Against the Day (47 page)

But she had tendered all she would,
and deploying over one bared shoulder a gaze of mock reproach at the outspoken
youth, was off to other tasks.

 
“Purple Thanksgiving,” beamed Miles Blundell, who tonight had
decided, by way of getting up to speed, to begin with the tacchino in
pomegranate sauce, evidence of which already decorated the jumper of his
liberty uniform.

“Not too promising a piece of news, Cap’n,”
Darby muttered, looking around the table for agreement—“maybe we should
skip the eats and get the heck
out
of
this place?”

“Not an option,” declared Lindsay
Noseworth, vehemently. “Whatever their intentions here—”

“Do, Noseworth, put a sock in it,” sighed
the Ship’s Commander—“for, all here know but too well that as we have run
away before, so may we again, and denying it shan’t improve our odds against
SkyBrother Padzhitnoff. So while we may—
dum vivimus, bibamus
—that’s
if you’d do the honors, Lindsay,” motioning with his wineglass toward the
icefilled bucket in the center of the table chilling the evening’s wine.
Sullenly, the secondincommand selected and opened two bottles, a Prosecco from
a vineyard only a little north of here and a comparably effervescent
Valpolicella from farther inland, proceeding then around the table, to pour
into each glass equal amounts of the white and red vini frizzanti.

Randolph stood, raising his glass.
“Red blood, pure mind,” which the others repeated in more and less grudging
unison.

The wineglasses were from a matched
dozen, each having begun as a glowing parison at the end of some blowpipe over
in Murano but days before. Tastefully ornamented in silver with the Chums of
Chance heraldry and the motto
sanguis
ruber, mens pura
, the set had been that very day presented to the boys
by current ShadowDogeinExile Domenico Sfinciuno, whose family in 1297, along
with quite a few others among the Venetian rich and powerful of the day, had
been disqualified from ever sitting on the Great Council—and hence made
ineligible for the Dogedom of Venice—by thensitting Doge Pietro
Gradenigo, in his infamous decree known as the
Serrata del Maggior
Consiglio.
But not even Napoleon’s abolition of the office of Doge five
hundred years later had any effect on the claim to what, by now, generations of
Sfinciuni, in a curious inertia of resentment, had come to regard as theirs by
right. Meanwhile they devoted themselves to trade with the East. In the wake of
the Polos’ return to Venice, the Sfinciuno joined with other upstart
adventurers, likewise relegated by Gradenigo’s lockout, whose money was newer
than that of the Case Vecchie but quite sufficient to finance a first
expedition, and headed east to make their fortune.

So there arose in Inner Asia a string
of Venetian colonies, each based

around some outoftheway oasis, and
together forming a route, alternative to the Silk Road, to the markets of the
East. Maps were guarded jealously, with death the notinfrequent price of
divulgement to the unauthorized.

The Sfinciuno grew ever richer, and
waited—they had learned how to wait. Domenico was no exception. Like his
ancestors before him, he wore not only the classic Doge’s hat with its upturned
point on the back but also the traditional
cuffietta
or linen cap
underneath, which usually only he knew he had on, unless of course he chose to
show it publicly to favored guests, such as the Chums at the moment, in fact.

“. . . and so,” he told the assembly,
“our dream is now closer than ever to being realized, as through the miracles
of twentiethcentury invention which these illustrious young American scientists
have brought here to us, we may hope at last to recover the lost route to our
Asian destiny usurped by the Polos and the accursed Gradenigo. Bless them! These
ragazzi
are not to be denied any form of respect, symbolic or practical,
at the risk of our ducal displeasure, which is considerable.”

“Why, it’s like the Keys to the
City!” exclaimed Lindsay.

“More like
‘
Attenzione al culo,
~”
Chick muttered. “Try not to
forget that this place is known for its mask industry.” A vigorous advocate of
inconspicuousness, Chick found ceremonies like today’s both unnecessary and
dangerous. Their mission in Venice, best performed without demands on time and
visibility like the present one, was to locate the fabled Sfinciuno Itinerary,
a map or chart of postPolo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the
hidden city of Shambhala itself.

“
First
,”
advised their cicerone in the matter, Professor Svegli of the University of
Pisa, “try to forget the usual picture in two dimensions. That is not the kind
of ‘map’ you are looking for. Try to put yourself back in the place of Domenico
Sfinciuno or one of his caravan. What would you need, to determine where you
are and where you must go? When the stars might not always be available, nor
the peaks such as KhanTengri
. . . .
Not
even Shiva’s own paradise Mount Kailash, at certain times of day an
allbutblinding beacon from which to take one’s range and bearing
. . . .
Because there are not only
landmarks but also antilandmarks—for every beacon, an episode of
intentional blindness.”

“Wait,” Chick frowning as if puzzled.
“Do I feel this conversation turning, how shall I say, abstract? Will this
Sfinciuno Itinerary turn out to be not a geographical map at all but an account
of some spiritual journey? Nothing but allegory and hidden symbolism—”

“And not one damn oasis you can get a
real drink at,” Darby put in bitterly. “Thanks a lot, Professor. We’re in the
religioussupply business now.”

“The terrain is quite real, quite of
this world—that, you may appreciate, is exactly the problem. Now, as in
Sfinciuno’s time, there are two distinct versions of ‘Asia’ out there, one an
object of political struggle among the Powers of the Earth—the other a timeless
faith by whose terms all such earthly struggle is illusion. Those whose
enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without
remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power.
Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools.

“The problem lies with the
projection. The author of the Itinerary imagined the Earth not only as a
threedimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an
imaginary surface,
the
optical arrangements for whose eventual projection onto the twodimensional page
proved to be very queer indeed.

“So we have a sort of anamorphoscope,
more properly no doubt a
para
morphoscope
because it reveals worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken,
until now, to be the only world given us.” The classical anamorphoscopes, he
went on to explain, were mirrors, cylindrical or conical, usually, which when
placed on or otherwise near a deliberately distorted picture, and viewed from
the appropriate direction, would make the image appear “normal” again. Fads for
these came and went, beginning as early as the seventeenth century, and the
artisans of Isola degli Specchi were not slow in learning how to supply this
specialized market. To be sure, a certain percentage of them went mad and ended
up in the asylum on San Servólo. Most of these unfortunates could not bear to
look at any sort of mirror again, and were kept scrupulously away from
reflective surfaces of any kind. But a few, choosing to venture deeper into the
painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now
grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidal and even stranger,
eventually including what we must term “imaginary” shapes, though some
preferred Clifford’s term, “invisible.” These specialists remained at Isola
degli Specchi under a sort of confinement within confinement so strict as to
provide them, paradoxically, a freedom unknown in Europe and indeed anywhere,
before or since.

“The Sfinciuno Itinerary,” explained
the Professor, “conflated from its original fourteenthand fifteenthcentury
sources, was encrypted as one of these paramorphic distortions, meant to be
redeemed from the invisible with the aid of one particular configuration of
lenses and mirrors, whose exact specifications were known only to the
cartographer and the otherwise hopelessly insane artisans who produced it, plus
the inevitable heirs and assigns, whose identities are even today matters of
lively debate. In theory each

point of the fiendishly coded map had
to be accounted for, though in practice, as this implied a degree of the
infinite not even Dr. Cantor in our own time is certain of, the draftsman and
the instrumentmaker settled for about the fineness of detail provided by what
were then the very latest compound microscopes, imported from the Low
Countries, anticipating—and, it has been said, superior even then
to—the planoconvex designs of Griendl von Ach himself.”

Sometime before the first report of
it in 1669, calcite or Iceland spar had arrived in Copenhagen. The
doublerefraction property having been noticed immediately, the ghostly mineral
was soon in great demand among optical scientists across Europe. At length it
was discovered that certain “invisible” lines and surfaces, analogous to
conjugate points in twodimensional space, became accessible through carefully
shaped lenses, prisms, and mirrors of calcite, although the tolerances were if
anything even finer than those encountered in working with glass, causing
artisans by the dozens and eventually hundreds to join multitudes of their
exiled brethren already wandering the far landscapes of madness.

“So,” the Professor had gone on to
explain, “if one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a
finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these
paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at
all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the network of
ordinary latitude and longitude
. . . .
”

One day Miles
Blundell
, off on one of
his accustomed fugues through Venice, pausing to gaze at ruined frescoes as if
they were maps in which the parts worn away by time were the oceans, or to
contemplate some expanse of Istrian stone and read in its naturally cursive
markings commentaries on a forbidden coastline, stepped across into what later
inquiry would suggest was the prophetic vision of St. Mark,
but in reverse.
That
is, he returned to the Rialtine marshes and lagoon as they had been in the
first century
a.d
., the dark
cormorants in ungainly swoop, the cacophony of gulls, the smell of swamp, the
huge fricative breathing, approaching speech, of the reeds beneath the scirocco
that had blown his ship off course—where, ankledeep in the ooze, it was
Miles who appeared to some Being clearly not of the immediate region. Nearby,
wading distance from the indistinct shoreline, lay a curious vessel which it
seemed the Being had arrived in. Not the usual lateener, in fact appearing to
have neither sails, masts, nor oars.

“Are you sure it wasn’t just somebody
wearing a mask or something? Aand

what of that
winged lion
?”
which Chick Counterfly, as
Interrogations Officer, particularly wanted to hear about, “the Book, the page
it was open to?”

“With its human face, yes,
Carpaccio’s ambivalent smile, the Porta della Carta, so forth, all artists’
whim, I fear
. . . .
Unless you mean
what the Being saw when it looked at me?”

“How would you know what it saw when
it—”

“What was given to me to understand.
To become as they’d say out here aptotic, uninflected, unable, sometimes, to
tell subject from object. While remaining myself, I was also the winged
Lion—I felt the extra weight at my shoulder blades, the muscular
obligations unforeseen. The Book, what of that? Somehow I knew the Book by
heart, the Book of Promises, promises to savages, to galley oarsmen, to Doges,
to Byzantine fugitives, to peoples living outside the known boundaries of the
Earth, whose names are as little known—how important in its pages could
‘my’ promise be, a simple promise that ‘here would thou our visitor’s body rest,’
here in some wet salt desert? While elsewhere in the Book waited matters far
more important to be arranged, marriages and conceptions, dynasties and
battles, exact convergences of winds, fleets, weather and market rates, comets,
apparitions—what did a minor promise matter, even to the Evangelist? he
was for Alexandria, wasn’t he, he knew his fate lay there, that this was only
an interruption, a perverse wind up from Africa, a false turn along the
Pilgrimage he knew, by then, that he was on.”

“Hey, Miles,” jeered Darby, “there’s
an opening for Unit Chaplain if you’re interested.”

Miles, beaming goodhumoredly,
continued. “It wanted us to know that we, too, are here on a Pilgrimage. That
our interest in the
itinerario sfinciunese
and the chain of oases set
down in it is less for the benefit of those who have engaged us than for our
own. When all the masks have been removed, it is really an inquiry into our own
duty, our fate. Which is not to penetrate Asia in hopes of profit. Which is not
to perish in the deserts of the world without reaching our objective. Which is
not to rise in the hierarchies of power. Not to discover fragments of any True
Cross however imagined. As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross
to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his
churchgrounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what
we take to be the allbutboundless world, but which in reality are only a
circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine—to
save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one
episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the
real, unbearable Jerusalem.”