Irregularity Page 8

  “Were a unicorn real,” Newton returned, “how long might its horn be?”

  Boyle smiled and tut-tutted. “Consider if the inconsistencies in the Ptolemaic system be explicable in terms of science yet to be developed? Science that postdates anno domini 1631? Consider: the system in toto consisteth of nine spheres: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Iuppiter, Saturn, the stellatum, wherein are located the fixed stars, and beyond it the Primum Mobile. If the space between spheres be fifty millions of miles, which accordeth with the telescopic data, then the radius of the primum mobile would be four hundred and fifty millions of miles. Such a sphere would inscribe a circumference of two thousand eight hundred millions of miles — a distance it must perforce travel in one day. It moveth, then, at a velocity of thirty three thousand miles per second. I, happening to know the speed of light itself, know thereby that the primum mobile approacheth that luminal speed, by a fraction larger than a third. And at such speeds, as the science that lies beyond Brahe’s ken assures us, relativistic effects begin to distort spacetime.”

  “Quoth what?” Newton exclaimed, disbelievingly.

  “Temporis spatio vel spatii tempore,” Boyle replied. “For they are indissoluble. And such distortions, including vortices of gyrotopic interference set in place, much as standing waves in a spiral motion, would impart retrogressive swirls to the motion of the inner spheres. If Kepler had known the natural philosophy I now know, he would have understood enough to explain such variables as appeared to misfit Ptolemy’s model. Relativistic effects in the primum mobile! Dark matter and graviton eddying.”

  “So ye deny the New Astronomy? Ye think it untrue?”

  “It is as true as the Old Astronomy! Copernicus’s system is as true as Ptolemy’s. Or, it becometh true, as we collect more data. The New Astronomers in that land I visited take it as axiomatic, and are right to. They plan and execute passage from world to world by magic chariots, and in so traveling they find the cosmos just as Copernicus said. But had we undertaken such voyages in the thirteenth-century, we would have found the cosmos just as Ptolemy said!”

  “Impossible,” Newton insisted. “The logical law of non-contradiction is such that it be impossible both versions of the world are true.”

  “Yet both are, at different times. Different ideas seize the collective minds of men, and each idea determines which universe we inhabit. For as Plato says, the only true reality is ideational; material bodies are but shadows of strong ideas. And if we change material bodies by sculpting or assembling them, do they not change? And what if we change the ideas that underlie material bodies? Would the change not be grander and more universal?”

  “A man may change his idea,” Newton pointed out, “from one day to another, and nothing changes about the world.”

  “A man, surely. But all men? What if every man in the world changed his idea. What would come to the world from that? Some ideas are stronger than others. And once they take root in the collective consciousness, and granted only they do not flatly contradict the physical reality of the cosmos, why then they change that cosmos. And your ideas, dear Brian, are such ideas. That forged pound note shows it.”

  “You seek to kill me,” Newton said, “for that you are a coward, and on account of a forged pound note that I did not forge?”

  “I assassinate you,” said Boyle, his face now grim, as he picked up his pistol and aimed it at Newton’s chest, “because, with you dead, the ideas sufficient to bring Copernicus’s cosmos into full non-Heisenberg life will never be. And so I can continue living in the more amenable cosmos of Ptolemy. I know the wrong I do. But those I met on my travels taught me that millions might die, if only the idea they fight for be pure enough, and so be accounted heroes and the war just. Millions upon millions of that place had been murdered to uphold lesser ideas than yours, Brian! Democratic anarchy was one. The wrongness of one tyrant and the rightness of another.”

  Boyle stood up quickly, quacking the chair back, and extended his right arm, with the pistol at the end of it. The click of Boyle’s finger tripping the flint. The quieter click as Newton, with perseverance and luck, at last managed to unhook the inner-mechanism of his hand-cuffs. But too late!

  The report of the pistol was a deafening thing, and Isaac clenched his eyes by reflex. When he oped them again, Boyle was standing, smoke cloaking him in slow-turning rags. The ball had missed its target. Even though fired at such close quarter. Newton threw his arms back and snapped the handcuffs free. He barely had time to register the look of surprise on Boyle’s face as he jumped forward, shouldering into the other man’s stomach. Boyle staggered, but did not tumble.

  Newton ran straight for the door, but his feet tried to betray him. His left ankle jellied and he staggered left against the base of the Plato statue. There was a second deafening retort, and a keening ping! and the reek of gunpowder.

  “Harder to aim than I fancied, sir!” hooted Boyle, behind him.

  Newton reasoned: the fellow cannot keep missing for ever. So he hurled himself at the door. But it was massy oak, threaded with metal, and locked — locked! Newton turn to see Boyle re-loading his pistol, thought of rushing him to snatch the key. He took a step forward, but the firearm was ready and aimed.

  “Stand still!” cried Boyle, as Newton ducked to the side and in amongst the statuary.

  He was breathing hard, and his left ankle hurt. He sidled behind the chunky, columnar legs of Athena, almost tripping over a reclining figure of, perhaps, a Fallen Trojan Warrior, holding a gold-bladed sword.

  “Vitam quaeritis inter mortuos statuas!” Boyle called out. “Yet can I see your motion.” But he did not discharge his weapon, husbanding his chance.

  There was a form of broad shelf behind the first row of figures, six feet high and broader than that at the top — the statuary placed upon it towered over the massive personages at the front. Newton scrambled up, thinking of the high windows and wondering at his chances. The pistol fired again, and a hail of marble chips rained down. Now! Newton stood, clambered awkwardly up an albino stone Laocoön being throttled by a golden serpent. But the windows were still out of his reach, and, looking over his shoulder as he stretched up, he saw Boyle aiming his weapon. He ducked back down, and took cover behind the Trojan priest’s petrified death-throes.

  “Come out,” Boyle called, impatiently. “Come out! Would you condemn our descendants to live in a universe that ignoreth them, to which they are less than nothing? Would you curse our children’s children to dwell in a heartless cosmos of implacable infinitude? Would you have them fleas, sir, or angels? I can bring the latter about; you will doom us to the former. Come out, and we can return humanity to the proportionate cosmos of Ptolemy.”

  Newton breathed as quietly as he could, and pondered his options.

  “Then,” said Boyle, “I must come up and get you.” He stepped in between the marble figures. Newton listened, picking out the sounds of Boyle’s breathing, and the noise of his footfall. His life depended upon it!

  “I can see you,” called Boyle, sounding close.

  Newton leapt, and felt his head jar painfully against something — Boyle’s chin. The pistol discharged again and Isaac sensed sharp heat near his stomach. But no pain; the ball had not burst through his skin. The two men tumbled back, falling hard against the erect legs of Odysseus. Boyle was gasping, and flailing with his free hand. A blow caught Newton on the side of the head, and a second blow, but he pressed himself harder against his assailant. Newton’s right hand fell upon the other’s key-ring, and with a leaping heart he yanked it from the assassin’s belt.

  “You are on fire,” Boyle cried out, in what sounded like a delighted voice.

  It was true. Newton darted behind Laocoön, and wriggled through the three Graces, but his coat was smoking and little flames were wriggling like worms at the fabric. It took a moment to pat out the miniature conflagration. Looking back, Boyle could be glimpsed between the marble limbs, recharging his weapon.

  Isaac looked to
the door. It would take a moment to operate the lock; and he must give his assailant as little by way of a target as possible. He squeezed through the upper level of statues. Boyle called out: “stand clear Isaac, I see you not.” His own heart pummelled his ribs. But he had the key!

  Hippomene and Atalanta was the final statue; after Atalanta was only wall. Newton gathered himself, readying a leap down, and wondering which of the two keys on the iron ring would open the lock. The odds, he thought, were half-upon-half. “Lord God,” he prayed quietly. “If it be thy will I survive this lunatic assault, then guide my hand to the right key —”

  Looking back he saw, with a horrible clutching sensation in his throat, that Boyle had a clear shot. No time to wait. Newton leapt down, heard Boyle sing out “oh!” in disappointment, or elation. He landed on his bad ankle, staggered, and got to the door. The key went in, and a rough twist turned it. The mechanism slid free. The words of thanks to God were on Newton’s lips, and he was speaking aloud, but his prayer was drowned out by the sound of the pistol discharging a fourth time.

  Boyle’s bullet flew wide. Newton was opening the door. The marble wrist of Atalanta disaggregated in a burst of marble chips, hurtling apart from the point of contact. The apple, sculpted at immense expense from solid gold, shot free, propelled along a shallow arc, striking Newton (he was opening the door) upon the side of his head. The force of the impact was determined by the mass of the object (which was considerable) multiplied by the velocity. It struck Isaac from the left. The momentum of the object was transferred to the skull of Newton, where it cracked the cranial bones along three distinct lines of fracture, and jarred the jelly of brain tissue within. If this latter collision had not been enough to kill the man, the swelling and tissue trauma of the blow would soon have done so. Newton fell right, and was dead before his body landed on the dusty floor.

  Up on the shelf, surrounded by the figures from a once-exploded mythology, Boyle sat down. He placed the pistol, hot from use, beside him. His heart was racing. He sighed; which is to say, by instinctively pressing down with his diaphragm he reduced the pressure of the gases occupying his thoracic cavity, which in turn set up an imbalance with the surrounding atmosphere, thereby drawing more air into the lungs. Then, by reversing this physiological process, he utilised the fact that the pressure of a gas tends to increase as the volume decreases, he breathed out.

  “At last,” he said, to nobody in particular. The wind blew a sharp bang against the windows, and Boyle leapt up. “Anyway!” he exclaimed, jollily. “The wind blows.”

  I am struck by your resemblance to Brian May

  I know the wrong I do

  Animalia Paradoxa

  Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Île-de-France, 1792

  “In Cap d’Afrique,” I tell Michel, “the cattle are more beautiful than the French varieties. Great spreading horns. Red or grey, or speckled.”

  Michel grunts. He watches me with suspicion as I rearrange the bones on the long table in the Countess’s orangery.

  Through the glass doors and the dome above me, I can see bats flitting in the evening sky. A few lamps burn in the upper rooms of the chateau across the terrace. The Countess is no longer here. After the recent troubles in Paris, she left with her retinue for the countryside, perhaps even for another country. I did not speak with her before she departed. Perhaps I am simply shunned. Perhaps she is seeing other suitors, charlatans selling her the usual curiosities: misshapen bears, dull tableaux of common birds, amusing scenes of mice and foxes.

  It is a cool autumn evening, but inside the orangery the weather is warm, even tropical. For a moment the expanse of glass makes me feel observed, as if I am placed here for display.

  Michel is very slow, and has no sympathy for the material. He is an old village soul, accustomed to the creatures of the old world. He knows how they are put together: four feet, two horns, milk below.

  “This cannot be just one animal,” he says. He is laying out the long-bones, and indeed there seem to be too many of them, and oddly sized. Everything is in a sorry state. Some of the more delicate items have crumbled to dust in the sea-chests.

  “Linnaeus himself does not account for all the creatures of the world,” I tell him. “Not of Africa.”

  Michel shrugs, and lets a femur clatter to the table. “Monsieur,” he says. “I am leaving now. You should go too: it is not safe.”

  But I cannot go, of course I cannot, not when I am so close. Late at night in the lamplit orangery I work on, fitting femur to radius, long bones to small. Boldness, I think, boldness and vision are needed here. But the bones will not do my bidding. They do not match up. They do not create a possible animal.

  The streaks of light fade from the sky; it is that slow cooling of the day, so different to nightfall in southern climes.

  I miss the boy’s quick hands, quick eyes.

  I remember the shape of his head. Jacques, Jakkals. He was a thin child, dressed in nothing but ragged sailor’s trousers, held up by twine and rolled to the knee. Hard-soled feet, skin tight over ribs and shoulder-blades. All of him shades of earth and ochre, but flashed with white, like the belly of a springbok as it leaps away. Ostrich-eggshell beads at his neck, teeth like Sèvres porcelain. And that round head, close-shorn. One could imagine the bone beneath. When I first saw him, tagging behind as our party struck north from the Cape, I thought: there are men in France who would like that cranium in their collection. A pretty piece to cup in the palm.

  Shadows gutter on the ceiling as the last of the lamp-oil runs out. Outside I see points of light and at first I think they are stars, burning low to the ground: the sky turned upside down. But no. They are flames, moving up the hill from the village, torches lighting faces in the crowd. The voices build.

  The last time I saw Jacques his skull was crushed on one side, the front teeth gone, face caked with blood and dust.

  I imagine he was buried with the usual native rites. Sitting upright, as I have heard it is done, in the old hide blanket, with nothing to mark the place but a small pile of stones. The vitreous black stones you find there in the north, in that dry country.

  Cape of Good Hope

  Venter was a chancer from the start. I met him on the church square; he was selling skins and ivory. With what was left of the Countess’s money, I was procuring oxen, muskets, what men I could afford.

  “I hear you’re coming north,” he said, his face shadowed by a leather brim. “I hear you’re looking for animals.”

  “Special animals,” I nodded. “Rare ones.” I had been in the Cape a month by then, and my own rough Dutch was improving.

  “Visit with us,” he said. “We have a hell of an animal for you.”

  “Ah. And what kind might that be?”

  I was not overly excited. Already I had received several offers of specimens. There had been enough European adventurers in these parts for the locals to imagine they knew what we sought. On the docks, a hunter had thrust a brace of speckled fowl at me, their bodies stinking in the heat. In a tavern, a wrinkled prospector had produced a pink crystal, its facets glinting in the candlelight. But the Countess wished for something she had not seen before. The foot of a rhinoceros, a pretty shell — these would not be enough. One of the slave-dealers had promised more exotic sights, native girls with curious anatomies, but this, too, I had refused. I was looking for something spectacular, something to cause a sensation; but not of that kind.

  “It’s big,” said Venter.

  “Like an elephant? An ostrich?” I said. “Perhaps a whale?”

  “All of those things,” he said, and tilted his head so that his pale eyes caught the sun, colour piercing the hues of hide and roughspun cloth. He was a handsome man, tall and with a strong jaw under his yellow beard, grown very full as is the habit of the farmers here. “It’s all of those things, God help us.”

  I tried not to smile at his ignorance. “Come now, it must be one thing or the other. Fish or fowl.”

  He shrugge
d. “It flies, it runs. Here,” he said, leaning forward and pulling off his hat. A waft of sweat, a herbal tang, the coppery hair compressed in a ring. “That is its skin.”

  I did not wish to touch the greasy hat, but he pushed it into my hands, pointing at the hide band. Spotted, greyish yellow. It might have been hyena fur, or harbour rat for all I knew.

  “Keep it.” He spat his tobacco into the dust. “You are welcome on my land. Ask for Venter. Up north the people know me.”

  It took me several weeks to gather what I needed for the expedition: oxen, two wagons, a donkey, the firelocks, the powder and lead. I could not afford slaves in the end, but employed ten bearers of the race they call here Hottentotten. The arsenical paste for the preservation of the specimens I had brought with me on the ship from France. My collecting trunk, which fitted perfectly into the back of the larger wagon, was a gift from the Countess, made by her own cabinet-maker, and had her initials inlaid in brass on the lid. Inside were dozens of ingenious drawers and racks for glass jars and flasks. I had also with me my fine brass compass — although the little hinged sundial did not work as it should, down in the south — and my most prized possession: my copy of Systema Naturae.

  The donkey I disliked. It looked exactly like any donkey in any part of France, and was every bit as doltish and mutinous. But the oxen were splendid animals. I was glad to see the mountain growing smaller over their lurching shoulders as our party took the coastal track to the north. Happy to be away from that town, with its hot winds, its slave-drivers from every filthy corner of the world, its rumours of plague and war.

  We turned inland. Game was plentiful and we did not lack for meat. It lifted my heart, to be out on those grasslands, with no sounds but the steady hoofbeats of the oxen, the wagons’ creak and the good-humoured talk of the men in a language I did not know. Clucks and kisses in it, impossible for my mouth to shape. At times people appeared out of the bush to meet us on the road, and spoke to the men in their own tongue, perhaps asking news of the Cape. As we travelled further north, the land became dryer, flatter, broken by pans of salty mud cracked in honeycomb patterns and pink with roosting flamingos; elsewhere by tumbled piles of glassy black and olive rock. It was wild country. I had high hopes of finding some striped or spotted beast for my lady yet. Indeed, one night we heard a throaty rumble from beyond the firelight. Lion, the men whispered. But it did not approach.