Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [270]
A pipe rack with two rows of little hourglasses, ten to a row, their necks elongated like the neck of a Modigliani woman, some unspecified material inside, and the upper bulge of each expanded to a different size, like balloons about to take off. This, an apparatus for the production of the Rebis, where anyone could see it.
Then the glassworks section. I had retraced my steps. Little green bottles: a sadist host offering me poisons in quintessence. Iron machines for making bottles, opened and closed by two cranks. What if, instead of a bottle, someone put a wrist in there? Whack! And it would be the same with those great pincers, those immense scissors, those curved scalpels that could be inserted into sphincters or ears, into the uterus to extract the still-living fetus, which would be ground with honey and pepper to sate the appetite of Astarte... The room I was now crossing had broad cases, and buttons to set in motion corkscrews that would advance inexorably toward the victim’s eye, the Pit and the Pendulum. We were close to carfeature now, to the ridiculous contraptions of Rube Goldberg, the torture racks on which Big Pete bound Mickey Mouse, the engrenage exterieur a trois pignons, triumph of Renaissance mechanics, Branca, Ramelli, Zonca. I knew these gears, I had put them in the wonderful adventure of metals, but they had been added here later, in the last century, and were ready to restrain the unruly after the conquest of the world; the Templars had learned from the Assassins how to shut up Noffo Dei when the time of his capture came; the swastika of Sebotten-dorf would twist, in the direction of the sun, the twitching limbs of the enemies of the Masters of the World. All ready, these instruments awaited a sign, everything in full view, the Plan was public, but nobody could have guessed it, the creaking mechanical maws would sing their hymn of conquest, great orgy of mouths, all teeth that locked and meshed exactly, mouths singing in tick-tock spasms.
Finally I came to the emetteur a etincelles soufflees designed for the EifFel Tower, for the emission of time signals between France, Tunisia, and Russia, the Templars of Provins, the Pau-licians, the Assassins of Fez. (Fez isn’t in Tunisia, and the Assassins, anyway, were in Persia, but you can’t split hairs when you live in the coils of Transcendent Time.) I had seen it before, this immense machine, taller than I, its walls perforated by a series of portholes, air ducts. The sign said it was a radio apparatus, but I knew better, I had passed it that same afternoon. The Beaubourg!
For all to see. And, for that matter, what was the real purpose of that enormous box in the center of Lutetia (Lutetia, the air duct in a subterranean sea of mud), where once there was the Belly of Paris, with those prehensile proboscises of vents, that insanity of pipes, conduits, that Ear of Dionysius open to the sky to capture sounds, messages, signals, and send them to the very center of the globe, and then to return them, vomiting out information from hell? First the Conservatoire, a laboratory, then the Tower, a probe, and finally the Beaubourg, a global transmitter and receiver. Had they set up that huge suction cup just to entertain a handful of hairy, smelly students, who went there to listen to the latest record with a Japanese headset? For all to see. The Beaubourg, gate to the underground kingdom of Agarttha, the monument of the Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. And the rest—two, three, four billion of them—were unaware of this, or forced themselves to look the other way. Idiots and hylics. While the pneumatics headed straight for their goal, through six centuries.
* * *
Unexpectedly, I found the staircase. I went down, with increasing caution. Midnight was approaching. I had to hide in my