by Tim Powers
Doyle shook his head sharply and closed the book again. That’s how you know you’re tired, he told himself: when a guy a century dead seems about to wink at you out of a picture. Never happened with Coleridge.
He tucked the book into his briefcase next to the book he’d brought along to serve as his credentials—it was The Nigh-Related Guest, a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Brendan Doyle. He had wanted to follow it with a lengthy study of the Lake Poets, but the reviews of the Guest, and its sales, had caused his editor at the Devriess University Press to suggest he pursue, as the editor had put it, “a more uncharted sort of territory. I’ve admired,” the editor had gone on, “your two articles in the PMLA that attempted, with some success, to make sense of the murky verse of William Ashbless. Perhaps a biography of that odd poet would strike the critics—and the college librarians!—as a more ground-breaking piece of work.”
Well, thought Doyle as he closed his briefcase, unless I resort to outright fiction, it looks like it will be a damned short piece of work.
The plane was descending, and when he yawned his ears popped. Forget Ashbless for now. Whatever Darrow is paying you twenty thousand for, it has to do with Coleridge.
He had another sip of the scotch, and hoped fervently that the job didn’t also have to do with planchettes or Ouija boards or any such stuff. He’d once seen a book of poems supposed to have been dictated by the ghost of Shelley, through a medium, and he half-suspected that this DIRE job might be a similar enterprise. He wondered, too, whether twenty thousand dollars might be enough to make him abandon his professional integrity and participate. He drained the cup, as the plane seemed to be about to touch down.
It was certainly an odd coincidence to be hearing so much of DIRE lately. A month ago they’d offered a job to Steerforth Benner, the most brilliant English Literature graduate student Doyle had ever had. Doyle remembered being mildly surprised to hear from Benner that DIRE was still in existence. Doyle knew of the company, of course—from small beginnings in the 1930s, it had become, under the shrewd guidance of its colorful founder, a pillar of American scientific industry rivalling IBM and Honeywell. They’d been very big in things like the space program and undersea exploration, and during the 60s, Doyle recalled, they were always sponsoring Shakespeare plays on television without commercial interruptions. But the company had withdrawn from the public eye during the 70s, and Doyle had read somewhere—in the National Enquirer, he believed it was—that J. Cochran Darrow had learned he had cancer, and after exhausting all the scientific possibilities of a cure, had tried to turn the resources of DIRE toward the occult, in the hope of finding a cure in the dubious annals of magic. Newsweek had only noted that DIRE was laying off most of its personnel and closing down their production centers, and Doyle remembered a Forbes article, titled something like “DIRE Straits,” about the sudden worthlessness of their stock.
And then Benner was approached by them and offered a high-paying, though unspecified, position. Over a pitcher of beer one night Benner had told Doyle about all the tests he was taking in order to qualify: tests for alertness under fatigue and distraction, physical endurance and agility, quick comprehension of complicated logic problems… and even a few tests which struck Doyle as distasteful, the purpose of which seemed to be to measure Benner’s capacity for ruthlessness. Benner had passed them all, and though he did tell Doyle afterward that he’d been accepted for the position, he completely, though amiably as ever, evaded all questions about the job itself.
Well, Doyle thought as, sounding distant through the insulation, the wheels yelped against the runway, maybe I’m about to learn what Benner wouldn’t tell me.
The guard unlocked the gate and took Doyle’s suitcase from the driver, who nodded politely and walked back toward the purring BMW. Doyle took a deep breath and stepped through, and the guard locked the gate behind him.
“Good to have you with us, sir,” the man recited, his voice raised to be heard over the roaring of diesel engines. “If you’ll follow me, please.”
The lot was more expansive than it had looked from the street, and the guard led him on a looping course to stay out of the way of intimidating obstacles. Big yellow earth-moving tractors lurched and shifted from place to place, popping head-sized stones to dust under their mill wheel tires and sending up an unholy clattering roar as they pushed quantities of rubble into big heaps and then pushed these away somewhere out in the darkness; the rubble, Doyle noted, was fresh, the broken edges of stone still white and sharp-smelling. And there were busy people hurrying about on foot, too, laying out thick power cables and peering through surveying instruments and calling numbers to each other over walkie-talkies. The ring of bright spotlights cast a half-dozen shadows from every object.
The guard was six feet tall and taking long strides, and the shorter Doyle, having to jog occasionally to keep up, was soon puffing and wheezing. What’s the goddamn hurry, he wondered angrily; though at the same time he promised himself that he’d start doing sit-ups and push-ups in the mornings again. A battered old aluminum trailer stood at the periphery of the glare, moored to the activity by cables and telephone lines, and this proved to be their destination. The guard hopped up the three steps to the door and knocked, and when someone inside shouted, “Come in!” he stepped down and waved Doyle ahead. “Mr. Darrow will speak to you inside.”
Doyle walked up the steps, opened the door and went in. The inside of the trailer was littered with books and charts, some looking old enough to belong in a museum and others obviously brand new; all were clearly in use, the charts covered with penciled notes and colored pins, and the books, even the oldest and most fragile, propped carelessly open and marked up with felt-pen ink. An old man stood up from behind one of the taller book stacks, and Doyle was impressed in spite of himself to recognize, from a hundred pictures in magazines and newspapers over the years, J. Cochran Darrow. Doyle had been prepared to humor a wealthy but sick and almost certainly senile old man, but all such thoughts evaporated before the man’s piercing and frostily humorous gaze.
Though the hair was whiter and scantier than recent photographs had shown, the cheeks a little hollower, Doyle had no difficulty in believing that this was the man who had pioneered more fields of scientific research than Doyle could probably even spell, and, out of a small-town sheet-metal factory, built a financial empire that made J. Pierpont Morgan look merely successful.
“You’re Doyle, I hope,” he said, and the famous deep voice had not deteriorated at all.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Darrow stretched and yawned. “‘Scuse.me, long hours. Sit down, any space you can find. Brandy?”
“Sounds fine to me.” Doyle sat down on the floor beside a knee-high stack of books on which Darrow a moment later set two paper cups and a pear-shaped bottle of Hennessey. The old man sat down cross-legged on the other side of the stack, and Doyle was mortified to note that Darrow didn’t have to suppress a grunt in lowering himself to the floor. Lots of push-ups and sit-ups, he vowed.
“I imagine you’ve speculated on the nature of this job,”
Darrow said, pouring the cognac, “and I want you to ditch whatever conclusions you’ve come up with. It’s got nothing to do with any of them. Here.” He handed Doyle a cup. “You know about Coleridge, do you?”
“Yes,” Doyle answered cautiously.
“And you know about his times? What was going on in London, in England, in the world?”
“Reasonably well, I think.”
“And by know, son, I don’t mean do you have books at home on these things or would you know where to look ‘em up in the UCLA library. I mean know ‘em in your head, which is more portable. Answers still yes?”
Doyle nodded.
“Tell me about Mary Wollstonecraft. The mother, not the one who wrote Frankenstein.”
“Well, she was an early feminist, wrote a book called, let’s see, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, I think, and—”
“W
ho’d she marry?”
“Godwin, Shelley’s father-in-law. She died in childb—”
“Did Coleridge really plagiarize Schlegel?”
Doyle blinked. “Uh, yes. Obviously. But I think Walter Jackson Bate is right in blaming it more on—”
“When did he start up on the opium?”
“When he was at Cambridge, I think, early 1790s.”
“Who was the—” Darrow began, but was interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. The old man swore, got up and went over to the phone and, lifting the receiver, resumed what was obviously an argument in progress about particles and lead sheathing.
Both from politeness and lack of interest, Doyle made a show of being curious about a nearby book stack—and a moment later his interest became wide-eyed genuine, and very carefully he lifted the top volume.
He opened it, and his half-incredulous suspicion was confirmed—it was the Journal of Lord Robb, which Doyle had been vainly begging the British Museum for a xerox copy of for a year. How Darrow could have got actual possession of it was unguessable. Though Doyle had never seen the volume, he’d read descriptions of it and knew what it was. Lord Robb had been an amateur criminologist, and his journal was the only source of some of the most colorful, and in many cases implausible, crime stories of the 1810s and 20s; among its tales of kill-trained rats, revenges from beyond the grave, and secret thief and beggar brotherhoods, it contained the only detailed account of the capture and execution of the semi-legendary London murderer known as Dog-Face Joe, popularly believed to have been a werewolf, who reputedly could exchange bodies with anyone he chose but was unable to leave behind the curse of lycanthropy. Doyle had wanted to link this story somehow with the Dancing Ape Madness, at least to the extent of the kind of speculative footnote that’s mainly meant to show how thoroughly the author has done his homework. When Darrow hung up the phone Doyle closed the book and laid it back on the stack, making a mental note to ask the old man later for a copy of the thing. Darrow sat down again beside the book stack with the cups and bottle on it, and picked up right where he’d left off. For the next twenty minutes he fired questions at Doyle, hopping from subject to subject and rarely allowing him time to amplify—though occasionally he would demand every detail Doyle knew about some point; questions on the causes and effects of the French Revolution, the love life of the British Prince Regent, fine points of dress and architecture, differences in regional dialects. And what with Doyle’s good memory and his recent Ashbless researches, he managed to answer nearly all of them. Finally Darrow leaned back and fished a pack of unfiltered cigarettes out of his pocket. “Now,” he said as he lit one and drew deeply on it, “I want you to fake an answer.”
“Fake one?”
“Right. We’re in a roomful of people, let’s say, and several of ‘em probably know more about literature than you do, but you’re being billed as the resident expert, so you’ve got to at least look like you know everything. So somebody asks you, uh, ‘Mr. Doyle, to what extent, in your opinion, was Wordsworth influenced by the philosophy expressed in the verse plays of, I don’t know, Sir Arky Malarkey?’ Quick!”
Doyle cocked an eyebrow. “Well, it’s a mistake, I think, to try to simplify Malarkey’s work that way; several philosophies emerge as one traces the maturing of his thought. Only his very late efforts could possibly have appealed to Wordsworth, and as Fletcher and Cunningham point out in their Concordium there is no concrete evidence that Wordsworth ever actually read Malarkey. I think when trying to determine the philosophies that affected Wordsworth it would be more productive to consider—” He stopped, and grinned uncertainly at Darrow. “And then I could ramble indefinitely about how much he was influenced by the Rights of Man business in the French Revolution.”
Darrow nodded, squinting through the curling smoke. “Not too bad,” he allowed. “Had a guy in here this afternoon—Nostrand from Oxford, he’s editing a new edition of Coleridge’s letters—and he was insulted at the very idea of faking an answer.”
“Nostrand’s evidently more ethical than I am,” said Doyle a little stiffly.
“Evidently. Would you call yourself cynical?”
“No.” Doyle was beginning to get annoyed. “Look, you asked me if I could bluff my way out of a question, and so off the top of my head I had a try at it. I’m not in the habit, though, of claiming to know things I don’t. In print, or in class, I’m always willing to admit—”
Darrow laughed and raised a hand. “Easy, son, I didn’t mean that. Nostrand’s a fool, and I liked your bluff. What I meant was, are you cynical? Do you tend to reject new ideas if they resemble ideas you’ve already decided are nonsense?”
Here come the Ouija boards, Doyle thought. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly.
“What if somebody claimed to have incontrovertible proof that astrology works, or that there’s a lost world inside the earth, or that any of the other things every intelligent person knows are impossible, was possible? Would you listen?”
Doyle frowned. “It’d depend on who was claiming it. Probably not, though.” Oh well, he thought—I still get five thousand and a return ticket.
Darrow nodded, seemingly pleased. “You say what you think, that’s good. One old fraud I talked to yesterday would have agreed that the moon is one of God’s stray golf balls if I’d said it was. Hot for the twenty grand, he was. Well, let’s give you a shot. Time is short, and I’m afraid you’re the likeliest-looking Coleridge authority we’re going to get.”
The old man sighed, ran his fingers through his thinning hair, and then gave Doyle a hard stare. “Time,” he said solemnly, “is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curled around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant.” He paused to grind his cigarette out on an antique Moroccan binding.
Doyle was distinctly disappointed to get vague platitudes when he’d expected to have his credulity strained by wild revelations. Apparently there were a few stripped gears in the old man’s head after all. “Uh,” he said, feeling that some response was expected from him, “an interesting notion, sir.”
“Notion?” Now it was Darrow that was annoyed. “I don’t deal in notions, boy.” He lit another cigarette and spoke quietly but angrily, almost to himself. “My God, first I exhaust the entire structure of modern science—try to grasp that!—and then I spend years wringing the drops of truth out of… certain ancient writings, and testing the results and systematizing them, and then I have to browbeat, coerce, and in two cases even blackmail the boys at my chrono labs in Denver—the Quantum Theory lads, for God’s sake, supposed to be the most radically brilliant and elastic-minded scientists at work today—I have to force them to even consider the weird but dammit empirical evidence, and get them to whip it up into some practical shape—they did it, finally, and it required the synthesis of a whole new language, part non-Euclidean geometry, part tensor calculus and part alchemical symbols—and I get the findings, the goddamn most important discovery of my career, or anyone’s since 1916, I get the whole thing boiled down to one sentence of plain English… and do some pissant college teacher the favor of letting him hear it… and he thinks I’ve said ‘Life is but a dream,’ or ‘Love conquers all.’” He exhaled a lungfull of smoke in a long, disgusted hiss.
Doyle could feel his face getting red. “I’ve been trying to be polite, Mr. Darrow, and—”
“You’re right, Doyle, you’re not cynical. You’re just stupid.”
“Why don’t you just go to hell, sir?” said Doyle in a tone he forced to be conversational. “Skate there on your goddamn ice river, okay?” He got to his feet and tossed back the last of his brandy. “And you can keep your five thousand, but I’ll take the return ticket and a ride to the airport. Now.”
Darrow was still frowning, but the parchment skin around his eye
s was beginning to crinkle. Doyle, though, was too angry to sit down again. “Get old Nostrand back here and tell him about the water weeds and the rest of your crap,”
Darrow stared up at him. “Nostrand would be certain I was insane.”
“Then do it by all means—it’ll be the first time he was correct about anything.”
The old man was grinning. “He advised me against approaching you, by the way. Said all you were good for was rearranging other people’s research.”
Doyle opened his mouth to riposte furiously, then just sighed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “So calling you crazy would be his second correct statement.”
Darrow laughed delightedly. “I knew I wasn’t wrong about you, Doyle. Sit down, please.”
It would have been too rude to leave now that Darrow was refilling Doyle’s paper cup, so he complied, grinning a little sheepishly. “You do manage to keep a person off balance,” he remarked.
“I’m an old man who hasn’t slept in three days. You should have met me thirty years ago.” He lit still another cigarette. “Try to picture it, now; if you could stand outside the time river, on some kind of bank, say, and see through the ice, why then you could walk upstream and see Rome and Nineveh in their heydays, or downstream and see whatever the future holds.”
Doyle nodded. “So ten miles upstream you’d see Caesar being knifed, and eleven miles up you’d see him being born.”
“Right! Just as, swimming up a river, you come to the tips of trailing weeds before you come to their roots. Now—pay attention, this is the important part—sometime something happened to punch holes in the metaphorical ice cover. Don’t ask me how it happened, but spread out across roughly six hundred years there’s a… shotgun pattern of gaps, in which certain normal chemical reactions don’t occur, complex machinery doesn’t work … But the old systems we call magic do.” He gave Doyle a belligerent stare. “Try, Doyle, just try.”