“Cazzo!”
Somehow they had taken a wrong turn and were no longer on the main canal, had wandered instead into a ghost-passage, fog-swept, all but stagnant with disuse, walled in masonry finely-set and windowless, crossed by footbridges that seemed to belong less to the Christian North than to some more exotic faith, some collateral notion of what it might mean to cross between the worlds. Out in the middle of the glaring night, somewhere disguised in echo and phase-interference, chimes had begun to sound, a harmonicminor nocturne too desolately precise to be attributable to human timing and muscle-power, more likely one of the clockwork carillons peculiar to this part of Belgium, replacing a live carillonneur, whose art was said to be in decline. . . .
The town, once a thriving Hanseatic port, accessible from all corners of the Earth, strolled and swaggered through by beer-happy burghers and their opulently turned-out wives and daughters, grown rich from the wool business and trade with cities as far off as Venice, but since its channel to the sea silted up back in the 1400s, become like Damme and Sluis a place of silence and phantoms and watery daylight, nocturnal even at full noon, no watercraft to disturb the funereal calm of the canal surfaces. The odd thing was how swept and tidied the place looked. Not that sand, salt, and ghosts created much city grime. But somebody must be up and about, in the darkest hours, busily re-pointing the stone walls, hosing the narrow streets, replacing bolts in the under-bracing of the bridges. Creatures perhaps not entirely what we think of as human.
Drifting, as if permanently unmoored from the waking everyday, insomniacs had come out to stare, the orbits of their eyes struck to black when the fog parted to let in the all but unendurable moonlight. One shadow detached itself and approached, growing sharper and more solid as it came. Kit looked around. Rocco and Pino had vanished. “Now what ’n the hell?” The shadow was doing something with its hands.
Woevre. Here before him. Kit had been fleeing not away from but toward his own likely destruction.
A round went purring away, spattering his cheek with tiny stone fragments, the sound of the shot clattering among the ancient surfaces. He headed for the nearest cover, an archway under which anything could be waiting, calling out, “Shootin at the wrong fella!”
“No matter. You’ll do.” When the next shot came, Kit was crouched, his heart hammering, as far as he could tell behind cover. Maybe he was not the only target, or maybe Woevre was firing off rounds for the heck of it. The melancholy chiming continued.
Woevre stood unprotected in the nocturnal light, feeling an exaltation beyond anything he could remember, even from the days in Africa. He was no longer sure who it was he was shooting at, or how he had come here. It seemed somehow to be about the Italians in their manned torpedo, that was in the message which had come in to the office earlier in the day, but nothing like that stirred now in these bright empty canals. The activity of interest seemed to be in the sky.
Each time he risked a glance upward, it was there, directly above him, the thing he had been seeing for days, emerging now from the sky, from behind the sky, carrying the unidentified visitors he had seen walking along the Digue, as if they were in town on an organized mission.
He knew he must try to bring down the flying ship. He pocketed his Borchardt, and went fumbling for the weapon he had brought back from Brussels, with no idea even how to get the case open, much less use what was inside. He didn’t know if it needed to be charged somehow with ammunition. But these were details. He was who he was, and trusted his intuitiveness with any weapon when the moment came.
But Woevre had not really seen it before, at least not out in the night like this, in the pitiless moonlight. He was overcome with certainty that the device was conscious, regarding him, not particularly happy to be in his possession. It felt warm, and he sensed a fine vibration. How could that be? Gevaert had mentioned nothing. Had he?
“Jou moerskont!” he cried. It did no good, whatever language the weapon could be screamed at in, it was not Afrikaans, its provenance was too far from those forests, from those slow, fatal rivers. . . . Something flashed, blinding him for a moment, leaving his field of vision a luminous green. The sound accompanying was nothing he wanted to hear again, as if the voices of everyone he had ever put to death had been precisely, diabolically scored for some immense choir.
He looked up. He was somehow fallen, face upward on the pavement, struggling for breath, and the American was there, reaching down to help him to his feet.
“What happened old buddy, shoot yourself? Tricky piece of hardware there—”
“Take it. Take the fucking thing. I cannot bear it . . . this terrible light . . . Voetsak, voetsak!” He stumbled away, down the canal, across a bridge, into the neat walled intricacy of the dead town. Kit heard several more shots from that direction, and when the bells fell silent at last, and the cordite smoke had drifted all away, with the starers returned one by one to the fold of sleep, the moonlight grown oblique and metallic, Kit found himself alone with the enigmatic object, back inside its leather case. He slung it nonchalantly by its strap over one shoulder, meaning to have a look inside later.
KIT COULDN’T QUITE see the reason for all the fuss. But Umeki was soon spending hours with the instrument, her brow tensing and relaxing as if with sorrow and release from sorrow, as if gazing through the eyepiece at the unfolding of a prolonged, perhaps never-ending, dramatic performance from her own land. Whenever her eyes came away briefly from the instrument, they were unfocused, inflamed, as if subject to two sets of laws. Whenever Kit asked what was up, she answered at first in a low tobacco-stricken voice, at affecting length, in what he guessed must be Japanese.
Finally, “Right. First the mirrors—see, here, half-silvering, not on glass but on calcite, and this specimen—it’s so pure! Any light-ray entering immediately becomes a pair of rays—one ‘Ordinary,’ the other ‘Extraordinary.’ Arriving at one of these half-silvered backings, each ray then is part-reflected and part-transmitted—so, four possibilities—both rays reflected, both transmitted, one of each, and the other way around. The fatal number four—to a Japanese mind, literally fatal. Same character as for death. Perhaps how I got drawn to the Quaternions. Let us say each of the four states is associated with one of the four ‘dimensions’ of Minkowskian space-time—or, in a more trivial sense to the four cusps of the surface reciprocal to that of the wave, what Quaternionists call the index-surface. Perhaps we are meant to ignore the optics altogether, as if the rays were no longer doubly refracted, but doubly emitted, from whatever object we may observe through this . . . as if in the coconscious there were some counterpart to the Extraordinary Ray, and we were seeing with the eye of that unexplored realm.
“And that’s only the eyepiece.” She removed an access panel, reached in, appeared to perform some swift, fancy translations and rotations, and came out again holding a crystal about the size of a human eyeball. Kit took it and scrutinized each face closely.
“All these faces are equilateral.”
“Yes. This is a true icosahedron.”
“The regular solid, not a 12 + 8 like you’d find in pyrites, but— This is impossible. There’s no such—”
“Not impossible! To date, unidentified! And the sphere described through the twelve summits—”
“Wait. Don’t tell me. No ordinary sphere, right?” The object shimmered at him, as if winking. “Something like . . . a Riemann sphere.”
She beamed. “The realm of x + iy—we are in it! whether we want to be or not.”
“An imaginary icosahedron. Swell.” Trying to remember what he could of Felix Klein’s magisterial Vorlesungen über das Ikosaeder, which had been required reading at Göttingen, but not having much luck.
“‘Imaginary,’” she laughed, “not the best way to put it!” She took the crystal, with a certain reverence, it seemed to Kit, and replaced it in the device.
“What’s this for?” A slender ebonite handle protruded from a brass-edged groove, which ran in a complicated curve.
When Kit reached for it she slapped his hand away.
“Don’t touch it! ‘Ohmic Drift Compensator’ regulates how much light is allowed to enter the silvering of the mirror! Special kind of refraction! Calibrated against imaginary index! Dangerous! Of the essence!”
“This unit is no bigger than a machine-pistol,” Kit said. “How powerful could it be?”
“I’m speculating, but the speed of the Earth moving along in its orbit—consider it! eighteen miles per second!—take the square of that, multiply it by the mass of the planet—”
“Good bit of kinetic energy there.”
“Recently Lorentz’s paper in the Proceedings of the Amsterdam Academy—Fitzgerald and others—they have concluded that a solid body passing through the Æther at a very high speed can become slightly shorter along the axis of motion. And Lord Rayleigh, looking for second-order effects, wonders if such motion might not cause a crystalline body to become doubly-refracting. So far these experiments show negative results. But—that principle—if we turned it around, and began with a crystal in which double refraction is caused by a set of axes no longer uniform, with the units of space itself actually being altered, because of the Earth’s motion—then already in such a crystal, implicit, embodied there, is that high planetary velocity, that immoderately vast energy, which someone has now come up with a way to couple in to. . . .”
“I really don’t like thinking about that,” Kit said, pretending to plug his ears.
In a dream early one morning, she stood before him holding the object. She was naked, and weeping. “Must I then take up the dreadful instrument, and flee to other shores?” Her voice, without its waking edge of cool sarcasm, defenseless, beckoned him into its sadness. This dream was about Umeki, but also one of those mathematicians’ dreams that surface now and then in the folklore. He saw that if the Q-waves were in any way longitudinal, if they traveled through the Æther in any way like sound traveling through air, then among the set of further analogies to sound, somewhere in the regime, must be music—which, immediately, obligingly, he heard, or received. The message it seemed to convey being “Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety. . . . Within the mirror, within the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim’s guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist.”
He woke knowing for the first time in a long time what he had to do. It was like having a stuffed sinus go away. Everything was clear. This piece of hardware had turned out to be supremely dangerous, as apt to harm its user as its target. If military intelligence here in Belgium was getting it confused with a “Quaternion weapon,” mythical or not, then the interest from other powers would be intense indeed. Introducing the vast population of the world’s innocent to more trouble than its worth to any government. On the other hand, if it were with someone who understood and appreciated it . . .
Umeki turned deliberately, twisting the sheets, humming a tune of her own, and bit his nipple.
“Konichiwa to you too, my little plum blossom.”
“I dreamed that you flew away on an airship.”
“I don’t ever have to leave. If—”
“You do. And I have to be without you.” But with none of the sadness her voice had bowed so under the weight of in the dream.
Later they lay smoking, about to leave the room for the last time. “There’s a new Puccini opera,” she said. “An American betrays a Japanese woman. Butterfly. He ought to die of shame, but does not—Butterfly does. What are we to make of this? Is it that Japanese do die of shame and dishonor but Americans don’t? Maybe can’t ever die of shame because they lack the cultural equipment? As if, somehow, your country is just mechanically destined to move forward regardless of who is in the way or underfoot?”
As if just having remembered, he said, “Something I’d better give you.”
She peered at him over the bight of a pillow. “It was never yours to give to anyone. It was mine before I knew it existed.”
“I know that’s just your way of saying thank you.”
“I would be obliged to show this to Kimura-san, to see what he can make of it.”
“Of course.”
“The Japanese government—I’m not so certain about them.”
“You’re going home?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know where that is. Do you?”
AT THE OSTENDE-VILLE STATION, Kit had a moment—soon dissipated in purposeful noise and coal-smoke, beer-drinking merriment, Root Tubsmith whanging away at a ukulele medley including Borel-Clerc’s wildly popular “La Matchiche”—in which he glimpsed how Ostend really might not be simply another pleasure-resort for people with too much money, but the western anchor of a continental system that happened to include the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian, the Berlin-to-Baghdad, and so on in steel proliferation across the World-Island. Not yet aware of how familiar, in the course of only a few more seasons, he was to become with the Imperium of Steam, and how, from Ostend, courtesy of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, one might, for comfortably less than two hundred francs, be hurled into the East, vertiginously and perhaps for good. He looked for Umeki among the crowds on the platform, even among subsets that would not possibly include her, wondering at the protocols of destiny, of being led, of turning away, of knowing where he did and didn’t belong. She wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be. The more she wasn’t there, the more she was. Kit supposed there was something in the theory of sets that covered this, but the train was moving, his brain was numb, his heart was incommunicado, the dunes slipped by, then the Bruges Canal and the larks swept upward from the stubble of the fields, gathering into a defensive front against the autumn.
Dally might have explained it if somebody had insisted—the Chicago Fair was a long time ago, but she had kept a memory or two of silent boats on canals, something began to stir as the vaporetto made its way from the train station down the Grand Canal, until, just at sunset, getting to the San Marco end, and there was the pure Venetian evening, the blue-green shadows, the lavenders, ultramarines, siennas, and umbers of the sky and the light-bearing air she was breathing, the astonishing momentum of the everyday twilight, gas-lanterns coming on in the Piazzetta, San Giorgio Maggiore across the water lit pale as angels, distant as heaven and yet seeming only a step, as if her breath, her yearning, could reach across to it and touch—she was certain for the first time in a life on the roll that whatever “home” had meant, this was older than memory, than the story she thought she knew. It was to gather into an upswelling of the heart she must struggle to contain, and might have begun to regret when a nearby tourist, in a vilely mucous specimen of British Accent, smirked to an effusive companion, “Oh, everyone says that, give it a day or two and you’ll be screaming to get away,” causing Dally to think about finding a gondola oar and hitting him with it, maybe more than once. But the evening itself, spreading mercifully its deep cloak, would see to this pest and his replicas in their thousands, they were like the gnats who rose in clouds here at nightfall, their purpose to infest the Venetian summer, to enhance its splendor with earthly annoyance, to pass quickly as they must, driven off, forgotten.
She, meanwhile, had just decided to live here forever.
The Zombinis’ first engagement, at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, had been a triumph. They got rhapsodically reviewed not only locally but in the Rome and Milan papers as well, and they were held over for an extra week, so by the time they got to Venice, the engagement here was already extended and the house sold out for weeks in advance.
“
So this is the Malibran.”
“Marco Polo’s house is right around the corner.”
“Hey, you think he’ll come if we give him free tickets?”
“Here, Cici, think fast.”
“Yaagghh!” Cici reminded himself that it only looked like a full-size elephant arcing through the air about to land on top of and squash him. He took a step to the side just in time, made a neat “pincette” pass, and slipped the animal into one of the profondes of his trick jacket, where it promptly vanished, though it is said today to be roaming comfortably the forests of its native Africa. Another Celebrated Tumbling Pachyderm Feat successfully negotiated.
From the wings, Vincenzo Miserere, the sales rep from the mirror factory on Isola degli Specchi, looked on in appreciation. Over the years he had seen acts come and go, and the high reputation of the Zombinis, whom he had taken the train to Trieste to see, was well deserved.
“I think once there were Zombinis around Venice,” he told Luca. “Long time ago. Come on out to the factory while you’re here, we’ve got a whole library full of old documents we’re in the process of cataloguing. Professore Svegli from the U. of Pisa is giving us a hand with it. You might find something.”
Bria had known about the Venetian Zombinis since she was a girl, when her father had motioned her one day into his study and dug from its sumptuous chaos an ancient volume, bound in shark leather, The travels and adventures of Niccolò dei Zombini, Specchiere. Back in the seventeenth century, Niccolò had been apprenticed by his family to the mirror-makers of the island, who like the glassmakers on Murano were fanatically protective about their trade secrets. Corporations today are gentle and caring compared to those early factory owners, whose secrecy and obsession just got meaner and meaner as the years and generations passed. They kept their workers confined to the one swampy little island, prisoners, forbidden to run away—the penalty for anyone who tried to was pursuit and death. But Niccolò made his escape anyway, and the book Luca was showing her began with his departure from the island. Luca got into the habit of reading the kids to sleep from it, one guaglion chasing another, place to place across the map of Europe and through the Renaissance, no telegraphs, no passports, no international spy networks, all you needed to stay ahead was better speed and some imagination. Niccolò managed to disappear into all the noise and confusion, which is what Europe was then.
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