Weird Tales - Summer 1990

by Vol. 51 No. 4

  She looked beseechingly at Jacques for reassurance; there was a lurking terror in the far corners of her mind, to the effect that one day her beloved father's collection might turn out after all to be spurious. . . .

  To her surprise and delight, he was nodding vigorously.

  "Oh, yes! I can testify to that. The expert they called in was my old teacher at Miskatonic, Professor Brass, and he came back saying that we no longer had the finest collection of mystical and al­chemical texts in the New World! He was made permanently jealous by what he saw! Not, of course, that some of the stuff wasn't duplicated by our own hold­ings, and anyhow we're more interested in the content of such texts than in their linguistic and etymological associa­tions. So I don't suppose anyone from my place has studied them since, let alone anybody from the other and stuff­ier foundations which look down on Foulwater as the back of beyond."

  Taking another sip of wine, Lies said, "I've always found that a very strange attitude. If it hadn't been for his fear of strangers, I'm sure my father would have gone anywhere to confirm or dis­prove his conclusions. All my life, I re­member him reading every single publication that he could lay hands on, studying them down to the tiniest de­tail, making piles of notes . . . Oh, he's so dedicated!" She drained her glass and concluded, "And I have to stand in for him, and I'm terrified!"

  "I don't see why," Jacques riposted, looking genuinely puzzled. "I mean, he's made out an excellent case for his views."

  "But Professor Tadcaster —"

  "I know, I know!" He signalled the waiter for another round of drinks; Lies made to decline, but thought better of it, for the sherry had definitely relaxed her.

  "But," Jacques went on, "the main thrust of his objection is not so much that he thinks your father's texts are forged — excuse me, but you did use the term forgery, and I think that's pitching it too high. It's more that, if he's right, we shall have to think again about how the learned words from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were pro­nounced in the days when they were the common means of communication among the academics and specialists of all Europe. Right?"

  "Y-yes!"

  "And this means that those words which then entered the common tongue, the vernacular, must have been pro­nounced differently from what we've assumed for more than a century, and we may even have to re-write that fun­damental dogma of language study, Grimm's Law. We shall have to revise our view of the Great Vowel Shift, we shall have to reconsider everything we have been teaching for generations. In short, people like Professor Tadcaster will have to make an about-turn and start teaching that what they taught yesterday was wrong after all! Worse yet, they themselves will have to go back to studying instead of merely passing on what they learned in their youth as though it were Holy Writ! And that is why Tadcaster in particular is so fierce in claiming that we cannot base such a radical revision of our views on a bunch of mystical and alchemical books which at best may have affected a small in-group of initiates among whom it may well have been a mark of distinction to know how to mispro­nounce certain words. Unworthy or not, though, it is a rational objection."

  A fresh glass of wine appeared before her. Lies drank deeply to cover the fact that her eyes had filled with tears. She had dared to think that this wonderful stranger, so tall, so friendly, so hand­some, so well-spoken, might be on her side. Instead, he had just presented Tadcaster's case better than he might have done himself.

  She muttered something and made to rise. Jacques caught her hand.

  "Please! Don't go away. I do appre­ciate how you feel — I felt just the same myself one time when old Brass told me he had screwed up his engagements and I'd have to deliver a paper he'd written because he couldn't be in two places at once. Which quite destroyed my respect for him — I'd been firmly convinced for three years that he could!"

  Against her will Lies found she was chuckling at the joke, and once again able to relax.

  "Even so," she said after a pause, "I don't really know what I shall be talk­ing about tomorrow. I mean, how can I possibly understand it in my bones the way my father does? I can't make my­self believe that it matters how some particular word was pronounced five hundred years ago! I can see how it can be interesting to some people, but im­portant . . . ?"

  "Maybe in a way," Jacques said judiciously, "it's a shame your father didn't find his way to Miskatonic. I can assure you there are occasions when the correct pronunciation is very important indeed. Today, for instance."

  Lies blinked at him. She registered peripherally that the bar by now was crowded with convention delegates, ex­changing shouted greetings or engaged in heated debate; all that, however, was washing past this charmed circle en­closing her and Jacques. They might as well have been on a private island.

  "Do you mean," she ventures, "that when one is talking about such a rare­fied subject it's essential to get across in speech the same as what you'd put over in IPA?"

  "If, back in the Middle Ages, someone had had the wit to invent a perfectly phonetic script, things might have been very different." Jacques gave a lazy smile, and sipped his very dry sherry before crushing out his cigar. A wisp of smoke rose from the ashtray.

  "No," he went on, "what I meant was something else. Ah . . . Well, perhaps I could make my point clearer if you told me what exactly it is about this speech that's bothering you."

  "I'm not sure I could explain —"

  "Oh, come on! Try, at least! After all, I seem to be the only person here from the only other university in North America where they have the same sort of respect as your father for the re­cherche and the arcane. I promise you, I'm not one to dismiss a source merely because it relates to a subject like al­chemy, or raising the devil, which has subsequently gone out of style. The im­portant thing is that these people be­lieved in what they were doing, and as the saying goes, faith can move moun­tains. It may take a long time — you may have to wait until that faith in­vents dynamite — but it does work. I have a suspicion that under Tadcaster's bombardment your father is losing faith in his own convictions. Am I right?"

  She gave a little sad nod. The same had often occurred to her. Had he really believed in his assertions, he would not, surely, have abandoned her — ulcer or no ulcer!

  She said at last, in a low and confi­dential tone, "There is one thing that I'm sure people are going to ask about, and I don't think I can answer. It's when he's analysing some macaronic verses, a sort of incantation in mixed-up Latin, Greek, and Magyar, and —"

  "Have you got a transcript?" Jacques interrupted, leaning across the table.

  "Oh, yes! I have photocopies of all the pages he cited!" Hastily she opened the file at her side, fumbling for the sheet in question.

  Jacques studied it gravely. He said at length, "This isn't where you got what you were saying when I bumped into you."

  "But you didn't actually —" Lies put her hand to her mouth. "I didn't know anyone had heard me!"

  "I heard. And what's more I can tes­tify that your pronunciation was im­peccable, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you. But this must have been one of the passages that afforded a clue, right?"

  "You heard what I said?" Lies mourned. "Oh, how awful! I didn't really mean to say it, I promise. I just felt so—"

  He laid his hand soothingly on hers and pressed gently.

  "Don't worry. Please! There probably aren't more than two people in this ho­tel — at this entire congress! — who'd know it for a diabolic invocation, and even if you were brought up to believe that swearing was a bad habit, like drinking, I can promise you that now and then there are exceptions. You're enjoying this sherry? I thought you would. I can feel how much more re­laxed you are now. Your pulse has stea­died and you aren't perspiring the way you were, and your attention is fully engaged in the important subject under discussion. One rescue operation under way."

  There was something infinitely re­assuring about his cool, almost surgical dissection of her condition. Lies felt a smile creep unbidden across her mouth.r />
  "I guess you missed your vocation. You're one Hell of a therapist, aren't you?"

  "If you said that twice I wouldn't ac­cuse you of exaggerating. But let's get back to the main line of the argument. I take it that this must be one of the passages in leontine verse which, be­cause its rhymes are from the middle of the line to the end, strike your father as supporting his claim that the broad a sound had already started to ap­proach the broad e long before . . ."

  At some stage during the next hour, in order to get a clearer sight of the papers she was spreading on the table, Jacques left his chair facing her and came to sit beside her on the padded bench he had gentlemanly urged her to accept on their arrival; she hadn't paid much attention at the time. The bar was now packed. There was a sort of humming in the air, an excited and ex­citing sound. It matched her mood. She was almost delirious. For here was this amazing stranger giving her the in­sight into what she must say tomorrow which even her beloved father had failed to communicate.

  Well, of course, if the Romans them­selves had pronounced such a word with a soft w sound, and yet in modern lan­guages it had been replaced with a harsh v, and virtually no other word in any of the languages that survived ex­hibited a similar change, then some­body must have had a reason for meddling with it. And given that the scientific method was just being de­vised as a universal standard, it fol­lowed that —

  And if this other word had an otherwise unaccountable broad i, and most similar words had a short one, and the surrounding consonants didn't match the standard pattern—and—and . . .

  "I'm getting hungry," Jacques an­nounced suddenly. "It's after seven. Let's go grab a table in the restaurant."

  "Wait a moment!" Lies exclaimed. "I was just going to bring up another point here on page . . ."

  And then the awful reality dawned on her. The budget allotted by Foul-water U. for this trip wouldn't stretch to eating in hotels or real restaurants; she was resigned to making do with MacDonald's or whatever the equiva­lent was in this strange city. She began to gather her papers.

  "You've been very kind," she said. "But really I can't —"

  "Can't accept my invitation to din­ner? Oh, my dear Lies! I came here ex­pecting the usually dreary round of back-slapping and in-fighting and gen­eral bitchiness, and here I am with somebody who actually cares about what we're all supposed to get worked up about, and you're telling me I can't go on talking to you over a meal? Hon­estly, that's ridiculous! You just come with me and bring the whole pile of paper and we can eat and talk at the same time. I think," he added mean­ingly, "we can lay a little trap for Pro­fessor Tadcaster . . . don't you?"

  An hour earlier she had been imag­ining disaster during tomorrow morn­ing's inevitable interrogation — dis­guised in the convention programme as "discussion," but nonetheless merciless if Professor Tadcaster were to be there. Now she was almost looking forward to it, for Jacques had shown her connec­tions between one word and another, and cited other references from differ­ent sources — most of which she had never heard of — that did, taken to­gether, tend to support her father's fa­vourite theory. . . .

  She mastered herself. She reminded herself that merely accepting an invi­tation to dinner was a normal thing in the lives of most young women, even though at home in Foulwater there had been very few men who made the offer. She was in a big city, attending a major academic congress. She must pretend she was in Rome, and behave like the Romans. . . .

  Up to a point.

  Smiling, she said, "Very well, Jacques." It was the first time she had used his name. "If you insist. . ."

  And there was a delicious meal, with white wine — she once again pleaded that she didn't drink, and was per­suaded to take a glass, that became two, but not three, because he was tactful enough not to press it on her. Two were fine; they made her loquacious and even vociferous, as she picked up the threads of her father's argument and improvised a defence for them which yesterday she could never have guessed at. Jacques sat—on her right this time, at a little square table whose far corner afforded a place to lay out the sheets of paper they were not currently consult­ing — smiling and nodding approval, and now and then offering a hint or clue that led her to yet further comprehen­sion.

  She was astonished at what was hap­pening to her. She did now at last have some conception of what so fascinated her father, and all these other people assembled for the convention, about the words which were the basic tool of hu­man communication. Jacques, whoever he was, must be a great teacher! If only he had turned up soon enough to be of help to her father!

  Or would that rigid and now elderly man have taken advice from someone twenty, thirty years his junior . . . ?

  She realised suddenly she had no idea how old her companion might be. Some­times he gave a mischievous grin which made him seem like a teenager; sometimes he spoke with a gravity that made him seem infinitely old, infinitely wise. . . . But did it matter? She was enjoying his company more than any­body else's she could recall, and occa­sionally he was making her laugh aloud, something she could not have believed when she got off the bus this afternoon, quailing at the prospect of her ordeal by Tadcaster.

  She said as much, and Jacques cocked one eyebrow.

  "Speak of the devil, as the saying goes . . . Here he comes now, with a bunch of his cronies, and I think he just caught sight of you."

  Fear clutched Lies's heart. Jacques set his hand on hers, and warmth seemed to flow from it.

  "Be polite," her murmured. "Just make him understand that he can't walk all over you tomorrow. And he can't. It's been arranged."

  Nonetheless she was shaking in­wardly as the red-bearded man ad­vanced.

  "Miss Andrassy?" he said in a voice as resonant as his big booming laugh. "I'm told your father is unfortunately indisposed, isn't that so? A shame! I had been looking forward to a debate with him in real time, instead of through the slow and fallible channels of the profes­sional journals."

  Lies sat tongue-tied, an artificial smile on her face. She would rather have replaced it by a scowl, but all her upbringing militated against it.

  Having waited just long enough for her to answer if she chose, Tadcaster went on, "Well, I'm sure you'll do what you can tomorrow to defend his repu­tation. But I really think that someone who relies on weird alchemical texts as the basis for a so-called 'scientific' hy­pothesis owes more to his colleagues than a presentation by someone totally without qualifications in the field. With all respect, Miss Andrassy. But you don't yourself possess a degree of any kind, I'm told — is that correct?"

  A hot and horrible blush was spread­ing over Lies's round face; she could feel sweat starting to loosen the grip of her spectacles on her nose. She was afraid even to nod miserable confirmation of Tadcaster's charge, for if she did she could imagine having to rescue them from the table, or worse yet the floor.

  "Well, it's very irregular," Tadcaster said, making to turn away. "But I sup­pose the organisers must have their reasons. I think, though, we should make certain such a thing doesn't hap­pen twice."

  Several nods greeted this remark from the party standing at his back, those whom Jacques had termed cro­nies.

  Lies sat rock-still, wishing she were safely home in Foulwater . . . even if, back there, she was always the wall­flower, always the gooseberry, always the unwanted third. Being humiliated in person was nothing compared to sit­ting here and feeling her father hu­miliated through herself. Didn't Jacques realise? Was he going to say nothing?

  Just as she was prepared to believe she had been betrayed, he gave a little sleepy smile, turning toward Tadcas­ter.

  "If you'll forgive my saying so, Pro­fessor, I think you may be in for a sur­prise. I've had the pleasure and privilege of a preview of Professor Andrassy's paper, and in my view the logic is un­assailable."

  "Have you now!" Tadcaster ex­claimed. "And by what right did you enjoy the preprint of this paper, which has been denied to the rest of us?"

  "Oh, come
now, Professor," Jacques chided mildly. "You know as well as I that the provision of preprints is op­tional, and in fact most participants prefer not to destroy the spontaneity of discussion which follows a live pres­entation. As a matter of fact, I recall that you yourself have delivered eight papers at conventions of this Society, and not one was circulated as a pre­print."

  Tadcaster was taken aback, but only momentarily. He said, "I was complain­ing that a preprint had been made available to some people and not to everyone!"

  "Oh, that's not the case. I've merely had the good luck to consult with Miss Andrassy, and coach her on a few points concerned with presentation of what I assure you is a most remarkable and insightful argument."

  For a second Tadcaster seemed at a loss. Then he collected his wits and, bending close, carefully read Jacques's name-badge. Straightening, he said contemptuously, "Oh, you're from Mis-katonic, are you? Never heard of it."

  "Most people say the same," Jacques sighed. "Until. . ."

  "Until what?" Tadcaster blinked un­certainly.

  "Until," Jacques concluded briskly, and turned back to Lies. "Now, my dear, let's just run over that matter of the u-to-w shift again, and I think you should be able to cope with any ques­tions anybody throws at you."

  Visibly disturbed — to Lies's great delight — Tadcaster withdrew, while his cohorts pestered him with questions he was plainly in no mood to answer. His food grew cold on the table, and he kept casting anxious glances in Lies's and Jacques's direction.