Each time he arrived at this precipice, Waldemar compelled himself to catch his conceptual breath. He could feel his neurons pickling whenever he dwelt on its implications, as though the fat his cerebrum floated in were gradually being transmuted into brine. This nauseated him at first — it made his entire body clench — but in time he taught himself to like the feeling. And once he’d begun to relish the sensation, once it had stopped sickening him, something shifted inside his skull, like a delirious child turning in a sweat-sodden bed, and his father’s text began to offer up its secrets.
What frustrated Waldemar most about Ottokar’s note was that it hovered so coyly between sense and nonsense, refusing to hold still from one line to the next. Sentences of gobbledygook were folded over and under familiar citations — like strata of dough in a strudel — and others that were clearly drawn from classical sources, whose origins might potentially be traced. And then there were the references (surely not arbitrary?) to mistresses and married life and sex. After dozens of failed attempts to crack the code, Waldemar decided to invert his strategy: he would begin on solid ground, by considering the citations, then work his way slowly out into the jabber.
Time can be measured only in its passing had been a favored axiom of Ottokar’s, often cited after long and fruitless mornings in the laboratory. Waldemar had heard it so often, in fact, that he’d never bothered to inquire where it came from, and it was only at the close of a long and increasingly despondent week at the Imperial Library that he found it at last, in the fourteenth chapter of Saint Augustine’s Confessions.
“What then, is time?” asks the saint. “If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” Neither the past nor the future, argues Augustine, truly exists — and the present is merely an instant. “The present of things past is memory,” he writes; “the present of things present is perception; and the present of things future is expectation.” Augustine’s conclusion — never fully stated, but unmistakably implied — is that time is subjective. It exists in the mind alone, and nowhere else.
This notion stupefied Waldemar nearly as much as the Michelson-Morley result. Augustine’s theory was an even blunter refutation of Newton’s law of absolutes, and he’d conceived it in a North African backwater, surrounded by desert, a millennium before Sir Isaac had drawn his first breath! Scrambling to recover his equilibrium, Waldemar reminded himself that Augustine had been a cleric, not a scientist; but the fact remained that Ottokar had cited him. The thought of it made Waldemar physically ill. Newton’s laws — with their elegance, their reasonableness, and, above all, their immaculate order — were the reason he’d consecrated himself to physics; without them, he might as well have stayed a pickler. He was not a young man who took pleasure in ambiguity. Ambiguity was dangerously close, in his estimation, to hypocrisy; and hypocrisy — as every true revolutionary knows — is the music by which complacency and decadence dance their unholy quadrille.
The next citation was more unsettling stilclass="underline" As the soul grows toward eternal life, it remembers less and less. This seemed more like something his mother might mutter into her handkerchief at church than anything relevant to Ottokar’s work. In which tightly shuttered compartment of his father’s brain had this mystical strain been concealed? For the briefest of instants, Waldemar found himself questioning Ottokar’s competence, even — fleetingly, half-consciously — his sanity; it took his last reserves of love and strength to force that portal closed. The very next night, however, when he identified Plotinus, of all people, as the author of the passage, his confusion returned with a force that swamped him utterly. Plotinus was the worst of the old pagan neoplatonists: a fuzzy-headed metaphysician who’d inspired countless early Christian flower-sniffers, not to mention soothsayers and Gnostics and God knew who else. Important as he might have been for the Church, he had no place in a scientific treatise.
Ironically enough, it turned out to be the Church — or one church, in particular — that set Waldemar on the proper path at last. Disenchanted with his father’s taste in philosophy, he narrowed his focus still further, restricting it to the parts of Ottokar’s text that seemed to refer to actual events of his duration. This proved most difficult of all, to his dismay, because the slightest reference to the sausage-chewing sow his father had fornicated with each weekday made piss-colored spots dance before Waldemar’s eyes and the carpet twitch and heave beneath his feet. In the end he was reduced to pondering a single sentence of the letter, which he read and reread, recombined and dissected and recited to himself until it acquired the power of prophecy. It was the plainest of sentences, no more than a phrase: the pulpit for preachers in Paměť Cathedral. It was pure chance, he would later write — certainly not fate, let alone Providence — that this turned out to be the only phrase he needed.
Ottokar had been clever — cunning, even — to hide the key in plain sight, in a thicket of high-minded nonsense. It stood out exceedingly subtly, betraying itself only if one knew where to look. Unlike his brother, Waldemar recalled that pulpit very well, not only because of its peculiar globelike shape, but also because of their father’s fascination with it. Like the uncle of Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, who’d once torn out a lock of his nephew’s hair so that the boy might never forget having seen the royal carriage pass, Ottokar had given Waldemar’s ear a sharp twist on that December morning, then directed his gaze upward toward the gilt-and-silver pulpit without a word of explanation.
The significance of that structure — for it was clearly the pulpit itself that interested his father, not the lisping, milk-faced clergyman it buttressed — became the defining enigma of Waldemar’s youth. If he’d kept the memory stowed away until that moment, if he’d hesitated to tell even his brother, it was only because of the tremendous charge it carried. But now his father himself, two years after his death, had eased the mystery back into the light. And what affected Waldemar most keenly — what made his eyes water and his fingers go numb with excitement — was that his father had done so with such stealth that he alone, of all people living, could recognize it for the hidden sign it was.
The pulpit was no more than five feet in diameter and (aside from a narrow, flattened opening through which the priest protruded) was perfectly round. It had been meant to symbolize the triumph of Catholic doctrine in all the seven corners of the world, evidently, because its silver-plated surface was marked by lines of longitude and latitude, and all the continents of the earth — Antarctica included! — were proudly represented in gold leaf. But Waldemar had spent nearly three years assisting his father, and he knew that geography had held even less interest for him than the niceties of internal combustion. It must therefore have been the shape of the pulpit that had mattered to Ottokar: its shape, and the relation of that shape to the pulpit’s purpose as a staging area for the Holy Word. A globe had been chosen to symbolize Rome’s omnipresence simply because the earth, at the time, was as much of the universe as mankind understood.
It was then that Waldemar had a remarkable thought, one that set him, quietly but inescapably, on a course for infamy. If the shape of the pulpit was the feature that had inpired his father, and if the pulpit had been built to house the truth, and if that truth — the divine truth, the Holy Word of God — had been meant both to explain and to contain the universe, then Ottokar’s message wasn’t so obscure at all. He was saying, in effect, that the sphere was not only the fundamental shape in the solar system — not only the shape taken by the planets, and by the moons of those planets, and by the sun at its center — but that the sphere was the shape of the universe itself. We were all contained within it — all matter, all energy, all experience, all time — like the priest in his pulpit in Paměť Cathedral.