Against the Day (103 page)

Back down in the Salon, the noise and
centrifugal jollification had picked up markedly.

“Maniacs,” cried Root, “every one of
us! Fifty years ago of course more than today, today the real maniacs have gone
into foundations work, set theory, all abstract as possible, like it’s a race
to see who can venture out furthest into the borderlands of the nonexistent.
Not strictly speaking ‘mania,’ not as we once knew it. The
good old days!
Grassmann
was German and hence automatically among the possessed, Hamilton was burdened
with early genius and in the grip of a first love he could never get beyond.
Drinking a lot, though who am I to talk, didn’t help. Heaviside was once termed
‘the Walt Whitman of English Physics’—”

   
“What.
. . excuse me
. . .
does that
mean?
”

“Open question. Some have found in
Heaviside a level of passion or maybe just
energy,
beyond the truculence already prevailing among
the different camps in those days.”

“Well if Heaviside’s the Whitman,”
remarked a British attendee nearby in a striking yellow ensemble, “who’s the
Tennyson, you see?”

 
“Clerk Maxwell, wouldn’t you say?” suggested someone else, as
others joined in.

   
“Making
Hamilton I imagine the Swinburne.”

   
“Yes
and who’d be Wordsworth then?”

   
“Grassmann!”

   
“I
say, what an amusing game. And Gibbs? The Longfellow?”

   
“Is
there an Oscar Wilde, by any chance?”

“Let’s all go to the Casino!” someone
invisible screamed. Kit wondered how any of this crowd would get as far as the
door, let alone inside it— though, as it turned out, the Quaternion folks
all had members’ privileges at the Kursaal, which included the Casino.

“Intriguing
new field opening up,” Root confided on the way in. “Quaternion Probability.
Seems that, as a baccarat game proceeds, you can describe each
coup
as a
set of, well you’d call ’em vectors—different lengths, pointing off in
different directions—”

   
“Something
like your hair, Root.”

“But
instead of finding a single resultant,” Root continued, “we’re working here
with rates of change, rotations, partial differentials, Curls, Laplacians, in
three dimensions and sometimes more—”

   
“Root,
I got my fishingboat pay, and that’s about it.”

   
“Stick
around, my son, and you’ll soon be wallowing in them francs.”

   
“Sure.
Think I’ll just wander for a bit.”

Being used to more of a saloon type
of atmosphere, Kit found the European manners here oppressive, not a heck of a
lot of bluffing, slandering, cheating, or getting into fistfights, it seemed.
Where was the fun? Except for a scream now and then whose polarity was hard to
read, high emotion had to wait either for later or maybe for some other
offstage room set aside for pain, lost souls, and canceled futures, for
everything that must not go on out here, for this was a temple of money, wasn’t
it, even if that did lead back to its own Unspoken, to figures like Fleetwood
Vibe, to rubber and ivory and fever and black African misery whose awful depths
were only beginning to appal public sentiment elsewhere in the civilized world.

Waiters
on padded soles passed in and out carrying Champagne, cigars, opiated powders,
intraCasino correspondence sealed in small heavy envelopes. Maquillages became
slowly blurred with perspiration and tears, beards disarranged, handkerchiefs
soiled not infrequently with blood from bitten lips. Top hats brimmed with
banknotes. Heads passing into slumber met baize surfaces in audible percussion.
Staccato utterances from wheels, dealingshoes, dancingshoes, dice, filled the
room and what might otherwise have been an intolerable silence. Electric
lamplight kept the scene hardfocused and readable, all proceeding stepwise, by
integers, little ambiguity allowed in the spaces between. And somewhere, that
unanswerable wavefunction the sea.

   
Oddly,
Kit noticed, the room was also crawling with lopsided makeup jobs,

and these weren’t limited to women either—broken
symmetries everywhere, as if each, at some forgetful or overconfident moment,
had allowed into the mirrorframe something they oughtn’t to see, and there went
the whole concoction. When at length he did run into a symmetrical face, it was
at a roulette table, and on a type known in these parts as a
sphinxe
Khnopffienne.
The woman poised above the wheel was looking Kit directly in
the face, right away ruling out all sorts of introductory chitchat, with a gaze
animal, timeless, as if already onto whatever he thought he understood
now—or even would come to understand later, should there not arise
matters more immediately desperate to attend to—an indifference to most
forms of terror, including those which Anarchists of the day were finding it
often necessary to selfincorporate. The difficulty lay in the extraordinary
pale amber of her irises—far too pale for safety, less a positive shade
than a failure on the side of jaundice to achieve the titaniumwhite that
surrounded them. Put another way, he supposed—if eyes as colorless as
these were on a dog, you would quickly enough understand that it was no dog
looking back at you.

This
presentable enigma regarded him through the smoke of a slender cigar. “You are
enjoying a moment’s independence from the rest of that ring you came in here
with?”

Kit
grinned. “Suspiciouslooking birds, ain’t we? What happens to a man spends all
his time sitting indoors and staring at numbers.”

   
“You’re
those mathematics people out at the Nouvelle Digue?
Mon Dieu.
”

   
“And
you must be staying at the Continental?”

   
She
raised an eyebrow.

   
“Judging
by that ‘ice’ you’ve got on, ’s what I meant.”

   
“This?
It’s paste. Of course if you did happen to know the difference—”

   
“Heck,
I’d forgive you, whichever it was.”

   
“Exactly
how jewel thieves talk. Now I’m sure I cannot trust you.”

   
“Not
much point offering my services, then, I guess.”

   
“You’re
American.”

“Doesn’t
mean I ain’t been up and down some boulevards,” Kit declared. “In and out some
hallway doors.”

“One
of these ’cute Yankees.” She presented, as if from the air, a small
ivorycolored rectangle bearing a linedrawing in violet of a shaft of daylight,
falling through a few panes of glass roof to illuminate a piece of iron arcade
girdering and, down in one corner, in a modern sansserif face, the name Pléiade
Lafrisée, with an address in Paris. “My business card.”

   
“I
won’t ask what your business is, ’cause it’s your business.”

   
She
shrugged.
“
Conseilleuse.
”

   
“I
won! I won!” came a deep bellow from across the room.

“Come
on,” Kit motioning her with his head over to a chemindefer table, “show you
something. Congratulations, Root. Little excitement, hey?”

“Ahhh!
but I forgot to keep any record of it,” Root Tubsmith’s eyeballs all but
whirling in their sockets, chips spilling everywhere, one tucked absentmindedly
behind each of his ears. “Card values, time of day, should’ve logged them,
might as well have all been random luck.” He pulled from his pocket a battered
slip of paper, covered with formulae full of upsidedown triangles, capital
S
’s
,
and small
q
’s
and frowned at it. “Think
I’d better adjust some parameters here, room temperature, punter irrationality
index, one or two coefficients in the rétroversion matrix—”

   
“
Ma
 
foi.
”

“If you like, mademoiselle,” Kit
offered, “we could place a small bet on your behalf
. . . .
”

“Leave the details to you gentlemen,
being the mathematicians and whatever.”

   
“That’s
it.”

   
Next
thing Pléiade knew, she was ahead by about ten thousand francs.

“This is the point where the Casino
detectives come over and make me give it all back.”

“We’re safe,” Root assured her,
“they’re looking for the latest thing, Nicol prisms and stroboscopic monocles
and wireless telegraph rigs in people’s shoes. But our magic is more ancient,
and the big advantage to being so outmoded is that nobody recognizes it when
they see it.”

   
“So I
have—what do you call them? Quaternions to thank.”

   
“That
might present difficulty—but you can thank us, if you like.”

   
“Come,
then, I’ll buy you all dinner.”

The Gentleman’s Code struggling
briefly with the possibility of a free meal and losing, most of the party took
her up on her offer, and they all headed for the restaurant next to the gaming
room.

Whatever
else this cupcake might be up to, she was no piker. For everything the Q’s
ordered, she added on more of the same. The wine had names and vintage dates on
the labels. At some point after the soup, Pléiade inquired of no one in
particular, “Yes but what is a Quaternion?”

Hilarity
at the table was general and prolonged. “What
‘
is
’
a Quaternion? Ha, hahahaha!” Heels drummed
helplessly on the carpet, wine splashed, deepfried potatoes were thrown to and
fro.

“Cambridge
personality Bertie (‘Mad Dog’) Russell observed,” observed Barry Nebulay, “that
most of Hegel’s arguments come down to puns on the word ‘is.’ In that sense the
thing about a Quaternion ‘is’ is that we’re obliged

to encounter it in more than one guise. As a vector quotient.
As a way of plotting complex numbers along three axes instead of two. As a list
of instructions for turning one vector into another.”

“And
considered subjectively,” added Dr. V. Ganesh Rao of the Calcutta University,
“as an act of becoming longer or shorter, while at the same time turning, among
axes whose unit vector is not the familiar and comforting ‘one’ but the
altogether disquieting
square root of minus one.
If
you
were a
vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the ‘real’ world, change your length,
enter an ‘imaginary’ reference system, rotate up to three different ways, and
return to ‘reality’ a new person. Or vector.”

   
“Fascinating.
But. . . human beings aren’t vectors. Are they?”

“Arguable, young lady. As a matter of
fact, in India, the Quaternions are now the basis of a modern school of Yoga, a
discipline which has always relied on such operations as stretching and
turning. Here in the traditional ‘Triangle Asana,’ for example”—he stood
and demonstrated—“the geometry is fairly straightforward. But soon one
moves on to more advanced forms, into the complex spaces of the Quaternions
. . . .
” He shifted a few dishes, climbed
on the table, announced, “The ‘Quadrantal Versor Asana,
’ ”
and commenced a routine which quickly became more
contortionistic and now and then you’d say contrarytofact, drawing the
attention of other diners and eventually the maître d’, who came running over
waving a vehement finger and was two steps away from the table when Dr. Rao
abruptly vanished.

   
“
Uwe
moer!
”
The
functionary stood fingering his boutonnière.

“Go
it, Doc!” chuckled Root. Pléiade lit a cigar, Barry Nebulay was looking under
the table for hidden compartments. Except for a couple of Dr. Rao’s table
partners who were now busily picking items of food off his plate, astonishment
was general. Presently they heard the Doctor calling from the kitchen, “Out
here, everyone—come, see!” and sure enough he had reappeared with his
foot in a tub of mayonnaise, though, curiously, not quite the same person he
had been before performing the Asana. Taller, for one thing.

“And
blond now, as well,” puzzled Pléiade. “Can you do it backwards and return to
who you were?”

“I
have still not learned how. Some master Yogis are said to know the technique,
but for me it remains noncommutative—mostly, I just like to hop about.
Each time I become somebody else. It is like reincarnation on a budget, without
the element of karma to worry about.”

Pléiade,
whom Kit had decided he was better off not trusting, lingered through another
bottle of wine before producing from her reticule a Vacheron & Constantin
watch, flipping open the huntingcase, and executing a dazzling smile of social
apology. “I must fly, do forgive me, gentlemen.”

   
Some
of that consulting, Kit supposed.