The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [25]
You could then write more information on a second piece of paper and lay it on top of the first. There they were: two whole universes, right next to each other but unable to interact. Wolfram hypothesized an Aether, a second universe that existed in the same time and place as the human universe, but fashioned in such a way as to be untouchable. The same Word, but in a different language. The information was there, but human beings couldn’t apprehend it.
He and Daior-Crabtree had built the Excelsior. It was a ship whose engines, instead of carrying it across the sea or through the air, would translate itself and its crew into the Aether, and then back again.
The launch of the Excelsior a century and a half ago had annihilated a square half-mile of the city. The crew, including Wolfram himself, had all been killed, as had three hundred spectators. No one from the Royal Academy of Sciences had been able to get close enough to the wreckage of the vessel to retrieve it for weeks. There had only been eleven heretical sciences when Wolfram and Daior-Crabtree built their aethership. After the Excelsior, the Church Royal added a new one for the first time in a hundred years.
The recording cylinders had been nothing but screams. Charterhouse had heard five men, screaming desperately, terrified beyond their capacity for speech, their voices filled with pain and horror. The Excelsior had been outside the universe for five minutes, and its recording cylinders held nothing but screams. The process of translation had destroyed their minds, their bodies, turned the Excelsior into a mangled wreck, and sent a shockwave through Trowth that leveled buildings.
Herman Zindel had been using the Excelsior’s translation engine.
Elijah Beckett sat on his bed in the corner of his small room, and rested his head against the wall. He’d achieved a perfect balance of veneine and consciousness: there was just enough in his system to keep the pain out of mind, but not so much that it was clouding his judgment, or threatening to send him to Cross the Water. It was an ideal time to be thinking about the Zindels.
If it hadn’t been for Mr. Stitch’s assertion that Herman Zindel hadn’t been murdered by sharpsie hooligans, the case would be open and shut. Zindel was a heretical mathematician, yes, but the odds were just the same that a random murder by sharpsie housebreakers would hit Zindel as they would anyone else. There were probably dozens of armchair heretics in Trowth, even a few with the funds to bribe the Academy of Sciences for access to the Excelsior’s flight recorder. Maybe it was just bad luck for Zindel.
The flight recorder had been almost a dead-end. Beckett had gone immediately that afternoon to the headquarters of the Royal Academy of Sciences, to see the wreckage of the Excelsior. He’d been denied entry.
“By orders of the Crown,” the clerk had told him, while the Lobstermen assigned to guard him had loomed monstrously. Their bone armor had glistened red and wet in the candlelight.
“Coroner,” Beckett had told the skinny, pinch-faced man. “I work for the Crown.”
The clerk had shrugged. “Unless you’re the Emperor or the Minister for Internal Security, I’ll need written consent before I can let you in.” He had a bored expression on his face; there was no malice in him, just a stubborn need to follow the rules. “Besides, we don’t keep the. . . we don’t keep that here. It’s in one of the Vaults in Old Bank.”
The process for getting a Search Writ from the Minister for Internal Security was a tedious one. Beckett had to have a message sent to Mr. Stitch, explaining what he wanted. Stitch would pass the message on to the secretary for the Vice-Minister of IS, who would determine whether or not it was important enough to pass on to the Minister’s Adjunct’s secretary, who would show it to the Adjunct, who would then probably just sign the Minister’s name to it, on the grounds that the Minister was very busy having lunch with Someone Important.
What all that meant was that Beckett wouldn’t be able to get his writ for at least a day, maybe