Act I / Scene I: The Lady in Blue
Scene I. in which Eli refines his art of hexameter, Legg studies the culture of the late Pebes, and Yasen discovers new meanings in an old book.
“— In those distant days,
when I was one of the Hungry,
our monastery was visited
by a Lady in a blue cloak,” Eli proclaimed quietly yet with extreme solemnity, as though it were the opening of a great epic rather than a spontaneous “hexametric improvisation,” as he privately termed this tirade.
Eli had a fondness for twisting learned words, sometimes to excess, which had cost him more than one acquaintance among influential but overly serious people.
“— Drop ‘hexametric,’” Waldemar interrupted, frowning. “It sounds ugly.”
At these words he raised a knotted forefinger to the heavens and looked at me with feigned gravity. His deep-set eyes were laughing.
“— Then let’s write ‘Homeric,’” I suggested. I wanted to finish the first chapter as quickly as possible—we had already been rewriting it for three days.
Waldemar licked his finger with relish, flipped through a hefty volume of Brockhaus and Efron in a matter of seconds—snatched from the shelf above the massive secrétaire—and read out with importance:
“‘Loud, unrestrained laughter, akin to the laughter of the gods as described by Homer.’”
A broad grin spread across his face, the grin of a petty mischief-maker.
“— The laughter of the gods!” he savored. “Now that really sounds right!”
“— But the golem Abraham is still asleep,” I objected. “What laughter are you talking about? That’s exactly why we wrote ‘proclaimed quietly yet solemnly’ above, instead of the more natural ‘solemnly declaimed,’ as I suggested at first. Do you even remember that, according to the script, he can’t stand daylight and sleeps in the pantry until dinner?”
“— The laughter of whom?” Legg asked belatedly, with reproach in his voice.
This was the first session of the introductory course on late Pebe culture, which, as a new laboratory employee, he had agreed to attend only out of necessity—on the strict condition that he be given a complete glossary of the book on which he was to study. And what now? Barely five paragraphs had been read, and the glossary had already stalled on an unknown—and, worse, entirely unnecessary—word.
“‘Thou shalt not take the name of thy God in vain,’” another quotation with the same word came to mind—one he did not understand either.
“— ‘Gods’ are an EXV,” Yasen commented calmly. “I simply forgot to mark it. An Excluding Value—that is, something that corresponds to no known fragment of reality. The inclusion of words such as ‘god,’ ‘fate,’ and ‘luck’ among EXVs was part of a desperate attempt to elevate the human race above other forms of thinking matter at a time when the ominous shadow of the Turn was already looming over humanity.
Incidentally, it was during the same period that the human race declared its exclusive right to the term ‘Pure Biological Life’ (PBL), with which History—left un-EXV’d by mere negligence—would soon play a cruel joke. The ethnonym ‘Pebe,’ originally derived from PBL in cyberne, the cyborg dialect, quickly became a common term for post-Turn humans and eventually spread to all of humanity, including, retroactively, pre-Turn humans as well—while the word ‘human’ itself was unjustly forgotten.”
At the word “unjustly,” Legg rolled his eyes (he had learned this Pebe trick only recently and usually applied it at the wrong moment), and Yasen decided it was time to return to the reading.
Digor stirred, emerging from a half-doze.
Eli continued his hexameter exercise:
— Spirits of her kind—
firstborn in the Sub-Lunar world,
knowing all of all things,
wandering for thousands of years.
In his bright, dark-brown, slightly protruding eyes danced sparks of sincere, irresistible, contagious joy, so well remembered by Digor from the glorious days of their student theatre, which Eli had led before his mysterious disappearance seven years earlier.
“— Stop!” Waldemar roared in a thunderous voice, having just glanced over my shoulder (which I detested), and demanded:
“— ‘Sub-Lunar’—what part of speech is that?”
“— An adjective,” I replied as calmly as possible, then, after a pause, added:
“— But it is capitalized, because it refers directly to the world of spirits, as opposed to the human world, for which I use the counterpart ‘Solar’ in analogous contexts,” I finished, unable to conceal my triumph.
Struck down by the calculated composure of my answer, Waldemar slapped his forehead, groaned pitifully, and collapsed into his chair (which groaned even more pitifully beneath him), and did not utter another word for the rest of the scene.
“— …from the glorious days of the student theatre, which Eli had led before his mysterious disappearance seven years earlier,” I repeated, and was about to move on to the next paragraph, but felt that the skirmish had drained too much of my energy, and declared a break.
Waldemar did not react—he was absorbed in rescuing a sandwich from the clutches of a storm the likes of which the world had never seen. I dropped my head onto my arms and fell asleep.
“Here is where they once lived,” said the angel.
I looked around, and at first it seemed there was nothing but grass, until I noticed beneath it the faint rectangular outlines of houses.
The angel nodded in satisfaction and led me some forty cubits aside.
“Now I will show you the Heavenly City, where they went,” he continued, extending his hand.
I took it, watching the shifting, winged figure from the corner of my eye.
Angels, like certain other beings of the second world, appear unstable. Whenever you try to focus your gaze on any point of their form, it begins to ripple, like water in a wind-stirred pond, dissolving into the air, becoming a whirl. One can only see an angel more or less clearly out of the corner of one’s eye.
We rose into the air—and in the next instant we were again standing on the ground, only much higher—so high that the sheep below looked like matchboxes.
On the plateau opposite stood an ancient city. Through its open gates, a clear river flowed across a bridge from our side.
The angel stepped onto the surface of the river and walked over the water toward the gates, beckoning me to follow.
I stepped onto the water cautiously and followed him. But soon the water beneath my feet began to ripple, and I felt I was about to fall through. The angel turned—and the water beneath me turned to ice.
Waking, I breathed a sigh of relief—the sight of Waldemar, blissfully finishing his sandwich in his chair, calmed me. Noticing that I was awake, he winked cheerfully, and I felt a fresh surge of energy.
They were sitting in the kitchen of the Roman apartments “At Cagliostro’s,” where they lived as guests of the Society of Saint Sibylla, pondering how to obtain information about the Heavenly City.
The matter concerned a record from an Austrian chronicle of the eleventh century, recently discovered in the Society’s bottomless archives:
“In that year, during the May Tree festival, a division occurred among the townspeople, and many who saw became blind. And those who remained seeing departed and built a city in the heavens, while the blind tore down their houses and rebuilt the earthly city.”
The Society’s researchers believed that the circumstances of this strange event might shed light on the reasons for humanity’s loss, in that historical period, of the so-called second-range perception, or second attention (Second Sight)—that is, the ability to perceive the world of immaterial entities (commonly called “spirits”).
The phenomenon of second attention and the cause of its loss were the primary focus of the Society’s research and the subject of a thorough investigation in which Digor and Eli, for various reasons, were actively involved.
“— This reminds me of something,” Legg remarked unexpectedly seriously.
“— Probably our laboratory,” Yasen replied. “I had never paid attention to this passage before, but if this is indeed the case—and the Society of Saint Sibylla has existed for a very long time, and I have no reason not to trust it—then it is quite possible that the degenerative mutation that led to the decline of the Pebe race began long before the Turn, and the loss of second attention was merely its first phase.”
“— But isn’t this fiction?” Legg asked, astonished, eyeing the worn volume before Digor with sudden curiosity.
“— No. Most of the book was recorded from Digor’s own account. After the events described in it, he settled here, in what was then Freiburg, at the end of the street where I lived, when I was still human. We became friends, and he gradually told me his story.”
“— I’d like to know what happened next,” Legg reminded impatiently, noticing that Yasen was about to drift into recollections of events five hundred years past, in which, as a young triborg, he saw nothing particularly remarkable.
Yasen nodded, smiling inwardly at his small tactical victory, and continued reading.
Then it dawned on Digor:
“— Is there any chance we could find the Lady in Blue and ask her?”
Eli’s eyes lit up with enthusiasm. He moved to the open window and began silently studying the sky.
Digor knew something about the Wanderers—he had already attended several lectures in the course on spiritology, taught by the incomparable Beatrice, the Society’s leading expert on immaterial entities. They traveled between domains, overseeing the observance of the Rule, and from time to time returned to their own domain to rest for a year or two.
“— ‘Domain’ sounds odd, like they’re landowners,” I remarked as I wrote. “Perhaps ‘manor’?”
“— Anglicisms are bad taste,” Waldemar cut in curtly, continuing to devour a massive sandwich composed of numerous layers of cheese and sausage. In his classification it was called a ‘four-deck battleship.’ A five-decker—the pinnacle of Waldemar’s engineering genius—remained in reserve, but he had sworn not to launch it before the second chapter.
Eli sat for a long time, gazing out the open window. His взгляд drifted aimlessly through the clouds, when suddenly joy flared within it.
— In the heavens I sought her,
and saw a star in the east—
fair in form she appeared,
the Lady in the blue cloak.
At that moment, a piercing creak came from the corridor—the kind of creak only a pantry door could make.
“— So you did wake Abraham after all with your Homeric hexameter,” Digor said with regret, carefully drawing the heavy curtains.
Eli did not reply — while Digor was busy with the curtains, he greeted Abraham, who was politely waiting on the threshold for Digor’s invitation, and slipped out without a sound.
Of late, he had come to dislike the dark.
End of Scene One