DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (5 page)

They went out at last through the front hall and the big door (passing unseen and unseeing around or through Boney Rasmussen
himself, who since his death on July Fourth night had been standing there before a door that would not open, unable to go
forward and certainly not back) and out into the fragrant morning, a nice day, another nice day.

Though she was now at the very least the acting director of the Foundation, Rosie wouldn’t pay herself more salary; every
week she wrote out for herself a check for the same amount she had been getting as the Foundation’s part-time secretary. Today
though she would allow herself the use of Boney’s great black Buick that lay dormant in the garage, formerly carriage house,
at the turn of the drive. On her own Bison station wagon—not even hers but Mike’s, he hadn’t bothered to demand it from her
or was holding the demand in reserve to be laid on the table later—the struts were weak and brakes insecure, and the thought
of driving it on the highway far from home made Rosie uneasy,
though Spofford said that if it was going to go, or stop rather, it was more likely to do it careening over a dirt road in
the Faraways than on the interstate. She said she saw the logic.

She had found the Buick’s key in the pocket of Boney’s winter overcoat, left there the last time he had driven, and yesterday
they’d gone out to the carriage house, Sam delighted and laughing, to start it up. They’d pushed the big stable doors open,
Rosie marvelling that Boney hadn’t ever bothered to put in a real garage with a roll-up door and concrete floor. Sam inspected
the sleeping dragon, putting her fingers in the gulp-holes in the side (which were actually fake, Rosie found, went in an
inch or so and stopped; on her father’s surely they had had some function, swallowed air or something). It came right to life,
strong and willing. Sam cheered.

Like all this, it wasn’t hers, even if it was hers to use. If it belonged to anyone it belonged, as did all of Boney’s remains,
to Una Knox.

I’m leaving it all to my old girlfriend Una Knox
, Boney said to her a month before he died. The way he’d said it, and the fact that nothing official ever turned up with this
name on it, convinced Rosie that Una Knox was a joke of some complicated kind, the kind that deeply private and solitary people
enjoy playing on themselves; or on the other hand was maybe a momentary ploy, a name snatched at random to fend off Rosie
and Allan who were forcing him to talk and think about his own fast-approaching nonexistence: that, in any case, there was
no such person. Which didn’t keep Rosie from imagining her appearing one day, sailing darkly tall into Arcady, come to claim
what was hers.

Vroom
. Sam cheered again at the miracle of the car’s starting. Rosie guided the great length of it out of its lair inch by inch,
certain that by day’s end it would be dinged; and to whom would she have to answer for that?

H
uman lives are ordered in cycles of seven years, counting from the child’s first appearance on earth to the day or night on
which she departs.
Cycles
, which in sequence form a wave, a wave with its tops and bottoms, ups and downs; it can be drawn on paper, a simple sine
wave, with
x
and
y
coordinates of Time and Amplitude, peaking at seven, at fourteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-eight, at thirty-five. Halfway
through the climb to the top, we reach the horizontal coordinate that divides this rolling wave of the years into upper and
lower halves; and the year in which we pass over this line we can call the Up Passage Year. Anyway that’s what the most recent
discoverer or deviser of this cycle chose to call it.

Rose Ryder, awake but undressed, sat unmoving on the edge of her narrow bed in her cabin by the Shadow. At her feet, on the
bedroom floor, were many long sheets of paper with waves or cycles drawn on them, crossed by a median line; she had drawn
them herself, with compass and rule. They had slipped in the night from the bed where she had left them, and she looked down
at them without exactly seeing them. It was to be another perfect cloudless day, tenth in a row, heating the Faraways to summer
levels by noon.

Rose was, herself, at the threshold of an Up Passage Year, headed for the uplands of twenty-eight. Which in her own case and
for this present cycle she did not contemplate reaching. She did not know or actively imagine what would intervene to stop
the upward progress but didn’t feel, today, that she would be around to celebrate her arrival there.

Of course she knew that “up” and “down” in the system had no necessary emotional coloration, your spirits didn’t necessarily
rise on the way up nor sink on the way down. Going down around the bottom of a cycle—your old certainties in pieces, whelmed
with new data, estranged
from former selves and not knowing what new ones await you on the way up again—can be quite exciting and interesting. Okay,
she said to herself, or to Mike Mucho, author of the system he called Climacterics: okay, but here on the way up I should
at least feel.

Feel what?

Not disintegrating, at least; together, and moving; I should know who I am, and that I exist. At least.

Yesterday she had known who she was, and who she was going to be. She was a graduate student, American and English literature,
and she was primarily involved with language; she was a teacher, or on her way to being one. A language school in Lima was
advertising for such a person in a journal Rose found the previous week at work, and Rose had been turning into that person
ever since, a little bit every day. She spoke good Spanish (she spoke, or had spoken, college Spanish). She lived with a family,
her own room up at the top of a tall old city house, lonely and a little afraid at first, but then discovering the city and
meeting people, going to the shore and up into the mountains. In her class she taught young people who wanted to become airline
stewardesses or import-export clerks, they were mild and beautifully mannered and seemed to come from another age, or another
decade anyway. In the company of these people and the others she met she went on from adventure to adventure, feelable but
not nameable in advance, and did not come back by the same path, if she ever came back at all.

For many days the presence within her of this person warmed her, like a child growing, or as she imagined such a child would
warm a woman. And then this morning she awoke and found her gone. Dead maybe; gone certainly, a cold hollow where she had
been, the awful cold hollow that she had for a time filled. Lima seemed as remote and airless as the moon. The Xeroxed page
from the journal where she found the ad looked up at her from her bedside table, also having died, showing nothing, or a cruel
joke.

Dead.

One more dead. There would come a day when there would be no more to die, and she would be alone.

With one bare foot she pushed the paper at her feet around so that it was upside down. The Up Passage Year now a slope to
a valley, the high hill a slough. What the fuck difference did it or could it make. It had died too.

Pierce (who had—maybe not seriously, she couldn’t tell—offered to help her make Mike’s Climacterics scheme into a book, a
self-help book, or a proposal for one) had asked her why a curve, how boring, how two-dimensional, why not a spiral, up which
we go as though climbing a
mountain; every seven years arriving at the same places or stages, only one turn higher, all different.

Why higher? She hadn’t asked it of him then, but asked it now. Why higher?

Why climbing?

The electric clock humming on the table hadn’t died, it alone remained alive, and by it Rose could see she was late, late.
The thought of the drive up around the mountain to The Woods was paralyzing, in spite of all she had hoped from it, this day,
this chance. She tried to make herself feel the urgency, getting later, all the while thinking it would be a good day to get
lost, drive upstate, find a mall she’d never been in. Get her hair cut. Thinking of this, imagining herself doing this, felt
like diving or sliding down that slide, Down Passage Year, no bottom in sight; and for some time longer she didn’t stir.

Meanwhile the mist had lifted from the Blackbury, a blanket withdrawn; and in his little yellow house by the riverbank, somewhat
hidden and lairlike amid the flame-tipped sumacs, Pierce was hard at his morning’s work. Someone snooping would have heard
from outside the arrhythmic tapping of the electric typewriter he had rolled out onto the porch; the squeaking of the kitchen
chair he sat in too, when he paused for thought or rest.

He’d begun with an anecdote.

One morning just after Christmas in the year 1666, the well-known Dutch physician and scientist Johann Friedrich Schweitzer,
known as Helvetius, had a visitor—a small beardless man in plain clothes with an accent that made Helvetius think he might
be from Scotland. It was a snowy day, and the stranger came in without wiping his boots. He had read, he said, in Helvetius’s
treatises that he was a skeptic concerning alchemical transmutation, and Helvetius admitted he had never seen it work. The
stranger showed him a “neat ivory box, and out of it took three ponderous lumps of the Stone, each about the size of a walnut.”
He could not, he said, give Helvetius any; but he allowed him to handle one piece, and Helvetius managed to scrape off a bit
while the stranger talked of the powers of his stone, and how he had come by it. When the man departed, promising to come
again, Helvetius collected the matter of the stone from under his nail, and later experimented with it, following hints in
the stranger’s conversation. No luck. When the stranger reappeared, he gave Helvetius, after some hesitation, a piece of his
stone as big as a turnip seed; when Helvetius worried it wouldn’t be enough, the stranger took it back, broke it in half,
and gave him only half, “wrapped up neatly in blue paper”: that would, he said, be sufficient. And indeed, late that night
Helvetius’s wife—who was a student
of the Art—persuaded him to try it, and together they transmuted with it a half ounce of lead to gold, which turned out when
Helvetius had it assayed to be extremely pure.

With the next carriage return, Pierce’s sheet extruded from the machine, toast from a toaster, nicely done, and he inserted
another. A fast and tidy penman, Pierce had never learned to type, it was like chopping wood the way he did it, banging down
each key in turn with a strong forefinger, tongue between his teeth, he would fall back exhausted by noon having covered no
more than four or five sheets.

For working Pierce affected a vast old dressing gown that had belonged to his uncle Sam, Dr. Sam Oliphant, now dead. It was
a rich garment, a gift from someone to the doctor, someone whose life he had saved (no surely not, Pierce forgot the actual
origin) which Sam himself had never worn. It was as heavy as an episcopal cope, of thick pin-wale corduroy on the outside
and purple satin inside. Pierce wore it always inside out, finding the touch of satin on his skin distastefully unctuous;
it was as highly finished on the inside as the out, every seam turned, the collar rolled high, the sleeves capacious. The
belt was lost, and Pierce belted it with a wide leather one. Rose had laughed to see that robe, belted with that belt; laughed
at first.

“This account,” he typed, “is extraordinary for a couple of reasons. First it is highly circumstantial; it has little of the
air of fable and romance these encounters with the Mysterious Master usually have. There is the fact that the alchemist left
Helvetius alone with the transmutative stuff he gave him, to try it for himself: the smokesellers and frauds who abounded
at the time always supervised experiments themselves, and had a lot of ways of seeming to have produced gold. Third and probably
most extraordinary, the stranger never asked for money—no investment, no ounces of gold demanded with the promise that they
would be returned tenfold. In fact he thereupon disappeared, never to be seen again.”

As he typed out this well-known anecdote, Pierce noticed for the first time, like a mystery-novel detective sorting his evidence,
a fact that had been in the story all along but that he had not considered; and he thought he saw an explanation for what
happened. But he continued anyway as he had meant to:

“It would seem, then, that we have two possible conclusions: either Helvetius lied about what happened, or Helvetius made
gold.

“We know now that gold is an element, and so is lead; therefore, one could never be transformed into the other by heating
it together with a third thing, whatever the third thing was. So we are left with Helvetius lying, spectacularly, convincingly,
and for no apparent reason (he never tried again to make gold).

“There is, though, one other possibility, least likely of all, indeed patently absurd: that Helvetius really could make gold
by the means he had, but we today no longer can, not by those means or any other. Not because we have forgotten how, though
we have, or lost faith that we can, though we have, but because gold is not the same as it once was, earth is not the same,
fire is not the same.”

He took his hands from the keys.

A snowy day in 1666. In Pierce’s imagination, each of the ten digits had a distinct color, a color it had had as far back
as he could remember, unchosen by him but there in his mind nonetheless: and the six is white. The snow on the Master’s boots;
the ivory box of glistening matter. Wife in white at the stair’s top: Husband what have you there.

That wife: that was what Pierce had noticed in retelling this tale. That wife skilled in the Art. What if she had been in
league with the supposed Nameless Master. Able to trick her husband, somehow produce the gold, expecting a further development
of some kind, she and the other guy, who knows what; a plot that never fruited. Guy skipped town. Wife kept quiet.

Pierce thought of writing a footnote; then decided not. He was on a quest, in these pages of his book, for evidence that once
the world was not as it is now; any little fact or tale, trivial but incontrovertible, that would fire the hearts of his readers
with wild certainty, or tease them at least with possibility. He hadn’t promised, hadn’t exactly promised, that any single
one he retailed might not vanish even as it was proffered, in fact it was implied in his philosophy that it must. But it was
not for him to underscore his own paradoxes.
Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat
: if you don’t get it, shut up or go figure.

“Now it may be,” he typed, “that every other recorded instance of gold made by fire—there are hundreds of them, almost all
seeming to be variants on a few themes, like old comedy plots—maybe every one is false, the product of mendacity or wishful
thinking or the accumulating errors of multiple transmission, history’s game of Telephone that always pushes anecdotes toward
clarity, wonder, or exemplum. Maybe this is the one and only real one we know about, the only one that slipped through that
baffle of advancing Time that falsified all the others, to reach us like Job’s servant out of the wreckage of the former world:
I only am escaped alone to tell thee
.”

He rested, gratified and guilty.

Pierce thought of the readers for whom he wrote as of three kinds. There were, first, all those who were expecting some sweeping
and final change in the ways of the world, had been expecting it ever since a sort of imaginary revolution had, a few years
back, seemed to spread nationwide,
worldwide; sometimes (like the heretic Franciscans of old) these took to living as though the old world had already ended,
and the new one begun. In the hills around here were tribes and family groups of them, inhabiting old farms and living in
caves and tree houses; books like the one he planned were about all the reading they had. Then there were the young, a large
contingent, whom Pierce pictured standing just at that crossroads in time to which the young always come, where they are certain,
sure certain, that they are to see and maybe to bring about a world different from the world they were born into. He remembered
his own certainty. And, lastly, there was the permanent and irreducible rump of hopers who can be found in any age, those
who feel Becoming almost as though by a sixth sense or a genetic endowment, always reading the signs, never bored or discouraged,
atremble lifelong with the approach of the next thing.

To this (potentially) large readership Pierce was going to show a New Age that they would be the first to notice dawning,
one they might themselves help to make. He was going speculate that maybe there have been many of these Ages, some short,
some long, some we all can recognize on looking back, and some not. The last one, the one before this one, would have ended
somewhere about the time Helvetius opened his door to the man in the snowy boots. The succeeding age was ending now, now when
Pierce wrote about it, now when he summoned his readers to hear about it. And as this world passed (as it did seem to be passing,
Pierce had a file drawer stuffed with tear sheets from newspapers and journals, impossibilities that could not be accounted
for, holes in Big Science’s increasingly leaky roof—so he thought of them) we would find or make up new Laws, and on them
build a world of a different kind: in fact, as Pierce would explain, the finding and the building
were
the new world.