After Dally had left, and Reef and his family, Kit went on soldiering, or more like engineering, alone, except for an interlude with Dally’s friend Fiametta, who had worked at the same hospital. Until one day the War was over, and by then he had run into a strangely possessed algebraist named E. Percy Movay, who was full of news about a fabled group of mathematicians in Lwów, out at the wild frontier of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. Which was how Kit discovered the Scottish Café and the circle of more and less insane who frequented it, and where one night he was presented with a startling implication of Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice. It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a doubt, to take a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun.
“Because one emits light and the other doesn’t, don’t you think.”
Kit was taken aback. “I don’t know.”
He spent awhile contemplating this. Zermelo had been a docent at Göttingen when Kit was there and, like Russell, had been preoccupied with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. He was also notorious around the beer halls for a theory that no expedition could ever reach either of the poles, because the amount of whisky needed was directly proportional to the tangent of the latitude. Polar latitude being 90°, this meant a value approaching infinity—Q.E.D. It didn’t surprise Kit much that the peculiar paradox should be traceable in some way back to Zermelo.
“But staggering subsets, fellows—you see what this means don’t you? those Indian mystics and Tibetan lamas and so forth were right all along, the world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one.”
It took Kit awhile to locate the speaker, and was agreeably confounded to see, emerging from behind a gigantic beer stein, the face of Professor Heino Vanderjuice, now strangely youthful, his hair dark again, with a few streaks of gray, his hesitant classroom stoop unbent into a bearing of forthrightness and responsibility.
“Why bless my soul if it isn’t Mr. Traverse. You were leaving for Göttingen the last time I saw you.”
“It’s so good to see you again, sir,” Kit embracing him. “Out here.”
“Out of the Vibe pocket, I’ll bet you mean.”
“Well most of all alive and kicking.”
“Same goes for me, young fellow.” They had another round, left the Scottish Café, and began to stroll down past the University toward Kliński Park. “With so many dead,” the Professor reflected after a bit, “it seems disrespectful to them—but I’m glad Scarsdale Vibe is now among their number. Though the company is too good for him. My only regret is that it wasn’t I who finally plugged him.”
Kit paused in the middle of lighting a cigarette. “Didn’t know you’d ever been out gunning for him.”
The Professor chuckled. “Had a crack at him once, must’ve been after you’d left for Germany. Sort of relapse into all-purpose loathing, saw how easily I’d been bought—flattered into thinking myself the equal of Tesla, though of opposite polarity. Beneath Vibe’s contempt, though not my own. Furious with myself, more with Vibe, I fetched down my old single-action Navy Colt and got on the morning express to New York. Some vague idea of turning it on myself once I’d done for him. Got to Pearl Street, found a rooftop nearby and settled in to wait. But something curious happened. It had taken me only thirteen steps to climb to where I was, and I saw I was standing not on a roof but on an executioner’s scaffold, as if somehow I had already carried out my modest attentat, been arrested, tried and condemned for it, and was now awaiting the ultimate penalty. Talk about anomalies in Time!
“It appeared to be somewhere outside New York City, one of those old-time county courthouses with a large gilded dome. A crowd was gathering, a military band was playing marches and airs, children were selling lemonade, American flags, corncobs, hot dogs and so forth. I was plainly visible to all, but no one seemed to be paying me much notice. Then the dome of the courthouse began to lift, or expand skyward, till after a moment I saw it was in fact the spherical gasbag of a giant balloon, rising slowly from behind the dome, where it had been hidden. Sort of that pea-and-sun conjecture again, only different. Of course it was the Chums of Chance, not the first time they’d come to my rescue—though usually it was from professorial inattention, walking off cliffs or into spinning propellers. . . . But this time they had rescued me from my life, from the cheaply-sold and dishonored thing I might have allowed it to become. Young Suckling of course liked to pretend it was nothing—‘Eeyynnyyhh, the old coot’s telling that one again—that six-gun wasn’t even loaded’—but they saved me, nonetheless.”
Evening crowds streamed unhurriedly through the park. Somewhere an accordion was playing a jazz-inflected hopak. Small boys ran up to pull the braids of girls and run away again, and slightly older couples stood out of the light, embracing. Peacetime.
“The boys are about,” Professor Vanderjuice scanning serenely the still-lambent sky. “I usually get a feeling when they are. Maybe you’ll meet them. Hitch a ride. They’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
Further implications of what Kit had begun to think of as the Zermelo Situation continued to arise. “We tell ourselves that Lemberg, Léopol, Lvov, Lviv, and Lwów are all different names for the same city,” said E. Percy Movay one night, “but in fact each is a distinct city of its own, with very precise rules of transition from one to the other.”
Since Tuva, where he had heard such unaccountably double-jointed singing, in times of perplexity, as other men might routinely curse or absentmindedly reach for their penises or inexplicably begin to weep, Kit had found himself making down in his throat a single low guttural tone, as deep as he could reach, as long as breath would allow. Sometimes he believed that if he got this exactly right it would transport him to “where he should really be,” though he had no clear picture of where that was. After he had done this for long enough he began to feel himself enter a distinctly different state of affairs.
One day Professor Vanderjuice vanished. Some claimed to have seen him taken into the sky. Kit went down to the Glowny Dworzec and got on a train headed west, though soon he got off and went across the tracks onto another platform and waited for a train going east, till after a while he was getting on and off trains bound for destinations he was less and less sure of.
It was like the convergence of a complex function. He would come to for brief intervals, and then go back inside a regime of starvation and hallucinating and mental absence. He didn’t always know where he was, or—especially unsettling for an old Vectorial hand—which direction he was going. He might drift into consciousness to find he was traveling up the Danube, through the Iron Gates, at the rail of a bouncing little steamer gazing up at the rock walls of the Defile of Kazan, taken inside the roaring of the rapids, as the river, beaten to mist, rose to encompass him, like a god’s protective cloak—another time he might all at once be seeing Lake Baikal, or facing some chill boundary at least that pure and uncompromising. The other side of this “Baikal,” he understood, was accessible only to those of intrepid spirit. To go there and come back would be like living through the end of the world. From this precise spot along the shoreline it was possible to “see” on the far shore a city, crystalline, redemptive. There was music, mysteriously audible, tonal yet deliberately broken into by dissonances—demanding, as if each note insisted on being attended to. And now and then, in brief periods of lucid return, he found himself thinking about nothing but Dally, aware that they’d separated, but unable to remember why.
After some weeks of this, he began to be visited by a sort of framed shadow suspended in the empty air, a transparent doorway, approaching him at a speed he knew he would not always be able to avoid. At last one day, still hesitant, he decided to approach it—might then, in fright, have lost his balance, and seized all at once as if by gravity, he toppled into the curiously orthogonal opening, exclaiming “What’s this,” as to t
he astonishment of onlookers he was turned to shimmering transparency, dwindling into a sort of graceful cone and swept through its point into what appeared to be a tiny or perhaps only distant window of bright plasma. Kit, on the other hand, found that he had remained the same size while the luminous opening began to grow, until it had flowed around and wrapped him in antique rusts and reds, brass gleaming through an interior haze, reassembling until he stood in a quiet hotel room in Paris, with Inner Asian rugs on a wood floor, the smell of tobacco and ganja, and a scholarly old party in a tarboosh and half-glasses bending over a sumptuously-bound stamp album, what collectors called a stockbook, where Kit saw an array of mint, never-hinged, superbly-centered Shambhala postage stamps all with original gum from local trees, issued in complete sets beginning shortly after the Treaty of Berlin (1878), with generic scenes from the Shambhalan countryside, flora and fauna, mountains, waterfalls, gorges providing entry to what the Buddhists called the hidden lands.
The man in the tarboosh turned finally and nodded in a strangely familiar way. “Lord Overlunch. Delighted to meet you.”
“What just happened?” Kit feeling dazed. He looked around a little wildly. “I was in Lwów—”
“Excuse me, but you were in Shambhala.” He handed Kit the glass and indicated one stamp in particular, whose finely-etched vignette showed a marketplace with a number of human figures, Bactrian camels and horses beneath a lurid sun-and-clouds effect in the sky.
“I like to look at these all carefully with the loupe at least once a week, and today I noticed something different about this ten-dirhan design, and wondered if possibly someone, some rival, had crept in here while I was out and substituted a variant. But of course I found the change immediately, the one face that was missing, your own, I know it well by now, it is, if you don’t mind my saying so, the face of an old acquaintance. . . .”
“But I wasn’t . . .”
“Well, well. A twin, perhaps.”
Lord Overlunch was in town for the Ferrary sale, a major event in the history of the stamp-collecting hobby, at least for a look if not a bid on the Swedish three-skilling yellow.
“And to hunt up a few old faces, don’t you know. Since the Spanish Lady passed through, close enough to feel the breeze from her gown, and try not to make out the face behind the black mantilla, one grows compulsive, I fear, about who’s aboveground and who below.”
“And how’d I get here again?”
“It’s the way people reappear these days. The trains are not always running. The switches are not always thrown the right way.” He looked at his watch. “Heavens, I’m late. Perhaps you’d like to be my guest this evening at Chez Rosalie. You might enjoy meeting my delightful American friend Miss Rideout, who was one of the first actually to discover Montparnasse after the war. Some sort of husband in the picture”—and then he gave Kit an unmistakably friendly smile—“very much so indeed, I’m told. Do come along, won’t you?”
Couples were out dancing the Hesitation Waltz in the middle of traffic, despite the signs clearly posted forbidding them to. From a nearby nightclub came the bandoneón-accompanied strains, ubiquitous in Montparnasse this year, of the melancholy yet catchy tango—
Vege-tariano . . .
No ifs ands or buts—
Eggs and dairy? ah no,
More like roots, and nuts—
Pot roast prohibido,
Tenderloin taboo,
why should my heart bleed o-
ver the likes of you?
Never known-to-be
Fond . . .
Of Châteaubriand . . .
Nor particularly close
To chipped beef on toast—steaks and
Chops, ¡a-di-ós!—Vege-
-taria-no . . .
Outcast Argentine,
Never could’ve gone “¡O-
lé!” for that cuisine . . .
Gauchos curse your name,
Still you haunt my brain—
Somehow I’ll carry on, oh . . .
Vegetaria-no!
May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the “imaginary,” the unimaginable, carrying them safely into this postwar Paris where the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic Marne, now carry only lovers and cheerful drunks, and music which cannot be marched to goes on uninterrupted all night, in the bars and bals musettes for the dancers who will always be there, and the nights will be dark enough for whatever visions must transpire across them, no longer to be broken into by light displaced from Hell, and the difficulties they find are no more productive of evil than the opening and closing of too many doors, or of too few. A vector through the night into a morning of hosed pavements, birds heard everywhere but unseen, bakery smells, filtered green light, a courtyard still in shade . . .
“LOOK AT ’EM down there.”
“All that light.”
“All that dancing.”
The Garçons de ’71 were having their annual convention in Paris. Everybody on the Inconvenience was invited. The festivities would be pursued not on the ground but above the City in a great though unseen gathering of skyships.
Their motto was “There, but Invisible.”
“The Boys call it the supranational idea,” explained Penny Black, wide-eyed and dewy as when she was a girl, recently promoted to admiral of a fleet of skyships after the Bindlestiffs of the Blue had amalgamated with the Garçons de ’71, “literally to transcend the old political space, the map-space of two dimensions, by climbing into the third.”
“There is, unfortunately,” Lindsay was eager to add, “another school of thought which views the third dimension not as an avenue of transcendence but as a means for delivering explosives.”
“You can see how marriage has changed him,” remarked Primula Noseworth.
“Glad anyhow to see you bunch of no-goods finally coming to your senses,” Penny grinned. “Blaze, now, you want to watch out for old Darby here, he’s a fast one.”
“Who, this slowpoke?” tickling him at a reliable spot among his ribs. “He says I move too fast for him—never at home, always in some kind of trouble, all the rest of that. I told him, read the Agreement.”
She referred to the document by which the girls had agreed to join their fortunes with those of Inconvenience, only on the understanding that they would always operate independently. They would be frigates, the boys a dreadnought—they would be freebooters and irregulars, the boys Military High Command. The boys would sail along, keeping pretty much to the ship, in an illusion of executive power, and the girls would depart the ship at right angles to its official course to do the adventuring, engaging the Exterior, often at great risk, and returning from their missions like weary commandos to Home Base.
Whereunto everybody had affixed his and her seals, and Miles broke out magnums of 1920 Puisieulx brut.
ONE DAY HEARTSEASE DISCOVERS that she’s expecting a baby, and then, like a canonical part-song, the other girls one by one announce that they are, too.
And on they fly. The ship by now has grown as large as a small city. There are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions. It is so big that when people on the ground see it in the sky, they are struck with selective hysterical blindness and end up not seeing it at all.
Its corridors will begin to teem with children of all ages and sizes who run up and down the different decks whooping and hollering. The more serious are learning to fly the ship, others, never cut out for the Sky, are only marking time between visits to the surface, understanding that their destinies will be down in the finite world.
Inconvenience herself is constantly having her engineering updated. As a result of advances in relativity theory, light is incorporated as a source of motive power—though not exactly fuel—and as a carrying medium—though not exactly a vehicle—occupying, rather, a relation to the skyship much like that of the ocean to a surfer on a surfboard—a design principle borrowed from the Æther units that carry the girls to and fro on missions whose det
ails they do not always share fully with “High Command.”
As the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity—it is an acceptance of sky.
The contracts which the crew have been signing lately, under Darby’s grim obsessiveness, grow longer and longer, eventually overflowing the edges of the main table in the mess decks, and occasionally they find themselves engaged to journey very far afield indeed. They return to Earth—unless it is to Counter-Earth—with a form of mnemonic frostbite, retaining only awed impressions of a ship exceeding the usual three dimensions, docking, each time precariously, at a series of remote stations high in unmeasured outer space, which together form a road to a destination—both ship and dockage hurtling at speeds that no one wishes to imagine, invisible sources of gravity rolling through like storms, making it possible to fall for distances only astronomers are comfortable with—yet, each time, the Inconvenience is brought to safety, in the bright, flowerlike heart of a perfect hyper-hyperboloid that only Miles can see in its entirety.
Pugnax and Ksenija’s generations—at least one in every litter will follow a career as a sky-dog—have been joined by those of other dogs, as well as by cats, birds, fish, rodents, and less-terrestrial forms of life. Never sleeping, clamorous as a nonstop feast day, Inconvenience, once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know—Miles is certain—it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace.
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