The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [42]
“What? What is it?”
“He’s been arrested. Assault, theft…” Valentine scowled. “Attempted espionage. He’s being held at Montgomery Square.”
“Montgomery Square…?”
“It’s the Committee, Skinner. The Committee for Public Safety has him.”
Fourteen: The Dangers of Heresy
Alan Charterhouse sat on the bed in his room. Papers were scattered about him; they tumbled in piles on his bed, they were balled up and crumpled on his floor, they were pinned to his walls. He used a book for a desk while he sat in his nightclothes, scratching formula after formula in a mathematical language that he could be executed for even knowing about. There was a copy of The Dangers of Heresy laying open on the bed next to him. In his feverish rush to understand what he’d seen in Herman Zindel’s home, Alan Charterhouse did not notice the irony.
Dangers of Heresy was given to every young boy or girl the first day they came to Sebet-Day school, to learn about the religion and the Word. It was full of terrifying copperplate etchings of Reanimates, of people that died of dream poisoning, of the hideous creations of chimeratists and ectoplasmatists, followed with page after page of descriptions about how terrible heretical science could be. The last two chapters were devoted to the Excelsior.
The pictures of the Excelsior were actually cheap kirlitotypes, so they were much more detailed than the copperplates. The first pictures were of the whole Excelsior, looking like nothing so much as a great brass shark with a huge, piston-driven phlogiston engine protruding from its back. There was a copy of the famous kirliotype of the Excelsior’s launch, with the Lord Mayor of Trowth smashing a bottle of sparkling wine against its brass hull.
The rest of the pictures . . . it wasn’t always possible to get kirltiotypes. Something was left over in the air after the launch that disrupted the flux-membranes used in the cameras. There were big black spots obstructing the view sometimes, like someone had burned the photographs with a match. Sometimes, the spots looked like they had fingers.
What could be seen was awful. The area directly around the launch, when the Excelsior had returned to real-space, had been completely annihilated. There was just an empty scoop out of the ground that was covered with ash. The mangled ship sat at its center. All around the central crater were twisted, burned-out buildings. Doorways or chimneys sometimes stood where houses had collapsed. Towers were burned and covered in black soot.
The people who had been nearest to the Excelsior had died almost instantly; vaporized along with the ground they were standing on. It had happened so fast that they’d left their shadows behind. According to the book, the few people daring enough to live in the Break insisted that they could still see those shadows moving about. Still, those were lucky ones. The people around them were less fortunate. They were sometimes fortunate enough to be burned alive for a few seconds; if they survived that, the Aether would get to them.
Somehow, the Excelsior had brought a wave of metaphysical space back with it. It erupted out from ground zero, wrenching space and reality out of alignment. People died as their bones sprouted thorns, veins turned to glass, skin shattered like stone. One man was torn apart as his muscles came to life like snakes, and tried to rip themselves free from his body.
Not everyone died immediately. There were survivors at the very outskirts of the explosion, and others who tried to move into what came to be called the Break shortly afterwards. They did not last long. They choked on extra teeth growing in their throats, or went mad as their limbs slowly began to split in half.
It was not the lurid photographs of the victims of the Excelsior that Alan was interested in. There were no blueprints or schematics available for the machinery on the Aethership; the kirliotypes in Dangers of Heresy were the closest he could come. He needed more information. The young cartographer felt starved for it.
There was something unsettling about