by Ian McDonald
He is an intelligent man. I have never met a Jesuit who was not at worst a pleasant conversationalist, at best a fine intellectual spar. Languages I have always found peculiarly broadening to the mind: to speak is to think; language is culture. Father Quinn speaks his native Irish in two dialects, the western and the northern; Latin and Greek of course; English; Spanish; French; Portuguese; Italian; can get by in Moroccan Arabic and claims to have taught himself the Tupi lingua geral, which is more commonly spoken than Portuguese on these waters, on the crossing from Lisbon. How that rowdy family of voices must shape the interior of a man’s skull is a fine speculation.
Last night, in the long and tedious dark that falls so early and swift in these latitudes, I showed him the working model of the Governing Engine. I demonstrated how the chain of cards fed from the hopper and thus governed the lifting patterns of the weft harnesses in the loom. ‘Thus the most complicated of brocades can be simply rendered as a series of holes or solids in the card: mathematically, substance or absence, ones or nulls. In a sense, an entire weave of cloth can be reduced to a single chain of figures: ones and zeroes.’ He handled the device and toyed intelligently with the wooden mechanism, observing how the pegs on the riser-heads fell into the holes and held the weft down, while the solid card pressed down on those same pins and caused the harnesses to rise.
‘I can see how it might be possible to use such a set of cards to play a program in a musical automaton,’ he said perspicaciously. ‘It is a much more flexible system than the pins on musical boxes; one mechanism could play any piece that could be rendered in holes and solids - ones and nulls, as you suggest. One of those new-fashioned fortepianos would be an ideal instrument, being not so far from a loom in its construction. A loom of music, one might say.’
I speculated then of other tasks that might benefit from the auto-motivation of the Governing Engine: arithmetical calculation was easily simplified, and Jean-Baptiste, whose touch of genius the punched card was, developed a number of card-sets that could perform mathematical computations as complex as factorization and deriving square roots, notoriously cumbersome and time-consuming.
‘I must confess that this thought fills me with intellectual excitement,’ I said to Quinn as we stood by Fé em Deus’ stern rail, taking what cool the evening offered. ‘If such straightforward arithmetic computations can be reduced to a string of ones and nulls, might not all mathematics be ultimately reducible to the same basic code? The great Newton’s laws of motion, his rules for the gravitational forces that order the physical universe, these too may be simply reduced to ones and zeroes, something and nothing. Might this simple machine - given a sufficiently large stack of properly coded cards - be capable of rendering the entire universe itself? A universal governor?’
I shall not soon forget his reply: ‘Your words come close to blasphemy there, friend.’ To him, I was reducing the vast created order, and everything in it, to something even less than Newton’s dumb mechanism, to a mere string of somethings and nothings. That Earth and the heavens could be governed, in effect, ex nihilo - by nulls, by the absence of God - was not lost on this acute man. He said, ‘Mathematics is the product of the mind, not the mind of mathematics, and all creations of the perfection of God.’
I should have understood that he was offering me a space in which to pause, even to withdraw from what he saw as the logical and, to him, heretical consequences of my speculation. But the wide vistas of mental abstraction have always called me on, to run like a horse turned loose after years at the mill; or perhaps the mad, dying horses of Brazil? I asked him to consider the automotive fortepiano: the same mechanism that turned digits on the cards into notes could be reversed, encoding the strokes of the keys into marks on a card, to be punched into holes. Thus we could obtain an exact record of a player’s performance at that moment and no other; in effect, the very thoughts and intents of Mr Handel or Father Vivaldi preserved forever. This record could be copied many times, as a book is printed, a permanent memory of a performance, not subject to the frailties and imaginings of human memory. A model of part of mind: I surmised that within a very few years of the Governing Engine’s general acceptance into the world of industry, ways would be found to record and code other aspects of the human mind.
‘Then thank God that our souls are more than mere numbers,’ Quinn said. He hefted the Governing Engine and for an instant I feared he might fling it into the river. He set it down on the deck as he might a colicky child. ‘A model of a model of a mind. Your engine, M. Falcon, will make slaves of us all.’
And so it is that human intelligence is the slave of doctrine, shackled and sold as utterly as any of the wretches that drift past us on those waterlogged slave rafts. The divine is invoked and there can be no more argument. Damnable Jesuit condescension! The arrogance of his assumption to possess all truth, that no debate need be entered into for I could only be correct insofar as I concurred with his doctrine. We spoke no more that night: we retired to our hammocks, he to banish the mosquitoes with the fumes of the powerful cigars he favors, I to rage and draw up arguments and counterblasts, exposing follies and inanities. It will be fruitless; truth is not ours to discover; it is what is revealed. It angers me to see a man of such gifts and intellectual grasp reduced to the state of child by the dogma of his order.
God keep you and save you, my dear sister, and my affections to Jean-Philippe and little Bastien, Anette, and Joseph - he must be quite the pup now! Surely Jean-Baptiste must by now have returned to France and is making a recovery from his bloody flux; convey my warmest brotherly affections. Beyond São José Tarumás there will be few, if any, opportunities for communication, so this may be the last letter you receive from me until I complete my experiment. If you should see Marie-Jeanne, the simple imparting of these words would give her comfort and certainty while we are necessarily parted: My mind is made up, I am decided: yes, I shall, yes. With all my heart.
With loving affection
Your brother
Robert.
Luis Quinn made his first exercise at dawn. The Fé em Deus lay anchored to a cable from the northern bank, a guard against escape though the slaves slept chained to their oars. Rags of mist coiled across the water and clung to the trees that crowded down to the cracked, muddy strand. The river was an ocean, its farther bank invisible through the vapors stirred from its deep-secreted heat. Sound hung close to the surface, pressed low by the layers of warm and cool air; it seemed to come from all sides at once, from immense distances. Luis Quinn found himself holding his breath, holding every creak of joint and pulse of blood still to unpick the weave of voices channeled along the river. The pagan roar of howler monkeys - they no longer terrified him as they had that second night out from Belém when they seemed the infernal host of Babylon - the frogs, the insects, the whoop and scrape of the morning birds, but beyond them . . . splashing? Oars? He strained to hear, but an eddy in the flow of heat and cool swept the faint noise back into the general chorus. Suddenly all other senses were overwhelmed by the smell of deep water, cool and sacred. A joy so intense it was pain made Luis Quinn reach for the rail. He could feel the river run, the world turn beneath him. He was infinitesimal, embedded in glory and unknowing, like a nut in its thick casing on the branch of a great tree. Quinn turned his face to the pearl-gray hidden sun; then pressed his hand to his heart. Sin to worship the creation before the creator. And yet . . . He set his leather-bound book on the rail, undid its lacing, opened the handwritten pages. A joy, a fire of another kind, his painstaking translation of the Spiritual Exercises into Irish. The Second Week. Fourth Day. A Meditation on the Two Standards. Loyola, that subtle soldier: the untranslatable pun.
‘A glorious morning indeed, Father.’
The violent loudness of the voice as Quinn prepared to descend into quiet was like a blow. He lurched against the creaking, unsound rail.
‘Forgive me, Father, I did not mean to alarm you.’
Falcon stood at the aft of the ship half-sha
dowed by the awning. He too balanced an open book on the rail, a soft suede-bound sketchbook in which he drew with charcoal.
‘Our superior general prescribes dawn as the best time for meditation.’
‘Your superior general is right. What is today’s subject?’
‘The Two Standards, of Christ and of Lucifer.’ At many junctions and embarkations in his life Luis Quinn had returned to the disciplines of the Spiritual Exercises. The packet from Coimbra to Lisbon had been brusque business, he no more than freight. The calm-bound crossing to Salvador was for preparation, for the lingua geral and the writings of the great explorers and missionaries. The slow crawl up the coast to Belém do Pará had been the opportunity to study his fellow traveler and subject - this small, fierce man of strangely juxtaposed convictions and doubts and swift, ill-concealed humors. But the river, that province of time as much as distance, unchanging and never the same from breath to breath, was the true embarkation to the celebration of discipline. ‘We are commanded to envision a vast plain about Jerusalem, and mustered upon it around his banner the armies of our Lord; and in the same work of the mind’s eye that other vast plain around Babylon, where around the banner of the deceiver are gathered the forces of Lucifer.’
‘How do you imagine it, the standard of Lucifer?’ Fé em Deus was waking; the movements of the crew sending luxurious ripples across the glassy water.
‘Golden of course, like a bird, a proud bird of prey with feathers of flame and diamonds for eyes. He was a Lord of Light, Lucifer. Quite quite beautiful and so skillfully made that the diamond eye enchants and seduces everyone who sees it so they think, Yes, yes, I see myself reflected there and I am good. Excellently good. Who would be drawn to it if it did not mirror their vanities and answer their hopes?’
Falcon gave his whole weight to the rail and looked out into the morning, where bands of blue were appearing as the higher mists evaporated. ‘You have a great gift for visualization, Father. I find that I must augment my memory with material aids.’ Quinn glanced at the doctor’s book. The double-page was covered in a drawing of the visible shore, the line of the trees, the taller tops rising above the general canopy, the jumble of high birds’ nests, the zones of the strand: the scrub vegetation - a writhe of black denoted the jacaré in the lee of the bleached fallen branch - the edge-grasses and the cracking reach of the exposed muds and silts. Captain Acunha never tired of saying he had never seen the river so low. The whole was annotated with comments and footnotes in a strange cursive.
‘I have no hand for the drawing,’ Luis Quinn said. ‘Your writing is unfamiliar to me. Might I ask what language?’
‘A code of my own devising,’ Falcon said. ‘It’s not unknown for scientists to need to keep their notes and observations secure. Ours is a jealous profession.’
‘Some might see it as the work of a spy.’
‘Would a spy show you that he writes in code? Look! Oh look!’ Quinn’s attention darted to where the doctor pointed, leaning intently over the rail. Yes, he had been about to say, if that spy thought that those notebooks would be found later, by stealth or theft.
A mound in the water, a wheezing spray of mist broke the surface and vanished into spreading ripples. A moment later a second apparition surfaced and submerged in a soft rain of exhalation. The two circles of ripples met and clashed, reinforcing, canceling each other out. Falcon dashed, flapping coattails and loosely bound sheaves of paper, along the narrow gunwale to the bowsprit, where he clung, keenly scanning the misty water through his peculiar spectacles. ‘There! There!’ The two humps arced through the water as one a short distance ahead of the ship, blowing out their lungs in a gasp of stale air. ‘How marvelous, did you see Quinn, did you see? The beak, a pronounced narrow protrusion, almost a narwhal spear.’ He dashed excitedly with his coals on the paper, never taking his eyes off the close, hazed horizon. ‘The boto - the Amazonian river dolphin. I have read . . . Did you see the color? Pink, quite pink. The boto: extraordinary and I think unclassified. To catch one, that would be an achievement indeed: to have the classification Cetacea Odontoceti falconensis. I wonder if the captain, the crew, even my own staff might obtain one for taxonomic purposes? My own cetacean . . .’
But Luis Quinn stared still into the pearl opacity that hung across the river. A plane of shadow, a geometry, moving out in the mist upstream of Fé em Deus, glimpsed and then lost again. There. There! His flesh shivered in superstitious dread as the dark mass resolved in the mist, like a door opening onto night, and behind it, another rectangle of lesser grayness. What uncanny river-phantasm was this? Silent, utterly silent, without a ripple, floating over water not on it. Luis Quinn opened his mouth to cry out in the same instant the lookout yelled a warning. Captain Acunha on the stern deck whipped glass to eye. Quinn saw his unmagnified eye widen.
‘Sweeps! Sweeps!’ Acunha roared as the house appeared out of the rippling mist. The coxswain and his mates lashed still-drowsing oarsmen awake with knouts as the floating house spun ponderously on its pontoon and drifted past within a biscuit-toss of the Fé em Deus. Behind it was the second object Quinn had glimpsed: another pontoon house, and behind it, appearing out of the fog, a whole village upon the waters, turning slowly on the deep, powerful currents of the stream.
‘Larboard sweeps!’ Captain Acunha shouted, running along the central decking with a landing hook to the station where the two benches of chained rowers craned over their shoulders to find a roofless wooden house bearing down on them at ramming speed, corner-forward. ‘On my word fend off. Any one of those putas could sink us. Cleverly now, cleverly . . . Now!’ The sweep slaves had pushed their oars as far forward as they could, and on their captain’s command hauled back, making gentle, oblique contact with the side of the house pontoon, forcing it slowly, massively, ponderously away from the side of the ship. The captain thrust away with the landing pike, fighting for leverage, his whole weight behind the spike, face trembling with effort. Forward oars passed the runaway house to aft oars; clenched muscles shone wet in the mist. The house grazed past Fé em Deus’ stern by a lick of paint and vanished through the downstream horizon.
From the forward deck Luis Quinn watched the houses sail past. A village afloat - a village cast adrift. The latter houses, many of them caught together in duets and trinities by tricks of the current, showed signs of burning: few had roofs; some were charred to the very waterline, stumps and sticks of blackened wood, like shattered teeth. Twenty, thirty, fifty. Six times the sweepers fended off a castaway house, once at the price of a third the larboard side’s oars. Not a village. A town. A deserted town, abandoned, slaughtered, taken.
‘Hello the village!’ Luis Quinn thundered, his deep sea-formed voice carrying across the smooth, unruffled water. And in the lingua geral: ‘The village, ho there!’ No answering hail, no word, not even the bark of a dog or the grunt of a pig. Then a house, burned down almost to waterline, turned in the stream and through the gaping door Quinn saw a dark object, and a pale hand lift. ‘There’s someone there!’ he thundered. ‘There is one yet alive!’
‘Raise anchors!’ Acunha shouted. Windlass catchpawls rattled over capstans. The anchors rose from the water, gray and slimy with river silt. ‘Sweeps! Starboard side. On my command.’ The drum beat; the oars rose and dipped; Fé em Deus turned on the steel waters. ‘All pull.’
The slaves strained to their oars. Fé em Deus dashed forward, gaining on the house that Quinn had seen. Acunha deftly commanded his sweeps to negotiate the boat through the drifting, turning pontoons.
‘Again lads, let’s have you.’
A final effort and Fé em Deus drew alongside. Quinn strained to see; a figure was visible lying on the floor of what, by the fallen statues and charred altar, must have been a church. Acunha’s scouts, lithe, agile Pauxis all, leaped aboard with lines and secured house to ship.
Quinn followed Acunha on to the raft. His feet slipped on wet, charred paper as he walked through the collapsed, smoking, still-warm ruin. Acunha and the
Pauxis knelt around a delirious woman who clutched the rags of a Carmelite postulant’s habit to her like children. A caboclo from the angle of her cheekbones, the fold of her eyes: her face was too direly burned for any other features to identify her. She stared up dumb into the ring of faces that surrounded her, but when Luis Quinn’s shadow fell on her she gave a keening shriek that made even Captain Acunha step back.
‘What is it, what happened my daughter?’ Quinn asked in the lingua geral, kneeling beside her; but she would not answer, could not answer, slapped away his ministering hands, gasping with fear.
‘Leave her, Father,’ Acunha ordered. ‘Bid Dr Falcon come over from the ship.’
Falcon was helped over the narrow water between the two vessels.
