Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  The work went on. Every day since then, and here, too, in this castle that was like something he and Meg might have dreamed. Flood took a deep breath and tied on his apron.

  There was a noise behind him and, thinking it was one of the bookcases, he stepped nimbly aside.

  – I’m sorry if I startled you, the Countess said. Sometimes I forget what this place can do to newcomers,

  He was glad to see her again, the only sane soul, it seemed, in this madhouse. He hoped she would linger and talk for a while, but she merely asked him if he was satisfied with the arrangements. He told her that he was, and then wondered why he had, since he most definitely was not. She said she would inform her father that all was well, and turned to leave.

  – Once I’ve finished a book, Flood said quickly, stepping down from the press platform, all I will have to do is deposit it on one of the passing shelves.

  Irena frowned.

  – I’m afraid no one is allowed to add or remove anything from these bookcases, she said, without my father’s approval.

  – I had thought from what the Count said that you were in charge of the library

  – That is how it works in theory, she said with a smile. In fact, my father inspects everything that gets done here, even down to how many mice the cats are catching. Nothing escapes his notice for long.

  – Does he ever sleep?

  – He does. He says sleep has its uses too. Dreams give him some of his best ideas.

  She turned to examine the press, and he knew somehow that there was more she wished to say. He wondered how he might encourage her to speak, and drew closer.

  – Don’t worry, Mr. Flood, I wasn’t going to touch anything.

  – I didn’t think –

  – I wondered, she said, if I might be allowed to watch you at work from time to time. I read a lot of books but I’ve never seen one being made.

  As he quickly consented, the great clock struck the hour. Irena looked up, the eagerness fading from her eyes.

  – I must go, she said, stepping away from the platform. I will return tomorrow.

  – Wait, he said, suddenly remembering something that had been nagging at him all day. Now he hesitated, confounded by the delicacy of the question.

  – Yes?

  – I’m not. I don’t. Could you tell me how to find my bed?

  The next morning she brought the assistants the Count had promised him.

  One was from the Count’s collection of human puzzles, a nine-year-old boy named Djinn, who had six fingers on each hand. Even discounting the extra digits, Djinn was the most exotic creature Flood had ever seen. Kinked African hair of a blond hue, coffee-coloured skin, almond-shaped eyes with blue irises. He could speak several languages, some from as far away as China, as well as Arabic, Spanish, and what Flood at first thought was Greek but turned out to be Gaelic. The Count had acquired the boy as a present from a Turkish envoy who visited the castle with a troupe of strolling actors. The Castle Ostrov, as the envoy had guessed, proved to be ideal for the performance of a play involving trapdoors, ghosts, and descending gods. The Count was most impressed, however, with this twelve-fingered boy who plucked a haunting melody on the lute at the play’s close. The troupe reluctantly surrendered Djinn to the Count, at the envoy’s insistence. The actors themselves had found him in the streets of Constantinople but guessed that he was from somewhere much farther away.

  – My father, Irena explained, thought Djinn’s fingers could be usefully applied to some aspect of printing.

  The boy kept his gaze fixed on her, his mute despair palpable. She was going to leave him here.

  The other assistant was an automaton of milky blanc de Chine porcelain and joints of bronze that, when wound with a key, nodded its head, moved its arms, and took a few halting steps. The automaton, clean-shaven and sporting an apple-bright spot of red enamel on each cheek, was dressed in the uniform of a cavalry officer. Kirshner, the Venetian metallurgist, had fashioned the inner workings and installed them in a porcelain body that had been cast at Meissen by the wizard Kaendler.

  Ludwig, as Irena called the automaton, was originally designed only to march a few steps and brandish its sword. When her father saw what the machine’s creator was capable of he had him add other functions, and now the automaton could dance a stiff minuet, write a few words with a quill pen, and drink a glass of wine. Ludwig’s limited movements, the Count had thought, might be adaptable to some of the more mechanical press operations. Flood admitted his doubts.

  – It can’t respond to my commands.

  As he spoke, a bell-like echo of his voice seemed to rattle around inside the automaton, reemerging at last in a buzzing string of words.

  – Can tress tomb man.

  Flood stepped back, startled.

  – Someone’s in there.

  Irena shook her head.

  – He repeats what you say, but he leaves parts out.

  – Reap you tea, the automaton buzzed. Eve arts out.

  Irena handed Flood a large brass key.

  – The metallurgist was very clever. Certain sustained tones move sensitive weights inside Ludwig, so that you can make him do things by singing to him. Watch.

  She leaned towards the automaton’s ceramic ear and hummed a long, wavering note. With a click and a whirr Ludwig’s arm rose, bending at the elbow, until the tips of his fingers touched his tricorn.

  To Flood’s surprise, Irena was the one who tinkered with Ludwig’s machinery and adapted him for presswork. She returned in the afternoon with a case of watchmaker’s instruments and an odd brass-plated paper-cutter that she set on his desk and connected to a treadle and a handwheel.

  – We designed this, she said, to help you with all of the pages you’ll be producing. You slide your paper in here, like so. These spools fold the sheet and then the blades cut it. And you can adjust the folding and cutting for an eight-, sixteen-, or thirty-two-page sheet.

  – We designed this?

  – My father and I.

  She unscrewed a panel in the automaton’s back and moved aside to let Flood see the secrets of Ludwig’s design. With the tips of a tiny pair of jeweller’s forceps she tapped a toothed copper cylinder ringed with thin disks. Patiently she showed him how a system of these disks, or cams, transferred the rotary motion of the clockwork to the rods and levers that controlled Ludwig’s movements. Depending on which set of cams was put in place, Ludwig’s routine could be altered. There were sets for eating, for swordplay, for dancing. By mixing and rearranging the cams, she explained, she was hoping to approximate the repetitive motions required in printing.

  – Can I stop him myself? Flood asked. If he starts to get ahead of me, for example.

  – You can hold his arm, yes, but I wouldn’t prevent his motion for too long. He may be a machine, but he can be rather temperamental.

  Flood asked her where she had learned such uncommon skills.

  – I watched the man who put Ludwig together, she explained, and asked a lot of questions. My father and Ludwig’s creator did not … get along. It occurred to me that, once Signore Kirshner had gone home to Venice, someone here would have to be able to repair these things.

  They had drawn close together to examine Ludwig’s inner workings. In the silence after her last words Flood could hear Irena’s breathing. He glanced at the boy, who was watching them with wide eyes.

  – Before I got it, Flood said, what was it supposed to do?

  – Live.

  He detected something in the tone of her strange reply, and then it occurred to him how, in a kind of lifeless parody, the automaton resembled her.

  – Ludwig was my brother’s name, she said. I never met him, but my father tells me that this Ludwig is a good likeness.

  That afternoon she told him the story of her brother’s death at the Battle of Belgrade, and the Count’s hope that he might resurrect something of his son in the form of a machine.

  – That’s why the Abbé de Saint-Foix is here, she said. />
  In the Abbé’s novel, she explained, the notion was put forth by one of the characters that the human soul might be found in the hair and fingernails. It is well-known that both continue to grow after death, and this astounding fact could be attributed to a residue of the divine spark. She quoted the novel from memory, he was dismayed to see.

  – The spirit, in its longing to return to the spiritual realm, ceaselessly flows, like electricity, from the core of the body to the outer regions. The soul, in other words, might at certain times be lodged in a person’s coiffure.

  – The idea, Irena said with a smile, has been very popular with fashionable ladies.

  – And so has the Abbé, I’ve heard.

  – My father, for his part, thinks the idea worth pursuing.

  When she spoke of the Count, Flood noticed, her voice was softened with affectionate forbearance. She spoke of how her father had supplied the Abbé with her brother’s topknot. The faded hank of hair that the Count had cut from his son’s head had been mortared into oily dust and mixed with an unguent to grease the joints of the porcelain soldier, in the hope that any glimmer of vitality remaining in the battlefield memento might be transferred to the machine.

  – I take it the experiment has been a failure.

  Instead of answering, Irena straightened the automaton’s cocked hat and bent to kiss the boy on the forehead.

  – Look after them, Mr. Flood.

  When the adjustments were completed Ludwig could stand at the press much longer than Flood himself, inking the formes and tirelessly lowering and raising the platen, until his mainspring finally wound down and had to be cranked up again.

  The first problem: how might one bind a book without beginning or end? On his third day in the castle Flood paced alongside his moving press and drew up a list of the ways books can be held together:

  – with the hands

  – with thread

  – with hair

  – with cloth

  – with bone and animal sinews

  – with wood

  – with paste

  – with other books

  – with the teeth

  – with hope

  And even if you could bind such a book, how might the contents be made truly infinite, having been given an enclosing frame? The Count likened infinity to a walled town, but to Flood’s mind it was more like everything that lies outside a walled town. If the text gets over that wall, he wrote in his journal, it spills right out of the book, doesn’t it?

  When he was not consulting with the Count about the other volumes he wanted printed in the meantime, Flood compiled a tentative list of possibilities.

  A cylinder of sheets of stiff cardpaper, rotating constantly around a central axle and throwing off infinitely repeated phrases, like the prayer wheels of the holy men of impenetrable Tibet. A reader can never decide that one particular page is the ending or the beginning. Note: this would be unlikely to satisfy the Count’s definition of true infinitude.

  A book that is sealed shut, with the word infinity burned on its wooden front cover. The reader cannot read the book and thus is free to entertain an infinite number of conjectures about the contents. Problem: as above.

  Philosophical idea: For every actual numbered page of the book, there exist hypothetical not-pages that … exist … elsewhere?

  No.

  By some as yet undetermined application of the principles of chemistry on the composition of ink, the printed words are not fixed on the page, but can be rearranged at the reader’s whim.

  An ashen rain was falling on the morning the Abbé de Saint-Foix came to see him. Thick runnels of water slimed the panes of the windows, dimming the interior of the castle in a glaucous undersea light. Flood was restless, frustrated by his lack of progress, and did not welcome the interruption of his mood.

  – I see you’ve replaced Death, the Abbé said. He was punctual, but not well-liked.

  He drifted up to the press platform with a studied nonchalance.

  – The Count has asked me to see if I could be of any help.

  The thought, bitter and unexpected, lanced across Flood’s mind: Your fraternity was no help when my ancestors were butchered on St. Bartholomew’s Day.

  – By all means, he said, setting down the tray of type he was sorting. After all, the infinite would be more your area than mine.

  – It depends, the Abbé said, on which infinite you mean.

  He gestured to the window.

  – How many drops fall, do you think, in a rain shower like this?

  – Thousands, Flood said with a shrug. Millions. I have no idea.

  – One wouldn’t say, though, that the number must be infinite. Merely indefinite. Unknown. And yet for all the difference it makes to us, the number of drops might as well be infinite. We can never determine for certain that it isn’t.

  The Abbé plucked a piece of type from the case on Flood’s table, examined it for a moment, and then dropped it back in its compartment.

  – Then there is the useful infinite, Flood said.

  – I see you know something of mathematics.

  – A little. My father made it part of my training in typography. Geometry, some calculus.

  – Where lovely paradoxes bloom like nightshade in the garden of the mind. My fellow Jesuit, Cavalieri, worked out a method for deriving the Volume of a solid object by assuming that a cube, for example, is composed of an infinite number of infinitely thin planes.

  The Abbé’s eyes did not blink in unison, Flood noticed. The left lid lagged ever so slightly behind the right, a barely perceptible tic that nevertheless lent to his assured speech a faint suggestion of derangement.

  – So, Flood said, if I could print a book with infinitely thin sheets of paper …

  – Indeed, the Abbé said, seating himself in the embrasure of the window. But that is not quite what the Count has asked you for, I understand.

  – No. He’s left the form of the thing up to me. It’s the content that matters to him. He wants a book that contains everything. A book without beginning or ending.

  The Abbé’s eyebrows rose.

  – Ah, now, there is your content.

  – What is?

  – Time. You must get it all into your book.

  – I don’t understand.

  – As St. Augustine said, If you ask me what time is, I know. If I wish to explain it to you, I know not.

  – A riddle worthy of the Count. Just remove the word time.

  – What if time is not what we imagine it to be? Not a smooth continuous absolute, the same for everyone.

  – You mean something like the fact that right now it’s night on the other side of the earth.

  – Not exactly. Perhaps, like the gods of India, time has many faces.

  The Abbé tapped idly on the windowpane.

  – Perhaps everything really happens at once. What if time is like the rain? We make a path through it, and a few drops touch us and we call that our lives. But if one could slip between the droplets, or gather them all, like water in a well …

  Flood rubbed the back of his neck.

  – My head is starting to spin. I haven’t had your schooling in these matters.

  The Abbé turned away from the window and smiled.

  – Which returns me to the thought of how I might assist you, he said. I have in mind certain volumes in the Count’s library which may be of help. We will, of course, need the assistance of the Countess. A remarkable woman. She knows every book in the castle, I believe, by heart.

  – Yours, too, Abbé.

  – Does she? I almost wish you had not told me so, Mr. Flood. After all, self-possession is difficult enough to achieve in the presence of such a woman, don’t you agree?

  At the mention of Irena, the muddied pool in Flood’s thoughts smoothed to a still mirror. He looked at the rivulets of water blindly seeking their way down the dirty windowpanes, and felt an ache of tenderness for the mute, persistent things of the world. He w
anted to tell the Abbé that his brief summary was incomplete, that there was another infinity he had neglected to mention, but he knew the words for his intuition, if there were any, would elude him.

  Irena met them among the shelves.

  – Good morning, gentlemen, she said. Shall we begin?

  Armed with the Abbé’s suggestions and Irena’s unerring knowledge of the library they prowled the shelves. Xenophanes and Aristotle. Giordano Bruno’s De l’infinito universo. Newton’s Optics. The Orbis Sensalium Pictus of Comenius. Ancient and recent treatises on alchemy, astrology, and the Abbé’s favourite topic, time. The Aenigmatum of Abu Musa contained tantalizing hints, but the Count’s copy of this extremely rare book contained a hidden clockwork mechanism that turned the thin metal pages at its own set pace. Flood found the attempt to copy intriguing passages left him with little more than broken quills and pinched fingertips.

  As they searched, they wandered among the shelves, and as each of them stopped here and there to examine an enticing volume, they drew farther and farther apart, until they found themselves calling to one another from different levels. Flood made his way back down to the last place he had seen Irena vanish among the bookcases, but when he peered around a shelf he saw her with the Abbé, the two of them sharing a laugh. He backed quietly away and waited until they came looking for him.

  At the end of the day Flood’s work table was barricaded with a wall of books. He spent that night and the next three days reading, collating and taking notes, gathering and comparing the thoughts of poets, mathematicians, philosophers, and mystics, searching for ideas that might somehow be applied to the physical object known as a book, a finite sequence of words printed upon a finite number of sheets of paper. Invariably he found that what each of these authors had to say about infinity was both too much and not enough.

  Hoping at least to organize his acquired material, he decided it was possible to divide his growing swarm of infinities into two main categories:

  1) the same thing recurring endlessly;

  2) almost the same thing, but not quite, recurring endlessly.