Doctor Mirabilis (19 page)

The fumes were now very thick, and Roger wondered that he had at first thought them pleasant. Now indeed they were reminding
him of something, but groping through them for the memory proved almost impossible … nevertheless, he captured it at last.
It was the thudding flocculent memory of the explosion at Westminster.

‘It might be well,’ he said hesitantly, ‘to snuff the candles as well. There’s enough light from the window.’

‘Why?’ Peter said.

‘Well, the fumes.… Substances as volatile and mephitic as this have an affinity for fire; Raymond so testified.’

‘Oh, it only burns if you touch flame to it,’ Raymond said. ‘Then it goes up all in a puff, and ware eyebrows! But there’s
no danger from the candles.’

He straightened uncertainly; and somehow dropped his pipette on his foot. It shattered promptly, but luckily there was no
acid left in it.

‘Tcha,’ he said. ‘Well, now I believe we are finished. If anyone would like to come up and inhale the vapour, let him come.
But I will warn him, breathe shallow; this sweet vitriol of mine puts chickens to sleep for half a day.’

As he spoke, he moved away from the beaker with caution; and Roger, observing more meaning in the movement than in the words,
decided at once to remain where he was. Julian de Randa, however, came forward with customary brashness, and lowering his
face over the quiet white liquid, sniffed sceptically.

He straightened as suddenly as if he had been kicked; but he did not quite stand erect, but rather at a slant, as though the
whole room suddenly had been tilted by some silent earthquake. His hand groped for support, and came to rest flat on the top
of the athanor, which had hardly cooled at all in this short time. Roger winced in anticipation of the inevitable scream.

It did not come. Julian walked crabwise back toward his seat in the circle. Before he got there, he had collided heavily with
the sharp corner of a table; but this, too, he did not seem to feel. With the utmost care, as though climbing down the face
of a precipice, he lowered himself into a sitting position; smiled a magnificently silly smile; and fell straight back, his
head hitting the sod floor with a soft thump.

‘Mother of God!’ Peter cried.

‘Never fear,’ Raymond said, in a slightly thickened voice. ‘I warned him, anyhow, didn’t I? He’ll sleep a while, and wake
up none the worse.’

‘But his hand! It’s seared, you can smell it, even through
your devil’s vapour. There’s lard in the kitchen, someone fetch it – or no, I’ve sesame oil right here. And lint, there in
the cupboard with the funnels. Quick!’

He knelt beside de Randa, who was breathing most gently, his mouth wide open.

‘That’s a frightful burn,’ Peter whispered. ‘And look you, he’s sleeping – nor felt a pang when he leaned against the furnace!
Help me, del Rey; this is your fault, your experiment is a very qualified success at best. You must learn to think twice.
If he complains against us to the colleges, or dies, our circle is foredone.’

The whole cellar was in an uproar now, but much of the scurrying was not notably purposeful. Throughout it all, Raymond’s
saucer of sweet vitriol sat neglected, continuing to sublime into the close air, to the subtle but marked confusion of everyone
in the room. It was now so strong that it was making Roger sick. He arose quietly – and slowly, after what he had seen – and
took up the beaker.

This close, the odour was unbearable. Holding the beaker at arm’s length, he went up the stairs and out the door, into a blast
of sunlight which was stunningly unexpected: he had forgotten that the gathering had commenced before noon, for it was always
the next thing to night in Peter’s cellar. After a moment’s fuzzy thought, he set the beaker down against the wall of the
building, in the direct sunlight.

A wandering, cruel-ribbed dog saw him put the dish down and came trotting over, a little sidewise … and then, as suddenly,
it cringed away and ran upwind. A more sensible nose than any down below stairs, obviously. Roger moved upwind himself, and
sat down on a sill to clear his lungs; and instantly, like a stone dropping into a well, he fell asleep.

He awoke in cool moonlight, still and stiff, and not yet quite clear-headed. His first thought was of the comet; and then,
like the prompting of the self, but without its gnomic directness, came another vision; that one needed no intoxication of
any sort for hints of worlds transmundane … for
there was the spectre of the moon, riding overhead at any hour of any season, blotch-faced, corpse-like, keeping its own calendar,
neither here nor there nor in Paradise.

He stirred tentatively, and found that his joints ached even more than he had thought; and further, he was feeling sick, as
though he had eaten bad food; which disturbed him, for though his frame had always been gaunt, he had never been ill except
transiently. It would be best, he thought, to sit still a while, and stretch out the stiffness gently. It was perhaps dangerous
to sit on a sill by one’s self at night in Paris, but the narrow alley here was deserted, and Peter’s laboratory was in a
part of the city so appallingly poor that footpads would not be likely to think it profitable browsing ground.

And all as well indeed, this obscurity, as it was deliberate and necessary; Roger himself would never have heard of Peter,
being a faculty member at Paris, except by thilke design and plan – plus certain dissatisfactions which the Englishman Roger’s
self had poured out to Hispanic Raymond during an Arabic lesson. Not that heroes were hard to find; everyone in Paris worshipped
them, as a matter of course, if only because there were so many. Each order had its own: the Franciscans’ was Alexander of
Hales, the author of the stupefying
Summa Theologica; the
Dominicans boasted first of all of their angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas – a huge lard-tun of a man who was not above calling
himself ‘the swine of Sicily’, and wrote to Roger’s furious annoyance in a script so tiny that even copyists could not read
it exactly – and secondly, Albertus Magnus.

It had been toward Master Albert that Raymond, as an apprentice apothecary, was most naturally drawn. Just so had it been
with Roger; and to see this history unfolding once more under his nose in the person of Raymond was more than he could bear,
not only in the light of his own disastrous victory – as a result of which neither Albert nor any master beholden to him would
now acknowledge Roger’s mere existence, even to the extent of giving way to him in the street – but because of discoveries
he had made
since which had cast over the whole of his Parisian venture the shadow of grievous fraud. In particular, Albert claimed not
to have entered into the Dominican order until the age of 28, yet it was inarguable that he had actually done so at a very
early age; which he could hardly have done had his birth date not been falsified for the purpose; though Roger had been unable
to find certain confirmation of this, he was here willing to trust a deduction which could lead no other where. It was certain
enough, forsooth, that Albert had slipped, as handlessly as an eel, by the many years of philosophical disciplines which were
invariably enforced upon the minnows like Roger Bacon … and most certain of all, because made certain by Roger’s direct experience,
that Albert today multiplied his learning – as when, belike, had he not? – by the mechanical grinding of the thumbscrews upon
the advanced university students whose teacher he purported to be. Who could not wax fat, had he blood to drink?

Certes, Albert was brilliant. He worked diligently; he had read and observed much; he wrote fluently; he summarized wittily;
he talked unceasingly; possibly, with God’s help, he dreamed fruitfully. But all this was magpie labour without some organon
of knowledge to which the nuggets and the digging could relate; and of this Albert was almost wholly innocent; he traded instead
upon a mixed coinage of dogmatism and intuition. And this, in God’s name, was a fraud; this, in the holy name of God, was
sinful beyond all sins, though there was no name in the Scriptures which such a sin might wear with certainty as yet. In the
meantime,
item:
Albert knew nothing but the rudiments of the
perspectiva:
yet he presumed to write of optics
de naturabilis,
almost as though a deaf man should lecture on music.
Item:
Albert was ignorant of speculative alchemy, which treats of the origin and generation of things.
Item:
languages – he was unable even to use a simple Greek word without defining it in a fashion which threw sense out of the window.

Currently it was being said in Paris that Albert was a magician; and that in fact he had built himself by arts
magical a head made of brass, which could’ answer any questions proposed by man. Of course, the head was said to exist no
longer; Thomas Aquinas had happened upon it, and finding himself unable to cope with its powers of reasoning, had broken it
into a thousand pieces with his staff. It was a pretty fable, but for Roger it stood for everything that seemed to him to
be urgently wrong with the University. That Albert could have built no such head was beyond dispute, for of the arts magical
he was ignorant beyond all his other ignorances; and as for Thomas, a blow from a staff was an argument without standing in
logic. Were heroes made of such clay? Or of such clay as Alexander of Hales was made, for that matter? Yet Albert, through
a reputation as a teacher made elsewhere than Paris,
was
applauded by the whole city as the equal of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes – and as a scientist could have been put into Master
Grosseteste’s pocket without disturbing a fold of the Capito’s gown. Was it for this that Roger had given up Grosseteste,
and Oxford as well?

Raymond had listened to this jeremiad to the end with an expression peculiarly undisturbed. When it was over, he had said
only:

‘Master, I know nothing of all this against Albert, and in truth I’m sorry to hear of it. Yet it’s all of a piece with Paris,
that I’ll agree; the natural sciences here, are in so sorry a state that I’m afraid to tell my father how I’m wasting his
money. But there
is
a remedy. Can I trust your?’

‘Trust me?’ The question was so unexpected that Roger did not have time to take offence at it. ‘In what?’

‘In a secret,
idem est,
there are real scientists in Pads; but they are not at the University. I can introduce you to a whole circle of such, wherein
you will learn more in a day than most masters have to teach in a lifetime. But this is no light matter, I’ll need have oaths
from you ere we seek it out; and should you refuse me such, our studies together must end, lest some lapse betray it to you.’

‘No, no, Raymond, I’ll give you my word. But wherein lies the need for such ceremonies?’

‘In more dangers than you know. It’s true that Paris is full of little circles of students and masters where one might discuss
a subject in an informal manner, without
Queritur
and
Quod sic videtur
and
Sed contra.
But the University frowns on them, as being “colleges” unauthorized by the charter, and not under the control of the Chancellor.
Ours is one such, and its purpose is the study of the natural sciences, and hence of Aristotle too where he applies. You can
see how quickly the suspicion of magic, or heresy, or both, could become affixed to such a “college”; wherefore I ask first
your most holy and hermatic oaths of secrecy.’

‘Done! Let’s go at once.’

Thus, not at once, but not long thereafter, did Roger make the acquaintance of Pierre de Maricourt, that extraordinary son
of minor Provencal nobility who called himself Peter the Peregrine because he had been to Palestine on Gregory’s crusade.
Tall, grave, reserved, judicious, and yet almost shaking just beneath his skin with the violence of his love for raw experience,
Peter dominated his ‘college’ like a bonfire inside a ring of candles, though every man in the circle was intellectually freakish
and unique, a
lusus naturae
, a lapse of nature’s attention to the forming of men’s minds. By bent, in so far as he could be categorized at all, Peter
was a mathematician; but even beyond figures, and relationships, and mensuration, he loved data – drawn nets flashing full
of them, traps a-team with them, compost heaps a-squirm with them, skies a-boiling. At first, it appeared, he had been content
with many small nets of his own devising: he walked in the fields, he collected specimens, he questioned travellers, he devoured
the narratives and the opinions of laymen, old women, country bumpkins; he wanted to know about metals, mining, arms and armoury,
surveying, the chase, earthworks, the devices of magicians, the tricks of jugglers – anything at all that an omnivorous soul
could call knowledge. Where he could not go himself to find the facts, he sent emissaries, trading first of all upon a small
inheritance, and secondly upon his nobility, which he had used as a defence against becoming a religious of any sort, ne monk,
friar nor clerk. How he had come to think at length of the still greater net of the ‘college’ he had never said; but they
were all his emissaries now.

Until now, in fact, there had been only three great sciences; but Peter, Roger thought, might be said to have found a fourth.
It lacked only a name by which to hail it. The science of tests? No, that was too mean, it suggested uroscopy, or auspices.
It was a science of the whole of experience, as distinguished from theory alone, theory superior, autonomous, empty: it was
a
scientia experimentalis,
serving all other sciences and arts, yet somehow superior to all, out of which might come either confirmations of systems,
or things as yet beyond systems. The notion was strange in his grasp; it conformed to nothing that he knew, and already was
sliding evasively away in the deceptive colourless moonlight.

As he fought to hold it, someone directly beside him groaned most piteously. He straightened with a start and an almost universal
twinge and cast about, one hand clapping his side for the sword of which stringent Paris had deprived him; but there was nobody
in sight, not even at his elbow where the sound had seemed to well up.