Against the Day (119 page)

   
“Sure.”

“They
worship it, this empty space, it’s their highest form of worship. This volume,
or I suppose nonvolume, of pure
Akaša
—being the Sanskrit for
what we’d call the Æther, the element closest to the allpervading Atman, from
which everything else has arisen—which in Greek obviously then becomes
‘
Chaos
,’
 
and so down to van Helmont in his alchemist’s
workshop, who being Dutch writes the opening fricative as a G instead of a
Chi,
giving us
Gas,
our

own modern
Chaos,
our bearer
of sound and light, the
Akaša
flowing from
our
sacred
spring, the local Gasworks. Do you wonder that for some the Gas Oven is
worshipped at, as a sort of shrine?”

   
“I don’t.
But then I never
didn’t
wonder either.”

   
“Am I
annoying you, Mr. Swallowfield?”

In
Lew’s experience of English English, this usually meant he was about to
overstay his welcome. “All done here. I’ll bring these back to the office,
we’ll write you up a sample policy, feel free to make any changes you like, or
to say hell no altogether.” And he withdrew again out into the empty suburban
lamplight, the stridently unpopulated evening.

ne day, the day he would be some time coming to terms with
his idiocy in not seeing the obvious approach of, Kit was summoned to the local
branch of the Bank of Prussia in the Weenderstraße and beckoned into its back
regions by Herr Spielmacher, the International Manager, hitherto friendly
enough but today, how would you put it, a little distant. He held a thin sheaf
of papers.

“We have a communication from New
York. Your
Kreditbriefe, . .
.” he gazed for a long time at an
interesting photograph of the Kaiser on an adjoining desk.

   
So.
“No longer in force,” Kit suggested.

Brightening, the banker risked a fast
look at Kit’s face. “You have heard from them?”

   
Had
been all along, Kit realized—just wasn’t listening.

“I
am authorized to pay you the balance of the funds as yet undrawn this period.”
He had the sum ready in a small pile of mostly fiftymark notes.

“Herr
Bankdirektor,” Kit held his hand out. “Nice doing business with you. I’m happy
we can part company without any embarrassing shows of sentiment.”

He
slipped outside, doubled down a few back alleys, and entered the Bank of
Hannover, where on his arrival in Göttingen, perhaps with some hidden talent
for precognition, he had set up a small account with his winnings from the
tables at Ostend, and insulated, he hoped, from any Vibe arrangements.

“You
seem disturbed,” noted Humfried that evening. “Usually you are so typically
American, without a thought in your head.”

   
It
wasn’t till later, on the wav to meet Yashmeen, that Kit was able to let the

situation catch up with him some. It seemed now that Scarsdale
Vibe had been far too eager to agree to Kit’s plan to attend Göttingen.
Whatever the longterm plan had been, here apparently was the payoff. Kit could
not see this quite as clearly as he’d have liked, but he had felt it in the
bright gazes directed at him in the bank.

He
found Yashmeen up on the third floor of the Auditorienhaus as usual, in the
reading room, a chaos of open books converging at her radiantly attentive face.
He recognized a bound copy of Riemann’s
Habilitationsschrift
of 1854 on
the foundations of geometry but didn’t see the 1859 paper on primes.

   
“What,
no ζfunction?”

She
looked up, not at all distracted, as if having known the moment he came in. He
wished. “This has been scriptural for me,” she said. “I see now the conjecture
was there only as an enticement to bring me ‘in’ a certain distance, to get me
ready for the real revelation—his astounding reimagination of
space—more than the usual
Achphänomen
. . .
an angel, too bright to look at directly, lighting one by one
the pages I must read. It has made me a very difficult person.”

   
“I’ll
say.”

They
left the Auditorienhaus and walked through the evening. “Had a piece of news
today,” Kit began, when out from behind a bush jumped a demented young man,
screaming
“
Tchetvyortoye
Izmereniye! Tchelvyortoye
~
Izmerenye!
”

   
“
Yob
tvoyu mat’
,”
sighed
Yashmeen in some exasperation, evading his grasp before Kit could move in. The
young man ran off down the street. “I should start carrying a weapon,” she
said.

   
“What’s
that he was hollering?”

   
“ ‘
Fourth Dimension!
’ ”
she said.
“ ‘
Fourth Dimension!
’ ”

“Oh.
Well, guess he came to the right place. Minkowski would sure be the one to
see.”

“They’re
all over the place lately. They call themselves ‘Otzovists.’ Godbuilders. A new
subset of heretics, this time against Lenin and his Bolshevists—said to
be antiMaterialist, devout readers of Mach and Ouspensky, immoderately focused
on something
they
call ‘the fourth dimension.’ Whether Dr. Minkowski, or
in fact any algebraist in the street, would recognize it as such is another
matter. But they have been able with little effort to drive the Materialists in
Geneva quite mental with it. Lenin himself is said to be writing a gigantic
book now, attempting to
refute
the ‘fourth dimension,’ his position
being, from what I can gather, that the Tsar can only be overthrown in three.”

   
“Intriguing
thought
. . . .
But what do these
folks want with you?”

   
“It’s been going on for a while. They
don’t say much, usually only stand there looking at me with these haunted
stares.”

“Wait,
let me guess. They think you know how to travel in the fourth dimension.”

She
made a sour face. “I knew you’d understand. But it gets worse. The T.W.I.T., it
seems, have also come to town. They want me out of Göttingen and back under
their wing again. Whether I want to leave or not.”

   
“Saw
them, wondered who they might be. Your Pythagorean friends.”

   
“ ‘
Friends.
’ ”

   
“Well,
Yash.”

“At
dinner yesterday evening, Madame Eskimoff—perhaps you’ll meet
her—said that when spirits walk, beings living in fourdimensional space
pass through our own three, and the strange presences that flicker then at the
edges of awareness are those very moments of intersection. When we enter, even
in ordinary daylight, upon a chain of events we are certain we have lived
through before, in every detail, it is possible tha
t
we have stepped outside of Time as it commonly passes here,
above this galleyslave repetition of days, and have had a glimpse of future,
past, and present”—she made a compressive gesture—“all together.”

   
“Which
would be to interpret the fourth dimension as Time,” said Kit.

   
“They
call it ‘the already seen.
’ ”

“That’s
what they’re here for? That’s what they think they can use you for?” He thought
he saw a connection. “Riemann.”

“At
the heart of it. But, Kit.” She performed that strange preening stretch of the
neck that had first captured his attention. “You see, it happens to be true.”

 
He reminded himself that the night they
first met he had witnessed her disappearance into a solid wall. “All right. Is
it something you can control? go in and out of when you want to?”

“Not
always. It started harmlessly enough, when I was much younger, thinking about
complex functions for the first time, really. Staring at the wallpaper. One
night, at some godawful hour, I understood that I couldn’t get away with only
one plane, I’d need two, one for the argument, one for the function, each with
a real axis and an imaginary one, meaning
four axes,
all perpendicular
to one another at the same point of origin, and the more I tried to
see
that,
the crazier ordinary space became, until what you might call
i, j,
and
k,
the unit vectors of our given space, had each rotated an unknown number of
degrees, about that unimaginable fourth axis, and I thought I had brain fever.
I didn’t sleep. I slept too much.”

   
“The
mathematician’s curse.”

   
“Then you . . .”

“Oh
. . .” Kit shrugged. “I think about it, sure, everybody does, but no more than
I have to.”

   
“I
knew yon were an idiot.”

   
“
My
curse. Maybe we could swap?”

   
“You
don’t want mine, Kit.”

He
considered lecturing her on what her real curse was, but thought better of it.

“The
first time I was in your rooms—something like it happened then. I thought
I’d found some kind of
Schnitte
—one of those ‘cuts’ connecting the
sheets of Riemann’s multiplyconnected spaces—something that would allow
access to a different. . . I don’t know, ‘set of conditions’? ‘vector space’?
Unreal, but not compellingly so—I was back in ordinary spacetime before I
knew it, and after a while the memory faded. That’s when it
really
happened.
Up at Rohns Garten, I was sitting at a table with classmates, eating some kind
of strange German soup, no forewarning,
Batz!
here was the room, the
view out the window, but as they
really were,
a threedimensional section
through a space of higher dimensionality, perhaps four, perhaps more
. . . .
I hope you aren’t about to ask how
many
. . . .
”

   
They
went in a cafe where they were unlikely to be interrupted.

   
“Teach
me how to disappear, Yash.”

   
Something
in his voice. She narrowed her gaze.

   
“They’ve
cut off my letters of credit.”

“Oh,
Kit. And here I’ve been banging on—” She reached a hand and placed it on
one of his. “I can lend you—”

“No,
nichevo,
right now money’s not what I’m worried about so much as staying
alive. My Pa always used to say, if it doesn’t work with gold, the next step
will be lead. Somehow I’ve gotten to be a threat to them. Maybe they finally
made an educated guess about how much I really know. Maybe something’s happened
back in the States, we got lucky and nailed one of them, or they got another
one of us
. . . .
” He held his head
briefly. “Just too much I don’t know. Except they don’t have to be nice
anymore. And I’m crossed off. Delivered into exile.”

“I
may be in that same predicament, and soon. With trivial changes of sign, of
course. No one is saying anything clearly. It’s this damned English practice of
talking in code, so everything has to be deciphered. I am guessing that since
the revolution in Russia my father’s position has become precarious. And so,
perforce, my own. There is also the AngloRussian Entente, and the fourthdimension
business, which is after all the current rage in psychical research. Take your
pick.” There was more—something she feared. Even Kit,

who wasn’t very sensitive, could see that—but she was
keeping her own troubled counsel.

   
Her
eyes were wide again, speculative, and she took a slow breath or two. “Well,
you’re
free,
then.”