by Adam Roberts
He did not remember finishing this function, or reascending to the carriage again, but he must have done so, for the next thing to loom out of the miasma of his thought was the sight of the Dean-a handkerchief at his mouth - sitting opposite him. The juggling shift of the seat must mean that they were in motion again. Bates tried to say something, but there were no words. There was somebody else in the carriage with them.
Fog again. The light at the open window flared day, muffled itself as night, Bates didn’t know one from the other.
The carriage had stopped. Perhaps they were watering the horses.
Once again the flux of the bowels overcame Bates; he hurried outside and clung precariously to the carriage wheel as he squatted to empty himself. It was humiliating. The flow seemed never to come to an end.
He was back in the carriage. He was half asleep, and half awake; but these two halves did not add up to a complete experience.
And then, with a suddenness that surprised him even as he was experiencing it, the miasma cleared, the world resolved itself back into clarity, and Bates discovered himself blinking spasmodically and trying to control with a soggy handkerchief a seemingly ceaseless flow of watery phlegm out of his nose - like the rheum produced by a cold, except much more prodigious and apparently unceasing. He was outside. Larroche was standing in front of him, angling his head, asking a question. Bates had to exert his will deliberately to understand the words.
Where was he now?
He was standing outside, talking to Larroche. He could not remember how he had come to be in this posture.
‘Monsieur Bates,’ the Frenchman was saying. ‘Not long ago you told me the English word for the material inside the meat of an animal, the lines, the threads. Please, tell me again. I regret, I have forgotten it. I am but a poor student, I am afraid.’
‘The word?’ said Bates, blinking, dabbing at his nose. Dabbing and redabbing.
‘The threads, inside the meat. Such that inside Brobdingnagian meat they are large and coarse, and inside a mouton of France or England they are fine. Yes?’
‘The fibres of the meat,’ said Bates, with a sort of stunned slowness. Where was he? He looked about himself; the carriages, scraped, muddied and bullet-pocked, were standing beside a river. Further away men were working energetically at a wooden bridge, breaking planks from the balustrade at the bank’s side to repair a gap in the middle of the span.
‘Ah!’ said the Colonel, his face broadening and smiling. ‘Just so! The fibres of the meat.’ He turned, and wandered off repeating, with a sort of heroic inconsequentiality, ‘The fibres of the meat, the fibres of the meat.’
‘Monsieur,’ said Bates, still looking about him as if he had awoken in a strange land. ‘I must apologise to you. I must apologise.’ Who was he speaking to? To whom was he speaking? Nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody. He felt his bowels giving way within him and positively ran from the fellow. He zigzagged across a lawn, and jumped over a low loose-stone wall, where he barely got his breeches down in time.
The shame was hard to bear, hard even to acknowledge.
It was a sunny day, bright and fresh. Bates squatted for long minutes, taking in his surroundings.
Most of the dandelions growing in the lawn had lost their heads. A few preserved their spectral globes of smoke-coloured white, but most looked like pencils stabbed into the turf. Green sticks.
The spring sunlight threw sharp, dark shadows from the trees, hedges, and from the low stone wall to Bates’s right. He was in a field where a number of cows grazed; one curious beast lumbered over to the wall, a dozen yards from Bates, perhaps to examine what the carriages were up to. Its preposterous head and brown-globe eyes stared with idiot intensity. Then it dropped its muzzle, as if drinking from the pool of shadow below the wall, to clench a mass of grass in its lips and wrench it away. Lips as agile and strong as grasping fingers. Grasping.
They were at a farmhouse, and had invoked military privilege to billet themselves there. The farmer, a pockmarked old fellow in a periwig, tolerated their presence with ill grace: but it meant at least that Bates had a bed in which to sleep. A marriage-bed indeed, which he was to share with the Dean.
‘I’ll trust you,’ the Dean was saying, ‘not to befoul the sheets in your sickness?’
‘Of course,’ said Bates, ashamed at himself. ‘Naturally not. Of course not. I do apologise.’
‘I feel bad for making her sleep in a servant’s bed,’ said the Dean. ‘But we’d not have fitted the two of us in that little cot. And it’s a more private space, up in the attic.’
‘Her?’
‘Her, sir?’
‘Who, sir?’
‘Mrs Burton, of course!’
‘Ah,’ said Bates, not knowing of whom the Dean was speaking.
The stars above us, the moral law within. Black sky threaded by the paths of stars. Each drew out a spaghetti-strand of light behind it. He could feel the cold, and see his own breath cresting, like wave-foam, bitter aphros, against the chill beach of night. Coming out of his mouth spectrally. He was looking up. Where was he? He did not know that, but he knew that the stars were birds, of a sort: for did they not move through the ether of space, pass with their tail-plumes spread behind them through the skies? Which star was the comet about which everybody was talking? He could not tell, unless it was that star there, smudged like a chalk dot upon a blackboard fingered and spread a little. Was that it?
Pigeons in all skies. Hawks chasing them.
Where was he? He did not know where he was.
And now he was conducting a calm and detail-laden conversation with the Dean. He was not sure how it began, or how it could be that this Abraham Bates was sitting opposite the ordained man in a dark space - darker wood, beams, a candle fizzing with light - an inn somewhere? No: he remembered, it was a farmhouse, he remembered. But how was it this Abraham Bates could speak so calmly, could act so normally, in this interlocution, this charade of speech? More puzzling still was the Dean’s ease of manner, as if there had been nothing unusual in Bates’s behaviour in the previous however-many days.
‘And the fact that a Brobdingnagian be twelve times as big as a man,’ the Dean was saying.
‘And a Lilliputian,’ Bates was replying, nodding, ‘one twelfth the size of a human being.’
‘We might ask ourselves the significance of this number twelve. Twelve apostles, sir! Twelve pennies in the shilling! Now, attend to this. The Earth is twelve thousand, seven hundred and forty-two kilometres in diameter,’ said the Dean. ‘Jupiter is 152,904 kilometres in diameter. Do these figures mean nothing to you?’
‘Nothing,’ Bates conceded.
Oldenberg poufed air between his lips dismissively. ‘Multiply 12,742 by twelve,’ he said, ‘and you will obtain 152,904. You will obtain exactly that figure.’
‘You are saying that Jupiter is exactly twelve times as big as the Earth?’
‘Twelve times the diameter,’ the Dean stressed. ‘Twelve times the diameter. Jupiter is not twelve times the size, to speak strictly. It is three hundred and twenty times the mass, two-and-a-half times the gravitational attraction, and so on. But there is a factor of twelve, yes-yes. Allow me to report the radius of Saturn, in kilometres.’
‘Please do,’ said Bates.
‘One hundred and fifteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-two. Multiplied by twelve, this number becomes 1,391,900. Now, the precise radius of the sun, our life-giver, is 1,391,900 kilometres. Saturn’s radius is precisely one twelfth that of the sun.’
‘Remarkable.’
‘Is it not? How long does it take the Earth to orbit the sun?’
‘A year.’
‘And Jupiter? How long for it to orbit the sun?’
Bates turned his hands over to indicate his ignorance. ‘Twelve years?’ he hazarded.
‘Precisely so! Twelve years. Four thousand three hundred and eighty of our days. But a Jupiterian day is nought point three-nine-five times the length of an Earth day ... excuse
my use of le système decimal. We might say, Jupiter takes but nine and a half hours to turn on its enormous axis.’
‘Dizzying,’ said Bates.
‘Indeed. And what if our year, our year of 365 days, were multiplied by this number, this 0.395? I will tell you: one hundred and forty-four. Twelve times twelve. Three hundred and sixty-five Jupiterian days is 144 earthly days - twelve times twelve! I am convinced that this number is of crucial significance to the cosmos. I am convinced that as I apply myself, I will be able to reduce all cosmic mathematical relations to this one number: twelve. Do you know that twelve is one times two times two times three? Four times three, two and two times three, two and two and two times two, it is the most harmonious of numbers.’
‘A Lilliputian,’ Bates said, nodding, ‘is one twelfth the size of a human being.’
‘And a Brobdingnagian twelve times as big as us,’ agreed the Dean.
‘You hold all these figures in your head, sir? I am most impressed.’
The Dean squinted modestly. But, Bates saw, he had his ledger-book on his lap.
‘And all relations in our solar system can be understood as multiples of twelve?’ Bates asked.
‘As for that,’ said the Dean, looking a little pained. ‘It is hard to say. I trust that it is so; but to date my calculations have found the rule of twelve to apply particularly to the relationships between the sun, the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. The remaining four planets do not, as yet, fit the pattern. I flatter myself that the sun, the two largest solar bodies and the Earth are, surely, the most important bodies in our system. But I will say more, to you, sir. Sir William Herschel discovered the furthest planet in the solar system fifty years ago, sir. He named it Ouranos. But astronomers insist that there must be yet a more distant body, a planet further out. The astronomers at the French Institute, messieurs Galle, LeVerrier and d’Arrest, peer into the heavens with their telescopes for this new planet. I make a prediction, sir: I say that this planet will be twenty-four times as far from the sun as is the Earth. If the distance between the Earth and the sun be taken as one, sir, then Jupiter is five and Saturn nine-and-a-half; do you see? Ouranos, it is difficult to measure, it being so very far away, but it seems it is sixteen times as far. The new planet, when it is discovered, will be twenty-four! This will be the last planet to be discovered, it will occupy that orbit around the sun most distant,’ he said, with nodding emphasis. ‘Of this I am sure. And it will draw a boundary to the dimensions of the cosmos, a boundary determined by the number twelve.’
[6]
Mrs Burton was that woman they had passed on the road.
There had been some attempt to ambush the party, presumably to seize the Calculation Device; a feint by a troop of yahoo infantry to drive the Frenchers south into the arms of a much larger army. But, confounding these plans, the Colonel had forced his little convoy north, breaking through the encirclement and pushing the horses almost to their deaths.
And now they hurried on, as if pursued by the very Devil. Larroche was no longer trusting to overnight stops in farmhouses or villages.
A comet ornamented the night sky like a brooch on black satin.
Events were beginning to coalesce in Bates’s mind. It was returning health. There was a sensation of coming-together, as if mental fibres were knitting into place and restoring the textus of his consciousness. He was able to invoke that faculty that contradistinguishes people from things, memory, and plait together a narrative. They were travelling ever further northward. They had escaped an ambush by bandits - his own countrymen, forces opposing the French occupation. They had sought to seize the Computational Device, deploying forces of fierce yahoos.
He was in conversation with Eleanor. He could remember neither the commencement, nor the topic, of this exchange, except that he almost came to himself (as it were) in the midst of a sentence: ‘And this has been my whole life’s work, Mrs Burton. The work of my whole life.’
Eleanor waited politely for him to continue, but he was struck with the thought that he did not know what he had claimed, just a moment earlier, to be the work of his life. His confusion registered in his face, and after a difficult pause she prompted: ‘Please go on, Mr Bates.’
Bates sat back. He looked around him. They were in a room; cedar-floored, oak-walled. The Dean was sitting in the corner, staring straight ahead.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, weakly.
‘You were saying that philanthropy has been ...’
The Dean spoke up. ‘Is it not a solecism to call it philanthropy? If the Pacificans be anthropos then the word applies, but if not?’
‘I have tried,’ said Bates, feeling confused, ‘to live a good life.’ This sounded to his own ears as a lamentable boast, and he attempted to qualify it. ‘I mean to say I have tried to do my duty. But, as with all of us, we must first discover what our duty is - what duty God has laid before us.’
‘Very true,’ said Eleanor, in a serious voice.
There were gaps in his memory. His health was certainly returning. He was no longer feverish, and no longer deranged in his mind. His body was, at worst, a little weak; but he could feel a fundamental health in his bones and in his blood. He could feel this in part because of the contrast with the way he had been feeling over the previous - days? Weeks? And his thought processes were whole again; his mind ran along its rails of cause-effect, he could think, he had not lost his mind. Once again, he knew this because of the contrast he sensed inside his own head with the spasmodic, heated, furious state he had recently known. He was healthy again, and sane.
Except that - he could not make his memory pull together the various patches of experience into a whole cloth. He could not remember, for instance, how it was that he had come to be sitting in the coach, bouncing and jigging along, with the sky through the little window red (dawn? or sunset?) in the midst of another conversation with Mrs Burton. He could not, indeed, remember at what point he had been introduced to her. And yet, he could see by the ease of exchange between them, her confident familiarity with him, that this was not the first time they had talked. He could see that they had been introduced; that they must have had a number of conventional, polite conversations about little; that over time they had become more comfortable with one another; and that now she regarded him as a confidant. But he could not remember any of the stages on this post-road. He smiled, to cover his confusion. He smiled.
‘We are in dangerous territory,’ said Eleanor. ‘I was speaking with the Colonel. He confirms that the coast is mostly in the control of the French forces.’
‘The coast,’ Bates repeated.
‘We make for Scarborough. It is a coastal town. It is a spa. For myself I have never travelled further north than Hampstead before in my life!’ She laughed, and Bates laughed, in reflex imitation.
‘Hampstead,’ he said.
‘I have been on the Continent, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘I asked the Colonel why we may not proceed along the coast road. He said that he judged this path safer. From which I deduce that the coast is not altogether under the command of l’armée française..’
‘Scarborough,’ said Bates again. He was aware, gazing at her, of her beauty; touched delicately, like a fine watercolour effect, by the ruddy light coming through the window, the pure curve of her jaw, her straight nose, her fine black eyes, her petal lips. Had he never been struck by her beauty before? How could he not have been?
‘We have been compelled to make a wide detour, I fear,’ Eleanor said. ‘With many forced stops. It is the long road to the north.’
There was a grunt to Bates’s right, a boar-like snuffle loud enough to make him jump in his seat. He had not noticed that the Dean was there also. ‘Fie upon it all,’ snapped Oldenberg.
‘Dean,’ chided Eleanor. ‘Come now!’
‘Fie I say,’ he repeated. ‘Dick Turpin rode from London, from the Charing Cross itself where he had tethered his horses - rod
e to York in a single day. A day!’
‘But this was only in story,’ said Eleanor.
‘Or was it a day and a night? But he rode the whole way, on one horse, and arrived by the next day. And we must dally upon the same road a week - or more? And now we go to Scarborough? It is monstrous. It is insupportable.’
‘It would be quite impossible for a horseman, howsoever determined, to make such a ride in such a space of time,’ said Eleanor. ‘Unless he were mounted upon Pegasus itself!’
