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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2011 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Minwen,
Who provided a light in the darkness
when I really needed it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although this story is complete in itself, occasional passing reference is made to earlier stories in the series to which it belongs: “The Legacy of Erich Zann” (in the Perilous Press volume The Womb of Time), Valdemar’s Daughter and The Mad Trist (published as complementary halves of a Borgo/Wildside Double), The Quintessence of August and The Cthulhu Encryption (both issued as Borgo/Wildside novels). The full text of Benoît de Maillet’s Telliamed, complete with the marginal notes to the manuscript, to which Auguste Dupin has privileged access in the present story, was published in English translation by the University of Illinois Press in 1968, translated and edited by Albert V. Carozzi. The fundamental idea of the “Thierachians” featured in the plot is borrowed from Jean Richepin’s novel L’Aile (1911), translated into English as The Wing (Black Coat Press 2011), but I have embellished it considerably in equipping the imaginary nomads in question with an entire new mythology.
PRELUDE
“I believe that I have sufficiently demonstrated,” the philosopher continued, “the probability, if not the truth of the theory that terrestrial animals originate from marine ones, and which also established the natural formation of the latter in the sea, by the seeds with which its waters are impregnated, whether such seeds are assumed to be eternal or whether they exist by creation.... It is thus easy to imagine the manner in which all sensitive or vegetative things could be generated in a globe, whether it is being repopulated, or whether it has never been populated previously.”
Marginal note to the manuscript of
Telliamed by Benoît de Maillet
(written 1692-1718)
* * * *
I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character...by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish someone would indicate one to me. But if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I should have done so.
Carl von Linné (alias Carolus Linnaeus),
letter to J. G. Gmelin, 1747
* * * *
If these different organisms are compared with one another and with what is known concerning man; if they are contemplated, from the simplest animal organization to that of man, which is the most complex and the most perfect, the progression exhibited in the composition of the organization, as well as the successive acquisition of different special organs and, therefore, of as many new faculties are developed organs; then it becomes perceptible how needs, initially reduced to a minimum and increasing gradually in number thereafter, have produced a tendency to actions appropriate to satisfy them; how actions that become habitual and energetic occasion the development of the organs that perform them; how the force that excites organic movements can, in the most imperfect animals, be located outside them and yet stimulate them; how, eventually, this force is transferred into the animal; and finally, how it there becomes the source of sensibility, and eventually of acts of intelligence.
Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck,
Philosophie zoologique, 1809
CHAPTER ONE
THE REVELATION
No matter how mild a winter might be, one is always glad to see the return to Paris of spring, which is said—not without reason—to be the city’s best season. No matter how much delight lovers of darkness may take in the long nights of winter, they eventually become wearisome. To tell the truth, as Auguste Dupin and I got older, the particular fascinations that had united us in the early days of our acquaintance, including our fascination with darkness, began to fade somewhat. Even though fate continued to deliver us into dark places on occasion, we became increasingly glad to find or create light within them as time went by.
I cannot say that, before the spring of 1847, we had suffered any personal revolution in anticipation of the political upheaval that was shortly to arrive, nor even that we had changed in any essential way—the notion of Dupin changing seemed absurd, given that his character seemed only to have hardened as a result of all our bizarre adventures—but I think we had become less emphatic in our commonplace idiosyncrasies. As for less commonplace idiosyncrasies...well, those remain emphatic by necessity, if not be definition.
The perversity of my own temperament had left me in considerable doubt as to the so-called joys of spring in my youth, even though the changing of the seasons was sufficiently well-marked in Boston, where I spent much of my early youth, and noticeable even in Virginia, where I spend the most significant fraction of my adolescence—although Virginia, in particular, had nothing of the exaggerated changes in the relative duration of light and dark enjoyed by Paris. It is, however, entirely in keeping with the principle of perversity that a man who has avoided such follies when they might have taken fruitful effect should begin to feel something of a special zest at the advent of the season of renewal, once he in his forties and no longer likely to express that zest in any fashion remotely connected to procreation.
The one problem with the equinoctial season in Paris, however, is the changeability of the weather. There are bright days, to be sure, but there are also rainy ones, often in abundance. The vegetable world needs both, of course, to fuel the sudden rise of its saps, but rain, especially when it comes in near-deluges, can have a singularly dispiriting effect on a human spirit that has only recently been buoyed up by emergence from winter torpor.
It was raining heavily on the strange evening in 1847 when I learned more about Auguste Dupin’s history in a matter of hours than I had contrived to winkle out of him in more years than I had fingers to count. There must, I suppose, have been dozens of people in Paris who had been acquainted him when he was authentically young, including at least three whom I saw on a regular basis, but they never talked about it any more than he did. His discretion was contagious, to a remarkably insistent degree.
I say “authentically young” because it was very difficult to judge Dupin’s age. When I had first met him he had seemed younger than I was, but I had soon learned to doubt that judgment; for a while I had thought him much older, and then had changed my mind again—but all my attempts to determine a exact chronology of his birth and education had been met with a conscientious vagueness that had begun to seem irritating. I suppose that it was necessary for me to encounter someone who had known him a quarter of a century before but had not seen him since, thus avoiding the contagion of discretion, in order to discover any reliable information.
Dupin had come to dinner that evening, with the understanding that we would spend the evening together, chatting as we had in the early days of our acquaintance, but we had not even finished dessert when a messenger came from the Prefecture begging him to come, in order to offer his advice on a matter of urgency. For once, even Dupin seemed annoyed by the rudeness of the summons.
“I’ll come back,” he promised me. “Within an hour, if possible—two at the most.”
As
