Thunderer (22 page)

A housekeeper brought in coffee on a silver tray. Arjun accepted gratefully. He stirred thick honey into it, and swigged it eagerly. It was better than any of the Nessenes’ cures.

“I can understand my fellow citizens’ knee-bending tendencies, of course. I was present, as you are no doubt aware, for the recent return of the Bird. I was otherwise occupied, of course, and it was very far away, but…And then, once, I was in the Arcades, I believe purchasing perfume for a young lady who is sadly no longer with us, and Orillia—the spirit of the lights? The god of the Illuminations?—manifested; all the glass of the Arcades, and the lamps hanging in chains from arch to arch, all became brilliantly
deep
and, ah,
brilliant
. I found myself bending the knee and tearing at my hair with all the rest of the crowd. So I
do
understand.

“But, now, that’s the problem; my fellow citizens, and too many of my fellow scholars, try to understand these forces by entering within them, within their manifestations. You might as well study hornets by sticking your head in the nest. It makes us mad. We must study them at one remove, through their traces. A science of signs. It takes patience, but it’s the only way.”

Olympia affixed a thin black cigarette to her holder. Without looking, Holbach skidded a brass ashtray toward her.

“For example. You must be aware of my success in predicting the Bird’s return to our city. There were many significant signs: for instance, white doves appearing in Kanker Market, in place of its usual pigeons. A sign of pressures within the city, welling up; the very same pressures that form and
are
the Bird itself. Prefigurations and intimations of its return. You might do something similar with, say, Lavilokan, whose signs often manifest on the stage, as be-fits a mirror-god.

“So, I might see myself as a natural geographer. One might also see the city as a machine, the tectonic forces within being like the pressures or charges that build up in an engine and move its parts. I have even, at times, believed that they may be more by-products than essential forces, like the heat the engine gives off. An engine, I do not dispute, of
enormous
complexity. I have been accused,” he said, warming to a digression, “of
simplifying
the complexity of the city and its, ah,
presences. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Consider my rivals’ schools: take Dr. Lodwick, for example, and his
Extrapolations.
What I have described as tectonic forces, he persists in seeing as
gods.
He sees them as
meaning
something, you see, as having something to
say
to us. So he reads as
signs
things that are only, ah, happenings. Events. Eructations. It makes him see simple rules and regularities where there are none. Do you see?”

“Ah…”

“To him it’s a conversation, like we’re having now. He thinks that
they
mean to mean something to
him,
to
us
. To me it is a matter of natural processes, which, not being
intended
for our understanding, are immensely obscure in their operation. Prediction and control of such forces is an art as well as a science.” Holbach slapped the table. “And
that
is my
point,
you see. A man who understands the operation of the engine and the placement of its levers may put it to
work,
harness its forces. As I did with the
Thunderer
. Whatever may become of it, however it may be used, I’m afraid I can’t regret its creation. It represents the promise of science. An all-seeing, all-mapping eye. My promise to posterity, to our future.”

It sounded like an applause-line. Arjun tried to look impressed. It was very foreign to his way of thinking: the Choir had never worried about the future, or sought to harness the Voice, only to echo it back and forth until the end of time. He supposed they were not great thinkers.

“So you see why I was interested in
you
. Your, ah,
Voice
. A god from
outside
the city, one that you believe may have been drawn here. Is that possible? I’d like to know. And I know nothing of the gods outside these walls. I should learn more. It’s all an intriguing problem. We
must
talk, soon, perhaps.”

In the pause that followed, Arjun said, “I would think the city would hate you, Professor. The mob outside the Observatory, for example. Would they love you any better than Shay? Wouldn’t they call this talk of forces and engines blasphemy?”

“Certainly, if they heard it. Though many others would cheer me on. As always, we of the city are complexly divided against ourselves. In any case, I don’t publish this sort of talk where the mob can see it, or the censors. At least not under my own name.”

“Nicolas did,” Olympia said.

“And look where it got him! Silenced and exiled; lucky to escape with his ears uncropped. Braver than me, yes, but gone, while I am still here. No,
this
talk is for the enlightened. I can adequately publish my research without betraying my deeper thinking. I can translate my work into the language of the knee-benders. I let them call the
Thunderer
a blessing from the gods, rather than a triumph of human reason. It is safest.” He deflated. “I suppose, for the time being, the
Thunderer
is only a promise to myself, one that cannot safely be shared.”

Arjun rubbed his brow. He tried to ask whether any of this mattered; if everything Holbach had to say could be equally well said in the language of worship or in the language of science, was the difference real? He wasn’t sure. He stumbled over his own sentences and Holbach, he thought, missed his meaning.

“Well,” Holbach said, “not to worry. You don’t need much of a grasp of theory for the work I have in mind. At least you’re not
shocked,
which is promising. Your work: let’s discuss it.”

Holbach led Arjun round the shelves, stopping to pick up a variety of books: a pamphlet the color of dead skin, two thick tomes bound with black leather, a twine-stitched bundle of typed papers. He heaped them into Arjun’s arms. “Your work is to translate these for me. Now, you know what I’m interested in. The Tuvar were, by all accounts, great or at least prolific theological scholars. Together let’s bring their science back into the light! Ah yes, take this, too. And, ah, yes, this.

“These are all very old, of course—nothing has been written in Tuvar in this city for, oh, gods only know—but it’s surprising how little theological science has progressed. Now this,” he said, slipping a slim journal onto the pile, “you should start with this. If the references to it in Varady’s
Letters
are accurate, this records an important series of studies on the Black Bull. It should interest you; the Bull is a potency that no longer exists, a god that has abandoned its post. We’ll talk later, see how you’re doing. For now, my lunch appointment beckons. Then I’ll be yours for the rest of the week; I’m afraid my other engagements have been canceled.” He gestured sadly toward the door behind which the soldiers stood watch. “I rather think people are afraid to be seen with me. Olympia will talk to you about your salary. A pleasure, again.”

Holbach tried to shake Arjun’s burdened hands, then patted his shoulder instead. He turned and disappeared between the shelves. Arjun heard a trail of conversation start in the next room: “Good morning, Corporal. How is your boy’s inflammation?…Oh dear, I
am
sorry, perhaps I know someone who may be able to help with that, let me think…. And your wife?”

I
n the hallway outside, Olympia leaned against a marble bust of a bushy-bearded thinker and said, “Congratulations. Welcome to the fold. You’re not the
strangest
person ever to work for the Professor, but you should be interesting anyway.” She drummed her fingers on the bust’s bald head. “Holbach has no idea what money’s worth these days, so he usually pays his translators—”

“What did Brindley die of? Holbach said there was a canal engineer who worked with you. Who wrote about the canals for you? What did he die of?”

“Oh, that’s before my time. Some sort of disease. Black lung? Shudders? Langshaw’s Disease? The canals are nasty places to go poking around.”

“Can I read what he wrote for you?”

“Ah. Maybe. We’ll see. Holbach may have been a bit indiscreet, actually. Do you mind if we don’t discuss this further? I suggest you keep yourself busy and put the canals out of your mind. Nasty places! Now I have somewhere to be, so we should talk about your work. You’ll be paid…”

A
coach brought Arjun back to the Cypress.

“Not dead, then?” Haycock said. “Very fetching gown, though. Mad, is it?”

“I was sick for a while. Now I’m getting better.”

His room was gone, rented to a Mr. Lovage, who opened the door only a crack and avoided eye contact. “How was I supposed to know you were coming back?” Defour snapped. “And you left owing a week’s rent, I might add.”

Haycock had sold Arjun’s books. “An easy mistake to make,” Haycock said. “Under the circumstances. I’ll make it up to you.
Dis
count. We’ll talk about it, all right?”

As an afterthought, Arjun asked after the envelope under the bed. “What envelope?” Lovage asked.

“Never mind,” Arjun said.

T
he salary Holbach had promised was generous. With Holbach’s letter of reference, Arjun rented a place in Stammer Gate, south of Foyle’s Ward, not too far from Holbach’s house. His new neighbors were students, scholars, priests of no particular denomination. His flat was in a stone tower, once the bell tower of some dismantled church. The windows overlooked a graveyard.

He made no effort to furnish the room. There was a bed and a desk and a chair; that was enough. He pushed the desk up against the window, where a cold draft reminded him of home. There was a chandler on the corner of his street, in a waxy little burrow of a shop. Arjun bought a crateful of candles. He emptied it out, and turned it upside down to make a side table on which he could rest a bottle of black ink and a jug of wine.

There was some dusty contraption hanging on the wall, a thing of mirrors turned on each other bound with wire and snakeskin, hung with bells and teeth and roof-tile. Was it one particular god’s icon, or a mishmash of many? Whatever it was, he took it down and folded it over, then slid it under the bed.

He placed the book Holbach had told him to start with on the desk, piling the others at his feet. He opened out a sheet of paper next to the book, and dipped his quill. He spent the first evening staring out over the graveyard, probing the cold riverbed of his mind for what remained of the passion that had brought him to the city, the ink going dry on the pen’s nub.

G
ravity began pulling
at Jack as he floated over a strange ghetto.

It was a close circle of tall, curved buildings, their spires curling in like a gently closing hand. He sank closer, accepting a compromise with gravity; he did not know how to fight it yet. He let the ship dwindle in the distance.

As he got closer, he could see that the spires rippled with strange valleys and ridges, like running wax. In the moonlight, the circle was like the hand of a ragged corpse. He settled, and sat cross-legged, his dirty hair falling into his face.

The surface was uncomfortable. The ridges he had seen from the air repeated themselves on a smaller and then a smaller scale, fingertip etchings. He ran a tired hand over it, marveling at the work that must have gone into it.

He’d flown. It was hard to look directly at the thought. There was an unbridgeable shadow between the rational mind that was sitting on the roof, wondering how to get home, and the entity that had moved on the wind. The sensation was strange.

One night, he remembered—staring at the back of his hand, his flexing fingers—one night when he was still quite new to the House, he had been herded into the lecture-room on the fourth floor, and sat in the shadows while Mr. Coil ranted.

“As for the presences: it is our solemn duty to be patient and quiet and open to their messages for us; as my colleagues say, without them, we are without meaning. Tiber in particular, of course, of course,
of course,
Praise Be. Without them, what would we be, what would this city be, but little clockwork figures moving in our tracks to no purpose? So much is familiar. But now, ratlings, we are to discuss the latest scientific discoveries. As we once might have done in the salons of Nicolas Maine, for those are the heights from which I am fallen.

“The philosophers have opened the brain, rat-boys, cracked the skull with knives, broken the backbone and torn away all the bloody tissues that wrap you so snugly. Apes first, then
thieves,
such as your filthy selves. The brain is your thinking-meat. The way in which they have proved this is interesting, and again involves deviants and criminals, but I will spare your tender sensibilities, for am I not a gentle shepherd? A lump of matter in your sloped skulls does your thinking for you.”

He’d gestured with his hands. “Roughly so big. Full of winding streets. They’ve found charges of electrical force running across and through it, prodding the meat into motion. Do you understand electricity, hatchlings? Imagine
fire;
how it crawled and sparked along the grain of the wood when your drunken, shiftless father was reduced to burning your furniture. The sparks run
here
and not
there,
and in consequence of that motion, the will forms in you to break
this
window or steal
that
purse, and on such motions our fates depend.”

Coil had struck the table with the palm of his hand. “So! We may see the presences of the city’s streets as being like the pulses of force that travel the paths of the brain. It is their motions that bring meaning to the city. We may see our city as an organ to house them, and to read their messages for us.”

Coil developed the analogy at greater length, but Jack had stopped listening. The notion that his thoughts were the product of motions and twitching in the meat in the head disturbed him. Was he not the source of his own intentions? He spent several nights sitting on his cot, holding his hand out in the dark, flexing and unflexing his fingers, trying to feel the moment at which the decision to move was made; was he acted upon or acting? He couldn’t tell.

It was something he had grown out of and stopped worrying about. Now he felt it all over again. It made him feel severed from himself. Flight was an impossible potential, which could not be under his will, but apparently was. He felt around inside himself for the power’s trigger. He could not find it.

There was a dark plain in front of him, a few streets away. Fires burned out on it. He thought he could see beasts, moving in their pens, but perhaps they were just shadows.

He tried to figure out what he could be sure of.
First,
whatever power he had—and he could not pretend anymore that it was not some more-than-natural power—must be all of a piece with the speed and grace he had displayed in thieving, in fighting, in racing over the roofs. And
second,
it was obviously the result of the magic he had worked with the Bird. But he had expected only to borrow the Bird’s flight for a moment, enough to escape. How had the power become fixed in him? Was it for some obscure purpose of the Bird’s own?

As Coil would have put it, that was all that could be reasoned from first principles. The rest would have to be a matter of experiment.
Third,
then: the power had limits. Or he did. He could not remain in flight forever, at least not
yet
. It drained him; gravity could not be defied forever.

On hands and knees, Jack inched out on a carved ledge, thrust out like a formless fist. It was too dark to see the street below, which was probably for the best. He tried to remember what it had been like when he had launched himself off the roof of Barbotin. Holding that memory in his head, he leaped.