Bruce Sterling - Crystal Express

The natives of the interior are stubbornly set in their heathen errors, yet full of remarkable stories of men with tails, ancestral giants, and the like, which I hope to convey to you when I have more thoroughly mastered their language.

And now I must chide you. A friend of mine in the Royal Society of London, a colleague in natural theology (though very lamentably a Protestant), has told me that he has read a certain manuscript circulated secretly among the savants of France and England, which he called Telliamed; or, Discourses On the Diminution of the Sea. He was full of praise for this manuscript, which, he being an infidel, does nothing for the sanctity of your reputation. And you need not protest your innocence; for a child could see that the supposed Indian sage, named Telliamed, who narrates this new System of Geology, merely has your own name spelled backward.

Perhaps the sea really has diminished; I should find this hard to deny, since I, too, have seen the desert of petrified ships in the Bahar-Balaama west of Cairo. But this should not be interpreted to go against Revelation. As your spiritual adviser, I must warn you, my old friend: you are no longer so young as to be able to neglect the very pressing matter of the salvation of your soul. In the end the Dogma must triumph, and no amount of sophistical "evidences," "hypotheses," or "deductions" will save you when you argue before the Throne of Judgment.

I should hate to think that the collections of rocks and fossils that I have sent you had been used for an impious purpose. Yet I cannot leave you without a gift of some sort; and knowing your fondness for snuff, I have sent you some of the aboriginals' own nasal aliment, which they derive from a number of curious bushes and vines. It is not tobacco, but upon the use of it, they receive the word of the Faith more readily, with excitement and rejoicing; so I cannot think that it is bad. I include the small birdbone snuffing tool with which they inhale the substance, for your collection.

In return, I ask that you burn a few candles for the repose of the soul of poor Berard Procureur; and please try to go to confession with regularity. I pray for you,

Your ancient friend,

Fr. Gerard le Bovier de Fuillet, S.J.

De Maillet smiled. "It is not at all a bad thing to have one's spiritual adviser in another country," he mused aloud. He pulled from within the heavy envelope another, smaller envelope, which rustled. He peeled the gummed endpaper loose, and the snuff within the packet released a pleasant, faintly bitter aroma of exotic spices.

The smell unlocked a chain of memories within de Maillet's mind: cones of black incense smoldering in a perforated silver bowl, dark coffee in a china cup, the nude rump of an Egyptian courtesan spread across a brocade pillow. With these unexpected and pleasant memories came a sudden comfortable loosening in de Maillet's bowels. He felt a brief sense of animal well-being, a warm flickering from the ashen coals of youth.

His doctor had forbidden him snuff. It had been several months since he had last felt his nostrils solidly plugged. He peered carefully into the paper packet. The fine-ground leaves looked harmless enough. He fingered the light, hollow birdbone, then plunged it into the packet and snorted recklessly.

"Yoww!" he shouted, leaping to his feet. His spectacles flew off into the sand. Cursing, de Maillet stomped heavily around the pole of the parasol, his old eyes leaking tears. The pagan snuff had stung his tissues like an angry wasp, hurting so much that he could not even sneeze. He clutched his cheekbone and sinus with one age-spotted leathery hand.

Slowly the pain faded to a strange numbness, not entirely unpleasant. De Maillet straightened his back, then bent to pick up his silver-headed cane and his spectacles. It had been a long time since he had bent so easily. He sat on the campstool without puffing for breath.

He noted with interest that his sensibilities seemed heightened. When he felt the smooth ebony of his cane, it was as if he had never felt it before. Even his eyesight seemed improved; the blue summer sky over the crystalline Mediterranean seemed to shimmer as if it had just been created. Even the sand grains on his silver-buckled pumps seemed to have been placed each just so, forming a tiny constellation of their own against the black leather.

He was just contemplating filling his other nostril when he saw a young townsman running toward him from a rockier section of the coast. Here there were a number of secluded dells and hollows where the young gallants of Marseille were wont to take their mistresses, or other young women whom they wished to persuade to assume that estate. The stranger was a handsome fellow of the commercial class with a face slightly marred by smallpox.

"Did you hear a cry for help?" the young man demanded, stopping in the broad shadow of de Maillet's parasol.

"My word," said de Maillet, embarrassed. "I'm afraid that I myself cried out. I, er, am somewhat troubled with the gout. I wasn't aware that there was anyone within earshot."

"It can't have been you, monsieur," the young man said reasonably, tucking in his linen shirttail. "It was followed by a spate of the most horrible cursing, some of it in a foreign language. My companion was so frightened that she fled immediately."

"Oh," de Maillet said. Suddenly he smiled. "Well, perhaps there was a boatload of sailors, then. My eyes are not so good as they were. I might have missed them completely."

The young man grinned. "All is well. Women always want to prolong a rendezvous long after its natural summation." His eyes fell on de Maillet's cane, a presentation item from the city fathers of Marseille. "Forgive me," the young man said. "You are the Sieur de Maillet, the famous savant, are you not?"

De Maillet smiled. "You know I am. You just read my name from the cane."

"Nonsense," said the young tradesman vigorously. "Everyone knows who Monsieur de Maillet is. Marseille owes its prosperity to you. My father is Jean Martine of the Martine Oriental Import- Export Company. I am his eldest son, Jean Martine the Younger." He bowed. "He has spoken of you often. My family owes you a very large debt of gratitude."

"Yes, I believe I know your father," de Maillet said generously. He loved flattery. "He deals in Egyptian trade-stuffs, does he not? Bitumen, antiquities, and the like." De Maillet shrugged with an aristocrat's proper vagueness about such matters.

"The very same," said Martine. "We have sometimes had the honor of supplying Your Excellency with curios for your very famous cabinet of natural wonders." He hesitated. "Without meaning to intrude, Your Excellency, I cannot help but wonder why I find you alone here on this deserted beach."

De Maillet looked at the tradesman's open, guileless face and felt the natural urge of the old, the learned, and the garrulous to instruct the young. "It has to do with my System," he said. "My life's work in natural philosophy, upon which my posthumous fame will rest. For many years, in my travels, I have examined seashores, and studied the history of the world as revealed in its rocks. It is my contention that the level of the sea is dropping, at a rate I calculate at perhaps three feet every thousand years. During my life I have amassed evidence of this diminution, and I believe it to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt."

"Very remarkable," said Martine slowly. "But surely you are not sitting here in order to watch it drop."

"No," said de Maillet, "but when the weather is fine, I often come here, to think over old times, to examine my notes and journals, and to extend my chain of deductions.

"For instance. If you grant that the sea is diminishing, then it follows quite rigorously that there must have been a time, many thousands of centuries ago, when the entire earth was covered by the sea. And you may prove this quite easily. I have examined the cabinet of Herr Scheuchzer in Zurich, which contains a great many fossilized fish that that worthy man pried from the stones of the Swiss mountains. In the writings of the savant Fulgose we find the story of an entire ship, with its sails, cordage, and anchors, and the bones of forty of its crew, found fossilized a hundred fathoms down an iron mine in the Canton of Bern. Herodotus writes of iron mooring-rings found far up the slopes of the mountains of Mokatan, near Memphis. How else can we account for these vestiges, than to assume that the sea was once deep enough to drown these mountains?"