Ink, Iron, and Glass

by Gwendolyn Clare

  In the back of the house, Montaigne’s study was hardly recognizable. Elsa could see into the bedroom above through holes in the scorched ceiling, and she didn’t feel entirely convinced the second floor wasn’t going to collapse on top of them. The smell of burnt books lingered in the air, but it looked as if the authorities had removed Montaigne’s body—or whatever remained of it after the fire—which came as a small relief.

  “What are we looking for?” said Elsa.

  De Vries lifted a burnt book, the pages crumbling in his hands. Paper ashes swirled in a shaft of morning light like motes of dust. “I’m not sure. If the covers aren’t too badly damaged, it would be worth doing an inventory of the titles. Or your mother might have left some small clue for you, assuming she was conscious by the time they brought her through the portal.”

  She took a moment to orient herself. That pile of charred wood on her left was all that remained of the desk where Jumi had so often sat, the desk she used when scribing changes into the Veldana worldbook. Elsa turned to her right, picked her way over to the place where the Veldana worldbook’s chamber had been. The wall had collapsed, leaving nothing but empty air between the support beams. Elsa swallowed hard, feeling as if she might choke on her next words. “It’s gone.”

  De Vries came over and crouched down, sorting through the pile of debris. She bent down to help him. After a few minutes of meticulous searching, he said, “No book remnants—not even a scrap of leather from the cover. That’s odd.”

  “There’s nothing here! Nothing that looks like a wall safe, intact or otherwise.” Elsa pushed herself to her feet, frustrated. “Where could it be? Do you think someone might have removed it after the fire?”

  He frowned thoughtfully at the place where the chamber should have fallen when the plaster and laths of the wall collapsed. “The police, maybe? If they thought the contents of a safe might prove important to their investigation. Assuming they know the fire was arson, and not an accident.”

  Either way, Veldana was beyond Elsa’s reach. There was no going home. This was a reality she had to come to terms with. She drew a deep, rattling breath, determined to set aside the terror of having lost her home. “Then we focus on finding Jumi.”

  They spent the morning doing as thorough and systematic a search as was possible, given the chaos left behind by the fire. It was nearly midday when Elsa spotted a large rectangular shape amidst the rubble. She knelt down and put a hand out to touch it. The charred leather casing disintegrated beneath her fingers, revealing the Pascaline mechanical calculator it held. The heat of the fire had warped the brass faceplate, but the row of input dials—each shaped like a tiny spoked wheel—looked intact.

  “I used to play with it when I was little, while Jumi worked on the Veldana worldbook.”

  De Vries came over to see what she’d found.

  “One time, I disassembled it to see how it worked,” she said as she held it up. “Jumi just about had a fit when she saw it all in pieces. I suppose Montaigne would have been furious if he’d found out, but I put it back together just fine.”

  An odd silence stretched between them, and when she looked up from the Pascaline, de Vries was staring at her as if seeing her for the first time.

  “What?” She frowned at him, confused. “Do you have a particular dislike for Pascalines?”

  He suddenly declared, “We have to go.”

  “Right this second? Why?” Elsa said obstinately. She didn’t understand his sudden change in mood, and that set her on edge.

  De Vries made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, but when he spoke, he chose his words carefully. “Did Jumi ever talk to you about … the madness?”

  “Yes. When someone is brilliant at something, like scriptology, you Earth people say they have the madness.”

  “It’s not quite so simple. The madness is brilliance, yes, but it’s also a sort of single-minded drive. An obsession. No one could succeed at scriptology without being at least a little obsessive. Jumi has it, and you do, too.”

  Elsa shrugged, still not sure how this was relevant. “If you say so.”

  “We can’t stay in France. Your mother was infamous. If the nationals get ahold of you, you’ll spend the rest of your life in a very comfortable prison scribing worldbooks for the Third Republic. Amsterdam is hardly better than Paris. Lord, what a fool I’ve been.”

  “Is,” Elsa corrected him. “My mother is infamous.”

  De Vries shot her a look of pity. “Of course. My apologies.”

  Elsa didn’t particularly like the idea of being rushed off somewhere with little explanation, but if her mother trusted anyone on Earth, it was de Vries, and he seemed genuinely afraid for her. For now, that knowledge would have to be enough. “So, where do we go, then?”

  He pursed his lips for a moment, thinking. “Do you speak Italian?”

  “Not yet,” said Elsa. “But I will.”

  “Abbiamo bisogno di pratica.”

  “It doesn’t happen that fast,” Elsa replied, still in Dutch. “I have to listen for a while before a new language clicks.”

  De Vries smiled, as if her response was funny. “I said, ‘We have need of practice.’” He cleared his throat, and his tone turned serious. “I have friends in the Kingdom of Sardinia—we’ll go there, to the city of Pisa. Of the four Italian states, Sardinia is the safest, and Pisa in particular has a long history as a refuge for persecuted scientists.”

  She nodded. “Very well.”

  Before they left, Elsa gently lifted the wounded Pascaline into her arms, intent on taking it with her. She’d lost so much—she wasn’t going to give up on this, too, without at least trying to repair it.

  They took the doorbook back to Amsterdam, surprising a pair of old ladies with parasols half to death when they appeared out of nowhere on the sidewalk. They cast furtive glances at de Vries and Elsa before nervously scurrying away down the sidewalk.

  Up in the flat, Elsa washed up and changed again into her mother’s laborious European clothing—chemise, stiff-boned corset, long skirts, high-necked white blouse, fitted jacket. The clothes were uncomfortable and impractical, and it struck her that she’d never asked Jumi how she’d felt when she traveled in Europe. Elsa had thought she’d known everything about her mother, and this small detail suddenly seemed of desperate importance. Panic roiled in her stomach. What else didn’t she know?

  Elsa pulled herself together, finished with the jacket buttons, and gathered whatever else of Jumi’s possessions she could find that might be of use. De Vries gave her a pair of carpetbags: a larger one for the stack of rescued books and a smaller one for the Pascaline and her mother’s personal items. She looked at him curiously when he came out of his room with his own set of packed luggage—she’d assumed he would return immediately to Amsterdam after making the introductions—but he offered no explanation.

  “Well, I think that’s everything,” said Elsa. “Have you been to Pisa before?”

  “It has been some time,” de Vries said, stretching out the words with a reluctance that made Elsa wonder if there was more to the story. He didn’t seem to be in a forthcoming mood, though, so Elsa decided not to press him.

  “Any time is good enough, so long as you’ve been there. Just describe a particular place to me. Something unique.” She opened the doorbook to a fresh page. “Do they have any distinctive buildings in Pisa?”

  He smiled. “Yes, you could say that.”

  De Vries gave her details and Elsa scribed them onto the page in the proper order, but her mind kept straying elsewhere, back to the events of the past day. Had the intruders taken Jumi because of her madness? It would’ve been easier to abduct someone here on Earth if they just needed a scriptologist. So they probably wanted Jumi specifically, but to what end? How could Elsa get Jumi back if she didn’t even know who had taken her or why?

  So many questions, and no answers in sight.

  3

  YOU MAY HAVE THE UNIVERSE IF I MAY HAVE ITALY. />
  —Giuseppe Verdi

  They stepped out of the portal’s darkness into a bright, pale world. Elsa looked around: they were standing on a flat, featureless plain, everything around them obscured by white haze.

  De Vries squinted, wiped the condensation off his glasses with a handkerchief, and looked around again. “This … I don’t believe this is right.”

  “No,” Elsa agreed primly. “We quite failed to get there.”

  He paled. “You mean to say failure was an option?”

  “Oh, no need to worry. I scribed the doorbook to shunt you to a fabricated world if the description isn’t accurate enough to connect to the destination. Minimal possibility of accidents with bad portals. It’s proved thoroughly reliable so far.”

  “The fact that the doorbook hasn’t brought you to an untimely demise yet is hardly a consolation. I’ve told you before, the very idea of connecting two locations on Earth to each other makes me nervous. It’s unnatural.”

  “You have a talent for worrying. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Your mother. Frequently.”

  Elsa set down her carpetbags and sat cross-legged beside them. The ground was smooth and flawless like polished stone, but not as hard. Actually, it felt almost supple. She pressed her fingertips into it, and five imprints remained when she pulled her hand away. They slowly disappeared as the material rebounded. “Fascinating, isn’t it? How a world will spontaneously generate properties that weren’t specified in the text.”

  “I’m afraid the study of emergent properties has been somewhat out of fashion in recent years,” de Vries said.

  “Right. Of course. Because of Jumi.” People were a difficult thing to create—when they were directly scribed into the worldtext, they turned out like puppets, capable of basic call-and-response communication but with no consciousness, no sense of self. The Veldanese were the first successful attempt at scribed people, created as subtext using emergent property theory. Veldana was scribed with cottages and agriculture and drinking water, but the people themselves were not specified in the text; they were merely implied by the existence of human infrastructure.

  The Veldanese were considered a major breakthrough in the science of scriptology. But when Jumi had fought back, demanding autonomy for her people, the scientific community had banned the creation of more populated worlds like Veldana.

  Elsa sorted through her belt pouches and brought out a fountain pen, a bottle of ink, and the doorbook.

  “You’re not going to do that here, while we’re still inside, are you?” de Vries said, aghast. “What next—shall we modify an airship engine while we’re in the air?”

  “Relax. I’d have to do something monumentally careless to strand us here forever. How did you ever get to be one of Europe’s preeminent scriptologists with such a cautious attitude?”

  Grumpily, he replied, “By living longer than all of the really brilliant ones.”

  Bending over the doorbook intently, Elsa copied what she’d written onto a fresh page. She’d been distracted and gotten sloppy, so now she adjusted the syntax and asked de Vries for additional details to flesh out the description. After a few minutes of work, she said, “There. I think that should work now. Shall we give it a try?”

  “How sure are you that it’s not going to kill us?”

  “Um … ninety-seven percent sure?” Elsa grinned. She handed the book up to him so he could hold it open while the ink dried, then put away her writing supplies and stood.

  De Vries harrumphed. “Well, at least you’re smiling about something. Not the thing I would have picked, though.”

  Elsa sobered. For a moment there, she’d been too swept up in their adventure to remember her mother was missing. Guilt blossomed in her chest, and she swore to herself: no more smiling until she got Jumi back.

  She dialed the new coordinates into her portal device, activated a portal, and tucked the device away again. Then she picked up her luggage and stepped through without turning to see if de Vries would follow.

  He did, of course, emerging from the darkness a few seconds behind her. They stood in a broad, grassy square near the right transept of an elaborate cathedral. The facade was an excess of columns and arches carved out of pale stone. To the left, near the front entrance of the cathedral, was a squat, round baptistery built in the same style. On their right, a multitiered bell tower tilted precariously away from the cathedral.

  “That,” Elsa observed, “is some poor architecture.”

  De Vries tilted his head back to look at it. “The Leaning Tower. It’s famous in part because it’s doomed.”

  “How morbid.” She tried to make her tone light, even though there was something chilling about all these old monuments. Elsa told herself the buildings were intentionally designed to inspire awe, and so the feeling in her gut belonged to some long-dead architect’s imagination, not to her. But in truth, there was a part of her that couldn’t help wondering how many centuries the tower had seen, how many people had lived and died and turned to dust in the shadow it cast over the city. The weight and silence of all that history felt like too much for anyone to bear.

  It came as a relief when de Vries led the way out of the square and onto a broad street paved with gray cobblestones. Elsa was also glad he seemed confident about which way to go. She could explore off-trail through unfamiliar woods and never get lost, but navigating city streets was not a skill she’d put much effort into developing. Now that she was stranded outside Veldana and Earth was the only inhabited world available, Elsa felt a bit foolish for neglecting to learn it.

  “The Kingdom of Sardinia is just one of four independent states ruling different parts of Italy,” de Vries explained as they walked. “We’re lucky to have friends here—the Sardinian government is very forward-thinking and supportive of the sciences.”

  “Not so in the other three states, I take it?” said Elsa.

  A pained expression crossed his face, as if he had some personal experience with the danger of other governments. He cleared his throat and said, “Not so elsewhere. They exploit mad people when it suits them.”

  Elsa was curious to hear more, but she could tell de Vries was reluctant to share the details. Instead, she asked, “So what exactly is our destination, now that we’ve made it to Pisa?”

  He seemed relieved at the change of subject. “The place we’re going to is a sort of haven for madboys and madgirls. No one will be able to get to you there. You’ll be safe.”

  Something in his tone made Elsa suspicious that there was more at play than he was letting on. Why the sudden onset of concern for her safety, back in the ruins of Montaigne’s house? But she decided to follow his lead anyway, as Jumi would have advised her to do, and trust that he would enlighten her at the proper time.

  De Vries moved rather slowly on foot—the last time Elsa had visited him with her mother, Jumi had argued it was time for him to acquire a walking cane for his stiff left hip, but he was still walking without one. In Veldana, it would have driven Elsa mad to have to walk so slowly, but here she didn’t mind. Their plodding pace gave her time to eavesdrop on the other people out walking the streets, so she could absorb their language properly.

  Everyone—the men especially—gestured a great deal with their hands as they talked. She wondered if the gestures served some critical linguistic function, though she could detect no obvious grammatical structure in the motions.

  As she watched the citizens of Pisa, Elsa caught their stares lingering on her in turn. These were a pale people not so different from the French, whereas the Veldanese all came in shades of brown. She could not guess what they thought of her, with her black hair and bronze skin and a pale elderly gentleman for an escort. Hot pinpricks of self-consciousness traveled down her spine.

  “Stai imparando?” de Vries asked, interrupting her thoughts.

  “I don’t know what that means yet,” Elsa snapped, feeling edgy and exposed. She wished the new language would hurry
up and sink in so they could get off the streets and out of sight. They were both quiet for a minute or two, and she started regretting her curtness. “Thank you for your help, de Vries. I know I don’t always make it easy for you.”

  He smiled down at her. “You can call me Alek, you know. After you’ve dug through a pile of burnt wreckage and run off to Toscana with someone, the need for formality has faded somewhat.”

  Elsa shrugged. “I’m accustomed to de Vries.”

  He chuckled to himself. “So like your mother. Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t a window back in time.”

  “What do you mean?” she said sharply.

  “Why, that she keeps everyone at a distance, of course. Everyone except you.”

  Elsa scowled at him, but she noticed his use of the present tense—keeps—and was silently grateful for it.

  She calmed her anxious thoughts and turned her attention back to the most immediate problem: language. As Jumi would have said, How can you hope to master your world if you cannot master your own mind? So Elsa started with herself, and focused on listening to and absorbing the words of passersby.

  The words began to churn in the back of her brain, mixing and clarifying. Yes, Elsa realized, it was not so unlike French in its grammar or etymology—startlingly familiar, now that she could hear it properly. She felt dizzy with the swelling knowledge.

  “Steady there,” said de Vries, and caught her by the elbow as she swayed.

  They had stopped walking. Elsa didn’t recall exactly when. Come to think of it, she’d lost track of where they were, too—she looked around at the cobblestone plaza they stood near the edge of, wondering how far they’d come from the Leaning Tower.

  “Not much farther,” said de Vries as he led her toward a broad four-story stone building. He presented it with a wave of his arm. “Casa della Pazzia.” House of the Madness.