Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  They were gone.

  "What a fool I am," Margarete muttered to herself. But she smiled when she said it, and she uncrossed her ankles and kicked her legs ever so slightly when next she reached the top.

  For a week the Great Wheel whirled the citizens of Nuremberg around and around—and then it was down. When Margarete went, fuming, to demand that Faust explain why, he was waiting for her. He stood solemn and still in his silent workshop.

  She stopped, nonplussed. "Where is everybody?" she asked. Meaning the artisans and noisemakers, the ambitious young men and avaricious old ones, the flock of interchangeable hangers-on.

  "I sent them away," Faust said. Then, politely, "What was it you came to ask?"

  "The wheel," she said, and somehow all her outraged anger had dissolved in the uncanny quiet of the shop, so that her voice sounded small and forlorn. "Why did you take it down?"

  "It was the stresses," he said in a distracted way. "The wheel should have been made of iron, really, but the foundries aren't yet geared up for that level of production. I knew from the beginning that wood wouldn't serve for long. If I hadn't had the wheel taken down, one of the struts would have broken. People would have been injured, killed—and who would trust my engines then?"

  He fell silent. For a long still moment neither of them dared speak. When he looked up, his eyes bored into hers.

  "Margarete," he said. It was the first time he had addressed her by her Christian name; always before it had been Fraulein Reinhardt. "I must speak seriously to you."

  He drew up a chair for her and, a little nervously, she composed herself upon it.

  Faust took her hands in his. He crouched down by the side of the chair, so that he was looking up into her eyes. His face was open and vulnerable; there was infinite tenderness in it, and a yearning ache that made her heart go out to him. One kiss, she reprimanded herself. No more. One kiss for Gretchen and that was all.

  "You and your parents must leave the city."

  "What?"

  "Your father will not listen to me. Well, who can blame him? He has seen and heard too many new things; his capacity for belief has been strained to the utmost. If I urged him away, he would laugh in my face.

  "But if his only daughter had a dream ... if she woke up with a cry in the middle of the night and said that an angel had appeared to her with a fiery sword and demanded that she and her family leave Nuremberg... The first time, he would not believe it a true portent. The second, he would wonder and doubt. Three nights, however, ought to do the trick. I know how it goes against your every instinct to lie, much less to your own father. But this is to save his life."

  "But why?"

  "There is a pathogenic organism in the ground-water. Its effects will be felt within the week. Your father has property in the country, friends in the Palatinate, business in Prussia— any of these would be an excellent destination. The further the better. But wherever you go, you must boil your water before you drink it. There'll be other refugees, and some of them will be vectors themselves; you're not entirely safe anywhere. Best if you boil the wash-water first as well; the bacteria can be carried to the mouth by a touch of the hand."

  "I don't understand," Margarete said. "What are you talking about?"

  "Plague."

  * * *

  THE PLAGUE KITCHEN

  How changed was Nuremberg!

  The smoke from the fires of pitch and faggots set evenly down the streets, one for every dozen houses, made a foul and choking miasma of the air. The stench of sulfur fumigations harried the nose. The flames cast alarming shadows upon the soot-blackened walls. Their heat contrasted strangely with the October chill.

  In the marketplace, butchers stood at their neglected stands with bowls of vinegar into which buyers might drop the coins the merchants dared not touch. Dog-killers with their red staves and body-searchers with their white gave each other nods and a wide berth in passing. A pair of friars, given Papal dispensation to perform the sacrament of extreme unction until the priests returned, carried gonfalons with an embroidered Virgin and a Bleeding Heart on long poles. Only

  their eyes showed beneath their cowls and above the herb-filled leather cones they wore to protect from contagion. They were terrifying to see, like long-beaked servitors of Beelzebub. Grass grew in the streets.

  Strangest of all was the silence. Despite the clatter of staves and crackle of flames, the city was as quiet as a country meadow. Half the citizens—those with money or desperation enough—had fled into the country, and taken with them all of the horses. The rattling of wagons and trampling of hooves that in normal times filled the ear were absent. Faust could hear sparrows fluttering about the rooftops, and the whisper of a breeze over the slates.

  White bills had been pasted on the shuttered fronts of the ribbon-makers' and lace-merchants' and chair-caners' shops. Handing the donkey's reins to Wagner, Faust went to read one.

  THE ONLY TRUE PLAGUE-WATER.

  The eminent hochsalzer, newly come from the Low Lands where he cured thousands of sufferers during the great misery in Amsterdam last year, offers an universal preventative for the current pestilence, along with never-failing spells and cantrips for those already afflicted, as well as a simple recipe for making cheese from chalk.

  "Who is this whimsical creature?" Faust snorted.

  They left the plaza.

  Faust paused in his rounds to talk with a watchman. He was a gnarled old creature whose face well betokened the lack of intellectual fire within. At his belt hung a heavy ring of keys for those houses that had been left in his care. He collected a fee for this service, another for overseeing the houses that had been quarantined and boarded up, and yet another for fetching bread, cheese, butter, and beer for those who had shut themselves away from the world until the general sickness abated. This in addition to the city stipend for tending the fires. The plague had been generous to him.

  "Good day, friend Charon!" Faust said heartily, extending a penny. "How many fares have you collected today?"

  The old man scowled in puzzlement—Wagner had several times explained the joke to him, but it never took—and then dutifully laughed. The penny disappeared into a pocket of his new greatcoat. It was a heavy garment of English wool, so overlarge for him that it brushed the tops of his boots, but with two rows of bright brass buttons. "Five, sir, four of them from that crook-chimneyed house, a family with two young girls it was, very sad indeed. I heard the mother screaming yesterday when she discovered her children stricken. The father sent me first for medications and then for water, most distracted, saying the wife was struck down, too."

  "Where did you go for water? Outside of the neighborhood?"

  "No, sir, there's a well just around the corner."

  "Go on."

  "So quick was the progress of the disease that when I got back with the buckets, there was no answer to my banging. I could only conclude that the father was ill as well. There was nothing to do but send for the body-searcher and notify the bellman when the dead-cart came by last night."

  "Most commendable," Faust said dryly. "And the other?"

  "A gentleman, in the fine house to the corner. The woman as sees for him came by this morning and was warned away by him, through the door. She told me straight he'd been taken ill, and so I nailed up his lower windows and padlocked the doors. Will you be going in?"

  "Yes, unlock it for me, please."

  On the door was a newly posted broadside:

  A SOVEREIGN CURE FOR ALL ILLNESSES.

  The Sweating Sickness, Influenza, Black Death, Saint Vitus's Dance, Bubonic Plague, French Pox, Small Pox, Red Pox, Baby Pox, Demonic Possession, and Falling Sickness, all have been cured through the miraculous intercession of the renowned hochsalzer, newly arrived from Naples, who also offers candles for impotence and the discovery of buried treasures.

  Old Charon undid the padlock. The bill, which had been pasted across the jamb, tore away as the door was opened.

  Faust went back to the c
orner where Wagner waited with the donkey-cart. "Four in the house with the chimney and another in the one at the corner."

  Wagner shifted his bottles from one shoulder to the other, leaned the stretcher bundle against a nearby wall, removed the ledger from his belt, and with a slim lead stylus made two neat entries. "This is the house of the English spy," he commented.

  Not listening, Faust muttered, "Five cases in a street where there should be none. It baffles me."

  (Mephistopheles grinned mockingly and said nothing.) They went in. The ground floor was a shambles. Cupboards had been splintered, furniture overturned, clothes strewn about.

  Wagner looked shocked. "Who would have—?"

  "Why, who else but the housekeeper? The watchman was wearing a London-cut coat. Doubtless it was her bribe that she be let pass, rather than be boarded up with her master. And as long as she was robbing him, why stop at clothing?"

  The bedchamber stank as only a sickroom could, of excrement and hopelessness, of vomit and despair. It contained a few opened chests and a narrow bed. Within the latter lay the Englishman, Will Wycliffe, as pale as ashes. His cheeks were sunken, his face as stiff as fossil ivory. The only color to him came from his flaming red hair. The sheets were badly soiled.

  Wagner wrinkled his nose but said nothing. He unhooked one bottle and poured out a cup of water.

  Wycliffe's head stirred. "Is somebody here?" he asked weakly. "Please tell me it's not more dreams. I saw a horned fiend leaning over me, and laughing, laughing..."

  "It's Doctor Faustus," Wagner said. "He'll soon have you well." Placing a hand behind the man's head, he brought the cup to Wycliffe's lips.

  "Doctor Foster is it?" Wycliffe said when he had drunk. "Well, Doctor, I'll not detain you long. Good of you to come by, and I'm grateful for the water. But you needn't bother tomorrow. I'll be gone by then."

  "Nonsense!" Faust said. "You'll be up and breaking into factories within the week." Wagner refilled the cup from his second flask. "Drink this. The wine contains an antibiotic. It and rehydration are all that you require."

  Wycliffe obeyed, and made a face. "Pfaugh! This tastes fouler than Herr Hochsalzer's plague-water."

  "Quacksalver again! I find this mosquito less and less amusing."

  The Englishman quirked his mouth slightly. "You have a Christian name, Foster?"

  "That's Faustus," Wagner said sternly. "Magister Johannes

  Wilhelm Faustus!" He unlaced the stretcher—a simple thing made of canvas and two poles—and laid it out on the floor by the bed.

  "Too much Latin for my ignorant head. I'll call you Jack, if you don't mind."

  "No," said Faust, amused in equal parts by the man's presumption and by Wagner's scandalized expression. "I don't mind at all."

  Together they lifted the spy from his bed and onto the stretcher. He cried out in pain once, and then was silent. By the time they had jigged and levered him down the stairs, he had lapsed into unconsciousness.

  There was a ripping noise when the door opened. Somebody had pasted a fresh bill across it. eternal health and long—began one scrap and—evity the other. When they had laid W^ycliffe in the straw of the cart, Faust went back and tore down the fragments. They concluded with the words—a new system for teaching cows to dance.

  Angrily, he waved the bill in the watchman's face. "Did Quacksalver have the gall to post this nonsense while I was inside?"

  "You just missed him, sir. A most imposing man with a lively smile and a hat this wide, who has cured thousands in Paris and—"

  "Paris be fucked! Where are his Nurembergish cures, if his methods work? Who will speak in his praise and say, 'Yes, the noble Quacksalver has restored me from the brink of the grave?' 'I was laid low and he brought me forth!' 'My body, which was shriveled, is now made whole and hale.' 'The bells were rung for me and yet here I stand!' Where are those myriad testimonials? Not here nor anywhere near. They must be sought in distant realms, in Amsterdam, in Naples, in Paris— or in Hell!"

  "But it could be true, sir! It could be true!" The watchman's hand slipped inside his new greatcoat to clutch at something hung on a string about his neck.

  "What's that you have, you scoundrel?" Faust forced open the hand, and then the locket revealed therein. Inside was a scrap of parchment. Unfolded, it revealed a triangle of words starting with abraxis and then removing a letter with each line until the progression passed a and vanished:

  A B R A X I S

  A B R A X I

  A B R A X

  A B R A

  A B R

  A B

  A

  "How much did you pay for this flummery?"

  "Nothing! It was a gift from the great Hochsalzer for recommending his tonic to my wards."

  "Idiot!" Faust threw the crumpled bill into the fire and the locket after it. Then he bunched the man's shirt in his fist, and spoke fiercely into his terrified face: "I'll give you a charm worth a thousand of Quacksalver's. Burn this jacket! And next time wash your hands after robbing the dead."

  Crossing himself frantically, the watchman fell back from him. Faust in his turn stormed away, pausing only once to roar over his shoulder, "Be sure to scrub beneath the nails!"

  In the cart, Wycliffe suddenly convulsed. "No!" he screamed. "Lord, defend me from his laughter, protect me from his teeth!" His hands rose like talons toward his eyes. Wagner fought them down and, with Faust's help, lashed them to his side. "I am licked by the tongues of Hell, its black dogs crouch about me, grinning. How my gut aches. His teeth!"

  Wycliffe railed about demons all the way to the convent.

  The only jolly place in all the city was the plague kitchen in the convent of Saint Catherine.

  Faces aglow with excitement and the heat, the sisters of Saint Catherine boiled water for drinking and cooked up gruel and apple sauce by the cauldron-load for their patients. The smells of apples, oats, and oak mingled with baking bread and fresh laundry being carried through from the drying sheds. Some twenty nuns toiled there, and for all the seriousness of their labor, it was a kitchen and they were women. There was joy in the air.

  (Proof, if any were needed) said Mephistopheles (that true happiness comes only from the satisfaction of being more virtuous than your rivals and certain that the bastards know it.)

  "Magister Faustus." Mother Sacred Bondage of Christ, a formidable administrator and by repute a dangerous woman to cross, sailed out from the infirmary. In her tow was a plump and somewhat homely nun. "I want you to meet a new member of our order."

  "A new one?" Faust said, astonished. "When most of the best families have fled, and those which remain are in hiding?"

  "We have had several converts in recent weeks," Mother Bondage said with prim satisfaction. "All from the Clares."

  "Ahhhh."

  The Clares had turned Faust away. He had known they would, but he wanted it public that he had tried. They had a hospital, as the Catherines did not, and this fact made them his logical allies. However, they were too vested in the old ways to ever submit to his authority. So, knowing in advance that he could not win over their mother superior, Faust had neither toiled to make his arguments convincing, nor spared her feelings on the way out. He said such words as would ensure that when she saw how well his methods worked, she would yet disdain to imitate them. "They will serve excellently as our control group," he assured Wagner.

  Mother Bondage, however, had given Faust an hour and let him take the afternoon. He brought his new binocular microscope into her office and began by revealing to her a garden of unearthly delights: delicate fronds and articulated spheres, pulsing and translucent animalcules that frolicked in the warm ocean of a water drop. She studied volvox, glowing like green glass; slipper-shaped and bluish paramecia; freshwater cilicates like carnivorous trumpets; rotifers, transparent with brightly colored organs and circles of cilia spinning about their funnel-shaped mouths like wheels; and delicately ornamented diatoms formed into circles, leaves, hourglasses, and every imaginable whimsy. Then,
when he knew she was entranced, he showed her the vibrio bacterium with its quick, darting motion. "This," he said, "is the snake in our garden, and the cause of the current pestilence."

  Thick curtains had been drawn so that only a sliver of light reached the microscope. Mother Bondage leaned into it with a faint crackle of starched cloth. Within the circle of light the dust-mote creatures swarmed, thick as bees, tumbling by each other in twisting spirals like so many bubbles. Though mindless, the less-than-tadpoles yet seemed purposeful, for they were tireless in their random movements. She studied the Beast solemnly, clearly trying to divine its essential evil.

  Then Faust brought out his final slide, saying, "This is the organism which will elaborate its cure."

  At this point Mother Bondage knew enough to grant him his request. But he did not make it yet. "This is a seduction," Mephistopheles had advised him. "Be patient. You must not ask her for anything which she has not already decided to give you."

  Instead, therefore, he spoke to her of the taxonomy of microorganisms and the pathology of disease. He explained the spread of an epidemic by contamination, contagion, and animal vectors. He laid out those methods by which its sources could be identified and isolated. Then he discussed hygiene and the basic principles of nursing. He touched lightly upon vaccination. He listened to her questions and answered them without condescension. The day grew quiet and the light faded from the sky.

  When he was done, Mother Bondage closed her eyes for a moment of silent prayer, and then promised her complete and unstinting support to the last penny and lady of the convent.