Ink (45 page)

The steps under his feet are white now, pinkish limestone, Jerusalem stone. It's Arab East Jerusalem, still a midwinter morning, predawn, still in 1999, but shifted over sideways a little. Kentigern is called Glasgow in this fold. Even less of the sky is visible in these streets which narrow the farther on he goes; but what sky there is is a rich cerulean, at once more heavenly and airily real.

He checks his watch—bang on time—and lifts the cigarette up to his lips to take a draw, closes his eyes as, somewhere in the distance, a muezzin in his minaret begins the call to morning prayers.

Fallen angels, he thinks, and books of souls. That's one of the legends of the Book of All Hours, that it was brought to earth by the angels who fought neither for Heaven nor for Hell. While the War in Heaven raged, they thought only to keep it safe. But it was lost.

He opens his eyes.

Bursa. Just outside the Dilmun Otel, cafes and restaurants around him, and Mount Uludag sloping above and down into the city. Somewhere below, a muezzin sings, and Guy stands at a fence, cigarette in hand, looking down over the slope of roofs and gardens, listening to the waver of that distant clarion voice.

The Book isn't the only thing that's lost, he thinks. They all are, in one way or another, all humanity cut loose from their native realities by the Evenfall, even their individual identities torn up and scattered. Now the Evenfall has died away and they clamber from this broken world to that, searching the Hinter mist for family and friends, forging new kinships in this cold haze, latching on to shapes and shades that
might
be their lost brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers. That might be their lost others.

He's come to understand now that there's a deeper connection between them—Jack, Puck, Anna, Joey, Don and himself… Finnan too, wherever he is. The seven of them, seven souls, but maybe really only one… identity.

He walks up past the little wooden booth with the Heykel taksi parked outside, into the driveway, into the foyer of the hotel. He likes the old world, hard-times grandeur of the Dilmun. It's not on a par with the Celik Palas just up the road— with its vast domed Turkish bath, black-and-white photos on the wall of how it was in old colonial days, with formal gardens stretching down through where a road now runs, busy with cars spewing black fumes out of juddering exhausts. There was a time when the Qelik Palas would have been much more up his street—but now the Dilmun feels more of a home.

‘Geniden,’
he says.

Good morning.

‘Geniden,’
the receptionist says. ‘Room 611?’

‘Evet. Te§ekkur.’

It is easy to see that these two philosophies—Manualist and Neo-Iconoclast— are essentially arguing for the primacy of, on the one hand, infinity and, on the other hand, zero. Both attempt to ground the existential enigma of the Book in an essentialist absolute, captivated by the perfection of these abstract ideas—the theistic notion of the ink as a divine spirit, the atheistic notion of the vellum as a tabula rasa. Both, however, are ultimately magicking reality from their preferred
abstractions, seeking to get the determinate out of the indeterminate, something out of everything or something out of nothing.

Both are therefore equally flawed, offering no real agency for the collapse from the infinite potentiality of a metaphysical state—divine spirit or tabula rasa—to the finite actualities of existential reality. We cannot get from either a full vial or a blank page to the Book of All Hours by the mere wave of a word. The unwritten book, as Hobbsbaum said, is neither in the ink nor on the page.

It is only in recent years that philosophers have returned to a more archaic theory of the cosmogonic nature of the Book, one which proceeds not from the infinite to the finite, but from the indefinite to the definite—the Orphean Cosmogony, as it is known. By this theory, neither ink nor vellum has primacy, both being only more recent surrogates for the pigments and hides in which the Book developed over time, emerging throughout human history in the merging of its scattered sources, its independent inventions—a cuneiform mark on clay, a tribal tattoo on skin, a notch made on an ivory spearthrower.

Taking chaos as its starting point, the Orphean Cosmogony sees the generation(s) of the Book not as a singular event, a scribing by an individual author, but as a process of conjunction and differentiation, of evolution. There
is
no unwritten book in the Orphean Cosmogony, no prior and perfect metaphysical state of absolute certainty. Instead the Orphean Cosmogony looks for the origins of the determinate in the indeterminate—something out of anything rather than everything or nothing. Before the Book, it tells us, there were a myriad of books, countless artifices of vellum and ink, and clay and reed, of wood and ocher, stone and blood.

The elevator tings as it reaches his floor, and the doors slide open for him to step out into a corridor of artificial light and warmth. There's something both secure and smothering about these sorts of hotels, he thinks, with their decor unchanged for decades, lighting always ambient and temperature constantly just comfortable. You can't tell what season it is outside.

He knows it's spring in Bursa though, even before he slides his keycard into the magnetic lock and steps into the room with its curtains open wide; on the sixth floor it's always spring in Bursa.

——

He slides the window open for that feel of air still fresh with the night but warming with the rising sun. The noise of traffic which comes with the open window doesn't irk him; frankly, it's a comfort after all the pseudo-medieval nonsenses of Havens out in the wilds of the Hinter and the sex-steam excesses of Kentigern. He's rather fond of his Modernity, for all its faults.

The others—Jack and Puck, Joey, Anaesthesia, even Don—somehow seem to belong in those less mundane folds; they're creatures of the vellum and the ink, of the Vellum and the bitmites. But Fox… he may well have been traveling in it, immersed in it, for longer than any of them, but he's never been dissolved in it the way they have, never lost himself the way they have… not for more than a short eternity at least.

Sometimes he rather wishes he
could
just surrender, let the bitmites drown him in whatever dream they think he wants.

But what he wants is to wake up, for all of them to wake up, for Jack and Joey to stop playing you-kill-me-then-I'll-kill-you, for Puck and Anaesthesia to stop playing victim and avenger. Ah, well. There's Don, at least… Don just does whatever needs doing, ever the stoic and sober old soldier. They've sat together, late into the night, looking out over some apocalypse from a rooftop garden, watching fires lit by Jack and listening to the screams of angels torn apart by Anaesthesia's rupter. Watching skyscrapers fall in plumes of gray smoke.

“We've got to find some way to finish this,” he'd said to Don once.

It was Kentigern, just after they'd liberated Joey, and the bitmites had turned the city into a temporary autonomous hell. The Empire had ended. The fascists had fallen as the bitmites tore out of their stinking sewers, ripped across the city,
rippled
across the city, a plague of rats ridden by fleas. They'd won, but all they got in exchange was sectarian civil war, Greens and Blues, gangs loyal to nothing but a color, stepping in to impose a new order on the chaos with cutthroat razors, half bricks and sawn-off shotguns. Christ.

Don had just smiled wryly.

In another fold, Don had said to him, in another Kentigern, they would have called themselves Catholic and Protestant, followed rival football teams, sung songs of hate across the terraces; there'd be the odd stabbing, the odd pitched battle in the City Centre after a nil-nil draw. This was just the same picture drawn in bolder brushstrokes; it was a part of the city's nature, part of its character, a heritage of pointless animosities. The way it would always be.

Fox had looked out toward the sun rising in the east—forever, it seemed,
rising
in the east. Was it just a little higher today?

“Nothing lasts forever,” he'd said.

Now he looks out of the window at spring in Bursa, and he's sure of it. Just as the Evenfall swept across the Vellum and changed everything, just as the long night of Hinter followed in its wake, things are changing again.

That's the thing about chaos.

The concept of chaos as it applies to the Book of All Hours is a particularly emotive issue. While the resurgence of interest in the Orphean Cosmogony has focused attention on this area, the legacy of Manualist and Neo-Iconoclast thought in religious and scientific circles means there is still much resistance to the idea that the Book may be an intrinsically chaotic entity, with order merely an emergent behavior, an epiphenomenon.

When, in 1939, Professor Samuel Hobbsbaum advanced the theory that, contrary to Schaller's assertion, Paracletus had in fact remained in contact with the Book throughout the later years of his work on the
Principaea Cosmogonka
, and that the progressive derangement of his work was actually a reflection of the content of the Book, the whole of Academia erupted into uproar.

“The Book does not play James Joyce with the Cosmos,” said Schaller.

In approaching the Book of All Hours and the Cosmos it describes, however, we are faced with an existential construct composed of myriad somethings, of stars and planets, of particles and waves, of matter and energy, of trees and thunderstorms, of acrobats and artists. The tendency to see the Book as a singular and grand, consistent and complete thing is, Hobbsbaum argued in his 1939 address to the Royal Institute of Metaphysics, to all intents and purposes, an act of faith predicated on our desire for certainty.

The Book, Hobbsbaum argued, might just as easily be inherently contradictory, open only to multiple inconsistent, incomplete descriptions. Our most accurate descriptions of the Cosmos, as Paracletus was attempting to explicate in his
Principaea
, may be at best only coherent and comprehensive … and utterly incompatible with each other.

“Let us consider time and space,” he said. “Let us consider reality itself, as a palimpsest…”

Fox slides the mirrored door of the wardrobe open and pulls out the leather satchel, lays it on the bed. He unbuckles the satchel and slides the Book out. Looks at it.

He doesn't open it much these days. The last time he did, all the pages he examined were blank as a field covered in snow; he'd had the awful thought that the ink itself had escaped the pages, dripped out into the world to become the shadows under their feet, the night sky above their heads, the bitmites themselves infesting every nook and cranny of the world. He'd flicked forward through the pages, blank after blank after blank, stopped just before the last. He couldn't bring himself to look at it.

They'd been making their way back through a fold approximating some pre-Revolutionary Russia, heading toward Kentigern on a wireliner filled with nobs and knaves, Jack and Puck riding down in steerage with the peasants, Joey at the gaming tables in his crisp black uniform, playing the Georgian fatalist to admiring contessas, Don and Anna dressed as Zhivago and his wife, Fox with a cabin to himself, dapper in his pince-nez and goatee, notebook under his arm, a journalist perhaps. He'd spent the last few weeks watching the ink fade day by day, as if something was scouring the vellum, stripping it back to scribe a new text. Flicking his eyes up from the pages to look out into this Syberian Hinter. Flicking them back down to look at the faint gray mathematics of—as far as he could discern—infinity and zero.

They were somewhere over Stavropol when he opened it to find the first page blank.

Fox runs his hand over the leather of the cover, brittle and thin, cracking at the spine. The thing has shrunk since he stole it—or created it—since it came into his possession,
however
it came into his possession in countless conflicting pasts. It used to be the size and heft of some ancient grimoire; now it's like some Sunday School Bible, the sort of thing a child would be presented with after their first Communion, thicker but smaller than a cheap paperback. He can hold it in one hand, carry it in a pocket—that's what it's meant for, after all: a guide-book
to lead the innocent through the storms of life. Not that he feels terribly innocent.

He tore it to pieces once, ripped the pages out and threw them to the wind. When was that? Christ, so far ago he can't remember.

Jack had come back from one of his trips out into the Hinter, bleeding and burned—
-fucking dragons
, he said—dropped it in front of him like a dog returning a stick.
Look what I found.

It shouldn't exist but it does, this impossible thing, this book stolen from a vault and carried across the Vellum. Created in eternal Kentigern from the skin of angels. Forged in Paris, 1939. Opened in Berlin, 1929. Lost and stolen, destroyed, remade, rewritten, the Book has as many histories as the world itself, and it contains them all in its Mobius loop of time and space, of contradicting stories somehow fused as one confused and rambling tale, a sort of truth but full of inconsistencies and digressions, spurious interpolations and interpretations, fiction told as fact, fact told as fiction. There are truths and half truths, he thinks, lies, white lies and damn lies. And there are stories, which are all of the above.

He opens up the book and turns a page, which cracks between finger and thumb. He closes it again gently.

It might be a good thing though, he thinks, if he just crushed it now, let it just collapse into dead eternities and dust.

Hobbsbaum founded his thesis of Eternal Collapse on a reinterpretation of the seemingly pointless formula which Paracletus inexplicably spends his entire last volume exegesizing… x × i⁄x = 1. Where Schaller takes Paracletus's monomania on this subject as final evidence of his insanity, Hobbsbaum, in a remarkable feat of intellectual athletics, leaps across the centuries from the era of alchemy to the era of relativity with an amazing insight.