The Infinite Library (65 page)

A dear colleague and friend of mine has recently been the victim of treachery resulting in his untimely death. I am rather certain who was responsible, and I also have knowledge that you have been the victim of a rather unpleasant set of mysterious circumstances. I am entrusting this manuscript to your care much in the way Marci gifted unto Athanasius Kircher the mysterious Voynich manuscript in 1666. I do know it holds the key to what you are looking for; namely, the name of the book that records the outcome of the nefarious synthesis. It is beyond my abilities to crack the code, but I was told that you are a bit of an enthusiast in this regard. Please accept this gift along with my luck. The cost of this book is immaterial to me, so do not feel in any way obliged to offer any remuneration. In closing, please, find out the name of this book, locate it, stop this synthesis from taking place, and maybe there will be some justice for my dear friend A. Setzer.

-Clysm.

Another book, and another mystery. The envelope contained a quarto manuscript in parchment, measuring 5” by 9”. I set to work discovering all I could about the manuscript before concerning myself with the wending mystery of the contents. I took out my notebook and recorded the size, and other details. There was no author and no date. There would be no clue as to who financed it since there was no colophon, and parchment does not have watermarks. Dating the manuscript proved difficult, but not impossible. Texts written on parchment existed up until the invention of the printing press when rag-linen paper replaced production, even for the most sumptuous editions. So, this meant the text was presumably incunabula: written, by hand, before the printing press. There were only sixteen pages in the manuscript. Without any further clues, I examined the paleography, looking for stylistic script and common abbreviations that may have narrowed when it was written. Despite what “Clysm” wrote, the text was not, upon deeper inspection, written in code, but rather cipher, as was common for the period (which I narrowed to 1350-1450). Only one word was intelligible on the first page: “Pergamena”, which only means “made in Pergamum”, a stylized way of saying the text was written on parchment. On the second page was a Latin inscription that stated that there were two keys to this text. The first key was to be “lowered in its tree by one,” which I knew to be to take the letter and go down one step in a cipher column. Those medievals occasionally used silly methods for concealing their words and meaning (which wasn't always too necessary given the fashion of the times for being abstruse)

The text itself came with this cipher:

.O H..W.E.H.. U..W K.D.K.J.K.O, U.R.R.O

WC.J.D H.. .G.K.K, .O E.D. WC..S.O;

.O H..D WC..M.K.O, E.D. .G.K.K

Otherwise, cipher or pure gibberish. Due to some of the conspicuous repetitions, I reasoned that it was unlikely there would be a grille involved. Grilles being, of course, only useful if both parties had the same card with the right chits punched out to be overlayed upon the text. From what I knew about ciphers, I applied the most common:

The result, by lowering each ciphertext by one letter in the column was this:

.T Q..C.N.Q.. H..C R.S.R.V.R.T, H.B.B.T

CL.V.M Q.. .P.R.R, .T N.M. CL..D.T;

.T Q..M CL..S.R.T, N.M. .P.R.R

Although this seemed to read to be as gibberish as the first ciphertext, after staring at it confusedly for half an hour I suddenly suspected that the periods were actually standing in for vowels. Given my understanding of Latin, the most reasonable vowel that would appear in the formulation “.T” would be an “E” to spell “Et” (most often represented as “&” in medieval texts). It took another few hours of trial and error to come up with the right vowel substitutions. As if the word “key” was the key, I located the Latin word for it (”clavem”). After much frustration, I finally came to a rational phrase, one that seemed very familiar:

ET QUICUNQUE HAEC RESERAVERIT HABEBIT

CLAVEM QUI APERIR, ET NEMO CLAUDIT;

ET QUUM CLAUSERIT, NEMO APERIR

From here, it was an easy matter to translate, and a trip to the search engine revealed these to be the last lines of Roger Bacon's
Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconis de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magicae
(1252). The letter was written by Roger Bacon to a colleague in enigma since it contained his recipe for making black powder. The letter begins with a long exposition on art and nature, and is filled with Bacon's predictions for horseless carriages, flying machines, the telescope, underwater equipment, suspension bridges, and elevators. However, the last line of the epistle was inserted with a highly significant purpose, and this was where the second key would prove important. The Bacon line itself can be translated as his rather dramatic finale to what black powder presents humanity; namely, that it is like a door that, when opened, no man can shut; and if shut, no man can open.

Exhausting a few other possibilities, I decided to follow the numerological line, thus rendering the now deciphered text thus:

56 889385 8153 25452115296, 8125296 331154 889 175292, 56 5546 3318496; 56 8884 331845296, 5546 175292

A hopeless kludge of numbers. On instinct, I reduced the numbers further so that “56” would be 5+6 = 11, and 1+1=2. The result was a more manageable, but possibly erroneous 2586687822721528. But this would prove the right way of going about it since, on the following page was a devotional text of four lines copied from some passage in the Bible. This was prefaced by a text written backward that the key was “in four fours”. I counted off the sixteen numbers I had in my collection and applied the numbers to pick out the letters so that the first letter was two letters in, the next five letters after that, and so on, so it would look like this:

x2xxxx5xxxxxxx8xxxxx6

xxxxx6xxxxxxx8xxxxxx7xxxxxxx8... &c.

The letters I was able to fish out were these:

DEAR

SATR

OCIT

ATIS

For a moment, I was frustrated, since it looked to me like another round of cipher, but when I put them all together in a string, DEARSATROCITATIS, it was just a matter of inserting two spaces to separate the words so that it spelled (
de
)
Ars atrocitatis.
The art of atrocity. The prefatory “de” was not correct Latin, but there was probably no way that the cipher-maker could have made the Bacon quote work out perfectly. From there, it was just a matter of trying to locate the book. Lo and behold, the Internet killed the mystery immediately, preventing too much undue sleuthing. There was a book listing on an academic site.

Title:
Secret Atrocity: Prophecies of Anonymous Medieval Authors Attributed with the Composition of the
Ars atrocitatis
.

Author: William R. A. Warburg, The University of Chicago.

Publisher: Lexburg Institute for Medieval Studies, 1977.

Synopsis: The
Ars atrocitatis
antedates
Codex Infinitum
(author unknown) by thirty-three years, although the reported events are chronologically reversed.
Ars atrocitatis
was originally written in 1315, corresponding with the death of Raymund Lull. The sensational text speaks of a mysterious synthesis of typological elements that have occurred, written in the past tense as if to lend the writer a prophetic affectation in having witnessed or experienced the events themselves. This study follows the many texts that reference or falsely attribute the
Ars atrocitatis
to a wide variety of credible names in the medieval period.

The book was, unsurprisingly, out of print, and there were no used copies in the offing. I decided to locate the author himself, but there was no listing for a Dr. William R. A. Warburg at the University of Chicago. I sent an email for some assistance and it was a solid two days until I received a reply that stated Dr. Warburg had left the Philosophy Department a decade ago and was now teaching as professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Rather than just show up unannounced and be risked being perceived as a lunatic, I found his email and contacted him. His reply was disappointing:

To say that I was peeved would be an understatement; here was a stranger showing interest in a work on such a highly marginal topic, and he couldn't be of any further assistance beyond telling me that I could track it down myself. In my pique and insomnia, I decided to contact him directly in person. I found out when and where he was teaching and waited for him after class. I was determined to satisfy my curiousity about this text, and to discover where I could get a hold of this
Ars atrocitatis
since it was reported as “missing”, and had never been reproduced for archive and research purposes. I was certain that the book Castellemare referred to me only by call number was this text, and the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library reported not having it in its holdings.

Upon further research, I would discover that there were not just one
Ars atrocitatis
, but several variants. One of them had been in the possession of history's most adept and unscrupulous master forgers of ancient texts, Constantine Simonides (I would later learn something a bit unsettling about this link). Another had been stolen from the Library of Paris by the most highly reputed book thief, Libri. Another had been reputed to have been in the holdings of the Cottonian Library, but succumbed to the great fire of 1731. I had no choice but to pay a surprise visit to Dr Warburg.

He was giving a class that I decided to sit in on, at the back of a lecture theatre with the slight smell of naphthalene. He was a portly, sagging hulk of an old man in a rumpled suit that was presumably purchased an era ago.

“So, we come now to the pernicious issue of attributions and the tangled web of genealogical errors in the history of codexes. This grail of truth and authenticity in regards the text, especially ones that are faithfully and unfaithfully reproduced, is at times pure folly. For the sake of argument, let us assume that there is some archetype text, a root book from which is copied several others. Can anyone here tell me what can go wrong in the transit from the root text to the copies?”