by Jeffrey Ford
The Dream of Reason
The renowned luminist, Amanitas Perul, who lived a secretive life in his private observatory, Dark See, atop a hill outside the university town of Veldanch, was said by some to be so dedicated an observer of the natural world as to achieve a kind of scientific sainthood. By others he was reviled as the vainest of men, who spent hours before the mirror contemplating his own chalk-powdered visage and wore his thigh-length hair in a vertical architecture of complex knots and ringlets like an ingenious city of a thought. The enigmatic Perul had two theories—one, that distant stars were made of diamond and, two, that matter was merely light slowed down. One night when he was in his observatory, preparing to climb a ladder to the eyepiece of the world’s largest telescope, his two theories happened to collide in his mind, and from the resultant slow explosion, like a flower opening, the notion of an amazing experiment revealed itself to him. He went immediately to his desk and wrote out the equations for the highly influential research that would eventually become known as the Dream of Reason.
Perul had already done experiments on the deceleration of light and found that heavy gases, like carkonium and tersus margolium, kept at low temperatures actually impeded a sunbeam’s progress to the point where his precision gear-work sensors were able to record its speed. The leap of imagination that led to the famous experiment was his consideration that if he used starlight instead of sunlight, the beam in question would have had to lose more of its speed, having traveled eons farther through the frigid gas of space. Perul believed that the stars were diamonds and reflected back the light of our sun, so that the journey out to the star, the speed-diminishing act of rebound, and then the lengthy trip back would greatly impede light’s velocity. He dared to wonder, if he managed to slow a beam of starlight sufficiently to where it fell into matter, would it produce diamond dust since the last thing it had touched was a star?
Once Perul’s concept became known, the University of Veldanch was eager to fund his efforts. At the late age of forty, he dove headlong into the problem of overcoming the speed of light. For four years, Perul ran experiment after experiment with different gases, using ice by the cartload to try to lower their temperatures, and little by little the beams of light slowed, like clockwork running down. In the late summer of the fourth year of the Dream of Reason, he reduced the speed of a beam of starlight so much that its course could be charted with the naked eye. And then in autumn, he had a breakthrough with a rare gas siphoned from the dung of cattle and named by those farmers who gathered it Lud Fog. He reported that he’d slowed light to the walking speed of a very old woman.
At this point Perul acknowledged that the gases had done their job, but for the last step in the experiment, he’d have to devise some manner in which he could slow light into matter. He conceived of a great stadium with glass tubes, holding, within, specially curved mirrors so that the beam could circle the thousands of concentric rings. As the freshly slowed light, having traveled the great distance of space and passed through the chilled Lud Fog, made continuous loops around the glass tube tracks, eventually, it might meet its end and fall out of thin air as diamond dust. The one problem with this solution, as Perul saw it, was that the stadium that held the glass tubes would necessarily have to cover an area the size of the continent of Ishvu.
Perul’s research came to a halt, his thinking stymied by an inability to conceive of a practical physical manifestation for a light trap (as he referred to the theoretical device in his notes) that would be compact enough to actually construct and also be large enough to hold the voluminous concentric rings of a track he had already proven mathematically would be necessary to effectively allow a star beam’s life to run down into matter. The problem was a paradox, and in his imagination it took the form of the Senplesian mythological figure of the two-headed monster, the Frakkas. In the ancient story, when the hero Marianna wields her sword and cuts off one head of the accursed beast, she then must deal with the other, but while she is in the act of severing the second head, the first grows back. One who does not know the myth might think an easy solution would be to sever them both with one blow, but the Frakkas has a serpent’s body, long and wriggling, with a head at either end, making a single-stroke solution impossible. It must not have been much solace to Perul that in the myth, the beautiful warrior goddess Marianna is always battling the Frakkas, cutting off one head and then the other to protect mankind from the creature’s potential chaos.
It was reported, years later, by Perul’s servant, the reliable Elihu Arbiton, that the scientist fell into a deep depression over the problem. He spent many more hours than usual staring into the mirror. At times he’d pound his temples with closed fists as if hoping to dislodge a frozen thought. Perul could be found roaming the halls of the observatory at night with a lit candle, going room to room. When Arbiton inquired what his master was searching for, Perul, obviously sleepwalking with eyes closed, would murmur that he’d heard a ghost calling to him in whispers the secret solution to the light trap. “I can only hear part of what she’s saying,” said Perul. “She’s here and I must find her.” When Arbiton noticed that Perul had shaved off his eyebrows and on his powdered visage wore a black-penciled version instead over only his left eye, an arch more like an arrowhead pointing up, he realized that his master was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A group of influential scientists from the university got together and convinced the great luminist that a vacation was needed.
For the first time, Amanitas Perul was seen in different spots around the continent. Descriptions of his unmistakable appearance mark these reports as more than likely reliable. A café operator in the town of Libledoth on the southern coast of Ufdicht told a historian, “Yes, the man with the ridiculous hairdo, like a doll’s house on his head, came every day in the late afternoon, to sit on the sidewalk, stare at the setting sun, and drink bottle after bottle of Rose Ear Sweet. When the sky would darken and the stars would appear, he’d leave immediately, but if it was overcast he’d stay till we were forced to kick him out. I asked him once why when the stars began to shine, he’d scurry away. He grabbed me by the shirt collar, pulled my face close to his, and said, ‘Because they mock me.’ ” Perul was spotted at the great dam at Indel Laven, tearing up pages of paper filled with numbers and tossing the scraps into the frothy roar of runoff thundering beneath him. From many corners came news that he’d fallen, as he’d hoped light would into matter, into the use of winterspice and had a special pipe he smoked it from—a single mouthpiece but two bowls on wriggling stems jutting away from each other at an angle, both carved in the likeness of a Frakkas head.
More than a year after he’d left his observatory to travel the continent, he wound up one morning in Cravey-by-the-Sea, stumbling along the shore of the Inland Ocean high on winterspice and watching the comforting show of turquoise waves rolling and breaking against the pink sand. The day was fair, and beautifully blue. The sun was bright. Exhausted, he sat down on the sand. At this point, as he wrote later in his autobiography, he’d not thought of the problem of the light trap in months. All of his concerns about the experiment had lain down and dozed off for the longest time. A sense of calm came over him, and he considered all he’d been through, all the stupidity of his travels and the extent to which his own mind had tortured him over his inability to find the answers he’d been looking for. He reviewed his thoughts—the complexly conspiratorial nature of his fears, the impossibly infinite tangle of scheming and knotted self-admonishment. It struck him, like lightning out of the blue, that the only possible light trap both compact enough and vast enough to manage the last step in the deceleration of a star beam was, of course, the human mind.
“Think of the world, a globe spinning in space, and then think of the sun and the dark distances to the stars. Think of it all at once, all of it, and you can without any trouble,” wrote the luminist upon his return home to Dark See. Elihu Arbiton was given a sheaf of pages that held a special diet to have the kitchen help prepa
re and also orders to awaken his master every day at precisely sunrise. Perul gave himself two weeks of true rest in order to regain his strength for the last part of the experiment. Every morning he strolled the grounds at daybreak, swam laps in the pool, breakfasted on peeled sections of chali fruit and a bowl of unflayed dost bran, meditated in the study with the windows covered and but one lit candle to focus his mind upon. In the afternoons, he did light calculations and read the philosophy of Herden Bylat—The Crucial Degree of Probable Hope. At night, he eschewed the mirror, and went to sleep to ethereal hymns played by a cellist sitting just down the hall from his room.
On the day Perul was to begin again on his signature work, he summoned Elihu Arbiton to him and ordered him to go down to the city of Veldanch and find someone who would be willing to act as a subject in the experiment. “Let them name their price,” Perul said, “for there is danger in this, and they must understand that an autopsy will be undertaken upon their remains when they eventually pass away.” He handed over to Arbiton a set of contracts for the chosen individual to sign. The servant nodded and left with the contracts rolled up beneath his arm. He traveled on horse with another horse in tow and was in the town before the workday had begun. Although the money was a great temptation to those he approached, Arbiton had difficulty performing his assignment. As he discovered, the bishop of Veldanch had taken umbrage at the fact that Perul had named his observatory Dark See, a luminist’s joke, pointing to the fact that the master of the estate spent all his nightly hours staring into the pitch of space to study light. When Bishop Gazbrak had reprimanded Perul about the estate’s name, reminding him that a see can only be the domain of a bishop, the scientist had reportedly laughed in his face. Afterward, Gazbrak warned his congregations to steer clear of Perul or risk losing their souls.
With the day sliding into late afternoon and still no one contracted to act as subject in his master’s experiment, Arbiton headed into the last quadrant of town that he had not yet covered. There, amid the crumbling buildings and unpaved streets, he came upon the Debtor’s Prison, an institution he’d all but forgotten existed. He breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the wretched place. And so it was that from the bowels of that dark hellhole, Perul’s servant brought forth a young woman, Enche Jenawa—a still healthy specimen, who had not yet lost to poverty her looks or the glint of intelligence in her eyes. The warden suggested her, thinking kindly of the girl and believing it a crime perpetrated by the kingdom that Enche should serve a sentence for her dead father’s financial excesses. When Arbiton put the deal before her, all the young woman asked was if she’d again be able to see the sunlight, and when Arbiton nodded, she signed. He then paid off the girl’s debt and gave the warden a little something for his troubles. As he led the girl out of the prison of shadows, into the late-afternoon sun, she covered her eyes against the brightness.
It was well after dark by the time Arbiton and Enche reached Dark See. Perul was waiting in the observatory for their arrival, curious to see who his future subject might be. So much hinged on this aspect of the experiment that his nerves had gotten the better of him and he’d retrieved his old winterspice pipe and calmed himself with a double dose of the drug. Now many histories of these events tell a Romantic tale and would have it that Perul was smitten with Enche Jenawa from the moment he laid eyes upon her and vice versa, but reality as reported by Arbiton and recorded by Perul himself will just not bear the weight of this fiction. Enche was brought before her new employer. She curtsied as was the practice, and Perul nodded and, leaning close to her, said only one word, “Circles.” Then he asked Arbiton to take the girl to the kitchen, feed her, and then show her to her room.
When Arbiton pushed back the door of her room in order for her to enter, Enche smiled, for the room was beautifully appointed and done up in a most remarkable manner. The walls were papered with a pattern of small red circles on a yellow background, and the window over the circular bed was round as a ship’s porthole. The light fixtures were globes, the rugs were round, and even the pillows, the tables, the chairs were round. “This is lovely,” she said, unable to believe that no more than hours earlier she was lying in the dark, in a stall covered with straw, a chain around her left ankle, starving. She’d only been at the prison for a week, but it had been an absolute certainty to her that she would be raped before long by the giant prison guard with one eye who served rotten gruel twice a day. Having left that behind, she was now only taxed by Arbiton’s suggestion, “Amanitas Perul requests that you think of circles as often as possible.” She laughed outright and nodded. “I’ll think of circles all night. In fact I’ll dream of circles if need be,” she said. “Very good,” said Arbiton, and left her to herself.
The next morning after breakfast, Enche’s tutor arrived. She was introduced to him, a tall, thin gentleman with a long smooth face and eyeglasses, dressed in lavender jacket and trousers. She could not tell if he was old or young, but the gleam from his completely bald head slightly disturbed her still sensitive vision. “Mr. Garreau,” he said to her and smiled, and she answered with her name. Arbiton showed them to another room done up all in circles. There was a chair for her to sit in, facing a desk behind which he sat, a chalkboard behind him. And her lessons began with him leading her in an hour-long chanting of the word “circle.” This was followed by a fifteen-minute break, and then another hour of the same word, accompanied by circling of the head and rolling of the eyes. Before lunch there were two more hours in which she was instructed to trace circles in the air with her index finger. Mr. Garreau encouraged her and also scolded when her circles wavered into ovals or worse. After the midday meal, and a brief respite out upon the grounds of the estate where Enche and Mr. Garreau walked in large circles, they returned to their workroom where she drew circles on the chalkboard and was then lectured by her tutor about the philosophy of circles. “Truth lies at the end of a circle,” he told her. She nodded and he was obviously pleased.
Every night, just before she turned in, Enche was ushered to Perul’s study, where he loaded the two-headed pipe with winterspice and encouraged her to smoke with him. During these sessions, he did not converse with her, but occasionally merely intoned the word “circles,” and she repeated. With the drug in her system, when she finally lay down to sleep at night, she did dream of circles, wild imaginings of mouths pronouncing the letter O, and eyeballs loose and rolling, and hoops of fire and ice, and frantic races run in a ring between herself and a doughnut with legs. Arbiton reports that the young woman rather enjoyed her lessons, and told him on one occasion that thinking of all of those circles was a pleasant thing, so much more comforting than her thoughts in her previous life, which were all frayed ends and ragged paths that went nowhere.
One day, after lunch, she was not instructed to go back to the workroom with Garreau, but was led by Perul himself, to a closet in his own private bedchamber where hung two racks of women’s clothes—dresses both formal and casual. She was allowed to choose whatever fashions she wanted and told that from that point onward they belonged to her. At night, as always, the smoke and Perul’s simple, monotonous suggestion of “circles.”
While Enche’s mind was being transformed into the great stadium of circular paths for the light to travel, Perul was hard at work in the observatory, fitting together rods of glass tubing, painted black on the outside, to lead from the telescope’s eyepiece to the gas chambers where chilled Lud Fog would wait. From the chambers, it would then travel to a small room where, through a single tube, the ray of starlight would proceed to its intended trap. The luminist had spent many hours scanning the night sky for just the right star whose refracted light he’d use in the experiment. Eventually the perfect choice came to him, not through direct observation but from one of his star charts. By accident one night, while looking for information on another heavenly body, he saw an entry for Mariannus, a specimen of particular brightness available for viewing from late summer through all of autumn. There was a mythological stor
y attached to it. Apparently, it shone in the sky as a signal to humanity that the warrior goddess Marianna was still bravely battling the Frakkas. “Of course,” Perul wrote after noting his discovery and final choice.
Two months of adjusting the artifacts for the experiment and lessons on the circle passed, but little is known of the daily particulars of Dark See during this preparatory span. One of the only pieces of evidence that remains is a single scrap of a page of a letter written by Enche to her sister. This was only discovered last year in one of Elihu Arbiton’s old books now in the Veldanch archives. Some think it a forgery, but the content makes me trust in its veracity. I reproduce it for you here: . . . circles and circles and circles, my head is spinning, my heart is spinning. I dream tornadoes and speak loops. Thoughts race around inside my head like Hoffmann hounds at the old racetrack at Temkin. I’m in love with Mr. Garreau, my tutor. He’s a shiny-headed, hapless sot, but that is precisely what attracts me to him. Every day he brings me gifts, large, small, circles. Before long, I hope to give him my circle. The servant seems jealous, the master, unconscious . . .
On the night of the first freeze, Perul went to Enche’s room and shared with her two bowls of winterspice as he had every night of her stay. That night, though, instead of simply exhaling a cloud as she’d been wont to do, she blew smoke rings. This was the sign the luminist had been waiting for. He recorded the event in a joyous entry, and at the end of it, he wrote, “We shall begin.” The next day, Arbiton was ordered to go to Veldanch and purchase ten wagonloads of ice to be delivered the following evening. Enche was relieved of her lessons for the day, and she chose to take a picnic lunch into the woods accompanied by Mr. Garreau. Perul was busy from dawn to dusk, rechecking his calculations and going over every connection of the glass tubing. He consulted the almanac to make sure the skies the following night would be clear, and found they would be. It is said by some that that evening, after Enche did not arrive on time for dinner, Perul went out to look for her, and found her and Mr. Garreau together, locked in an embrace and kissing. When they noticed that Perul was watching, they stepped quickly apart. “We’re practicing circling the tongues,” Garreau called to his employer. Supposedly, Perul called back, “Circles,” and returned to the observatory.