The Translated Man Page 6

  Sensory information began pouring in. There were sharpsie feet; he recognized the leathery texture of their skin. There were human feet, lots of human feet. Children’s feet. The children, Alan thought, as he imagined them running through the door to climb onto the sofa with their parents. He almost lost his focus then, but shook the image off. There was something here he was missing, something new but elusive. He tried to clear his mind, to blot out the other textures. He narrowed his field of touch to that one, strange texture…

  . . . and almost cried out. There it was: something… something awful. He couldn’t say what it was, or even what it felt like. It was not just unfamiliar, but alien—completely alien. He’d never felt anything like this: something not just unknown, but unknowable, something completely dissimilar from the million textures he’d ever experienced. The horror of this thought grew as did the sense that the floor was covered in something that was completely impossible for him to comprehend. Alan snatched his hand up.

  “…must be trying to hide something…Charterhouse. What’s wrong?” There was more curiosity than concern in Beckett’s voice. The weight of his attention suddenly seemed very heavy.

  Alan realized he was biting his lip. He consciously stretched his jaw and puffed out his cheeks for a moment, before releasing it with a “puh” sound. “I don’t know, sir. There’s… there was something here. Something…” Alan shook his head and backed into the corner, inadvertently banging against the gramophone. “I can’t…I don’t know what it is.”

  “Was it a person?” Skinner asked him, her tone worried. “A sharpsie?”

  “N-no. No. It wasn’t made of . . . of what people are made of. Or of what anything’s made of.” Alan sank to the floor. The sense of the alien presence was fading, and nervous energy was making Alan’s hands twitch.

  “What does that mean?” Beckett asked him.

  “I can’t explain it.” Alan snatched up one of the cylinders from the gramophone and began to fiddle with it. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  Beckett looked at him appraisingly for a moment. “All right. Take a minute for yourself, then I want you to check the rest of the room.”

  Alan nodded. “There were sharpsies, here, sir. I’m having trouble sorting out the chronology, because of all the people that have been in and out. I’d say yesterday, or the day before.”

  Beckett turned back to his partner. “That puts them here about the time of the murder.”

  “So Stitch is wrong?” Skinner asked.

  “Maybe. I want to know why there’s no struggle.”

  “Poison? Maybe the sharpsies had access to the house. That would explain the unlocked door. They could have gotten in, slipped something into the food…” Beckett grunted, but didn’t say anything. “I know, I know. Why?”

  “Sir?” Alan Charterhouse said querulously.

  “We should question the maid, again,” Beckett said. “Maybe they got a hold of her key, somehow.”

  “Sir?”

  “What is it, now?” Beckett asked without looking up. The boy said nothing. Beckett glanced to where the young cartographer had sat down in the corner, then did a double-take that practically snapped his neck. The boy had gone as white as a sheet, and his eyes were bulging like they’d fall out of his head.

  “What is it?” Skinner asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Alan had one of the cylinders from the gramophone in his hands. He was running his super-sensitive fingers over the grooves in it. “Have…have you listened to these, sir?”

  Beckett approached and knelt beside him. He’s knees creaked violently as he did so. “No. Why?”

  “I can read recording cylinders, by touching them.” He looked down at the wax cylinder in his hands. “This…it’s not music sir,” he turned to the coroner, clearly terrified. “These are from the flight recorder on the Excelsior.”

  Seven: the Excelsior

  Beckett wasted no time. He immediately grabbed Alan Charterhouse by the collar of his coat dragged him outside at speed, through the crowd that was still milling in the street, and practically threw the young man into the coach.

  “Forget it,” he said, over the extended finger that he jabbed in Alan’s direction. “Forget everything. Forget what you saw here. Forget that we even came for you.” He slammed the door shut. “Take him home,” Alan could hear the man shout to the coachman.

  The ride back home seemed even longer. Alan watched the crooked shadows that haunted the streets of Trowth grow longer and deeper. The city still made Alan uneasy, despite his years living there, and his familiarity with it. It was the cold late afternoons that were the worst, when icy night air had yet to dispel the perpetual murky overcast of the city, so that everything seemed unnaturally dark. It made Alan long for the summers he’d spent south, in the low counties, pacing out distances between rocks in his cousins’ fields, or trying to build sundials in the garden.

  Trowth was a cold city, and dark, but above all it was a frighteningly still city. Even in the country, miles away from the crowds and population, there seemed to be more noise, more movement, than in Trowth. It was a city whose every narrow window and crooked shadow seemed to hide invisible eyes, threatening eyes that gave the city’s lonely inhabitants cause to pitch their voices low, to keep to their homes and public houses and to stay off the chasm-bordered streets at any dark hour.

  Even the parades and markets, or the angry muttering crowds that followed men like Edgar Wyndham-Vie were subdued. Above all in Trowth there was a sense, even among the oldest families that had lived on the shores of the Stark for a hundred generations, of having stumbled into a private garden late at night. The sense of being one loud noise away from attracting the garden’s owner. The Trow, the legendary giants that had abandoned their homes on the Stark at least a thousand years before human beings had come, seemed to have never fully left.

  That eerie feeling of presence was the first thing that travelers to the city remarked on, and it was so ubiquitous that the residents of Trowth hardly seemed to notice it anymore. There were still times, though, when the sense of sharing a place with—or worse, having usurped it from—something awesome and terrible was very strong, and it could set the entire city’s teeth on edge.

  Alan turned back to his book, and tried to read in the failing light. The truth was that he was getting tired of the Ted East stories. He’d discovered them a year ago, when his father had bought him Ted East, Agent of the Crown for his birthday. Alan had torn through the twenty-two two-penny novels in six months. He practically worshipped the fictional Ted East, with his old-fashioned ways, his out-of-date bowler hat and turn-ofthe-century revolver. Ted East protected the Empire from the gravest threats that heretical science could produce: cults of ectoplasmatists, mad necrologists and their armies of the undead, Khadavri spies and invasions by the Leech-Fingered Men. In one of the novels, Ted East and the Szarkany Rend, he’d actually fought all of those and more. But it was starting to become boring.

  The novels were really very formulaic: they all started with a locked-room mystery, that Ted East would somehow miraculously guess the solution to; often, as Alan was starting to notice, with highly dubious reasoning. Then, Ted East would harass and intimidate his contacts in the criminal underworld until he had enough information to track the criminals to their secret underground layer. This was usually because the criminals were importing some rare chemical for their insane experiments, or because they’d had some kind coal-dust on their shoes that could only be found in one particular factory in the city. In Ted East, Coroner the clue had actually been a wrapper for a pat of butter left behind when the villain had eaten dinner with one of Ted East’s contacts. The wrapper had the name of the hotel that the man, an ambassador from Canth who was actually an ettercap spy, had been staying at.

  Ted East would track the villains down to their lair, and proceed to shoot them all. Sometimes, he’d contrive to blow something up first, if there were too many to be reasonably dispatched with a r
evolver. Sometimes, sometimes not: Ted East’s revolver often carried a little more than six bullets.

  Alan wondered if the author of the Ted East novels, a man named Geoffrey Holland, thought his readers were stupid, or if he was just careless. It was possibly a little of both. Alan’s cousin had recommended that he start reading Phillip Crowe’s work, but Alan had never found much appeal: the novels were too slow, too atmospheric. It took too long to get to the point of the story, and by then he’d lost interest.

  Night had fallen about two-thirds of the way into the trip, and Alan found it impossible to read by the intermittent phlogiston-blue streetlamps. He thought instead to what he’d seen in Herman Zindel’s house. Of course, Beckett had told him to forget everything, and of course Alan would if he could have, but it was impossible. Alan Charterhouse had a frustratingly perfect memory. He could recall virtually every piece of the formulae he’d seen in that house.

  There were some things about the equations that were highly disturbing. It was one thing to theorize, mathematically, about the nature of higher-plane geometry. Harcourt Wolfram, the brilliant scientist who had virtually single-handedly invented the modern world over a hundred and fifty years ago, had journals filled with hypotheses about planar mathematics. It was something else, however, to actually be experimenting with them.

  What Alan couldn’t reveal to the coroners, because it would reveal too much about his own knowledge of the heretical subject, was that Zindel’s equations were using experimental data. They weren’t just theories; they were getting information from somewhere. And that meant that Herman Zindel had access to a working translation engine…

  The Excelsior, Alan thought, then shook his head. It was impossible. The Excelsior, the final brainchild of Harcourt Wolfram and Chretien Daior-Crabtree, had only been used once. The consequences of that experiment were…Alan Charterhouse shuddered.

  Harcourt Wolfram had developed a theory, based on the fundamental principles of the Church Royal: that the world as human beings understood it was the product of a single, infinitely complex Word, and that all matter and energy was an intricate sub-harmony within that Word. Wolfram had taken it a step further. A word, he reasoned, has not just sound, but meaning. If what the Church says is true, then the world is as much made from information as anything else. And information was easy to store. You could write it on a piece of paper and lay it flat on your desk.

  You could then write more information on a second piece of paper and lay it on top of the first. There they were: two whole universes, right next to each other but unable to interact. Wolfram hypothesized an Aether, a second universe that existed in the same time and place as the human universe, but fashioned in such a way as to be untouchable. The same Word, but in a different language. The information was there, but human beings couldn’t apprehend it.

  He and Daior-Crabtree had built the Excelsior. It was a ship whose engines, instead of carrying it across the sea or through the air, would translate itself and its crew into the Aether, and then back again.

  The launch of the Excelsior a century and a half ago had annihilated a square half-mile of the city. The crew, including Wolfram himself, had all been killed, as had three hundred spectators. No one from the Royal Academy of Sciences had been able to get close enough to the wreckage of the vessel to retrieve it for weeks. There had only been eleven heretical sciences when Wolfram and Daior-Crabtree built their aethership. After the Excelsior, the Church Royal added a new one for the first time in a hundred years.

  The recording cylinders had been nothing but screams. Charterhouse had heard five men, screaming desperately, terrified beyond their capacity for speech, their voices filled with pain and horror. The Excelsior had been outside the universe for five minutes, and its recording cylinders held nothing but screams. The process of translation had destroyed their minds, their bodies, turned the Excelsior into a mangled wreck, and sent a shockwave through Trowth that leveled buildings.

  Herman Zindel had been using the Excelsior’s translation engine.

  Elijah Beckett sat on his bed in the corner of his small room, and rested his head against the wall. He’d achieved a perfect balance of veneine and consciousness: there was just enough in his system to keep the pain out of mind, but not so much that it was clouding his judgment, or threatening to send him to Cross the Water. It was an ideal time to be thinking about the Zindels.

  If it hadn’t been for Mr. Stitch’s assertion that Herman Zindel hadn’t been murdered by sharpsie hooligans, the case would be open and shut. Zindel was a heretical mathematician, yes, but the odds were just the same that a random murder by sharpsie housebreakers would hit Zindel as they would anyone else. There were probably dozens of armchair heretics in Trowth, even a few with the funds to bribe the Academy of Sciences for access to the Excelsior’s flight recorder. Maybe it was just bad luck for Zindel.

  The flight recorder had been almost a dead-end. Beckett had gone immediately that afternoon to the headquarters of the Royal Academy of Sciences, to see the wreckage of the Excelsior. He’d been denied entry.

  “By orders of the Crown,” the clerk had told him, while the Lobstermen assigned to guard him had loomed monstrously. Their bone armor had glistened red and wet in the candlelight.

  “Coroner,” Beckett had told the skinny, pinch-faced man. “I work for the Crown.”

  The clerk had shrugged. “Unless you’re the Emperor or the Minister for Internal Security, I’ll need written consent before I can let you in.” He had a bored expression on his face; there was no malice in him, just a stubborn need to follow the rules. “Besides, we don’t keep the. . . we don’t keep that here. It’s in one of the Vaults in Old Bank.”

  The process for getting a Search Writ from the Minister for Internal Security was a tedious one. Beckett had to have a message sent to Mr. Stitch, explaining what he wanted. Stitch would pass the message on to the secretary for the Vice-Minister of IS, who would determine whether or not it was important enough to pass on to the Minister’s Adjunct’s secretary, who would show it to the Adjunct, who would then probably just sign the Minister’s name to it, on the grounds that the Minister was very busy having lunch with Someone Important.

  What all that meant was that Beckett wouldn’t be able to get his writ for at least a day, maybe more. Not that he expected to find much, even with the delay. Certainly, no one was going to cart off the two tons of wreckage that used to be the Excelsior. Beckett liked to be thorough, though. Maybe someone had come in to make copies of the flight recordings, and had dropped a matchbook or something.

  On the surface, the simplest solution was a sharpsie break-in, which is precisely what made Beckett distrust it. If Stitch hadn’t been there, hadn’t called Beckett in right away, then there wouldn’t have been a search of the home. No one would have brought in a psychometrist, no one would have found Zindel’s equations, or the recording cylinders. The investigation would have just stopped, and the gendarmes would have headed out to kill sharpsies.

  If you were trying to throw someone off the trail, the sharpsies made a perfect target. That gendarme captain wouldn’t have worried about unlocked doors, about lack of struggle. He’d find the answer he liked, and stop looking. Beckett liked sharpsies as an answer, because they were easy. But he couldn’t stop looking. Thirty years in service, trading away the better parts of himself as he steeped in the horror that human beings were capable of, and it seemed like the obdurate refusal to stop searching was the only thing that Beckett had left.

  Someone had killed Herman Zindel, and Beckett would give two-to-one that it had something to do with geometry. Beckett closed his eyes for a moment, to rest them, and to try and focus.

  A sharp pain stabbed through his head and all the way down his spine, jerking him awake. The candle on his desk had almost burned down; it was just a lump of smoking wax. His joints no longer ached, they shrieked, and it felt like he was crushing shards of broken glass in his knees every time he moved.

  Panic struck,
when Beckett realized he couldn’t move his right hand. There was a horrible cramp in it, it felt like the tendons in his fingers had been twisted around each other, like his fingers were out of place. The hand had curled up like a claw, and wouldn’t respond when he tried to move it. It just twisted up harder. It hurt, but it was more terrifying than anything else.

  Beckett stumbled around in the dark towards his medicine chest, with his right hand pressed hard under his left arm. The pain was unbearable; a hundred jagged snares of it, behind his eyes, in his arms and legs. The coroner had a brief vision of himself curling up with pain and dying on the floor, inches away from his medicine. He managed to snatch up a hypodermic and a new bottle of veneine and tore off the top with his teeth. Not bothering to measure, he filled the syringe with fang, ripped open his right sleeve, and rammed the drug into his veins.

  For a single heart-stopping second nothing happened, and then the relief hit him like a sledgehammer. Beckett barely had time to yank the needle out of his arm before his legs turned to jelly and he collapsed on the ground. He cracked his head on the bedpost as he fell, but barely noticed it. The veneine wrapped its warmth around him, and all the pain and cold in the world seemed a hundred miles away.

  Then his vision distorted. His room bulged and shrank, twisted like he was looking at its reflection in the back of a spoon. He blinked, and his nose and mouth were filled with salt water, his ears with the sound of rushing waves.

  He was in the stormy, midnight-black ocean that fang-addicts called Cross the Water. It tossed him relentlessly, rolling him in the salty black breaking waves, so he couldn’t tell which way was up or down, couldn’t even try to swim, as his legs and arms were hammered by the force of the waves

  And then it was gone. The water rushed away, and Beckett lay gasping for air on a hot, golden surface. His stomach abruptly rejected the brackish seawater, and he vomited it up, struggling to catch his breath over the violent retching.