The Soul Continuum (24 page)

His office is like a reluctant extension of his soul. It hides at the end of the corridor farthest from the most social areas of the Borealis University Laboratories. There is only one window, tall but without much light coming in; dead vines choke any hope of sunshine warming Withering's back as he hunches over a desk cluttered with the dusty relics of his career. Most of the light comes from two gas lamps on the adjacent walls. Even they are hampered by bookcases crowding into the room.

“I see nothing here that reflects the man sitting opposite
me,” Withering says. I can just make out the lips pouting beneath all the hair, and he seems a little out of breath. It is then that I notice he looks worse than usual. His forehead is pale and shiny with fevered sweat. “You were born into a privileged household with plenty of money,” he continues,
“you grew up with supportive parents, had glowing success in every area of your education, yet you provide us with this.”

Withering closes my personal file and moves his hand
over to the other file, the one containing a thesis that took me six months to perfect even after I had finished drafting it.

“I'm sorry, Professor, I don't understand.”

He breathes heavily out of his nose as he opens the file and examines the first page. “Do you know why I arranged this appointment?” he asks, still avoiding eye contact.

“I assumed it was something to do with my thesis.”

“Then why do you tell me you don't understand?”

“Well, I fail to see how my upbringing has anything to do with the quality of my work.”

“You fail to see,” Withering mutters, more to himself than to me. He shakes his head.

“Are you going to tell me what the problem is, Professor
Withering?”

His head snaps upward at my question, and this time, he removes his spectacles to hold me with a stern gaze.

“You're being blunt, Doctor Arken-Bright, so allow me to return the sentiment and tell you that this establishment does not look favorably on plagiarism. Now do you understand?”

His accusation steals the breath from my reply. “Plagiarism,
Professor?”

He mops his pale brow with a handkerchief, replaces his spectacles, then closes the file. “You have placed me in a very difficult position, Clifford.” His voice is softer now. “What am I to do? We invested quite a substantial sum on the project you were supposed to be working on, and I was in receipt of excuse after excuse about why no results were forthcoming. I even assigned Edith Levaux to help you when I was told you were struggling. She volunteered. Did you know that? Heaven knows why. But even with her assistance, when we finally get something out of you, it's a paper on arc spectra of lesser-known metals.” He pauses to draw a long, tired breath. “You are obviously unaware that Ms. Levaux submitted her own paper, discussing the very same
topic as yours. But that was handed in to me three months ago.”

Edith? This is her doing? I am hardly listening to Withering now. He's banging on about university policy, goodwill, moral values, about how difficult it is for women to establish themselves in the scientific field without people like me treading all over them, but his words soon become an irritating hum in my ears. I cannot believe she would do this. Day after day she showed up in my lab after Withering assigned her to me, helping me set up the equipment, bringing me hot drinks and sandwiches, taking notes for me. Ha! Taking notes, was she? All along, she was compiling them for her own purposes. And to think, she has set me up as the plagiarizer. Me!

“Did you listen to one word I just said, Arken-Bright?”

I stare at his desk, not at him. I cannot. There are coals being stoked in my heart, and if I were to look him in the eye and speak, I fear I would engulf him in fire. Instead of responding, I reach forward and grip the edge of his desk. I want to thrust it into him and send him flying through the window.

“Clifford?” He leans forward. “Are you quite all right?”

Images of his office swallowed in rolling fire and his flaming body hanging from the ivy through the frame of the broken window fill my head, and I take in a long breath, slowly releasing the desk so that I can fold my hands neatly in my lap.

I breathe in. Breathe out. “I must confess to a little disappointment, Professor.”

Withering leans back again and interlaces his fingers over his waistcoat and, after waiting a few moments for me
to elaborate, encourages my input with a wiggle of his fingers.
“Go on.”

“I am afraid I am not the plagiarizer,” I tell him. “That would be Ms. Levaux.”

“Even though she submitted her paper three months ahead of you?”

“Yes. I keep a ledger. I write a line in it every day with a sentence of summary about my experimentation and the date on which it was done. I can show it to you. You'll find
the information quite conclusive, and quite obviously earlier
than her submission, I'm sure.”

“You wrote this ledger yourself, did you?”

“Of course, well . . . no, actually, I get Ms. Levaux to . . . Oh.”

Withering sighs again. “Clifford, have you actually done any work on the papers to which you were originally assigned?”

“On levulose preparation?”

“Yes.”

Levulose preparation. Of course I hadn't. What could possibly be so interesting about sugar? Spectroscopy is so much more fascinating. For Edith bloody Levaux too, apparently. “I am afraid not, Professor.”

He shakes his head, places one elbow on his desk, and removes his spectacles so that he can rub the heel of his hand into his eyes. And after yet another labored sigh, he risks eye contact and places a palm on the file. This time it is me who looks away.

“This is really your work?” he says.

“Of course.”

“Look at me, Arken-Bright.”

I leave it a moment before meeting his gaze.

“Let me explain to you what I am going to do,” he says carefully. “This is against my better judgment, and there will be some who slam me as a misogynist for doing this, but I'm going to accept your paper over hers—”

“Professor?”

“Let me finish, Arken-Bright. There's a condition attached.” He lowers his head as if challenging me to speak, and he'll remove his blessing if I do. “You obviously have a flair for this area of research and have no interest in what was originally assigned to you. Fortunately for you, it just so happens that I have something that may appeal to your talents. Interested?”

The old bastard is going to find something cruel and ironic to punish me with. “Of course, Professor. What do you have in mind?”

He stares at me for a moment, then drags his chair backward so that he can stand up. He turns to face the crowded window as if he has a chance of seeing something through it other than dead leaves.

“Are you a superstitious man, Clifford?”

“I'm a scientist.”

“Good, but that's not what I asked.”

“May I inquire why you asked that question then, Professor?”

“You may, but if I give an honest answer you will not be satisfied by it.”

I have no idea what his angle is, but in the moments I consider my reply, it seems to me that the room is getting a little darker. I look at the gas lamps. They are still steady. Perhaps it is just Withering blocking what little light ekes through the window.

“I want you to continue your work with spectroscopy, Doctor Arken-Bright.”

“Really?”

He turns around again, observes me, then walks over to a set of drawers beside a bookshelf. “Yes, really, but I have something very specific for you to work with.”

He opens the top drawer and pulls out a dented metal box that looks like an old army rations tin. He sits back in his chair, places it carefully between us on the desk, and slides it slowly toward me. “Open it.”

I look at it, uncomfortable with the atmosphere in the room. I feel like I am being watched from behind by eager and malevolent shadows.

“Well, go on,” he says. “I promise you will be intrigued.”

Not willing to show any signs that I am unnerved, I take the tin quickly and flip the lid as if I am about to remove
a piece of Turkish delight from inside. Withering was not exaggerating. It is intriguing. More than intriguing, it is captivating. There is light coming from the tin but not enough to relieve the ever-pressing darkness. A slight indigo pulse, like a sleepy heartbeat, radiates from a craggy crystalline stone resting on a piece of scarlet cloth inside the tin. Now the room feels suddenly colder, as if the mineral—or whatever it is—is leeching warmth from the air.

“Is it radioactive?” I ask. “What is it?”

“My dear fellow,” says Withering, placing the lid back
on the tin, “I have absolutely no idea what it is. Why do you think I'm giving it to you? This is your chosen field, is it not? To find out exactly what things are? I have been reliably informed,
however, that it is most certainly not radioactive.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Ah! That, Clifford, will remain a secret for now. I don't want the knowledge of where it came from to taint your experimentation.”

“How could knowing that possibly—?”

“Do you want the project or not?”

“I do. Yes, of course I do.”

“Splendid. I'll have the board—”

“But I do have a condition of my own.”

Withering tilts his head, just slightly, waiting.

“I want to work with Ms. Levaux again.”

“Seriously? Even after the allegations you made just now?”

“Especially after that, yes.” Keep your friends close and bitches closer. “I don't hold grudges, Professor, and I did find her to be a most efficient assistant.”

Withering nods, pouts in consideration, then nods
again, more vigorously this time. “Agreed, but I want results, understand?” He points a finger at me. “Stay on project
this time and write the bloody ledger yourself.”

“I understand, Professor.”

“Good.” He slides the tin closer to me, as if it is something cursed that he needs to get rid of. “Keep me informed of your findings. I don't want to wait another nine months for a paper this time.”

I
spend the next day tidying away paperwork and gathering some additional research material for the new project. I have not even looked at Withering's mysterious crystalline stone since our discussion in his office. Only a single day has passed since I received it, and I already regret taking on the project. It is not that I am uninterested in finding out what it is and why it has the professor so intrigued; rather, it is because of one word he made reference to: superstition. There is something wrong with that pulsing stone. Aside from its startling luminescent properties, there are too many queer factors surrounding its presence. Certain sensations and thoughts have dogged me since I placed it in my room at the gentlemen's club: the air seems a little colder, the shadows a little darker, and I cannot shake the uncanny notion that the stone is simply . . . wrong. That it should not exist.

This morning before breakfast, I opened the curtains wider and turned up the heating, but the sense of foreboding that stalked me throughout the night still clung to me, and as I passed the drawer containing the stone on my way out, I even experienced a moment of lightheadedness. It irritates me greatly that I have allowed Withering's words to affect my physical state; I thought myself immune to such ridiculous auto-suggestion, but it seems I am not.

At first it was an unsettled stomach stopping me from eating a cooked breakfast, but later I felt so nauseated I could not even face lunch, and well into the evening when I should have been looking forward to drinks and cigars in the lounge of the club with some of the other fellows,
the thought of a meal beforehand left me cold. My hope is that when Edith and I begin our spectrographic tests on the material tomorrow, the science will expel these ridiculous feelings. I comfort myself with that thought before heading into the lounge.

The club lounge is open to the village residents and in recent years has become their cozy local. They have become accustomed to mixing with fellows of the university, often jovially quizzing us about what diabolical theories we might be trying to dream up while they are sweating through an honest day's work. Any opportunity for good-natured ridicule of the scientific community is met with great gusto, so while I nearly pass out beside the fireplace, they are more interested in jest than employing any sympathy, believing it to be a moment of clumsiness rather than a swoon.

It is not a welcome moment, and now, coming around from my temporary weakness, I am as dazed as I am embarrassed.

“Good heavens, Brighty, did you see your life flash before you?”

The words are muffled, as though they come from the bottom of a pond. The faces are swimming, too, and it
takes me several confused moments to register the burning
in my throat; I think I may have suffered some reflux. Several
hands help me up into the leather armchair closest to the fire, and at once I am subject to a mixture of mirth and concern at the drama I created. I had cracked the back of my head on the edge of the table when I'd fallen. It is no secret that some fellows of the society see me as a diva, especially since the wildfire rumors spread about my latest paper, and this episode has not helped to dissuade them from that opinion.

The man who spoke is George Forchester, a tubby man with misbehaving ginger hair and an equally rebellious
moustache. I almost wish I could pass out again if only to avoid the smirk on his face, which draws a little too close to mine as he bends over to make a show of examining my eyes.

“No,” he announces in his usual barrel-chested tone, “still no sign of any sense knocked into the man. He's a lost cause.” He taps me on the cheek, a friendly gesture coupled with a smile and a wink, before standing up and folding his arms. There is a ripple of amusement from patrons seated at the bar, and my companions are leaning forward to look closer at me.