Doctor Mirabilis (2 page)

Except for an anonymous writer who saw Bacon at a gathering like the one described in Chapter VII, not a single soul in his
own lifetime ever managed to mention him by name in a writing which has survived, not even people he obviously knew intimately;
and we have the text of only one letter
to
him, that being the mandate of 1266 from Clement IV. A Roger Bacon does appear in one of the footnotes to Matthew Paris’
Chronica majora,
but few modern scholars believe that this anecdote can refer to
the
Roger Bacon. (I disagree, as Chapter III shows, but there is simply no present way to settle this question except by intuition.)

An unknown amount of Bacon’s own work is missing, in addition to the fact that not all that is known has yet been published.
He mentions two treatises,
De generatione
and
De radii,
which have not yet been found, and the many unpublished unattributed manuscripts of the period in European libraries may
include many more. There are no Bacon
incunabula; the
Voynich manuscript, in which W. R. Newbold claimed to have found an elaborate cypher concealing a knowledge of human anatomy
which would have been staggering even for Bacon, was once thought to be in his own hand, but modern scholarship has discredited
hand and authorship alike (and cyphers, as we have learned painfully from Ignatius Donnelly and his followers, are not reliable
clues to the authorship of anything). The only authenticated sample of Bacon’s handwriting is that of the
corrections – not the text – of the piece of the
Opus Majus
in the Vatican Library.

Finally, just the published body of Bacon’s work is so vast – some twenty-two thick volumes, plus smaller pieces – that no
one has ever attempted a definitive Collected Works, and the existing partial collections, those of Steele and Brewer, are
arranged in no rational order. Furthermore, for the reader who would rather not cope with medieval Latin, only the
Opus Majus
and a few much smaller works have ever been translated, and the translations are long out of print. It is easier to deal
with a mountebank like Giambattista della Porta, whose
Natural Magick can
be bought today in a facsimile of the handsome 1658 English printing, boxed; but a universal genius is born mutinous and
disorderly, and remains so seven hundred years later.

This is a wholly inviting situation for a novelist, providing only that he has the brass head to believe that he can turn
a universal genius into a believable character; but he must not pretend that the book he writes from it is a fictionalized
biography. Under the circumstances it would be impossible to write any such work about Roger Bacon. What follows is a fiction.
It is as true to Bacon’s age as I have been able to make it; there is, at least, no shortage of data about the thirteenth
century – the problem is to mine it selectively. Roger Bacon himself, however, is unrecoverable by scholarship alone. The
rest is – or should be – a vision.

A word about language:

The reader may wonder why I have resorted here and there to direct quotations in Latin, especially since the characters are
speaking Latin a large part of the time and I have been content to give what they say in English. The reason is that these
exceptions, these ideas and opinions written down seven centuries ago, might otherwise have been suspected of being a twentieth-century
author’s interpolations. There is always an English paraphrase close by; but the direct quotations are intended to demonstrate
that I have not modernized my central figure, and did not need to do so.

I must, however, admit to one modernization, this being the translation from
De multiplication specierum in
Chapter XII. Here it seemed to me that the Aristotelian terminology Bacon uses would be worse than impenetrable to most modern
readers. Hence I have followed Sarton and others in converting what Bacon calls ‘the multiplication of species’ (which today
suggests that he must have been talking about biology) into ‘the propagation of action’, which shows that his subject is physics.
Several other Aristotelian terms, such as ‘agent’ and ‘patient’ have suffered a similar conversion at my hands.

As for the English, I have followed two rules. (1) Where the characters are speaking Middle English, I have used a synthetic
speech which roughly preserves Middle English syntax, one of its several glories, but makes little attempt to follow its metrics
or its vocabulary (and certainly not its spelling, which was catch-as-catch-can). (2) Where they are speaking French or Latin,
which is most of the time, I have used modern English, except to indicate whether the familiar or the polite form of ‘you’
is being employed, a distinction which should cause no one any trouble.

I am greatly indebted to W. O. Hassall of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for help in locating pertinent manuscripts; to L.
Sprague de Camp, whose vast knowledge of the history of technology I mined mercilessly; to Ann Corlett, Algis Budrys, L. D.
Cole, Virginia Kidd, Willy Ley and Henry E. Sostman for invaluable criticism and suggestions; and to Kenneth S. White for
pushing me into the project in the first place.

J
AMES
B
LISH

Arrowhead,

Milford, Pennsylvania

It was called the fever, or the plague, or the blue-lips, or the cough, but most often simply the death. It had come north
across Folly Bridge into Oxford with the first snow, and at first had shown a godly grim decorum, spreading mainly inside
the enclave of the Jewerye, so that the mayor and the burgesses of Oxford decided that there was nothing to fear from it.

The astrologers agreed. There was every heavenly sign that the city would be at peace throughout the whole of A.D. 1231. Certainly
there would not be another pestilence; and certainly not in October, when Jupiter, Venus and the moon would be in trine before
All Hallows’ Eve.

Besides, the Jews had excellent physicians, even one or two from Bologna. There was nothing to fear.

Now
It
is too late to be afraid,
Roger thought. The words came to him not as his own thought, however, but like an aphorism which he had only remembered;
it was the way he had learned to distinguish the prompting of his self from the general tumult of notions which stormed tormentingly
out of his soul the instant he started awake. He stood motionless in the pitch-black, freezing stone corridor, hands folded
tensely into each other under the coarse hempen robe he had thrown over his clothing when Adam Marsh had brought the word
and called him out, listening; but the self had nothing further to say.

It had said all that was needful. It was too late to fear the death now. Neither the Bolognese Jews nor anyone else had been
able to prevent the death. If it was not yet a plague, it had not much further to spread to become one. Half the burgesses
were stricken of it already, and the school was dissolved into a shivering huddle of coughing shadows. No classes had met
for over a week; no convocations had been called since the death had taken the prior of Carfax; the halls
were silent; the students huddled on their pallets, too sick to care for themselves, or providentially too well to risk breathing
the prevalent miasma outside the dormitories. Here, at the Franciscan school, the gloom was absolute, for the death was visiting
the lector.

Roger’s heart filled; he could feel his knuckles crackling under the robe. Since he could see nothing at all in the damp-ticking
black passageway, he could not prevent himself from standing suddenly, also in his shivering shift, by the bedside of his
father in the blocky fieldstone house outside Ilchester now abruptly gone, as his father was gone eleven years.
Domine, Domine!
Until that moment he had not loved his father. How little he had been able to anticipate even in his new rough boyhood, five
years old and already master of the wide-nostrilled sweaty horses trembling with day-end exhaustion in their stalls, that
Christopher Bacon’s rude remote justice would some day be replaced by the trade-swine arrogance of Robert Bacon, hardly eight
years Roger’s senior!

And now Robert Grosseteste was dying, too, only a door away in the timeless darkness.
Justice is Love,
the self whispered suddenly. And he had no answer. The vision of his father’s death vanished as suddenly, leaving him empty
in snow-covered Oxford, a black mark on a black ground inside a black box. If Robert Grosseteste died, where could Roger go
then; what would he do; what would he think? Adam Marsh was well enough, but no man can have three fathers; besides, the gentle
Adam lacked both the strength and the desire; he was a brother and would never be more –not a brother such as Robert Bacon,
but a brother in love. As a father, he had no vocation.

Adam was with the lector now; had been with him a long time. In a while, perhaps, he would emerge and say: ‘It is over.’ There
had been no assurance that the lector would be able to see Roger at all; it had been with a shock of guilty delight that Roger
had heard that he even wanted to see Roger, but even of that there was no proof. It might only
have been an idea of Adam’s; he might have been summoned only on a chance.

On the thought, the door opened a little, letting a wedge of smoky orange light into the corridor. That was all. There were
no voices, no footsteps. A draught began to move gently past Roger’s face, seeking the smokehole of the lector’s fireplace
and discovering to Roger that he was sweating under his cassock even in this black realm of liquid ice. The light wavered
and lost some of its yellowness, as though a few tapers were nodding and blowing inside the room. Then a long-fingered hand,
deeply chiselled on the back with shadows between the tendons, took the door by the latch and pulled it soundlessly to again.
Perhaps it had been only a wind that had opened it to begin with.

But Roger knew the hand. He stood in the blackness and struggled with a jealousy only a little away from love. Never mind
that Adam Marsh of Wearmouth had come to him the moment it appeared that the lector might die; he was only trying to prove
to his student how high he stood in Robert’s esteem. Never mind that Adam had recognized the quick wit of the seventeen-year-old
who sat under him in theology and had won him a place at Robert’s lectures to the Francisans; Roger could have done the same
for himself. Never mind that Adam did seem to stand high in the esteem of the lector, and in the general esteem of the Order;
he was only thirty-one years old and had become a Franciscan only last year. One Robert Bacon was enough;
Domine, Domine!

But it was not true.
Justice is Love.

The words drove the jealousy from him, though he fought sullenly to hold it. There was something about the self that hated
emotion, and particularly the red emotions, the ones that fogged the eye, inside or out. Why should Grosseteste have called
Roger at all? Roger and the lector had never even spoken, except once or twice in passing. Grosseteste had his own favourite
students – Adam, obviously, and a frighteningly brilliant lecturer in his mid-twenties named John of Bandoun – and could hardly
be aware of the deep,
irrational awe he had inspired in some anonymous franklin’s son from Ilchester.

Justice is Love,
the self said again in its sweet bodiless voice, and the fury was gone. Suddenly, he was only a man in a corridor in a hall
in a town in a snowfall, his eyes as empty as embrasures, his head capped like a merlon in winter with coldness. For an instant
he did not even know his own name; he stood as alone as a planet in the general dark.

It had been a long day, like all days: the bell in the night, calling him out of bed to church for matins and the lauds, the
seven psalms of praise; the Divine Office at prime, six o’clock in the morning, still full darkness and the cold at its bitterest,
seven psalms, the litany and the mass with freezing toes; midday mass and then the meal, roots and eggs and water, and the
sleep of afternoon – but no sleep for Roger, because of the letter; then the bell again to sing nones at three o’clock; and
studies, but again no studies for Roger, because Robert Grosseteste was sick and Adam beside him, and one of the Bolognese,
too, especially dispensed to minister to an archdeacon thrice over; then supper, waste-bread, butter and beans, with a little
ale (the letter had made him cautious of spending any money on wine, for the first time in his life; besides, it was written
in Aelfric, ‘Wine is not a drink for children or foolish people, but for the old and wise’); then the bell, and compline.

And then the summons from Adam.

He lifted one hand under the robe to finger the bulge of the letter, like a man cautiously investigating a fresh wound. It
was a dirty scrap of old vellum, grey with erasures; under its present burden could still be seen the shadows of minuscules
which had been the previous writing. These were almost clear at the bottom of the letter and Roger had been able to work out
a little of it: ‘… e ministr e omnib fidelib suis Francis e …’ – possibly a piece of some charter. But this game had run out
quickly, and the faint remains of what the palimpsest had carried before it had been pumiced for the charter proved even duller:
pieces of a crabbed hymn by
some barely literate canon. There was
no
way to put off thinking about the message on top in new ink.

It was brief and disastrous enough. A villein whom Roger did not even remember had thought well enough of him to dictate it to Ilchester’s recorder, and had it sent to him by the most reliable means available to a man with neither purse nor freedom: a beggar. It said: