As they walked down the road, they kicked a large pebble back and forth between them. Lionel gave the pebble a kick, and laughed as it skittered between Robert’s ankles. ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of there,’ he said. ‘I think one more doctrine would have been more than I could bear.’
‘Why do they even bother calling it natural philosophy?’ said Robert. ‘Just admit it’s another theology lesson and be done with it.’ The two of them had recently purchased A Boy’s Guide to Nomenclature, which informed them that nomenclators no longer spoke in terms of God or the divine name. Instead, current thinking held that there was a lexical universe as well as a physical one, and bringing an object together with a compatible name caused the latent potentialities of both to be realized. Nor was there a single ‘true name’ for a given object: depending on its precise shape, a body might be compatible with several names, known as its ‘euonyms,’ and conversely a simple name might tolerate significant variations in body shape, as his childhood marching doll had demonstrated.
When they reached Lionel’s home, they promised the cook they would be in for dinner shortly and headed to the garden out back. Lionel had converted a toolshed in his family’s garden into a laboratory, which he used to conduct experiments. Normally Robert came by on a regular basis, but recently Lionel had been working on an experiment that he was keeping secret. Only now was he ready to show Robert his results. Lionel had Robert wait outside while he entered first, and then let him enter.
A long shelf ran along every wall of the shed, crowded with racks of vials, stoppered bottles of green glass, and assorted rocks and mineral specimens. A table decorated with stains and scorch marks dominated the cramped space, and it supported the apparatus for Lionel’s latest experiment: a cucurbit clamped in a stand so that its bottom rested in a basin full of water, which in turn sat on a tripod above a lit oil lamp. A mercury thermometer was also fixed in the basin.
‘Take a look,’ said Lionel.
Robert leaned over to inspect the cucurbit’s contents. At first it appeared to be nothing more than foam, a dollop of suds that might have dripped off a pint of stout. But as he looked closer, he realized that what he thought were bubbles were actually the interstices of a glistening latticework. The froth consisted of homunculi: tiny seminal foetuses. Their bodies were transparent individually, but collectively their bulbous heads and strandlike limbs adhered to form a pale, dense foam.
‘So you wanked off into a jar and kept the spunk warm?’ he asked, and Lionel shoved him. Robert laughed and raised his hands in a placating gesture. ‘No, honestly, it’s a wonder. How’d you do it?’
Mollified, Lionel said, ‘It’s a real balancing act. You have to keep the temperature just right, of course, but if you want them to grow, you also have to keep just the right mix of nutrients. Too thin a mix, and they starve. Too rich, and they get over lively and start fighting with each other.’
‘You’re having me on.’
‘It’s the truth; look it up if you don’t believe me. Battles amongst sperm are what cause monstrosities to be born. If an injured foetus is the one that makes it to the egg, the baby that’s born is deformed.’
‘I thought that was because of a fright the mother had when she was carrying.’ Robert could just make out the minuscule squirmings of the individual foetuses. He realized that the froth was ever so slowly roiling as a result of their collective motions.
‘That’s only for some kinds, like ones that are all hairy or covered in blotches. Babies that don’t have arms or legs, or have misshapen ones, they’re the ones that got caught in a fight back when they were sperm. That’s why you can’t provide too rich a broth, especially if they haven’t any place to go: they get in a frenzy. You can lose all of them pretty quick that way.’
‘How long can you keep them growing?’
‘Probably not much longer,’ said Lionel. ‘It’s hard to keep them alive if they haven’t reached an egg. I read about one in France that was grown till it was the size of a fist, and they had the best equipment available. I just wanted to see if I could do it at all.’
Robert stared at the foam, remembering the doctrine of preformation that Master Trevelyan had drilled into them: all living things had been created at the same time, long ago, and births today were merely enlargements of the previously imperceptible. Although they appeared newly created, these homunculi were countless years old; for all of human history they had lain nested within generations of their ancestors, waiting for their turn to be born.
In fact, it wasn’t just them who had waited; he himself must have done the same thing prior to his birth. If his father were to do this experiment, the tiny figures Robert saw would be his unborn brothers and sisters. He knew they were insensible until reaching an egg, but he wondered what thoughts they’d have if they weren’t. He imagined the sensation of his body, every bone and organ soft and clear as gelatin, sticking to those of myriad identical siblings. What would it be like, looking through transparent eyelids, realizing the mountain in the distance was actually a person, recognizing it as his brother? What if he knew he’d become as massive and solid as that colossus, if only he could reach an egg? It was no wonder they fought.
Robert Stratton went on to read nomenclature at Cambridge’s Trinity College. There he studied kabbalistic texts written centuries before, when nomenclators were still called ba’alei shem and automata were called golem, texts that laid the foundation for the science of names: the Sefer Yezirah, Eleazar of Worms’ Sodei Razayya, Abulafia’s Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba. Then he studied the alchemical treatises that placed the techniques of alphabetic manipulation in a broader philosophical and mathematical context: Llull’s Ars Magna, Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica.
He learned that every name was a combination of several epithets, each designating a specific trait or capability. Epithets were generated by compiling all the words that described the desired trait: cognates and etymons, from languages both living and extinct. By selectively substituting and permuting letters, one could distill from those words their common essence, which was the epithet for that trait. In certain instances, epithets could be used as the bases for triangulation, allowing one to derive epithets for traits undescribed in any language. The entire process relied on intuition as much as formulae; the ability to choose the best letter permutations was an unteachable skill.
He studied the modern techniques of nominal integration and factorization, the former being the means by which a set of epithets – pithy and evocative – were commingled into the seemingly random string of letters that made up a name, the latter by which a name was decomposed into its constituent epithets. Not every method of integration had a matching factorization technique: a powerful name might be refactored to yield a set of epithets different from those used to generate it, and those epithets were often useful for that reason. Some names resisted refactorization, and nomenclators strove to develop new techniques to penetrate their secrets.
Nomenclature was undergoing something of a revolution during this time. There had long been two classes of names: those for animating a body, and those functioning as amulets. Health amulets were worn as protection from injury or illness, while others rendered a house resistant to fire or a ship less likely to founder at sea. Of late, however, the distinction between these categories of names was becoming blurred, with exciting results.