“Meantime three people died.”
“What would you have me do? I did not intend that they should die. May I go on?”
Ben set his mouth stubbornly. “Contained how? Where?”
Newton smiled, and waved in the direction of the strange automaton. “It is there, in my talos, and entirely under my control. Now, the rest requires a longer answer. Perhaps I was mistaken and should have taken you into my new system earlier, though I don’t see that it would have helped anything. In fact, if I had not made it clear to the emperor that you had no knowledge of it, you may well have been tortured. The emperor must not have my knowledge. As to this supposed comet of which the Muscovite kidnapper babbled—I assure you, Benjamin, there is no comet.”
“No comet? But—”
“A tactic to frighten and confuse, nothing more. I have secure methods of discovering such things, and I assure you that there are no heavenly bodies threatening Prague. Really, Benjamin, did you think, after London, that I would leave myself no means of warning?”
“Begging your pardon, but how am I to believe that? You are the one who taught me only to believe the evidence of observations. You’ve as much as said that you would abandon Prague to its fate. How can I be sure that this isn’t merely a device on your part to convince me to leave? You do intend to leave, don’t you?”
“Yes, presently. If I do not, the emperor will lose all patience. At the moment he is mollified, for I gave him part of what he wanted, but that will not last long.”
“What did you give him?”
“Youth. In the end, he will not thank me, I think.”
“I …” Ben was stunned. “I thought you said you could not replicate that feat.”
“Replicate it, yes. Comprehend it, no.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. I am forced to it, now, Benjamin. If you will sit, and be civil with me, I’ll give you what you came here to steal. I will explain my new system to you. And I will also explain that your fear of Prague becoming another London is the least thing that mankind has to worry about.”
Newton said, after a moment, “I must tell you of events that occurred some years ago. Exceeding strange events which changed the direction of my thoughts. My Principia had just been revised, and some fresh questions came to my mind. I began reflecting upon the prophecies and chronologies of the ancient kingdoms, and I saw that the ancients had knowledge of the laws of gravity, of the inverse-square law, and the like. I came to realize that they knew everything I had ‘discovered,’ and much more besides, and that this knowledge had been lost. Or, rather, not lost, but stolen—stolen from mankind by the malakim.”
“Stolen? How do you mean?”
“More patience. It was about this time, you see, that I had my first contact with the malakim. They wrote to me upon my aetherschreiber. Naturally, I was at first skeptical of what they claimed to be, but I made certain tests—asking them to observe experiments that I conducted near at hand—and in the end I was convinced that there were, indeed, mysterious intelligences in the aether. I continued to correspond with them, and at first they seemed a great help to me.”
“Do you know what they are?”
“Surely you have guessed. You tell me.”
“They seem—Well, if atoms are bound by ferments into particular forms, we can also guess that ferments exist without there being matter in them.”
“Yes, as Boyle proved. Go on.”
“I surmise that these malakim are ferments without matter, but ferments of a very special nature, such as those, perhaps, which contain our own souls.”
Newton nodded indulgently. “Very fine reasoning, and insofar as my experiments show, correct. They exist as configurations of harmonies and affinities, but with little or no matter in them. I have postulated that there may be a fifth sort of atom, a particle which makes up souls, but none of my investigations have borne it out conclusively. I now believe souls propagate more in the fashion of a wave, like the affinity linking aetherschreibers, an instantaneous wave unfettered by distance, as gravity and magnetism are.”
“You have proven the existence of the human soul?”
“Certainly—we have two of them. I have the proofs.”
“And the malakim are bodiless souls?”
“Not exactly. They are more and less than that. I would be disingenuous if I claimed I understood them entirely—as I said, many of my experiments have not borne fruit. The Bible and cabalistic texts speak of a separate creation of the malakim and human souls, and I am inclined to that view.” He leaned back, brow furrowed in thought.
“In any event,” Sir Isaac began again, “they are creatures of the aether. They ‘see’ and ‘hear’ not light or sound, but the higher harmonics—mostly those which are absolute, or mathematically instead of exponentially proportional to distance.”
“That’s why they contacted you through the aetherschreiber!” Ben exclaimed. “It’s an absolute affinity!”
“Precisely. Gravity, magnetism, aural harmonics—these things they are nearly as blind to as they are to matter. But the other affinities—those closer to God—”
“Closer to God?”
Newton blinked. “Surely you see that. God is all-being, all-knowing, everywhere the same. Light is matter, and travels at a fixed speed. Magnetism and gravity weaken with distance exponentially. If He were composed of anything with such finite, limited properties, He could not be all-knowing. If He had to wait for light from the far reaches of the universe to perceive—You see?”
“I do see,” Ben said, warming to the notion, so fitting to his own speculations. “But can you prove it?”
“Of course.”
“But I have drawn you from your original point, sir. How have these malakim robbed us of the knowledge of the ancients?”
“I have faith that you will see that soon enough, too. The malakim, in their natural state, thus have little power to manipulate matter, or even the grosser attractions and repulsions. And yet, by our ingenuity, we can construct devices that allow it, enhance their abilities.”
“I see you have been at that,” Ben replied, gesturing at the talos. “But what is the benefit?”
“The benefits are great. They are blind in our realm, we in theirs. And yet, through science, we can see into theirs. That is what we have done, in constructing our laws. We are like blind men, feeling this and that part of something, trying to imagine the whole. As you know, it is a taxing process. The mathematics upon which even so simple a thing as an alchemical lanthorn is based are prodigious. But the malakim, once directed—once provided with a way of ‘seeing’ gross matter—can alter ferments instinctively, with no need to understand what they do, just as you or I can boil water with fire or lift a stone without knowing how fire excites atoms or understanding the manifold properties of gravity. It is enough, once the bridge has been provided, to merely explain to them what result you want.” He smiled slyly, reached into a drawer, and withdrew something. “For instance,” he said, passing a heavy metal ball to Ben.
“This is gold,” Ben noticed, turning it in his fingers.
“Indeed. It once was copper.”
“Then you have solved the equations for the vegetation of metal? You have mapped its ferments?”
“No. Aren’t you listening to me? I merely commanded it and it was done.”
“Oh. Like that fellow in the Arabian tales.”
“Yes, you see? Useless.”
“I would hardly call gold useless.”
Newton snorted. “The gold is not useless, but the process by which it was made is. Likewise my returned youth—and now the emperor’s—the levitating globe that transported us here from the English Channel, and so on. I do not understand how these things were done, though I can command that they be done again.”
“But still …”
“Benjamin, I could see light before I understood its nature. Which is more important, seeing it or understanding its laws?”
“
Well, in a general sense I would say seeing it—”
“Nonsense. Perfect nonsense, if you speak as a philosopher.”
But Ben already understood. After all, hadn’t he just been arguing this to Robert? “It is not science, this use of the malakim.”
“No, of course it isn’t.”
“But then why do you continue with all this?” He waved at the laboratory and its weird apparatus.
“Because they can be used, Ben, used to understand what they do. By making them do it and then observing, in a thousand experiments, how they do it—something that even they themselves do not know, any more than an unlearned peasant knows how he breathes. And I have been, in part, successful. But it requires holding them captive. While they are willing enough to do certain things—like create that gold—they will not hold still to be examined. It is not their wish that we understand them. So I must force them—and, naturally enough, protect myself against them, for since I began my experiments, as long ago as London, they have tried in many and cunning ways to murder me. Indeed, it was my first thought, on our hunt, that the panther and its familiar sought to kill me, not you.” He rubbed his hands together. “In any event, there is much more for us to do, and I am ready to teach you again.”
Ben arched his eyebrows, but gave no other indication of his deep distrust of that remark. “There is the little matter of the hangman’s noose,” he pointed out instead. “I am no good to you hanged.”
“But of course we must leave Prague. You see now why I cannot satisfy the emperor’s whims. If I gave him the malakim to command, think of the results.”
“Oh, Lord, yes,” Ben said, as the implications sank in.
“Best we leave soon,” Newton went on.
Now would be the time to tell him about Frisk and the offer of the Swedish king. But, still, he hesitated. “Sir, you must swear to me that there is no comet, that Prague is not in danger.”
“There is no comet,” Newton repeated. “As I have already told you. The malakim could easily detect it, and they have not.”
“Mightn’t they lie to you? You suggest that they have sinister designs on mankind. Why should you trust them?”
“It is true, they have no love of mankind, and I believe that they have contrived the downfall of our race countless times in the past and now do so again. But ‘my’ malakim obey me not from love of me, but because they must.”
“You are certain?”
“Yes—and you will question me no more on that. I grow weary of your incredulity. It is insulting. The greatest philosophers in the world have huddled at my knees, and yet my seventeen-year-old apprentice remonstrates with me as if I were a naughty child in grammar school.”
Ben clenched his jaw, but kept his peace. As things were going, he might soon know enough about this system of malakim to see how it really worked. If he went too far with Newton now, the older man might simply reveal him to the emperor’s men, and that would not do.
“Very well, sir,” he said. “What is your plan?”
“Since you are here, help me gather the things we shall take with us.”
“When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow night. Meantime, perhaps you should continue to hide here. It may well be the safest place for you. Besides, someone needs to prepare an airship. Do you remember how to do it?”
Ben glanced at the glowing, enthroned orb and repressed a shudder. “I can do it,” he said.
When the door had been closed for perhaps twenty seconds, Ben rushed back to where Lenka lay. To his surprise and amusement, he found her asleep, and tugged gently on her arm to waken her.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Newton is gone,” he told her. “How could you sleep?”
She grinned a little sheepishly. “It was boring. I could not understand your English, and when it became clear that the emperor’s soldiers weren’t going to rush in and take us captive or anything, I grew sleepy. And so what has happened? Your master came and went. Are you reconciled?”
“That’s difficult to say,” Ben temporized, “but things seem better than they were. Sir Isaac has done away with the Golem, so there will be no more deaths among the servants. He also started explaining all this” He motioned to indicate the room.
“Is your mind set at ease about the danger to Prague?”
Ben smiled his brightest smile at her. “No,” he said, and then froze, unbelieving. He had meant to lie to her, he really had. What had happened?
“Damn it all,” he muttered, not sure to whom.
“No? Then this doom you spoke of is coming?”
“Er—” It was done, now. “He told me that no such disaster was coming, but—”
“Enough. Tell me the nature of this doom, Benjamin Franklin. I deserve that much, for my troubles.”
“Now look here—” Ben began, but her expression stopped his tongue. He took a deep breath and began again. “You’ve no doubt heard of the destruction of London?”
“Of course, though none knows the cause.”
“Sir Isaac and I know. That is one of the secrets the emperor meant to force from Sir Isaac by killing me.”
“The stories are of fire from heaven …”
“Do you know what a comet is, Lenka?”
“A comet? It is like a planet, is it not?”
“Yes,” Ben said, relieved that he could start at that point, and not by dispelling some superstition. “They are very like planets, save that they are smaller and have more eccentric orbits—they go very far from the sun and then approach very near. The wind of light blowing from the sun pushes the atmosphere that surrounds them into a tail and makes it to glow, and that is what we see in the sky.”
“Very well. That sounds sensible.”
“Good. Now, there are also comets of a sort that have no atmospheres, and so though they pass by us, we do not see them. One of these was made to fall on London.”
“Made to fall?”
“Made to fall by philosophers, enemies of England. Imagine a stone a mile across, traveling at greater speed than a musket ball, striking a city.”
Lenka paled, and for the first time since Ben had known her, crossed herself. “Matka Bozhye,” she whispered. “This will happen to Prague?”
“Newton says no. I don’t know whether I believe him, especially since he prepares to flee the city.”
“He is leaving?”
“Aye, as am I.”
“You promised to raise the alarm.”
“And so I shall. But, Lenka, I made that promise before it was death for me to be seen here. I will write a letter, with diagrams and all, and send it to the emperor—I will send another to Prince Eugene. It is as much as I can do.”
She lifted her chin. “That is true. No one could ask more of you.” She turned and clasped her hands behind her back, then—when she remembered that her skirt was still torn—dropped her hands and pinched the cloth together.
“Wait a trice,” Ben told her. It took him only a few moments to find an iron pin. “There.”
“Thank you. And so will I have to arrange a new distraction to manage you and Sir Isaac through the gate?”
“Oh,” Ben said, trying to both look and not look as she pulled the cloth together, hitching the skirt and then pinning it. “No. Sir Isaac and I will be leaving as we came.” He gestured out the window and thumped the wooden boat. “We shall fly.”
“Using this craft? Johannes Kepler’s boat? You can make it fly?” A strange light seemed to film her eyes.
“We can make any boat fly. But I suppose as this one is a moon ship, it should fly spectacularly well.”
“That is no joking matter!” Lenka snapped. “It is a moon ship, or was meant to be. Some say Kepler did go to the moon in it, so as to write a treatise upon it.”
Ben arched his brows skeptically. “I doubt that very much,” he said.
“Why? If you can make a boat fly, why couldn’t he?”
“He hadn’t the means. Look, Lenka,” h
e said, pulling at the cloth. “This was a balloon. It may have flown, yes, filled with hot air—”
“Dew,” she corrected angrily.
“Dew? As in that Frenchman’s silly story? Lenka, it would most certainly have not flown anywhere on dew. Hot air, yes. If a fire were built under it, and the envelope filled—yes, it might rise until the air began to cool, and then ’twould sink again, no great distance away.”
“Is there no way to cause the air to remain hot?”
“If you could keep a fire going beneath it, or build some sort of alchemical device to produce heat. Just so long as the air is kept in a rarefied state. As a boy, I used to put candles in paper lanterns and fly them aloft.”
“But couldn’t this boat have a magical heating device?”
Ben looked at her in mild surprise. “I don’t know. Do you have some reason to think it does?”
She looked away. “Yes. I have seen it flown. There was no flame.”
Ben frowned at the boat, and then began to push back the silk. “Even if it did have such a device,” he explained, “the distance to the moon is staggering, and in regions between here and there no atmosphere exists for a man to breathe. He would smother on the journey.”
“Smother?” Her face was a sort of stony mask as she nodded and said, “I see.”
“Lenka, how does this concern you? What is this obsession you have with the moon and means of reaching it?”
She did not answer right away, and an instant later he had almost forgotten that he asked the question. For there, in the bottom of the boat, was bolted a device about the size of a man’s head. A nearly globular bowl, polished and smooth on the inside, its aperture was partially closed by eight overlapping plates, like flower petals but curved inward so as to resemble a whirlpool. A lever on one side dilated or closed the opening. At its widest, he could just fit his fist into it.
Ben whistled. “Lenka, I’ve found the device.”
“Really? Can you reckon how it works?”
“It is some sort of catalyst. Some substance is placed in the receptacle and generates warm air.”
“Dew,” she said. “Dew. Morning dew. They say it comes from the moon, but in the morning is attracted back.”
A Calculus of Angels Page 27