Codex (29 page)

After a certain point, though, he got stuck. Times had changed since his days as a high-flying buccaneer of the jetstream. The cooling of the earth continued, and with it yet another age had arrived, an ice age. A secondary phenomenon was accelerating the process, too. In the sky, next to the sun, hung a ghostly circle. It was almost transparent—it was visible only along its round edge, which was defined by a slight but definite distortion in the air. As Edward watched, the disk's edge touched the edge of the sun and began to pass over it. The disk was slowly eclipsing it, sliding into place on top of it like a contact lens over an eye. The portion of the sun that it covered was whiter, paler, colder, less painful to look at.

The genteel man reappeared.

“It's the aliens,” he explained matter-of-factly. “They're covering the sun with a special lens. To accelerate the cooling,” he added helpfully.

From then on the sunlight changed, became colder and grayer. Clouds rushed in, low and white, and the temperature dropped. Light, powdery snow began sifting down from the sky. The humans now eked out an existence among the cold ruins of New York, which had survived improbably intact during the millennia the city spent under sand and water. Civilization had fallen good and hard, and it wasn't getting up.

Edward's role in the game had become less that of a military leader and more that of a mayor, or a tribal chieftain. The humans who inhabited the New York of the future weren't concerned with resisting an alien invasion. They were concerned with staying alive on a day-to-day basis. They lived underground in the subway stations, where it was warmer and they were safer from predators. His job was resource management: finding food, collecting firewood, building tools, salvaging supplies from office buildings. He micromanaged, breaking out the spreadsheets and the actuarial tables. It was almost like his old job. As he played he manically hummed the theme from an animated Christmas special:

 

Friends call me Snowmeiser
Whatever I touch
Turns to snow in my clutch—
I'm too much!

 

Edward would stay up all night playing MOMUS and finally force himself to quit at eight in the morning, in broad daylight, with morning rush hour in full swing under his window. If he could have billed the hours he spent playing MOMUS, he thought, he'd be a millionaire ten times over. When he finally closed his eyes he saw the game on the insides of his eyelids, and when he finally fell asleep he dreamed about it.

Life in the game mimicked the bleakness of his real life. Wolves had returned from wherever they'd been living during happier times, and now they prowled the streets in search of the old and feeble, pink tongues dangling from gray muzzles. Icebergs as tall as skyscrapers crowded into New York Harbor. In Central Park the ground was hard as iron and streaked with light, powdery snow. The only color was the trace of blue that showed through where the snow had formed low drifts, which the wind blew into the shape of breaking waves. Edward knew where he was now, knew it with a bizarre, delusional certainty. He was in Cimmeria.

E
DWARD'S PHONE RANG,
and messages were left, but never by Margaret. He'd called her often enough now that it was pointless to call her again, but he couldn't think of anything else to do. Her phone numbers (he'd managed to pry an office number for her out of a stuttering secretary at Columbia) felt like his sole connection to anything that mattered. He was feeling the pull of the codex again, more than ever, and he needed her to find it, and he missed her, too. Was she embarrassed by what happened at the library? Angry? Ashamed? At this point he didn't care, he just wanted an answer.

He was sitting on his couch noodling aimlessly on a guitar he'd never learned to play when the phone rang again. His answering machine picked up.

It wasn't Margaret. The voice was clear, sensuously sweet, and oddly ageless, neither young nor old. He snapped awake, and every nerve in his body fired at once. It belonged, unmistakably, to the Duchess of Bowmry. It seemed like the first real sound he'd heard in weeks.

The Duchess seemed nonplussed—she didn't seem to really understand that the answering machine wasn't a human being. He picked up.

“Edward,” she said, flustered. “You're there.”

“Yes.” He was wearing only his boxers, and he looked around for some pants to put on. It seemed wrong to address her while looking down at his pale, bristly legs. “Uh, Your Grace,” he added.

“You don't have to call me that, you know. Peter insists on it, but I never got used to it. Growing up I was just a baroness.”

He sat back down, still in his underwear.

“So—Baroness Blanche?”

“I was called Lady Blanche.”

He waited for some clue as to what she wanted, but nothing came.

“So are you a baroness of...somewhere in particular?” he hazarded. “Or just a baroness? I mean, not that you could ever be
just
a baroness—?”

“Of Feldingswether,” she said. “It's a horrible little place. I never visit. They make tennis rackets there, the whole town smells like varnish.”

“So how did that work when you got married? I mean, if you don't mind my asking. Did you have to give up being Baroness of—?”

“Of Feldingswether? Not at all.” She laughed. “One person can hold more than one title, thank God, so I'm Baroness of Feldingswether in my own right and Duchess of Bowmry by courtesy.”

“And so is your husband the Baron of Feldingswether by courtesy?” Edward asked, manically following the logic to its bitter end. He didn't seem to be able to shut up.

“Certainly not!” she said triumphantly. “Men don't automatically assume their wives' titles the way women do. That's why if you marry a king you're a queen, but the husband of the queen of England gets fobbed off with some silly little title like ‘prince consort.' Anyway, it's all very complicated.”

“So what should I call you?”

“Call me Blanche,” she said. “It's what my friends call me.”

Edward did. To his surprise he and the Duchess had a long, meandering, fairly pleasant, and utterly ordinary conversation. He could hardly believe it was happening. She could have been a friendly aunt—affable, voluble, slightly flirtatious, a world-class conversationalist, obviously the product of centuries of breeding and decades of training. True, there was a slightly manic quality to her speech, but at least it had the advantage of making up for any awkwardness on his part. She had obviously set out to charm him, and even if the gesture felt a little forced, he wasn't in any position to put up a fight. Before he knew it he was explaining about his job, about his vacation, about his plans for the future, such as they were, and she had the gift of making it all seem improbably fascinating. It was a relief to talk to somebody who—unlike, say, Margaret—knew how to make him feel paid attention to for a change. And so what if she was an enigmatic foreign plutocrat?

She steered the talk around to Edward's upcoming move to London, to the vagaries of air travel, the various neighborhoods he might consider living in, the relative advantages and disadvantages of country life over life in the city, and so on and so forth. She told a long and actually fairly humorous story about renovating an ancient garderobe at Weymarshe. In the background Edward heard the
yip yip
of a tiny dog jumping up and down for attention.

Inevitably they came around to the subject of the codex. He told her the story of his and Margaret's trip to the Chenoweth Annex, and their disappointment there—leaving out the part about his close encounter with the Duke's driver. She sighed.

“I sometimes wonder if it's real.” The Duchess sounded tired. “The
Viage,
that is. It was once, I feel sure, but do you think the poor thing has really survived all this time? Books can die so many ways, they're like people that way. Though they remind me of mollusks, too—hard on the outside, but with those delicate articulated innards...”

She sighed again.

“This is going very badly, Edward. We're running out of time.”

“I don't know what to tell you.” Edward could hear the concern in her voice, and he imagined her pale brow furrowing. “We've pretty much exhausted all our leads.”

“What about Margaret? She sounds very clever.”

“She is. But she...I don't know where she is. I haven't heard from her in days.”

“What's she like?” A hint of something—could it possibly be jealousy?—crept into her voice. “Can we trust her? I just love the
idea
of her—she sounds like a cross between Stephen Hawking and Nancy Drew.”

“She's a hard person to read.” Edward felt guilty talking about Margaret behind her back, but really, why not? What did he owe Margaret, anyway? “She's very serious. Very earnest. A little strange. But she's read practically everything anybody's ever written about anything.”

“She sounds intimidating.”

“She is. She makes me feel like a complete idiot, to tell you the truth. But it's not her fault. She can't help it if I'm ignorant.”

“Don't be silly. You're not ignorant at all.”

“Well,” he finished up haplessly, “maybe you'll meet her someday.”

“Well, I hope I will,” the Duchess said graciously. “Is she coming with you when you come to England?”

“I don't know. At least, I don't think so.” The idea had never even occurred to him. “She has her own work to do here. I could never drag her away from that.”

“But you would if you could, wouldn't you?”

“You mean, bring her with me?” He balked. “I don't think so. I mean, I wouldn't want to assume—”

He broke off, flustered. The Duchess laughed.

“I'm teasing you, Edward!” she said. “You're much too serious! You do know that about yourself, don't you? You're much, much too serious.”

“If you say so,” he said, chagrined. He felt like he needed to turn the conversation around, regain the initiative. “Blanche, why doesn't your husband want me to look for the codex?”

There was a long pause.

“He said that?” She sounded distracted—maybe it was the little dog's turn to bask in her attention. He sensed that he'd broken an unspoken rule, that their temporary rapport was fragile and could disappear in an instant. “Well, I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it. So you talked to him, did you?”

“No, of course not! It came through Laura. But why don't you want him to know I'm looking for it?”

“Look, I appreciate your concern, Edmund—”

“Edward. Good, because—”

“And if at any point you feel that you'd rather not be involved with this project, you're free to go, as long as you agree to keep the substance of our dealings confidential.” She spoke in a warm, full, obtrusively generous tone, a warning tone, and he could tell her impersonal manner was meant to wound him. The friendly aunt was suddenly far away. “But as long as you're working for me, you'll do so on my terms. I have a lot of other irons in the fire right now, Edward. I have resources beyond anything you know about. You're not the only one looking for the codex, you know. You're a very small part of this.”

Edward hesitated. He wondered if it was true, that she had other people like him working for her. He strongly suspected that it wasn't, that the Duchess was bluffing him, but that was almost beside the point. She was testing him, ascertaining to a precise tolerance how much of her bullshit he was willing to put up with, and how little information he could get by on before he balked. And he realized to his dismay that he hadn't reached his limit.

Once he apologized the Duchess reverted to her cheery, unaffected manner, and he sensed her starting to steer the conversation toward a graceful ending. They talked for five or ten minutes more. She showed him her flirtatious side again. He must call her when he came to London. They must meet. It would be wonderful. She had a few thoughts about where to look for the codex—she would send him a letter. He was almost embarrassed by how easily he succumbed to her wiles, giving himself up to the blissful illusion that they could trust one another. He found himself admitting that he was already supposed to be in London, that in fact his job was already supposed to have started, and she laughed as if that was the most hilarious thing she'd ever heard.

“I was wrong about you,” she said, when she recovered her composure. “Maybe you aren't too serious after all.”

“Maybe I'm not serious enough,” Edward countered.

“Well, I don't know,” said the Duchess. “But it can't be both. I should think it would be either one or the other, as a matter of logical principle.”

He sensed that she was getting ready to hang up, but he couldn't let her go, not yet. Not before she gave him something more.

“Blanche,” he said gravely. “I need to know something. Why did you ask me to help you find the codex? Why me and not somebody else?”

He expected her to snap at him again, but she just smiled instead—he could hear it in her voice—and suddenly he suspected that he was treading dangerously close to something he didn't want to know.

“Because I know I can trust you, Edward,” she said, her voice low and thrilling over the phone line.

“But why? Because of that deal I did for you, at Esslin & Hart? The one with the silver futures? And the insurance company?” He was grasping at straws now.

“No, Edward. It was—” She hesitated. “Well, that was the reason at first. Peter wanted you. But when I saw you that day, I knew you could help me. I could see it in your face. I just knew I could trust you.”

Edward was silent. That's it? he thought. Was she making fun of him? Was she trying to seduce him? Was she insane? What kind of a fool did she take him for? It had been a serious question, and he dearly wished she had a better answer for him. Her answer made him want to hang up the phone, badly.