The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  Victory sat down again. He was annoyed, because Janice had strict instructions never to permit salesmen or journalists to fill appointment-slots reserved for potential patients—but the mistake was understandable. Victory had never seen a salesman or journalist so unfashionably dressed, and the ancient briefcase was something a fossilized academic might have carried defiantly through a long career of eccentricity.

  The object that Gwynplaine produced from the worn bag was a book, but its pages were not made of paper and its leather binding bore no title. It was not the product of a printing-press—but it was not Medieval either. Victory guessed, on the basis of the condition of the binding, that it might be eighteenth century, or seventeenth, but not earlier.

  Gwynplaine laid the book on the desk, and pushed it towards Victory. Victory accepted it, but did not open it immediately.

  “You seem to have mistaken the nature of my collection,” Victory said, frostily. “Nineteenth-century portraiture is my specialism. Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist. I don’t collect books, except for products of the Kelmscott Press. In any case, I don’t pursue my hobbies during working hours.”

  “This is to do with your work, not your hobby,” Gwynplaine told him. “Nor am I trying to make a sale—the book isn’t mine to sell, but if it were, I’d deem it priceless.”

  “What is it?” the doctor asked, curiously. He opened the volume as he spoke, but the first page on which his eyes fell was inscribed in a language he had never seen before.

  “It’s a record of the secrets of the comprachicos,” Gwynplaine told him. “It appears to be complete—which is to say that it includes the last secret of all: the purpose for which the organization was founded, long before it became notorious.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Victory told his mysterious visitor. “If you’re hoping to barter for my services I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong plastic surgeon.” But he had turned to another page now, and although the script remained utterly inscrutable, this one bore an illustrative diagram.

  Victory had seen a great many anatomical texts in his time, but he had never seen an account of the musculature of the human face as finely detailed as the one he was looking at. It was easily the equal of Durer’s anatomical studies, although it was more intricate and seemed indicative of an uncanny appreciation of the inner architecture of the human face. It seemed to Victory that the author of the diagram addressed him as one genius of plastic surgery to another, even though the message emanated from an era in which plastic surgery had been unknown. His interest increased by a sudden order of magnitude.

  “I hope you will permit me to explain,” Gwynplaine said, mildly.

  Victory turned to another illustration. This one had been carefully modified in a manner that was impossibly similar to the print he had taken from his computer only a few minutes earlier. A layman might have seen nothing but a confusion of arbitrary lines scrawled on the image of facial musculature, but Hugo Victory saw a set of clear and ingenious instructions for surgical intervention.

  Victory decided that he wanted this book as desperately as he had ever wanted anything. If Gwynplaine could not sell it, then he wanted a photocopy, and a translation.

  If this is genuine, Victory thought, it will rewrite the history of plastic surgery. If the text lives up to the promise of the illustrations I’ve so far seen, it might help to rewrite modern textbooks as well. And even if it turns out to be a fake, manufactured as recently as yesterday, the ingenuity of the instructions testifies to the existence of an unknown master of my art.

  “Please go on, Mr. Gwynplaine,” the surgeon said, his eyes transfixed by the illustration. “Tell me what you came here to say.”

  * * * *

  “Comprachicos means child-buyers,” Gwynplaine said, his strange voice taking on an oddly musical quality. “Even in their decadence, in the eighteenth century, the comprachicos took pride in being tradesmen, not thieves. They were wanderers by then, often confused with gypsies, but they were a very different breed. Even nineteenth century accounts take care to point out that while true gypsies were pagans, the comprachicos were devout Catholics.

  “Those same sources identify the comprachicos’ last protector in England as James II, and state that they were never heard of again after fleeing the country when William of Orange took the throne. The retreat into obscurity is understandable. The Pope had excommunicated the entire organization—one reason why the Protestant William was secretly supported by Rome against his Catholic rival—and such succor as those who fled from England could receive in France was limited and covert. The entire society retreated to Spain, and even then found it politic to vanish into the Basque country of the southern Pyrenees. They’ve remained invisible to history ever since—but they had been invisible before, and the wonder may be that they were ever glimpsed at all.

  “Almost everything written about the comprachicos was written by their enemies, and was intended to demonize them. They were attacked as mutilators of the children they bought, charged with using their techniques to produce dwarfs and hunchbacks, acrobats and contortionists, freaks and horrors. It was true that they could and did produce monsters but even in the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment the demand for such products came from the courts of Europe, which still delighted in the antics of clowns and clever fools. The comprachicos sold wares of those kinds to Popes and Kings as well as Tsars and Sultans. The clowns that caper in our circuses even to this day use make-up to produce simulacra of the faces that the comprachicos once teased out of raw flesh.

  “Yes, the comprachicos used their plastic arts—arts that men like you are only beginning to rediscover—for purposes that you or I might consider evil or perverse. But that wasn’t their primary or their ultimate aim. That wasn’t the reason for which the organization was founded, in the days when the Goths still ruled Iberia.”

  Hugo Victory had never heard of comprachicos, but he had heard that families of beggars in ancient times had sometimes mutilated their children in order to make them more piteous, and he had heard too that the acrobats of Imperial Rome had trained the joints of their children so that they could be dislocated and relocated at will, preparing them for life as extraordinary gymnasts. For this reason, he was not inclined to dismiss Gwynplaine’s story entirely— and he was still turning the parchment pages with reverential fingers, still marveling at the anatomical diagrams and the fanciful surgical schemes superimposed upon them. “What was the reason for the organization’s existence?” he asked.

  “To reproduce the face and figure of Adam.”

  That startled the surgeon into looking up. “What?”

  “Adam, you will recall, was supposed to have been made in God’s image,” Gwynplaine said. “The comprachicos believed that the face Adam wore before the Fall was a replica of the Divine Countenance itself, as were the faces of the angels; when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, however, their features and forms became contorted—and when God expelled them from Eden, he made that contortion permanent, so that they and their children would never see his image again in one another’s faces and figures.

  “The comprachicos believed that if only they could find a means of undoing that contortion, thus unmasking the ultimate beauty of which humans were once capable, they would give their fellows the opportunity to see God. That sight, they believed, would provide a powerful incentive to seek salvation, and would prepare the way for Christ’s return and the end of the world. Without such preparation, they feared, men would stray so far from the path of their religion that God would despair of them, and leave them to make their own future and their own fate.”

  “But there never was an Adam or an Eden,” Victory pointed out, still meeting the oddly plaintive eyes of his frightful visitor, although he knew that there was not a man in England who could win a staring-match against such opposition. “We know the history of our species,” he added, as he dropped his gaze to the book again. “Genesis
is a myth.”

  But this book is not a myth, Victory said to himself, silently. This is, at the very least, a record of experiments of which the accepted history of medicine has no inkling.

  “The comprachicos had a different opinion as to the history of our species,” Gwynplaine told him, flatly. “They knew, of course, that there were other men on Earth besides Adam—how else would Cain have found them in the east of Eden?—but they trusted the word of scripture that Adam alone had been made in God’s image, and that Adam’s face was the face of all the angels, the ultimate in imaginable beauty. Not that it was just the face that they were anxious to reproduce, of course. They wanted to recover the design of Adam’s entire body—but the face was the most important element of that design.”

  “This is nonsense,” Victory said—but he could not muster as much conviction as he would have desired, or thought reasonable. There was something about Gwynplaine’s peculiar voice that was corrosive of skepticism.

  Gwynplaine leaned forward and placed the palms of his hands flat upon the open pages of the book that he had laid on Victory’ desk, preventing the doctor from turning the next page. “All the secrets of the comprachicos are recorded here,” he said, “including the last.”

  “If they knew how to achieve their object,” Victory objected, “why did they not do so? If they did it, why did they not succeed in bringing about their renaissance of faith and the salvation of mankind?”

  “According to the book, the operation was a success,” Gwynplaine told him, “but the child died while the scars were still fresh. The surgeon who carried out the operation died too, not long afterwards. The project was carried out here in London, not two miles east of Harley Street, but the timing was disastrous. The year was 1665. Plague took them both. There was no one else in England with the requisite skill to make a second attempt, so a summons was sent to Spain—but by the time the call was answered, London had been destroyed by the great fire. The record of the operation was thought to have been lost.

  “When William came to power and the comprachicos fled to the continent they no longer had the book, and their subsequent experiments failed—but the book hadn’t burned in the fire. It was saved, and secreted by a thief, who didn’t know its nature because he couldn’t read the language in which it was written. It was only recently rediscovered by someone who understood what it was. You won’t find a dozen scholars in Europe who could read it—in a century’s time, there might be none at all—but I’m one. What I need, as well, is a man with the skill necessary to carry out those of its instructions that require an expert hand and surgical instruments. I’ve been told that I might do well to take it to California, but I’ve also been told that I might not need to do that, if only you will agree to help me. I already have a child.” He added the last sentence in a negligent tone, as if that consideration were a mere bagatelle.

  “Have you also been advised that you might be insane?” Victory inquired.

  “Often. I’ll admit to being a criminal, given that it’s illegal to buy children in England now, or even to import children that have been bought elsewhere—but as to the rest, I admit nothing but curiosity. Perhaps the instructions are false, and the whole tale is but an invention. Perhaps the judgment of success was premature and the child wouldn’t have grown up to display the face of Adam at all. But I’m curious—and so are you.”

  “If you wanted me to operate on you,” Victory said, “I might take the risk—but I can’t operate on a child using a set of instructions written by some seventeenth century barber.”

  “The child I’ve acquired is direly in need of your services,” Gwynplaine told him. “So far as anyone in England can tell, I’m his legal guardian—and no one in the place where I bought him will ever dispute the fact. The manipulations of the body and the training of the facial flesh that require no cutting I can do myself—but I’m no surgeon; even if I could master the pattern of incision and excision, I wouldn’t dare attempt the grafts and reconnections. Your part is the minor one by comparison with mine, requiring no more than a few hours of your time once you’ve fully understood the instructions—but it’s the heart and soul of the process, and it requires a near-superhuman sureness of touch. You can’t do this as a matter of mere business, of course. I cannot and will not pay you. If you do it, you must do it because you need to know what the result will be. If you say no, you will never see me again—but I don’t believe that you’ll say no. I can read your face, Dr. Victory. You wear your thoughts and desires openly.”

  As he tore his avid gaze away from Gwynplaine’s censorious fingers Victory became acutely conscious of his own reflexive frown. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, roughly.

  “Gwynplaine is as good a name as any,” the man with the unreadable face informed him, teasingly.

  “I want the book,” Victory said, his own perfectly ordinary voice sounding suddenly unnatural by comparison with the other’s strangely-contrived locutions. “A copy, at least. And a key to the script.”

  Gwynplaine could not smile, so there was no surprise in the fact that his face did not change. “You may make a copy it afterwards, if you take care to do no damage,” he agreed. “I will give you the name of a man who can translate the script for you. Have no fear that you might do harm. If you achieve nothing else, you might prevent the child from growing up a scarecrow. I think you understand well enough what costs that involves—though not, of course, as well as I.”

  Victory felt—knew, in fact—that he was on the threshold of the most momentous decision of his life. He had seen enough of the book to know that he had to see all of it. He was faced with an irresistible temptation.

  “I’ll need to see the child as soon as possible,” Victory said, slightly astonished at his own recklessness, but proud of his readiness to seize the utterly unexpected opportunity. “I’ll tell Janice to fix an emergency appointment for tomorrow.”

  * * * *

  Even at a mere thirteen weeks old, the child—to whom Gwynplaine referred as Dust—was as hideous as his guardian, although his ugliness was very different in kind. The baby had never been burned in a fire; the distortion of his features was partly due to a hereditary dysfunction and partly to the careless use of forceps by the midwife who had delivered him, presumably in some Eastern European hellhole.

  Had the child been brought to him in the ordinary course of his affairs, Hugo Victory would have been reasonably confident that he could achieve a modest reconstruction of the skull and do some repair-work on the mouth and nose, but he would only have been able to reduce the grotesquerie of the face to the margins of tolerability. Normality would have been out of the question, let alone beauty. Nor could Victory see, to begin with, how the procedures outlined in the diagrams illustrating the final chapter of Gwynplaine’s book would assist in overcoming the limitations of his own experience and understanding.

  “This is an extremely ambitious series of interventions,” he told Gwynplaine. “It requires me to sever and relocate the anchorages of a dozen different muscles. There can be no guarantee that the nerves will function at all once the reconnections heal, even assuming that they do heal. On the other hand, these instructions make no provision for repairing the damage done to the boy’s skull. I’ll have to use my own procedures for that, and I’m not at all sure that they’re compatible. At the very least, they’ll increase the danger of nervous disconnections that will render the muscles impotent.”

  “My part of the work will replenish and strengthen his body’s ability to heal itself,” Gwynplaine assured him. “But the groundwork has to be done with scalpel and suture. If you can follow the instructions, all will be well.”

  “The instructions aren’t completely clear,” Victory objected. “I don’t doubt your translation, but the original seems to have been written in some haste, by a man who took a little too much for granted. There’s potential for serious mistakes to be made. I’ll have to make further modifications to my computer software to take aboa
rd the untried procedures, and it will be extremely difficult to obtain an accurate preview of the results.”

  “It won’t be necessary to preview the results,” Gwynplaine assured him. “Nor would it be desirable. You must modify the software that controls the robotic microscalpel, of course, but that’s all.”

  “That won’t take as long, admittedly,” Victory said. “Amending the imaging software isn’t strictly necessary....but working without a preview will increase the uncertainty dramatically. The robotic arm ought to make the delicate procedures feasible, but guiding it will stretch my resources, as well as the computer’s, to the full. If a seventeenth-century surgeon really did set out to follow this plan with nothing but his own hand to guide the blades he must have had a uniquely steady hand and the eyes of a hawk.”

  “You only have to step into the National Gallery to witness the fact that there were men in the past with steadier hands and keener eyes than anyone alive today,” Gwynplaine said. “But your technology will compensate for the deterioration of the species, as it does in every other compartment of modern life. As to the lack of specificity in the instructions, I’m prepared to trust your instincts. If you’ll only study the procedures with due care, and incorporate them into your computer programs with due diligence, I’m certain that their logic will eventually become clear to you—and their creativity too. There’s as much art in this business as science, as you know full well.”