Against the Day (109 page)

   
“All
these faces are equilateral.”

   
“Yes.
This is a true icosahedron.”

“The
regular solid, not a 12 + 8 like you’d find in pyrites, but— This is
impossible. There’s no such—”

“Not
impossible! To date, unidentified! And the sphere described through the twelve
summits—”

“Wait.
Don’t tell me. No ordinary sphere, right?” The object shimmered at him, as if
winking. “Something like
. . .
a
Riemann sphere.”

She
beamed. “The realm of x +
i
y—we
are in it! whether we want to be or not.”

“An
imaginary icosahedron. Swell.” Trying to remember what he could of Felix
Klein’s magisterial
Vorlesungen über das Ikosaeder,
which had been required
reading at Göttingen, but not having much luck.

“ ‘
Imaginary,
’ ”
she laughed, “not the best way to put it!” She took the
crystal, with a certain reverence, it seemed to Kit, and replaced it in the
device.

“What’s
this for?” A slender ebonite handle protruded from a brassedged groove, which
ran in a complicated curve. When Kit reached for it she slapped his hand away.

“Don’t
touch it! ‘Ohmic Drift Compensator’ regulates how much light is allowed to
enter the silvering of the mirror! Special kind of refraction! Calibrated
against imaginary index! Dangerous! Of the essence!”

“This
unit is no bigger than a machinepistol,” Kit said. “How powerful could it be?”

“I’m
speculating, but the speed of the Earth moving along in its orbit—
consider it! eighteen miles per second!—take the square of that, multiply
it by the mass of the planet—”

   
“Good
bit of kinetic energy there.”

“Recently
Lorentz’s paper in the
Proceedings
of the Amsterdam Academy—
Fitzgerald and others—they have concluded that a solid body passing
through the Æther at a very high speed can become slightly shorter along the
axis of motion. And Lord Rayleigh, looking for secondorder effects, wonders if
such motion might not cause a crystalline body to become doublyrefracting.

So far these experiments show negative results.
But—that principle—if we

turned it around, and
began
with a crystal in which
double refraction is caused by a set of axes no longer uniform, with the units
of space itself actually being altered, because of the Earth’s motion—then
already in such a crystal, implicit, embodied there, is that high planetary
velocity, that immoderately vast energy, which someone has now come up with a
way to couple in to
. . . .
”

   
“I
really don’t like thinking about that,” Kit said, pretending to plug his ears.

In
a dream early one morning, she stood before him holding the object. She was
naked, and weeping. “Must I then take up the dreadful instrument, and flee to
other shores?” Her voice, without its waking edge of cool sarcasm, defenseless,
beckoned him into its sadness. This dream was about Umeki, but also one of
those mathematicians’ dreams that surface now and then in the folklore. He saw
that if the Qwaves were in any way longitudinal, if they traveled through the
Æther in any way like sound traveling through air, then among the set of
further analogies to sound, somewhere in the regime, must be music—which,
immediately, obligingly, he heard, or received. The message it seemed to convey
being “Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, field
equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an
itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again
as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of
this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in
many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety
. . . .
Within the mirror, within the
scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and takenforgranted has always lain,
as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim’s guide, the nameless
Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not
yet exist.”

He
woke knowing for the first time in a long time what he had to do. It was like
having a stuffed sinus go away. Everything was clear. This piece of hardware
had turned out to be supremely dangerous, as apt to harm its user as its
target. If military intelligence here in Belgium was getting it confused with a
“Quaternion weapon,” mythical or not, then the interest from other powers would
be intense indeed. Introducing the vast population of the world’s innocent to
more trouble than its worth to any government. On the other hand, if it were
with someone who understood and appreciated it. . .

Umeki
turned deliberately, twisting the sheets, humming a tune of her own, and bit
his nipple.

   
“
Konichiwa
to you too, my
little plum blossom.”

   
“I
dreamed that you flew away on an airship.”

   
“I
don’t ever have to leave. If—”

“You do. And I have to be without
you.” But with none of the sadness her voice had bowed so under the weight of
in the dream.

Later they lay smoking, about to
leave the room for the last time. “There’s a new Puccini opera,” she said. “An
American betrays a Japanese woman. Butterfly. He ought to die of shame, but
does not—Butterfly does. What are we to make of this? Is it that Japanese
do die of shame and dishonor but Americans don’t? Maybe
can’t ever
die
of shame because they lack the cultural equipment? As if, somehow, your country
is just mechanically destined to move forward regardless of who is in the way
or underfoot?”

   
As if
just having remembered, he said, “Something I’d better give you.”

She peered at him over the bight of a
pillow. “It was never yours to give to anyone. It was mine before I knew it
existed.”

   
“I
know that’s just your way of saying thank you.”

“I would be obliged to show this to
Kimurasan, to see what he can make of it.”

   
“Of
course.”

   
“The
Japanese government—I’m not so certain about them.”

   
“You’re
going home?”

   
She
shrugged. “I don’t know where that is. Do you?”

At the
OstendeVille Station
,
Kit had a moment—soon dissipated in purposeful noise and coalsmoke,
beerdrinking merriment, Root Tubsmith whanging away at a ukulele medley
including BorelClerc’s wildly popular “La Matchiche”—in which he glimpsed
how Ostend really might not be simply another pleasureresort for people with
too much money, but the western anchor of a continental system that happened to
include the Orient Express, the TransSiberian, the BerlintoBaghdad, and so on
in steel proliferation across the WorldIsland. Not yet aware of how familiar,
in the course of only a few more seasons, he was to become with the Imperium of
Steam, and how, from Ostend, courtesy of the Compagnie Internationale des
WagonsLits, one might, for comfortably less than two hundred francs, be hurled
into the East, vertiginously and perhaps for good. He looked for Umeki among
the crowds on the platform, even among subsets that would not possibly include
her, wondering at the protocols of destiny, of being led, of turning away, of
knowing where he did and didn’t belong. She wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be. The
more she wasn’t there, the more she was. Kit supposed there was something in
the theory of sets that covered this, but the train was moving, his brain was
numb, his heart was incommunicado, the dunes slipped by, then the Bruges Canal
and the larks swept upward from the stubble of the fields, gathering into a
defensive front against the autumn.

ally might have explained it if somebody had
insisted—the Chicago Fair was a long time ago, but she had kept a memory
or two of silent boats on canals, something began to stir as the vaporetto made
its way from the train station down the Grand Canal, until, just at sunset,
getting to the San Marco end, and there was the pure Venetian evening, the
bluegreen shadows, the lavenders, ultramarines, siennas, and umbers of the sky
and the lightbearing air she was breathing, the astonishing momentum of the
everyday twilight, gaslanterns coming on in the Piazzetta, San Giorgio Maggiore
across the water lit pale as angels, distant as heaven and yet seeming only a
step, as if her breath, her yearning, could reach across to it and
touch—she was certain for the first time in a life on the roll that whatever
“home” had meant, this was older than memory, than the story she thought she
knew. It was to gather into an upswelling of the heart she must struggle to
contain, and might have begun to regret when a nearby tourist, in a vilely
mucous specimen of British Accent, smirked to an effusive companion, “Oh,
everyone says that, give it a day or two and you’ll be screaming to get away,”
causing Dally to think about finding a gondola oar and hitting him with it,
maybe more than once. But the evening itself, spreading mercifully its deep
cloak, would see to this pest and his replicas in their thousands, they were
like the gnats who rose in clouds here at nightfall, their purpose to infest
the Venetian summer, to enhance its splendor with earthly annoyance, to pass
quickly as they must, driven off, forgotten. She, meanwhile, had just decided
to live here forever.

The Zombinis’ first engagement, at
the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, had been a triumph. They got rhapsodically
reviewed not only locally but in the Rome and Milan papers as well, and they
were held over for an extra week, so by

the time they got to Venice, the engagement here was already
extended and the house sold out for weeks in advance.

   
“So
this is the Malibran.”

   
“Marco
Polo’s house is right around the corner.”

   
“Hey,
you think he’ll come if we give him free tickets?”

   
“Here,
Cici, think fast.”

“Yaagghh!”
Cici reminded himself that it only looked like a fullsize elephant arcing
through the air about to land on top of and squash him. He took a step to the
side just in time, made a neat “pincette” pass, and slipped the animal into one
of the profondes of his trick jacket, where it promptly vanished, though it is
said today to be roaming comfortably the forests of its native Africa. Another
Celebrated Tumbling Pachyderm Feat successfully negotiated.

From
the wings, Vincenzo Miserere, the sales rep from the mirror factory on Isola
degli Specchi, looked on in appreciation. Over the years he had seen acts come
and go, and the high reputation of the Zombinis, whom he had taken the train to
Trieste to see, was well deserved.

“I
think once there were Zombinis around Venice,” he told Luca. “Long time ago.
Come on out to the factory while you’re here, we’ve got a whole library full of
old documents we’re in the process of cataloguing. Professore Svegli from the
U. of Pisa is giving us a hand with it. You might find something.”

Bria had known about the Venetian
Zombinis since she was a girl, when her father had motioned her one day into
his study and dug from its sumptuous chaos an ancient volume, bound in shark
leather,
The travels and adventures of Niccolò dei Zombini, Specchiere.
Back
in the seventeenth century, Niccolo had been apprenticed by his family to the
mirrormakers of the island, who like the glassmakers on Murano were fanatically
protective about their trade secrets. Corporations today are gentle and caring
compared to those early factory owners, whose secrecy and obsession just got
meaner and meaner as the years and generations passed. They kept their workers
confined to the one swampy little island, prisoners, forbidden to run
away—the penalty for anyone who tried to was pursuit and death. But
Niccolo made his escape anyway, and the book Luca was showing her began with
his departure from the island. Luca got into the habit of reading the kids to
sleep from it, one
guaglion
chasing another, place to place across the
map of Europe and through the Renaissance, no telegraphs, no passports, no
international spy networks, all you needed to stay ahead was better speed and
some imagination. Niccolo managed to disappear into all the noise and
confusion, which is what Europe was then.