Mephisto’s Crusade
Part 1 - The House on the Hill
Adriatic Coast. 3205 A.E.
The house stood on a small hill, high enough to offer a view of the countryside for several miles. Baked by the sun in summer and lashed by winter winds that drove the tides close to its front door, the house had witnessed the shifting sands of the beach over time. From the right point on the hill, with the sun in the right quarter, the lagoon would turn the color of molten gold; on another day, it became a silver mirror reflecting the world.
An old oak table, turned grey with age, stood near the kitchen door in the walled garden at the back of the house. This was where they ate their meals, and it was now laden with bread and cheese, bottles of wine, and bowls of pasta and seafood. The brothers had returned from the fields, and Marta scolded them endlessly as she heaped food onto their plates. Sometimes the cousins joined them, sometimes friends who were helping the brothers. The two girls assisted Marta, who delegated tasks to Alia, who in turn passed them on to Cara—the youngest and often the most burdened at mealtimes. This was partly because of her station in life until she reached puberty, and partly because her volcanic temper provided great entertainment, especially when her slight figure erupted with a torrent of scorching insults, arms waving like windmills—a precise, if unintentional, caricature of Marta at her scolding best.
And then there was Alia.
Alia, the morning star, the angel of the hill, Marta’s pride, teased him as she passed by, leaving him thoroughly distracted and lost to the conversation. This caused the brothers to tease him, as did Cara, who took the opportunity to retrieve some pride.
He sat at the end of the table, the position of an honored guest. At the head of the table was a place setting for Patra, who had been gone for some years now, yet his influence could still be felt filling the corners of the house and in the relics treasured by the family—like the wooden chair by the fire in which no one sat, and the pipe in an alcove in the hall.
The talk roamed about, traveling from speculations about the promising size of the upcoming harvest to the flatness of Cara’s breasts. Then they reviewed the events in the village the week before, when the priest had caught the baker enjoying the expertise of the bar owner's wife behind the church one evening. Curious, Cara wanted to know what the woman’s expertise was. Paolo said it was helping men with their sowing, which earned him a slap from Marta and laughter from everyone else.
Most days after the main meal, he would join the brothers for the final tasks of the day, making the most of the long summer daylight. As the afternoon work progressed, he watched dark storm clouds south of the farm drift slowly west—a train of thunderheads with white summits and blue-grey flanks. They were a long way off yet massive, towering over the nearer clouds that moved swiftly in front of them. The sea beneath the base of the mountain of clouds had turned steel grey, forming a band of shadow across the whole ocean horizon.
As the light faded, they would sit on the wall watching the sun begin to set over the bay.
But as he watched with the brothers, something strange happened to remind him of the oddness of this place. All along the base of the clouds, tiny pinpricks of light were appearing like city lights seen from a great distance.
"What are the lights, Paolo? I have never seen storm clouds with lights."
Paolo smiled and translated for his brother before telling him, "That isn’t a storm; that’s Kashmir."
That night, Alia came to him—her body brown and sinuous as an otter’s. When the storm subsided and the star of the hill lay exhausted, arms and legs limp and tangled with his, she whispered to him. She told him how her heart ached when he was out of sight, how when she first saw his face she couldn't speak and had to run away like a little Cara until her heart calmed down. He called her inferno, angel, and star of the morning, watching for the smile that brought splendour to her face.
Later, he told her a little more about what he could remember—hesitant because even now, after many months, he could only catch fragments. He told her about Kashmir and how that surprised him. Alia cocked an eyebrow and then frowned.
"Tomorrow we visit the Doctor."
After breakfast, they walked together into the village to the sanctuary house where the Doctor lived. It stood next to the church and had probably been built at the same time from the crumbling yellow stone of the region.
The wall of the house stood flush against the cobbled street, but once through the big oak and iron-bound door, they stood in a courtyard rich with vines and olive bushes, clematis growing wild among the shrubs for colour. A tall and white-haired man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles met them at the door and listened as Alia explained his request. The Doctor looked surprised and curious, intelligent eyes probing his own, but he smiled and nodded, waving them into his hallway.
He led them up the wide, dark stairway that dominated the hall, calling to his housekeeper for coffee and bread despite Alia's protestations about inconveniencing such an important man. He gently brushed aside her concerns.
"I am intrigued by the notion of someone who has lived so long without looking at an atlas, Alia, or one so unobservant of the world. At least one of these things I can provide a cure for. What do I call you, young man?"
Alia blushed. "I am sorry, Doctor, forgive my manners; I forgot to introduce you. This is Nemo."
"You are called Fish?" the Doctor asked.
"It is a joke. Paolo called him Nemo when we found him on the beach."
"I can’t remember my name," he offered, wary of the Doctor's frown.
"And you were found on the beach? Like driftwood?"
"It was after a storm, Doctor. Nemo was unconscious."
"Even more mysterious. You must tell me more, Alia, while our little fish studies."
The Doctor led them along a corridor at the top of the stairs to another large door—this one intricately carved in the Spanish manner and heavily oiled to preserve the beauty of the dark grain.
The library was larger than he expected, containing several thousand books arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelves—the larger, heavier volumes on the lower levels, the smaller ones on the upper shelves. They appeared to be arranged topically, although some of the subjects were new to him. There were whole fields of understanding that he had never heard of before, signalled by gold script painted onto thin wooden panels at the start of each section: Absolutism, Barbarisms, Femtronics, Neurotica, Xenoflora, and Xenofauna. He did not bother to look at Historica or Politica, knowing there was little he would find familiar. This was another sign he was a long way from home in an innocent world which saddened him because the allure of this place was so strong—not least because of the slender, white-clad form of Alia standing by the large arched windows.
In the centre of the library stood a table at least four times the area of the one outside the house on the hill. It was immaculately polished and clear of any mess; the Doctor was a fastidious man. The Doctor went to the shelves marked with signs. As he approached the shelves, the gold lettering flowed as if written by an invisible hand into narrower subject bands.
"The names change," he whispered to Alia, but the Doctor had excellent hearing.
"Of course, how else would the library guide me to the volume I want?"
He took down a thick, well-worn volume the size of a tray and placed it on the table near the window where Alia stood, beckoning to him with a smile.
"But how does it know what book you want?"
"The library is an attentive companion. And it has known me many years."
The Doctor opened the large volume to a page showing a Mercator projection of the Mediterranean coast printed by hand engraved copper plates in muted colours. For a moment, he felt a loss of hope as he studied the sketch of the sea, certain it was less accurate than he anticipated. He resigned himself to politely studying the unfamiliar coast before returning to the fields. But as he looked, he watched some of the lines change almost imperceptibly.
"This is Kashmiri-Laputia, its position and orbit. It will traverse the Mediterranean in a few days."
"What is it?"
"Why, as its name suggests, the Kashmir that flies. The home of the Gigasaur from the Himalayas."
"But that's impossible."
"Oh, Doctor," Alia cried in embarrassment. "I am so sorry. He does not mean to be rude. It's just his way."
The Doctor turned a page to a Mercator projection of the world. There were more Laputia. The islands were coloured the same muted salmon pink, and each island name was suffixed with "Laputia." He learned Madagaska-Laputia orbited in the tropics, and Tasmani-Laputia orbited the southern pole, which was not ice-bound but similar to the depiction the Viking Leif had described. Each island's orbit was clearly marked, and the atlas recorded routes for weather systems as orderly and precise as clockwork.
"Perhaps these are impossible too?" the Doctor suggested.
He sat back, oblivious to the conversation between the Doctor and Alia as they discussed him quietly by the window, lost in a world where the Atlantic had grown and the Pacific was home to a line of new islands that arched across the Asian edge of the ocean. This enlarged what he might have called Japan into a long proto continent stretching a thousand miles further west and south, greatly amplifying the complexity of Oceania.
By contrast, the Mediterranean Sea was hardly changed except for the salmon pink addition that was marked "Kashmiri-Laputia" in minute script. With the Doctor's help, he navigated to the correct page that displayed the floating island in more detail. He asked the Doctor if the display was quantum mechanical in nature, but the Doctor shook his head and explained that it was achieved by biotic fragments—intelligent but non-sentient flora that lived on cellulose and were activated by light and heat—a technology totally new to him. The Doctor explained that quantum technology was not used for intelligent systems lest it intrude on the natural progression of the world's gestalt wave function.
This thrilled him, and he smiled at the news. Alia hugged him and said he looked beautiful when he smiled, which caused him embarrassment in front of the Doctor, who left at that point with a chuckle and a warning about "amore, amore."
Alia showed him where they lived on the eastern coast and then, on another page displaying the local area around the village, she pointed out all the people—tiny, elegant, cartoon shapes with their names beside their heads. She turned another page and revealed the plan view of the Doctor's house and the library, where two figures sat at the end of a table looking at a book marked by a cross with the title "Geographica Mundi," appended with "You are Here." One tiny figure was marked "Alia," the other a baleful question mark that surprised her and made her squeeze him even tighter, murmuring encouragements.
She showed him how to navigate to Kashmiri-Laputia again—a frustrating process until he learned how to let the biota help him. He poured over the linear cities that ringed the island's skirts, seeing thousands of people going about their day in each city. She pointed out the baffling interiors of the island's mountain range, which isolated its mass from the Earth's gravitational field and directed its orbit. The internal caverns formed miniature worlds for the Gigasauri, who were the original stimuli and architects of the floating islands some long time in the past. Nobody now could imagine a world without such splendour.
Alia explained they were not Xenofauna or Xenoflora. She seemed alarmed by the idea of letting xenobiology loose on the Earth and clarified that they were not artificial but an intelligence evolved from some other form of natural complexity—it was not clear to him at all.
What was becoming clear was that this world was totally unknown—a unicosm, untouched before his arrival. He fluctuated wildly between extreme hope and mortal dread as the morning passed into afternoon. Shadows from the window stretched across the desk as the light grew softer and more golden. The large wooden table in the Doctor's library slowly filled with leather-bound, light-energized books. Alia, and sometimes the Doctor himself, helped him progress from subject to subject, following no particular path other than that driven by his own sense of strangeness.
He learned that the Gigasauri were elemental beings, perhaps eternal, as complex in their structure as a city seen at a microscopic level. This was shown in wonderful cross-sections that moved to display their elaborate and massive interactions with the biosphere. They live separate lives, communicating with mankind sporadically and only as they needed.
In one book written in a cramped and archaic style barely legible to him, the conversations of the Gigasauri were recorded by a hermit who had lived on the island of Tasmani-Laputia all his life, scorning the company of men. The hermit wrote in dense, incomprehensible, convoluted couplets entirely in the third person, concerning subjects beyond his experience. Each sentence was pages long, and to make it more difficult, the lines were arranged in rows of three, implying that the hermit had had three conversations at once with the Gigasauri—or that, to gain a full understanding, the three interwoven texts had to be read together. The Doctor confirmed the latter was the case, indicating this particular Gigasaur was known for being difficult and made few concessions for men.
It was a point of considerable honor that the Gigasaur had conversed at all, entirely due to the hermit's persistence over the years. The hermit was considered a likely candidate for sainthood, as it was miraculous that the Gigasaur had related to him so well. Some suspected a divine purpose.
In the atlas Gloria Lundi, he learned that the blue and white globe he had seen every night was indeed the Moon. Mare Tranquilus and Mare Imbrium were saltwater seas filled with weeds, coral, fish, and crustaceans. There were grass plains at the equator and glaciers the height of Everest at the poles. The water had been brought by comets a long time ago, and the life brought from Earth.
He watched the minute cartoons of the citizens of Luna in their intricate cities and learned the meaning of their distinctive symbols denoting origin and age. He discovered the Moon revolved once every twenty-four hours and that its revolution had started five thousand years before this day. From this, he realized that he was so far from his origin that a temporal displacement had occurred.
The light eventually faded to the point where he looked up from the complex, moving engravings of armillary spheres showing the explored stars. The moving images were faltering in the dimmer light—colours fading to pastel shadows and movement becoming partial, momentarily distorting the fine lines—the intelligent biota adjusting their errors.
Alia was sitting in a chair by the window, haloed by the orange dusk, head resting on one hand, a music book in her lap in which the quavers and semitones still scrolled across the page. He recognized illustrations of flute, piano, and cello. He waited until the passage scrolled to an end, then said hello. She looked up, smiling—always smiling—and took his hand, chattering incessantly until he silenced her with a peck on the lips.
He thanked her and rested his head against hers.
Alia pushed him away.
“It is shameful that you are so ignorant. The Doctor has agreed. Tomorrow you start school.”
To be continued…
The inspiration for this extended piece of nonsense comes from three places.
The first is the curvature of Spacetime and its implications. If Spacetime is flat then the universe is infinite. The current measurement, made at the very limit of our technical ability, found that the figure is extremely close to 1 at 1.0007±0.0019 (95% confidence limits). So thats good enough for me as far as proof is concerned.
Infinity is a funny thing, because it means that literally any physically coherent combination of particles and movement is not only allowed, it is mandatory. If you can imagine it, and it is physically possible, it exists somewhere. This leaves me plenty of room for alternative Earths without having to disturb quantum physics, or having quantum physics disturb us, which is more to the point for those anxious about such things. Clearly in the part of the universe occupied by this Earth there are concerns about disturbing the natural quantum progression of the universe, the details of which will be revealed later in the novella.
The second inspiration is Lee Cronin’s ground breaking work on defining life. His premise is that living systems, through evolution and natural selection, tend to produce molecular structures with a much higher “assembly complexity” than would be statistically probable under purely random chemical processes. In other words, life’s hallmark from Cronin’s perspective is its ability to generate, store, and propagate complex chemical information over time. This gives me the room to propose a completely new form of life, neither silicon based or carbon based. Like all good Sci-Fi authors, I gloss over the details at this point.
As for an engineered Earth-like Moon, that is also permissible given a big enough energy budget. As world renowned physicist David Deutsch comments “All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
If it’s good enough for him….
Wonderful stuff, can’t wait for part two!
Give us more, Steve!