by Jeffrey Ford
"Let me mark this hour," I said. I lifted the timepiece and flipped it over. The grains began to fall, bleached atoms dribbling three or four at a time into an empty, other world. It was the first instance of my registering the passage of time since we had entered the dome of the Panopticon. There was something alluring about the phenomenon, and I could understand how Misrix must have felt when, being born into humanity, the light of the Beyond went out in his head and he initially became aware of himself.
I heard someone speak, and thinking it was Anotine, I looked away from the hourglass. From where I sat, I could see that she was still sleeping. I turned in the other direction, and there I saw someone coming toward me out of the shadows. As he moved across the floor, he dragged behind him an unfolding light. Inside this light I saw a room with wallpaper and furniture, and it blossomed outward, quickly replacing the shadows of the dome and obliterating my view of the stars above. It happened so quickly, I could do nothing but stare.
I realized that the young man approaching me was unaware of my presence.
"Watch out," I said, but he ignored my warning and continued on his course, passing through me as if I wasn't there at all.
He stopped and turned around, and I saw his face. No more than twenty, and strikingly handsome with his dark hair and piercing eyes, I immediately knew it was Below in his youth.
"Please, Anotine," he said, as if addressing someone behind me. I looked around, first noticing that I was no longer in the dome but rather in some room in a house, and then I saw her, sitting on a pink chair, dressed in the very yellow dress she had worn when I first met her on the island. Her long hair was in ringlets, and she wore an ironic smile.
25
The hourglass proved to be the repository of jum-bled scraps of memories I was able to splice together into a love story of sorts involving the Master and my Anotine. A series of scenes melted one into the next around me, out of order but each completely convincing in its reality. I remained an invisible presence through the course of their unfolding, and though I could no more affect the outcome as stir with my phantom breath the flame of a candle within the tale, I found I had a clear omniscience about everything that transpired. This ability that came with the hallucination allowed me to automatically rearrange the events into a chronology. The beauty released me from its embrace at precisely the end of the hour, and I found myself sitting on the floor of the darkened dome, the moon and stars overhead. I woke Anotine and told her everything.
In the summer of his thirteenth year, after the death of his younger sister, Below left home never to return. Being an exceedingly sensitive child, the girVs passing so frightened and confused him that he fled from the very thought of it. He traveled as far as he could on the small amount of money he had been able to put away. It took him as far as the seacoast to a town called Merithae. The winter was coming on and he found himself in dire straits. Without so much as a scrap of bread, he was forced to hire himself out as a servant to an old man by the name of Scarfinati.
Although Below had never heard of him, Scarfinati was famous throughout much of the realm for possessing a limitless imagination and the ability to bring his dreams to life. His specialty was a kind of technomancy, and he dabbled in those regions where science and magic mingled. Through his wealth, acquired from work for various patrons, political, military, artistic, religious, he had been able to amass an impressive fortune. With this money, he had a palatial house built out at the tip of a spit of land that jutted into the ocean a mile south of Merithae. It was to this place he called Reparata (named for Scarfinati s own sister), he brought the young Drach-ton Below.
There were many rooms in the house, and Scarfinati hated dust. Below worked from early in the morning to late at night continually dusting books, furniture, scientific gadgetry, glass, primitive sculpture. When he finished every room, he was instructed to begin again. Scarfinati, though old, was large in stature and stern in his demeanor. During the first month ofBelow''s employment, his existence was barely recognized. He was fed well, paid a modest sum, and had a comfortable bed to sleep in. There was one day off a week, and he had access to the books in the libraries granted he returned them to their precise locations. When the snows came, he decided he had better stay until the spring.
At the end of his first week at Reparata, Below saw a girl his age cooking at the kitchen stove. He tried to speak to her, but she completely ignored him. When he realized she wasn't going to speak, he sat down and watched her work. He would have stayed there all afternoon if Scarfinati hadn't come through and warned him to get back to his dusting. As the days passed, he learned the girl's name was Anotine. He also began to see that she was not just a cook, but also a kind of student. Occasionally, Below would enter to dust a room already being shared by the old man and the girl. He would eavesdrop on their conversations. Tor the most part, she listened and he spoke, instructing her in processes that Below had no understanding of. He often found them in the basement laboratory, working together over a small fire with glass beakers and golden tongs.
Through the long winter, the mysterious nature of his employer and the huge house were enough to keep away memories of his sister and the tragedy of her death. When spring arrived, young Below
decided he would again take up his traveling now that he had saved some more money. This time he found himself fleeing not death but love. He had become completely enamored of Anotine, even though she had not said one word to him or cast -a single glance in his direction. The situation, as it was, had become sheer torture, as he planned out entire days to try to get as little as a mere glimpse of her.
One day, when the snow had all but melted, Scarfinati entered one of the libraries where Below was dusting. The young man cleared his voice and explained to his employer that he would soon be moving on. Scarfinati said he was very sorry to hear that, because he had had it in his mind all along to request that Below become one of his students. Below most likely would have declined the invitation had it not been for Anotine, but he saw the old man's offer as a way to get closer to her. He agreed to become an apprentice—of what, he wasn't exactly sure.
A week later, he retired his feather duster and rags and joined Scarfinati and Anotine in the basement laboratory for his first lesson, the production of a chemical ice that could not melt. In the beginning his ignorance was always evident, and his inability to grasp the concepts the other two discussed fluently made him physically clumsy. He broke equipment, burned himself, and dribbled a highly corrosive acid onto the toe of Scarfinati's boot. The old man had a great deal of tolerance for his ineptitude, but the girl was impatient, rolling her eyes and calling him a fool.
On a rainy afternoon in late spring, as they all sat quietly having tea in the library on the third floor, Scarfinati, by mumbling and tossing a pinch of blue powder onto the carpet, conjured for Below the spirit of his sister. The little girl walked out of thin air and up to her brother. His immediate reaction was to bolt from the room, but the old man commanded that he return and stay seated. With this, he found he couldn't move. "Is there something you wanted to say to your brother?" asked Anotine of the spirit. The little girl nodded. "Drachton, your mind is in a fist with the thought of my death. If you love me, you will relax it, so that I may travel over into the next world. Release me and open yourself to possibility." The girl vanished then, and Below broke down in tears.
From that time on, his ability to learn seemed to grow exponentially. The lessons that had seemed so obscure to him just a week earlier, mathematics and the properties of chemicals, all began to fall into place in his mind. He began to notice that with every procedure he was able to accomplish in the lab without spilling the contents of the beaker, every complex problem he was able to solve without benefit of pencil and paper, Anotine began to grow more interested in him. This extra incentive charged his newly discovered intelligence.
As the years progressed, he learned at an alarming rate all of the secrets that had made Scarfinati rich and p
owerful. The old man had become like a father to him, but Below saw the girl as anything but a sister. Things began between them with a conversation one day in which she instructed him in some terms that would help him to discuss that area of study where magic and science merged. From that purely innocent conversation grew a friendship, which led, after months of talk, to a kiss, and then quickly to secret rendezvous in the middle of the night while the old man slept.
Things continued in that fashion for quite a few years, until the time both Anotine and Below turned twenty. It was then that Scarfinati announced that they would no longer take their lessons from him together. He told them that Below would continue on his course of alchemy, philosophy, and mathematics, whereas Anotine would be taught the memory book. A flare of jealousy leaped to life within Below, for he knew that the memory book was the last step, the most important element in one's progress toward becoming an adept.
Both Below and Anotine had been lectured in how to understand and utilize mnemonic systems. Each had built in his own mind a kind of crude memory palace, and used it in order to store information. Scarfinati had always stressed, though, that this was only the first step, and that the ultimate achievement of the mnemonics was to turn the memory into an engine of creativity. In order to do this, he said, "You must introduce life into it. The elements of it must continue to interact, commune, intermingle, even when your attention is elsewhere. This way new ideas are forever being born, and all you need do is harvest them."
The memory book contained lists of symbols and their values. Scarfinati had told them that those symbols, for some reason, could not be stored as a list, within the memory palace itself. Whenever he tried to hide them in the mnemonic structure, they would disappear, so the physical existence of the book would always be necessary. He also revealed that in order to introduce life into a mnemonic system, one had to learn how to manipulate the symbols from the book in one's mind. The correct juxtaposition of symbols would create
an environment that was conducive to mnemonic life, and where this was achieved, imagination would surely grow. It was also a certainty that if you tried to use the symbols and did not know how, it could result in serious damage to the memory and the mind in general.
Knowing all of this, Below felt slighted that he had not been chosen to learn the book. From the time Scarfinati and Anotine began on their private lessons concerning the text, the young man tried to get her to talk about what she had learned. They would still meet at night and would discover the moment, but even in the throes of passion, or the dreamy time that followed, Anotine never uttered a word about the book. She told him flatly one day that if he were to keep interrogating her about it, she would have to stop seeing him. At her words the secret knowledge he was being left out of became in Below's mind almost like a secret lover whom Anotine was surreptitiously seeing.
Scarfinati noticed the young man's new sullenness and confronted him about it. Below asked why he was not also chosen to learn the book. The great adept told him he was not ready. "You have made great strides in the acquisition of knowledge, but that is only the beginning. I am leaving you an incredible legacy in what I am teaching you, and I don't want it squandered by impatience and immaturity." "But I'm ready," he told Scarfinati. "The very fact that you say that means you are not," said the old man.
Below tried to ignore the issue of the book and dedicate himself to his studies. He neither asked Anotine nor Scarfinati about it, but went through his lessons with a false smile and an exaggerated show of determination. Still, the book always worked its way back into his thoughts, and it began to drive him insane. It was his belief that when Anotine had finished with the special course of study, she would be so superior that she would no longer notice him. Then it struck him that Scarfinati had been planning all along to make her his wife. Such machinations led Below to one overriding desire—he must see the book.
He sneaked into Scarfinati's private study one night when the others were asleep and found it lying on the table, where it had been left from the day's lesson. The cover was fashioned from stiff leather boards with only three straps of leather serving as the spine. Upon opening it, Below saw that the pages were not sewn together as with a bound book, but were merely placed between the covers. There were no numbers in the corners or on the bottoms of the pages, and he wondered how Scarfinati kept track of their arrangement. The text was handwritten in black ink, rows of symbols (stars, circles, squares, florettes, depictions of animal paw prints, a water droplet, the sun, etc.) followed by equal signs and either other symbols or numbers. He carefully perused each page, bringing all his vast knowledge to hear on the system, but in the end found it meant nothing to him.
He was not content to leave things as they were, though, and so he decided to steal one of the pages. Searching through Scarfinati's study, he located the old man's paper and ink. With great care, he produced a facsimile page, using symbolic designs that were much like the others in the book, but of his own invention. The forgery of his mentor's drawing style was exquisite, driven to excellence by the idea that he now had insinuated himself into Anotine and Scarfinati's secret. When he finished, he folded the original page and placed it in his pocket. After returning the book and the writing implements to their appropriate places, he sneaked quietly back to his room. The mask of affability he wore for Anotine after this theft was his first true work of genius.
In his private moments away from the others, he would pore over the original sheet from the memory book. Days passed and he tried to implant some of the symbols that he found on the page into his already-existent memory palace, hoping they might imbue it with creative energy. He felt as if he was really beginning to understand the strange system when one day, while reaching into his mind to retrieve a basic mathematical formula, he discovered that his mnemonic world was slowly disintegrating. The steady forgetting confused him and made him physically dizzy.
He grew concerned when it became evident that he would not be able to halt the dissolution of all the knowledge he had worked so hard to acquire over the years. The idea of confessing what he had done to the old man in hopes that there was some way to reverse its effects was quickly becoming his only option. During this time, Anotine could sense there was something wrong with him. She promised that if he could be patient for a few more days, she would beg Scarfinati to let them go on a vacation. During one of their midnight meetings, she wondered if it wasn't time they should be married.
The feelings of jealousy began to disintegrate along with his memory, hut they were replaced by a sense of guilt. Anotine s concern for him, her desire to he with him, showed that his paranoia had
been unfounded. During a particularly troubling night, he decided to confess the following morning. He only hoped that even if Scarfinati could not forgive him, Anotine might find it in her heart to.
The next day, before he could present himself to his mentor, he heard Scarfinati calling to him from the private study on the second floor. As he mounted the stairs, he wondered if his theft had been discovered. When he reached the closed door of the study, he knocked meekly on it. "Enter," Scarfinati said from the other side.
He opened the door and saw Anotine sitting at the study table in front of the open book. She looked straight ahead with a perfectly blank expression, her mouth slightly open. Next to the open book was the original page that Below had stolen. How it had gotten there, he could only surmise. Scarfinati must have been aware of the theft all along and taken it back through some act of magic. The mysterious old man was nowhere to be found.
Scarfinati never appeared again at Reparata. Below came to realize that the bogus symbols he had inserted into the book on the forged page had been studied by Anotine and put to use in her mind. Because of their ill effect, her thoughts had seized. She could neither think ahead nor remember, but sat perfectly still, staring into that moment when everything came to a halt. He now could no longer deny the truth of his selfishness, and this plunged him into a great depression.
Using a formula the old man had taught him, he entombed Anotine in a chemical ice that was impervious to heat. In that way he hoped to preserve her until he could conceive of a way to free her mind. With the last of his own fading knowledge, he set about learning the symbology of the memory book. This he finally mastered and, almost at the last second, was able to reverse the effects of his mnemonic disintegration. Even when his thought processes had returned to full efficiency, and he was using his mnemonic world as a creativity engine, he still could not discover a cure for Anotine, who lay completely immobilized in her clear sarcophagus.
Her presence tormented him so that he invented a drug that would, for the short time it took control of his body, make him forget the pain of his guilt. Sheer beauty, as he called it, became his refuge, but when even that lost its effectiveness against his anguish, he knew he had to escape. He finally sold Reparata, and with the fortune it brought, he hired a ship and a crew in Merithae. Anotine was loaded into the hold of the ship, and Below gave orders to the captain that he was to stay perpetually out on the ocean. Once a year they would be allowed to dock in order to take on supplies and change crews. It was an odd request, but he had the wealth to back it up. The thought of not knowing with any certainty where Anotine was at any given moment came as a great relief to him.
He spent the next few years searching for Scarfinati, but never found him. The lessons the old man had taught him proved exceedingly valuable, though, and he sold his services to the wealthy and powerful in order to survive. Each spring, he would make his way back to Merithae and wait for the ship to put into port. Then he would visit the hold where Anotine lay like a beautiful insect in amber. It was on his last visit to the coastal town, as he was watching her sail away again toward the horizon, that all at once his mind conceived of a magnificent city. This seed of a thought began to sprout behind his eyes right there on the dock as the outgoing ship diminished against the horizon to a speck of white sand and then fell through the neck of the hourglass.
