by Rob Swigart
“We will do it, my brother. But what of the disk, the Founding Document? It isn’t likely they’ll just bring them along.”
“No, we must convince them to bring it all to the abbey. Then we’ve only to put them to the question.”
The smile lines at the corners of her eyes deepened for a moment. “I think I would like that. You did promise me they would beg, my brother. You did promise.”
“Yes!” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Let us set to work, then.”
As she turned and glided away from him, Dupond clearly saw both the twitch of pain at the corner of her eyes and her strangely contented smile.
That smile should have warned him, but the notion that the nun and Defago had spoken for his benefit never crossed his mind.
He remained in his vehicle after they had gone back inside. The building now presented a blank face: there were no lights in the windows, no one left and the door remained firmly closed.
No doubt they had come outside to avoid speaking in front of others inside and thought he was asleep. Their plans, then, were secret, and did not represent general church policy. What other explanation could there be for such indiscretion?
No matter, he knew enough. They were going to trap Lisa Emmer and the Canadian. They wanted some things she had, a disk and a document.
They weren’t the only ones who wanted things from Lisa Emmer.
He was no closer to finding her, but if Defago and the nun were successful, they would find her for him. Hugo would be unhappy when he failed to deliver them, but he could placate the policeman with bits of information. He had only to keep it vague enough to stall for time. Once he had the disk and the message, he could call in the police, and his employers in Washington. After all, by then he would have everything both groups wanted.
Or so he hoped.
42.
Later that night the two parts of the Alberti cipher lay side by side on the safe house table. Steve carefully placed the printout from the lab beside the original Procroft 506 document.
Lisa assembled the two disks. “The back is what’s important,” she said, turning them over. She carefully lined the triangle with its tips so the two dates were in alignment, bisected by a vertical line.
“Symbol of the Pythos,” she said. “This might be the key. Very simple, even obvious.”
“To someone who has the true disk!” Steve added dryly. “Our adversaries must be pretty frustrated and angry by now.”
“Let us hope so.”
“It won’t be pretty if they find us.”
“We’ll decipher this. If it leads to the Founding Document, we’ll make sure it’s safe and then deal with them.” She sighed. “There’s so much I don’t know, don’t understand.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, how do we find my successor?”
He grinned. “Isn’t it a little early to be thinking about that?”
She was grave, though. “They’re dangerous, Steve. They kill for their beliefs, a luxury we don’t have. If I die, there’s no one to take over.”
“There’s probably a list of some kind,” Steve began.
“Probably, but I don’t know how the succession works, and I should. I need more time with Ted and Marianne, and I can’t take it, not now.”
“Then you can’t die.”
She sniffed. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”
Steve shook his head. “About this disk, this symbol might identify it as belonging to the Pythos but we still need a keyword.”
She looked dubious. “Possible; it would be more secure, but would it really be necessary, or even wise? This disk was well hidden, the two sections kept far apart, and a decoy left in place. And besides, the Pythos knows something about the future.”
“Prophesy,” Steve muttered. “All right, let’s see what this gives us.” He set to work, reading off the letters of the palimpsest text one by one, comparing their appearance on the inner disk with the outer rim’s alphabet and writing down the plain text that resulted.
When he finished he sat back. “What do you think?”
She leaned over the sheet of yellow legal paper. “It’s Bruno all right, writing in Latin.”
“Can you read it?”
She glared at him. “Of course I can read it. His language is ornate, but clear. Very sixteenth century. Very….”
Something without edge or form flowed up from the page and enveloped her in sudden darkness and cold. She had the sense of swirling snow, an enclosed room, a fire.
Never had a fugue done this to her before: she was aware of two times, two places at once, the frightening sense of dislocation in one, and the room, the document, Steve looking thoughtfully at the page. She was firmly Lisa Emmer. At the same time she was something else, a presence, a ghost. In that moment she knew that this was four hundred years in the past and the man hunched over a plain wooden table was Giordano Bruno.
He was muttering angrily – mostly half words, exclamations, vague grunts that conveyed contempt, anger, or disgust.
His chair was hard. This he preferred; it helped keep him awake and attentive to the objects before him: a mechanical disk made of bronze, a pen, an inkwell, a leaf of new parchment and some blank sheets of precious paper, real Italian paper, not papyrus but hemp and linen scraps mulched and pressed and dried. The point of his quill trembled over a blank sheet as if ready to plunge into its virgin heart.
He was a small, bearded, irascible man with eyes as sharp as his tongue, an apostate priest and dissident scientist, and usually the words flowed from him, sharp, satiric, learned. This night, though, he was just killing time, waiting. The words simply wouldn’t come.
Vague sounds leaked up through the thick floor from the tavern downstairs. He could hear the muffled clink of cutlery, occasional roars of laughter, the background murmur of conversation. A brief vision rose to tempt him: dark foaming ale in a great tankard or a flagon of raw Neapolitan wine. Some cold meat, an acquiescent maid….
He shook his head. Not tonight.
At that moment came a knock. He snapped, “Come.” When he saw the big man made bigger by a heavy coat, he exclaimed, “You!”
His visitor had a surprisingly soft voice. “They told me downstairs you were here, Giordano.” He spoke Italian.
Bruno laughed. “They? My fat proprietress speaks neither Italian nor Latin, only German, so how then did you communicate with her? Especially above that racket?”
The giant grinned. “It took some shouting, sure, but finally she understood. ‘Ach, Herr Bruno!’ She pointed at the ceiling and her fat finger looked like pale salami ripe enough to eat. ‘Ja, ja!’ she said. And here you are.”
“Yes, that is the way it would happen,” Bruno agreed. He put down his pen and waved at the chair opposite. “Please, Usignuolo, sit. You have something.” It wasn’t a question.
The other grunted.
“Well? Tell me.”
“Two weeks hard riding through damnable weather, all the way from Venice, Bruno.” It fell just short of accusation.
“Ah,” Bruno nodded. “Mocenigo, then.”
Usignuolo tipped his chin. “Mocenigo.”
The philosopher leaned back and rubbed his temples. “That cursed patrician’s been hounding me since the Book Fair last year, September. Wants me to come back to Venice, live in his palazzo, teach him the arts of memory, he says. I’ll get the best of treatment, he says. He says he’s rich, powerful, and influential. I can even take a professorship in Padua if I want. He’ll protect me from the Inquisition, he says. I get no peace, and oh, he’s tempting me.” Bruno sighed. “Then I realized this could be the opening I’ve been seeking. But I had to know, so I sent word.”
“You suspected him from the beginning.”
“Of course! He’s too eager by far. So I asked for a discreet inquiry, and I’ve been stringing him along waiting for your report.”
“It took time.”
“Of course it did! But I didn’t expect
you to come yourself, Usignuolo.”
“I had to. There’s great danger.”
Bruno was a Neapolitan and quick to anger, with a reputation for pugnacity, constantly fighting with all he considered pedants and fools. As a result he had spent the past decades running from one small position to another, a short step ahead of his growing list of enemies.
Now he smacked the table with his palm and the inkwell tipped. He reached out and caught it without looking. “Damn him!”
He was also quick to forgive, though, and with sudden calm vaguely waved away this mythical danger, after which he seemed to forget his visitor and to fall into deep contemplation of his small window. A vertical snow of imperfect pellets hard as ice hissed incessantly on the roof and obscured the dark forest behind a white veil. Certainly not a bridal veil, he thought, and smiled. “Ironic, don’t you think?” he murmured, still gazing at the window. “This, the coldest winter in memory, while in the future, my future, I think I feel flames… Well, we won’t discuss that.” He lapsed once more into silence.
Finally he shook himself and looked mournfully at Usignuolo. “You spoke with Tonetti?” Bruno had conjured up the old man’s crowded set of bleak, squalid rooms swarming with an uncountable brood of women and brats in the tenements of the gheto vecchio, the old ghetto in the Cannaregio district of Venice. He could see the old man, bent of back, peering out of a terrific squint. Yet the old Jew also had an endless fund of intelligence and good humor. Some thought he played the fool, and indeed he did, which was what made him one of Bruno’s best informers.
Usignuolo shifted in his chair. “I assigned him the task, yes.”
“He knows everyone,” Bruno agreed. “He’ll talk to anyone, from the docks to the doge, in or out of prison, high and low. And what does our Tonetti tell us of Mocenigo?”
“He confirms your fears.”
“Mocenigo is an agent of the Inquisition.”
“It’s a trap, Bruno.”
“Yes. Thank you, Usignuolo. This is not a surprise to me. He doesn’t want the arts of memory, he wants magic and all the dark, hermetic secrets. He wants to conjure and command. He will bring me back to Venice and there find ways to betray me. I shall lead him down a difficult path, but in the end….”
“You’re not going.” The giant didn’t want it to be a question.
Bruno pursed his lips and looked once more at the window. By now it had grown dark, and there was nothing to see beyond their reflections in imperfect glass. “I have always valued your council.” The bitterness showed only for a moment. “But I must go,” he murmured gently.
The fireplace was small, and the meager flames cast little warmth. Usignuolo pulled his coat closed at his chin and hunched forward. “You can’t.”
Bruno reached across the table and gripped the big man’s forearm. “I will accept the invitation. I’ve made most of the arrangements, only one more thing to write. I’ll give it to you in the morning. Take it to Paris and give it to my successor. You know where to go. I’m handing everything over before I leave.”
“Please, don’t ask this of me. We’ve been together more than twenty years…”
“You’ll be Usignuolo for him. You will speak for him when he requires it. You will sing. You are the nightingale, my friend.”
The big man threw this aside with a splayed hand. “They’ll take you. Torture. You’ll die.”
“I want them to take me. It’s the only way I can reach the Pope. If I fail, the future will be dark indeed. Already they’ve assassinated Henri, a king of cultivation and taste, who would have soothed the world’s ills.” He shook his head dolefully. “1589 will go down in infamy, Usignuolo. Can it have been only three years ago? And now I see a similar end for his successor, already at the center of endless scheming in these religious wars that bedevil us. I fear for him. I fear greatly.” More softly he repeated, looking up with a smile that was almost serene, “So you see, there is no real choice. It is good to know the truth, and be prepared. Now, go downstairs and have some supper, drink a tankard, take a wench. I’ll have a package for you in the morning.”
When the giant had gone he blew on his hands to warm them. After long moments in contemplation he sighed and picked up the bronze device. There were letters inscribed around the rim. An inner disk set into it was also so inscribed.
He idly rotated the disks, one inside the other. They made no sound and there was something strangely fluid about the way the metal moved, as if it were somehow alive.
The device had come down directly from its creator, the great Leon Battista Alberti, dead this past century and more. Its existence had remained a closely guarded secret by the organization that Bruno now headed. It would remain secret for a long time to come, perhaps forever.
This was only the third time Bruno and Usignuolo had used the cipher to send secret messages. They had used it once when Bruno was in England spying for the Protestant Queen, and they had used it once before when he had had to flee Calvinist Geneva.
The third time now would be his last. Tomorrow he would regretfully part with the precious disk along with his last message to the future. In the long run, he didn’t doubt that he would part with his life.
Even on the surface Mocenigo’s invitation had been tempting: to return to his native land after all these years! A dream, but a dangerous one. The Inquisition had a long arm and a longer memory. They never ceased trying to take him, to put him to the question about his dangerous ideas – the ones the world knew about, and the far more dangerous one about which the world knew nothing.
He blew on his fingers again and pulled the sheet toward himself. He wrote for an hour, with long pauses to consider his words.
When he had finished, he carefully enciphered his text, using the disk. He wrote the cipher in a small, neat hand on the sheet of precious parchment, and sealed it in paper, folded and waxed. His successor would have it within the week. If intercepted, it would be unreadable. If it arrived safely, it would remain sealed for a long time as it was for someone in the distant future. No one now would understand, even if they could decipher it.
He hefted the light package in his hands. Then he carefully placed the sheet of paper holding the plain text on the coals in the small fireplace and watched it turn to ash. His smile, as he watched, was more poignant than bitter. Mocenigo was bringing him to Venice, and Venice, though fiercely independent, was far too close to Rome. If the Inquisition caught and condemned him, he faced the stake.
The blackened paper crumbled away and the embers gradually took on an ashen cloak. He nodded, satisfied, and prepared himself for sleep.
He lay back, clasped his hands behind his head, and looked up into the darkness. “Thank you, Usignuolo, my nightingale. My fate, and that of our world, are now in the hands of the Infinite.”
The vision ended as abruptly as it began and she shook herself.
Steve was staring at her. “What happened?”
“I saw… never mind. How long?”
“Two or three minutes. Is that what your fugues are like?”
“No, this was different. I knew who I was, where I was, but I was somewhere else at the same time.”
“Where?”
“I was watching Bruno write this letter.” She held it up to the light, feeling calm and firmly in control for the first time since she had been approached on the platform of Corvisart so long ago. She started to read as if nothing extraordinary had happened at all.
Now in the year 1589 at temporary peace near the town of Helmstedt, I, Giordano Bruno, called the Nolan, philosopher, excommunicated by Churches both Catholic and Lutheran, write this on clean parchment using the Alberti cipher disk, which I will transfer to the Pythos who follows me in case my plan does not succeed, which I foresee. Though my bowels weaken at the thought of the fire, for my imagination is strong, yet it is still worth the trying, for if I succeed in reaching the Pope I may yet change what is coming and spare the world much of the violence begat of what ignorant and p
rideful men, overturning all reason and giving way to base passions, call religion, for which see the Apocalypse of Thomas. Wars there will be between the Roman Church and those who seek to reform her, or to think for themselves, or to believe as they would; between those who believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who died under torture and those who follow the prophet of Arabia; and so in ever-widening circles of rage and despair, all this I foresee. Many centuries will come and go before these horrors fade, and then only in the face of a more terrible calamity bred of Man’s reckless profligacy. When at last the world is one small globe among the infinities, humankind will come too late to understand its place.
This would be the first time a Pythos attempts to intervene directly. Some who follow me will call it reckless, foolish, prideful, perhaps possessed, but I must return to Venice and give myself unto the Inquisition, and so attempt to convince the Holy Father through reason, though it may lead only to my death. If I fail, my successors will continue our great work. I have determined that this one time I am compelled to break the rule of secrecy. It is the least I can do. Our universe is an infinity of infinite worlds, and God is in all. This we know from the secret writings, Hermetic philosophers, and the long tradition of the Pythos before and after the closing of the Oracle at Delphi.
Now I must speak to the Founding Document, the spring from which we have drawn these twelve hundred years: it lay in the heart of Empire, in Rome herself, until it was recovered from its precise location, which was illuminated by the oculus of the Pantheon on a date foretold and at such and such a time, &c. As it was not possible for me to go myself my designated successor retrieved it and delivered it to me in Paris in the year 1577. Its whereabouts are safe in the City of God until need arises once again. When that day comes the Pythos will know.