Against the Day (108 page)

One
day Kit and Umeki were walking back from the café on the Estacade and ran into
Plèiade, in animated conversation with Piet Woevre, coming the other way.

“Hello,
Kit.” She stared a moment through Miss Tsurigane. “Who’s the
mousmée?
”

   
Kit
with a reverse nod at Woevre, “Who’s the
mouchard?
”

Woevre
smiled back with a direct grim sensuality. Kit noticed he was heeled. Well. If
anybody knew how to engineer death by mayonnaise, Kit bet it would be this ape.
Pléiade had taken Woevre’s arm and was trying to hurry him away.

   
“Old
flame!” speculated Umeki.

   
“Ask
Dr. Rao, I think they’ve been keeping company.”

   
“Oh,
she’s
that
one.”

Kit
rolled his eyes. “The gossiping never stops with you Quaternion folks, do you
all have to swear some oath to always lead an irregular life?”

   
“Monotony—it’s
something you Vectorists are proud of?”

October
16, the anniversary of Hamilton’s 1843 discovery of the Quaternions (or, as a
disciple might say, theirs of him), by tradition the climactic day of each
World Convention, also happened to be the day after the bathingseason at Ostend
officially ended. This time Dr. Rao gave the valedictory address. “The moment,
of course, is timeless. No beginning, no end, no duration, the light in eternal
descent, not the result of conscious thought but fallen onto Hamilton, if not
from some Divine source then at least when the watchdogs of Victorian pessimism
were sleeping too soundly to sense, much less frighten off, the watchful
scavengers of Epiphany.

“We
all know the story. It is a Monday morning in Dublin, Hamilton and his wife,
Maria Bayley Hamilton, are walking by the canalside across from Trinity
College, where Hamilton is to preside at a council meeting. Maria is chatting
pleasantly, Hamilton is nodding now and then and murmuring ‘Yes,

dear,’ when suddenly as they approach
Brougham Bridge he cries out and

pulls a knife from his pocket—Mrs. H. starts violently
but regains her composure, it is only a penknife—as Hamilton runs over to
the bridge and carves on the stone
i
²
=j
²
= k
²
= ijk
= –1,” the
assembly here murmuring along, as to a revered anthem, “and it is in this
Pentecostal moment that the Quaternions descend, to take up their earthly residence
among the thoughts of men.”

In the
festivities
attending
departure, romance, intoxication, and folly were so in command, so many
corridor doors opening and closing, so many guests wandering in and out of the
wrong rooms, that de Decker’s shop, declaring an official Mischief Opportunity,
sent over to the hotel as many operatives as they could spare, among them Piet
Woevre, who would rather have been working at night and toward some more
sinister end. The minute he caught sight of Woevre, Kit, assuming he was a
target of murderous intent, went running off into the hotel’s labyrinth of back
stairways and passages. Root Tubsmith, thinking that Kit was trying to avoid
paying off a sidebet made several evenings ago in the Casino, gave chase.
Umeki, who had understood that she and Kit would be spending the day and night
together, immediately assumed there was another woman in the picture, no doubt
that Parisian bitch again, and joined the pursuit. As Pino and Rocco, fearing
for the security of their torpedo, ran off in panic, Policarpe, Denis, Eugénie,
and Fatou, recognizing any number of familiar faces among the police operatives
swarming everywhere, concluded that the longawaited action against Young Congo
had begun, and went jumping out of various low windows and into the shrubbery,
then remembering absinthe spoons, cravats, illustrated magazines, and other
items it was essential to salvage, crept back into the hotel, turned the wrong
corner, opened the wrong door, screamed, ran back outside. This sort of thing
went on till well after dark. In those days it was the everyday texture of
people’s lives. Stage productions which attempted to record this as truthfully
as possible, like dramatic equivalents of genre paintings, became known as
“fourdoor farce,” and its period as the Golden Age.

Kit
roved from one public place to another, riding trams, sitting at cafés, trying
to keep to light and population. He saw no signs of citywide emergency, only
the Garde Civique about their business wellmannered as ever, and the
Quaternioneers he did happen to sight no more insane than usual— yet he
couldn’t shake some fearful certainty that he was the object of forces wishing
his destruction. He was rescued at last from his compulsive promenade by Pino
and Rocco, who accosted him around midnight down by the

Minque, or fish auction house. “We’re going back to Bruges,”
said Rocco.

“Maybe on to Ghent. Too many police around here.”

   
“You
need a ride?” Pino offered.

Which
was how Kit found himself late at night, later than he ever thought it got,
torpedoing away down the canal toward Bruges.

At
some point in their cheerful velocity, the boys seemed to become aware that it
was night, and that furthermore there were no navigational lights to be seen
out here.

   
“I
don’t think anybody’s chasing us,” said Rocco.

   
“You
want to slow down?” Pino said.

   
“Are
we in a hurry to get to Bruges?”

   
“Something
up ahead. Better throttle back just in case.”

   
“
Cazzo!
”

Somehow they had taken a wrong turn
and were no longer on the main canal, had wandered instead into a ghostpassage,
fogswept, all but stagnant with disuse, walled in masonry finelyset and
windowless, crossed by footbridges that seemed to belong less to the Christian
North than to some more exotic faith, some collateral notion of what it might
mean to cross between the worlds. Out in the middle of the glaring night,
somewhere disguised in echo and phaseinterference, chimes had begun to sound, a
harmonicminor nocturne too desolately precise to be attributable to human
timing and musclepower, more likely one of the clockwork carillons peculiar to
this part of Belgium, replacing a live carillonneur, whose art was said to be
in decline
. . . .

The town, once a thriving Hanseatic
port, accessible from all corners of the Earth, strolled and swaggered through
by beerhappy burghers and their opulently turnedout wives and daughters, grown
rich from the wool business and trade with cities as far off as Venice, but
since its channel to the sea silted up back in the 1400s, become like Damme and
Sluis a place of silence and phantoms and watery daylight, nocturnal even at
full noon, no watercraft to disturb the funereal calm of the canal surfaces.
The odd thing was how swept and tidied the place looked. Not that sand, salt,
and ghosts created much city grime. But somebody must be up and about, in the
darkest hours, busily repointing the stone walls, hosing the narrow streets,
replacing bolts in the underbracing of the bridges. Creatures perhaps not
entirely what we think of as human.

Drifting, as if permanently unmoored
from the waking everyday, insomniacs had come out to stare, the orbits of their
eyes struck to black when the fog parted to let in the all but unendurable
moonlight. One shadow detached

itself and approached, growing
sharper and more solid as it came. Kit looked around. Rocco and Pino had
vanished. “Now what ’n the hell?” The shadow was doing something with its
hands.

Woevre.
Here before him. Kit had been fleeing not away from but toward his own likely
destruction.

A
round went purring away, spattering his cheek with tiny stone fragments, the
sound of the shot clattering among the ancient surfaces. He headed for the
nearest cover, an archway under which anything could be waiting, calling out,
“Shootin at the wrong fella!”

“No
matter. You’ll do.” When the next shot came, Kit was crouched, his heart
hammering, as far as he could tell behind cover. Maybe he was not the only
target, or maybe Woevre was firing off rounds for the heck of it. The
melancholy chiming continued.

Woevre stood unprotected in the
nocturnal light, feeling an exaltation beyond anything he could remember, even
from the days in Africa. He was no longer sure who it was he was shooting at,
or how he had come here. It seemed somehow to be about the Italians in their
manned torpedo, that was in the message which had come in to the office earlier
in the day, but nothing like that stirred now in these bright empty canals. The
activity of interest seemed to be in the sky.

Each
time he risked a glance upward, it was there, directly above him, the thing he
had been seeing for days, emerging now from the sky, from behind the sky,
carrying the unidentified visitors he had seen walking along the Digue, as if
they were in town on an organized mission.

He
knew he must try to bring down the flying ship. He pocketed his Borchardt, and
went fumbling for the weapon he had brought back from Brussels, with no idea
even how to get the case open, much less use what was inside. He didn’t know if
it needed to be charged somehow with ammunition. But these were details. He was
who he was, and trusted his intuitiveness with any weapon when the moment came.

But
Woevre had not really seen it before, at least not out in the night like this,
in the pitiless moonlight. He was overcome with certainty that the device was
conscious, regarding him, not particularly happy to be in his possession. It
felt warm, and he sensed a fine vibration. How could that be? Gevaert had
mentioned nothing. Had he?

“
Jou
~
moerskont!
”
he cried. It did no
good, whatever language the weapon could be screamed at in, it was not
Afrikaans, its provenance was too far from those forests, from those slow,
fatal rivers
. . . .
Something
flashed, blinding him for a moment, leaving his field of vision a luminous
green. The sound

accompanying was nothing he wanted to hear again, as if the
voices of everyone he had ever put to death had been precisely, diabolically
scored for some immense choir.

He
looked up. He was somehow fallen, face upward on the pavement, struggling for
breath, and the American was there, reaching down to help him to his feet.

“What
happened old buddy, shoot yourself? Tricky piece of hardware there—”

“Take
it. Take the fucking thing. I cannot bear it. . . this terrible light. . .
Voetsak,
voetsak!
”
He
stumbled away, down the canal, across a bridge, into the neat walled intricacy
of the dead town. Kit heard several more shots from that direction, and when
the bells fell silent at last, and the cordite smoke had drifted all away, with
the starers returned one by one to the fold of sleep, the moonlight grown
oblique and metallic, Kit found himself alone with the enigmatic object, back
inside its leather case. He slung it nonchalantly by its strap over one
shoulder, meaning to have a look inside later.

Kit couldn’t
quite
see
the reason for all the fuss. But Umeki was soon spending hours with the
instrument, her brow tensing and relaxing as if with sorrow and release from
sorrow, as if gazing through the eyepiece at the unfolding of a prolonged,
perhaps neverending, dramatic performance from her own land. Whenever her eyes
came away briefly from the instrument, they were unfocused, inflamed, as if
subject to two sets of laws. Whenever Kit asked what was up, she answered at
first in a low tobaccostricken voice, at affecting length, in what he guessed
must be Japanese.

Finally,
“Right. First the mirrors—see, here, halfsilvering, not on glass but on
calcite, and this specimen—it’s so pure! Any lightray entering
immediately becomes a pair of rays—one ‘Ordinary,’ the other ‘Extraordinary.’
Arriving at one of these halfsilvered backings, each ray then is partreflected
and parttransmitted—so, four possibilities—both rays reflected,
both transmitted, one of each, and the other way around. The fatal number
four—to a Japanese mind, literally fatal. Same character as for death.
Perhaps how I got drawn to the Quaternions. Let us say each of the four states
is associated with one of the four ‘dimensions’ of Minkowskian
spacetime—or, in a more trivial sense to the four cusps of the surface
reciprocal to that of the wave, what Quaternionists call the indexsurface.
Perhaps we are meant to ignore the optics altogether, as if the rays were no
longer doubly refracted, but doubly
emitted,
from whatever object we may
observe through this
. . .
as if in the
co

conscious there were some counterpart
to the Extraordinary Ray, and we were seeing with the eye of that unexplored
realm.

“And
that’s only the eyepiece.” She removed an access panel, reached in, appeared to
perform some swift, fancy translations and rotations, and came out again
holding a crystal about the size of a human eyeball. Kit took it and
scrutinized each face closely.