The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [24]
The novels were really very formulaic: they all started with a locked-room mystery, that Ted East would somehow miraculously guess the solution to; often, as Alan was starting to notice, with highly dubious reasoning. Then, Ted East would harass and intimidate his contacts in the criminal underworld until he had enough information to track the criminals to their secret underground layer. This was usually because the criminals were importing some rare chemical for their insane experiments, or because they’d had some kind coal-dust on their shoes that could only be found in one particular factory in the city. In Ted East, Coroner the clue had actually been a wrapper for a pat of butter left behind when the villain had eaten dinner with one of Ted East’s contacts. The wrapper had the name of the hotel that the man, an ambassador from Canth who was actually an ettercap spy, had been staying at.
Ted East would track the villains down to their lair, and proceed to shoot them all. Sometimes, he’d contrive to blow something up first, if there were too many to be reasonably dispatched with a revolver. Sometimes, sometimes not: Ted East’s revolver often carried a little more than six bullets.
Alan wondered if the author of the Ted East novels, a man named Geoffrey Holland, thought his readers were stupid, or if he was just careless. It was possibly a little of both. Alan’s cousin had recommended that he start reading Phillip Crowe’s work, but Alan had never found much appeal: the novels were too slow, too atmospheric. It took too long to get to the point of the story, and by then he’d lost interest.
Night had fallen about two-thirds of the way into the trip, and Alan found it impossible to read by the intermittent phlogiston-blue streetlamps. He thought instead to what he’d seen in Herman Zindel’s house. Of course, Beckett had told him to forget everything, and of course Alan would if he could have, but it was impossible. Alan Charterhouse had a frustratingly perfect memory. He could recall virtually every piece of the formulae he’d seen in that house.
There were some things about the equations that were highly disturbing. It was one thing to theorize, mathematically, about the nature of higher-plane geometry. Harcourt Wolfram, the brilliant scientist who had virtually single-handedly invented the modern world over a hundred and fifty years ago, had journals filled with hypotheses about planar mathematics. It was something else, however, to actually be experimenting with them.
What Alan couldn’t reveal to the coroners, because it would reveal too much about his own knowledge of the heretical subject, was that Zindel’s equations were using experimental data. They weren’t just theories; they were getting information from somewhere. And that meant that Herman Zindel had access to a working translation engine…
The Excelsior, Alan thought, then shook his head. It was impossible. The Excelsior, the final brainchild of Harcourt Wolfram and Chretien Daior-Crabtree, had only been used once. The consequences of that experiment were…Alan Charterhouse shuddered.
Harcourt Wolfram had developed a theory, based on the fundamental principles of the Church Royal: that the world as human beings understood it was the product of a single, infinitely complex Word, and that all matter and energy was an intricate sub-harmony within that Word. Wolfram had taken it a step further. A word, he reasoned, has not just sound, but meaning. If what the Church says is true, then the world is as much made from information as anything else. And information was easy to store. You could write it on a piece of paper and lay it flat on your desk.