New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Kiggertarpoq was now fully aglow, as if pulling on a leash.

  Gabriel patted the Lion’s head.

  “Good boy,” he said. “Daddy’s going home.”

  He faced the Aurora and got ready to plunge, turning to take one last, solemn look at the city.

  At which point, the fear crushed his chest, and he couldn’t do it. Stepping back abruptly, he tripped over his own feet, got tangled in a coil of rope, and, in a panic, tried to regain his foothold. He teetered, waving his arms over the void.

  “Holy Cod!” he thought, trying to grab hold of the Winged Lion at his side and simultaneously dropping the cane which, suddenly blazing, twirled down towards the snowy ground. Trying to catch it, he lost his footing and flew like black sperm into the night, the rope tail undulating in his wake with Kiggertarpoq whirling on just out of his grasp.

  In the early morning the crowds of unemployed workers who streamed from Belleville and Ménilmontant to the foot of the tower, and gathered there in hope of employement, found a body dangling from the statue of the Winged Lion. Just below it, through a crack of the pavement, a little mandrake was growing.

  Go see for yourself if you don’t believe me.

  To be continued …

  I

  One Week Ago in the Future …

  There was a time without time and a space without space. And it was wonderful.

  “What are you, some sort of mad scientist? Using me, your friend—Ha!—as a blasted telephone!”

  Brentford opened his eyes and found he was in the half-lit Psychomotive, with the Colonel arguing with Woland Brokker Sson nearby. For a moment he wasn’t sure if it was a dream or reality, but it was so luminous and loud that eventually he became convinced that it was the latter. His headache seemed very real, too.

  “Am I alive?” he croaked.

  “Ah!… Well, you never really died,” Sson reassured him, obviously glad at Brentford’s revival, and grateful for the diversion. “Your soul just changed places and times. But I admit it’s a troubling experience.”

  “It seemed like death to me.”

  “Only physical. The old reluctance to leave one’s body! Not that I can criticize that. If it hadn’t been for your spare body waiting for you, you would have died for good and never known it. Souls need bodies, you know, as much as bodies need air.”

  The wizard looked like an old man tonight, his cheeks sallow and his eyes puffy, even though, Brentford remembered, he was seven days younger than he had been when Brentford had seen him last. Perhaps the effort of creating a Black Aurora had exhausted him. He knew from Helen’s experience (as little as you can know from someone else’s experience, especially when that someone is a goddess of sorts) that whatever miracles you perform must be purchased from nature, and some of them carry an exacting price.

  “How are the others?” he asked, suddenly worried.

  Sson looked embarrassed. “There’s good news and, then, there’s bad news,” he said.

  “Let’s hear the bad first,” Brentford told him, with a sigh.

  “Ensign Paynes-Grey never made it. There was a little jolt but then—nothing. And neither did Miss Lake, nor Mr. Blankbate nor Mr. Tuluk nor Dr. Lavis. Their bodies have shown no signs of reanimation.”

  “Lavis, Blankbate, and Tuluk died before tonight,” Brentford pronounced curtly. “And Ms. Lake chose not to come back. I should have told you. But Ensign Paynes-Grey—he should have …” Brentford caught himself. Perhaps Thomas, too, had chosen to remain where his heart was? Brentford decided that he’d rather see it that way than think of Thomas suffering some dreadful accident.

  “I took the liberty of getting rid of their bodies while you were recovering,” Sson said quietly. “I thought it might be uncomfortable for you to do it yourself.”

  “I thank you for that,” Brentford said. “But … they’re all still alive, aren’t they … somewhere in New Venice?”

  “Very much so, and quite their younger selves,” Sson reassured him. “All of them, but here’s the rub: you are as well—but more on that later. So that was the bad news. But I must say, three out of eight is rather a good ratio for a wizard, and three out of four is simply excellent.” Sson’s smile was nonetheless weary.

  “The good news, then?” Brentford asked.

  “The Colonel, as you see, is in good health but somewhat troubled, and …”

  “Who are you calling troubled, you senile old quack?”

  “… and your friend Mr. d’Allier mumbled a lot of nonsense.”

  Brentford chuckled. “That sounds like his normal state.”

  “And to think I called you a friend,” Gabriel said from behind him.

  Elated, Brentford whirled around. “How was it for you?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had that much fun since Acteon’s stag party,” Gabriel replied.

  Whatever that meant.

  “And you, Colonel?” Brentford asked, taking him in with relief, too.

  “I’d rather not think about any of it ever again.”

  Brentford nodded. He understood. “We are very grateful, Mr. Sson,” he said.

  “I think you can be, yes. The Aurora was a lot of work, but believe me, the hardest part was getting that Psychomotive one week back in time—speaking of which, there’s something I’d like you to see.”

  “It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast …” Gabriel said with a wink as he stepped from the Psychomotive and was almost blown over by a gust of cold wind. Their complaints about the cold in Paris seemed rather petty now.

  Fur-clad and hooded, Brentford rejoined him. The landscape struck them with its sublime, astringent savagery, barely softened by a dreamy snowfall. So this was home, really? They had died to come back here? They looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders in disbelief. But over there, in the distance, a hazy halo gleamed upon the horizon, and they both knew what it meant: the Fire Maidens of the Air Architecture, the Thirty Sisters of Dawn, were waiting for them, and it warmed their hearts.

  “Here,” Sson said, pointing at a yellowish shape in the starlit shadow of the Psychomotive. “When I moved the Psychomotive back in time, this is what I found at the exact spot where you forked out.”

  Brentford drew closer. “Is it … de Lanternois?”

  “You tell me, Mr. Orsini.”

  Sson kneeled down and turned the corpse’s face towards Brentford. The magnetic crown appeared below the rim of his hood. And it was still there, in his dead eyes: the ecstasy and the fear.

  “It’s him,” Brentford declared, “shortly before I suppose some patrol found him and took him …”

  “Not to you, but to Peterswarden, curiously … as you were still Regent then,” Gabriel completed the thought, while hugging and patting himself.

  “They may have thought it was some anthropological finding, which would have made it more appropriate for Peterswarden and his committee,” Brentford mused, not really convinced by his own argument. He had to admit he had been thoroughly betrayed. But something else was troubling him.

  “Did de Lanternois’ being here have anything to do with the Psychomotive forking out in time?” he finally formulated.

  “Of course,” Sson said. “De Lanternois may well have been dead, but the crown wasn’t: it still held what was left of his mind. The snow and ice around the body were charged with Odic effluvia from contact with the crown, especially as the effluvia are at their peak at the moment of death, as you yourself have experienced. One full week after the body was taken from here, the place still emitted a strong Odic field.”

  “And of course, the crown found on the corpse was still functioning. Indeed, Peterswarden may have tried it out on someone—I’ve recently learned that, the day before the ceremony, a dream interpreter from the Dunne Institute was found roving in the wilderness muttering, ‘To the North, to the North.’ Presumably, this unfortunate person had time to communicate the latent content of the crown to Peterswarden—not only the magnetic spell but also the memori
es that had seeped in during the turmoil of death.”

  “So,” Gabriel concluded, “Peterswarden knew that we would either go to Paris … or to our deaths at the Pole?”

  “I’ll let you draw your own conclusions,” Sson said. “But this still-active crown was put in the Psychomotive, and being still full of Od, it was attracted to the place of death as it came near to it, as if picking up a signal from its own time frame. It steered you there imperceptibly, and resonated with its own memory, so to speak. It created a chronomagnetic whirl that was strong enough to generate a Black Aurora and send you straight back to where the crown came from.”

  “You mean it was the remains of a dead man’s mind that took us to Paris?” Gabriel wondered aloud. And then he wondered why he wondered. This was precisely what books did, after all.

  “The mind creates its own universe,” Sson said, somewhat impatiently. “That’s a rather standard philosophical tenet, after all, and it’s a rather standard magical tenet that it sometimes happens literally.”

  “It’s the way it works that I’m not sure I understand,” Brentford went on, shouting to be heard in the suddenly rising wind.

  Sson sighed. “Nobody really understands,” he began, with visible effort. “But it has to do with the fact that Black Auroras are not exactly void. They’re filled with indeterminate particles of invisible dark matter that can turn into solid matter when informed by desire and imagination. We call this the Materia Prima, though, as a rule, it’s something that we don’t like to talk about. This is how the Psychomotive and your bodies were duplicated when you passed through the Black Aurora. And this is how de Lanternois’ memories came to life, bringing you, along with the crown, to Paris in 1895.”

  Gabriel tried to frown in spite of the frost growing on his brow. “You know, I was struck by the fact that Jean-Klein—who should have been much older here if he was a young intern in 1895—did not recognize the Paris of his youth when we got there,” he recalled. “He didn’t remembered the snow, for example. Could it be that the snow came from here, then? That it seeped in, as you said, from de Lanternois’ last sensations, and got mixed up with his memories of Paris? So that the Paris we found ourselves in never actually existed, other than in de Lanternois’ mind—which was dreaming of Paris … while he died in the snow?”

  “The Paris we found ourselves in was a Paris where he was dead, remember?” Brentford cut in. “And we saw many things that he could not have known.”

  “That the mind expresses the whole universe, past, present, or future, is another fundamental philosophical tenet,” Sson observed wearily. “Now, if you please, there’s something to consider that’s a bit trickier. Please look more closely at this corpse, and see if you see something slightly wrong.”

  Brentford felt he’d seen enough dead bodies these past few days, but he did his best to oblige the wizard. But all he could see was how ugly death was.

  “What should I see?” he finally asked.

  “It’s clear this corpse is not decades old,” Ssson said simply. “A few days at the most.”

  Brentford straightened up in surprise. “Of course! If he left Paris in 1895 …” he began.

  “… how is it he died here in 1907 A.B.?” Ssson concluded.

  “I don’t see how that could be possible,” said the drowning scientist in Brentford.

  “Although you were, I have heard, close to the source,” Sson declared. “It’s your friend Helen’s stopping of time, for a period that by nature remained indefinite, which has definitively put New Venice off the map, chronologically, and perhaps even retroactively, if you can imagine that. Technically, it lies now in the middle of a perpetual vortex of chronomagnetic forces. This means that we can have visitors from any time … depending, that is, on their desire to see us.”

  “Ah!” said Gabriel. “That may explain why Jean-Klein did not look his real age when he was here. He’d been rejuvenated by coming here.”

  “This fresh air is doing you good, Gabriel,” Brentford nodded. “But we didn’t only travel through time …” he went on, puzzled again. “You said yourself that we were sent to where de Lanternois’ mind sent us.”

  “That seems logical,” Sson said. “Time is for bodies; it doesn’t make sense outside of them. But the mind knows nothing of such constraints. The dying, delirious de Lanternois created in his mind a variant of the world that, out of time, was as real as the actual Paris, and at the moment of his death, he desired it so strongly that when the crown opened a chronomagnetic field within the Black Aurora, it was so charged with this desire that it eventually forked out and became incarnated in another dimension through the Materia Prima—blending memories, fantasies, and whoever happened to be there.”

  He looked at the perplexed faces that gaped back at him.

  “Well, that’s my tuppence worth, at least … And that’s the trouble with magic,” the wizard conceded somewhat bitterly. “It always sounds like hogwash when you try to explain it. Now, gentlemen, it’s not that I’m bored by this conversation, but we’re not exactly sitting by the fireside, and you’ll have to tell me—well, what to do with this corpse.”

  Brentford immediately saw the implication: if they got rid of the body such that the snow patrol never found it, there would be no Parisian embassy, no fork in time, no deaths, no lost Lilian. He had no choice, and there was no time to lose. “We’ll pay our last homage here,” he said.

  “There’s a crevasse a few yards from here,” Sson indicated. “That’s where I dumped—er, where I paid homage to your friends.”

  Brentford nodded and, aided by a disgusted Gabriel, he lifted de Lanternois’ fragile body, so thin from hunger and so stiff from the cold that it felt like a plywood cutout. It took several excruciating minutes in the glare of the Psychomotive lights to bring it to the edge of the crevasse.

  “Let’s swing him over,” Brentford suggested, breathless.

  “Nice eulogy,” Gabriel smirked. “Are you sure you don’t want to destroy his goddamned crown?”

  “Oops. You’re right.”

  Brentford put de Lanternois down and, with great effort and not a little nausea, removed the crown, feeling as if he were scalping the man, as torn strips of frozen pinkish skin clung to the metal. Brentford felt a deep pity for the French explorer: it must have been maddeningly painful to wear the crown to the point of having it freeze onto his skin.

  While Brentford crouched there mulling over the crown, Gabriel pushed the body over the edge of the crevasse with his foot, feeling queasy himself as the body plummeted, with a series of thuds that quickly grew fainter and fainter …

  Until there was a moment of silence, at which point Brentford busied himself with trying to burn the crown. But its sodden leather straps would not catch fire, and Sson fetched a can of oil and some kindling, and the three of them gave a deep sigh of relief as the kindling caught, and then the leather finally flared, twisting and melting the rest of the crown. And as they watched the blazing metal writhe in the middle of the Arctic night, they could almost see faint pictures of the Paris it contained crackle, shrivel up, and burn out in the flames. Now that snowy Paris will disappear forever, Brentford mused, wondering if all his memories of it would be erased, too.

  Either way, he regretted nothing. He had done his duty, and twice over at that: he had saved Paris from the snow that never was and saved New Venice from never being built. With a sigh of weary relief, he ticked them off his list of Twelve Labours. Go get Orsini, anyone?

  Surrounded by its half-blue, half-red aura, the Psychomotive glided back towards the distant flames that circled New Venice. From a hillock, a furry white shape, firmly planted on its powerful hind legs, watched it disappear. When all trace of the Psychomotive had passed below the horizon, the creature gave a short howl and flapped its huge white wings for the sheer pleasure of feeling them on its back.

  II

  The Second Death of Colonel Branwell

  “I don’t want to do it,” the Colonel d
eclared, once the Psychomotive had silently glided into its berth at Sson’s Uraniborg Castle and the other passengers had gone off with solemn goodbyes to fulfill their own looping destinies.

  “And why is that, Benedict?” Sson answered, barely listening as he scanned the approach from the cockpit. He had cut all the alarms from a distance, so as not to warn his snoring, younger self of their arrival from some fourth dimension, and apparently everything was calm. In any case, if there had been an incident a week previously, he would have remembered it.

  “Because I lost my son.”

  The wizard was paying attention now.

  “What are you telling me, Benedict?”

  “Tuluk was my son. From that Inuk girl I told you about. He died in Paris, in the catacombs, fighting with honour, and I was there. He was killed and they buried him where he died, among the bones and skulls. I don’t want to remember this, Woland. Ever. I think I have endured more than my share of atrocities, but if a head is all I can be, at least I want to be able to put in it only whatever pleases me.”

  “But your son is still is alive somewhere in this city. You understood that part, didn’t you? You will see him again.”

  The Colonel bit his moustache, as he did when he was planning a difficult move in chess.

  “Not with these images of him dead in my head. Not after what we’ve been through. I want to start again with the boy. You know, on a clean slate.”

  “So it’s you that has to go, have I got that right?”

  “Aye, aye.”