Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘You speak only of temporal advantages,’ insisted Burton. ‘But to do so is short-sighted. It is true that the discoveries of our navy have enriched our country in purely material terms - but the spiritual, sir? The spiritual?’

  ‘God,’ said Burton.

  ‘Indeed, my friend. God created all these creatures as marvels. We have spat upon his gift. Lilliputians may seen small to us, but they are part of God’s universe.’

  ‘There are giants in Genesis, I believe,’ said Burton. ‘Did not the Flood destroy them?’

  ‘The Flood may not have reached the northwestern coast of America, ’ said Bates. ‘At least, this is one theory as to the survival of these peoples.’

  ‘It hardly seems to me that God’s Providence was greatly disposed towards these monsters. He tried to destroy them in the Flood, and again in the form of two British frigates.’ His face twitched a smile.

  ‘After much prayer,’ Bates insisted, not wanting to be distracted. ‘After much prayer, it has become evident to me . . .’

  At this Burton laughed out loud, a doggy, abrasive noise; each laugh parcelled into sections, like the ‘ha! ha! ha!’ of conventional orthography. It broke through Bates’s speech. ‘Pannell,’ said Burton. ‘Mr Bates has come to vex us, not to divert us, and yet how diverting he is!’

  ‘Mockery is,’ began Bates, his anger rising. He swallowed his words. Better to turn the other cheek. ‘I come, sir, to invite you. To invite you to join a commonality of enlightened employers and financiers-a small core, sir, but a vital one. From us will grow a more proper, a more holy society.’

  ‘A society? So that’s it. And if I joined your commonality, I would not be allowed to possess any slaves, I suppose?’

  ‘You might own slaves, sir, provided only they were slave—Blacks I mean. The Lilliputians are not slaves, sir, in God’s eye, and it is God you mock by treating them so. God will not be mocked.’

  ‘I daresay not,’ agreed Burton, hauling his cumbersome body from its chair. ‘It’s been a pleasure, sir, talking with you. Mr Pannell here will show you out.’

  Bates rose, flustered, uncertain at exactly which point he had lost the initiative in this interview. ‘Am I to take it, sir, that you . . .’

  ‘You are to take it any way you choose, sir. I had thought you a spy for Parliament, sir. There are MPs who would gladly outlaw slavery in all its forms, and they have the power to do actual harm. But you, sir, do not-I doubt nothing but that you are harmless, as are your God-bothering friends. Good day, sir!’

  Bates’s ire spurted up. God-bothering! The insolence! ‘You are rude sir! God is more powerful than any parliament of men.’

  ‘In the next world sir, the next world.’

  ‘You approach blasphemy, sir!’

  ‘It is not I,’ Burton growled, ‘who attempted to infiltrate an honest workman’s shop with lies and deceit, not I who broke the commandment about bearing false witness to worm my way inside a decent business and try to tear it down. But you knew that you would not gain admittance if you spoke your true purpose. Good day, sir.’

  [2]

  Bates paced the evening streets of London, the long unlovely streets. He passed gin shops and private houses. He walked past a junior school with ranks of windows arrayed along its brick walls like the ranks of children within. He passed churches, chapels and a synagogue. Up the dog-leg of Upper St Martin’s Lane and past the rag traders of Cambridge Circus, now mostly putting away their barrows and boarding up their shops. Bates, lost in his own thoughts, walked on, and up the main thoroughfare of Charing Cross Road.

  Around him, now, crowds passed. Like leaves at autumn, drained of their richness, dry and grey and rattling along the stone roads before the wind. He thought of the French word: folles. A true word, for what was of greater folly than a crowd? The stupidity of humankind, that cattle-breed. Hiding, unspeaking, in some crevice of his mind was a sense of the little Lilliputians as daintier. More graceful, more faery. But he didn’t think specifically of the little folk as he walked the road. There was an oppressive weariness inside him, as grey and heavy as a moon in his belly. Melancholia was, he knew it of course, a sin. The black bile sneered at God’s gift of life. It was the sin against hope. It was to be fought, but the battle was hard. It was hard because it was the very will to fight that melancholia eroded; it was a disease of the will.

  Over his head, one of the new clockwork flying devices buzzed, dipping and soaring like a metal dragonfly, long as his arm. It croaked away through the air up Charing Cross Road, flying north and carrying who knew what message to who knew what destination. Only the wealthy could afford such toys, of course; the wealthy and the government. Perhaps it was the noise, the self-important humming of it, that always gave the impression of a creature hurrying off on an errand of the mightiest importance. The war! The empire! The future of humankind !

  Probably a financial facilitator, a manufactor, somebody with nouveau riches in the city, one of that type, had sent it flying north to let his servants know he would be late home from work.

  The thought was sour in Bates’s belly, an undigested pain. He should not have drunk the brandy.

  He stopped to buy The Times from a barrow-boy, and ducked into a mahogany-ceilinged coffee shop to read it. Hot chocolate breathed fragrant steam at his elbow. Gaslight from four lamps wiped light over the polished tabletops, reflecting blurry circles of light in the waxwood of the walls. He brought his face close to the newsprint, as much to bury himself away from the stare of the other patrons as to make out the tiny printface. Miniature letters, like insects swarming over the page.

  News.

  British forces had seen action again at Versailles; the famous palace had been pocked with cannon shells. There was little doubt that Christmas would see the flag of St George flying over Paris. Anxiety of the French people; reassurance from the King that there would be no anti-Catholic repression after an English victory. The mechanics of the Flying Island had been thoroughly analysed by the Royal Society, and a paper had been read before the King. It seemed that a particular ore was required against which a magnetic device of unusual design operated. This ore was found only rarely in His Majesty’s dominions, and in Europe not at all. But deposits were known to lie in portions of the North American and Greater Virginian continent. The way was clear, the paper announced, for this resource to be exploited and a new island to be constructed as a platform for use in the war against the Spanish in that continent.

  Still Bates’s spirits sank. He could not prevent it: some malign gravity of the heart dragged him down.

  He turned to the back of the paper, and studied the advertisements. For sale, one Lilliputian, good needleworker. For sale, two Lilliputians, a breeding couple; one hundred and fifty guineas the pair. For sale, stuffed Lilliputian bodies, arranged in poses from the classics: Shakespeare, Milton, Scott. For sale, prime specimen of the famed Intelligent Equines, late of His Majesty’s Second Cognisant Cavalry; this Beast (the lengthy advertisement went on) speaks a tolerable English, but knows mathematics and music to a high level of achievement. Of advanced years, but suitable for stud. And there, at the bottom, swamped and overwhelmed by the mass of Mammonite hawking and crying, was a small box: Public Lecture, on the Wickedness of Enslaving the Miniature Peoples from the East India Seas. Wednesday, no entrance after eight. Wellborough Hall. Admission one shilling.

  Hopeless, all hopeless.

  For Bates, this was the familiar sinking into the long dark of the soul. It had happened before, but every time it happened there was never anything to compare it to, there was never any way to fight it off. He stumbled down Oxford Street in a fuggy daze of misery. Where did it come from? Chapels littered both sides of the road, some polished and elegant, some boxy and unpretentious, and yet none of them held the answer to his indigestion of the spirit. If only some angel would swoop down to him, calling and weeping through the air like a swift, angelic and varicoloured wings stretching like a cat after a sleep, the feather
-ends brushing the street itself in the lowest portion of its flying arc, its face bland and pale and still and beautiful. If only some angel could bring God’s blessing down to him. Or perhaps the angel would be faery, a tiny creature with wings of glass and a child’s intensity of innocence. Grace was Grace, even in the smallest parcels.

  [3]

  11 November

  By the time Bates next rose from his bed he had been on the mattress for two days and two nights. His man put his insolent white head through the doorway of his cubby and chirruped: ‘Feeling better today?’

  ‘Go away, Baley,’ Bates groaned. ‘Go leave me in peace.’

  ‘Off to your club today? It’s Thursday - you told me most particular to remind you, Thursday.’

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered, more to himself than to his servant. ‘Yes, Thursday. I will be getting up today. My . . . stomach feels a little better.’

  ‘There you go sir.’ The head withdrew, a smirk upon it.

  Bates turned over in the bed. The sheet underneath him was foul with two days’ accumulated stink, creased and wrinkled like the palm of a white hand. His bedside cabinet was littered with glasses, bottles, a newssheet, an ivory pipe. The curtain was of cotton velvet, and muffled off most of the daylight. The joints between knuckles and fingers’ ends ached in both hands; the small of his back murmured complaint. His feet hurt from inaction. There was a series of bangs, miniature sounds, goh, goh, goh. Bates could not tell whether the thrumming sound was the spirit of Headache rapping inside his skull, or the sound of something thudding far away. The volatile acid of his melancholia had eroded away even the boundaries of self and world, so much so that Bates’s misery spread out and colonised reality itself, it became a universal pressure of unhappiness. It occurred to Bates at that moment that the biblical flood had been, symbolically speaking, a type or trope for Melancholia itself, washing away strength, joy, will, hope, diluting the very energy of life itself and spreading it impossibly weakly about the globe. Grey waves washing at a rickety waterfront.

  He pulled the pot from under the bed and pissed into it without even getting up, lying on his side and directing the stream over the edge of the mattress. Flecks of fluid messed the edge of the bed, but he didn’t care. Why should he care? What was there to care about? When he had finished he did not bestir himself to push the pot back under the bed. He turned on his other side and lay still. There was the small noise again, a repeated thud-thud-thud.

  It stopped. Bates turned over again.

  Turned over again. Ridiculous, ridiculous.

  He pulled himself upright, and snatched at the paper. Baley had brought it to him the night before, but Bates’s fretful, miserable state of mind had not allowed him to concentrate long enough to read the articles. He started on the first leader, an imperial puff about the prospects for a British European Empire once France had been defeated. He read the third sentence three times - our glorious history reasserts itself, our generals revitalise the dreams of Henry the Fifth - without taking it in at all. The words were all there, and he knew the meaning of each, but as a whole the sentence refused to coalesce in his mind. Senseless. It was hopeless. In a fit of petty rage, he crushed the whole paper up into a ball and threw it to the floor. At once it started to unwind itself, creakily, like a living thing.

  He lay prone again.

  ‘Gentleman at the door, sir.’ It was Baley, his head poking into the crib. ‘I’m not at home,’ Bates said into his mattress.

  ‘Won’t take that for an answer, sir,’ said Baley. ‘A foreign gentleman. Says he’s High Belgium, but I’d say France, sir.’

  Bates hauled himself upright. ‘His hair black, in a long queue at the back of his head?’

  ‘A what, sir?’

  ‘Long hair, idiot, long hair.’

  ‘Continental fashion, yes sir.’

  Bates was struggling into his gown. ‘Show him through, you fool.’ He pressed the crumbs of sleep from his eyes and wiped a palm over his sleep-ruffled hair. Here? The selfsame D’Ivoi who had never before come to his rooms, had always insisted upon meeting in the club? Perhaps Baley had made a mistake - but, no, coming through to the drawing room there he was, D’Ivoi, standing facing the fire, with a turquoise hat under his arm, the sheen of his silk suit gleaming, and his ridiculous tassel of hair dangling from the back of his head. Baley was loitering. Bates shooed him away.

  ‘My friend,’ said D’Ivoi, turning at the sound of Bates’s voice.

  ‘I was coming to the club today ,’ said Bates at once. ‘Perhaps I seem unprepared, but I was in train of getting dressed.’

  D’Ivoi shook his head very slightly, no more than a tremble, and the smile was not dislodged from his face. ‘There is no need for us to meet at the club.’ His ths were brittle, tare is no need for us to meet at t’ club, but otherwise his accent was tolerably good. ‘I regret to say, my friend, that I leave this city this afternoon.’ Tat I leave tis city tis.

  ‘Leave?’ Bates reached without thinking for the bell-rope, to call for tea. At the last minute he remembered that this was a conference to which no servant must be privy.

  ‘I regret to say it. And before I depart, I bring a warning of sorts. Events in the war are about to take a turn . . . shall we say, dramatic?’

  ‘Dramatic? I don’t understand. The paper says that we . . . that, ah, the English are on the edge of capturing Paris. When that happens, surely the . . .’

  ‘No my friend,’ said D’Ivoi. ‘You will find tomorrow’s newspapers tell a different story. France and the Pope have declared a common right with the Pacificans.’

  It was all a great deal for Bates to take in at once. ‘They have?’ he said. ‘But it is excellent news. Excellent news for our cause! Common right with Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, both?’

  ‘Certainly, with both. The petite folk and the giant folk, both are made in God’s image. The talking horses, not; the Pope has decreed them devilish impostures. But of course he does so more because the English has its cavalry regiment of sapient horses. And the French army now has its own regiments. Regiments of the little folk would be useless enough, I suppose, but the giants make fearsome soldiers, I think.’

  ‘The French army has recruited regiments of Brobdingnagians?’ repeated Bates, stupidly.

  ‘I have not long, my friend,’ said D’Ivoi, nodding his head minutely. ‘I come partly to warn you. There are other things. The President of the Republic has relocated to Avignon, as you know. Well, there have been great things happening in Avignon, all in the south you know. And these great things are about to emerge to the day’s light, for all the world to see. It will be terrible to be an English soldier before them.’

  ‘Monsieur,’ said Bates. ‘Are you . . .?’

  ‘Forgive me, my friend,’ interrupted D’Ivoi. ‘When these things happen, it will be uncomfortable to be a French national in London, I think. And so I depart. But I warn you too: your cause, your pardon our cause, for the liberation of the Pacificans, has aligned you with the nation of France. Your government may take action against you for this reason.’

  ‘I am no traitor,’ Bates asserted, though his tongue felt heavy in his mouth uttering the sentiment.

  ‘No no,’ assured the foreigner. ‘I only warn you. You know best, of course, how to attend to your own safety. But before I depart (and time is close, my friend), let me say this: contemplate a French victory in this war. I advise it. Believe that, with the Pope and the President now allied formally to the petites and the giants, believe that a victory for France will spell freedom for these people. Perhaps one smaller evil counterbalances a larger good? Perhaps?’

  Bates did not know what to say to this. ‘I know that my actions here,’ he started saying, speaking the words slowly, ‘have benefited the French government. And I am not ashamed of this.’

  ‘Good! Extremely good! Because it will be less time than you think before French soldiers arrive here in London town, and you would be well to consider how your duty lies. Your
duty, my friend, to God above all. No?’

  ‘Monsieur,’ said Bates again anxiously.

  But D’Ivoi was donning his top hat and bowing, stiffly. ‘I regret I must depart.’

  ‘French soldiers here?’

  ‘Ah, yes. I will say only this, at last. There has been a very great series of inventions. We have a machine, a thinking and calculating machine . . . have you heard of this?’

  ‘A machine?’

  ‘Mister Babbage, with his French mistress, they have been working in Uzès, in France’s south, for many years now. You have heard, perhaps, of Mister Babbage?’

  ‘The name is familiar ...’ said Bates. His head was starting to buzz unpleasantly. This conference was a shock, there was no mistaking that.

  ‘He has built a machine. It can undertake a week’s calculations in a moment. It is nothing more than a box, the size of a piano I think, but it gives great power of calculation and ratiocination, of the power of thought in this box. Forgive me, I am forgetting my English already. But our engineers now use this box, and with it they design fantastic new machines. Our generals use it, and with it they plan all possible military strategies. This box will win the war, for us.’