"Magister!" Wagner cried joyously. "You're—"
"Quickly, quickly now. We must take up the pen. The world awaits my reshaping words." Faust paused and swept a scornful glance toward Schnabel's scattered instruments, his knives and clyster, his potions and leeches. "First, however, clear away this trash."
Wagner leaped to obey. For one bright instant, all was well.
Far into the night and for many nights thereafter, Faust dictated letters to all the great men of Europe and a myriad of the lesser as well, outlining his discoveries and insights. To Johann Tritheim, the Benedictine abbot of Spanheim, who published under the humanist name of Trithemius, he confided the information that colors are but fractions of white light and that white light is compounded of mingled colors. To Konrad Mudt, known to the learned as Mutianus Rufus, he described a force to be found in lightning bolts and easily demonstrated with strips of metal and fresh frogs' legs, and proposed devices by which it might be harnessed. To Johann Weiher, body physician to the Duke of Cleves, sometimes known as Wierus and other times as Piscinarius, he offered a close description of the circulation of the blood, along with observations on the purposes of the minor organs. Pamphlets he dictated as well on painless surgery, the origins of disease, the outlines of a calculus for problems dealing with rates of change, and more besides, enough to sate the appetites of an army of booksellers.
All these documents he signed neoprometheus, explaining to Wagner that his own name was but little known and in the cause of spreading enlightenment there was no point in modesty. "Not," he said, "when my revelations are so great as to dwarf those of all the scholars and savants of Antiquity and modern times combined. Either I am the New Prometheus or I am completely deluded. There can be no middle ground."
Wagner wondered greatly, but wrote as he was directed.
While he scribbled, Faust drew: diagrams of the molecular structure of crystals, the orbital mechanics of planets, detailed maps of an Antarctic continent, a mathematical proof for the convergence of infinite series, plans for what he called "leaf-springs" to make carriages ride more smoothly, calculating machines, difference engines, steam-driven mining pumps. These were included with letters explaining their import.
"These are strange observations," Wagner commented after a letter to Dtisseldorf on the economics of supply and demand. The ideas passing beneath his pen were dizzying; he needed a month or three for each, to judge its validity and absorb its implications. Instead, he had but the minutes of their dictation before more ideas were piled upon him, each as challenging as the earlier. Strange and aching things they were to wrap his thoughts about; it would be easier and less painful by far to dismiss them all without thinking. From any other source he would have. "When did you find the time to gather such detailed information on the quantities of grain and price of bread in so many cities over such a period?"
"Inspiration, Wagner! Inspiration! The facts follow logically upon the insight."
"But—"
"A fresh sheet of paper! Has the cramping in your hand subsided yet? There is much to do. We owe it to posterity not to rest."
The weeks passed like a fever dream: Wagner wrote and wondered. Faust drew up plans for impossible machines. He designed buildings like no man had ever seen or wished to. He talked of prodigies to be found in a drop of water, and drew up plans for an instrument of tubes and lenses that would display them to others. Briefly melancholic, he spoke of soldiers dying of sepsis after successful amputations. But his sadness did not last. "In the morning," he said, "you must go to the lens-grinder. I require several pieces from his stock and many more that must be ground to my exact specifications. I will provide you with a list." He started to scribble, then looked up wildly. "And linen! I must have linen!"
"Linen?"
"To fly with. We shall build me wings such as have never been seen before—wings as round and spherical as the world."
Faust laughed.
Wagner's days were thronged with errands. He was sent running from carpenter to brass-worker, from tinsmith to apothecary, fetching herbs from the fields outside Wittenberg and commissioning lengths of copper wire that were thrice rejected as being too thick. For two leather-tubed optical devices in particular, Faust was especially anxious; he promised double payment for their rapid completion. And yet Wagner, who had gone through every chest and bag in the scholar's rooms before calling upon Doctor Schnabel, knew exactly how little money his master had, and worried for his finances.
Faust's excitement reached climax on that day when the instrument-maker's apprentice finally appeared at the door with two tight-wrapped packages. Chortling, Faust unwrapped the smaller and placed the commissioned device on the table.
The leathered tube was angled upon a stand, with knobs to adjust the distance between lenses, clips to hold thin rectangles of clear glass, and a mirror to reflect sunlight up through the glass and into the tube. Faust set it up anxiously, drew a drop of water from a glass of stagnant pond-water Wagner had fetched from beyond the city walls the day before, and, placing the drop on the glass rectangle, put his eye to the tube and adjusted it. For a long instant he was still.
Then he crowed.
"It's true!" Explosively, he seized Wagner by the shirt and swung him before the device. "Look!" Faust commanded, forcing his head down with one strong hand. "Tell me what you see."
"I—my reflection, Magister. The reflection of my eye."
"Idiot! Keep both eyes open. Look through the tube. Turn this knob slowly until a clear image comes in view."
Hesitantly, Wagner obeyed. The lens was a bright formless circle at first. Then vague shapes appeared, condensed, and abruptly sharpened. With a cry, he drew back from the device. "It's filled with monsters!"
Faust chuckled. "Not monsters, my dear Wagner. Not monsters—the future."
"I... I don't understand."
"No, of course you don't." Faust unwrapped the larger packet and quickly assembled the second device. "You have eyes and yet you cannot see." He ran loving hands up and down its delicately tooled barrel. "Ah, but here is the invention that will make my name echo down the ages! No learned fool or scholarly tortoise, however encrusted he might be with degrees and years of tenure, barnacles and moss, can fail to be convinced by what it will show."
"What is it?" Wagner asked unhappily.
"Who cares for names? Call them what you will. Assemble words from the classical languages. Name the one 'microscope' and the other 'telescope.' From the Greek for 'small-seeing' and 'far-seeing.' I have no interest in the matter. It will be clear tonight. I can make my first observations. And tomorrow—the baths. Oh, how the Leucopolitans will praise me! How delighted they will be."
Abruptly, he set his telescope aside and went to the window. Placing both hands on the sill, he leaned out straightarmed and stared up at the moon. Pale and full, it hung in the dark blue sky of late afternoon. For a long moment he simply stood unmoving. Then quietly he said, "Do you think we shall live to see men walk upon the moon? Is it possible so much can be accomplished in a single lifetime?"
"Walk upon the moon?" It was a comic notion, the sort of flying-horse-and-ten-leagues-boots lie one used to set a small child to laughing and clapping. But Wagner was no child, and Faust was a man nine years into his third decade, far too old and, one would have thought, dignified for such frauds and whimsies. Wagner was baffled. Was Faust speaking metaphorically? Could this be some manner of allegory?
His master returned to the instrument. After several more minutes peering through it over the rooftops and at the moon, he straightened, sighed, and said, "I need to see the planets! Will night never come?"
"Soon, Magister. The sun is going down."
Turning his back on the window and the city, sky, and moon it framed, Faust said irritably, "The Earth is tilting up!"
It was in that instant that all the bits and pieces of the last few weeks came together in such a way that Wagner could no longer deny to himself what all of Wittenberg was soon to
learn: that the famed and learned scholar Johannes Wilhelm Faust was mad.
* * *
FLIGHT
Like storks to the Low Countries or plague rats to the seaports, the students had returned to Wittenberg. The young vagabonds were everywhere, exasperating and enriching the townsfolk, boasting and swaggering and fighting mock duels, energetic, boundlessly curious, eagerly poking their noses into everything, like so many thousand human puppies.
They scattered before Faust as he swooped down the castle road with a stride so long he almost flew. Two black-and-white Dominican monks coming out of the Schlosskirche scowled upon seeing him. (Smile and nod) Mephistopheles suggested. (That will infuriate them.) And so lighthearted did he feel that Faust complied, throwing in a merry wink for good measure. He was rewarded by the sharp hiss of indrawn breath as he hurried by.
Wagner trotted after Faust, rendered tortoiselike by the enormous basket he carried upon his back, on its way to the harness-maker's to be fitted with leather straps for the flying-device's suspension ropes. "As soon as that's done," Faust called over his shoulder, "you are to bring my telescope to the bathhouse."
"Yes, Magister," Wagner muttered sullenly.
(Tell him not to dawdle with the harness-maker's daughter) Mephistopheles said. (The one with the tits as big as Westphalian hams. She's in heat, and if she catches his eye you won't see him again until morning.)
"And no talking to any girls!" Faust said. "I know your ways."
"Magister!"
"I must demonstrate my invention to the Leucopolitans. This is important! No—imperative! If you do not have it there and set up within the hour, I promise you I will thrash you to within three breaths of your life."
The Sodalitas Leucopolitan (the "white city," as its resident poet, Ricardus Sbrulius, was unfailingly careful to point out, came from the color of the Elbe's sands and not from a bad etymological back-construction of "Witten" as meaning "white," which it most decidedly did not) was the least Germanic of learned societies in all Germania. No minutes were kept, dues collected, or meeting announcements sent out. It convened in taverns or in the rooms of its various members as the whim to discuss matters philosophical hit them. But once a month they met more formally to bathe, talk, and debate, at which time Sbrulius inevitably referred to them as the Knights of the Bath.
(Oh, what a wonder for marveling eyes to see!) Mephistopheles exclaimed. (All the finest minds and wits in Saxony with their butts and balls flapping in the breeze.)
"Be silent," Faust directed him. "This is no time for your cynical remarks. Those you mock are philosophers, poets, and lovers of the truth. There are no more honorable men anywhere, nor any whose good opinion I value more."
(Indeed? Would you care for me to show you how today's meeting will go?)
"No! I forbid it. You have contracted to tell me of things as they are. Let the future tend to itself. Once shown, what freedom would I have to act contrary to your visions? I shall discourse with the society as a learned man among equals. More I do not need."
(Put a thief among a hundred honest men, and within the hour they'll have relieved him of his purse and trousers. Set a whore among schoolgirls and see how long her virtue lasts! Sell a Moorish slave to the College of Cardinals and he'll be worshipping demons by nightfall. You go to put your head in a den of intellectuals and thinkers. I fear that they will drive you mad.)
"Pish."
Here Faust's way parted from Wagner's. The younger man, grown accustomed to his master's new habit of mumbling to himself, cast a fretful glance back at him, but made no comment.
Wagner placed his master's leather-bound calculations on a small table in the grassy yard at the rear of the bathhouse, and then erected the telescope alongside it. The summer baths were separated from the yard by a waist-high fence and sheltered from rain and sun by a high wooden roof. This pleasant arrangement allowed gentle breezes to flow freely over the bathers. Beer was available, and soap, and attendants rapid to scratch a back or fetch a thick, clean towel. Gentlemen were encouraged to bring musical instruments for their amusement. Out of a common regard for decency, women were allowed nowhere near. A man could pull himself out of the shallow common bath and amble over to the fence to pee on its pilings without interrupting the erudite disputation.
It was a paradise for scholars.
A socketed brass band was looped about the barrel of the telescope, so that it could be set up on a wooden tripod of the sort surveyors or architects used. Wagner struggled with the balky device, equally anxious to keep it away from the piss-marshy regions of the lawn and at the same time remain close enough to eavesdrop upon the learned discussion.
Sbrulius sang:
Come to the bathhouse, rich and poor,
The water is soothing, to be sure,
There's fragrant soap to wash your skin,
A sweat box that we'll put you in;
And when you've had a healthful sweat,
We'll cut your hair, your blood we'll let,
After which, a good brisk rub,
And a pleasant soak in a nice hot tub.
The Leucopolitans applauded and he put aside his lute with an ironic bow.
Beckmann, lounging against a spigot post, turned to Faust. Beside him, a dribble of water spattered from a brass mackerel's ugly mouth. 'There's talk the Dominicans are planning to bribe a tame priest to preach a sermon against you. What in Heaven's name have you done to rile them so?"
Faust made a dismissive gesture. "I told Brother Josaphat that the original of his name was no Christian saint at all but
a heathen god known as Bodhisat, revered in India for sitting many years beneath a tree. In the eighth century, John of Damascus popularized his tale with a fanciful translation from a corrupt Arabic text."
If Beckmann had a single fault, it was his distaste for conflict in any form. A deep and abiding sadness came into his eyes that only emphasized his long-faced resemblance to an old and peaceable hound. "Now why on Earth would you tell him a thing like that?"
"Because it's true."
Sbrulius laughed. "That, dear Faust, is the single worst argument you could have raised. Many things are true. Few are proper. Fewer still are desirable." He was not the most powerful of intellects at the university—his gifts being poetic rather than analytic—and thus in conversation relied heavily on paradox, metonymy, litotes, hysteron proteron, and other such light rhetorical devices. He had no enemies but those earned by his compulsively indiscriminate womanizing.
"I had thought," Mette said darkly, "it was for your heterodox and potentially heretical new cosmology." He was a lean man, a theologian, and avidly ambitious for a more honored place within the society and in the university as well. Fat and lazy old Balthasar Phaccus shrugged and stretched out a hand for his stein.
"That too, perhaps. The fact—I know you are tired of hearing this, but a fact it is—that the Earth and other planets all revolve around the sun must necessarily be controversial. I admit it. So radical a revision of common prejudice is bound to make enemies.
"Still—I have heard of Brother Josaphat's displeasure from sources of my own. His face didn't break out in pimples because he thought the sun had been insulted. It was the slight upon his name that raised his ire."
(Well put) Mephistopheles said. (Tell them about his mas-turbatory practices.)
"Good friends!" Beckmann cried, horrified. "Let us discourse as scholars, without ad hominum attacks. Faust—there is no need to slander Brother Josaphat, however much he may invite such treatment. And Mette—it is scandalous of you to call Faust's theory heretical. Nicholas of Cusa proposed much the same thing when he wrote that to a man standing upon the sun the Earth would seem to revolve about him. This is no more than a restatement of his idea."
"No!" Faust cried. "Save me from such defenders as you, good Beckmann! You will defend my thesis to oblivion. I assure you that what I intend is nothing less than a total revision of our understanding of the universe. Look upon my figures
. Wagner! Bring the book! You will see the beauty, the elegance, the compelling logic of my system. Look! Look! See for yourselves."
To Faust's dismay, it was of all people Phaccus who grunted and heaved himself up from the bath. Like a walrus, he waddled to the fence, slapping his hands against his buttocks to rid them of excess water and then holding them out to an attendant to dry. With Wagner respectfully serving as a book-stand, he casually flipped through the manuscript, perusing one page in five. Then, meditatively scratching the underside of his ample belly, he returned to his place at the lip of the bath. .
Finally, he spoke. "It's a very pretty conceit, but what's the point? To justify a rank of numbers? De minimus, my dear. If you are to turn the universe upside down, you must have some compelling reason to do so."
"At any rate," Mette said, "it all falls apart at a touch. If the Earth revolves about the sun, then what does the moon revolve about?"
"Why, the Earth, of course!"
The Leucopolitans all laughed.
"You see? You retreat from your heliocentrism at a word," Mette said.
(A touch!) Mephistopheles cried. (Sound the trumpets so the citizenry may be assembled to witness what brilliance among us dwells!)
"All bodies have a mutual attraction for one another," Faust said testily, "in direct proportion to the product of their combined masses and inversely with the square of distance between them. The moon, being proportionately closer to the Earth, is caught in its gravitation field and the two together revolve about a common point within the Earth, and thus orbit the sun as a dual planetary system. If you would examine the mathematics, you would see this for yourselves."
"This is complication piled upon complication!"
"Not in the least. If you but imagine the structure of space as being—"
"Faust," Beckmann said firmly. "Your colleagues have, gently and with good humor, demonstrated your error. Do not cling to folly."
"It is not folly, which can be proven in three words: Jupiter has moons! I have seen them through my lenses."
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 5