Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  ‘You have done me no harm at all, Milord. I am simply called home, and given new tasks I fear I ill deserve. It is good news, and in no wise urgent.’

  ‘I thank God,’ the marquis said. ‘Of course I knew it was to bring our visits to an end; that was fore-ordained and I must abide it. But I am emboldened to ask a favour.’

  ‘Anything in my power, Milord.’

  ‘Then … would you leave me the book you read from tonight?’

  ‘Why, certainly. But Milord, it is incomplete.’

  ‘I know,’ the marquis said, very quietly. ‘It is a child of this house. But I would have it if you could yield it up.’

  Silently, Roger laid the manuscript upon the table. Then he drew back the top leaf, and picking up a dripping quill, wrote across the top of it: Communia naturalium – I.

  The marquis received it in a like silence, and held out his hand. As their fingers touched, a candle crackled and went out.

  The housekeeper prophesied disasters as she packed him up, but he was used to that now. Why she should seem to be pitying him at the same time was impossible to guess; for he had never been happier in his life than in these two years.

  He found the courage to tell Livia so when they parted … but that too ended in mystery, for as Luca and he rode companionably from the gate, he saw that she was silently weeping.

  Going north, he had nothing left to think about but the cipher, which belatedly had almost solved itself, while he had been thinking about the recension of the Communia he had given to Piccolomini. In the midst of these labours he had been vouchsafed a revelation of a kind, though a difficult one and without any promise that he could trust. It had been simply a prompting from the long-silent self; and it said nothing but, Count.

  After pondering this word long and long, in some bafflement as to whether or not it was itself another word of the cipher, he had used his last days in the marquis’ library to ferret out three long books to study – books on subjects of so little interest to him that they threatened to put him to sleep after the first chapter. (That in itself had proven unexpectedly hard; there was virtually nothing at all in this vast ranking of manuscripts which was not wholly fascinating, regardless of subject.) He counted every character in all three, and made up a table of how many times each letter occurred. He had intended to go on to make more tables, the next to tabulate how many times pairs of letters occurred, next triplets, the next fours, but he had utterly failed to anticipate how stupefying just the first task would be, and how long it would take him; and his time was running out. He would have liked, also, to make up a congruent table for three Greek books of similar length, and make allowances, for the differences arising out of the relative shortness of the Greek alphabet, and the fact that one letter in Greek might often stand for groups of two or even three in the Latin; but there was no time.

  But the Greek tables did not turn out to be pertinent. With incredible swiftness the unbreakable pronouncement began to rank itself into meaning, so fast indeed that he did not pause to consider it for sense until well past noon; it was enough to see the words surfacing, one by one, like a procession of dolphins each bulging at the forehead with patent wisdom yet seeming to the sailor on such seas as alike as pea-beans.

  Then, famished once more without being aware of it, and almost mortally exhausted as well, he stopped and looked. He had supplied the wolf his serpentine tail or yard, and on that model given another to LURU as a word plainly encoded on the same model; but as he had expected, that wolf had vanished now. The man in the middle, the still unbroken VIR, now stood in the heart of an explosion, with saltpetre on the one shore and sulphur on the other. He had now: Sed tam sa petr … e sulphur, separated still by VOPO VIR VOARCUMIA RICO, but he was in no doubt that something enormous had already happened. Standing himself in the middle, Roger remembered the sharp crepitating crackle of the saltpetre crystals, salvaged from his father’s dungheap, under the blow of a rock in a boy’s hand when he tried to shape them into larger rhombs through which to look into the eyes of Beth or old Petronius or at blades of grass, and had got nothing but that noise and a puff of pepper-smelling air for his pains; and on the other bank, there thudded in his memory the exit of the demon from the window of his noisome room at Westminster. In the middle with him was the dream, in which these huge ciphered words had become an explosion like nothing so much as the earthquake which shall exhume the dead for the Last Judgment.

  He began to tremble. These words were words of power. Even in the terror of the vision he had not dreamt of how much power there was in them, nor could he yet fathom why it was being put into his hands; for he knew well enough what it was. This was the ignis volans, the flying fire of the Hellenes which had been lost for all these many centuries; and Roger Bacon had been told in one single struggle with the death how it was to be made … and of what horrors would follow. How could that be? In Simon de Montfort’s grave words, would God allow? Yet He had allowed it to the Hellenes; and now in this age it was almost, almost come down to a simple piece of alchemy, about to flow from the quivering tip of the quill in Roger’s hand.

  Yet not quite. The rest of the anagram, it seemed, would not be broken. Again and again Roger rearranged the remaining characters, but nothing emerged but a Satanic gabble, more impenetrable than the four remaining blocs themselves. Yet it was as sure as death and resurrection that this was alchemy entire, and nothing more. What could be missing? Saltpetre and sulphur and … what?

  Roger went back to the tables of numbers, though they were now hard to read in the light of his candle. Wiping his eyes and forehead, he tried again, counting, half asleep, gradually losing once more his awareness of the meanings of words, only seeking to see in the numbers some relationship which.…

  And then, in a moment of whirling delirium, he had the dream back, and with it the answer. That answer was numbers. Why had he not seen before that all those U’s could not be told from V’s in Roman capitals? There it all was, the great fish at the bottom of a pellucid pool:

  SED TAM SA PETR RC VII PART V CAROUM PV NOV CORULI V E SULPHUR

  It was painfully crabbed Latin, but certainly correct, for it was in the style of his demon self, which spoke nothing well but English and that not often; and its meaning was totally beyond argument. With the elisions expanded, the pronouncement said: Sed tamen salis petre recipe vii partes, v carbonum pulvere novelle coruli, v et sulphuris.

  FOR THIS TAKE SEVEN PARTS OF SALTPETRE, FIVE PARTS OF POWDERED CHARCOAL FROM YOUNG HAZELWOOD, AND FIVE OF SULPHUR

  He was versed enough in alchemy to know that nothing useful could be expected unless one began with pure substances, he had absorbed that in Peter the Peregrine’s college; but he knew well enough how to proceed. Alongside his Arabic lessons he had learned the test for pure flowers of sulphur, which should crackle faintly when rubbed between finger and thumb; he had known from boyhood how to dig a pit in which fine charcoal is burned; and from boyhood too he remembered without irony that the most refined of all saltpetre is to be found in a dungheap. Nothing remained but to go forth and procure these things.

  And this white flash of knowledge took him no longer to encompass than would have sufficed him to write down the shortest verse in Scripture; which reads, Jesus wept.

  X: ST. EDMUND HALL

  Much had changed at Oxford, as was only to have been expected; and yet in that special world which was called into being by its very name, the University had not changed at all; it was almost deceptively peaceful: the same streets, the same customs, and above all the same faces, unchanged after so much had changed him. To be sure, Adam Marsh had gone quite grey about the temples, but it did not make him seem old. Grosseteste was only just as grave and venerable as he had always been, no more; the Bishop was properly beyond age, as though he had been canonized at birth. If the King’s aborting of his teste synodale – a confusing story, of which Roger heard so many conflicting versions that he gave it up as little better than a myth – disturbed him, he did
not show it, nor did he speak of it. Roger saw him but seldom, as before; and Adam, more than ever preoccupied with the affairs of state which he loathed and loved, was at court or at Leicester for much of the year.

  After the pleasures and explorations of reunions were past, Roger rather welcomed the relative solitude of the new life. He had much to do, beginning, appropriately’, in the a’s, with alchemy. His lectures were time-consuming, for he had discovered in himself a real passion to teach – had, indeed, discovered it in Paris; but herein lay the principal change since he was last at Oxford, in that he was now a master, weighty with respect, and could to some extent allot his own hours. He was somewhat at a loss to account for the obvious tentativeness with which the other masters treated him, however, until he discovered that Richard of Cornwall had bruited it about the University that this Roger Bacon was a dangerous sciolist: at Paris he had attended other men’s lectures and confounded them before their students with questions they could not answer.

  Well, Roger had done that now and again, in particular to a booby-headed master in Euclid’s Elements who had not actually known enough geometry to calculate the volume of a mousehole; and then there had been that lector on the law of Moses, four out of five of whose statements about the chirogrillus Roger had pointed out to be wrong; that one could count himself fortunate, since the fifth statement had been as wrong as the others. But it was a custom in Paris; Albertus Magnus had done it to Roger once, after his debacle at Roger’s examination, though happily Albert had come out again the loser and had immediately – and balefully – given up the sport as unprofitable.

  As for Richard Rufus of Cornwall, rumour had it that he would not be making mischief for long, for he had received a permission – in essence, an order – from John of Parma, Minister General of the Franciscans, to return to Paris to lecture on Lombard’s Sentences. From what Roger knew of the man, it seemed a wholly appropriate assignment.

  In the meantime, Roger contentedly made many bad smells and burned himself repeatedly, to considerable profit. Within a span of two years he had mastered most of the appalling jargon of alchemy, designed not to communicate but to conceal, and was able to record with satisfaction the discovery of methods for refining three metals to the pure state. One of these – he had no names for them, and the books did not know them – seemed to be a genuine element, which when blended with iron made a mixture of phenomenal hardness perhaps promising for arms and armour. Each of the other two exploded when dropped into water, an observation which nearly cost him his eyesight, and gave him a festering sore on one shoulder which took three weeks to heal. Since nothing so fickle could be of any practical use, he dropped the matter there; if he needed a loud noise, he had the secret of the cipher – the first alchemical formula he had tried. It had worked awesomely well, particularly when, as in the vision, it was packed tightly into a parchment roll and lit with a spill at one end.

  With the aid of the Arabs, whose language he now knew well enough to be able to distinguish a stylist from a plodder, he began himself to write on alchemy: in particular a new translation of excerpts from Avicenna, centred upon such passages as he had himself been able to test, or to enlarge upon. It did not greatly surprise him to find that knowing how the experiments went in practice was almost as corrective of bad translation as was a knowledge of Arabic grammar; the world, it was perfectly clear, was only the other form of the Word, and often much easier of access to its meaning. This work with the text of the great Islamic physician sent his pen scratching into several side excursions, wholly natural to his way of thinking now, into medicine. Among these was a revision of his first attempt at a book, made long ago at Oxford: Liber de retardation accidentium senectutis et de sensibus conservandis, the book on old age, undertaken this time at the request of Piccolomini, marquis of Modena, brought to Roger in a letter from Tivoli as equally far away and long ago. It was a hair-raisingly bad book and probably could not be much improved, but this recension, at least, would have the benefit not only of Avicenna but of the book of secrets.

  Richard Cornwall stubbornly refused to disappear. His health was uncertain, and the Paris appointment had not been to his taste. Misfortunately, Adam Marsh took his part. He wrote to the provincial minister, begging him to allow Cornwall to stay; Oxford, he said, would be delighted to keep him. Cornwall was now spreading the word that this Roger Bacon was obviously also a magician, in which he was aided more than a little by the notorious stinks, noises and oddly-coloured lights which emanated of nights from Roger’s cell in St. Edmund Hall.

  These sinister mutterings reached the students, as they were bound to do. The young men looked to Roger now not only for outrageous propositions – which taste was inevitably gratified, for Roger generated outrageous propositions these days as naturally as other men breathed, and with almost as little awareness of it – but also for miracles. He was tempted, and after a while he fell: with the help of alchemy, small ‘miracles’ were not hard to produce, and Roger quickly discovered that they were dramatically useful as teaching aids.

  Cornwall’s sickly malice puzzled Adam sufficiently to move him to question Roger about it, but Roger’s theory – that it derived from Albertus Magnus, whose familiar Cornwall had been for a time in Paris – would not have sat well with the lector, and so instead he professed ignorance. In the end, Adam contrived to set it down to academic jealousy over the popularity of Roger’s lectures on the libri naturales; and these indeed were now more of a success than ever, since Cornwall had indirectly led Roger to exhibit experiments in the hall.

  Nor were these the only good to emerge from that malice: for the provincial minister sent his clerk, one Thos. Bungay, to Oxford in response to Adam’s letter, to investigate the merits of the case. Though he decided in Cornwall’s favour, that is, that he need not go to Paris, the incessant chatter he had to endure about that sciolist and magician Roger Bacon aroused his deepest curiosity.

  Within half a day Bungay and Roger were fast friends. Thomas was an astronomer, which happened to be the next item but one in the a’s, just after astrology. Within six months he had applied for leave to study at Oxford; within another month, they had together leased the massive eight-sided gatehouse across St. Aldate’s Street in the walls. This blocky structure, which was eighty-four feet high, served them as observatory. In addition, Thomas lived there; Roger, for the time at least, kept to his quarters at St. Edmund to be near his classes, but it was already evident that he and the University would probably benefit alike were he to take his stenches elsewhere – regardless of the fact that he was already better than half done with alchemy.

  They were, they discovered, remarkably alike in some ways. Thomas Bungay was plump and affable, but he was in his heart a solitary man – and like all such, as ready to cleave to another of his rare kind as one lore Assyrian to another. He had the love of knowledge, though with him it looked mostly toward the stars (still, he had recently been reader in theology at the nascent University in the distant marsh town of Cambridge). And despite his higher rank in the Order, he plainly regarded Roger as his teacher, deferentially playful though their manner was toward each other. He had caught the vision, at least in part.

  Also they quarrelled constantly; and drank more than was good for them; and stayed up all night, studying the stars; and planned to live forever. They were alike ridiculous in their tonsures, tunics and talk, middle-aged and laden with learning, and all unaware in love; two men in a desert.

  ‘Tonight we shall have Venus and Jupiter in conjunction in Aquarius.’

  ‘Good for us. Where’s the wine?’

  Nothing disturbed them, though 1250 was a year of overturns. The Emperor Frederick died; they said, Requiescat in pace, and watched the occultation of Vega by the moon. To find a book for Thomas, Roger went briefly to Paris, where with his own eyes he saw in the streets the leader of the Pastoureaux rebels; the sight interested him mildly, but he was in a hurry to return home. This year, too, Adam Marsh left Oxford for good,
forced to give up his lectorship to the Franciscans by the pressure of his political duties. Roger and Bungay attended his last lecture, where he created a sensation by conferring upon a youngster named Thomas Docking – no older than Roger had been when Grosseteste had plotted to send him to Paris – the unprecedented honour of succeeding to the readership (though not, since the rules forbade it, to the title itself; this and its prerogatives would be held in abeyance until a formally qualified master could be chosen; Docking’s was an interim appointment, and even this did not wholly please the University).

  The departure of Adam cost Roger a pang, but its sting too was solved by the new friendship with Bungay. Besides, the vision was growing clearer every year; he was now occupied, as a work of preparation, with the writing of a gloss for the Secret of Secrets, of which he had found at Oxford four mutilated copies. Fortunately, the MS given him in Paris by John Budrys of Livonia appeared to be perfect – fortunately, because his money was now sensibly diminished. One of the pre-conditions of the scientia experimentalis, it was beginning to appear, was a bottomless purse.

  He was still incubating, too, that same treatise on the causes of the rainbow which he had conceived as a member of the Peregrine College; but no question of perspective he had ever encountered was so difficult as this. He could advance no farther than a plateau of theoretical nihilism, represented in manuscript by nearly a score of leaves demonstrating that all the existing explanations – even Grosseteste’s, even Aristotle’s – were inadequate. The road to a valid theory, however, remained invisible.

  Cornwall was now lecturing on the Sentences in Oxford, instead of at Paris, and in his success seemed to tap t fresh well of slander. The new campaign finally succeeded in annoying, not Roger, who was too preoccupied to do more than take perfunctory notice, but Bungay.