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?”
“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 boil: 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.