Codex

by Lev Grossman

  After two or three days of this he lost all remaining sense of connection with his old working life. He should have been in a panic. It was almost time for him to go to England; a glance at his offer letter, disinterred from his briefcase, confirmed that he was due there tomorrow. With a casual mendacity that was totally uncharacteristic of him, he called Esslin & Hart in London and gave them an exaggerated account of his illness. Afterward he couldn’t remember exactly what he said, but they agreed that he sounded terrible and that he could postpone his arrival for another two weeks, to the beginning of September.

  One strange thing: He called Margaret and left messages, but she never picked up and never called him back. He didn’t understand. It hurt that she was ignoring him—or at least, it would have hurt if he’d really been able to feel much of anything, but not much got through the soft, warm blanket of illness that was wrapped around his brain. He felt physically unable to think about the codex, either. He forgot about the past and the future; only the miserable, meaningless present existed. And when even that was too much, he played MOMUS.

  Time was in free-fall in the game. The sun raced by overhead, faster and faster, until it blurred into a single glowing band, a burning streak across the sky. Day and night, clouds and sky, sun and moon blended together into an even gray-blue luminescence.

  Talk about wasting time. He had climbed up to the roof of a skyscraper, and from there he watched as centuries passed like minutes. Entire ages arose and subsided, millennia came and went, civilizations waxed and waned. The city became a jungle crowded with towering ginkgo trees between which sailed enormous birds of paradise trailing long feathered plumes. Then the trees withered and fell away, and New York became an oasis in a vast desert. Scalloped dunes of yellow sand hundreds of feet high drifted by like great waves, one after the other, mountains of dust marching inland over the horizon, driven by the wind. Finally, when it seemed like the desert age would never end, the sea rose and covered everything, until he could have leaned down from his rooftop perch and dabbled his fingers in the salt water.

  Edward was joined by a strange man—his presence was never satisfactorily explained by the narrative—who moved the story forward in genteel, surprisingly cultured tones.

  “It’s actually pretty simple,” the man said. “Aliens are planning to invade Earth, but first they need to make it habitable. They come from a cold planet, and Earth is heated by the hot molten lava at its core. When that core cools and hardens, millions of years from now, Earth will be cold enough for them to colonize. So the aliens are accelerating the passage of time until Earth has cooled down enough to be comfortable. If they’re lucky, humanity will have died out by then, too.”

  “Right, okay,” Edward typed. “So how do we stop them?” He wasn’t interested in the details. He was tired of being a passive observer. He was spoiling for a fight. But the man—whether out of stoicism or because of some gap in his programming—didn’t answer him.

  Tens of thousands of years slid by. With oceans covering the land masses, mankind evolved a society that lived entirely aloft in massive dirigibles made from whale skins sewn together and inflated with hot air. Edward left his high tower and joined a band of aerial buccaneers, and together they cruised the jetstream, miles above the glittering seas, preying on smaller craft. For food they dragged the oceans with massive nets and snared seabirds from the endless flocks that darkened the skies. They flew jury-rigged gliders made of bamboo harvested from the peaks of the Himalayas, the only mountains that still poked their tips up above the water.

  After a while he forgot all about the alien invasion. After all, he reasoned, from his point of view, within the accelerated time-stream, he had millions of years to go before they would even begin to be a threat. He could go on like this practically forever—bronzed by the sun, knife clenched between his teeth, living by his wits, caring for nothing.

  THEN ONE MORNING Edward woke up feeling better. His sinuses were clear. His head had returned to its normal size. The dull yellow scrim of fever had lifted.

  In fact, he felt fabulous, if a little light-headed. His momentum was back, and with interest. My God, he’d wasted so much time! It had rained torrentially the night before, and the sky was still overcast. The air smelled moist, and the day had a freshly washed look to it, as if it had been vigorously scrubbed with a steel brush. Edward showered, dressed, and did ten push-ups.

  He picked up the phone and dialed Margaret’s number. No answer, as usual. No problem. A quick search online yielded her address in Brooklyn.

  Bounding out the door, he felt—for no particular reason, and despite quite a few reasons to the contrary—relaxed and happy and refreshed. Purged. It was the first time he’d left his apartment in a week, and he was exploding with energy. Armed with a bundle of newsprint—the New York Times, the Journal, the Financial Times—to bring him up to speed on the world at large, he jogged down the steps to the 6 train. An hour later he reemerged, blinking, in Brooklyn.

  Zeph was exaggerating when he said Edward had never been to Brooklyn, but not by much. Apart from a night or two of artsy slumming in Williamsburg, and one accidental detour the wrong way down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he’d almost never crossed the East River. He looked around at a sinister cityscape of brownstones and row houses receding away from him in all directions at strange off-angles, and he wished he’d thought to bring a map. Clearly he was in foreign territory, terra incognita, way outside the easy Cartesian grid of Manhattan. The streets were leafier, with a ginkgo or some other hardy urban flora planted every twenty yards, and dirtier.

  When he finally found Margaret’s building, he had another problem: She wasn’t in it. He rang her bell for a good five minutes with no answer. It was midafternoon. The strolling mommies and elderly stoop-sitters scrutinized him, then looked away when he looked back. Staring up at what he assumed to be her window, Edward felt anger infecting his sunny postrecovery mood. How dare she disappear on him now! Was she just going to cut him off like this? Was she even in town? Had she lost interest in the codex? Or had she left him behind to go off on her own, pursuing some more promising lead?

  In the end he wedged a note under her door and got back on the train. Somewhere around Soho he realized he was ravenous—he hadn’t had a real meal in days—so he got out and ate a huge late-afternoon lunch sitting at the counter in a cheap Japanese diner in Chinatown. He watched as a short, wide man with a shaved head and strangler’s arms cooked dumplings in a frying pan the size of a manhole cover. He thought about Zeph and Caroline—he’d been ignoring their calls the way Margaret was ignoring his. He called Margaret on his cell phone, but she didn’t answer. The hell with her, he thought. He was having a fine old time without her. He called Zeph and Caroline, but they didn’t answer, and that was fine, too. He didn’t feel like talking. Talking would just lead to explanations, and discussions, and sober evaluations, and stock-taking, and other things he wasn’t in the mood for.

  By that time it was getting dark, so he took the subway up to Union Square and saw a pointless action movie about CIA assassins. Then he stayed for another one about good-looking teenage surfers, and by the time he got out it was almost midnight. On his way back to the subway he stopped at a bar that was barely wider than its front door, with a cheap-looking papier-mache dragon hanging from the ceiling, and ordered vodka gimlets—the favored drink of the CIA assassin from movie number one—until he was drunk. Then it was late and somehow he’d teleported onto the subway platform. A team of men and women in fluorescent vests hosed down the platform, and the air smelled comfortably of warm, soapy water. A blind Chinese woman picked out “The Girl from Ipanema” on a hammered dulcimer. A gray pigeon floated by weaving hopelessly between the pillars, a lost soul trapped in the underworld.

  Tomorrow Margaret will call, Edward thought. Tomorrow I’ll get back on track. Staring dreamily at the lights that glittered far down in the subway tunnel, he felt like he was gazing into the secret, jeweled interior of the eart
h.

  BUT MARGARET didn’t call, and Edward didn’t get back on track. Instead he spent five thousand dollars on an expensive laptop, a tiny technological masterpiece: black, wicked-looking, nearly weightless, and so thin it seemed almost occult—it felt like it was constructed out of the chitin of some monstrous black tropical beetle. He bought a high-tech laptop case for it, too, made of black synthetic gel-filled fabric, and he started carrying it around with him. Its function, as he saw it, was to maximize the efficient use of his increasingly abundant free time. Whenever he had the urge—in a café, on the subway, sitting on a park bench—he would crack it open, boot it up, and play MOMUS.

  After a certain point, though, he got stuck. Times had changed since his days as a high-flying buccaneer of the jetstream. The cooling of the earth continued, and with it yet another age had arrived, an ice age. A secondary phenomenon was accelerating the process, too. In the sky, next to the sun, hung a ghostly circle. It was almost transparent—it was visible only along its round edge, which was defined by a slight but definite distortion in the air. As Edward watched, the disk’s edge touched the edge of the sun and began to pass over it. The disk was slowly eclipsing it, sliding into place on top of it like a contact lens over an eye. The portion of the sun that it covered was whiter, paler, colder, less painful to look at.

  The genteel man reappeared.

  “It’s the aliens,” he explained matter-of-factly. “They’re covering the sun with a special lens. To accelerate the cooling,” he added helpfully.

  From then on the sunlight changed, became colder and grayer. Clouds rushed in, low and white, and the temperature dropped. Light, powdery snow began sifting down from the sky. The humans now eked out an existence among the cold ruins of New York, which had survived improbably intact during the millennia the city spent under sand and water. Civilization had fallen good and hard, and it wasn’t getting up.

  Edward’s role in the game had become less that of a military leader and more that of a mayor, or a tribal chieftain. The humans who inhabited the New York of the future weren’t concerned with resisting an alien invasion. They were concerned with staying alive on a day-to-day basis. They lived underground in the subway stations, where it was warmer and they were safer from predators. His job was resource management: finding food, collecting firewood, building tools, salvaging supplies from office buildings. He micromanaged, breaking out the spreadsheets and the actuarial tables. It was almost like his old job. As he played he manically hummed the theme from an animated Christmas special:

  Friends call me Snowmeiser

  Whatever I touch

  Turns to snow in my clutch—

  I’m too much!

  Edward would stay up all night playing MOMUS and finally force himself to quit at eight in the morning, in broad daylight, with morning rush hour in full swing under his window. If he could have billed the hours he spent playing MOMUS, he thought, he’d be a millionaire ten times over. When he finally closed his eyes he saw the game on the insides of his eyelids, and when he finally fell asleep he dreamed about it.

  Life in the game mimicked the bleakness of his real life. Wolves had returned from wherever they’d been living during happier times, and now they prowled the streets in search of the old and feeble, pink tongues dangling from gray muzzles. Icebergs as tall as skyscrapers crowded into New York Harbor. In Central Park the ground was hard as iron and streaked with light, powdery snow. The only color was the trace of blue that showed through where the snow had formed low drifts, which the wind blew into the shape of breaking waves. Edward knew where he was now, knew it with a bizarre, delusional certainty. He was in Cimmeria.

  17

  EDWARD’S PHONE RANG, and messages were left, but never by Margaret. He’d called her often enough now that it was pointless to call her again, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Her phone numbers (he’d managed to pry an office number for her out of a stuttering secretary at Columbia) felt like his sole connection to anything that mattered. He was feeling the pull of the codex again, more than ever, and he needed her to find it, and he missed her, too. Was she embarrassed by what happened at the library? Angry? Ashamed? At this point he didn’t care, he just wanted an answer.

  He was sitting on his couch noodling aimlessly on a guitar he’d never learned to play when the phone rang again. His answering machine picked up.

  It wasn’t Margaret. The voice was clear, sensuously sweet, and oddly ageless, neither young nor old. He snapped awake, and every nerve in his body fired at once. It belonged, unmistakably, to the Duchess of Bowmry. It seemed like the first real sound he’d heard in weeks.

  The Duchess seemed nonplussed—she didn’t seem to really understand that the answering machine wasn’t a human being. He picked up.

  “Edward,” she said, flustered. “You’re there.”

  “Yes.” He was wearing only his boxers, and he looked around for some pants to put on. It seemed wrong to address her while looking down at his pale, bristly legs. “Uh, Your Grace,” he added.

  “You don’t have to call me that, you know. Peter insists on it, but I never got used to it. Growing up I was just a baroness.”

  He sat back down, still in his underwear.

  “So—Baroness Blanche?”

  “I was called Lady Blanche.”

  He waited for some clue as to what she wanted, but nothing came.

  “So are you a baroness of...somewhere in particular?” he hazarded. “Or just a baroness? I mean, not that you could ever be just a baroness—?”

  “Of Feldingswether,” she said. “It’s a horrible little place. I never visit. They make tennis rackets there, the whole town smells like varnish.”

  “So how did that work when you got married? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. Did you have to give up being Baroness of—?”

  “Of Feldingswether? Not at all.” She laughed. “One person can hold more than one title, thank God, so I’m Baroness of Feldingswether in my own right and Duchess of Bowmry by courtesy.”

  “And so is your husband the Baron of Feldingswether by courtesy?” Edward asked, manically following the logic to its bitter end. He didn’t seem to be able to shut up.

  “Certainly not!” she said triumphantly. “Men don’t automatically assume their wives’ titles the way women do. That’s why if you marry a king you’re a queen, but the husband of the queen of England gets fobbed off with some silly little title like ‘prince consort.’ Anyway, it’s all very complicated.”

  “So what should I call you?”

  “Call me Blanche,” she said. “It’s what my friends call me.”

  Edward did. To his surprise he and the Duchess had a long, meandering, fairly pleasant, and utterly ordinary conversation. He could hardly believe it was happening. She could have been a friendly aunt—affable, voluble, slightly flirtatious, a world-class conversationalist, obviously the product of centuries of breeding and decades of training. True, there was a slightly manic quality to her speech, but at least it had the advantage of making up for any awkwardness on his part. She had obviously set out to charm him, and even if the gesture felt a little forced, he wasn’t in any position to put up a fight. Before he knew it he was explaining about his job, about his vacation, about his plans for the future, such as they were, and she had the gift of making it all seem improbably fascinating. It was a relief to talk to somebody who—unlike, say, Margaret—knew how to make him feel paid attention to for a change. And so what if she was an enigmatic foreign plutocrat?

  She steered the talk around to Edward’s upcoming move to London, to the vagaries of air travel, the various neighborhoods he might consider living in, the relative advantages and disadvantages of country life over life in the city, and so on and so forth. She told a long and actually fairly humorous story about renovating an ancient garderobe at Weymarshe. In the background Edward heard the yip yip of a tiny dog jumping up and down for attention.

  Inevitably they came around to the subject of the codex.
He told her the story of his and Margaret’s trip to the Chenoweth Annex, and their disappointment there—leaving out the part about his close encounter with the Duke’s driver. She sighed.

  “I sometimes wonder if it’s real.” The Duchess sounded tired. “The Viage, that is. It was once, I feel sure, but do you think the poor thing has really survived all this time? Books can die so many ways, they’re like people that way. Though they remind me of mollusks, too—hard on the outside, but with those delicate articulated innards...”

  She sighed again.

  “This is going very badly, Edward. We’re running out of time.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” Edward could hear the concern in her voice, and he imagined her pale brow furrowing. “We’ve pretty much exhausted all our leads.”

  “What about Margaret? She sounds very clever.”

  “She is. But she...I don’t know where she is. I haven’t heard from her in days.”

  “What’s she like?” A hint of something—could it possibly be jealousy?—crept into her voice. “Can we trust her? I just love the idea of her—she sounds like a cross between Stephen Hawking and Nancy Drew.”

  “She’s a hard person to read.” Edward felt guilty talking about Margaret behind her back, but really, why not? What did he owe Margaret, anyway? “She’s very serious. Very earnest. A little strange. But she’s read practically everything anybody’s ever written about anything.”

  “She sounds intimidating.”