Irregularity Read online

  First published 2014 by Jurassic London

  SW8 1XN, Great Britain

  www.jurassic-london.com

  “Fairchild’s Folly” copyright © Tiffani Angus 2014

  “A Game Proposition” copyright © Rose Biggin 2014

  “Footprint” copyright © Archie Black 2014

  “A Woman Out of Time” copyright © Kim Curran 2014

  “The Heart of Aris Kindt” copyright © Richard de Nooy 2014

  “An Experiment in the Formulae of Thought” copyright © Simon Guerrier 2014

  “Circulation” copyright © Roger Luckhurst 2014

  “Irregularity” copyright © Nick Harkaway 2014

  “The Voyage of the Basset” copyright © Claire North 2014

  “The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle” copyright © Adam Roberts 2014

  “Animalia Paradoxica” copyright © Henrietta Rose-Innes 2014

  “The Last Escapement” copyright © James Smythe 2014

  “The Darkness” copyright © Matt Suddain 2014

  “The Spiders of Stockholm” copyright © E. J. Swift 2014

  Afterword © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 2014

  Cover shows Resolution by Howard Hardiman

  www.howardhardiman.com

  Artwork by Gary Northfield (www.garynorthfield.com), based on original imagery from the collection of the National Maritime Museum.

  Original images © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

  978-0-9928172-1-3 (Trade)

  978-0-9928172-3-7 (eBook)

  Printed and bound by Imprint Digital, Exeter, UK

  eBook conversion by handebooks.co.uk

  The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Irregularity

  art by Gary Northfield &

  the National Maritime Museum

  cover by Howard Hardiman

  edited by Jared Shurin

  To failure

  Contents

  Prologue:Irregularity

  Nick Harkaway

  A Game Proposition Rose Biggin

  The Spiders of Stockholm E. J. Swift

  The Last Escapement James Smythe

  The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle Adam Roberts

  Animalia Paradoxa Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Footprint Archie Black

  The Voyage of the Basset Claire North

  The Heart of Aris Kindt Richard de Nooy

  An Experiment in the Formulae of Thought Simon Guerrier

  Circulation Roger Luckhurst

  The Darkness M. Suddain

  A Woman Out of Time Kim Curran

  Fairchild’s Folly Tiffani Angus

  Afterword

  Richard Dunn and Sophie Waring

  Email

  Contributors

  Irregularity

  Excerpted from the “missing diary” of Augusta Noel, recently discovered in a cache of documents in Penwith. Reproduced by kind permission of Nicholas Harkaway.

  My mother was one of those women of a type I have come to dislike intensely, who believe that everything in their mothers’ days was better than it will be in their daughters’, and she was constantly caught between the desire to commiserate with me for my lot and the overwhelming need to blame me for this fall. She could read, for example, but chose not to, lest her head fill with an unfashionable weight of ideas, and, in consequence, she opposed my going to university or indeed being educated in anything much beyond the management of a household and the aesthetics of the person. A well-bred girl should perhaps know about music and even play an instrument, but if so it should be one which did not expose the person to undue sensuality. This meant neither a stringed instrument where vibration may pass from the instrument’s body — scandalously designed in a caricature of femininity and therefore somehow party to mysteries of sex I should absolutely not come to hear of, despite my possession in some measure of every feature thus described — to the flesh of the player; nor a woodwind instrument which might by excitation of the lips stimulate earthy passions. Brass, of course, was simply too manly and forceful for a young girl. The lesser harp, she averred, was ideal because the tone was delicate and flowery and the playing was a minor mortification, being uncomfortable to the back and shoulders and miserable for the soft skin of the fingers. The great harp was quite unacceptable, being a toy for courtesans and foreign adventuresses.

  My father had entertained a string of such foreigners, each more glamorous and aristocratic than the last as his renown as a gentleman engineer increased, so one might suspect her of partisanship in this last, but in truth, I think she was glad when he removed himself to Tunis with a woman who optimistically claimed the title of princess from her minute fiefdom in Bohemia. It meant, at least, that she was free of his incessant explosions. The tinkle of glassware and the smell of burning did not sit well with her, no more than the stark, Newtonian understanding of nature which he applied not only to the world of inert objects but also to human beings. It was his conviction that people, like billiard balls, must first be impelled and will then move onwards until intercepted, and that any deviation must be due to a spin imparted at the outset of their journey. For my father, the world was a linear progression made up of linear progressions, so that the planet and the sun rolled through space, and on them we all rolled as well, along the cushions and across the felt, knocking into one another and producing the appearance of chance or choice. This, my mother said, was both offensive and ridiculous, and she would not have him tell me such things, nor any of his other modern notions, and now he was gone with his fancy woman and his vile, stinking chemistry, well, there at least was an end to it.

  That he continued to govern my education, under laws of patriarchy which I myself subsequently worked to overthrow, was a conundrum for us both. He enabled my present intellectual breadth as surely as she would have prevented it had she had the means. To assert her right to make me in the image she desired, she must accept the arguments I advanced into the face of her stony disapproval. To bring me up short, in turn, as I railed at her, she needed only to observe that had she been properly enfranchised — very much against her better judgment — I most assuredly should not be. Thus we lived until her death in an analogue of that place posited by the French mathematician, Lagrange, where opposing forces cancel one another and the field of events, though in tension, acts as if it is uncontested.

  For all that, this is not the story of my family arguments, but the story of how I came to know that the world is more strange than my father ever imagined or my mother ever acknowledged, and it begins with her death, which was abrupt but hardly unexpected.

  She died on All Fool’s Day, the first of April, a celebration she found entirely odious for its frivolity and for its lingering sense of licence and misrule. The annual upending of certainties and established orders which was traditional in the Middle Ages was to her a lower class amusement — it did not occur to her to search for irony in this perception — and as such was to be avoided and dismissed by anyone who perceived themselves as coming from quality. This it must be acknowledged she did, and we did, for generations back on either side, without any possibility of denay. I inherited her effects — my parents
had no other children and my father would have insisted on an equitable disbursal of funds and objects even if it were otherwise, primogeniture being one of those customs he most considered wasteful. How many bad kings has England suffered, he wrote to me once from his Tunis palace, that had wise sisters or strong mothers?

  Among these effects was an envelope addressed to me, made out in her somewhat flowery cursive script, within which was the singular and unanticipated instruction that I present myself at the town offices of a solicitor named M and upon demand announce to him a succession of nonsensical words, which must be sung to an enclosed musical score. This I did, to the profound mutual embarrassment of myself and Mr. M , and he in consequence agreed that he had certain instructions in turn: that he must pass to me a key to a certain house, and bring me safely to the door. In anticipation of my arrival and my positive identification as my mother’s daughter, he had taken the liberty of hiring two former army men who would perform that last office and remain at my disposal for the remainder of the day. In they came, Mr. Buck and Mr. Trimble, and a more unlikely brace of guardians you never saw: they had narrow, mistrustful eyes and huge-knuckled hands, and skin made rough and brown by time spent, M said, in the Afghan mountains. Neither man spoke, and I realised that here was a true challenge of my mettle. Today, for this brief time, I was their commander, a post other women had occupied in these last feverish years: Jane Digby had her Bedou and Sardarni Sada Kaur fought for her kingdom. I stiffened my spine and inspected them, without the vaguest notion of what to look for, but under this scrutiny they instinctively fell into a sort of parade rest, and when I turned to go their manner was crisper and more confindent than it had been a few moments before.

  The cab ride from M ’s office to the house lasted no more than a quarter of an hour, but in that time my imaginations were remarkably lurid and bizarre. I imagined for the first moments that I had given myself into the grip of some remarkable religious conspiracy and should shortly be captured and taken by nuns to an out of the way place, and there live out my life at my mother’s behest as a prisoner unless I should in some manner counterfeit the symptoms of redemption according to instructions she had given, and be released into the keeping of a suitably masterful — yet dispassionate — husband.

  My next thought, at the extreme remove, was that she had for all of her life been the proprietress of a bordello — or more, a seraglio — so staggeringly licentious that only the most corrupt and the most powerful might enter. I pictured myself discovering that, far from having been against the act of sex on principle, my mother had been the greatest expert in the permutations and possibilities between human bodies in matters of pleasure and excess that the Empire possessed, and that my father had not left her in pursuit of greater eroticisms but lesser ones, or had gone off with her blessing to pursue his own mastery of the craft she had imparted to him. My experience in this regard being somewhat uncertain and hasty at best, I was concerned that I should be at a disadvantage vis à vis my employees. From this it followed that I might have to learn about and experience, for good and sufficient reasons of practical governance, all the most outré indecencies that man had devised. I found I did not entirely quail at this prospect.

  In quick succession thereafter I imagined myself the heir to a lost kingdom, to a criminal organisation trading in opium, and to an alchemical order preserving the secrets of antiquity.

  What never occurred to me for one moment was what I actually saw when I opened the door and stepped through the narrow opening, Mr. Buck and Mr. Trimble loitering in the street to see off any opportunistic thief.

  It was a library.

  I was seized immediately with a sense of weight, as if the presence of so many books created a concrete pressure on the mind as a concentration of gas does upon the inner workings of the ear. I felt that the thinking aspect of my self lay like a droplet upon a flat surface and the pressure must soon cause me to boil and become vapour, slowly dispersing in space. This feeling was so certain, so intimate, that it appeared to come from within my body. I stepped back and slammed the door.

  The afterimage of thousands of books hung imprinted on my eyes. It did not matter to me if each and every one was full of provable falsehoods and stupidities: any text is an image of a mind, and any mind is worthy of attention. A book is a portrait not only of what it is about but also of its author: between the lines of text is the ghostly impression of a person. A library, by extension, is a mosaic describing its librarian. In this house was not only a gathering of educated thinkers preserved on paper but also the last residing flavour of my mother, and it was a flavour most covert, most occluded and concealed, that she had revealed to me only now that she was dead. I felt that for the first time in my adult experience we were about to have a real conversation.

  The toughs were still behind me, taking some amusement from my actions. To men accustomed to standing down smugglers and thieves in the alleys of Cheapside and enforcing the collection of debts from drunken officers of the cavalry waving pistols in all directions, no doubt a house full of books is a slight enemy and one easily dispatched with matches. For a moment I thought to rebuke them, but then realised that it was obliquely a compliment: neither of them would mock a lady of quality, but both would feel free to find amusement in the folly of a superior officer. From which it followed, however, that I must find my courage or lose their respect. I drew breath and opened the door once more. The effect was no less astonishing the second time, but preparation was evidently some defense, as I was not blasted back over the threshold but found my feet, and was able to come into the room and stand at the centre, taking stock.

  The walls were entirely covered up with shelves, and these were entirely full of a broad-ranging catalogue covering the latest work on the natural sciences and extensive political discourses and the arts. Burke was there, and Condorcet, and so too were Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz. There was no obvious logic to their arrangement: Milton rubbed shoulders with Euler, Lavoisier with Metastasio, and yet as the eye travelled around the room there was an appropriateness to the placements, a sense of journey and of balance. I felt that if I were to begin at any point in the maze I would find myself guided by implication or quotation to nearby texts and thence outwards in a webwork of reference, inspiration, inference and opposition. Likewise if I placed my hand upon a book I knew — there were few enough that I could claim to know well, but these were immediately apparent to me because the brain apprehends the names of things it understands more clearly than those it finds yet mystifying — I determined that behind my back I would find some inverted image either of the content or the character of the text. The disquisition on anamnesis in the Meno, which I had always taken as a literal argument on the topic of reincarnation, I now perceived in an instant, as I looked over one shoulder and glimpsed a beautiful edition of Voltaire’s Zadig, to be a metaphorical rumination on the nature of argument and the governing principles of the human brain.

  The tables, meanwhile, waiting placidly under the stacks of newer books, suggested threads and traditions of narrative or poetic style and schools of thought.

  There was only one chair, and I sat in it, entirely bewildered. I could not begin to reconcile this trove with the woman I had known, and nor could I imagine when she might have come here. Had she, then, inherited it from someone and passed it on to me as she had found it? But no: there were recent writings here: the place was maintained. Was it some gift of my father’s she had withheld? Had she for some reason purchased — with what money I could not imagine — the services of an archivist and scholar to assemble it for me? Was I standing in the shadow of a person hired to create a perfect Heaven for an inquiring mind, or some diabolical Hell where every track of understanding eventually petered out in disappointment and frustration? Could someone, working with these materials, reasonably expect to stifle or to drown the urge that was in me to learn and to understand? The more I looked around, the more I thought not, but the more I believed also that I was sti
ll looking only at the shell of the egg. I passed through the library, therefore, into the other rooms of the house, but they were quite bare, literally bare, with wooden boards and shuttered windows, as if awaiting more books or, perhaps, myself, to seek out what designs and furnishings I might desire.

  And then, returning no wiser to a room constructed for the most part out of the assembled understandings of mankind, I saw the book I was looking for without really knowing that I was looking, the book whose existence was implied by the position of all the others, which must surely resolve the puzzle of the library.

  It rested on the table nearest the door, and a glance at the other titles told me this was a place of triage and taxonomy, for here alone the serendipitous organisation of the rest was in abeyance. This table was a muddle of new arrivals, and the most motley of them all was a smooth, remarkably precise volume, most curious in appearance.

  Unlike the books around it, this one was not bound between hard covers or kept loose-leaf in a box. It was instead protected by a varnished design printed or painted onto flexible card. The covering image was unconventional, an inward spiral in browns and greys which evoked a profound sense of foreignness, in the manner I have seen where an artist from Italy is asked to work in the style of the Dutch. The final product of such commissions is almost right, but the execution comes with all the wrong signals and habits as the technique of origin is entirely different, so that the whole belongs in neither country but rather in some space in between. So it was with this book. I knew at once that there was a mathematical underpinning to what I was seeing, and that was familiar, but the way in which the thing was presented was quite alien, deriving from a different sensibility that seemed to decry ornamentation and reach for purity of form. Of course it was itself an ornament. The paradox relieved my alarm somewhat: wherever this book came from, publishers were the same there as they are anywhere else.