by John Wray
To my great surprise my father didn’t argue.
“There was no other option,” he murmured. “Not for me. I didn’t believe in the Accidents.” He was quiet a moment. “I still don’t, no matter what you say.”
“What is it that you do believe in, then?” said Gentian. “You must believe in something.”
“In my family,” my father spat out—then stopped short, as if surprised at his own answer. “I believe in this family.” He paused again, then mumbled, “God knows I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“Give him to us,” said Enzian. “We had an understanding, Orson. We had a covenant.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What covenant?”
“It’s just for a spell,” Genny purred. “You can visit whenever you like.”
“But I’ve been enjoying his company lately. He’s just starting to reason, to think for himself—”
“We had an understanding,” Enzian repeated. “You knew this day would arrive.”
“What are you blathering about?” said my father, his voice going shrill. “What goddamn understanding?”
“We sent you a message,” Genny said with a sigh.
“You did no such thing.”
“Don’t play the fool,” said Enzian. “Why else do you think we named him Waldemar?”
If my father gave an answer I no longer heard it. I was halfway up the hallway already, scuttling backward like a water bug, stopping only when my sneakers hit the door. It gonged faintly, its earlier boom in miniature, but they were too busy squabbling to notice. I rose to a crouch, barely able to breathe. I’d been brought as an offering: that much was now clear. I would never see daylight again.
I was too young to have much self-control, Mrs. Haven, but I mustered what little I had. Be reasonable, I commanded myself—a thing my parents often said to each other. “Be reasonable, Waldy,” I whispered aloud. Nobody gets sacrificed anymore. Nobody gets skinned alive or atomized or eaten. Reality isn’t like your father’s books.
I lived in awe of my father, as most children do; but just then, in that dim no-man’s-land, my reverence for him failed to bring me comfort. My upbringing had been religion-free, more or less, but I knew the fable of Abraham and Isaac. Orson himself, just a few weeks before, had told it to me over breakfast.
I turned to face the door and found it locked. The sight of that column of deadbolts, thick and black and corroded, made me start to hyperventilate with panic. I hadn’t started crying—not yet—but I could feel my lungs and tear ducts mobilizing. I stepped away from the door, dropped back onto my knees, and set a course for the end of the hallway.
My luck held long enough to carry me past the parlor door, then the bathroom and the dressmaker’s mannequin, but after that the air began to shudder. The forced-perspective sensation returned with a vengeance: the turning kept its distance like a fata morgana, as though it were miles away from me instead of yards. It was easier to move, I discovered, if I kept my eyes closed. The argument was growing fainter now, less relevant, more abstract. When I rounded the corner it stopped altogether.
What happened then, Mrs. Haven, is still beyond my power to describe. It was a long time ago, back when the real and the unreal were interchangeable to me, and thinking in the colorless, odorless, soundless nonplace I suddenly found myself in was like trying to breathe on the moon. I made a left turn, then a second, then a third. The last of my panic had fallen away. I was traveling counterclockwise, in an inward-curving spiral, in accordance with the laws of C*F*P. When I finally stopped and stood upright and opened my eyes, it came as no surprise that I saw nothing.
THERE’S A PASSAGE in that silver book you gave me, Mrs. Haven, that comes to mind each time I think of our elopement. It’s from chapter two—“Modern Survivals of Ancient Customs”—and it touches on one of the author’s pet topics, namely abduction:
THE HONEYMOON.—The honeymoon is a period of seclusion for the amorous couple, and/or absence from the familiar habitat. It is a relic of the remote time of marriage by capture, when it was necessary for the groom to remain in hiding with his bride until the search was given up.
We never discussed it—we steered clear of the topic, both of us, by unspoken consensus—but I thought of those weeks on the run as our honeymoon, and I was relatively sure that you did, too. It was improbable and preposterous and most likely a violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions that I’d managed to spirit you away from New York City, and the happiness this gave me lent a lightness and warmth to everything I saw or touched: the world you and I inhabited for that brief, exalted interval was less a solid object, looking back on it now, than a vast and exquisite soufflé.
But like all soufflés, Mrs. Haven, it was ultimately destined for collapse.
You paid for our tickets—cash, for reasons of secrecy—and I never thanked you. The reason for your change of heart remained a blind spot in my understanding, a redacted line, a glowing white unknown, and I was incapable of asking you, for fear that you’d suddenly come to your senses. Absurdly, inexplicably, my last-ditch attempt to use the mystery of the Accidents to beguile you to Europe had worked, and I took a giddy sort of comfort in my triumph. At the same time, the fact that your husband was bankrolling our “period of seclusion from the familiar habitat” made me sick with resentment and shame, and lent the whole enterprise—your escape, our elopement, my ill-thought-out scheme to find Ottokar’s notes, even my pursuit of the Timekeeper himself—the triteness of a junior high school play.
As the more experienced of the two of us (in elopement especially), you let these moods pass without comment. You even indulged me so far as to inquire about my plan, though it was obvious you didn’t expect much in the way of an answer: you’d assumed (perfectly reasonably) that Vienna was only a pretext. You finally posed the question two and a half hours out of JFK—we’d just left the coast of Nova Scotia, I remember—and I answered as forthrightly as I could. By the time I’d finished we were over Belgium.
“So—” you said tentatively, after a long spell of quiet. You didn’t get further than that.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Haven. I know it’s a lot to take in.”
You blinked and cleared your throat and tried again. “Let me try to summarize what you’ve told me, Walter. To make sure I’ve got it all straight.”
“Sure thing.”
“First we’re flying to Vienna, to visit your mother. Then we’re going by train to, um, Snodge—”
“Znojmo,” I said patiently. “The letter j has a y sound in Czech. Like the oy in goyim.”
“Znojmo. Okay.” You flagged down a stewardess and ordered a bourbon-and-soda. “We’re going to Znojmo to track down some papers that your great-grandfather dropped in the street when he was hit by a car at the turn of the century—”
“He might not actually have dropped them; that’s conjecture on my part. They could have disappeared some other way—stolen by rivals, for example. Or his mistress might have them.”
You gave me a sharp look. “His mistress.”
“Her descendants, of course.” I hesitated. “His mistress is dead by now, I’m guessing.”
“I’d call that a safe guess.”
“Absolutely. Point taken.”
“Except that the whole reason, you’re telling me, that we’re looking for these papers—”
“These notes—”
“—these notes, is to track down your grandfather’s brother, a Nazi war criminal, who developed relativity in the same year that Albert Einstein—”
“We never say that name in my family, if you don’t mind. And it wasn’t relativity, exactly. He referred to it as rotary—”
“—in the same year that Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, and who used his knowledge of the secret workings of time to somehow screw up your whole family—including, apparently, you—not to mention all sorts of other god-awful and nasty and just plain weird stuff, like sending cicadas back into the past, and t
ampering with people’s dreams—”
“That’s not exactly what I—”
“—and who now, if I’m doing my math right, would be one hundred and seven years old. And you’re doing this—we’re doing this—because you want him to be—” You pursed your lips. “What’s the expression you used?”
I took a deep breath. “Brought to justice.”
“Brought to justice. Okay.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. The cabin bucked and shuddered death-defyingly. Someone very close by, possibly right behind us, let out a groan of pent-up human misery. The stewardess arrived with your bourbon. You tried to give her a tip, which she refused.
“It all sounds so hokey, when you put it like that,” I said.
“It doesn’t sound hokey, Walter. It sounds batshit crazy.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Haven.” I leaned forward. “But the man you’re married to believes it—I know that for certain. And so does the rest of his church.”
You took a slow swig of your bourbon. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Tolliver. The two of us had better pray that isn’t true.”
* * *
The Kraut was living in a one-room apartment on Taubstummengasse that had been used as an atelier by so many artists over the years that you could feel the clots of hardened paint under the carpet. One of them—or so she claimed—had been the mysterious Kappa, for whom Sonja had modeled in her Jandek days. The Jandek itself was two blocks up the street, still open for business and seedy as ever.
None of this was by design, of course, but neither was it pure coincidence. I soon learned that Vienna is such a dense and impacted mass of translucent, overlapping layers of history and nostalgia and happenstance that it resembles nothing so much as a massive candied onion. I found emblems of my family’s downfall everywhere I looked: some as slight as a waltz played by panhandling Poles, some as monumental as the gold-and-marble plague column up the Graben from Saint Peter’s. The Brown Widow’s villa was still standing, and the house with the intertwined dragons was, too, though it now housed a shop selling Red Bull and bongs. I shambled through those marzipan streets like a zombie, Mrs. Haven, if only because the dead seemed so oppressively alive. You admired the Breughels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and shopped for Alexander boots and sea-green loden jackets on the Graben. Both of us kept our distance from the Klimts.
You didn’t make the best impression on the Kraut—what’s the use of denying it?—but then again, neither did I. She was in grad student mode at the time, living in her big, drafty studio on bread and liverwurst and Turkish coffee, as single-minded and disheveled as her secret patron saint, Madame Curie. My decision to drop out of Ogilvy had disappointed her deeply. The one thing I’m grateful for, even now, is that we managed to keep the Husband’s identity from her. She didn’t blame Synchronology for the end of her marriage—that would have meant giving the UCS some credibility, however slight—but she had nothing but contempt for its disciples. The only thing she viewed more skeptically was love.
“Where is she?” she said, before she’d even let me in the door.
“She’s coming,” I answered, defensive already. “I think she’s taking a tour of the Opera.”
“I see,” said the Kraut. “She’s off shopping somewhere?”
“You don’t know the first thing about her, Ursula. For your information—”
“I’m sorry, Waldy. I’ll untwist my knickers.” She squinted past me, as if checking to see whether I’d been tailed. “I’m assuming that those flowers are for me?”
“Of course they are,” I said, giving her a kiss.
The only furniture in the place was a cot in one corner and a rolltop desk and chair against the wall. A pot of goulash sat on a hotplate in the middle of the floor. It looked as though she’d been eating out of it for days.
“I’m doing what I want to do, Waldy,” she said, guessing my thoughts as always. “I don’t cook anymore. I’ve done quite enough cooking.”
“Just as long as you’re remembering to eat.”
She smiled. “Tell me about your relationship. I assume you find it sensually fulfilling.”
I made a face and wandered over to the desk. “I’ll have to defer to Mrs. Haven on that point.”
Her eyes narrowed at once. “Mrs. Who?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “That’s just a name I call her sometimes. As a joke.”
“Ah,” said the Kraut.
“What’s ‘aha’ supposed to mean?”
“I didn’t say ‘aha,’” she said, following me to the desk. “I said ‘ah.’ Would you like to ask me how my work is going?”
“Of course I would. But I probably wouldn’t understand your answer.”
The Kraut frowned at me for an instant, as if the possibility had only just occurred to her. She wasn’t as different from the rest of the family as she liked to think.
“You might find some of it rather dusty, I suppose—it’s true you never were much good at theory. But what I do isn’t so far removed from what your father did, at times. The difference between a hypothesis of mine and a hypothesis of his—the only meaningful difference, it sometimes seems to me—is that mine must be expressible in terms of mathematics.”
“I know the difference between science and science fiction, Ursula.”
“Do you?” the Kraut said. “Your father seems to think he does, as well. You’re both so sure.”
That surprised me, I have to admit. “Aren’t you?”
“Orson once wrote a story—more of a fable, really—called ‘The Principatrix of Gnawledge.’ Do you remember it?”
I shook my head.
“It’s in the only book of his I brought along,” she said, digging a coverless pulp out of a drawer. “You can read it, if you like, while I make coffee. It’s quite short.”
An itching began in my palms as I reached for the book. The Kraut had never before suggested that I read anything of Orson’s. The story was marked with a postcard of Znojmo, featuring a portly businessman in a bowler hat, riding an enormous green gherkin above the Dyje River.
THE PRINCIPATRIX OF GNAWLEDGE
The Imperator of Omphalos-8, a satellite of Ganymede-12 in the System of Mines, had a proGene, a female, who duly attained to principatrix when she came of age. This principatrix, it is told, was the rarest of beauties: skin the color of subpolar frost, hair luminous as ore from a core-stratum vein. The Imperator doted on her, as fathers will, and built her a stronghouse of chromium and silica by the shore of a quarry on a neighboring moon, far removed from the intrigues of court. There she ripened to the first term of youth, and had no care for the Winter, and no means of influence over the Great Thermodynamic Arc, after the manner of ordinary men.
Now it happened one autumn, as she walked by the quarry, that the principatrix saw an other: a wizened old thrall, humming to herself as she cast cicada shells into the water. The oiled and ore-heavy waves danced about the thrall’s feet, and the leaves rustled about her hunched back, and her mica-colored rags flapped about her gray face in the beating of the ruthless autumn wind.
“Here,” said the principatrix, “is the loneliest thrall betwixt the Seven Poles. What brings you to my quarrylake, old woman?”
“Imperator’s Daughter,” said the thrall, “you live in a stronghouse, and your hair is as ore from a core-stratum vein; but what good does it bring? Duration is brief, and existence is grief—you exist after the manner of ordinary men, with no thought for the Winter, and no influence over the Thermodynamic Arc.”
“Thought for the Winter I do now possess,” said the Imperator’s daughter; “but influence over the Arc, I have not.” And she began to consider.
The thrall cast the last of her shells into the water and laughed.
The light turned, and the air cooled, and the principatrix returned to her stronghouse. When the door had been bolted and the fission-lamps lit, she summoned her governess to her.
“Governess,” said the principa
trix, “thought for the Winter has found me, so that I grow out of the manner of ordinary men, like a cicada growing out of its shell. Tell me what I must do to have influence over the Arc.”
Then the governess sighed like the subpolar winds. “Alas!” she said, “that this should come to pass; but the thought has now entered your lymph and your blood, and there is no antidote against thought.”
So the Imperator’s proGene sat in her pressurized chamber in the silica-and-chromium–masoned keep, and gnawed there day and night upon the thought. Ten-and-seven years she was gnawing, and as much time again; and the wind beat against the fastness of the stronghouse, and the stars transcribed their arcs as if to mock her. Her governness fed and clothed and washed her without speaking, and she ate and bathed and slumbered without any thought but one.
Now when thirty and four years were passed away, the principatrix raised herself up slowly to her feet, and she passed from chamber to chamber of her ruined house, and saw that all her thralls and keepers had long left her; her governess remained, but she was stone-faced now and still. The principatrix walked out of the stronghouse, leaving its doors open behind her, and the gate to the garden, and the gate in the fortified field. She walked to that part of the shore where the old thrall had been, and where thought for the Winter had first found her, and there she sat down. And the ore-heavy waves lapped at her feet, and the shells of cicadas rustled at her back, and her mica-colored rags flapped about her in the beating of the wind. And when she lifted her eyes, behold! there was a daughter of an Imperator come up along the shore. Her skin was the color of subpolar frost, and her hair was as luminous as ore from a core-stratum vein; and she had no care for the Winter, and no means of influence over the Great Thermodynamic Arc, after the manner of ordinary men.
“What do you think?” said the Kraut, coming back with the coffee.
“This doesn’t sound like Orson.”
“It’s cribbed from someone better—Stevenson, I think, or Collins. But that’s not why I wanted you to read it.” She set the cup and saucer down. “Of all your father’s fiction, it comes closest to what I consider fact.”