Against the Day (102 page)

   
“
Macchè,
Pino! They
. . .
they interest me, that’s all. As a
category.”

   
“
Ehi,
stu gazz’, categoria.
”

“You are safe with me, lieutenant,”
Fatou assured him. “Any government that hired me to spy would have to be
hopeless idiots
. . . .
”

   
“My
point exactly!” Rocco staring in righteous density.

She peered at him, at the justarisen
chance that, like the heedless
mezzogiornismo
of his companion Pino,
this might be Rocco’s way of slyly flirting with her.

“As usual,” Eugénie had warned her,
“you’re too suspicious. You have to learn to listen more to your heart.”

“My heart.” Fatou shook her head. “My
heart knew him for a rogue, long before he got close enough to hear it beating.
Of course he’s a
bad marriage risk,
but what’s that got to do with
anything?”

Eugénie demurely touching her
friend’s sleeve. “As it happens, actually, I may
. . .
hmm
. . .
fancy
. . .
Rocco?”

   
“Aahh!”
Fatou collapsed on the bed, pounding it with her fists and feet.

   
Eugénie
waited till she was quite done. “I’m serious.”

“We can go out dancing together! Have
dinner! The theater! Just like
boys and girls
would do! I know you’re
‘serious,’ Génie—that’s what has me worried!”

Both young women experienced some
distress whenever the Italian duo were obliged to spend time in Bruges, the
Venice of the Low Countries, just a short canal journey away, which since the
Middle Ages had enjoyed a reputation for its pretty girls. This was not so
important, Rocco and Pino both swore repeatedly, as the need to run frequent
midnight exercises with the Torpedo, which was having its internalcombustion
engine modified by the staff at Raoul’s Atelier de la Vitesse, most of them Red
mechanicians from Ghent. Once everyone was satisfied with the weapon’s
performance, Rocco and Pino planned to ride it through these nocturnal ghostways,
invisibly, to the seaside and a certain
royal ~rendevous.

“They’ve put in a Daimler
sixcylinder,” explained Rocco, “with an Austrian military carburetor, still
very hushhush, and a redesigned exhaust manifold, which means we’re already up
to a hundred horsepower, and that’s just cruising,
guaglion.
”

“Why didn’t you sell the plans to the
English?” one of the Ghent machinists had thought to ask. “Why give them away
to some stateless collection of Anarchists? “

Rocco was puzzled. “Steal from one
government to sell it to another?” He and Pino looked at each other.

“Let’s kill him,” Pino suggested
brightly. “I killed the last one, Rocco, so it’s your turn.”

   
“Why
is he running away?” said Rocco.

   
“Come
back, come back!” cried Pino. “Oh well. They’re all so stolid up here.”

Hotel staff
of a spruceness less rigorous than
what they might’ve been held to in daylight hours were maintaining a fine
balance between annoyance and bewilderment at the spectacle of these
Quaternionist troupers, by now years in retreat from their great struggle for
existence, still resolute and insomniac. Were this its afterlife, only some of
those wearing the livery of the Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue could have
been classified as ministering angels—the rest being closer to imps of ingenious
discomfort.

“Is this a stag affair, or are there
likely to be one or two lady Quaternionists?” Kit inquired, one would have to
say plaintively.

“Rare birds,” said Barry Nebulay,
“though of course there is Miss Umeki Tsurigane, of the Imperial University of
Japan, a former student of Professor Knott when he was there. Astonishing young
woman. She’s published as

much as anyone in the
faith—memoranda, monographs, books—Kimura has I believe translated
some of them into English— Ah. And she’s right over there,” nodding at
the bar.

   
“That
one?”

“Yes. Presentable, wouldn’t you say?
You ought to hit it off, she was just in America. Come along, I’ll introduce
you.”

Black trousers, drover’s sombrero
. . .
black
leather
trousers, in
fact
glove
leather, “Are you sure some other time wouldn’t be
more—”

   
“Too
late. Miss Tsurigane, Mr. Traverse, of New Haven.”

Around her slender neck, the
beauteous Asian was also wearing a furoshiki printed in a woodland motif of
peacock blue, taupe, and Chinese red, folded in a triangle so as to make a
cowgirl bandanna, and knocking back boilermakers and their helpers at an
astonishing pace. A modest betting pool had already developed over how long she
might keep it up before paralysis in some form set in.

“ ‘
Some Quaternionic Schemata for
Representing the Anharmonic Pencil and Related Forms,
’ ”
Kit recalled. “I saw the abstract in
Comptes Rendus.
”

“Not another Anharmonic Pencilist,”
she greeted him, calm and so far lucid.
  
“There
is by now quite a cult, I am told. Expecting all sorts of. . . strange things!”

   
“Uhm
. . .”

   
“The
Projective Geometry Symposium—you’ll be speaking at it?”

   
“Uhm
. . .”

   
“Will
you be speaking at all? Anytime soon?”

“Here,
let me buy you a couple more of those,” offered Barry Nebulay, who then, like
some angel of the alcoholic, was off to other good deeds.

“Yale—you studied there?
Kimurasan, who is now at our Naval College— did you ever meet him?”

   
“A
little before my time, but he is remembered with much respect.”

“He and his American classmate, De
Forest—san, have both gone on to contribute most materially to the field
of syntonic wireless communication. Kimurasan’s system—tonight,
somewhere, it is on station with the Japanese navy, in service against the
Russians. Both of those gentlemen studied Vectors with the eminent Gibbs
Sensei. How much of a—coincidence, could that have been?”

   
“With
the Maxwell Equations at the heart of the matter . . .”

“Exactly.” She stood and looked up at
him, more or less devastatingly, from under the brim of that cowgirl hat. “The
festivities in there—would you mind escorting me?”

“Why,
not at all, miss.” The only hitch being that two steps into the Grand Salon,
she had slipped away, or he had, and it would be days before they saw each
other again. He had two choices, either leave and go sulk someplace or wander
around and see what else might be up. Or, actually, only one choice.

Kit
threaded his way out into the Grand Salon, wallpapered in aniline teal and a
bright though sour orange, to appearances floral in theme, though few would
insist on it, lit by hundreds of modernlooking sconces, each quartershade of
Congo ivory scraped thin as paper to let its electric bulb shine through,
roisteringly aseethe tonight with Quaternionnaires from around the globe, all
persuasions not to mention apostates therefrom, quasiGibbsites and
pseudoHeavisiders and fullbore Grassmanniacs, milling about, more than in the
mood for a clambake, eccentrically attired, negligently when not defectively
groomed, all, with perhaps no more than the usual quota of barking and
drooling, gossiping breathlessly about vacant appointments, compulsive
marriages, cretinous colleagues, and real estate both overpriced and otherwise,
scribbling on one another’s attire, performing with cigarettes and banknotes
feats of vanishing and restoration right up in one another’s faces, drinking
Monopole de la Maison, dancing on tabletops, exhausting the patience of wives,
vomiting into the pockets of strangers, getting into long, intensely hoarse
disputes in fluent Esperanto and Idiom Neutral, the technical discussions being
in large part impenetrable, the phatic or sociable chitchat tending to the only
slightly less problematic.

“.
. . Heaviside’s hamfisted attempt to deQuaternionize the Maxwell Field
Equations—not even they have been safe from assault—”

   
“Face
it. The
Kampf ums Dasein
is over, and we have lost.”

   
“Does
that mean we only imagine now that we exist?”

   
“Imaginary
axes, imaginary existence.”

   
“Ghosts.
Ghosts.”

“Yes,
QBrother, yours is a particularly depressing case. From the mistakes in your
last paper, your own struggle should be called a
Kampf
oops
Dasein.
”

“We
are the Jews of mathematics, wandering out here in our diaspora— some
destined for the past, others the future, even a few able to set out at unknown
angles from the simple line of Time, upon journeys that no one can predict
. . . .
”

“Of
course we lost. Anarchists always lose out, while the GibbsHeaviside
Bolsheviks, their eyes ever upon the longterm, grimly pursued their aims,
protected inside their belief that they are the inevitable future, the
xyz
people,
the party of a single Established Coordinate System, present everywhere in the
Universe, governing absolutely. We were only the
ijk
lot, drifters who
set

up their working tents for as long as
the problem might demand, then struck camp again and moved on, always ad hoc
and local, what do you expect?”

“Actually
Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought they know
of God’s intention—that space be simple, threedimensional, and real, and
if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But
Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space
as imaginary and leaving Time to be the
real
term, and a scalar as
well—simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. Nothing
they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than they could allow
space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space they had fought
over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to defend.”

Accompanying
these laments was some inappropriately chirpy music, which Kit had now come in
earshot of. What appeared to be a musichall contralto in a species of Poiret
gown sat at a piano, accompanied by a small streetensemble of accordion, glockenspiel,
baritone saxophone, and drums, singing, in a bouncy 6/8,

O,

   
the,

Quizzical, queer Quaternioneer,

That creature of ijk,

Why must he smile so curiously,

And creepabout quite that way? from

Waterloo out to Timbuctoo, just as

Many as you please—

They’re down, they say, in Tasman

Iay, and they’re

Upthere inthe trees!—and should
you

Find one in your parlor at

The fullness of the moon,

You’ll avoid a spot of awkwardness,

 
If you sing this little tune
. . .
(23and)

Once
I saw a Quaternion chap, he was

Acting oh so queer—

There was something
rather green
and long
he
was

Putting in his ear
. . .

Yes it might have been a gherkin,

If it wasn’t, dear oh dear! that

Quizzical queer Quaternioneer!

Which
the captivated assembly had been tirelessly singing along with, over and over,
since the chanteuse had come on shift, its timesignature working some ancient
tarantellical magic as well, producing among the company an irresistible desire
to dance with wild abandon, whatever that meant around here. Collisions were
frequent, often forceful, Kit being able to avoid one only by having
recognized, just before contact, a familiar deep voice. There sure enough in
full barrelrolling conviviality was Root Tubsmith.

   
“Thought
you’d eloped with that redhead!” he greeted Kit.

“Got drafted into the navy,” Kit
said. “I think. Nothing’s been rigorously what you’d call ‘real’ lately. Does
seeing you in this condition mean that everything is normal again?”

   
“Of
course,” handing him a bottle of noname wine, “next question.”

   
“Wouldn’t
have a dinner jacket I could borrow?”

“Come on along.” They found Root’s
quarters, which like Kit he seemed to be sharing with a dozen or so others of
the Hamiltonian persuasion. Clothing in a wide selection of colors, sizes, and
degrees of formality littered the available floor space. “Take your pick I
guess. Closest we’ll see to Anarchism in our lifetime.”