Against the Day (25 page)

“The main thing to be looking at,
though,” the tycoon gazing off into various distances which failed to include
his son, a tell that Fleetwood and his brothers had learned quite early meant
that Scarsdale did not fully trust them and was not providing the full story,
not by a damn sight, “is the railworthiness of the terrain. As we speak,
Brother Harriman is out buying up scientists by the shipload, mobilizing some
kind of Alaskan junket. Him andold Schiff as usual, hand in glove. Almost
certainly suggesting a scheme for a rail link across the Bering Strait, Alaska
to Siberia, hooking on into the TransSib, and from there God knows. Setting
aside of course the unholy conditions any train trying to cross a railroad
bridge over the Bering Strait would likely encounter.”

This had the appearance of an open
sharing of deep business confidences, but all it meant was that important data
were being withheld, which Fleetwood, if he wished further enlightenment, must
inquire after on his own. “So
. . .
you
want to beat him to it.”

“Them,” Scarsdale corrected him. “A
climber plus a Jew. Any wonder the world’s going to hell.”

The Transnoctial
Discussion Group
met in
one of the lounges in the basement of the hotel, located well out of the
earshot of other guests who might have wished, for example, to sleep. Tonight’s
announced topic was “The Nature of Expeditions.”

“We learned once how to break horses
and ride them for long distances, with oceangoing ships we left flat surfaces
and went into Riemann space, we crossed solid land and deep seas, and colonized
what we found,” said Dr. Vormance. “Now we have taken the first few wingbeats
of what will allow us to begin colonizing the Sky. Somewhere in it, God dwells
in His Heavenly City. How far into that unmapped wilderness shall we journey
before we find Him? Will He withdraw before our advance, continue to withdraw
into the Infinite? Will He send back to us divine Agents, to help, to deceive,
to turn us away? Will we leave settlements in the Sky, along our invasion
routes, or will we choose to be wanderers, striking camp each morning, content
with nothing short of Zion? And what of colonizing additional dimensions beyond
the third? Colonize Time. Why not?”

“Because, sir,” objected Dr.
Templeton Blope, of the University of the Outer Hebrides, “—we are
limited to three.”

“Quaternionist talk,” shouted his
collegial nemesis Hastings Throyle. “Everything, carnal and spiritual, invested
in the given three dimensions—for what use, as your Professor Tate
famously asked, are any more than three?”

“Ever so frightfully sorry. The given
world, in case you hadn’t noticed. Planet Earth.”

“Which not so long ago was believed
to be a plane surface.”

So forth. A recurring argument.
Quaternionism in this era still enjoyed the light and warmth of a cheerful
noontide. Rival systems might be acknowledged now and then, usually for some
property considered bothersome, but those of the Hamiltonian faith felt an
immunity to ever being superseded, children imagining they would live
forever—though the sizable bloc of them aboard the
Malus
were not
quite certain what the closely guarded Mission Document meant when it described
the present journey as being taken “at right angles to the flow of time.”

“Time moves on but one axis,” advised
Dr. Blope, “past to future—the only turnings possible being turns of a
hundred and eighty degrees. In the Quaternions, a ninetydegree direction would
correspond to an
additional axis
whose unit is √–l. A turn through
any other angle would require for its unit a complex number.”

“Yet mappings in which a linear axis
becomes curvilinear—functions of a complex variable such as
w=e
^z
,
where a straight line in the
z
plane
maps to a circle in the
w
plane,” said
Dr. Rao, “do suggest the possibility of linear time becoming circular, and so
achieving eternal return as simply, or should I say complexly, as that.”

Inexpensive cigar smoke thickened the
air, and the fifteencent bottles of imported Danish aquavit ran out, to be
replaced by a locally distilled product stored in somewhat larger earthen
crocks. Out in the dark, the ancient ice went creaking, as if trying to express
some argument of its own.

As if the hour itself in growing
later had exposed some obscure fatality, the discussion moved to the subject of
the luminiferous Æther, as to which exchanges of opinion—relying, like
Quaternions, largely on faith—often failed to avoid a certain vehemence.

“Bloody idiots!” screamed Dr. Blope,
who belonged to that British school, arisen in the wake of the MichelsonMorley
Experiment, of belief in some secret Agency in Nature which was conspiring to
prevent all measurement of the Earth’s velocity through the Æther. If such
velocity produced, as Fitzgerald maintained, a shrinkage of dimension in the
same direction, it was impossible to measure it, because the measuring device
would shrink as well. “It’s obvious Something doesn’t want us to know!”

“About what I’d expect from the
Brits,” thoughtfully countered Dr. Vormance. “Half the dwelling units of that
island have been visibly haunted at some time or other. They see ghosts, they
see fairies under every fungus, edible and otherwise. They believe in astral
projection, foreknowledge, reincarnation, and other proofs of immunity to
Time.”

“You’re talking about me, aren’t
you?”

“Why no, Blope, no not at all.”

Everyone chuckled condescendingly,
except of course for Dr. Blope.

“What cannot be resolved inside the
psyche,” put in the Expedition alienist, Otto Ghloix, “must enter the outside
world and become physically, objectively ‘real.’ For example, one who cannot
come to terms with the, one must say
sinister unknowability
of Light,
projects an Æther, real in every way, except for its being detectable.”

“Seems like an important property to
be missing, don’t you think? Puts it in the same class as God, the soul—”

“Fairies under mushrooms,” from a
heckler somewhere in the group, whom nobody, strangely, seemed quite able to
locate.

Icelanders, however, had a long
tradition of ghostliness that made the Brits appear models of rationalism.
Earlier members of the Expedition had visited the great Library of Iceland behind
the translucent green walls facing the sunlit sea. Some of these spaces were
workshops or messhalls, some centers of operation, stacked to the top of the
great cliff, easily a dozen levels, probably more. Among the library shelves
could be found
The Book of Iceland Spar
,
commonly described as “like the
Ynglingasaga
only
different,” containing family histories going back to the first discovery and
exploitation of the eponymic mineral up to the present, including a record of
each day of this very Expedition now in progress, even of
days not yet
transpired
.

“Fortunetelling! Impossible!”

“Unless we can allow that certain
texts are—”

“Outside of time,” suggested one of
the Librarians.

“Holy Scripture and so forth.”

“In a different relation to time
anyhow. Perhaps even to be read through, mediated by, a lens of the very sort
of calcite which according to rumor you people are up here seeking.”

“Another Quest for another damned
Magic Crystal. Horsefeathers, I say. Wish I’d known before I signed on. Say,
you aren’t one of these Sentient Rocksters, are you?”

Mineral consciousness figured even
back in that day as a source of jocularity—had they known what was
waiting in that category
. . .
waiting
to move against them, grins would have frozen and chuckles turned to
drythroated coughing.

“Of course,” said the Librarian,
“you’ll find Iceland spar everywhere in the world, often in the neighborhood of
zinc, or silver, some of it perfectly good for optical instruments. But up here
it’s of the essence, found in no other company but its own. It’s the genuine
article, and the substructure of reality. The doubling of the Creation, each
image clear and believable
. . . .
And
you being mathematical gentlemen, it can hardly have escaped your attention
that its curious advent into the world occurred within only a few years of the
discovery of Imaginary Numbers, which also provided a doubling of the
mathematical Creation.

“
For this is not
only
the
geographical Iceland here, it is also one of several convergences among the
worlds, found now and then lying behind the apparent, like these subterranean
passages beneath the surface, which lead among the caves of Iceland spar,
blindly among crystals untouched, perhaps never to be touched, by light. Down
where the ‘Hidden People’ live, inside their private rock dwellings, where
humans who visit them can be closed in and never find a way out again. Iceland
spar is what hides the Hidden People, makes it possible for them to move
through the world that thinks of itself as ‘real,’ provides that allimportant
ninetydegree twist to
their
light, so
they can exist alongside our own world but not be seen. They and others as
well, visitors from elsewhere, of nonhuman aspect.

“They have been crossing here,
crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them.
Looking back over a thousand years, there is a time when their trespassings
onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishingpoint, with those of the
first Norse visitors.

“They arrive here in criminal frames
of mind, much like those early Norsemen, who were either fleeing retribution
for offenses committed back where they came from or seeking new coastlines to
pillage. Who in our excess of civilization strike us now as barbaric, incapable
of mercy. Compared to these other Trespassers, however, they are the soul of
civility.”

The sun came up
a baleful smear in the sky, not
quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately
recognizable yet unnamable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed
from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment
to moment
. . .
its name a word of
power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence. All around
lay ambushes of the bad ice, latent presences, haunting all transaction, each
like the infinitesimal circle converging toward zero that mathematicians now
and then find use for. A silvergray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world
. . . .
The sun might be visible from time
to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutraldensity gray than
blue. Out on the promontory grew some eventextured foliage, in this light a
blazing, virtually shadowless green, and breaking down at the base of the
headland was the seagreen sea, the icegreen, glassgreen sea.

Hunter had been out with his
sketchbook all day, taking down as much as he could, to bring away with him.
That night was the last he and Constance would have before his departure. “I
wanted this to be a bon voyage party,” she said, “but there’s nothing here to
eat.”

“I can go over to Narvik’s.”

“It’s late. Bad ice after midnight.”

“It isn’t that dark tonight,
Grandmother. Won’t take me long.”

There were usually boatmen down at
the shore, who would bring passengers over after the regular ferries had docked
for the night—they could count on a steady, if not brisk, allnight
traffic, as if over on the mainland were a darkly glamorous resort known only
to the discerning few. With winter in the offing, leads of open water were
harder to find. The sleek little steam craft throbbed to and fro in the accents
of frustrated hunting dogs, and the pilots called to each other over the
drifting floes. Something phosphorescent in the ice kept the night well
illuminated.

But tonight the town was a melancholy
place. Not much going on. The impending departure of the
Malus
seemed to
have put everyone at loose ends. Lights burned everywhere, as if invisible
receptions of some kind were in progress. Insomnia wrapped the town like a
sweaty blanket. Gangs of petty criminals swept by from time to time, committing
no offense more serious than staring. Like temporary innkeepers, the unsleeping
residents brought the newly arrived in to their own parlors, sitting without
speaking, seldom offering alcohol because of its exorbitant price, paid in the
dark and in banknotes only, as the noise of specie traveled too far,
undiminished, in the vast silences.

The only eating place open this time
of night was Narvik’s MushItAway Northern Cuisine, crowded at all hours,
usually with a queue out the door. Hunter foresaw a long wait. Not only was the
line intolerably slow—often it did not move, for fifteen
minutes—but when it did move, it ratcheted ahead only
a fraction of
the space
a single body would occupy. As if some of those waiting were,
somehow, only fractionally present.

Alongside the creeping queue, in the
opposite direction, an ingenious steamdriven train of potsize wheeled
conveyances passed continuously, to remind those waiting of today’s menu, the
braised blubber with cloudberries, skua eggs any style, walrus chops, and snow
parfaits, not to mention the widely praised Meat Olaf, which was This
Week’s—in fact Every Week’s—Special, all cranking along behind the
display glass, inches away from the drooling clientele, though, given the
absence of impulsecontrol locals were notorious for, not securely protected.
Along with episodes of snack theft, the waiting was enlivened as well by
queuejumping, foodthrowing, mother defamation, and unpremeditated
excursions
 
off the end of Narvik’s
pier.