New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Ah, Mr. Orsini. Welcome to my humble laboratory,” he said, getting up with the help of a cane, a severe limp in his left leg. “I’ve been looking forward to this.” His deep-etched face seemed never to have been young; he looked exactly to Brentford like a mad scientist in a play who has a beautiful daughter, living with him contentedly, happily cut off from the world and dedicated to his work—and bound to fall in love with the hero.

  “Mr. Sson, I presume?” Brentford said, shaking himself from his reverie. “I didn’t know my visit was expected.”

  “What sort of wizard would I be if I had not expected it?” answered the man, with more than a hint of a Scandinavian accent.

  “The wizardry I have seen here so far is rather technical,” observed Brentford without malice.

  “Oh. There is no difference, really. Machine-building used to be a part of magic. It is just another way to make nature work beyond its … usual inclinations, is it not? What is it that I can do for you, Mr. Orsini?”

  “I am supposed to borrow one of your Psychomotive vehicles in the service of the City.”

  “I have been informed of that, yes … It is purely a matter of money, as you know. I find money is an interesting energy. So full of magic …”

  “Is it, really?” said Brentford. “It seems rather stubborn and down-to-earth to me.”

  “No, no. You are wrong, young man! After all, most of our sense of magic comes from it nowadays: it keeps alive in us the noble and ancient belief that the possible can come true. But it is a powerful and volatile spirit, and I grant you that when it is invoked by fools, money can replace imagination instead of enhancing it.”

  “You will just have to name your price. I have reason to think you will not find the Council thrifty in this matter,” said Brentford sombrely. He wondered how much the Regent-Doge would pay to get rid of him. The sky was the limit, probably, but strive as he might he could not find that flattering.

  “Very well, then. But I must warn you that Psychomotion is a powerful technology. Some would even call it dangerous. It is not to be used lightly.”

  It had already crossed Brentford’s mind that the danger could be another reason behind Peterswarden’s choice of transport for him. He tried to shrug off the idea—right or wrong, it would get him nowhere, and especially not to Paris.

  “I’ve heard little about these machines, outside of rumours.”

  “Ah. But some rumours can be true. If you want to follow me.”

  Another, more comfortable elevator took them up to the berths of the Psychomotives. To Brentford’s surprise, this area was much more luxurious than the laboratory. The walls were decorated with a mustard-coloured wallpaper in an Arts and Crafts pattern that blended stems and cogs, leaves and lightbulbs. Thick carpets lined the platform beside a long, shiny, black machine. Its design was surprisingly simple: two cylinders, one slightly larger, fitted together like the parts of a telescope. Two little portholes at the front of the wider, shorter cylinder indicated it as the cockpit; the longer, slimmer tube looked like the tank of a compressed-air locomotive. The whole contraption rested on rail tracks, and in the pit below, Brentford could see something like a reversed fin, obliquely pointing forward and almost as sharp as a knife.

  “It looks quite comfortable here,” said Brentford.

  “Ah, Mr. Orsini. Imagine yourself sleeping peacefully in the earth and one day being taken out of the darkness to be burnt, beaten, chained to strangers and forced to work at full speed under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature. Even if you’re a bit dimwitted and of a retiring nature, as metal mostly is, believe me, you will cruelly resent it. The elements of a machine are often unhappy together, the way whipped slaves are bound to be. A well-constructed machine, on the contrary, will be a smooth machine, where all the parts are kept in harmony according to the most natural bonds, a machine whose components bathe in the surroundings that are the most sympathetic for them, in terms of temperature, hygrometry, light, magnetism and so on …”

  “And how do these things work?” Brentford asked, eager to get to the point.

  “Oh! Very well. A little too well for human beings, perhaps.”

  “I meant, the principles. I have never quite understood.”

  “I seem to remember you are an engineer by trade. And if you are as good as your father was, the principles should not be difficult for you to grasp. Up to a certain point, that is,” Sson said, affectionately patting the black graphite body of the tank, where the name Voda was etched in rune-like roman letters.

  “Try me, please,” said Brentford, who had wondered for a while when his father would be evoked. He himself remembered clearly, more from his father’s point of view than from his own, the time when Afnor Orsini had talked to him about the legendary Woland Brokker Sson, the exile from the short-lived Boreal Republic of Spitzberg, and about his machines that challenged all known laws—and, it seemed, a few unknown ones as well.

  “You may have heard about Odic Force?”

  Brentford rummaged in vain in a dusty drawer at the back of his brain that he hadn’t opened since his years as a Poletechnician at the Septentrional School of Extreme Engineering. His father’s transphered memories yielded no better results, dim and uncertain as they were.

  “I don’t think it was part of my curriculum.”

  “Ah, schools nowadays … Well, maybe you’ve seen an Aurora Borealis, then?” the wizard said, with a touch of irony that slightly vexed Brentford. “This is where Von Reichenbach mostly got the idea from. In the 1850s, he observed that some sensitive subjects could perceive aurora-like coloured lights at the ends of magnets, crystals, and fingers. Actually what Reichenbach had found was a pervasive force that is present in the whole universe and resonates within our nervous system. Now, this force has certain kinetic powers, which can be projected from the body under certain circumstances. So, I said to myself, why not use it to power a vehicle? A vehicle whose fuel and motor are produced by the pilot himself?”

  “That force—of will or whatever—would have to be very powerful to move such big vehicles,” Brentford said doubtfully.

  “Bah, nothing in nature is weak when it is properly invoked. Od is very strong at the poles. The auroras crackle with it, as ice crystals do. It can be slowly but easily accumulated and stored—I use pure ice crystals—and it is slow to discharge. Once the pilot is charged with Od, it is but a matter of channelling the force efficiently. For one thing, Od, as I said, is diamagnetic and can be used for easy levitation. Then, because the two hands of the body are differently Od-polarized, they can rotate two disks in different directions, hence furnishing electromagnetic power, which in turn operates contra-rotating turbines with mobile rotor blades for steering. It’s as simple as that, really.”

  Brentford was unconvinced, but after all, this was New Venice. He had seen Helen stop Time and a kangaroo with a wolf’s head emit telepathic messages: if he willed it, he could make his disbelief diamagnetic and let it float on thin air.

  “Would you like to have a look inside?” asked the wizard. He touched some unseeable zone on the hull, a door slid open, and the bars of an iron ladder seemingly sprang from nowhere.

  The circular interior of the Psychomotive was comfortable, with golden padded walls and black upholstered seats, zircon lamps on ebony tables, and small round copper portholes. But it was to the steering room that W. B. Sson led Brentford.

  Two seats were installed there, facing the front portholes. One of them was topped with a helmet on a swivel, which was in turn connected to a complex system of batteries, dials, and wiring fixed at the back. In front of the other seat were a curious double steering wheel covered in runes, a brass gyroscope, and an instrument board with an array of paper-recorders.

  “I still don’t get the psychic part of it,” Brentford said.

  “It is all about receptivity. Alas, we are not all equal in regard to Od. Very few people are sensitive enough to it to perceive its emanations in themselves or in othe
rs, but it is nevertheless the last of the series of physical phenomena, and the closest to what we could call the world of the spirits—or, not to trouble you with that idea, the world of the mind. It is exactly what people used to call—misguidedly, for lack of a better word—animal magnetism. And like animal magnetism, it is quite simply the vehicle of Vision. The Psychomotive pilot, once equipped with this solenoid Odic Helmet—I call it the Tarnhelm—which is nothing but an Od accumulator, becomes somewhat clairvoyant and foresees obstacles in the darkness, hidden paths, possible accidents, and many other phenomena that demand, shall we say, a certain training: ghosts of past travellers, for instance. Here lies the rub. This machine can have unpleasant side effects, to say the least.”

  Brentford immediately thought of the story he had been told by the Twins, of the pilot Jeremy Salmon, who had literally dissolved on arrival.

  “So, if I follow you, the difficulty is in finding a pilot.”

  “What about my mysterious daughter?” asked W. B. Sson with a mischievous smile.

  Brentford was flabbergasted. “Do you read minds, too?”

  “Ah! At my age, only the large print.”

  II

  The Magical Crown

  “It’s called a couronne magnétique, or magique—a magnetical or magical crown, and I never thought I’d ever see one again,” said Jean-Klein Lavis, in his unapologetically thick French accent, as he examined the curious object that Gabriel had brought him. Brentford and Gabriel, who had little inclination to put it on their heads, had been right in supposing that the Paris-born doctor would know what it was.

  “They were invented in the early 1890s, I think, during the Suggestion Craze,” the elegant French exile went on, in his exquisitely affable style. “If I remember correctly, the idea was that you could hypnotize a subject while he wore the couronne magique. The device would record and retain the command, so that when someone else put the crown on, they would act according to the first suggestion, as if it were contagious, so to speak. But I was certain it had been forgotten.”

  “So why would the explorer have been wearing it, then?”

  “Maybe they have made progress on it, though I don’t see how. Perhaps it was storing information. It would be interesting to find out.”

  The Magnetic Crown had proven good bait: Lavis was hooked. Of course, there was every reason for him to be interested. His first visit to New Venice had been as part of an invited delegation of doctors from the famous La Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Gabriel had first met him when Lavis had taken care of him after a drug-fueled duel, and Gabriel still remembered this with gratitude. A few years later, Lavis had come back to New Venice with a contingent from the crackpot Société des Polaires, which wanted to promote world awareness through telepathy, and he had been instrumental in establishing contact with the Polar Kangaroo at a time when the city badly needed to be defended from Delwit Faber and the Lobster Girls.

  Fascinated by the city, Lavis had decided not to go back to Paris with the Polaires, and had remained behind to settle in New Venice. The House of Health & Hygiene had never formally granted him a license to open a medical practice, but through cunning or vision he had managed to bypass this obstacle by launching into a venture that it had never occurred to the authorities to forbid: noticing, much to his hand-rubbing surprise, that nobody had ever thought to systematically fight the depressive effect of the city’s long winter months, he had established the first phototherapy and chromotherapy institute in the city, Lavis’s Colour and Light Clinic, which soon attracted to Barents Boulevard a numerous and wealthy clientele.

  Behind the office in which he had received Gabriel was a large, elegant room furnished with tables where people could casually use the hand-held condenser lamps. Along the walls, a few ecstatic heads bobbed above photo-bath cabinets, their owners’ light-starved bodies basking in the warmth from dozens of colour-filtered bulbs. At the back, an “operating room” boasted reclining chairs and beds topped with the telescopic tubes of ultraviolet lamps (and, Gabriel had noticed, a rather cute team of nurses); other snug private spaces were equipped with red or blue coloured glass screens for tanning and “edenic” relaxation. Neurasthenia, neuralgia, skin diseases, and tuberculosis were treated there and sometimes cured, though Lavis was honest enough to recognize the part that autosuggestion played in the process. But then, it was still something of an accomplishment in itself to create an environment that was conducive to it.

  “Well, what would you think of the suggestion that you could very easily go back to the source of the couronne magique?” Gabriel offered tentatively. For all his loyalty to Brentford, he still felt annoyed by the situation that loyalty had landed him in. It reminded him of his days in the Press Gang, when he’d had to convince unsuspecting people that life in New Venice would be a bed of hothouse roses. Even if he was less pained by his bad conscience than by the disappointing revelation that he in fact had something so common and cheap as a guilty conscience, he nonetheless had qualms about selling a subzero Paris to Jean-Klein.

  The Frenchman, fortunately, looked interested, and a smile dawned on his rosy, perfectly shaved cheeks.

  “How could I do that, Monsieur d’Allier?”

  “By joining the delegation to the New Venetian Embassy in Paris, for a year or so, under Brentford Orsini’s direction.”

  For a moment, he thought about telling Lavis the truth about the high stakes involved in this operation. But given the doctor’s cheerful reaction, he decided, well, who was he to ruin it for others? And after all, Gabriel thought, however much the Frenchman liked New Venice, it was an isolated and at times dreary place, and there could be little doubt that as the years went on, Lavis had grown nostalgic about Paris.

  “The City of Light,” the doctor murmured, as if to himself.

  Gabriel reeled in the line.

  “It appears that the City of Light urgently needs our lights after a few extremely cold months. You would be the Embassy’s specialist for matters regarding health.” And without giving him more time to think, he added, “The only inconvenience is that our departure is scheduled for Sunday.”

  “Are you going, too?”

  “Well, you know Brentford. He would be lost without me.”

  Lavis nodded, like a man who tries to think things out, but Gabriel could see in his eyes that his mind was already prowling the streets of some dream Paris, half remembered, half made up. He knew it all the more because it was in this vapourous image that he himself had been living for most of the two previous days.

  “Of course, I would have to get things organized for my absence,” Lavis continued to muse. “But I suppose that can be arranged in the allotted time. The clinic is really slow in the spring, anyway. It could even be closed for a while … So, how do we get there?”

  “By Psychomotive, it would seem,” Gabriel replied as casually as he could. Much to his surprise, Lavis’s enthusiasm increased.

  “Really?” he said, glowing with anticipation. “I’ve never taken one, but from what I have heard about the way they work, I wouldn’t want to miss this. Count me in, by all means.”

  It was early evening when Gabriel, his mission accomplished, returned to the dusky, misty streets, where here and there the openings of the boulevards and the angles of the buildings already seemed to have something faintly Parisian about them.

  “Well, that was an easy catch,” he thought, almost ashamed of his own satisfaction. “The master will be happy.”

  III

  The Duel

  The Northwestern Naval Armoury & Academy was a long white building along Parry Canal, with a massive square dungeon in the middle and a domed tower at each end. Brentford took the winding staircase up one of the towers, absorbing the vista as he passed the arched openings. The skyline was graceful, perhaps because there were more domes than spires, as befitted a self-contained city in a godforsaken place. It floated in a soft golden haze, more like a cloud of coloured light particles than a definite set of li
nes and angles. Brentford breathed in its beauty along with the bracing air, until a stinging in his eye warned him that he’d better look away. He was now an exile, and should not forget it, let alone forgive it.

  As he ascended he could hear, closer and closer, the familiar clanging from the fencing hall on the top floor under the roof. For Brentford, that apparent chaos resolved into a melodious cadence of well-timed thrusts and parries, over a rumbling bass of rapid footwork. But it was the smell, a subtle blend of warm rust and subdued sweat, that took him years backwards to the days when he was one of these fencing cadets, padded and yet exposed, the world reduced to a grey grid of mesh and two moving straight lines. He found himself missing the way the formalities and coded attitudes, the masks and protections, rendered one’s opponent slightly unreal, reducing him to a mere target, a moving geometry of weak points. With a faint thrill of pleasure, he remembered precisely the way the ritual and its rules disciplined the murderous impulse that ran along his nerves and the faint thirst for blood that hardened his muscles.

  Today the small hall was crammed with fencers, gliding on different planes like tin ducks in a shooting gallery. Brentford immediately saw that the meticulous pinpoint style he had painstakingly learned when he was a cadet had been replaced by a kind of happy-go-lucky carelessness: These cadets fenced with their arms instead of their wrists, and with their wrists instead of their fingers. To a purist like him, they looked like blind men waving white canes at each other.