Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

by John Crowley

  “He was trembling slightly, poor fellow, and had no idea of the social graces. He only turned to me—his eyeglasses were the kind that oddly diffract the eyes behind and make them unmeetable—and said, ‘What do you want?’”

  The President pro tem caressed the ashtray with the tip of his cigar. He had been offered no tea, and he felt the lack. “We engaged in some preliminary fencing,” he continued. “I told him what I had come to acquire. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said I thought he did. He laughed and said there must be some mistake. I said, no mistake, Mr. Last. At length he grew silent, and I could see even behind those absurd goggles that he had begun to try to account for me.

  “Thinking out the puzzles of orthogonal logic, you see, is not entirely unlike puzzling out moves in chess: theoretically chess can be played by patiently working out the likely consequences of each move, and the consequences of those consequences, and so on; but in fact it is not so played, certainly not by master players. Masters seem to have a more immediate apprehension of possibilities, an almost visceral understanding of the, however, rigorously mathematical logic of the board and pieces, an understanding that they can act on without being able necessarily to explain. Whatever sort of mendacious and feckless fool Caspar Last was in many ways, he was a genius in one or two, and orthogonal logic was one of them.

  “‘From when,’ he said, ‘have you come?’

  “‘From not far on,’ I answered. He sat then, resigned, stuck in a sort of check impossible to think one’s way out of, yet not mated. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘go back the same way you came.’

  “‘I cannot,’ I said, ‘until you explain to me how it is done.’

  “‘You know how,’ he said, ‘if you can come here to ask me.’

  “‘Not until you have explained it to me. Now or later.’

  “‘I never will,’ he said.

  “‘You will,’ I said. ‘You will have done already, before I leave. Otherwise I would not be here now asking. Let us,’ I said, and took a seat myself, ‘let us assume these preliminaries have been gone through, for they have been of course, and move ahead to the bargaining. My firm are prepared to make you a quite generous offer.’

  “That was what convinced him that he must, finally, give up to us the process he had discovered, which he really had firmly intended to destroy forever: the fact that I had come there to ask for them. Which meant that he had already somehow, somewhen, already yielded them up to us.”

  The President pro tem paused again, and lifted his untouched whiskey. “It was the same argument,” he said, “the same incontrovertible argument, that was used to convince me once, too, to do a dreadful thing.”

  He drank, thoughtfully, or at least (he supposed) appearing thoughtful; more and more often as he grew older it happened that in the midst of an anecdote, a relation, even one of supreme importance, he would begin to forget what it was he was telling; the terrifically improbable events would begin to seem not only improbable but fictitious, without insides, the incidents and characters as false as in any tawdry cinema story, even his own part in them unreal: as though they happened to someone made up—certainly not to him who told them. Often enough he forgot the plot.

  “You see,” he said, “Last exited from a universe in which travel ‘through time’ was, apparently, either not possible, or possible only under conditions that would allow such travel to go undetected. That was apparent from the fact that no one, so far as Last knew, up to the time of his own single excursion, had ever detected it going on. No one from Last’s own future, that is, had ever come ‘back’ and disrupted his present, or the past of his present: never ever. Therefore, if his excursion could take place, and he could ‘return,’ he would have to return to a different universe: a universe where time travel had taken place, a universe in which once-upon-a-time a man from 1983 had managed to insert himself into a minor colony of the British Crown one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier. What he couldn’t know in advance was whether the universe he ‘returned’ to was one where time travel was a commonplace, an everyday occurrence, something anyway that could deprive his excursion of the value it had; or whether it was one in which one excursion only had taken place, his own. My appearance before him convinced him that it was, or was about to become, common enough: common enough to disturb his own peace and quiet, and alter in unforeseeable ways his comfortable present.

  “There was only one solution, or one dash at a solution anyway. I might, myself, be a singularity in Last’s new present. It was therefore possible that if he could get rid of me, I would take his process ‘away’ with me into whatever future I had come out of to get it, and thereupon never be able to find my way again to his present and disturb it or him. Whatever worlds I altered, they would not be his, not his anyway who struck the bargain with me: if each of them also contained a Last, who would suffer or flourish in ways unimaginable to the Last to whom I spoke, then those eidolons would have to make terms for themselves, that’s all. The quantum angle obtended by my coming, and then the one obtended by my returning, divorced all those Lasts from him for all eternity: that is why, though the angle itself is virtually infinitesimal, it has always to be treated as a right angle.

  “Last showed me, on his computer, after our bargain was struck and he was turning over his data and plans to me. I told him I would not probably grasp the theoretical basis of the process, however well I had or would come to manage the practical paradoxes of it, but he liked to show me. He first summoned up x-y coordinates, quite ordinary, and began by showing me how some surprising results were obtained by plotting on such coordinates an imaginary number, specifically the square root of minus one. The only way to describe what happens, he said, is that the plotted figure, one unit high, one unit wide, generates a shadow square of the same measurements ‘behind’ itself, in space undefined by the coordinates. It was with such tricks that he had begun; the orthogons he obtained had first started him thinking about the generation of inhabitable—if also somehow imaginary—pasts.

  “Then he showed me what became of the orthogons so constructed if the upright axis were set in motion. Suppose (he said) that this vertical coordinate were in fact revolving around the axle formed by the other, horizontal coordinate. If it were so revolving, like an aeroplane propeller, we could not apprehend it, edge on as it is to us, so to speak; but what would that motion do to the plots we were making? And of course it was quite simple, given the proper instructions to the computer, to find out. And his orthogons—always remaining at right angles to the original coordinates—began to turn in the prop wash of the whole system’s progress at one second per second out of the what-was and into the what-has-never-yet-been; and to generate, when one had come to see them, the paradoxes of orthogonal logic: the cyclonic storm of logic in which all travelers in that medium always stand; the one in which Last and I, I bending over his shoulder hat in hand, he with fat white fingers on his keys and eyeglasses slipping down his nose, stood even as we spoke: a storm as unfeelable as Last’s rotating axis was unseeable.”

  The President pro tem tossed his extinguished cigar into the fading fire and crossed his arms upon his breast, weary; weary of the tale.

  “I don’t yet understand,” the other said. “If he had been so adamant, why would he give up his secrets to you?”

  “Well,” said the President pro tem, “there was, also, the matter of money. It came down to that, in the end. We were able to make him a very generous offer, as I said.”

  “But he didn’t need money. He had this stamp.”

  “Yes. So he did. Yes. We were able to pick up the stamp, too, from him, as part of the bargain. I think we offered him a hundred pounds. Perhaps it was more.”

  “I thought it was invaluable.”

  “Well, so did he, of course. And yet he was not really as surprised as one might have expected him to be, when he discovered it was not; when it turned out that the stamp he had gone to such trouble to acquire was in fact rather a commo
n one. I seemed to see it in his face, the expectation of what he was likely to find, as soon as I directed him to look it up in his Scott’s, if he didn’t believe me. And there it was in Scott’s: the one-penny magenta 1856, a nice enough stamp, a stamp many collectors covet, and many also have in their albums. He had begun breathing stertorously, staring down at the page. I’m afraid he was suffering, rather, and I didn’t like to observe it.

  “‘Come,’ I said to him. ‘You knew it was possible.’ And he did, of course. ‘Perhaps it was something you did,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you bought the last one of a batch, and the postmaster subsequently reordered, a thing he had not before intended to do. Perhaps…’ But I could see him think it: there needed to be no such explanation. He needed to have made no error, nor to have influenced the moment’s shape in any way by his presence. The very act of his coming and going was sufficient source of unpredictable, stochastic change: this world was not his, and minute changes from his were predicated. But this change, this of all possible changes…

  “His hand had begun to shake, holding the volume of Scott’s. I really wanted now to get through the business and be off, but it couldn’t be hurried. I knew that, for I’d done it all before. In the end we acquired the stamp. And then destroyed it, of course.”

  The President pro tem remembered: a tiny, momentary fire.

  “It’s often been observed,” he said, “that the cleverest scientists are often the most easily taken in by charlatans. There is a famous instance, famous in some worlds, of a scientist who was brought to believe firmly in ghosts and ectoplasm, because the medium and her manifestations passed all the tests the scientist could devise. The only thing he didn’t think to test for was conscious fraud. I suppose it’s because the phenomena of nature, or the entities of mathematics, however puzzling and elusive they may be, are not after all bent on fooling the observer; and so a motive that would be evident to the dullest of policemen does not occur to the genius.”

  “The stamp,” said the Magus.

  “The stamp, yes. I’m not exactly proud of this part of the story. We were convinced, though, that two very small wrongs could go a long way toward making a very great right. And Last, who understood me and the ‘firm’ I represented to be capable of handling—at least in a practical way—the awful paradoxes of orthogony, did not imagine us to be also skilled, if anything more skilled, at such things as burglary, uttering, fraud, and force. Of such contradictions is Empire made. It was easy enough for us to replace, while Last was off in the tropics, one volume of his Scott’s stamp catalog with another printed by ourselves, almost identical to his but containing one difference. It was harder waiting to see, once he had looked up his stamp in our bogus volume, if he would then search out some other source to confirm what he found there. He did not.”

  The Magus rose slowly from his chair with the articulated dignity, the wasteless lion’s motion, of his kind. He tugged the bell pull. He picked up the poker then, and stood with his hand upon the mantel, looking down into the ruby ash of the dying fire. “I would he had,” he said.

  The dark double doors of the library opened, and the servant entered noiselessly.

  “Refresh the gentleman’s glass,” the Magus said without turning from the fire, “and draw the drapes.”

  The President pro tem thought that no matter how long he lived in this world he would never grow accustomed to the presence of draconics. The servant’s dark hand lifted the decanter, poured an exact dram into the glass, and stoppered the bottle again; then his yellow eyes, irises slit like a cat’s or a snake’s, rose from that task toward the next, the drawing of the drapes. Unlike the eyes of the Magi, these draconic eyes seemed to see and weigh everything—though on a single scale, and from behind a veil of indifference.

  Their kind, the President pro tem had learned, had been servants for uncounted ages, though the Magus his host had said that once they had been masters, and men and the other hominids their slaves. And they still had, the President pro tem observed, that studied reserve which upper servants had in the world from which the President pro tem had come, that reserve which says: Very well, I will do your bidding, better than you could do it for yourself; I will maintain the illusion of your superiority to me, as no other creature could.

  With a taper he lit at the fire, he lit the lamps along the walls and masked them with glass globes. Then he drew the drapes.

  “I’ll ring for supper,” the Magus said, and the servant stopped at the sound of his voice. “Have it sent in.” The servant moved again, crossing the room on narrow naked feet. At the doorway he turned to them, but only to draw the double doors closed together as he left.

  For a time the Magus stood regarding the doors the great lizard had closed. Then: “Outside the City,” he said, “in the mountains, they have begun to combine. There are more stories every week. In the old forests whence they first emerged, they have begun to collect on appointed days, trying to remember—for they are not really as intelligent as they look—trying to remember what it is they have lost, and to think of gaining it again. In not too long a time we will begin to hear of massacres. Some remote place; a country house; a more than usually careless man; a deed of unfamiliar horridness. And a sign left, the first sign: a writing in blood, or something less obvious. And like a spot symptomatic of a fatal disease, it will begin to spread.”

  The President pro tem drank, then said softly: “We didn’t know, you know. We didn’t understand that this would be the result.” The drawing of the drapes, the lighting of the lamps, had made the old library even more familiar to the President pro tem: the dark varnished wood, the old tobacco smoke, the hour between tea and dinner; the draught that whispered at the window’s edge, the bitter smell of the coal on the grate; the comfort of this velvet armchair’s napless arms, of this whiskey. The President pro tem sat grasped by all this, almost unable to think of anything else. “We couldn’t know.”

  “Last knew,” the Magus said. “All false, all imaginary, all generated by the wishes and fears of others: all that I am, my head, my heart, my house. Not the world’s doing, or time’s, but yours.” The opacity of his eyes, turned on the President pro tem, was fearful. “You have made me; you must unmake me.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” the President pro tem said. “All that I can.”

  “For centuries we have studied,” the Magus said. “We have spent lifetimes—lifetimes much longer than yours—searching for the flaw in this world, the flaw whose existence we suspected but could not prove. I say ‘centuries,’ but those centuries have been illusory, have they not? We came, finally, to guess at you, down the defiles of time, working your changes, which we can but suffer.

  “We only guessed at you: no more than men or beasts can we Magi remember, once the universe has become different, that it was ever other than it is now. But I think the Sylphids can feel it change: can know when the changes are wrought. Imagine the pain for them.”

  That was a command: and indeed the President pro tem could imagine it, and did. He looked down into his glass.

  “That is why they are gathering. They know already of your appearance; they have expected you. The request is theirs to make, not mine: that you put this world out like a light.”

  He stabbed with the poker at the settling fire, and the coals gave up blue flames for a moment. The mage’s eyes caught the light, and then went out.

  “I long to die,” he said.

  IV. CHRONICLES OF THE OTHERHOOD

  ONCE PAST THE DOOR, or what might be considered the door, of what Sir Geoffrey Davenant had told him was a club, Denys Winterset was greeted by the Fellow in Economic History, a gentle, academic-looking man called Platt.

  “Not many of the Fellows about, just now,” he said. “Most of them fossicking about on one bit of business or another. I’m always here.” He smiled, a vague, self-effacing smile. “Be no good out there. But they also serve, eh?”

  “Will Sir Geoffrey Davenant be here?” Denys asked him. He followed P
latt through what did seem to be a gentlemen’s club of the best kind: dark-paneled, smelling richly of leather upholstery and tobacco.

  “Davenant, oh, yes,” said Platt. “Davenant will be here. All the executive committee will get here, if they can. The President—pro tem.” He turned back to look at Denys over his half-glasses. “All our Presidents are pro tem.” He led on. “There’ll be dinner in the executive committee’s dining room. After dinner we’ll talk. You’ll likely have questions.” At that Denys almost laughed. He felt made of questions, most of them unputtable in any verbal form.

  Platt stopped in the middle of the library. A lone Fellow in a corner by a green-shaded lamp was hidden by the Times held up before him. There was a fire burning placidly in the oak-framed fireplace; above it, a large and smoke-dimmed picture: a portrait of a chubby, placid man in a hard collar, thinning blond hair, eyes somehow vacant. Platt, seeing Denys’s look, said: “Cecil Rhodes.”

  Beneath the portrait, carved into the mantelpiece, were words; Denys took a step closer to read them:

  To Ruin the Great Work of Time

  & Cast the Kingdoms old

  Into another mould.

  “Marvel,” Platt said. “That poem about Cromwell. Don’t know who chose it. It’s right, though. I look at it often, working here. Now. It’s down that corridor, if you want to wash your hands. Would you care for a drink? We have some time to kill. Ah, Davenant.”

  “Hullo, Denys,” said Sir Geoffrey, who had lowered his Times. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  “I think we all are,” said Platt, taking Denys’s elbow in a gentle, almost tender grasp. “Glad you’ve come.”