Analog SFF, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  No finer epitaph was ever written.

  He was the education of Europe. Ptolemy's Almagest. The Physics of Aristotle and his Meteorology, On the Heavens and the Earth, On Generation and Corruption, the Posterior Analytics, Euclid's Elements, The Geometry of the Three Brothers, Galen's Medical Art, ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine, al-Razi's Book of Divisions. A dozen astronomical texts, seventeen on mathematics and optics, fourteen on logic and natural philosophy, twenty-four on medicine. Did that man never sleep?

  Hardly ever; but the sun does grow long and a man's eyes are not what they once were. Reading glasses are a hundred years yet to come, and the toll is telling in squints and headaches, and one day Gerard rubs the bridge of his nose and considers his bed.

  The candle gutters. The sun has touched the rim of the Toledo hills. Hermann has gone, and John. He is alone in the scriptorium. Books whisper from pigeonholes racked upon the walls. The toll of the Angelus drifts through the windows with the breeze. Gerard reaches out, fingers poised to pinch the candle flames.

  But, no. Perhaps one more, something to read before sleep. He scans the shadow-gathered room, spies a dusty bin in an ill-lit corner. He goes to it and finds there a folio written on brittle papyrus. But the writing is Greek, not Arabic, and he sighs because Greek is not his strength. He closes the cover, almost puts it back. Yet ... Greek can be translated using verbum de verbo, its word order being much like Latin. So, why not?

  He carries the volume back to his desk. On such whims, turn worlds.

  His lips move as he reads the title. Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle, by John Philoponus, and he laughs. John “the Work-lover"? He thinks he might have enjoyed this man's company.

  Gerard has already teased the text of the Physics from amidst ibn Rushd's Arabic commentary, but copyist errors multiply like loaves and fishes, and the Arabic had come from the Syriac, which had come from the Greek. How many stumbles of the pen on that journey? Now here is a Greek commentary on the same text. He can check the Philoponus against the ibn Rushd and thereby synthesize a more accurate version of the Aristotle. He reads further and sees that Philoponus has dedicated his work to...

  Justinian, emperor of the Romans.

  A cold hand seizes Gerard's belly when he reads that. Age wafts from the text as the breeze off an Alpine glacier. The Goths had ruled Italy when these words were written. The Hagia Sophia was new, and Mohammed not yet born. Yet, Aristotle was as distant to Philoponus as Philoponus is to him. Gerard feels suddenly the gaping depth of time; and hears the echo of a long, slow dialogue whispered across the ages.

  He impales a fresh candle on the sconce and begins to read. This first pass will be to grasp the gist of the book (and he will note difficult passages as he reads) but it is also for pleasure. A few chapters, then to bed.

  But the candle stub finds him hunched over his copy desk, brow furrowed, a knuckle caught in his teeth. Philoponus’ thesis is clear.

  Aristotle is full of crap.

  Gerard suddenly imagines a new volume. A disputatio. He will couple this work with Aristotle's recovered text into a gigantic sort of Sic et non. Let the two old Greeks wrestle between the covers—and the Latins would judge the winner. He scrapes a sheet of palimpsest clean with his razor, dips his quill into the ink, and joins the dialogue.

  The sun is up and dozens of candles have lived and died and still Gerard writes, stopping now and then only for quick meals or fitful naps. By summer's fevered end, he will have finished and the manuscript will go to the copyists.

  Afterward, matters great and small progress pretty much as before.

  But, not quite.

  * * * *

  What happened after.

  Two hundred years have fled and Gerard is dust forgotten. The New Age is seized with enthusiasm for power. Water has been tamed, and the wind harnessed; and some dream of controlling the very gravity of the earth. Camshafts and overhead springs and newfangled cranks. Clocks have begun to toll the hours in the public squares of Europe. A new word has appeared: ingeniator—the engineer—and for the first time in history, a civilization does not cinch its saddle upon the sweating backs of slaves.

  It is Paris, it is the center of the world, and Jean Buridan de Bethune makes his way through the raucous stalls in the cathedral market place. Fishmongers cry, greengrocers hawk their produce, butchers whack great carcasses hung from hooks. A jongleur sings over his lute while his apprentice taps a small tambour. Pilgrims throng the square, pointing and chattering. The tower bell above the Church of Our Lady of Paris announces tierce, and Buridan, peering past the scaffolding that still adorns the cathedral's upper reaches, gauges the sun's position. He plunks some copper pennies on the bench and departs the poulterer's stall one goose the wealthier.

  Buridan himself is goose-plump, but he is a chimera: his nose evokes a horse, his lips a frog. He is an important man, Rector of the University of Paris—a great, sprawling guild of masters brooding like doves on that very left bank of the Seine where Abelard once taught. He has mastered every science known to man. He can recite the Physics of Aristotle—and explain where the Stagerite went wrong. Students flock to him with their fees, so that he has become that singular anomaly: a scholar with a full purse. He is the sort to whom legends cling like filings to a lodestone. Some say he once struck the Pope on the head with a shoe in a quarrel over a woman. Perhaps the story is even true; Buridan never denies it. The two had been students together at this very university; but he is past forty now, and gray flecks his temples. He no longer fights over women and counts himself fortunate even to find his shoe.

  At the Grand Bridge, he encounters Marcel Etienne, the clothier. A young man with smoldering eyes, suddenly heir to his grandfather's commercial empire, Etienne aspires to the office of Provost of the Grand Fraternity of Our Lady, and spends his time “beating the kettledrum” for votes among the merchants that sell there. Buridan finds himself trapped by the geometry of bridges.

  “Bad news from Flanders, Rector,” the merchant declares in lieu of greeting. “Van Artevelt and the cloth makers have risen up and the price of your new cloak will rise up with them."

  Buridan lifts the goose's head from its leather bag. “Do you hear, my old? Master Etienne demands more for my cloak because some weavers in Flanders have gone out."

  The goose remains noncommittal; the clothier does not. What do Arts Masters know of money and trade! Etienne waves a hand, encompassing all of commerce and politics. “For three years now,” he explains, “Edward has cut them off from the English wool, which as all men know is the best wool to be had. Now the weavers have gone to the streets to declare him the rightful king of France.” Etienne wags a finger with the assurance of youth. “Mark me, Master Buridan. This will be Edward's casus belli. Soon, English ships appear off Sluis and seize Flanders. What then, the price of your cloak?"

  There is more. Etienne's verbal carnivale runs from the “Matins of Bruges,” through the Battle of the Golden Spurs, to the white heron served to the king. He recounts how, following the Revolution, the Flemings had traded exigent guild masters for Count Guy, then Count Guy for King Philip. Now, languishing under the oppressions and taxes of the French crown, they seek the English to rid them of the French.

  Buridan thinks the Flemings slow learners. He pleads another appointment and escapes Etienne's lecture. Everyone, it seems, would be king of France: Valois, Navarre, Burgundy, now Plantagenet. He thinks that if there is a war, Valois will call on his vassal, the Duke of Aquitaine, to fight his enemy, the King of England, and he laughs because Edward Plantagenet holds both titles.

  The waters of the Seine are choked with floating mills—sixty-eight between Bar Street and the eastern tip of the Isle of Our Lady—and Buridan pauses at the parapet of the Grand Bridge to watch the wheels splash and turn and the water sparkle in the sun. The prospect is at once restful and invigorating. The mills are moored under the arches, where the current is stronger. Thirteen churn under the Grand Bridge alone. Beneath his fee
t mill stones rumble, saws rasp, fulling hammers thud.

  A stocky man in a dusty cloak brushes past him with two apprentices in his wake. The apprentices carry a large wooden cam slung on a pole across their shoulders. They clamber down the broad stone stairs that lead from the bridge to the riverside, where a miller steps forth from one of the floating mills to welcome them. Consumed by a sudden curiosity, Buridan follows.

  Nor is he alone. The ingeniator has attracted a small crowd, as men find ever in the labor of others a reason to desist from their own. However, the miller expels all bystanders from the mill, save only “my sir, the Rector” and a man and woman of bourgeois mien. These two, as polite introductions reveal, are members of the Anonymous Civil Society of the Mills of the Seine, and between them they hold seven of the eight “shares” of this particular mill. The miller himself is but their hireling.

  That worthy stands by, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “What we really need is an overshot,” he tells Buridan, as if in confidence. “An overshot wheel delivers more of the power of the current, but tell the Town Council that! It would not close the channel of the navigation, no, my sir. It wants a small dam only, but—” But the ingeniator calls on him to stop the grindstone, if he would please, so that work might proceed on his by-Our-Lady improvements. So the miller and his apprentice heave on a mighty wooden lever to disengage the crown gear. Gears shift, disengage—and the grindstone continues to roll for a time before coming to a stop.

  Buridan has often seen such posterior motion—or momentum, to use the Latin. Aristotle thought it a great mystery how a thing might move after parting contact with the mover; but modern science has found the answer in the impetus. Yet he considers that circular motion is not natural to the sublunar region, belonging rather to the celestial realm, where the planetary stars...

  “Holy Blue!” he cries. “And yet they still move!"

  All of them—ingeniator, miller, apprentice, shareholders—stare in amazement as Rector and goose fly from the mill to his lodgings on the Left Bank.

  * * * *

  At sept, Albrecht of Saxony finds Buridan in his quarters, scribbling fiercely. He does not interrupt his teacher, but proceeds to the fireplace, where the wood is green and not burning well. He finds a bellows to blast the fire, but it is flat and, pull as he might on the handles, he cannot extend it. Albrecht is a young man of twenty, a most promising student, with fine features and hair like tow. His fingers taper delicately and his nose is long and thin.

  Albrecht throws the instrument down. “There is something wrong with your bellows,” he tells Buridan, but the master continues to scribble, pausing only to wave the quill over his head to show that he has heard. Albrecht shrugs, finds a sufflator, and takes it outside and down the stairs to fill it with water. The sufflator is cast of brass in the form of a human head with its lips pursed and cheeks blown out, like the boreal figures that represent the winds. By the rain barrel, he checks that the mouth-plug still dangles from the end of its chain. “You, at least, will answer,” he tells the head.

  “In his own good time,” says Nicole Oresme, who has just arrived and has paused before climbing the stairs to Buridan's quarters, “much like our Master.” Nicole is the complement to the Saxon. A Norman blockhead, he sometimes calls himself—unfairly, because his head is more sphere than block, the perfection of its curves spoilt only by the undershot chin. “Why did you fetch only the one head? Two heads are better than one. Wait, I'll get the other."

  Albrecht watches him scamper up the stairs two at a time. Nicole is obnoxiously precocious. At fourteen, he has only this year achieved adulthood, yet he shines already a star in the academic heavens. Worse, he knows it.

  The Saxon turns to the rain barrel and puts the funnel between the sufflator's pursed lips.

  “You know what that looks like, don't you?” Nicole is on the landing above him, a second sufflator in his hand.

  Albrecht does not look up. “I think you've told me once or twice."

  “Like it's performing fellatio."

  “Or thrice. Don't you plan to become a priest or something?"

  “Not yet. Has the Englishman come?"

  Albrecht jams the stopper into the sufflator's mouth, giving it an extra rap to make sure it is tight. “Not yet. The Mastah went himself this morning out, and fo’ the dinnah bought a goose. Cook has it now.” Being a Saxon, Albrecht sometimes drops his final—er and twists his long o's and u's into peculiar diphthongs. This gives his Latin a whimsical inflection, whence the passive voice of his verbs masquerades oft as the dative of their participles.

  Oresme makes a show of sniffing the air. “Will it be ready in time? Will one goose feed four?"

  “If not, you may fast as a penance for your vulgarity."

  In answer, Nicole puffs his cheeks out and blows hard on the finger he has stuck in his mouth. Albrecht cries, “Catch!” And he throws the sufflator, now full of water, like a Scotsman hurling a stone, taking the younger man off his guard.

  Nicole is near-sighted. He fumbles for the head one-handedly and in so doing loses his grip on the other, and both sufflators seek their natural place, landing at the Saxon's feet.

  The young Norman scampers down the stairs. “Look what you made me do!” he complains. “If you've busted the master's brass balls..."

  But both are whole. A relief! Albrecht fills them and, this time places the one in Nicole's arms as gently as a nurse returning a mother's newborn. The other, he carries himself. On his way up the stairs, he glances down at the place where the brass heads had struck, and purses his own lips in unconscious imitation.

  * * * *

  If the world does turn on itself with a diurnal motion, as Buridan and others suspect it may, it makes precious little noise in doing so. The hinges of the world must be well greased, for it turns over always in quiet moments. It turned over once when Gerard of Cremona picked up his pen. It turns over again when Jean Buridan de Bethune puts his down; and maybe there is just the slightest creak when he does. If there has ever been such a creak, it is then, it is there, in that room.

  Possem enit dici, he has written, quod quando deus creavit sphaeras coelestes, ipse incepit movere unamquamque earum sicut voluit; et tunc ab impetus quam dedit eis, moventur adhuc, quia ille impetus non corrumpitur nec diminuitur, cum non habent resistentiam.

  Or to put the matter more plainly: A body set in motion will continue in that motion if it meets no resistance.

  There. In a few strokes of the pen he has disenchanted the heavens. There is no need to suppose the celestial spheres filled with Aristotle's “fifth element,” the quint essence, whose natural motion is circular. No need to distinguish celestial from sublunar physics. Since God created the heavens and the earth, the same forms that account for earthly motions may also account for those of the heavens. Uniform motion above, where there is no resistance, difform motion below, where there is.

  “After leaving the arm of the thrower,” he tells his students, “the projectile is moved by an impetus proportional to the body's weight and speed. The body will continue to be moved so long as this impetus remains stronger than the resistance, and, the impetus being permanent, motion will be of infinite duration if it be not corrupted nor diminished by a contrary force resisting it, or by one inclining it to a contrary motion."

  Nicole bounces with excitement. “Then you don't need the Stagerite's Intelligences to keep the spheres turning!"

  Buridan shrugs eloquently. Aristotle is full of crap, his shoulders say. If the Stagerite was wrong on matters of theology, as a Bishop of Paris once decreed, then might he not also be wrong on matters of the physics? “As my own master was fond of saying,” he tells his students, “we ought not call upon entities we do not need. One might assume that there are many more separate substances than there are even celestial spheres and celestial motions, and invoke whole legions of angels to move them...” He waves his arms grandly at this. “...but this cannot be demonstrated by arguments origina
ting from the senses, and the philosophy of nature demands always that our arguments be sensible."

  Albrecht glances toward the stairway with a contemplative look and his lips part, as if to speak, but the young Norman pipes up. “The world is a gigantic clock that God set in motion at the Creation and runs now by itself!"

  “The machina mundi,” Buridan repeats the common phrase, “runs by the laws of nature set by nature's God."

  Albrecht smiles. “A clockwork world? Ach, that has right. The Lord has better things to do than spinning planetary spheres. Saving Nickl's soul wants his full attention."

  Oresme tries to knock Albrecht's cap off, but is defeated by the Saxon's height. He settles for making a fig with his left hand. “But master,” the young man says, “according to the Stagerite, velocity is the ratio of the motive force to the resisting force. So without resistance, speed must be instantaneous, and a body would be in two places in the same instant, which is impossible."

  “Which alone tells us that Aristotle was mistaken,” Buridan comments. “Albrecht, would you explain for our bachelor?"

  “Internal resistance, yngling,” the Saxon replies with a swat, easily ducked, toward the Norman's head. “All material bodies are compösed of elements in various proportions; so that in part they fall and in other parts, rise. Thus, a falling body will from its own airy or fiery parts resistance encountah, even in...” His voice trails off at the end. “...a void."

  “Should a void exist,” Buridan adds the usual disclaimer. “This ‘intrinsic resistance’ makes it difficult to start a heavy body into violent motion.” He waves his hand. “The external resistance from the air, pfft! For a heavy body, it is nothing. No, lad, a body resting wants to remain so, by an inner nature which we call ‘inertia.’ Or ‘ideleness.’”

  “Like Albert? It's hard to get ‘Farm-boy’ moving, too!"

  Buridan smiles. “Albertus!” he says, because the lean Saxon has not responded to the jape. “You are not listening! What engages that subtle mind of yours?"