“Because it seems the other fellow invented it ten years before I did, and didn’t tell anyone.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve been waiting for him to say something. But it’s been almost twenty years since he did it, and he doesn’t show the slightest inclination to let anyone else in on it.”
“You’ve waited eight years-why today? It’s well after midday,” Jack said. “Take it with you-give it another two or three years’ thought.”
“Why today? Because I do not believe God put me on this earth, and gave me either the best or second-best mind currently in existence, so that I could spend my days trying to beg money from the likes of Lothar von Hacklheber, so that I could dig a large hole in the ground,” the Doctor said. “I don’t want my epitaph to be, ‘He brought the price of silver down one-tenth of one percent.’”
“Right! Sounds like a decision to me,” Jack said. Reaching into the carriage he gathered up the manuscript, carried it up the walk to the door in question, and heaved it through the transom. “And now, off to the mountains!”
“One more small errand in the Booksellers’ Quarter,” the Doctor said, “as long as I’m getting myself into trouble.”
THEBOOKSELLERS’QUARTER LOOKED ANDworked like the rest of Leipzig except all the goods were books: they tumbled out of casks, rose in unsteady stacks, or were arranged into blocks that were wrapped and tied and then stacked into larger blocks. Bent porters carried them around in hods and back-baskets. The Doctor, never one to accomplish anything in a hurry, devoted several minutes to arranging his carriage and escort-train before the widest and clearest of the Book-Fair’s exits. In particular he wondered if Jack wouldn’t mind mounting Turk and (for lack of a better word) posing between the booksellers and the carriage. Jack did so, and was reasonably merry about it, having given up any hope that they’d escape the city before nightfall.
The Doctor squared his shoulders, adjusted numerous subsystems of clothing (today he wore a coat embroidered with flowers, just like the ones painted on his carriage), and walked into the Book-Fair. Jack couldn’t see him any more, but he could hear him. Not his voice, actually, but rather the effect that the Doctor’s appearance had on the overall sound of the fair. As when a handful of salt is thrown into a pot that’s about to boiclass="underline" a hush, then a deep steady building.
The Doctor came running. He moved well for a man on high heels. He was pursued by the booksellers of*Konigsberg, Basel, Rostock, Kiel, Florence, Strasbourg, Edinburgh, Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Seville, Paris, and Danzig, with a second echelon not far behind. The Doctor made it past Jack well before any of them. The sight of a mounted man with a heathen saber brought them to a jagged halt. They contented themselves after that with flinging books: any book that was handy. They gang-tackled porters, molested promotional displays, kicked over casks to get ammunition, and the air above and around Jack grew rather dark with books, as when a flock passes overhead. They fell open on cobblestones and spilled out their illustrative woodcuts: portraits of great men, depictions of the Siege of Vienna, diagrams of mining-engines, a map of some Italian city, a dissection of the large bowel, vast tables of numbers, musketeer drills, geometers’ proofs, human skeletons in insouciant poses, the constellations of the Zodiac, rigging of foreign barkentines, design of alchemical furnaces, glaring Hottentots with bones in their noses, thirty flavors of Baroque window-frames. This entire scene was carried out with very little bellowing, as if ejection of the Doctor was a routine matter for the booksellers. At the crack of the coachman’s whip, they made a few desultory final heaves and then turned back to resume whatever conversations the Doctor had interrupted. Jack for his part adopted a ceremonial rear-guard position behind the Doctor’s baggage-cart (inadvertently laden, now, with a few random books). The brittle sparking impacts of horse-shoes and wheel-rims against cobblestones were like heavenly chimes to his Vagabond-ears.
HE COULD NOT GET ANexplanation until hours later, when they had put Leipzig’s north gate a few miles behind them, and stopped at an inn on the road to Halle. By this time Eliza had been thoroughly saturated with the Doctor’s view of events as well as his gloomy and resentful mood. She stayed in the Ladies’ Bedchamber, he stayed in the Men’s, they met in the Common-Room. “He was born in Leipzig-educated himself in Leipzig-went to school in Leipzig-“
“Why’d he go to school if he educated himself? Which is it?”
“Both. His father was a professor who died when he was very young-so he taught himself Latin at the same age when you were hanging from dead men’s legs.”
“That’s funny-you know, I tried to teach myself Latin, but what with the Black Death, the Fire, et cetera…”
“In lieu of having a father, he read his father’s library- thenwent to school. And you saw for yourself how they treated him.”
“Perhaps they had an excellent reason,” Jack said-he was bored, and getting Eliza steamed up would be as good an entertainment as any.
“There is no reason for you to be gnawing at the Doctor’s ankles,” Eliza said. “He is one of that sort of man who forms very profound friendships with members of the gentler sex.”
“I saw what sort of friendship he had with you when he was pointing out your gentle bosom to Lothar von Hacklheber,” Jack returned.
“There was probably a reason-the Doctor is a tapestry of many threads.”
“Which thread brought him to the Book-Fair?”
“For some years he and Sophie have been trying to persuade the Emperor in Vienna to establish a grand library and academy for the entire Empire.”
“Who is Sophie?”
“Another one of the Doctor’s woman friends.”
“What fair did he pick her up at?”
Eliza arched her eyebrows, leaned forward, and spoke in a whisper that could etch glass: “Don’t speak of her that way-Sophie is none other than the daughter of the Winter Queen herself. She is the Duchess of Hanover!”
“Jeezus. How’d a man like the Doctor end up in such company?”
“Sophie inherited the Doctor when her brother-in-law died.”
“What do you mean by that? Is he a slave?”
“He is a librarian. Sophie’s brother-in-law hired him in that capacity, and when he died, Sophie inherited the library, and the Doctor along with it.”
“But that’s not good enough-the Doctor has ambitions-he wants to be the Emperor’s librarian?”
“As it is now, a savant in Leipzig may never become aware of a book that’s been published in Mainz, and so the world of letters is fragmented and incoherent-not like in England, where all the savants know each other and belong to the same Society.”
“What!? A Doctor here wants to make things more like England?”
“The Doctor proposed to the Emperor that a new decree be drawn up, ordering that all booksellers at the Leipzig and Frankfurt fairs must write up a description of every book they publish, and send these, along with copies of each book, to-”
“Let me guess-to the Doctor?”
“Yes. And then he would make them all part of some vast, hard-to-understand thing he wants to build-he couldn’t restrain himself from breaking into Latin here, so I don’t know exactly-part library, part academy, part machine.”
“Machine?” Jack was imagining a mill-wheel assembled from books.
But they were interrupted by ribald, helpless, snorting laughter from the corner of the Common-Room, where the Doctor himself was sitting on a stool, reading (as they saw when they came over and joined him) one of the hurled books that had lodged in the baggage-cart. As usual their progress across the room, or to be specific Eliza’s, was carefully tracked by lonely merchants whose eyeballs were practically growing out of their heads on stalks. Jack had at first been surprised, and was now growingly annoyed, that other men were capable of noticing Eliza’s beauty-he suspected that they did so in some base way altogether different from how he did it.