Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  ‘Were this from any other hand, I would have called it gibberish.’

  No matter; as an experimenter first and foremost, Peter could not be expected to have much knowledge of or patience with the ancient problem of the multiplication of species –as Aristotle and the Arabs had called the propagation of action; and besides, the work would in the end be only a part of that Communia naturalium the proposal of which the convent brothers had so scorned. Its comprehension could likewise wait; for the ignorance of the times there were sufficient causes – not alone the coming of Antichrist foreshadowed in the strife of which Bungay wrote anxiously:

  Civil war hath broken out anew, and no man may say from one day to the next how he views his expectations. Henry the King hath repudiated the Provisions of Oxford, and the barons, led by earl Simon, have taken to the field. Of late they have made several victories in the West and South, and have taken London with the greatest fanfare of welcome from the stinking populace. Yet methinks our Henry is but temporarily cowed, for it is most clear that Leicester’s support is still much divided. Give thanks to God that thou art where thou art.

  – but, also, as Roger saw upon one false dawn among many, the whole failure of any scholar in history to divine how knowledge (it mattered not what knowledge) might be made trustworthy.

  Since the days of revelation, in fact, the same four corrupting errors had been made over and over again: submission to faulty and unworthy authority; submission to what it was customary to believe; submission to the prejudices of the mob; and worst of all, concealment of ignorance by a false show of unheld knowledge, for no better reason than pride.

  ‘I had better get this out of the house right away,’ Joannes said, when he had caught his breath.

  ‘Memorize it first, while the ink dries. If the College loses it, we will need to write it again.’

  ‘I don’t even want to think of it again, Master. Uhm … it lacks a title.’

  ‘So it does,’ Roger said. ‘Very well. Write at the top, De signis et causis ignorantiae modernae.… It is dry? Then, run.’

  Joannes ran like a deer; but no industry of his could take that explosive doctrine away. Within a week, Roger was writing it again: the scientia experimentalis, that knowledge from experience of which even Ptolemy had spoken and henceforth had ignored, had found its method and its sieve, by the mercy of God, the negative fervour of Socrates, and the voiceless, pervasive whisper of Roger Bacon’s imprisoned demon Self.

  Thereafter, he was ready to go back to the Computus; but he was interrupted by Joannes, in a transport of excitement. After two whole years and more, the letter from Guy de Foulques had arrived.

  It was on first reading all that Roger could possibly have wished it to be: a mandate from Guy de Foulques, Cardinal-Bishop of Sabina and papal legate in England, to send him forthwith, and notwithstanding any prohibitions to the contrary of Roger’s Order, the scriptum principale which Roger had offered on the natural sciences. But Roger’s elation was short-lived; for on the very next reading of the letter, it became apparent that something had gone seriously awry.

  Only to begin with, this prince required that there be sent to him forthwith the long-promised synthesis of knowledge, of the completion of which, after so many years, he was delighted to hear – but there was no such book, nor indeed more than the shadow of one. How had this happened? Roger could but speculate; yet it seemed to him that the fault must lie with Raymond of Laon, or in the caution which had led Roger to send Guy only a verbal entreaty. Perhaps Raymond had taken Roger’s reference to those manuscripts in the hands of the Peregrine circle to be chapters of some large work and had so informed the Cardinal; whereas they were of course only isolated opusculi, now on this science and now on that, and some not formal works at all, but only letters. Of those two major works with which Roger had meant all along to crown his life, the Communia naturalium and a Summa salvationis per scientism, only the first existed, as a few scraps; the second he had not even begun to think about.

  Moreover, the charge that Roger was to send this work notwithstanding any prohibitions of his order to the contrary was followed by the stunning words, ‘in secret’. Guy’s letter provided no way around even the most minor of the prohibitions of Narbonne; nor even any direction to Roger’s superiors at the convent for the easement of his menial duties; on the contrary, Roger was specifically forbidden to speak at all to the brothers of the very existence of the mandate.

  Furthermore, the Cardinal-Bishop of Sabina and papal legate in England had sent no money. Perhaps, out of older memories of England, he had thought that a scholar-son of Christopher Bacon of Yeo Manse would hardly be in need of it.

  Yet withal, this was the mandate that Roger had sought; and, being a mandate, that he must obey.

  The absolute overriding need was money – first of all for books, particularly the De ira and Ad Helviam of Seneca which Piccolomini had shown him at Tivoli, and Cicero’s De republica. Also he was still lacking essential astronomical and mathematical tables. All these he could probably set one or another of the students in the Peregrine circle to searching out, but he would have to stand ready to pay for them. It would be useful to have an astrolabe, too, and a new set of magnifying glasses – most of his present ones were badly chipped.

  And the greatest expenditure inevitably would be for the writing of the book itself. His usual failure to be satisfied with any manuscript until he had revised it four or five times consumed huge amounts of parchment, but there was no help for that; indeed for this labour he must be more scrupulous than ever before. The MS. completed, there would then be the copyists to pay, since the injunction to secrecy and the censorship alike would make it impossible to have the work copied inside the convent.

  There was no one to turn to but Eugene, harassed though the boy already was. The only deference Roger could show toward his younger brother’s burden was to ask for the smallest possible sum compatible with the work to be done; after some calculation, Roger fixed that, not without misgivings, at one hundred pounds. He took no pleasure in the writing of that letter.

  That much passed over, the next question was, what kind of a work should it be? There was only one possible answer, grim though it was: nothing less would be suitable for Guy than the Communia naturalium itself. Finishing that under the restrictions and distractions of this confinement, he realized glumly, would probably take five years.

  The sooner begun, the sooner ended; and there were, he realized, certain expedients that might shorten the labour. As a second move, he dispatched Joannes to recover everything that was in the keeping of the Peregrine College. Much of it, he hoped, might go almost verbatim into the final document, thus sparing him the recomposition of many whole chapters.

  While he waited, he proceeded with the Computus, conspicuously strewing its pages about his cell. Its value as a mask was now even greater; and besides, it too could go into the final document when it was completed – which, in view of its complexity, might take almost as long as the Communia itself. Well, durability is a virtue in a mask.

  Slowly, the scattered manuscripts came back. He was astonished at their bulk; this was the first time he had seen them en masse; there were no less than eight books here, all but two begun since his exile, all but one completed since then. That one, the Metaphysica, was not suitable for the major task; in fact, reading it now, ten years after its inception, he was strongly tempted to destroy it; but the others would almost surely fall into place as he proceeded.

  Only then did he become aware that, despite the impressive mass of leaves now stored in his chest, there were at least four smaller works missing. The De secretis operibus natural and the letter on time and motion could doubtless be recovered from Eugene, but that still left the alchemical summary, which had cost him so much in apparatus in noble metals and in rare drugs, and the book on astronomy. Repeated inquiries by Joannes produced no results; somehow, the College had indeed lost them.

  That had, certes, always been a part of
the risk; and since the Summa alchemica had been published, it might be possible to have it copied from the shelves at Oxford; but for the astronomical work there was no recourse but to write it all over again when the appropriate point in the Communia was reached. Now unquestionably he would have to have that astrolabe, and an armillary sphere, and star-charts … more expenditures to contemplate.

  ‘How long is it since you’ve been outside of nights, Master?’ ‘Eh? Truly, I don’t know. Perhaps months. Two months, at the least, I believe.’

  ‘Then you haven’t see the comet. It’s a monster – covers almost half the sky. You’ve never seen anything like it’

  ‘You have never seen anything like it.’ Roger corrected him, remembering with a chill the cold glare in the Dragon of his first Paris days, an incredible twenty years ago. Naytheless, he took himself outside to look at it, and found that Joannes had been right: this one was much greater. Such an apparition could not have been vouchsafed for any mean mischance, but Roger could not spare the hours needed to riddle out its astrological import; if the thing had, as it appeared, been generated under the influence of Mars, its portent was bloody; but he contented himself with thinking, uneasily, that a disaster requiring so terrific a prognostick would be unlikely to have much bearing on his personal problems.

  And perhaps it did not; for what astrologer could say with confidence that the ill foretold might not be some plague or war far in the East, of which the Latins would never hear? Yet for Roger the word he heard was disastrous enough. Bungay wrote:

  Earl Simon hath been excommunicated by the papal Curia, but it doth not appear to have depressed his secular fortunes overmuch. He hath behind him the reformers among the barons; many of the knights and gentry; all of Oxford, eke including the students; and much of the commonalty, to which the Dominicans are appealing on behalf of the poor, with the preachment that Pope and King is an unnatural marriage. There hath been a pitched battle on the heights above Lewes in Sussex – scarce twenty miles west of where Hastings was fought under another such comet – and with an equally strange outcome. Earl Simon’s forces appeared on the field at the head of some fifteen thousands of citizens of London, marching to the tune,

  Nam rex omnis regitur legibus quas legit

  Rex Saul repellatur, quia leges fregit.

  On May fourteenth they joined, and Prince Edward was lured into breaking and chasing the rabble, while earl Simon and the barons devoted themselves to smashing the main body of the King’s army like a nut beneath a hammer. Both Henry and Edward are prisoners, and Simon bath gone to London, where on St. John’s Day he summoned a parliament and proclaimed his purpose to draw a new constitution. I know no more this day, dear brother, and for fear of interception offer thee no comment, but only this story as I have it, I think, reliably. – Thos.

  And on the same ship, apparently, had travelled the reply from Ilchester:

  Alas Roger I can be of no help to thee and may never see so much money as 100 pounds again. This our South is overrun with rebels and Yeo Manse having once been held by de Burgh was ruled to be King’s land and taken from us; with what little I myself was allowed to keep have had to ransom myself, and may yet be in such a toil again. Our brother Robert is reported slain, having taken the field with the Londoners at Lewes all unaware that his own side was doing this ill work at home; and so are the fortunes of the Bacon name and family at an end Pray for me, as I for thee. –E.

  All this news was nearly a year old, but it was final enough; it contained no cause for hope that any later word would be better. For this conclusion came verification at first hand from Sir William Bonecor, a knightly neighbour and friend of Christopher Bacon.

  ‘Eugene bath told me how to find thee,’ he said in English, a language. Roger had not heard spoken in a decade; ‘and as I am carrying letters from Henry to the new Pope, I paused to see thee. But ‘tis true, what thy brother writ thee: the Manse is bankrupt. Of Robert there is no certain word, but belike he’s dead; Edward’s slaughter of the Londoners was fearsome, and many died of panic.’

  ‘God rest Robert, alive or dead,’ Roger said dully. ‘But Sir William, what’s this of the King? Wast not taken prisoner last May?’

  ‘Aye, but not for long. It happened early this year, after earl Simon’s second parliament – a vast muddle of boots and bare feet, including not only the barons, but two citizens from each city, two townsmen from each borough, two knights from each county, and two witches from each coven for all I ken. But it was scarce concluded ere Prince Edward escaped and put himself at the head of a royalist army; and King’s man though I be myself, little to the credit of the barons is it that so many then defected from Leicester, who had given them naught but devotion. He was returning from the field in the west, marching to join his son at Kenilworth and thence home, when he was surprised two days after Lammas by Edward at Evesham; and comported himself most knightly, as the tale runs; sent his barber to the top of a church tower to read the ‘scutcheons as they forgathered below, and noted down his rude descriptions of these blazons and assigned them names, till ’twas plain that even Gloucester and Roger Mortimer had gone over to the King; whereupon went out among his army and quoth, “Commend your souls to God, my beloved; for our bodies are the foe’s.” For nigh half the afternoon the battle was in doubt, but in the end ‘twas the King’s, and earl Simon slain.’

  And yet another death of the most beautiful and noble. It no longer bore thinking about.

  ‘God grant that will be the end of all this strife. Tell me, an thou canst, what manner of man is this Clement the Fourth? Here we’ve heard naught but the bare word of his election.’

  ‘Why, Roger, thou know’st him as well as I, it seemeth me. Clement is he that was our jolly-solemn legate, Guy de Foulques – or Foulquois, as the Frenchmen call him.’

  Roger could not find a word to say. The white-haired knight nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Strange, is it not? Never did I dream he had the makings of a Pope; indeed I thought his Cardinal’s hat sat ne so up-and-down as was seemly. But ‘tis His will.’

  ‘Sir William,’ Roger said with all the intensity he could muster; ‘wilt thou do the Bacons, who owe thee so much already, one last service?’

  ‘Why, certes, am I able. How wild thine aspect, Roger!’

  ‘Your pardon, but it means much to me, much perhaps to us all. I must write a letter to this Pope, at once. Wilt carry it for me?’

  ‘An it’s nat too wearisome long in the writing. I must leave within the week.’

  ‘I’ll give it thee tomorrow, promptly after lauds. And charge thee too with a verbal message, an I may; that will be brief.’

  The old man smiled. ‘Lay on, boy, and I’ll be thy post.’

  XIII: THE BOWL OF BELISARIUS

  Never was there a more delicate task of composition than the making of that letter. What was to be gained was enormous: freedom from the censorship; freedom from his chores; freedom from money; perhaps even freedom itself, pure, unqualified and complete. Yet there stood in the way his failure to reply to the first mandate, now a good two years old; this would have to be explained, yet not at such length as to appear that he was seeking redress of a grievance. It would be best simply to touch upon the difficulties of writing anything at all inside the convent; to suggest that there existed remedies for the evils – all the evils – besetting the Latin Church; and to leave the matter of money for Sir William to broach viva voce, should the Pope show interest in these propositions.

  After the letter, he was left with naught to do but to continue with the Communia: but this went badly. In part, he was beginning to realize reluctantly, the difficulty lay in his own limitations, in that he was now attempting to deal with a science of which he had had no personal experience. The attempt to apply the sieve of the causes of error to the writings of other men sometimes left him with no statement that he trusted, and at others with an account of the subject so confused as to be unworthy of its valuable parchment.


  In addition, the daily difficulties were mounting once more. No matter that he stood under no accusation, and that the work he was doing was officially understood to be blameless; the disguise was wearing thin; these comings and goings of minor eminences inevitably aroused the suspicions of the brothers once more, and coupled with Roger’s visible industry, convinced them that something was afoot. They did not need to know what it was to conclude that Roger had best be hindered in its prosecution.

  Nothing, overtly, was changed, but his chores were enforced with great strictness, and Joannes was expressly forbidden to go outside the convent walls without permission from above – a permission Roger knew better than to ask. In the longueurs of scrubbing and sweeping, and in the hours of despair over the blotted, scratched-out, interlined and cut-apart leaves of the Communia, there was ample time to reflect upon the temerity of what he had done, and on the magnificent unlikelihood of its coming to any good end, or indeed to any outcome at all.

  This cloud grew month by month – irrationally, for well Roger knew that two years might pass before a busy Pope might reply to a letter of no official urgency – no matter how urgently the writer had put his case – and the reply could find its way from Rome to Paris. By spring he had convinced himself that Clement, had he read the letter at all, had called to mind Roger’s failure to respond to his first mandate –which, after all,, had also been solicited – and had dismissed the matter out of hand.

  And indeed the reply was very late; it arrived on the Feast of St Ursula and Her Companions, and was dated June; had at the best spent a long summer among the avalanches:

  Dilecto filio, Fratri Rogerio dicto Bacon, Ordinis Fratrum