The Infinite Library
Page 1
i cope.
Copyright © 2011 Kane X. Faucher
Cover image copyright © 2010 Nicolas Grospierre and used with permission.
All Rights Reserved
CCM Cover and Design by Michael J Seidlinger
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Selections in previous incarnations have appeared in Copious Magazine, Ken*Again, Sixth Ward Review, Journal of Experimental Fiction 39, and Camera Obscura (later winning the Outstanding Fiction Award).
The author would like to extend his gratitude to the magazines that published earlier sections of this work, the generous readers who read previous drafts of the novel, and the artist Nicolas Grospierre for kindly granting the publisher permission to reproduce his library image.
First paperback edition.
Published in the United States of America
Civil Coping Mechanisms (www.copingmechanisms.net)
ISBN 978-0-9846037-8-7
The Infinite Library
*
Kane X. Faucher
For the Librarians
Published on the 25th anniversary of Jorge Luis Borges’ death and 70 years after the publication of his story, The Library of Babel, in his collection El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.
... because I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that there is any mountain or valley in existence, but simply that the mountain or valley, whether they do or do not exist, are inseparable from each other.
René Descartes, Meditations (5th Meditation)
cave ab homine unius libri!
Categories in the Trilogy
Title
The Infinite Library
The Infinite Atrocity
The Infinite Grey
Genre
Mystery
Horror
Speculative Fiction
Identity
Superego
Id
Ego
Force
Information
Energy
Matter
Type
Form
Copy
Simulacrum
Action
Analysis
Chaotic
Metamorphosis
State
Metaphor
Delirium
Identity
Motif
Reason
Crisis
Catastrophe
Theme
Science
Art
Politics
The Infinite Library
(Book I of III)
Kane X. Faucher
In the beginning there was the Word. The Word first drifted emptily, an itinerant thing before it became imbued with energy to form a relationship to become Data. This data was expressed in matter by way of a book, and the Word made its impact there. The Word was full, and from it all other words would derive from it. In one explosive moment too small for any instruments to measure, the Word spread and filled the Library, these words nested within more books than can be counted. Every possible variation of the Word makes up the entire holdings of the Library, but one thing was lacking to make the Word resonate with meaning and sense: the Librarian. And so, from the Word also came the Librarian who was made distinct by being split in two. The first Librarian had access to the entire catalogue, and knew the tasks, while the other did not have either of these traits.
The word, attired as data, is compressed into a code or a cipher. And everything that is meant to appear throughout the story must all appear now, in condensed form, a coalescing of all possible colours into one band of white.
The expression of the Word cannot be condensed in any single volume, let alone three, but the expression of the Word does involve three narrative phases: information, energy, and matter.
BOOK I: CODEX INFINITUM
1
The Invisible Book
“Let your vast Library be justified!” the unnamed Librarian in Borges' “Library of Babel” declaimed in desperation. In the face of an infinite library, it is the most thoughtful demand to make. But if the Library cannot be justified, which is to say that if the purpose of existence cannot be traced to a purpose or design as to its beginning or end, then at least it should be organized. Information is what organizes matter and energy into some stable form of random coherence. That's the best I can make of it. Any mathematician would be exasperated by my juvenile understanding of infinity and information, and any philosopher would dismiss my musings as irrelevant or in want of reason. But I am not a mathematician or a philosopher. I believe that there is one station higher than these two, and it is the librarian, the art and grace by which he or she can organize our most seemingly miscellaneous information to facilitate its storage, retrieval, and methods for improved accessibility. I am far from being a religious man, but if there was a god, he or she or it would be a librarian – thus is the primacy of information over energy and matter.
Anchoring points of time and place: Vatican City, 2007, on a fruitless research junket, given permission to forage through the Vatican holdings courtesy of fancy letterhead, two institutions. My name is Alberto Gimaldi. His name was Castellemare, a self-proclaimed librarian. His physique was narrow and bony, composed entirely of haphazard piping and knotted joints in some kind of Soviet industrial parody on human anatomy, angular bones floating in aspic features and an odd affectation of uncertain origin. He always wore the most conspiratorial grin upon that Jack O’ Lantern of a face, I bet even in his most private moments. He said he was of mixed parentage without ever qualifying any further, and if I may say so without sounding ridiculous, he was the only person I have met that lacked the residual trauma we all bear in having once been born. Perhaps it was not that he was born, but printed, the origin of body and book being one. His specialty was, indeed, books, but books of a different type.
Of myself, there is not much to say that would bear interested hearing, nothing plangent or remarkable about the scholastic years of empty service, the dull rustle or scribble here and there to mark time. But I have to fill the time and say something, generate sympathy with whoever hears my tale, and this through being so painfully average or mediocre in as many ways that my eccentricities are absorbed and subsequently negated.
I am a largely forgettable mind desultorily hitched to a frumpy body. There are two concerns in my daily affairs, both united by bibliophilia: either I am trafficking in enigmatic texts or I am cracking the codes and ciphers of the most mysteriously penned codices. The one habit supplies the other since I make a modest enough income to fuel my travels to various manuscript libraries in Europe to continue my assiduous research, research that is largely uninteresting except to the most niche specialists. I have published a few articles on untranslatable incunabula without bothering to offer any solutions, a few reviews of what is current in glyptology, cryptology, and cryptanalysis. In such instances, I parrot what has already been said by merely grafting the seminal references in a different order, my work drawing to its end as inconclusive, petering off as a littoral of quotations and a bland toss-off summary of all the nothing that was said. Sometimes I give myself the task of debunking hasty theorists who employ the most absurd of methodologies in cracking what is a mere
“Greeking” of text, or refuting those who claim that certain texts are just hoaxes by demonstrating how the code actually works. It is largely shadowboxing, but it takes on an especial importance among those of us who share a concern that is centuries dated. I have cracked a few codices in my time, most notably two: De heteromachina rerum (author unknown) and the luridly extraterrestrial Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus. Actually, I failed to crack the latter, but I let the rumour persist without worrying about anyone checking to see if there is any support for a claim I can disown if pressed. Although such preoccupation sounds to the outsider as thrilling, glamourous, fraught with penetrating the shibboleths of conspirators resulting in peril, it is nothing of the sort. It is dry and tedious work, not the sort of Da Vinci Code hijinx that seeks to uncover the one secret conspiracy that motors history. No such things exist, or at least not in the register one would mundanely imagine.
Codes and ciphers are enormously important to me. I think the Library knew that, why I must have been selected, never mind the means it did so, the agents it sent. There are keys in a code to unlock it, and keys in the frets of ornamental friezes, and everything is in hand... con clave. But given a handful of keys and being tossed in a world of locks does not demystify anything.
I have never met a book I could not decipher with but a few maddening exceptions (all exceptions in this field are the source of madness and infuriation, a dirty secret kept under the floorboards of one’s reputation and profession). But it is time-consuming work to an extreme, and I am rarely rewarded for efforts by either monetary compensation or a bump in scholarly reputation; the members of this global fraternity who occupy their time obsessively devoted to deciphering could not even fill a room at a party, and I do not mean the legion of amateurs and closet hobbyists. Besides, a party of our kind should be strictly avoided. The “community” is small, vicious, insular, zealous, and populated by professional cutthroats, inimitable egos, and belligerent windbags. We keep mostly to ourselves and share nothing until we are absolutely certain that no further work need be done. That is, none of us publish a “lead” in the cracking of the code without having deciphered it entirely unless we have to, for this community is also covetous over others’ work. The numbers have dwindled over the last twenty years for two reasons; at first the best cryptologists were seduced by stable incomes provided by governmental secret agencies and private sector think tanks with large budgets, and now computers have outmoded our antique methods, being able to cycle through a decade’s worth of permutations performed by hand in a matter of minutes. Others in our trade lament that we are an endangered breed, whereas I am more the realist by knowing that we are in fact extinct and in absolute denial of this grimly real circumstance. Why forestall the inevitable when it is already here, when it has already been here for so long? But I take comfort in the fact that there are codes written in hand that only another hand, not a computer, can decode. I like to think of this as coding with the right and decoding with the left, the symmetry of all mystery.
I once held an adjunct position at a university, lecturing on old manuscripts… But this I abandoned when it seemed that my students, and even my colleagues, ceased to share any enthusiasm when in the presence of an extremely rare manuscript. Their indifference was symptomatic of my trade’s decline; the people are no longer interested in books or book-related mysteries, and so it stands to reason that the unity of the two would cease to hold anyone’s interest for more than a fleeting moment before running toward the certainty of science or formulaic television programming. However, I do not wish to malinger here with my heavy baggage of complaint when I have in fact accepted the fate of my trade, and have supplemented my own joy by peddling texts to keep solvent. I can do nothing to change the tide of indifference, and I am too arrogant a creature to believe that I am responsible in making the attempt. And so, I made my way teaching on occasion, on a part time basis, gypsying about from one institution to another. Same old yawn.
Enough about that.
Of all places the narrative would choose for me to meet the librarian, it was just outside Vatican City, that little religious satrapy of itself. Swiss guards in their ridiculous blue suits trafficked by history’s own haberdasher rotated in their appointed guard patterns. Faith met finance in the swatches of coffee and ice-cream shops that plucked the tourist-faithful into its overpriced maw. The day began with oppressive heat that later reconciled itself with a drop in humidity. Cool winds arced into the piazzas and stirred up dust into faint rosette patterns matching souvenir Romanesque reproductions frozen in keychains. The sun was partially occulted by menacing cloud that clotted the sky with the threat or promise of melodramatic biblical weather to follow. The Vatican Library was an occasional haunt of mine, and I was but another face plucked from the indistinct sea of greying scholarly types all eager to plunder some obscure text to resolve some meaningless little conspiratorial riddle, to worship at the spine’s edge of the Codex Vaticanus Graecus. I had just finished my research stint in one of the stuffy manuscript rooms, and was satisfied with my findings the way one must justify to oneself that the research in such an illustrious place was fruitful… even if it was a dismal failure. To be honest, I had wandered through the catalogue of the Vatican holdings on so many occasions that it seemed to me what a city’s public library is to its populace: just another nexus of books sheltered from the elements, a collection point like a heavily populated car on a commuter train. By my many frequent visitations, I perhaps knew the Vatican holdings catalogue and Holy Index better than I knew the details of my own childhood. Not that I enjoyed the tedious arguments of theologically involved scholastics, but some of these books were the basis upon which codes were written, and they were beautifully bound - the finest crafted materials for the dullest possible content.
There had been a rush to acquire photocopies for study given that the announcement gave urgency to any researcher’s aims: that the Library would be closing for three years. I finished up, went to my rental car, and trundled myself off to a nearby small town.
I do not fancy myself a grand gourmand, but I could usually determine good cuisine from what was merely slapped together for the indiscriminate tongues of tourists. I knew the best local food was always in a small and narrow street, in an establishment with a modest lit sign that read VINO. I stepped in just as the wind went into crescendo and the sky’s bloated bladder emptied its contents upon the city with its hissing relief. I was determined to get a hot meal, return to my hotel, and then depart the next morning for Barcelona, then make my connector flight back to Toronto where the only living thing affected by my absence would be a pathetic and neglected house plant in one of those made in China dollar store pots that are far more florid than whatever can grow inside them.
Be it the meal or my sense of liberality with my wallet (since I had just been paid a handsome sum for a rare text that netted me a fair profit), I seduced myself into ordering a liter of expensive wine to attend my meal. The patrons seemed slightly rough without being ignorant and abrasive; working people, bakers and butchers and other such trades that still have a sense of familial honour. The place was small, a bit dingy, but very homelike. There were decorative votive candles with opulent depictions of the Virgin and child, seemingly painted in an effusive hybrid Medieval iconic and Renaissance style, softened by mass production, a holdover from that Cult of Mary now 800 years stale-dated. The tablecloths were damask. Tucked away in one corner, seated by himself over a heaping feast of pasta, soup, buns, salad, and wine, was a very odd looking fellow, as out of place as I was. I contrived to draw some attention to myself without being obtuse. The fellow ate his food greedily, but his eyes seemed fixed, perhaps mulling over an amusing anecdote. He wore the slightly apprehensive grin of someone who was unsure when it was his cue to laugh. His long, knotted fingers were ridiculously ringed like a wizard’s, and the hands were a gangly roadmap of one of those ancient, overcrowded cities where one was unsure if something was being renovated or de
molished. I observed his hands for quite some time without staring too obviously - for his hands were the real scene of action. He was both ravenous and mechanical. Even his operation of the spoon betrayed his famished aspect. There were dark orange smudges on his right index and middle fingers, undeniable truth that he was a heavy smoker; in fact, there were three packages of cigarettes by his knobby elbow, and there was a cigarette on the go in the overflowing ashtray just astern his soup bowl as he absentmindedly lit another. He managed his fare and cigarette in such a precise choreography that I could look away and predict what his hands would be busying themselves with in accordance to the rhythm: fork dipping into pasta, twirl, puff, slurp soup, tear piece of bun, chew, chew, slurp wine, puff, more wine, soup, puff. It was only with the salad that he was dainty, his fingers lightly pinching the salad fork between thumb and middle finger while the other fingers splayed out like dainty antennae, an out of place affectation, hovering over the salad like one trying to sneak up on a fly, dabbing at it gingerly but with purpose for a particular green. Only later would I realize just how adept those hands actually were; he once made a signal to me with them, later on during our strange acquaintance, forming a kind of narrow edge, declaring that, “one must know where to make the division between books in order to pluck the one that is not apparently there.” He called it, ineloquently enough, a knife in the ribs.