods. It was a hard thing to be skipping out on his debts. But if it were to be done, it were best done now: The examinations began in less than a week, and who would expect a teacher to disappear before collecting all those fat fees? By the time anyone was convinced he had fled, he would be long gone. And he would have good advice on which roads to take. He did not fear pursuit. Only the bitterness of shame.

  The morning breeze carried the sulfury tang of swamp air over the walls, and the putrefying essence of stagnant moat-water as well. These smells mingled and merged in an alchemical marriage with the ordinary street stench of humans, dogs, and scavenger pigs to form a bouquet as rich and pervasive as an outhouse fart.

  Deaf and distracted old Brother Jerome hurried across the square. The younger of the men hailed him cheerily, but he paid no mind. Without a glance at either, he scurried up the Schlosskirche steps, took a key from his cassock, and unlocked the church doors. The week's notices fluttered briefly. Then the doors slammed behind him.

  The horse snorted.

  The younger man slapped his jacket with both arms. "You'll be happier once we're on the road," he said.

  "Nothing will make me happier. Nothing but—" The elder stopped abruptly, and cocked his head as if listening to a suggestion. "Yes," he said with sudden energy. "Yes, that's exactly what I'll do."

  Brusquely, he seized a rope and began to undo its knot. Throwing a tarpaulin aside, he dug into the bags and trunks like a terrier, emerging after a few minutes with a blunt German hammer, several nails, and a parchment sheet. "Wait here," he said.

  He walked up the castle-church steps with the sheet of paper in his hand, disappearing into shadow, then reappearing again. Posters covered the doors—examination notices, satirical broadsides, theses presented for debate—tacked one on top of another in places an inch thick. He tore them down in great handfuls and flung them away. Then, with fifteen solid hamme
r blows, he nailed up the chart. The boom of those blows echoed over the city, louder than a drum.

  At the sound, pigeons scattered and the younger man glanced nervously over his shoulder. In his garret, the student looked up stupidly, shook his head, sighed, and set aside Cic-его for a bowl of wash-water. Brother Jerome frowned faintly, half-turned, and then decided it had been his imagination. Nobody else heard.

  The gaunt dark-bearded man threw the hammer into the back of the wagon and climbed up in the front.

  "There!" he said. "That will rattle their provincial little world. That will shake them more thoroughly than they have shaken me. I have lit the fuse to a bomb, Wagner. All the gunpowder in the world crammed within that church would not set off an explosion half so grand as mine." He waited for the questions he knew were coming.

  But Wagner did not need to ask or even know what the poster said or meant. There was no least trace of fear or mistrust in his mind any more; the flight of the Daedalus had restored all his lost faith in Faust. He had walked through the dark night of disloyalty and emerged with his faith stronger than ever. He had now a sure and abiding confidence that he would never doubt his master again.

  Inside the church, Brother Jerome stared steadily up at a particular corner of the stained-glass window of Saint Cer-aunos, waiting for the light to hit it just so. This was his special gift, to pinpoint the moment of dawn through the shifting seasons, even on the most overcast of days, and though he could not have told exactly how he did it—Brother Jerome was not a verbal man—yet he enjoyed some small fame for this knack. When he judged the moment right, he seized the bell-rope and hauled down on it. The bell resisted, swung, reverberated. He let the rope run silkily up through his cal-lused old hands, and then stretched, grabbed, pulled again. Brother Jerome could hear the bell only faintly, as if it were being sounded underwater by mermen in a distant Atlantean city. But he could feel its vibrations. Those he could sense as well as any man.

  Wagner looked up as the bell rang. Faust did not.

  From the Coswig gate came the groan of wood and metal. The guard was opening the city for the day's traffic. Outside, the world would be bright with promise. The sun had risen.

  It was morning.

  Faust climbed up on the cart. He made a clucking noise and shook the reins. The horse pricked up his ears and lifted his heavy legs.

  The cart pulled away from the church, through the gate, and down the road. Left behind, the chart was a luminous white rectangle on the church doors. On it, a hundred-some neatly penned but eccentrically placed squares were arranged in nine rows, not all of them continuous. Numbers and symbols abided in each square. Notations dwelt here and there in the margins, defining the significance of atomic weights, valences, electron shells, and such esoterica, to enable the clever to decipher its use and meaning. Atop all, in Faust's finest Gothic script, ran the heading: periodic table of the elements.

  * * *

  PRACTICAL DESIGNS

  His second night in Nuremberg, Faust went for a stroll with the devil. They walked east, past the convent of Saint Catherine, where the Meistersingers held their singing schools, toward where the Pegnitz passed through fortified breaches of the wall in two branches, forming a slim green island in the heart of the city. Six stout bridges enabled it to be used as a park and commons; they crossed one. It was that pleasant time just before sunset, when the air is clear and colors soft, and the towers of the city wall—by a myth proudly attested to by its citizens, there were three hundred sixty-five in all, one for each day of the year—present themselves at their finest. It was a Saturday and all the best people had come out to walk and be seen, in clothes not quite opulent enough to run them afoul of the sumptuary laws.

  (You listen to me) Mephistopheles grumbled (but you never take my advice.)

  "That was never our understanding," Faust said sharply. He bowed to a passing burgher, who returned the honor with a complacent bow of his own.

  (You are like the boy who is so anxious to build a tree-house that he slams the lumber down in the garden before the oak is out of the acorn. It is impractical to think you can revolutionize the science of your world without first improving its technology. If you attempt to build your tree-house now, you will only trample down the seedling.)

  "I am a scholar, not a mechanic."

  (To remake the world requires hammers as well as books, sweat as well as words. A revolution is not a picnic. You can name as many quarks as you like, as whimsically as you will, but all your elegant reasonings will convince nobody. Belief requires proof, and for proof you'll need a cyclotron.)

  "Put aside these futile arguments. Divert me."

  (Oh, very well.) Mephistopheles had incarnated himself tonight as a tattooed American savage, clad only in a loincloth, with wooden plugs in his earlobes, a long spear, and a small leather pouch hanging from a thong about his neck. His hair was shaven halfway up his head and macaw feathers sprouted from his topknot; his teeth had been filed to points. Yet his poise, posture, and proud stare were simple and unforced, so that he presented an odd mixture of the noble and the brutish. (What variety of learning would best suit your current mood: physics, chemistry, biology?)

  "Show me a new creature," Faust said, thinking of the order Dinosauria, those monstrous Titans which had ruled the world for so many millions of years and whose existence he had first learned of in a tavern on the road from Wittenberg to Nuremberg. "Something so unfamiliar to me as to rouse my sense of wonder. Something stranger than giraffes and more dangerous than electric eels. Something pleasant to the eye and yet baffling to the mind."

  Mephistopheles slung his spear across his shoulders and hung both arms over it, semicrucified. (Strangely dangerous and pleasantly baffling.) His mouth twisted in a cruel smile. (I have just the thing. And look—here comes one now!)

  A young and modestly dressed woman passed them, with a fleeting smile and a nod of recognition. When Faust looked after her, the devil took his arm.

  (She's a pretty thing, isn't she? Our landlord's lovely daughter. She'd lift her skirts for you in an instant if her mother were not present. Ah, but the mother is hardly better herself; a soft word and a grope in a dark place would win her, too. She has no face worth looking at, I'll grant you, but all cats are black at night.) He pointed his spear across the water, to where a dark-haired maiden gazed moodily from a window over the river. (That quiet woman with the deceptively modest eyes as well. But she's poxy and you'd regret it soon enough.)

  "What! You'd serve as my pimp?" The scholar could not help but laugh. "Is there no end to your talents?"

  (Information is information, Faust. Knowledge is knowledge. I make no distinction between the high and the low.) Several paths wound their way through the island. By common consent, they followed one that ran along the river for a time, then looped inward, through a scythed meadow and under the trees. (Returning to the subject of our landlord's wife and daughter, though. Were you willing to put in a solid month's intrigue, with lies and flowers, forged letters, small kisses, and cunning promises, you could have the both of them in the same bed at the same time: daughter competing with mother, experience vying with youth. Each one mad to prove herself the better fuck. I see that the thought interests you!)

  "I find this hard to believe—that women, whom I have always revered as purer and more spiritual than men, should behave so sordidly."

  (More sordidly than the men who would use them so? Didn't you yourself, during your student days in Krakow, once pay two women to—)

  "Those were whores! Degraded creatures, scarce worthy of the sacred name of Woman. It is foul of you even to mention the two in a single breath."

  (Women are as lascivious, unfaithful, and coy as men, Faust. But men have created the lie otherwise, in order to keep them in control. Control is born out of scarcity, and to render scarce something everybody can and most wish to do requires a sound foundation of denial and deceit.)

  Their way passed through a grove of lime trees, plant
ed by the city fathers expressly to refresh strollers with their scent. When Faust paused to savor the blossoming fruit, Mephistopheles shook his spear at a tall and striking woman on the path ahead. A rich-dressed Netherlandish merchant walked with her, smiling indulgently. (Here comes a famous courtesan, one who has slept with so many princes that now she is as respectable as any ten married women. A night with her would cost you a month's wooing and more silver than you possess. A sizable investment to make purely on speculation and faith! And yet many a man who would not buy a turnip on such terms is at her beck and call. Would you like to see what her friend, Herr van t'Hoort, has not—the quality of merchandise that lies beneath those fine and regrettably concealing clothes?)

  "You can do that?"

  (I am in your mind. I need but your command.)

  "Show me, then."

  Mephistopheles unlooped the pouch from about his neck, and emptied into his palm what looked at first to be pebbles but were in fact the bleached skulls of small birds. He clapped his hands together, pulverizing the skulls, and then blew the resultant powder into the air. A fine mist or haze imposed itself upon the world, making its colors swirl and swim.

  When Faust's swooning vision cleared, he found himself looking at the courtesan's nude body. She was approaching middle-age, and one could see that all her features had softened; that her chin was not so straight as it had once been; that her belly was less firm than of yore; that her large-nippled breasts were now distinctly pendant. Yet still her strong legs and heroically long torso made of her a perfect Amazon among women save only for the fact—hardly a flaw—that she had sacrificed neither breast to the perfection of her archery. Even in decline, she was a sight well worth the seeing.