Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  Of medicines for the spirit there was also God’s plenty: ‘Avoid the inclinations to bestial pleasures, for the carnal appetites incline the mind to the corruptible pleasure of the bestial soul if no discretion be used. Therefore the corruptible body will rejoice, and the corruptible intellect be saddened. The inclination to carnal pleasure therefore generates carnal love. But carnal love generates avarice; avarice generates the desire of riches; the desire of riches generates shamelessness; shamelessness generates presumption, and presumption generates infidelity …’ a strange catalogue of deadly sins to a Christian eye, both in selection and in order, yet incredibly appropriate admonitions for an Alexander; nor did Aristotle neglect medicines for the body politic of his prince: ‘Take such a stone, and every army will flee from you.… Give a hot drink from the seed of a plant to whomsoever you wish, and he will obey you for the rest of your life.… If you can alter the air of those nations, permit them to live; if you cannot, then kill them …’

  Yet these matters and the most secret of secrets of this kind had always hidden from the rank and file of philosophers, and particularly so after men began to abuse science, turning to evil what God granted in full measure for the safety and advantage of man; until he should strive that the wonderful and ineffable utility and splendour of experimental science may appear, and the pathway to a scientia universalis be again opened.

  And that by thee.

  ‘Stand forth!’ Roger shouted hoarsely. The goat leaped to her feet and was again thrown by the tether. Roger swallowed and resumed his perch.

  ‘What art thou?’ he said quietly. ‘I demand thou answer, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.’

  For a while there was no answer; and Roger noted that in the darkness beyond the candle flame there were strange amorphous patches of colour, pulsing and elusive. Moreover, his giddiness was worse; was that still the sweet vitriol, or was he in truth working too long, as Raymond—

  I am the raven of Elias.

  ‘That is blasphemous and untrue. I charge thee, tell me who thou art!’

  I am the man.

  ‘What man is this? Tell me thy signification, else I’ll exorcize thee straight!’

  Thou art the man.

  ‘Speak on.’

  Thou art the man, shalt bring back into the world the scientia universalis. Thou shalt make of it an edifice, unto the glory of thy Lord. All help I shall give thee, that thou requireth.

  ‘How?’

  As food brought unto Elias in the desert. Thine edifice shall touch Heaven, and on its brow be written, Knowledge is power.

  These cadences were putting him to sleep. Almost he failed to see the trap, that self-same trap into which the builders of Babel had fallen.

  Nay. Moral philosophy is the pinnacle, otherways nothing can touch Heaven.

  ‘How dost thou know?’ Roger whispered.

  Forbye the light of knowledge the Church of God is governed; the commonwealth of the faithful is regulated; the conversion of unbelievers is secured; and those who persist in their malice can be held in check by the excellence of knowledge, so that they may be driven off from the borders of the Church in a better way than by the shedding of Christian blood.

  ‘And – this is the meaning of that saying, Knowledge is power?

  All matters requiring the guidance of knowledge are reduced to these four heads, and no more, the self sang sweetly. It was strange and horrifying to hear it discourse of these matters weighty and unusual in that same remote, bodiless, tuneless whine, as though it sang only to amuse itself.

  The pages of the Secret of Secrets wavered and blurred before him, and he closed the book. He could think of nothing else to ask; he was suspended in an ecstasy of disbelief. In that emptiness, the self sang suddenly:

  Time is.

  ‘Yes,’ Roger said, wonderingly. ‘It is the subject of motion. But I don’t—’

  Time was, sang the self. Time was. Behind the voiceless music, Roger seemed to hear an endless mirroring of echoes.

  ‘Is this the bread thou bring’st me, raven?’ he said sternly, though the words came forth more than a little slurred. ‘Well know that time is single and linear, and giveth up one age belonging to all ages. This is a necessary conclusion, and doubted by no one skilled in philosophy. Nor is it opposed to the sacred writers and principal doctors, but is in agreement with their view. Why triest thou this axiom with me?’

  Fool!

  The moment hung. The point of the candle-flame bobbed up and down, like a fisherman’s float moored above ripples. When the self spoke again, its distant soundless voice was as terrible as the strokes of a gong of brass.

  Time is past!

  The candle went out.

  Whence from the darkness there rose rank upon rank of armed men with Saracen faces, and the faces of sheep, and the faces of demons, too bright in their chains to look upon massed under the invisible sun, passing in their thousands as men who march to the last great engagement; and with them thousands on horseback, and more on animals not yet seen in the world; and many bearing strange engines; and at their head was Antichrist. Yet in a twinkling, all this terrible host shrank, so that each man was no bigger than a grain of millet; and then even this emmet army was turned out of sight, as an image vanishes when the glass is turned; and naught left behind but the whitecaps of some torrent, stretching to the far horizon, as if one looked in vain across a strait for the coming invader. Things moved, like Leviathan, beneath these waters, but they were engines, and there were men in them; and there were dragons in the air like the dragons of the Aethiopians, yet there were men in them; and there were moles under the earth, and men rode them, all in mail, and with terrible countenances. And one wearing a cowl came and stood upon the headlands above the wide waters, and held up such glasses and mirrors as were necessary to show forth these things. And the mirrors turned, and there across the wide waters was the self-same army brought close again, yet now every man was as great as a giant across that distance, so that every link of the mail could be counted. And the mirrors moved, and the head of him in the cowl appeared in the air above the army, greater than any of them, and burning as it were of brass in a furnace, yet was not there; and many of those giants threw down their engines of war and fled; yet the host came on. And he made in the air certain compositions, which a man might know only by smelling them, or not at all, but which were certainly fell, for the ranks toppled in windrows; yet on came that inexhaustible host, and at their head was Antichrist. And he in the cowl held out his hand over the wide waters, and in the palm of it were certain crystals like saltpetre from a dungheap; and he wrapped the crystals in a scrap of parchment without any writing on it, and cast it into the wind, crying,

  LUPU LURU VOPO VIR CAN UTRIET VOARCHADUMIA

  TRIPSARECOPSEM

  whereat all that army was seen to fall in a single flash of lightning, and with a roar of such sharp thunder that the cowl flew from the skull of him that had cried out; and he fell dwindling away to nothing, like an ever-burning lamp cast into the sea.

  After that for a long time there was darkness and silence. It was not the nothingness of sleep, in which the consciousness of time itself is obliterated, so that in an instant the night is gone that wakeful men could vouch for. Time passed, but what events marked it in that sable silence could not be known, nor words spoken reach the ears, nor any touch penetrate.

  Then he moaned, and heard, and confused light passed before his closed lids. In a while it was gone. In the new darkness he almost awoke, drawing a breath only to discover that he could hardly breathe, and that he was soaked in sweat. Someone murmured near him, and there was an answer; he understood neither. Now, however, he could fall into true sleep.

  In the early morning the world crept back into his room, grey and cautious as an old man. He turned his head exhaustedly. Raymond was lying in the straw beside his pallet, supine, his mouth open, snoring softly. The man at the lectern had his head buried in his arms, but while Roger watched with detached
wonderment, he lifted heavy eyes and stared upward at the weak light coming in the window, as a man seeing somewhat unwelcome but beyond his powers to undo. It was Peter the Peregrine, his profile so gaunt and hungry that he looked like a beggared Simon de Montfort.

  Then he was aloft, tottering toward the pallet on spider’s feet.

  ‘Roger! You’re awake? Shh, don’t speak, rest.’ He stirred Raymond with a toe; the boy only groaned. Peter nudged him harder.

  ‘Be quiet, Roger; you’re a sick man. Raymond, thou Spanish cow, get up and act the apothecary, in God’s name! Julian, light the lamp and heat me some of that goat’s milk; he’s come around. Gloria! But let’s look lively.’

  Perhaps it was still only Tuesday, and time now for the Arabic lesson? But why were Peter and Julian here … and where were all those mailed glittering men? Then he remembered, seeing the cowl fly back from the skull in the instant of that enormous noise, and fainted.

  Nearly the whole college was there, bustling and anxious, when he opened his eyes again. Hands lifted his head gently; other hands gave him something warm and sweet to drink; there was a cold wet cloth on his brow. Peter hovered over him like a man on stilts.

  He felt weak, but curiously tranquil, as though he had just accomplished some great work. There were now so many things that he understood that it seemed to him that he had for the first time left his long childhood.

  ‘How do you feel, Roger?’ Peter said.

  ‘Content. God bless you all.’

  ‘You were very ill. We did our poor best, but in sooth there was little enough to do but pray.’

  ‘I had the death,’ Roger said tranquilly. ‘I recognize it now. Perhaps it’s been pursuing me all this time; but now I’ve slipped away.’

  Peter’s face grew more worried; Roger shook his head.

  ‘Nay, Peter, I’m not raving, only thinking back. I didn’t mean to speak in riddles.’

  ‘I told you you were working too hard,’ Raymond said, appearing next to Peter. ‘Will you heed me now?’

  ‘It’s true you ought to rest,’ Peter said, ‘if you can, Roger. Is there no place you could go – perhaps to visit relatives in England, or in the mountains? Some place in the south would be the best of all, if that’s even barely possible.’

  It was, of course, wholly possible; for now that he had decided, with an inspiration which had sprouted fantastically from the very heart of his delirium, what was to become of him, the problem of the money had solved itself; and a trip to the south would consume a substantial sum. It seemed so easy now that he knew, beyond all doubt, that he was to make of himself a scientist instead of a theologian; he had simply never thought of it in those terms before.

  A rest in the sun … and leisure to read as much as he wished in the Vatican Library, greater even than the University’s. And why not? The time had come to repudiate Paris in any event, it had given him all that it had for him, and were he to stay on much longer he too would harden into the same mould as those tonsured donkeys he and Raymond had been flyting just before the death had seized him in its fowl’s claw. Toulouse did not attract him either; the last letter from Eugene had reported that the university there had restricted the teaching of the libri naturales for the first time in its history – a long step backward into the darkness. The rest of the Latins would soon follow; for the first act of Innocent IV after his coronation (his first, that is, after his wild flight from the Emperor who had sponsored him) was to rescind Gregory’s acts of absolution of the Paris masters who lectured on the books of nature. The fever was already festering in Paris itself: the Dominicans had promptly forbidden all members of their order the study of medicine and natural philosophy, Aristotelian or otherwise. The hand-writing for Latin Christendom was on the wall; the darkness was coming back.

  Yet it might not reach England, where Roger’s friends were in the ascendancy in court and church alike, and where independence of the Pope would continue a long time after it had been snuffed out on the continent, despite Henry’s proclaimed vassallage to Rome. Later, the continent might change again, for letters from Adam Marsh intimated that Guy de Foulques, the papal legate whom Roger had met briefly at Westminster, might find himself in the apostolic succession – and Innocent, in revolting so instantly against Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, had not laid the best foundation for a long pontificate.

  Oxford, then, was the place; Oxford, by way of Rome.

  Someone coughed lightly. ‘Shh, he’s asleep,’ Peter’s voice said, in a whisper so intense that it was almost savage.

  Roger opened his eyes at once. ‘Nay, I was but thinking of what I should do; and have concluded, I must leave off work and rest; wherefore I’ll go to the Holy City for a time –perhaps as long as a year.’

  ‘Gloria!’ Raymond crowed excitedly; and immediately his face turned sober. Roger wondered if he had suddenly thought of the loss of his Arabic tutoring fees; but never mind, all that would be well shortly.

  ‘Most excellent wise,’ Peter said. ‘And now, we’ll let you rest; and come bid you farewell when you’re ready.’

  ‘No, Petrus Peregrinus, there’s one more favour I’ve to ask of you. Help me up.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Peter said, horrified. ‘You must rest absolutely; though you know it not, a full week has passed while we watched you, and the better part of another. You are not ready for any sort of venture, but must rest, and eat.’

  ‘A brief venture only – nor will I be dissuaded, gentle Peter. First someone must open my chest and take out my money; someone strong in the thews, for there’s a lot of it, and much adulterated with base metals. Raymond, do so. There’s the chest, lift the lid, and there you see the bag; set it out.’

  The rest of the college gathered around curiously, except for Peter, who remained by the pallet, disapproving yet obviously without enough foreknowledge to raise any objection he could think reasonable.

  ‘Now, Raymond: select what coins be most useful in Paris this year and count out five pounds all around, except to Peter – which I charge you all, use either in learning, or in such charity as your dear souls showed me in my illness. As for you, gentle Peter, well I know you’re not without resources, but that’s not the issue. You should be wealthy, too, but that’s not within my power; I will you out of my little death fifty pounds, for your college and its master.’

  The bag slumped open on top of the chest. Peter might have been about to protest, but if so, the sudden small flood of coins out of the bag’s mouth paralysed him with astonishment. Roger was filled with glee; how much more joyful a thing it was to spend money than to hide it! The coins chinked musically as Raymond, biting his lip and sweating, poured share after share into the hands of the fellows of Peter’s college. Then he stood aside, and Peter approached the bag hesitantly. He looked down at it for a long time without moving; without, it seemed, even blinking.

  ‘Peter, I beg you,’ Roger said. ‘Fifty pounds is but a fraction of the whole, your own eyes so testify. Take it; for there’s much else yet to be done.’

  Peter nodded blindly, and reached into the bag. When he was finished counting, he discovered that he had no place about his person to put fifty pounds; one of the fellows tied it up for him.

  ‘So. Now I require you all, help me up, as first I asked. Julian can carry the rest of the money; I once ran with it, when there was more, and he’s far larger a carl than I.’

  ‘But Roger,’ Peter said. ‘This wealth – what mean you to do now? Think me not ungrateful, but is not this wholesale generosity a little fond? Bear in mind, you’re not wholly in your right humour, and …’

  ‘… And was always a little strange,’ Roger said. ‘Never fear, Peter, these since yesterday are different times, and better. I’ll not scatter the rest of my patrimony in the streets of Paris; I mean to keep it, until I may use it again in the study of the sciences. And this day or die I shall join the Franciscans who are rich in learned men, for only strict sanctity of life can foster true philosophy; thenceforwa
rd shall I be poor in Christ. Who will help me? Peter, Raymond, Julian, lift me up!’

  And silently: Lift me; I must be in orders, before another voice say again to me: Time is past. I have seen the powers of the Antichrist.

  They would have improvised a litter, but he would not have it; so they bore him downstairs in the cradle of their interlocking hands, and set him on his feet in the blinding sunlight; Raymond on one side, Peter on the other, and the rest of the college knotted around Julian and the bag, glowering at passersby. While they stood waiting for Roger’s nausea to pass – for he was really as weak as death, and knew well that he was wood to insist upon today for so solemn a step, and so taxing – a voice came calling against them in the middle distance.

  No one seemed to notice; they shifted Roger’s weight, and the weight of the bag, preparing their first steps. After a while, a man in tatters came in sight at the intersection and began to cross it slowly, limping painfully and indistinguishable with dirt. That way led toward the English Nation, and he was crying in English as he stumped the street:

  ‘An alms for John.… Only a penny to touch the bowl of Belisarius.… Only a sterling for John the Pilgrim.… An alms for John, who hath the very relict of Belisarius the Anointed.… Only a penny …’

  Then he stopped, and caught sight of the unusual still group in Straw Street. He swivelled around and came toward them, his gimpy leg making poor weather of the broken paving, holding out a wooden bowl with carven writing around its edge. He needed a crutch, that was plain, but he had none.