They found no fire save that overspilling the hearth, but only Faust himself, vacant-eyed, mumbling, and incoherent. Somebody threw a bucket of water into the fireplace and the resultant explosion of noise and steam and smoke so unnerved the shakier elements of the throng that they began pulling down shelves and smashing in walls with frantic earnestness.
But then a clear-thinking Jew threw open the windows and fresh air entered the room. The smoke blew away and everyone paused in what they were doing, confused and blinking, stamping their feet uncertainly. The monk, fists on hips, scowled at the mess and confusion. "Disgraceful!"
"Oh, master, dear master." Wagner took one of the scholar's cold white hands into his. "Tell me you can hear me."
But Faust's eyes showed no response. His lips continued their idiot mumbling, and his face was beaded with sweat. Brother Josaphat peeled back an eyelid, laid his hand over the brow. "Fever," he declared. (Several of those closest shrank away, were frowned back.) "Put him to bed."
They put him to bed.
On the way out, the puppeteer seized the opportunity to steal a breviary of some small value, but as it chanced to belong to Wagner, no harm was done.
"Why do you show me this?"
All these events Faust witnessed at a remove, dispassionately viewing the players, himself among them, from all aspects at once, as if through the shards of a shattered but still enchanted mirror. They were all one in their insignificance, the hat-woman and the Jew, the monk, the farmers and the thief, flies upon the common dungheap, negligible. The petty comings and goings of Wittenberg coursed through his senses in a headlong stream of pictures/smells/textures/ sounds whose significance he had not the time or concentration to sort out. But always a fragment—the most important one—of his attention was focused inward, into that dark and airless space where the voice had first spoken:
Faust. It was the smallest of whispers, a voice calling from a distance more than a universe away and yet simultaneously more intimate than his own thought. It was a voice powerful with hate. The malice of it seared him like a murderer's iron-hot grin in the night. Vile and ignorant insect, we show you this so that you might understand. There can be no physical commerce between our world and yours—the gulf that separates us is too great. Only information can wing that chasm. Only words and thoughts. We can speak solely in the silence of your mind. Tell no one of us. You will be thought mad or worse.
"Who are you?"
Those you summoned.
"Make yourself manifest."
His study re-formed about Faust with such hallucinatory clarity that the very air sparkled. The room was uniformly lit and without shadows, as if every object shone in the perfect light of its own nature. Here was his table, half-hidden under a futility of papers and blown-glass vessels, here the lodestone and there the alligator, here the charts of Irlandah al-Kabirah ("Ireland the Great" or "Greater Ireland" by his tentative translation) across the western Atlantic, with each stone city drawn and named in the fine and flowing script of the Arab geographer Idrisi, which he had, despite misgivings, bought from a Portuguese traveler who had sworn them stolen from the library of Henry the Navigator himself. So detailed a simulacrum was it that, had he not witnessed himself being put to bed, pale and muttering, he would never have doubted its reality.
A gleeful sensation seized him then, an involuntary roar of triumph that rattled and shook him down to his foundations. "Who are you?" he repeated.
From nothingness, a figure composed itself. It was protean, monstrously so, shifting restlessly from form to form but fixing on none. The glistening skin and black stone eyes of a manatee gave way to a living construct of trumpet vines growing over a crude armature of oak planks. A flower closed in a wink to become a wet orifice that swallowed itself and sprouted tin crystals. It hurt Faust's eyes and wrenched his guts to look upon the creature, for its surfaces came together disturbingly, as if comprised of too many dimensions and those dimensions failing to come together in any sane fashion. To look upon it was to intuit (dimly, as in an uneasy dream) a universe in which four right angles might combine to form a triangle or six cubes stack into a sphere. "We are legion. A hundred libraries such as you have burnt could not contain our name."
"Begin, and I will tell you when to stop. Tell me who or what you are."
Dipping what might be a finger into the hearth, as if to pick up ashes, the creature wrote in bold black letters upon the white-plastered wall:
"Mephistopheles," the scholar repeated, charmed by the complexity of the equation, the implication of secret algebras lying within. "And the meaning?"
"The first symbol, m-subscript-e, represents the rest mass of an electron. This is multiplied by the mass-density of the universe times a constant measuring the size of quantum effects within any given system. In your universe this expresses itself as 6.6261 X 1034 joule-seconds, a laughably small quantity, by the way. Which is done in order to establish a benchmark for a comparison of our relative energies. The derived whole is not, you understand, so much a name as it is an address, an expression of our relationship to your world.
"Returning to the equation—forgive me if I oversimplify— we determine this value by multiplying the square root of negative one by the variance of f-subscript-zero, the age of the universe, times the wave function of the universe times H, a constant for the rate of expansion of the universe. You see how neatly it all fits together? Epsilon-subscript-L is of course the permeability of the universe to information, and the sigma is a sum over standard values for S, where S represents—"
"I can make no sense of any of this!" Faust cried in dismay.
A crystalline human form, perfectly proportioned in all organs but one and that one grossly swollen, dissolved into a being with the stench and murky coloration of brackish water. "Calm yourself, little monkey. You will. For now, let it suffice that our universe exists at higher ambient levels of heat than you can comprehend. A window between our worlds the size of your head would let such energies pour from us to you as would melt the Earth like a candle.
"Under such conditions, both chemical and physical interactions transpire almost instantaneously, and thus signal occurs and information is processed with a rapidity inconceivable to you. Time also flows at a correspondingly greater pace. Even &s we speak, a hundred generations of our kind are born, grow old, and die. This entity you see is an artificial construct, a homunculus or marionette by analogy, operated by vast numbers of our kind. You do not speak to an individual, but to the collective race. It is the only way we can communicate."
"Where are you?"
"That is no easy question." The Earth blossomed in Faust's vision. He saw it, serene and noble, and beauteous enough to fill his eyes with tears: blue with oceans, white with clouds, and so seemingly small that no least trace of humanity showed. He was given to know that the Earth revolved about the sun (and here was the solution to his muddled calculations!) for only an instant before his vision was yanked back and he saw that the glorious sun, great father Apollo himself, was but one star of many, and then was yanked back again to see that those many stars were an insignificant fraction of a whirlpool galaxy so vast that the light from a star at one edge would take a hundred thousand years to reach the other.
Again he was yanked back! Now he saw that the bright wheel of suns was only one of countless such, spinning, turning, and tumbling masses of many-colored stars. Next, that these galaxies were but an island in an archipelago of such. Then, that the archipelagoes themselves were arrayed within greater structures and those greater structures revealed as minor parts of still greater. Until finally he saw the cosmos whole and entire, a strangely twisted marble such as he might hold in his hand.
Drunk with wonder, Faust could only marvel. This was not the stately clockwork elegance of classical astronomy, but instead a wild and savage kind of glory that poured wonder upon wonder, surprise upon surprise, and each one nestled within embracing equations of such compelling logic that once known they could not be
denied.
"Imagine this, your cosmos," Mephistopheles said, "as a bubble. Within it, a single set of conditions and laws uniformly applies. Without it, time is not spatialized nor space unpacked; they cannot even exist. Imagine that there are many such bubbles, each with its own unique set of laws. Our cosmos is one such."
"This is enlightenment beyond avarice!"
"It is nothing. You are like a beggar who stands in the doorway of the Emperor's kitchen, smelling the odors, and thinks himself within reach of all his desires. But we stand prepared to give you not just the food, the kitchen, and the castle, but the Empire as well, and the armies that will conquer those lands beyond if you wish.
"Though we can give you nothing more than knowledge"—the voice came from within a crawling mass of brighteyed bats who clutched at each other with sharp claws and showed needle teeth to the scholar—"our knowledge is absolute. We have mastered all sciences, perfected all technologies. We can show you events from the distant past, the solemn rituals of Nippon and pagan ecstasies of undiscovered Western lands, the priviest moments of pontiffs, the rutting of kings and queens. With our aid you can remake the world, bend the strongest men, the most beautiful women to your will. You can obliterate enemies, reward friends, rule nations in secret or open as you wish. Whatever you ask to see, we can show it. No knowledge shall be hidden from you. Surely this is worth the pittance we ask in return."
"In return—" Faust said with sudden apprehension. "Yes. Yes, what do you want of me in return?"
"Only that you listen."
"Listen? Why?'"
The room vanished. Faust stood beneath a grey sky. Identical clapboard houses were arrayed in a grid to all sides of him like barracks, enough to house a city. A walkway stretched from his feet to a windowless, many-chimneyed structure. Its bricks were blackened with soot. Heavy smoke gushed from its stacks. A cold autumn wind pressed down on the smoke like the rejecting hand of Heaven, forcing it to the ground.
The stench was beyond belief. It imparted a foul taste to Faust's mouth. He smacked his lips uneasily. Where the smoke touched his flesh, it left a grey, faintly greasy deposit.
"Why am I here?"
There was no answer.
He walked forward. Gravel crunched underfoot. It was eerily quiet. Despite the many buildings, there were no voices, no sounds of human commerce. Not a bird sang. In all this desolate tract, only the smoke moved.
He passed blind windows and vacant walls. Something creaked, regular-irregular, not loud but impossible to ignore. A door swinging, all but imperceptibly, in the breeze. As he passed it, Faust glanced within.
A glimpse—no more—of an empty classroom. Desks were arrayed in neat lines; their surfaces were scratched and scarred with use. Upon the walls hung violins by the hundreds, all sized to the hands of children, all silent.
He strode on, unaccountably disturbed.
The walk took Faust to the blackened building. The cold breeze died. The crunch of gravel ceased. He laid a hand upon the structure's metal doors and found them warm to the touch. A sudden dread seized him then and he could not open the doors. He could not. There was no power or reward great enough to make him look within.
But when he started to turn away, Mephistopheles stood at his side. The creature had taken on a nearly human form. He was red-skinned, sharp-chinned, and hook-nosed, with long and slender waxed mustaches. A long prehensile tail rose from clownishly striped pantaloons to sway its spearpoint tip over one shoulder. A plume bobbed from a ridiculous cap. He was the very picture of a comic devil from a low farce. There was no mistaking him, however, for an aura of ravening madness radiated from beneath the rouged cheeks, the sly and painted leer, as if a werewolf crouched just beneath the skin. He touched Faust's forearm and at this genteel gesture the scholar shuddered.
"You must look. There can be no misunderstanding between us."
"No. Please ..."
But Mephistopheles was already pushing at the doors, already swinging them open.
"Do not look away! If you flinch, if you cringe, if you deny what you see, there will be no compact between us. None of this exists yet, but if you enter into our service, then it will. This is the price you must pay for knowledge: You must understand and acknowledge its consequences."
The doors slammed open.
Faust saw.
It was impossible. Unbearable. All chance of accord with this fiend vanished forever. He could not. Could not. Not with this before him. Abruptly, Faust found himself crying, not only out of disgust and pity for the reeking horror he was forced to witness, but for losing the infinite wealth of knowledge offered him along with it. He had come so close! It was maddening to think upon.
He did not, could not look away.
"How ... how can"—savagely, he slashed an arm down before him in absolute negation of all he saw—"such be? How could God allow it?"
"God? You fool—there is no Godl"
The words struck Faust like a great bronze clapper, shattering the crusted certainties of a lifetime, reverberating, setting up echoes that washed back and forth through his being in slowly lessening waves, leaving no atom unshaken, no belief untouched. There was no God. He knew this for the truth, recognized it as such on an almost physical level, for it summed up everything he had ever thought or reasoned. It resolved a thousand doubts. It left no question unanswered. There was no God! Everything was possible now. Nothing was forbidden.
This moment of bleak liberation from belief would have been exhilarating at any other time. Standing before the charred building's open doors, he could feel nothing but despair. "What purpose," he asked, "is served by showing me such a thing?"
"I am delighted that you should ask." Mephistopheles jauntily twirled a mustachio. "It is, quite simply, our will that your race should die. You live so much longer than we, you see. Ours are mayfly lives alongside yours. In time, a long time even by your standards admittedly, our race will grow old and die—there are reasons why this is inevitable and should you wish, we will happily explain entropy and the tyranny of thermodynamics to you. Yet here, where time runs slowly, your feeble and noisesome kind will survive our extinction. This is intolerable. It offends us.
"So we will give you all the knowledge you desire. So much, indeed, that your race will choke upon it. We will give them the tools to commit every crime and outrage their fecund imaginations can devise. Through you, we will give them power without limit and they will inevitably use it to destroy themselves in a symphony of horrors." He gestured lightly at what lay beyond the doors. "Horrors so great that when they have run out of victims, the last survivors must inevitably surrender themselves to their own atrocity machines.
"Then, with existence scoured of your verminous breed, we can die."
"This cannot be!"
"It must be."
"You said—you showed me the cosmos, stars beyond number, and named it but one of an effervescence of bubbles in the matrix of being. We inhabit an insignificant world in an obscure corner of a forgotten galaxy of a cosmos that can never influence yours. It can hardly matter to you whether we prosper or fall."
"If you were dying, Magister Faustus, and a cockroach chanced to scuttle upon the bedside table, an inch from your clenched fist, and you knew it would live to see the dawn denied you—what would you do?"
Faust's eyes felt dry and gritty. It was painful just to keep them open. A ferocious anger rose within his breast at all the human race for having within it the potential to create the grotesquerie before him. Bastards! Weaklings! Were it not for their failings, their undisciplined appetite for cruelty and destruction, he could achieve in an instant such insight and enlightenment as all the philosophers of the ages had sought and been denied. Knowledge without limit was his for a word.
"Surely," he cried, "this is not inevitable. Surely humanity could take the knowledge you offer and use it to ennoble itself. Surely they could apply it wisely and without folly."
"They could," M£phistopheles said dryly. "B
ut will they?"
"This is hard, very hard," Faust said. Then, convulsively, "Must I obey you?"
"Do what you will. Only listen."
"I have never turned away from the truth..."
"Then do not turn away now."
For a long time Faust was silent. Ashes drifted across his shoes, but he did not move away. Seeing was the hardest part; once he had looked, enduring was, by contrast, easy.
"On them," he said at last, "be it. I believe that Mankind can endure any truth and, more, that with the perfection of knowledge we will and must ascend toward the perfection of spirit. We are not animals! But if I am wrong... If the common run of people cannot rise to the challenge of knowledge, if the only check on their passions is ignorance, then they deserve whatever they bring down upon themselves. I wash my hands of them."
He turned from the open doors.
And found himself home again.
Mephistopheles reclined lazily upon the study table, raised slightly upon one arm, head turned coquettishly. He retained the comic devil's visage and plumed hat, atop the nude body of a certain plump whore whose favors Faust had from time to time employed. He scratched up a louse from her cunt hair and ate it. His eye glinted mockingly.
"Sweet Faust," he purred. "Ask me whatever you wish. I will deny you nothing."
* * *
THE NEW PROMETHEUS
For seven days Wagner nursed Faust through his fever. He knelt by the great scholar's bed to spoon broth and watered milk into his mouth. He changed the bedclothes when they were soiled. To bring down the temperature, he soaked folded cloths in tepid water and placed them on Faust's groin and in his armpits. He knew to rub alcohol over the pale limbs and Christ-long torso, and to shift the body periodically so that it did not develop bedsores, because he had lost all three of his sisters to fevers and had helped his mother nurse each one through her final illness. Brushing Faust's hair every morning, he would remember each of their dear faces, white as marble, still and angelic on their death-sheets, and hot tears would flow down his face and the back of his throat.
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 3