Codex (40 page)

“Very
Planet of the Apes.
”

“Isn't it? But Gervase scrapped all those versions. In the final draft, the hero wakes up one morning and realizes it's Easter Sunday. It's been a long time since he's been to Mass, and he needs to go to confession. He doesn't know if the Cimmerians are Christians, but he asks, and they agree to lead him to a church.

“They take him to a miraculous chapel, telling him that to pray there is his only chance for a safe return home. The chapel is mysteriously constructed entirely out of stained glass, without a single stone. I don't know if you've ever been to Paris, but I imagine it looks something like the Sainte-Chapelle. The windows depict stories out of classical myth: Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion, the fall of Troy, and so on. In a way the whole structure is like a codex. Gervase points out the resemblance: ‘Hyt was as a very boke hytself, a volume boonde wyth walles, with leeves of glas.'

“It is, he realizes, the Rose Chapel. It's the mystical church that the stag knight described at the very beginning of the story, that was the object of his quest all along. He's finally found it, long after he stopped looking for it. The quest is finally over.

“It's hot inside, which makes a certain kind of literal sense—I imagine a glass building like that would function something like a greenhouse. The lord feels warm and safe for the first time in months. He prays, and as he prays he lets go of the things he had been looking for. All at once he no longer misses his wife, or his home in England. He no longer cares about anything on earth. He lets go of everything that had ever been important to him. Maybe it's a spiritual epiphany, a shedding of all his earthly, material bonds, or maybe he's just exhausted. In a mixture of faith and disillusionment, ecstasy and disappointment, he takes off his armor, curls up, and falls asleep in front of the altar. As he sleeps, his soul leaves his body and is accepted into heaven.”

Edward shifted from foot to foot. There was something satisfying about the ending, but also something sad about it.

“So that's it? He never gets to go home?”

She shook her head slowly. “He doesn't get to go home.”

He felt like he should have something intelligent to say about it, but he was drawing a blank.

“What do you think it means?”

Margaret shrugged.

“I know what my colleagues will think,” she said guardedly. “On a dialectical level the Rose Chapel is the inverse of the black page in the second fragment: light where the black page is dark, sheltering where the blind canyon is destroying, legible where the blackness is unreadable...”

“Okay, okay. I get it. But what do you think?”

She turned away to her desk and discreetly swept some book dust off it into the palm of her hand.

“It's strange. It feels almost more existential than Christian. I don't know. I like it.”

“Well,” he said uncomfortably, “but don't you think he should have gotten to go home? In the end?”

She rounded on him without warning.

“Is that what you think? You think he should get to go home?” She threw the fistful of dust at him. He flinched. “Look around you! Is that what the world is like? Everybody gets what they want, everything works out fine, everybody gets to go home. Is that what you think?”

“Well, no,” Edward said, brushing himself off, hurt and baffled. “I mean, I don't know—”

“You don't know? Well, you'll find out!” she retorted bitterly. “Or why don't you ask the Duchess? Maybe she can tell you.”

Her anger came almost as a relief. He wanted her to be angry. He was angry at himself.

“All right,” he said. “All right. I'm sorry, Margaret. I have no choice about this. You know that. I'll do everything I can for you.”

She nodded. She dusted off her hands over the trash.

“I know,” she said. “I know that.”

A stillness fell over the room. The constant background wash of street noise, always audible in Margaret's apartment, mysteriously ceased for a second, leaving them alone in a conspicuous silence. He shifted the bag on his shoulder.

“I should go,” he said. “My flight is in a couple of hours.”

“All right.”

“We'll talk soon. I'll call you when I get there.”

“All right.”

She took a graceless half step forward and kissed him with unexpected tenderness. He held her for a moment, then turned and unlatched the door. There was nothing else to say. Anyway, she knew it wasn't his fault. There was no real reason for him to feel guilty.

T
WO HOURS LATER
Edward was sitting in a Chili's on the concourse at J.F.K. wearing his most expensive suit—a black four-button Hugo Boss—and his best black leather shoes, with an impeccable pink silk tie rolled up in his pocket. He had two bags with him: his laptop case, into which he'd also managed to stuff his toothbrush and an extra change of socks and underwear, and the tote bag with the codex in it. He stowed them safely under the table, clamped between his knees, and ordered a huge frosted mug of pale Mexican beer with a chunk of lime floating in it. He felt like he should have something quintessentially American before he left.

He glanced surreptitiously at his reflection in a mirrored beer ad. The pain of leaving Margaret behind was still with him, but it was starting to pale next to the thrill of what was happening next. It was all coming together. Now that he was actually on his way the whole past month seemed like one long, dreamlike ordeal that was finally ending, and thank God. Even the past four years that he'd spent working at Esslin & Hart seemed unreal, like a jail sentence he served for a crime he never even committed. Forget about it. That time was gone. He was facing forward, ready to start over. God, he was so tired. He felt like an astronaut waiting on the gantry, his rocket sweating liquid nitrogen on the launch pad, waiting to boost him up and out and into the next world.

A voice called his flight over the PA. A flight attendant was waiting for Edward beyond the security checkpoint, and she accompanied Edward personally to his seat, squiring him past the long line of passengers who shuffled obediently down the telescoping corridor to the airplane. Nice touch. Once he was on board Edward didn't want to stow the codex in an overhead compartment—in an ideal world, he thought, he would have had it handcuffed to his wrist, secret agent style—but he was determined to keep his laptop with him, so he reluctantly consigned the case with the codex in it to the luggage rack. A nozzle over his head blasted him with dry, frozen air. The seat next to him was empty, presumably having been bought up by the Duchess for his traveling comfort. He thought about trying to call Esslin & Hart on his cell phone to tell them he was en route, but at that same moment the announcement came to turn off all electronic devices, and he put it away. The day had gone dark, and a couple of raindrops left fine stitches of water down the thick plastic window. Through it he watched the runway crew driving around in their weirdly shaped baggage-handling vehicles, like alien golf carts.

When they finally took off the acceleration pressed him gently back into his seat. His long night was finally catching up with him, and he closed his eyes. They seemed to be rising up, up, up into nothingness, and he felt as if at any moment he might just vanish, just blissfully cease to be, draw the curtains, bring up the houselights. The story was over, and it wasn't perfect, but well, things were never perfect, were they, except maybe in books. By the time they were above the clouds he was asleep.

He woke up again in the middle of the in-flight movie. He watched it lazily, not even bothering to put on the free headset. It was a big-budget martial arts movie, easy enough to follow even minus the dialogue. The young hero was being trained by an ancient fighting master who set him a series of torturous exercises. He played the flute while balancing on the point of a sword. He shattered a giant ruby by smashing it with his forehead in slow motion. He kicked tropical fruits off the heads of the masters' servants without ruffling their bowl haircuts.

The time came for the disciple to compete in a big tournament. Not only did he fail miserably, he was publicly humiliated by the star pupil of the ancient fighting master's archrival, a shadowy figure possessed of sinister mustachios. The old master shook his head sadly. All that time and training—wasted. But just when all hope seemed to be lost, when the master's pretty daughter was struggling to hold back tears, the disciple reappeared. The purpose of his training had become clear to him. His dormant abilities manifested themselves. He reentered the ring. Victory in the big tournament. Defeat of the archrival's student. Joy with the pretty daughter. Knowing smile of the master. The movie ended.

It was dark inside the plane. The window shades were drawn—glowing red with the high-altitude sunset behind them—and all the reading lights were off except for one single one, far up toward the front of the plane. The dry, sterile air was cold, and each passenger snuggled up underneath his or her individual gray fleece blanket. On the monitors the arc of their trajectory was approaching the Arctic Circle, and the sound of the engines had become a dull, soporific, reassuringly steady roar. The stewardesses clustered together silently at the ends of the aisles, slipping off their shoes to massage their shapely, aching feet through their stockings.

But Edward wasn't sleepy—he could already feel his circadian rhythms drifting out of whack—and he fished out his laptop from under the seat in front of him and booted it up. He slipped in the disc that he'd remembered, with the addict's presence of mind, to bring with him in his lapel pocket. The cool gray light from the liquid crystal screen flooded over him in the darkness like a bath of milk. MOMUS was waiting for him, as it always was, just where the Artiste had left it. Now that he had the means and the know-how and the free time to finish it off, he might as well do it.

To his surprise, Edward found that he remembered everything the Artiste had told him about how to win the game with absolute clarity: how to reactivate the subway, where to find the diamonds, how to get to the airport, how to fly to Florida, how to take a rocket into orbit. He still had four hours left till London, and now that he was free of the Artiste's Easter Egg it was all ridiculously easy. He felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He won every fight, found every clue, dodged every trap without even half trying.

Before he knew it he was up in outer space. The swirly blue-green marble of earth rolled beneath his feet. Missiles flew, lasers flashed. He had mustered a crack army of warriors and engineers, and now he bent them to his will: Using a superpowerful magnetic field they lassoed a passing asteroid—it was conveniently rich in ferrous metals—hauled it out of its trajectory and sent it hurtling into the center of the orbiting lens that the aliens had used to deprive the earth of sunlight. It was like the rose window of a cathedral shattering: A lattice of fine cracks spread out from the center—a jewel with a blinding bright flaw, or a great eye bloodshot with capillaries of molten gold—then it broke apart, letting through the pure intolerable burning brilliance of the sun.

Satisfaction. It was over. The earth was frozen and dead, but at least the aliens were gone, and soon the sun would be back. Life would reemerge. He guessed. Anyway, he'd done his part, he'd won the game. He yawned and stretched.

Except that the game wasn't over. It was still going on. Edward frowned. Logically—at least according to Zeph's logic—there must still be something left to take care of. But what?

He studied the situation. It was nighttime, the night before the first new dawn of the old, unfiltered sun. Edward watched his little figure struggle along on the screen, tireless as ever, crunching robotically through the light, powdery snow that covered the ground. He guided it up the frozen river that led north out of the city, walking for miles along the ice, leaving a dotted line of miniature footprints behind him.

It took a long time, and he lost track of the minutes and hours in the monotony of the moonlit landscape, drift after drift, like waves or sand dunes, interrupted only by the occasional stand of evergreens or a collapsed farmhouse half covered by a blanket of snow like a restless sleeper. And maybe time was the problem. He'd destroyed the giant floating lens and routed the invading aliens, but the aliens had speeded up time, too, and he hadn't fixed that, had he? For that matter, even if he did manage to stop time, hadn't the damage already been done? He tried to think like a science fiction geek for a minute. The earth was cold and dead. Nothing was going to change that. Maybe it was too late after all. A creeping fear stole through him. Had he won the game, or had he lost it?

He rounded the last bend in the river valley. He was almost there. The ruins of the old bridge were long gone, but he recognized the shape of the bluff: This was where the game had started. The summit was still covered with grass that had somehow survived the cold—coarse, green, thick-bladed tufts, hoary with frost. It really was like Cimmeria. He wondered if the Artiste had stuck in a model of the Rose Chapel somewhere for him to find. Edward watched as a flat pink sunrise tinted the frozen field a delicate rose-gray. As he walked through it the frost crystals began to melt into dewdrops. When he stooped down to examine one, he saw in each gleaming droplet—and he'd long since stopped wondering how this degree of detail could even be possible—the reflection of the entire world around it, and in every other droplet appeared the reflection of that reflection, and on and on into infinity.

The old mailbox was still there, still empty. The thin birches and aspens he'd walked through at the very beginning of the game were bent almost double with the weight of ice and snow, so that they formed an arched colonnade roofed over with heavy drooping branches. Beside them was a great old tree, now overthrown and on its side, lying next to the pit its hideous roots dug as the weight of the trunk ripped them out of the earth. Edward settled deeper into the comforting embrace of his business class seat and closed his eyes.