“More flattery.”
“No-his way of telling me that we should ask a high price.”
“Where’s he taking us?”
“The House of the Golden Mercury, which is the factory of the von Hacklheber family.”
“We’ve already been kicked out of there.”
“He’s going to get us in.”
AND THAT HE DID,by means of a mysterious conversation that took place inside the factory, out of their view. This was the biggest courtyard they’d seen in Leipzig: narrow but long, lined with vaulted arcades on both sides, a dozen cranes active at once elevating goods that the von Hacklhebers expected to rise in price, and letting down ones they thought had reached their peak. At the end nearest the street, mounted to the wall above the entry arch, was a skinny three-story-high structure cantilevered outwards over the yard, like balconies on three consecutive floors all merged into one tower. It was enclosed with windows all round except on the top floor, where a golden roof sheltered an open platform and supported a pair of obscenely long-necked gargoyles poised to vomit rain (should it rain) out onto the traders below. “Reminds me of the castle on the butt-end of a galleon,” was Eliza’s comment, and it wasn’t for a few minutes that Jack understood that this was a reminder of the naughty business off Qwghlm years ago, and (therefore) her oblique female way of saying she didn’t like it. This despite the gold-plated Mercury, the size of a man, bracketed to it, which seemed to be springing into flight above their heads, holding out a golden stick twined about with snakes and surmounted by a pair of wings. “No, it’s a Cathedral of Mercury,” Jack decided, trying to get her mind off the galleon. “Your Cathedral of Jesus is cross-shaped. This one takes its plan from that stick in his hand-long and slender-the vaults on the sides like the snakes’ loops. The wings of the factory spreading out from the head of it, where is mounted the bishop’s pulpit, and all of us believers crowded in below to celebrate the Messe. ”
Eliza sold the stuff. Jack assumed she sold it well. He knew they were soon to leave Leipzig and so amused himself by looking around. Watching the bales and casks ascend and descend on their ropes, his eye was drawn to a detaiclass="underline" from many of the countless windows that lined the courtyard, short rods projected horizontally into the air, and mounted to their ends, on ball-joints like the one where the thigh-bone meets the pelvis, were mirrors about a foot square, canted at diverse angles. When he first noticed them Jack supposed that they were a clever trick for reflecting sunlight into those many dim offices. But looking again he saw that they shifted frequently, and that their silvered faces were always aimed down toward the courtyard. There were scores of them. Jack never glimpsed the watchers who lurked in the dark rooms.
Later he chanced to look up at the highest balcony, and discovered a new gargoyle looking back at him: this was made of flesh and blood, a stout man who hadn’t bothered to cover his partly bald, partly grizzled head. He had battled smallpox and won at the cost of whatever good or even bad looks he might ever have had. Quite a few decades of good living had put a lot of weight into his face and drawn the pocked flesh downwards into jowls and wattles and chins, lumpy as cargo nets. He was giving Eliza a look that Jack did not find suitable. Up there on that balcony he was such an arresting presence that Jack did not notice, for a few minutes, that another man, much more finely turned out, was up there, too: the Doctor, talking in the relentless way of one who’s requesting a favor, and gesturing so that those white lace cuffs seemed to flit around him like a pair of doves.
Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for a evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.
LEAVINGLEIPZIG WITH THEDOCTORdid not happen at any one particular moment-it was a ceremonial procession that extended over a day. Even after Jack and Eliza and Turk the Horse had located the Doctor’s entourage, several hours of wandering around the town still awaited them: there was a mysterious call at the von Hacklheber factory, and a stop at the Nicolaikirche so that the Doctor could make devotions and take communion, and then it was over to the University (which like all else in Leipzig was small and serious as a pocket-pistol), where the Doctor simply sat in his carriage for half an hour, chatting with Eliza in French, which was the language he preferred for anything of a high-flown nature. Jack, restlessly circling the carriage-which was chocolate-brown, and painted all over with flowers-put his ear to the window once and heard them talking about some noble lady named Sophie, a second time, a few minutes later, it was dressmaking, then Catholic vs. Lutheran views on transubstantiation… Finally Jack pulled the door open. “Pardon the interruption, but I had a notion to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crawling there and back on my hands and knees, and wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t delay our departure…”
“Ssh! The Doctor’s trying to make a very difficult decision,” Eliza said.
“Just make it-that’s what I say-doesn’t get easier if you think about it,” Jack advised. The Doctor had a manuscript on his lap, and a quill poised above it, a trembling drop of ink ready to break loose, but his hand would not move. His head teetered and tottered through a ponderous arc (or maybe it was the wig that magnified all movements) as he read the same extract over and over, under his breath, each time adopting a different sequence of facial expressions and emphasizing different words, like an actor trying to make sense of some ambiguous verse: should this be read as a jaded pedant? A dim schoolmaster? A skeptical Jesuit? But since the words had been written by the Doctor himself, that couldn’t be it-he was trying to imagine how the words would be received by different sorts of readers.
“Would you like to read it out loud, or-”
“It is in Latin,” Eliza said.
More waiting. Then: “Well, what is the decision that wants making?”
“Whether or not to heave it over the transom of yonder doorway,” Eliza said, pointing to the front of one of those Leipziger houses-that-weren’t-houses.
“What’s it say on that door?”
“ Acta Eruditorum-it is a journal that the Doctor founded two years ago.”
“I don’t know what a journal is.”
“Like a gazette for savants.”
“Oh, so that stack of papers is something he wants to have printed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if he founded it, it’s his journal, so why’s he got leeches in his breeches?”
“Ssh! All the savants of Europe will read the words on that page-they must be perfect.”
“Then why doesn’t he take it with him and work on it some more? This is no place to make anything perfect.”
“It has been finished for years,” the Doctor said, sounding unusually sad. “The decision: should I publish it at all? ”
“Is it a good yarn?”
“It is not a narrative. It is a mathematical technique so advanced that only two people in the world understand it,” the Doctor said. “When published, it will bring about enormous changes in not only mathematics, but all forms of natural philosophy and engineering. People will use it to build machines that fly through the air like birds, and that travel to other planets, and its very power and brilliance will sweep old, tottering, worn-out systems of thought into the dustbin.”
“And you invented it, Doctor?” Eliza asked, as Jack was occupied making finger-twirling movements in the vicinity of his ear.
“Yes-seven or eight years ago.”
“And still no one knows about it, besides-”
“Me, and the other fellow.”
“Why haven’t you told the world about it?”