John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“—and who now , if I’m doing my math right, would be one hundred and seven years old. And you’re doing this— we’re doing this — because you want him to be—” You pursed your lips. “What’s the expression you used?”

I took a deep breath. “Brought to justice.”

“ Brought to justice. Okay.”

Neither of us spoke for a while. The cabin bucked and shuddered death-defyingly. Someone very close by, possibly right behind us, let out a groan of pent-up human misery. The stewardess arrived with your bourbon. You tried to give her a tip, which she refused.

“It all sounds so hokey, when you put it like that,” I said.

“It doesn’t sound hokey, Walter. It sounds batshit crazy.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Haven.” I leaned forward. “But the man you’re married to believes it — I know that for certain. And so does the rest of his church.”

You took a slow swig of your bourbon. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Tolliver. The two of us had better pray that isn’t true.”

* * *

The Kraut was living in a one-room apartment on Taubstummengasse that had been used as an atelier by so many artists over the years that you could feel the clots of hardened paint under the carpet. One of them — or so she claimed — had been the mysterious Kappa, for whom Sonja had modeled in her Jandek days. The Jandek itself was two blocks up the street, still open for business and seedy as ever.

None of this was by design, of course, but neither was it pure coincidence. I soon learned that Vienna is such a dense and impacted mass of translucent, overlapping layers of history and nostalgia and happenstance that it resembles nothing so much as a massive candied onion. I found emblems of my family’s downfall everywhere I looked: some as slight as a waltz played by panhandling Poles, some as monumental as the gold-and-marble plague column up the Graben from Saint Peter’s. The Brown Widow’s villa was still standing, and the house with the intertwined dragons was, too, though it now housed a shop selling Red Bull and bongs. I shambled through those marzipan streets like a zombie, Mrs. Haven, if only because the dead seemed so oppressively alive. You admired the Breughels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and shopped for Alexander boots and sea-green loden jackets on the Graben. Both of us kept our distance from the Klimts.

You didn’t make the best impression on the Kraut — what’s the use of denying it? — but then again, neither did I. She was in grad student mode at the time, living in her big, drafty studio on bread and liverwurst and Turkish coffee, as single-minded and disheveled as her secret patron saint, Madame Curie. My decision to drop out of Ogilvy had disappointed her deeply. The one thing I’m grateful for, even now, is that we managed to keep the Husband’s identity from her. She didn’t blame Synchronology for the end of her marriage — that would have meant giving the UCS some credibility, however slight — but she had nothing but contempt for its disciples. The only thing she viewed more skeptically was love.

“Where is she?” she said, before she’d even let me in the door.

“She’s coming,” I answered, defensive already. “I think she’s taking a tour of the Opera.”

“I see,” said the Kraut. “She’s off shopping somewhere?”

“You don’t know the first thing about her, Ursula. For your information—”

“I’m sorry, Waldy. I’ll untwist my knickers.” She squinted past me, as if checking to see whether I’d been tailed. “I’m assuming that those flowers are for me?”

“Of course they are,” I said, giving her a kiss.

The only furniture in the place was a cot in one corner and a rolltop desk and chair against the wall. A pot of goulash sat on a hotplate in the middle of the floor. It looked as though she’d been eating out of it for days.

“I’m doing what I want to do, Waldy,” she said, guessing my thoughts as always. “I don’t cook anymore. I’ve done quite enough cooking.”

“Just as long as you’re remembering to eat.”

She smiled. “Tell me about your relationship. I assume you find it sensually fulfilling.”

I made a face and wandered over to the desk. “I’ll have to defer to Mrs. Haven on that point.”

Her eyes narrowed at once. “Mrs. Who ?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “That’s just a name I call her sometimes. As a joke.”

“Ah,” said the Kraut.

“What’s ‘aha’ supposed to mean?”

“I didn’t say ‘aha,’” she said, following me to the desk. “I said ‘ah.’ Would you like to ask me how my work is going?”

“Of course I would. But I probably wouldn’t understand your answer.”

The Kraut frowned at me for an instant, as if the possibility had only just occurred to her. She wasn’t as different from the rest of the family as she liked to think.

“You might find some of it rather dusty, I suppose — it’s true you never were much good at theory. But what I do isn’t so far removed from what your father did, at times. The difference between a hypothesis of mine and a hypothesis of his — the only meaningful difference, it sometimes seems to me — is that mine must be expressible in terms of mathematics.”

“I know the difference between science and science fiction, Ursula.”

“Do you?” the Kraut said. “Your father seems to think he does, as well. You’re both so sure.”

That surprised me, I have to admit. “Aren’t you?”

“Orson once wrote a story — more of a fable, really — called ‘The Principatrix of Gnawledge.’ Do you remember it?”

I shook my head.

“It’s in the only book of his I brought along,” she said, digging a coverless pulp out of a drawer. “You can read it, if you like, while I make coffee. It’s quite short.”

An itching began in my palms as I reached for the book. The Kraut had never before suggested that I read anything of Orson’s. The story was marked with a postcard of Znojmo, featuring a portly businessman in a bowler hat, riding an enormous green gherkin above the Dyje River.

THE PRINCIPATRIX OF GNAWLEDGE

The Imperator of Omphalos-8, a satellite of Ganymede-12 in the System of Mines, had a proGene, a female, who duly attained to principatrix when she came of age. This principatrix, it is told, was the rarest of beauties: skin the color of subpolar frost, hair luminous as ore from a core-stratum vein. The Imperator doted on her, as fathers will, and built her a stronghouse of chromium and silica by the shore of a quarry on a neighboring moon, far removed from the intrigues of court. There she ripened to the first term of youth, and had no care for the Winter, and no means of influence over the Great Thermodynamic Arc, after the manner of ordinary men.

Now it happened one autumn, as she walked by the quarry, that the principatrix saw an other: a wizened old thrall, humming to herself as she cast cicada shells into the water. The oiled and ore-heavy waves danced about the thrall’s feet, and the leaves rustled about her hunched back, and her mica-colored rags flapped about her gray face in the beating of the ruthless autumn wind.

“Here,” said the principatrix, “is the loneliest thrall betwixt the Seven Poles. What brings you to my quarrylake, old woman?”

“Imperator’s Daughter,” said the thrall, “you live in a stronghouse, and your hair is as ore from a core-stratum vein; but what good does it bring? Duration is brief, and existence is grief — you exist after the manner of ordinary men, with no thought for the Winter, and no influence over the Thermodynamic Arc.”

“Thought for the Winter I do now possess,” said the Imperator’s daughter; “but influence over the Arc, I have not.” And she began to consider.