by Magnus Flyte
But beyond all that was the anticipatory thrill of taking Westonia. The drug was the ultimate rush. Who knows what she might encounter if . . .
No. She would stay very focused. No looking out the window and trying to find Beethoven. It was time to get high and then get out of town.
At the lab, Sarah stood lookout while Nico removed a toolkit from a very beautiful brown leather satchel. “Bespoke,” said the little man, patting the bag fondly, “and still in good condition despite its age and the fact that I once had to wrestle it away from a lunatic camel in Morocco. My relations with the animal kingdom in general, it must be said, have not been easy.”
He had the door open in about three seconds.
Someone else must be taking care of the rats, Sarah thought. The brown specimens were all still in their cages (minus the one that had gone kaput during her last visit) and the place was clean and orderly.
“Okay.” Sarah rolled up her sleeves literally and metaphorically. “I don’t want to go back hundreds of years. Specifically, I’d really like to avoid a plague.”
Nico produced the pill from his pocket and placed it on the table between them.
“You displayed remarkable control the last time,” he said. “Just remember that this is not time traveling. You are expanding your awareness. So think of what you want to be conscious of—think of Bettina and the laptop—and move slowly. Please remember that if you start running I will not be able to keep up with you, and that without me the likelihood that you will run into traffic or into a wall or hurt yourself is very high. Remember Sherbatsky.”
As if she could forget. She had seen her beloved mentor Absalom Sherbatsky on Westonia walk out a window to his death.
“And I know your Latin is horrible,” Nicolas continued, “but you are familiar with the phrase ‘quid pro quo’?”
“We want the same thing,” Sarah said. “We want a cure for Pols.”
“Perhaps we need a leash,” Nico fretted, turning away to lock the door.
Sarah picked up the pill and bit it in half. She put the remainder in her pocket.
Hold on, Pols. I’m going to figure this out.
• • •
She was plunged—almost instantly—from the relatively calm sounds and sights of Bettina’s rats hanging out in their cages to the sight of the siege of Vienna by Turkish invaders, which had apparently involved a lot of rape along with the usual screaming and blood and hacking of limbs. The vertigo was intense and she appeared to be floating. Sarah tried to get out of the lab, found the door locked, and managed to rip the doorknob off the door, a feat of strength that pleased her immensely, before Nicolas tackled her to the ground. He actually sat on her chest. She could see him, through a thick veil of smoke. Vienna was burning.
Max. Where was Max? He had kept her sane on Westonia, he had helped her. Nico was just muttering, “Don’t scream, don’t scream,” over and over and pestering her to describe what she saw and she didn’t want to. Max had told her once to find the music, hadn’t he? Music. That was what kept you sane. Sarah shut her eyes and listened and then she found it. A series of single notes, played over and over. They sounded so familiar, and so peaceful, a ringing on glass, a frequency that made her feel calm.
• • •
When she opened her eyes, there was Mesmer, in a violet frock coat, sitting at an armonica. Bettina’s lab was now a room filled with wooden pews like she had seen Marie-Franz teach in. Mesmer was surrounded by a group of men in powdered wigs.
“This is what I played,” said Mesmer. “To bring her through the crisis. And then I removed the last wrapping from around her eyes. I stood before her and bade her look upon me. Her first remark was, ‘That is horrid. Can that be a figure of a man?’”
The remark was met with general laughter, and Sarah laughed, too, shoving Nico off her and standing up. “It’s okay!” Sarah shouted. “It’s Mesmer. I think he’s describing how he cured Maria Theresia von Paradies of her blindness.”
Nico started to speak, but Sarah shushed him.
“My dog Anselmo was brought before her at her request,” continued Mesmer to the circle of gentlemen. “And she said, ‘The dog pleases me better than the man. His looks are far more agreeable!’”
This, too, was met with laughter, but Sarah saw that Mesmer hadn’t really intended this as a funny tale. He was intent, elated. He was offering proof of his cures. Sarah had read about Mesmer’s cure of Maria Theresia a few days earlier, after she had heard Marie-Franz’s lecture.
Maria Theresia had been blind since she was four years old. Every doctor had been consulted, and no expense had been spared. The girl’s father was a courtier at the court of Empress Maria Theresia, and the empress had taken a special interest in her namesake, who despite her blindness was a remarkably gifted pianist. After trying everything—which included bleeding and thousands of applications of the eighteenth-century version of electric shock therapy (Leyden jars and wires)—the girl’s parents had brought her to Mesmer. He had taken one look at the spastic eye rolling (and probably another long look at the equally spastic, quarreling, and melodramatic parents) and insisted that the girl live in his home while he supervised her care.
Nico was just not getting how completely fascinating and extremely relevant all this was. He kept going on about laptops! Which, sure, a part of her understood was vaguely interesting, but she wasn’t sure why. The people around Mesmer were leaving now, although one younger man remained. Mesmer was packing up his armonica.
“Maria finds noses very amusing,” Mesmer was saying to his colleague. “She has a beautiful laugh.”
“Herr Doktor, I must warn you,” the younger man was whispering, “there are rumors circulating . . . the girl’s father . . .”
“He is worried that the empress will no longer favor Maria,” Mesmer cut in. “And he will lose the stipend she has been giving him for his daughter. And the mother is a hysteric. Those two are the source of her blindness. They and the doctors that have been torturing her.”
“But the girl has been examined by the committee,” the younger man said. “And they did not find the results conclusive.”
“They were asking the wrong questions!” Mesmer exploded. “Asking her to name objects. Of course she was confused! Names are difficult for her still. She cannot reconcile what she is seeing with what she was feeling before. The names of colors—she has to relearn this. Even perspective. Yesterday we walked in the garden and she thought the rose trees were walking along with us, and the house was moving forward to greet us, rather than us approaching it.”
“But she cannot play,” the companion insisted. “It is this that worries the father.”
“It worries her, too.” Mesmer stopped and fingered the small pouch that hung from a cord at his throat. “This is the crisis that we must push past. She is melancholy from the new sensations. The sight of her hands on the keyboard confuses her. She told me she was more peaceful in her mind when she was sightless, but I have told her over and over again that the music will return. It is simply too much knowledge all at once. We are limiting her exposure now. All shall be well.”
“Vienna is talking—”
“Vienna is always talking. You cannot hear the birds for all the gossip.”
“They say you have personal reasons for keeping the girl. That you . . . that you and she—”
“Personal!” Mesmer exploded. “What I do, I do for science!”
• • •
“Sarah!” Nico was shouting. “Pollina!”
Pollina. What she was doing, she was doing for Pollina. That was why Mesmer was important. Why didn’t Nico understand that? Oh. Laptop. Yes. There was something else.
“Bettina Müller!” Nico shouted.
Sarah turned her back on Mesmer and took a deep breath. Bettina Müller. Laptop. Twenty-first century. Lab. She could do this.
• • •
“And how are you, Hermes? You’re looking very fit!”
Sarah turned to
see Bettina Müller tap on the cage of Specimen #134. She was here. She had found her.
But it was hard to know when exactly the action she was watching had taken place. She had only seen Doktor Müller for a few seconds at the ball. Her hair was the same—heavy bangs and a severe pageboy—though now she wasn’t wearing her thick glasses or the bright lipstick and rouge. She looked younger. Had she come too far back?
And then Bettina took her hair . . . off.
“Didn’t see that coming,” Sarah muttered as Bettina tossed the pageboy on her desk. The doctor’s own hair was sparse and very blond, almost white. It didn’t look like a buzz cut—more like premature hair loss, or perhaps the result of chemotherapy? Bettina opened the cage of Specimen #134. The rat slunk to the back of the cage and made squeaking noises, vibrating its tail.
“Don’t be like that,” Bettina cooed. “After all I’ve done for you? You have more gold in you than your average rapper. Show a little gratitude. And don’t even think of biting me or I will remove your teeth.”
The rat rolled over on its back, its paws curling and jaws open.
Bettina laughed. “Oh, so we’re playing dead now? I know that trick. Come on.” She held up a tiny harness. “Suit up, Hermes. It’s showtime.”
“Sarah, what are you seeing?” Nico pulled on her hand.
“Bettina is bald and she’s trained her rats to submit to blood samples.”
Hermes rolled over and reluctantly climbed into his harness and Bettina inserted him into a kind of trap on one of the lab tables that kept him immobile while she stuck a tiny needle into him. After this, the rat hung limply, but his eyes, Sarah could see, followed Bettina’s every movement.
The doctor put the sample onto a glass slide under a microscope and began humming and then singing softly to herself.
“She’s also a terrible singer,” Sarah said. Hermes seemed to agree. He was twitching miserably in his harness. Bettina flipped open her laptop (there it was!) and began typing something rapidly. Sarah looked over her shoulder, but could make no sense of the data. Numbers, percentages.
Hermes squeaked loudly.
“Oh, shut up!” Bettina snapped at him. “You would have been dead of a nasty little autoimmune disease years ago if it hadn’t been for me. And now you’ll live forever. I could literally cut your head off and you’d probably just crawl around headless for eternity. Actually . . .” She smiled at the rat, who went very still.
“Nico,” Sarah said softly, “this isn’t . . . this isn’t good.” Bettina was singing again. Sarah recognized the tune now. It was from Leos Janacek’s opera The Makropulos Affair. An opera about, among other things, a singer who was granted immortality because of an alchemical experiment during the time of Rudolf II. Sarah had never seen the opera, but she remembered Sherbatsky playing it in class, and telling her about a famous production at the Met in 1996, when the tenor had suffered a heart attack while climbing a ladder onstage and had fallen to his death after singing the line, “Too bad you can only live so long.”
Sarah was very close to either passing out or puking. Bettina didn’t have a cure for Pols; she had a cure for death. And Bettina—she could see it in her face—was as twisted as a strand of DNA, as full of dark matter as the universe. Sarah had been played, and played well. If Bettina wasn’t Moriarty—and she very well might be—she was definitely a modern-day alchemist, binding telomeres with gold. The alchemists had always been looking for a way to turn base metal into gold, and had sought the Elixir of Life. It had taken a couple hundred years for the techniques of science to catch up with intuition and speculation, Sarah thought, looking at the rat in his harness, but it had been done.
No more death.
Even if she could get her hands on this research, she wouldn’t be bringing Pollina a cure, she’d be bringing her a curse.
She had failed.
“Sarah, talk to me.”
But Bettina was putting the rat into a pet carrier now and rinsing out her slides. She flicked the computer off and, grabbing the bag with Hermes in it, left the lab.
“Bettina. We have to follow her,” Sarah said dully. “Come on.”
• • •
But once on the street, things got confusing again rapidly. Sarah was witness to a horrifying scene of a man being bludgeoned to death. At first she thought she had stumbled into the twentieth century, as the man was being taunted for being a Jew and she saw a yellow emblem on his frayed coat, but then she realized that it was a yellow circle, not a star, and from the clothing she guessed she was somewhere in the sixteenth century.
“Help me, Nico,” Sarah whispered. “Touch me. Sing something. Anything.” Sarah turned and realized that she was looking at two versions of the little man. They were not entirely identical. Nico I looked a little older—more weathered maybe—and was wearing a camel hair coat. Nico II was wearing a thick cloak.
“Sarah, what are you seeing?” She could feel his hand in hers.
“Two of you. Nicos. Nicii. What are you doing? Why are you so anxious?”
“Probably because I was depressed. The Age of Enlightenment was very groovy, darling, but mostly I just wanted to die. Where is Bettina now?”
Sarah’s mind shifted. There was that. Both of the little men standing in front of her wanted the same thing, wanted it passionately, desperately. She was almost knocked off her feet by their collective yearning. They wanted to die. They wanted to die so very badly.
Nico had not been honest with her. He wanted to help Pollina, yes. But he wanted something more than that. Quid pro quo. Life for Pollina. Death for Nico.
• • •
She could see Bettina now, walking ahead of her with the pet carrier, and Sarah followed but she could feel Westonia loosening its fingers on her brain. It was like she was wearing bifocals. Look one way and she was passing a Starbucks. Look another and she jerked to avoid being stepped on by Franz Joseph’s processional. She caught sight of a wan Sissi in a carriage, then streets filled with smoke and fire and the heavy sounds of bombing and explosions. Vienna was smoldering, dying, paying the price for its splendor and its poison. In one moment she was walking on the Ringstrasse, then seeing the Ring being built, then seeing it bombed, then seeing it built again. “It shouldn’t look the same, but it does,” she muttered. Nico II pulled the hood of his cloak up around his face and retreated into a crowd.
“History repeats,” Nico said, pulling her by the hand. “Vienna may burn again. Mozart may live again. I can’t go through it all, over and over. Sarah, please. You have to keep going.”
Pollina. Pollina could be Mozart if she was given the time. Ashes to ashes, gold to gold.
Bettina was getting on a tram. Sarah felt her triumph, her purpose, and her intensity. She was glowing with it.
“A tram.” She pointed.
“Yes. There’s a tram coming.”
The ride was a nightmare, since the two trams were not in sync. Bettina’s tram was about ten seconds’ worth of distance ahead of the one Sarah and Nico were on, and Sarah kept lurching forward and being dragged back by Nico. She watched a little girl sitting next to Bettina peer inside the carrier and say loudly, “Oh! Es ist eine Ratte!”
Bettina smiled beautifully at the little girl.
“Isn’t he handsome?” she said. She stood up. They were at the Karlsplatz station.
“I’m exhausted,” Sarah said to Nico. “I want to sit down. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Magnify that times four hundred years,” Nico said, “and you’ll get a glimpse of what I feel. Keep moving.”
Sarah trudged alongside Nico, bumping into people. The Westonia was definitely fading now, possibly because she was just too tired to see anymore. When they turned onto Paniglgasse, Bettina vanished entirely.
“She must have taken it home,” Sarah said.
“Taken what home?”
Sarah looked down at the little man.
“An immortal rat.”
TWENTY-FIVE
&
nbsp; Pollina woke up coughing.
She could hear Boris by the side of the bed. At her own apartment in Paris Street, she had instructed Jose to move her mattress to the floor, because her bed was too high for Boris to get on and off easily. And Boris was too heavy for her to lift. She would have joined him on the floor here in one of the palace’s guest bedrooms, but in strange places Boris liked to sleep separately from her, in order to guard the door.
Her coughing worried him. He whined and paced if it went on too long.
Sometimes the coughing went on for a very long time. This bout was not bad, although her chest hurt. Her chest hurt all the time now, even when she wasn’t coughing, and she was tired all the time. She was not sleeping well, because of her dreams, and so she was always tired. Her dreams were very bad.
Moving to the palace was a relief. Here, she could just walk thirty-five paces down the hall and then down a flight of ten stairs, step-step-step, half-turn, twelve stairs, step-step, right turn, then forty-four paces to the music room. She could do all that and still have energy to play. To compose. Max was helping her with the libretto for her opera about the Golden Fleece, reading her things he’d found about Ferdinand and Philippine. It made a perfect story for the opera. Ferdinand was curious and intelligent and in love, and Pols thought he sounded a lot like Max.
Pollina felt for her Braille clock, although she knew that it was evening. Time to get up for a little while, play a bit before going back to bed. Her brain registered the difference between day and night nonvisually; her body operated on the same circadian entrainment as sighted people. Her retinohypothalamic tract functioned. The same was true, Sarah had told her, for mole rats, who were also blind, and whose bodies also followed circadian entrainment. Blind rats had body clocks, too.
Sarah knew interesting things like that.
There had been a rat again, in her dream. And clocks. She had been dreaming of the rat for several days. She had read once that Helen Keller had described the dreams she’d had before acquiring language as being pure sensation, and the sensation was only fear. Later on, the dreams had shifted into narratives. Helen had described a recurring dream of a wolf biting her, an image Helen believed she had learned and adapted from the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
