Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  "Oh, this is too much."

  "Not the lenses again!"

  "Come out tonight, all of you, and I will show you."

  "Out of doors on a moonless night?" Mette sneered. "Only fools, footpads, and astrologers stray where there is no light. I have no desire whatsoever to have my head bashed in by some nameless thug, thank you. Let somebody else martyr himself upon the altar of your faulty scholarship."

  Exasperated, Faust surveyed his naked compeers, one by one. Except for Mette, who glared at him like a basilisk, not one would meet his eye. Even Beckmann looked away. "Then—Wagner! Bring my lenses here. I shall demonstrate the efficacy of this new tool." He went to the fence and after some clumsiness had his telescope set up and adjusted. "Look there, through the gap between buildings a small fraction of the city walls is visible, and beyond it a stand of trees. If you look through my lenses, it will seem that the trees leap toward you. You will be able to count the leaves. If there is a bird on one of the branches, you will be astonished to see its beak move in song and yet be so distant you cannot hear the song itself. Now look down below, where the stream that meanders by the bottom of our lawn is crossed by a stone bridge... Do you see how two housewives have paused on their way to market to gossip? Through my tube you can see a wonder: their tongues wagging in silence. Come, Mette, my doubting Thomas, you shall be the first."

  Mette looked away, saying nothing.

  "No? Then—Sbrulius, Phaccus? Come, gentlemen, who will be first?"

  Sbrulius sauntered casually to the tube and bent to peer through it. Under Faust's direction, he aimed the tube at the distant bridge and adjusted the focus. For a moment he was silent. He raised hi$ head from the tube to look at the bridge, and then returned his eye to it again. "Remarkable," he murmured. "Does it see through walls as well? Which way is the women's bathhouse from here?"

  (Marvelous! The invention is but a day old and already

  Magister Sbrulius contrives to find a way to make it serve his lust!)

  "Beckmann!" Faust cried. "Surely you will not refuse the entreaty of a friend and fellow scholar. Please."

  When Beckmann looked up from the telescope, a thoughtful expression came into his eyes. "An ... interesting tool. But is it necessary? As Mette reminded me just yesterday, Aristotle described this exact same phenomenon long ago."

  "He did not!"

  "Indeed he did," Mette smugly interjected, "in his Physics. He described how stars can be seen in the daytime from the bottom of a dry well. The well itself obviously serves as does this tube, denying excess light entry into the passage. The place of the lenses would be taken by coagulating layers of air. So your device is nothing truly new."

  "You will note, too," Sbrulius threw in, "that Aristotle's observations were clearly all made by the unassisted eye. From which we may assume he found this device of no merit in the advancement of science. And what is good enough for Aristotle is surely sufficient for us."

  "Mette!" Faust cried. "You are an honest man. Your arguments, though wrong, are based upon reason. Let you, my harshest critic, become my first convert. Here is the telescope. Come, look, understand!"

  Mette shook his head bullishly.

  "You will not even look?" Faust cried, astonished. He gestured toward the device. "Either I am right or I am wrong. How can you refuse to bend the inch or two it would take to put your eye before my telescope and see?"

  "I have no need to expose myself to your flummery," Mette said with dignity. "I believe in order that I may know. I do not know in order to believe."

  "I marvel at your spite. Of what possible benefit can this willful ignorance be to you?"

  "Spite?" Mette rose to his feet, fists clenched, face pale. "Ignorance? You have decided to set yourself above your fellows; we are to provide the altitude by letting you clamber up the mountain of our praise; which praise is to be heaped before you in exchange for the wildest and most fanciful of whimsical nonsense; and you dare speak to us of ignorance and spite?" He shrugged off Beckmann's restraining hand, but nevertheless subsided again into the bath. "Your immodesty ill becomes you."

  "This is astonishing!" In his anger, blood rushed to Faust's head. His face felt stuffy and hot. "You debate my points before I am finished making them. Your minds are set against me even before I can voice my reasoning. Your words have the stale sound of well-rehearsed arguments. It is almost as if—" He paused. "It is almost as if you had all formed a cabal to conspire against me."

  (Oho! The light dawns.)

  Uncomfortably, Beckmann said, "We had a discussion together the other day, yes. But you must not think we were plotting against you! It merely seemed wisest to form a consensus of opinion before hearing you expound upon your new .. . notions."

  For a long moment Faust could not speak. Then, when he could, the words came pouring out of him in a torrent, unstoppable, driven by anger and betrayal:

  "I am appalled. I came here before what I thought were the noblest minds in Christendom, to dispute and prove new insights into the nature of the universe. For you I reserved the honor of being the first to learn of these wonders in detail.

  But the truth means nothing to you! You contaminate everything about you with putrefaction and ignorance. You beslobber and besmirch all that is beautiful and good and then try to convince the world that it is better off for your tasteful leavening of excrement. You quibble and quack and chop logic while revelation is yours to be had for the asking. This is unbearable! You are—"

  (Yes!)

  "You are driving me—"

  (Come, say it!)

  "—mad!"

  (Thank you, Faust. My thesis is proved. Let us depart.)

  That evening, not long after sunset, Faust went shouting through the marketplace. With Wagner reluctantly trailing behind clutching the telescope, he summoned the citizens to rise from their sleep and come out to behold the stars. "See the rings of Saturn!" he yelled. "Planets new to mortal ken and moons in profusion! Galaxies and nebulae! Wonders beyond cataloguing!"

  When nobody emerged from their houses, he bellowed and roared and slammed on doors with his fists. Reaction varied by the temperament of those within. Some laughed; some scolded; some dragged furniture against the doors and shouted loudly for the watch.

  Tears of rage and disappointment filled his eyes. "I offer you enlightenment!" he screamed. "I offer you truth!"

  Nobody came out.

  Finally, dejected, Faust returned to his rooms. He sent the humiliated and dispirited Wagner to bed. Then he sat up late into the night with Mephistopheles and a bottle of wine. The devil manifested himself as a small black-furred monkey with malevolent red eyes.

  "I have written," Faust said dejectedly, "literally hundreds of letters, and received not one reply."

  Mephistopheles hopped up on the writing desk and began to search himself for lice. Offhandedly he said, "The posts are unreliable and even at the best of times a letter can take weeks to move a few score miles. Mud slides, robbers, the rumor of dragons in a mountain pass—any of these things can isolate a city from the outside world for months."

  "Still, my messages go out by every post, and some of them do not have far to travel. Yet from Erfurt, from Heidelberg, from Krakow, there come no replies." His goblet was low; he tipped the bottle over it and poured. "Why do you appear in such a grotesque form?"

  "I do this in honor of your race. If you compared the human genome with that of chimpanzees, you would find that ninety-eight percent of the DNA was identical. You are only two percent distinguished from an ape. Two percent!" Mephistopheles placed his fingers to his anus and then to his nose, repeating the action several times before he was satisfied. "Yet, strange to relate, I swear that from my perspective the differences seem even less."

  Faust shook his head dismissively, wrapped both hands about his goblet. "I publish pamphlets that nobody buys. I bring scholars into my study to look through my microscope and they go away shaking their heads in bafflement."

  "Patience. Rome was
not corrupted in a day." The monkey began playing in a bored way with his genitalia. "I fail to see, however, why you should wait upon the post when you can have the same information by merely asking."

  "You can do this?"

  Mephistopheles yawned, baring tiny razor-sharp teeth.

  "Tell me, then. How were my letters received?"

  "Trithemius has written to the mathematician-astrologer Johann Windling, calling you a fool, a mountebank, and a vain babbler who ought to be whipped. Mutianus Rufus considers you a charlatan. And our beloved Piscinarius is telling all who will listen that you are a drunken vagabond. The carriage-maker in Nuremberg, however, is enjoying great success with your design for the leaf-spring. The Emperor himself has heard of your innovation and ordered all his carriages replaced."

  Faust made a disgusted noise.

  " 'Tis but proof that it's easier to make the ass smart than the head." Mephistopheles dipped a long-nailed finger into the ink pot and meditatively stirred. "You'd do better to take my advice and stop wasting your time on humanists, thinkers, and philosophers—they are misers who dearly love their hard-earned and long-hoarded knowledge. Your revelations would bankrupt them—can you wonder they will not listen? Let me give you instead a list of merchants and mechanics, tool-makers, and other tradesmen, with practical suggestions for the improvement of their businesses."

  "I have diamonds to pour at the feet of the wise and you wish me to muck out the stables of fools."

  "Exactly so."

  Dejectedly, Faust put his chin in his hand. "What wonder can I present these lard-headed idiots that will convince them? What marvel is there that they cannot refuse to see?"

  Mephistopheles shrugged.

  "My balloon ... how goes it?"

  "The linen merchants are beginning to grumble that you intend never to pay them for their cloth. The varnish-dealer too has expressed his doubts. In consequence, your seamstresses have made your commission a lesser priority and set it aside whenever cash work comes to them."

  "Money again! When the balloon ascends, there will be money in plenty. It will fall from the hands of the great and powerful like rain. I shall be showered with riches and honors."

  Mephistopheles made a disbelieving face. "Patronage is a notoriously unreliable source of funds."

  "What would you have me do?"

  "A simple word in the ear of a councilman you know well: Timonias/ say you. 'Saint Martin's day. For the sake of a certain lady.' Say also that you are in serious need of silver. He will help you to the uttermost of his ability."

  "Oh, vile! You urge extortion on me."

  "How swiftly you see to the heart of things!"

  "I will not heed such advice."

  "Pity." Mephistopheles drew out his finger and with obvious pleasure lapped up the ink with a long black tongue. "Then honesty requires that your balloon rely on the more traditional method of ordering goods and not paying for them."

  "They will be paid for. I swear it." The scholar sighed again and drained his cup. "But, oh, sweet misery. How long can this go on?" л

  "Through the winter, at a minimum. I promise you, Faust, that if you hold true to your course you will achieve all you desire. But you will have to pay the freight in advance. You must endure cold and hunger and the taunts of fools."

  "Must it be?" Faust groaned.

  "It must. To triumph, you must first suffer as much as ever a scholar did."

  It was as painful a winter as the devil predicted. Faust lived frugally, feeding upon barley and oats, drinking water rather than beer, going for months on end without so much as a scrap of meat. He sold the better of his two gowns and patched the lesser. He heated his rooms with driftwood and deadfall.

  It hardly mattered that few attended Faust's regular lectures, for he was the mathematicum superiorum, the professor of astronomy for the university, his chair endowed by the Elector himself. It provoked criticism, but his position was secure. So he told himself. Still, it stung.

  The worst of Faust's many humiliations was how the students flocked to his afternoon lectures, which he offered free for all who cared to attend. They came to laugh at his outlandish pronouncements, to jeer at what they should be receiving with prostrate gratitude. He glowered at them and shifted his shoulders like a great bear (there were white bears in the Arctic regions, and primitive but fearless peoples who hunted them with bone-tipped spears; he had seen them) and stubbornly continued his lecture, for he wished to reach that one student in a hundred, a thousand, whose eyes and ears and mind were not closed but open. Who might actually learn from him.

  He lectured himself hoarse. He spoke to all who would listen. Not many would listen.

  As winter turned to spring, the number of students at Faust's lectures dwindled. The mockers and braying asses fell away as their studies became more demanding and the sport grew old. Finally there was only a handful of the most promising young men. And Wagner, of course. Outwardly they were an unlikely lot, and in ways inwardly as well. For the sake of the two who had not the Latin—and were consequently flunking their other courses—he lectured in good honest German. This only increased the public scorn.

  During the lectures, Wagner took notes his master intended to rework as textbooks. Because there was not the money to have them bound, Wagner tied them up with bits of string begged from an indulgent butcher.

  Faust's debts grew.

  So much of a scholar's income came from examination fees that it was common to spend most of each year in debt. The merchant who did not extend credit would have quickly gone out of business. The trick lay in knowing the seasonal rhythms of poverty and coin-lack for all professions, so that credit could be offered in times preceding affluence and denied where that affluence would never come. This seasonal indebtedness masked Faust's greater liability. No one creditor had advanced him too much money. Yet many had advanced him all they dared.

  His scant wealth he trickled out a coin at a time, in order to keep work on his balloon from ceasing altogether.

  Finally, on a warm spring day not long before the examinations were to begin, news came that the great balloon was ready.

  Wagner was given a brush, a bucket of paste, and a handful of quickly printed handbills and sent about town to plaster the walls with notices:

  Come Witness THE ASCENT OF DAEDALUS'. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Humanity Freed from the Tyranny of Earth The Dream of the Ancients Become Cold Hard Fact THE FLIGHT OF EAGLES ACHIEVED BY MORTAL MAN OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO This Miracle to be Demonstrated on The Feast of the Ascension —Market-Square—

  I I Noon

  "What new impiety is this?" Brother Josaphat demanded. He had stopped Faust on the street and thrust a poster into his face, too close to be read but not so close he could not see the size and force of the monk's enormous fist. Faust smiled.

  "You must wait and see."

  "Only birds, angels, and saints can fly. And you are none of the three."

  "Neither angel nor saint, I readily agree. But a bird is no difficult thing to be, I think. You yourself are as odd a bird as I've ever seen."

  With a roar of incoherent rage, Brother Josaphat crumpled the handbill and threw it in Faust's face. Then he turned and stormed away.

  The balloon slowly filled, swelling and rising up above the market-square like some hallucinatory great skull. Faust oversaw the hose and leather funnel arrangement that fed it hot air, while Wagner kept the fire fueled. By slow degrees the balloon lifted from the ground, tugging at the ropes that held it captive. Its yearning to lift grew stronger.

  The crowd was enormous. It had to be held back by a line of burly students, all of them volunteers eager to have a place in this diverting enterprise, whatever their opinions of Faust's sanity, and all of them certified reliable for the task by Mephistopheles himself.

  The balloon continued to grow. The linen was sewn in three concentric circles, black at the top, then blue, and after that an unbleached white, and heavily varnished with a solution of elas
tic gum, so it would hold the hot air. "Silk would have been better," Faust murmured, staring up at it, "and hydrogen better still."

  "Hydrogen?" one of the students asked.

  "It's abundant in water. Helium would be best of all."

  Faust stood by the wicker basket.

  Two ruffianly students—Fritz and Karl, both favorites of his—held their hatchets ready to cut the anchor ropes. Nearby sulked a third, Hans Metternich, who had been told by Faust that if he were to attempt this simple feat he would slice open his own leg and—worse—unbalance the basket, spilling its passenger upon the ground. "Wait for my word." Faust jovially wagged a finger at them. "Don't let my air-carriage leave without me."

  The balloon was filled at last, and the hose thrown aside. Now, horrified, members of the crowd were seeing what had evaded them before, that the circles of cloth, inflated, formed the perfect semblance of a great eyeball, staring upward. Faust, climbing into the basket, made the monstrous eye bob slightly, down and then up again.

  Somebody in the crowd seized a stone and made to throw it at the balloon. Hans, vastly more alert than he ever ap

  es

  peared to be in class, wrestled the would-be assailant to the ground. All in an instant the mood of the crowd shifted. Brother Josaphat pushed through it, toward where Hans and his adversary wrestled on the ground. Fights broke out here and there. Wagner had been adjusting the balloon's ballast bags; now he turned to reinforce the line of students.

  But Faust seized Wagner by the rear of his belt and hauled him back. "No, no, my young friend," he said jovially. "You have served me well and faithfully—you must have your reward." He was in great humor; everything seemed amusing to him, as if he were on the inside of an enormous joke that the entire rest of the world lacked the perspective to see.

  When he had hauled the horrified Wagner in with him, Faust waved a hand to his young hatcheteers. "Now!" he cried. Blades flashed, and with a double jerk the anchor ropes parted.

  The balloon lifted.

  It ascended slowly, perpendicularly, with no sensation of movement at all. To Faust it was as if the world had, with infinite gentleness, drawn back a pace from him. What an instant ago had threatened to become a mob was now silent with reverent astonishment. Hans and his opponent rolled apart, stood, gawked upward.