Salamander (8 page)

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 wanted 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.

In an argosy of Hellenistic authors he found an amusing diatribe against the reading of novels.

Section XXVII:

• Lassitude during public debates indicates the chronic reader of books full of lies, coincidences, and impossibilities
  .
  

• Some of these pernicious works have been known to bring on fits of sneezing, others cause blood to flow from the ears. Those which contain didactic passages may fill the lungs with mucosity and impair breathing
  .
  

• Inflammation of the eyes from protracted reading of such works may be alleviated by drinking slightly watered wine
  .
  

• Care should be taken of the books given to a pubescent female; if the breasts begin to swell to unusual fullness, reading should cease
  .
  

• These noxious books are often hastily bound with pastes derived from the boiling of animal hides. The inferiority of such bindings is usually matched by the worthlessness of the contents
  .
  

• Curiously, eunuchs do not read these books, nor do they go bald
  .
  

He was intrigued by Sabbatai Donnolo’s comparison of God to a book. If you could cradle this fearful volume in your hand, and were to open it anywhere, beginning, middle, or end, you would find that between any two pages there would be always a third, between any two words there would be always another, between any two letters would be an unheard, invisible letter, a doorway to the void known only to mystics, where reigns a silence so profound that the roar of the entire universe rushes to fill it.