The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  Victory did know that, and always had; it was Gwynplaine’s comprehension of the art and science that he doubted. But Gwynplaine would not permit him to photocopy a single page of the book until the work was done. So Victory imported his own diagrams and his own calculations into his modified computer programs, embodying within them as much arcane knowledge as the specific task required. He wanted far more than that—he wanted the whole register of secrets, the full description of every item of the comprachicos’ arts—but he had to be patient.

  There was a great deal of preparatory work to be done before Victory could even contemplate taking a scalpel to the infant’s face, but the surgeon was as determined to get the job done as Gwynplaine was. He cleared his diary by rescheduling all the operations he had planned, in order to devote himself utterly to the study of the diagrams that Gwynplaine allowed him to see, and Gwynplaine’s translations of the text. He practiced unfamiliar elements of procedure on a rat and a pig as well as running dozens of simulations on the computer—but time was short, because the child called Dust was growing older with every day that passed, and the bones of the baby’s face were hardening inexorably hour by hour.

  Under normal circumstances Victory would have required a team of three to assist with the operation, in addition to an anesthetist; as things were, though, he had to be content to work with Gwynplaine alone—and, of course, the computer to guide the robotic arm. It was as well that Gwynplaine proved exceedingly adept in an assistant role.

  The first operation took four hours, the second three and the third nearly six....but in the end. Victory’s part was complete.

  Victory had never been so exhausted in his life, but he did not want to retire to bed. Gwynplaine insisted that he could watch over the boy while the surgeon slept, but if Victory had not been at the very end of his tether he would never have consented to the arrangement. “If there’s any change in his condition,” Victory said, “Wake me immediately. If all’s well, there’ll be time in the morning take a final series of X-rays and to finalize the post-operative procedures.”

  When the doctor woke up again, however, Gwynplaine had vanished, taking the child and the book with him. He had also taken every scrap of paper on which Victory had made notes or drawings of his own—every one, at least, that he could find. Nor had the computer been spared. The instructions for the operation had been deleted and a virus had been set to work. Had it been allowed to run its course, it would have trashed the hard disk, thus obliterating all the other notes Victory had covertly copied on to the machine and photographs of several pages from the book that he had taken unobtrusively with a digital camera. Fortunately, it seemed that Gwynplaine did not understand the workings of computers well enough to ensure the completion of this particular task of destruction. Victory was able to purge his machine of the virus before it had done too much damage, saving numerous precious remnants of the imperiled data.

  A good deal of work would need to be done to recover and piece together the data he had contrived to steal, let alone to extrapolate that data into further fields of implication, but Victory had never been afraid of hard work. Although the material he had contrived to keep was only a tiny fraction of what he had been promised, he had enough information already to serve as fodder for half a dozen papers. Given time, his genius would allow him to build considerably on that legacy. Even if he could not recover all the secrets of the comprachicos, he felt certain that he could duplicate the majority of their discoveries—including, and especially, the last.

  * * * *

  In the years that followed, Hugo Victory’s skill and fame increased considerably. He was second to none as a pioneer in the fast-advancing art of plastic surgery, and he forced tabloid headline-writers to unprecedented excesses as they sought to wring yet more puns from his unusually helpful name. He lacked nothing—except, of course, for the one thing he wanted most of all: Gwynplaine’s book.

  On occasion, Victory paused to wonder how the experiment had turned out, and what the child’s face might look like now that he was growing slowly towards the threshold of manhood—but he didn’t believe in Adam, or angels, or the existence of God. The existence of the book, on the other hand, was beyond doubt. He still wanted it, more than anything his money could buy or his celebrity could command.

  He did all the obvious things. He hired private detectives, and he scoured the internet for any information at all connected with the name of Gwynplaine, or the society of comprachicos. He also published a painstakingly-compiled photofit of Gwynplaine’s remarkable face, asking for any information at all from anyone who had seen him.

  Despite the accuracy of the image he had published, not one of the reports of sightings that he received produced any further evidence of Gwynplaine’s existence. The detectives could not find anything either, even though they checked the records of every single burn victim through all the hospitals of Europe for half a century and more.

  In the meantime, his internet searches found far too much. There were more Gwynplaines in the world than Victory had ever imagined possible, and the comprachicos were as well known to every assiduous hunter of great historical conspiracies as the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians. Somewhere in the millions of words that were written about their exploits there might have been a few grains of truth, but any such kernels were well and truly buried within a vast incoherent chaff of speculations, fictions and downright lies.

  Victory tracked down no less than a dozen copies of books allegedly containing the teratological secrets of the comprachicos, but none of them bore more than the faintest resemblance to the one Gwynplaine had shown him. Some of the diagrams in the older specimens gave some slight evidence that their forgers might have seen the original, but it seemed that none of them had been able to make a meticulous copy of a single image, and that none had had sufficient understanding of anatomy to make a good job of reproducing them from memory.

  He had all but given up his quest when it finally bore fruit—but it was not the sort of fruit he had been expecting, and it was not a development that he was prepared to welcome.

  When Janice’s successor handed him the card bearing the name of Monsignor Torricelli, and told him that the priest in question wanted to talk to him about the fate of a certain mutilated child. Victory felt an inexplicable shudder of alarm, and it was on the tip of his tongue to ask the secretary to send the man away—but his curiosity was as powerful as it had ever been.

  “Send him in, Meg,” he said, calmly. “And hold my other appointments till I’ve done with him.”

  * * * *

  The Monsignor was a small dark man dressed in black-and-purple clerical garb. Meg took his cape and his little rounded hat away with her when she had shown him to his chair.

  “You have some information for me, Father?” Victory asked, abruptly.

  “None that you’ll thank me for, I fear,” Monsignor Torricelli countered. He was not a man incapable of smiling, and he demonstrated the fact. “But I hope you might be generous enough to do me a small service in return.”

  “What service would that be?” Victory enquired, warily—but the priest wasn’t ready to spell that out without preamble.

  “We’ve observed the progress of your search with interest,” the little man told him. “Although you’ve never publicly specified the reason for your determination to find the individual you call Gwynplaine, it wasn’t too difficult to deduce. He obviously showed you the book of the secrets of the comprachicos, and you’ve indicated by the terms of your search that he had a child with him. We assume that he persuaded you, by one means or another, to operate on the child. We also assume that he spoke to you about the face of Adam, and that you didn’t believe what he told you. Am I right so far?”

  “I’m not a Catholic,” Victory said, without bothering to offer any formal sign of assent, “but I have a vague notion that a Monsignor is a member of the pope’s own staff. Is that true?”

  “Not necessarily, nowadays,” the priest r
eplied. “But in this particular case, yes. I am attached to the papal household as well as to the Holy Office.”

  “The Holy Office? You mean the Inquisition?”

  “Your reading, though doubtless wide, is a little out of date, Dr. Victory. There is no Inquisition. There has been no Inquisition for two hundred years, just as there has been no society of comprachicos for two hundred years.”

  “Do you know where Gwynplaine is?” Victory asked, abruptly.

  “Yes.” The answer seemed perfectly frank.

  “Where?”

  “Where he has always been—in hell.”

  Somehow, Victory felt less astonished by that statement than he should have been, although he did not suppose for a moment that Monsignor Torricelli meant to signify merely that Gwynplaine was dead.

  “He wasn’t in hell nine years ago,” Victory said. “He was sitting where you are. And he spent the next ten days with me, in the lab and the theatre.”

  “From his point of view,” Torricelli counted, still smiling, “this was hell, nor was he out of it. I’m borrowing from Christopher Marlowe, of course, but the description is sound.”

  “You’re telling me that Gwynplaine was—is—the Devil.”

  “Of course. Had you really not understood that, or are you in what fashionable parlance calls denial?”

  “I don’t believe in the Devil,” Victory said, flatly.

  ‘‘Of course you do,” the Monsignor replied. “You can doubt the existence of God, but you can’t doubt the existence of the Devil. You’re only human, after all. Good may be elusive within your experience, but not temptation. You may doubt that the Devil can take human form, even though you and he were in such close and protracted proximity for ten long days, but you cannot possibly doubt the temptation to sin. You know pride, covetousness, envy—you, of all people, must have a very keen appreciation of the force of envy—and all the rest. Or is it only their deadliness that you doubt?”

  “What other information do you have for me, Monsignor?” Victory tried to sound weary, but he couldn’t entirely remove the edge of unease from his voice. He wondered whether there was a level somewhere beneath his conscious mind in which he did indeed retain a certain childlike faith in the Devil, and an equally childlike certainty that he had once met him in human guise—but the thought was difficult to bear. If the Devil existed, then God presumably existed too, and that possibility was too horrible to contemplate.

  “The child died,” Torricelli said, bluntly.

  Strangely enough, that seemed more surprising than the allegation that Gwynplaine was the Devil. Victory sat up a little straighter in his chair, and stared harder at the man whose smile, even now, had not quite disappeared. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “You hired a dozen private detectives to search for you, who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were up against. We have a worldwide organization at our disposal, who knew exactly what to look for as soon as your postings had alerted us. The child died before he was a year old. Don’t be alarmed, Dr. Victory—you weren’t responsible. So far as we could judge, the operations you performed were probably successful. It was the Adversary’s part that went awry. It has all happened before, of course, a dozen times over. If it’s any comfort to you, this was the first time since 1665 that the cutter’s part was properly done. If he’d only been prepared to honor his bargain and let you help with the part that remained to be done....but that’s not his way. You might think yourself a proud and covetous man, but you’re only the faintest echo of your model.”

  “If you weren’t a priest,” Victory observed, “I d suspect you of being insane. Given that you are a priest, I suppose delusions of that kind are merely part and parcel of the faith.”

  “Perhaps,” the little man conceded, refreshing his cherubic smile. “I wonder if, perchance, you suspected Mr. Gwynplaine of being insane, when he too was only suffering the delusions of his faith.”

  Victory didn’t smile in return. “I don’t see how I can help you,” he said. “If the resources of your worldwide organization have enabled you to discover that the child’s dead and that Gwynplaine’s safe in hell, what can you possibly want from me?”

  “We’ve been monitoring your publications and your operations for the last few years, Dr. Victory,” Torricelli said, letting his smile die in a peculiarly graceful manner. “We know how hard you’ve worked to make full use of the scraps of information that you plundered from the Devil’s book, while laboring under the delusion that he didn’t mean to let you keep them. We know how ingeniously you’ve sought to use the separate elements of the operation you carried out on his behalf. I’m sure he’s been watching you just as intently. We suspect that your busy hands have done almost all of the work that he found for them and that he’s ready to pay you another visit, to offer you a new bargain. We don’t suppose that it will do any good to warn you, although we’d be delighted to be surprised....but we do hope that you might be prepared to give the incomplete program to us instead of completing it for him.”

  Until the priest used the word “program” Victory had been perfectly prepared to believe that the whole conversation was so much hot air, generated by the fact that the lunatic fringe of the Holy Office was every bit as interested in crazy conspiracy theories as all the other obsessive internet users who were fascinated by the imaginary histories of the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati and the comprachicos. Even then, he struggled against the suspicion that he had been rumbled.

  “What program?” he said.

  “The most recently updated version of the software you use to show your clients what they’ll look like when you’ve completed the courses of surgery you’ve outlined for them. The one whose code has finally been modified to take in all but one of the novel procedures to which the adversary introduced you. The one that would reproduce the face of Adam, if you could only insert that last missing element into the code—the tantalizing element that the Devil has carefully reserved to his own custody.”

  Victory tried hard to control his own expression, lest it give too much away. He had known, of course, that he had come close to a final resolution of the comprachicos’ last secret, but he had not been able to determine that he was only one step short. But on what authority, he wondered, had the Monsignor decided that he was almost home? Did the Vatican have plastic surgeons and computer hackers at its disposal? If it did, would they be set to work on tasks of this bizarre sort? If so, had the men in question genius enough not only to steal his work but to read it more accurately than he had read it himself?

  It was too absurd.

  “Why would I give my work to anyone while it’s incomplete?” Victory asked. “And why shouldn’t I show it to everyone, when I’ve perfected it? Surely that’s what you ought to want—if what Gwynplaine told me is true, it ought to put humankind back on the path to salvation.”

  “He’s not called the father of lies without reason,” the priest observed. “He was an angel himself, before his own fall. He doesn’t remember what he and Adam looked like, but he knows full well that the comprachicos weren’t searching for a way to set mankind on the path to salvation. Quite the reverse, in fact. Why do you think they were condemned as heretics and annihilated?”

  “I understand the politics of persecution well enough to know that so-called heretics didn’t need to be guilty of anything to be hounded to extinction by the Church,” Victory retorted.

  “I doubt that you do,” Torricelli said, with a slight regretful sigh. “But that’s by the by. We’ll pay you for the program as it presently exists, if you wish—provided that we can obtain all rights in the intellectual property, and that you agree to desist from all further work on the project.”

  Victory was slightly curious to know what price the Vatican might be willing to pay, but he didn’t want to waste time. “I already have more money than I can spend,” he said, proudly. “The only thing I want that I don’t have is the book I saw nine years ago—and I’m not enti
rely sure that I need it any longer. I don’t have any particular interest in the faces of angels but I’m extremely curious to know what the results of the operation I performed might have been, if the boy had lived.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Dr. Victory,” said Monsignor Torricelli.

  “You needn’t worry about my selling out to the opposition,” Victory said. “I’ve dealt with Gwynplaine before. This time, I’ll need copies made in advance—and then we’ll be even. Afterwards, I might let him look at what the program produces—but I’m certainly not going to let him walk off with it while I have the strength to stop him.”

  “I wish you’d reconsider,” the priest persisted. “No harm will be done if you stop now, even though you’re so close. The Adversary might be able to complete the program himself if he steals the present version, but he wants more than a computer-generated image. He’d still need an artist in flesh, and that he isn’t. He isn’t even as clever with computers as he’d like to be.”