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A HISTORY OF THE REMARKABLE VOYAGE LATELY UNDERTAKEN ON BOARD THE CELEBRATED LEVIATHAN.

Written by Sir John M——, from his own journals.

 

The First Day: Our Departure, and My First Encounter with the Duke.

WE SET SAIL from the greenish coasts of home on the last day of spring in the year ——, and I do truthfully believe the whole country had turned out to see our departure;—though whether in delight at the new thing we were attempting or in eagerness to be rid of us I cannot say. There was certainly feasting and drunk­en­ness enough on both sides of the affair, among those of us who went and those who stayed. I myself refused most of the wine that flowed so prodigiously, so that I might retain enough of my senses to enjoy the sight of our mighty Leviathan drifting away from the shore for the first time.

That nothing like our expedition has ever been attempted, and that nothing like it will ever be attempted again: of these two things I am equally sure. For the common sense of the scribblers and the talkers at court is that we failed. Yet of that I am not entirely certain. I suppose the memory of our igno­minious return is fresher in most minds than the memory of our departure. But our departure was glorious. In all our thousands of years of history, no human eye had ever beheld such a spectacle. We were doing a thing that our wisest heads had told us could never be done; and if we did not make it to the end of our journey, remember that it was the beginning that was said to be impossible.

When at last the gigantic signal flags unfurled and gave the command, and two thousand giant oars, worked in perfect unison by the most ingenious contrivance, began to beat the water with a mighty roar, the cheer that erupted from six thousand throats on our floating city was nearly deafening. Yet it was not so loud that we could not hear the even greater cheer from the land. And when, after perhaps a quarter-hour of rowing, the great sails began to billow, we could still hear the cheering from the coast. Bank after bank of sails unfurled, all brilliantly colored according to their functions, so that the hardy seamen charged with maintaining them could find their way in the forest of canvas. There were red sails, yellow sails, blue sails, and white sails, thousands of them, and as they caught the wind our Leviathan surged forward with a majestic delib­erate­ness that well became her. The cheering on the coast continued, but from us there was only awed silence.

I must have stood silently admiring the spectacle for a good half hour. I might have stood longer, but a carriage arrived with a summons for me to speak with the Duke. One does not refuse the Duke’s invitation, of course, so I immediately boarded the carriage.

The driver took us slowly up the port promenade, stopping often to wait for the milling crowds to part. We passed the houses of the minor nobility and the prosperous merchants, then the cafes and theaters, finally coming to the palaces of the greater nobles, and at the very end of the promenade the residence of the Duke himself. A footman greeted the carriage and opened the door for me, then led me to the door of the Duke’s palace. From there a butler led me through the entry hall (which was as grand as the limited space assigned to even the Duke would allow) to the drawing room, where the Duke himself immediately greeted me.

“Sir John! We are honored by your visit.”

“The honor is certainly mine,” I replied.

“Yes, I suppose it is. Still, good of you to come. I’ve been wanting to meet you personally for some time now. You’re our senior diplomat, as I understand.”

“That is true, your grace.”

“And I’m told you’re something of a wizard with languages.”

“I usually am able to pick up at least the rudiments of a new language fairly quickly.”

“Splendid,” he said. “We’ll need that. Say something in French for me.”

He caught me off guard, so I strung together the first few words of French that came into my head: “J’aime bien les haricots.”

“Marvelous! Certainly sounded like French to me. I don’t actually know the language myself, but then that’s rather the idea of having someone like you with us, isn’t it? Well, I see no reason why I shouldn’t have every confidence in you. It really was very good of you to drop in. Thank you so much.”

And that, it appeared, was the end of our interview. I learned from the butler on my way out that the Duke had done the same thing to three other men before me that day.

“I certainly can understand if the Duke’s mind is distracted by the weight of his responsibilities,” I said.

“No, sir,” the butler said. “The Duke’s mind is merely dis­tracted. Shall I send for the carriage to take you back?”

“Thank you, but I think I’ll walk. It’s a beautiful day.”

“It is that, sir. My apologies for the Duke’s distraction, but one soon becomes accustomed to it.”

I decided to stroll down the central boulevard on my way back, since there were no other demands on my time. Except for the wood planks under my feet, I might well have been on the high street of one of our more prosperous provincial cities. The houses and shops made the sea invisible, and nothing short of a cyclone could cause our great ship to rock noticeably. First I passed the houses of the lesser nobility (for the greater nobles all had their houses along the outer promenades), small perhaps by land standards, but tastefully built and ornamented by our leading architects. After them came a sudden change in the aspect of the street; it was lined with small shops and bustling with servants and workmen’s wives. Then came another abrupt change; the street broadened, and the shops were grander. When I reached the exact center of the city, the boulevard broadened again into the Great Square, as it was called, a broad piazza or forum as capacious as it could be made considering the limited space, and surrounded by the public buildings necessary in any city (even a floating one): the courts, the guild halls, and—on the starboard side of the square—the public market, bustling with servants and tradesmen’s wives. After that, there were more grand shops; and from there the aft end of the boulevard was something of a mirror image of the fore end. For the wisdom of our architects had decreed that the various orders of persons should be distributed and balanced through the Leviathan, so that factions might be discouraged. At last, turning to the right through a narrow side street, I made my way to the port promenade, and finally to my own comfortable little house, where my man Aelfric was awaiting my instruc­tions for supper. There was something altogether comforting about the little ceremony of giving him the same instructions I gave him every evening: “So long as it’s good plain food, Aelfric, I’ll leave the matter to your judgment.” I sensed for the first time how much trepidation I had felt in setting out on our voyage; but there was great reassurance in seeing that my simple household routine continued unaltered.

After supper I walked to the starboard promenade to admire the sunset; then I retired and read Henricus on the Book of Job until my eyelids grew heavy.

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From DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION.

Calendar. Not until 1992 were astron­omers, using minute observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, able to determine the exact date of Secretaries’ Day.

When England switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, several days were lost, which are still kept in storage in a heavily guarded wing of the National Archives.

Canaries. Canaries and other talking birds are born speaking Hebrew, and can only with diffi­culty be taught to pronounce a few words of other languages.

Released into the wild, canaries quickly learn to clip their own wings.

Candles. Candle wax, once melted and allowed to solidify again, becomes the hardest substance known to man, and is frequently employed in the cutting of diamonds.

It is not possible to burn a candle at both ends. If one end of the wick is ignited, the other end will immediately be extinguished.

In colonial times, turnip greens, boiled and mashed into a paste, were often used as a substitute for tallow in the manufacture of candles.

A candle at the north end of a room will in­variably burn more brightly than a candle at the south end of the same room. The cause of this phenomenon is unknown.

Candy. A very palatable substitute for licorice can be made from broccoli properly cooked.

Cardboard. Cardboard is nothing more than wood in an early stage of development.

Cats. Most cats can be taught to read if trained from a young age.

A cat’s fur contains all the nutrients the cat needs to survive, which is why cats spend so much time licking themselves.

There are many more cats than commonly supposed, but most of them are too small to be seen with the naked eye.

Cement. It has been proved by science that the attachment of two bodies made to adhere by cement or glue is more emotional than physical.

Chameleons. Light is necessary for a chameleon to take on the color of its environment; in a com­pletely dark room, the animal reverts to its natural color, which is plaid.

Cheese. Cheese never spoils; it simply changes into a different kind of cheese.

In medieval times, the cheesemongers of Limburg were the only tradesmen exempt from the requirement of presenting a tithe of their goods to the Church.

Many fine edifices made of blocks of Romano cheese in the 1300s are still standing today.

Circles. English common law prohibited the squaring of a circle, and the prohibition is still enforced by 47 of the 50 states. Vermont allows it only under licensed psychiatric supervision.

The risible superstition that crop circles are messages from extraterrestrial visitors per­sists to this day, despite the frequent proofs to the con­trary. It is now well known to scientists that crop circles are messages from an ancient underground civilization.

Clematis. “Clematis” is the most variably pro­nounced word in the English language, but only the pronunciation Dr. Boli uses is correct.

Clocks. The first clocks had ten hours marked; the two extra hours were added during the time of Elizabeth I to give the queen time to practice her virginals.

In the southern hemisphere, clocks run counter-clockwise.

Coffee. During the Second World War, chicory was often used as a substitute for coffee, which meant that endive had to be used as a substitute for chicory.

Cola. Cola and coffee come from the same plant, but grown in different soils.

Computers. Blaise Pascal invented an early com­puting machine; but his graphical user inter­face for it, which relied on the cooperation of a live mouse, was only intermittently successful.

Constitution, American. By the thirty-sixth amend­ment, the President is required to raise his hand if he needs permission to go to the bathroom while addressing Congress.

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THE CASE OF THE MISSING CASE, Part 1.

A new detective novel to be serialized over the next few months.

 

Chapter 1: Which Contains Bean Sprouts and Spanakopita.

“IF A THING is lost,” I said, flicking the bean sprouts out of my hair with an easy self-confidence, “then the thing to do is to find it.”

“You agree, then?” She tossed another bowl of bean sprouts at my head, but I ducked and this one missed.

“On my usual terms,” I agreed. “Fifty per cent up front, fifty per cent after thirty days, and fifty per cent when the job is complete.”

She thought about that for a moment, and then lobbed a final bowl of bean sprouts in my direction. It missed me again. “That is acceptable,” she declared. “But remember this: the next time you serve me vegetables, I expect them to be fully grown vegetables.”

With that, she turned on her heel—which is rather a neat trick in high heels; you should try it some time—and left me.

She left me with so many questions. What did she really want from me? Why the pathological aversion to sprouts? What was her name? Where would I send the bill? I realized that I ought to have asked some of these questions before she left, but now it was too late.

Nevertheless, I had a job: that much was clear. I called my secretary to clean up the bean sprouts; but no one answered, and I recalled ruefully that I had no secretary. So I left them where they were. Perhaps they would root in the carpet and grow into beans.

Now that I had a job, the first thing to do was to make a note of it in my memorandum book, since it was after all a thing to be remembered. I pulled the tattered notebook from my pocket, arranged the tatters in order, and wrote on the first blank page:

 

Job no. 103

 

(I had begun numbering my jobs at 101.)

 

Category: General

Description: Locate missing case

Remarks: Case described as containing $35,462,817.98 in cash. Client states that case was left to her by her beloved great-uncle & thus has sentimental value.

 

Now that I had made my official memorandum, it was time to get to work.

The first thing I did was to call the Hagia Sophia Diner. I asked Ludmilla to look in the lost-and-found box, because that’s where things always seem to turn up when I lose them. But no luck: there was no case in there with $35,462,817.98 in cash in it. All she found was a large bag with two million in it, and that in negotiable bonds, not in cash. Ludmilla said I could have it if I wanted it, but I told her to put it back in the box. What good would it do me? I knew my client couldn’t be fooled that easily.

Well, that was it, then. I was out of ideas. —Not quite completely: I did have the really inspired idea of ordering a spanakopita to go while I was on the phone. But other than that, I came up blank. I sighed, put on my hat, and headed for the Hagia Sophia to pick up my spanakopita.

“You need more protein than that,” Ludmilla said when she was ringing up my order.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” I told her. “What I need and what I want are two different things.”

“Suit yourself” was her witty rejoinder. “But if I were you, I’d add one of our lamb shakes to your order, or maybe some liver spice cake for dessert.”

I thanked her for her advice, but I didn’t change my order. I’d had liver spice cake for breakfast.

While I sat on a bench in the park and ate my spanakopita, my keen eye continued to scour the landscape for clues. But it was just an ordinary day at the park. Over on the green, a few Parthians were playing cricket. Up the street a bit, a taxi stopped to let out a woman with a small wallaby on a leash. On the playground, two third-graders were trying to sell each other insurance. The only remotely unusual thing I saw was one suspicious-looking character hanging around in the park.

He was dressed in a dark suit, with a matching bowler and umbrella—rather unusual garb for an afternoon at the park in my city. But what really made me suspicious was the way he was standing five feet in front of me and saying “Excuse me, sir” over and over again in a louder and louder voice.

“Were you talking to me?” I demanded at last.

“Yes, sir,” the man said.

“Well, spill it, then. What’s on your mind?”

He cleared his throat. “Please pardon this intrusion, sir, but my employer, Dr. Henricus Albertus Boli, would like a few words with you.”

“Wouldn’t everybody?” I laughed a professional laugh that did not involve my steely eyes. “But what’s it worth to me?”

“Dr. Boli has been given to understand that you have been retained by the Countess Tatiana von Sturzhelm y Sombrero on a question involving a certain case that she seems to have misplaced.”

“What’s it to you?” Never give anything away: that’s my policy.

“If you do not mind accompanying me, sir, Dr. Boli has certain information to impart which he believes you may find material in your search.”

“What sort of information?” I asked suspiciously. It pays to be suspicious. I have that motto framed behind my desk.

“Information,” the man explained, “which Dr. Boli believes you may find material in your search.”

Well, that was more like it. “Okay, I’ll go with you, as long as you’re paying for the bus.”

“If you don’t mind, sir, it might be more expeditious to use Dr. Boli’s car, which he has sent with me for that purpose.”

“Lead the way, then.” I stood up from my bench.

“I have taken the liberty of summoning the driver already, sir.”

Just as he finished saying that, the biggest limousine I’d ever seen rolled up to the curb. It looked like someone had taken an ordinary limousine and tied the ends to two freight trains pulling in opposite directions.

“Some car the old man’s got,” I remarked with a little less indifference than I usually try to project.

“I beg your pardon?” The man in the bowler saw what I was looking at and almost smiled. “Oh, no, sir, that is not Dr. Boli’s car. Dr. Boli prefers to be more discreet.”

The light changed, and the big limousine drove on.

“Here is Dr. Boli’s car now, sir.”

I looked down the street and saw the front of a Lincoln from the late 1930s. The grille passed us, and then for a long time there was nothing but hood. At last a window came, and I could see some sort of driver inside. Then more windows, and finally there was a door in front of us just as the car rolled to a stop. The man in the bowler opened the door for me and seemed to expect me to get in.

I think the car was even bigger on the inside. The seat I sat in was really more of an easy chair, and it had a sort of built-in reading lamp behind it. Along the side wall of the car, under the windows, were rows of old books behind glass.

“This is discreet?” I asked.

“Dr. Boli generally finds that people do not notice this car unless it is pointed out to them.”

“I see,” I said. I didn’t see, but I wanted him to think I saw.

We drove through Banksville, Beechview, Bellevue, Blawnox, Bloomfield, Bon Air, and Brookline, all in alphabetical order. At last we came to what I thought must be some university campus, with great big stone buildings covered with Boston ivy.

“Here we are,” said the man with the bowler. “This is Dr. Boli’s town house.”

“Are you sure it isn’t his town?” I remarked with my trademark rapier wit.

“Quite sure,” the man in the bowler said. “Dr. Boli’s country house appears as a city on county planning maps, but his town house has no separate municipal status.”

“Oh,” I said. There didn’t seem to be much else to say.

The car stopped in front of the main building. The door of the car opened, and I was obviously expected to get out. So I did. You can’t say I don’t do what’s expected of me.

“Dr. Boli will meet us in the library,” the bowler man said, “if you would care to follow me, sir.”

I followed him up the marble steps, under a forest of columns, and through a pair of giant doors with all kinds of carvings on them. Then I had to stop and let my eyes adjust to the light inside. When I had done that, I had to stop a little more and let my brain adjust to what my eyes were seeing.

 

Proceed to Chapter 2.

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DR. BOLI’S LIBRARY OF LOST BOOKS, No. 3.

Pernix Ineptus: De Architectura

PERNIX INEPTUS WAS born in Ostia about 320 a.d., but he spent most of his early life among poor relatives in the country, where the rude huts of the farmers were the only constructions that met his eye. The memory of these early years stayed with him for most of his career, and indeed even his most mature designs were frequently described as “rude” by his contemporaries. None of his buildings has survived, but as he was the nephew of Pernix Illustrius, who was twice consul, Ineptus was commissioned to design a number of important public works. The most celebrated of these were a theater in his native Ostia, in which a natural rock formation unfortunately blocked the view of the stage from most of the seats right of center; a public bath, also in Ostia, which was washed away by a water supply that proved somewhat too generous; and a Christian basilica on the Aventine, which became so unstable as its foundation settled that Pope Quintus IV had it exorcised—a measure that failed of its desired effect, since, according to a contemporary account of the event, the demonic forces threw down the entire west front while the rite of exorcism was being performed.

Although De Architectura is lost, an epitome by one of Pernix’ students survives. The prologue to this epitome tells us that the original work was in eleven books, which Pernix regarded as the perfect number “for the reason that it may be evenly divided into quarters two different ways.” Scholars have not been able to determine what Pernix thought he meant by that.

The first book was a treatment of the geometry that architects employ; to judge by the epitome, Pernix’ geometry was non-Euclidean, but not plausibly so. The second book treated of mathematics, but the epitome omits this subject entirely, on the grounds that Pernix never bothered to teach it to his students.

After that came several books treating of the various orders of architecture: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, and a new order which Pernix claimed as his own invention, and which from his own name he styled the Pernicious. The epitome is frus­tratingly vague on this new order, but it appears to have been based on the “parts of eleven”: that is, the ratios between the various numbers into which Pernix believed eleven could be evenly divided. If the reading in the unique manuscript is correct, the decorations on the capitals were inspired by intertwined tapeworms.

For reasons no longer clear, these books were followed by two books on wine and its effects on the architect. In the epitome, this section is largely incoherent.

The last book, clearly inspired by Vitruvius, was a book of clever mechanical contri­vances. The epitome gives only three of them, which it says may serve as representative examples of the whole: a device for making holes of any desired size in the earth, which appears to be what we should call a shovel; a device for holding any number of items elevated at a certain distance from the floor, which appears to be a table; and a device for preventing sheets of papyrus or other thin and light material from blowing away in the wind, which appears to be a rock.

The epitome ends with an epilogue, from which we learn that Pernix perished when the roof of his own villa, which he had designed for himself, fell in on him, killing him instantly: a death which the author of the epitome regards as proper and fitting for a master who, he says, both lived and died by architecture.

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From DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION.

Air. “Oxygen” is an imaginary gas hypothesized in the nineteenth century to account for certain phenomena then not understood. We actually breathe ether.

Alexander the Great. Archaeologists have re­cent­ly established that Alexander the Great died of a surfeit of saag paneer.

Apalachicola. Any straight line on the earth’s surface, if extended indefinitely, will eventually pass through Apalachicola.

Anthropology. Just as theology is the study of God by men, so anthropology is properly the study of men by God.

Antimony. The word “antimony” was invented by Samuel Johnson as a hoax, but by the time the deception was revealed it was too late.

Bakers. In medieval times, just as the barbers were also the surgeons, so the bakers were also the nuclear physicists.

Ballpoint pens. The first ballpoint pens were invested as an April Fool’s prank.

Bats. Bats cannot truly fly; the bats we see apparently “flying” have actually been thrown at high velocities.

Beer. The ancient Greeks believed that wine was a gift from the gods, but beer was a gift from the Johnsons down the street.

The vaunted superiority of traditional German beers is illusory: in reality, they only taste better.

Bicycles. Hero of Alexandria invented the first working bicycle, but he fell off and refused to ride the thing again.

In Bridgeville, Delaware, all bicycle bells are required to play Westminster chimes.

Books. The codex, or book with pages bound on one side, was invented as a tool for pressing flowers. An anonymous postclassical herbalist was the first to hit on the idea of writing on the pages.

Bouquets. The cut-flower bouquet originated in medieval Luxembourg, where sales of ornamental plants were taxed by the number of roots.