Just to let you know about a nice little cipher-mystery-themed short story just published on the Daily Science Fiction website: “The Voynich Variations” by Edoardo Albert neatly merges the Voynich Manuscript’s inaccessibility with modern orchestral music’s inaccessibility, with a magical flourish to tie it all up. Enjoy!
Such a stupid thing for a bright kid to do: pinballing through her mid-teen rebellion, Jena Kyng had wanted to demonstrate some kind of unbranded online tribal allegiance, and ended up with two lines of Voynichese across her lower back (from the end paragraph of page f67r2, as if anyone off-list really cared). Though in many ways, she’d had a lucky escape: imagine ending up with that bozo Gap logo as a tattoo – now that would have really sucked.
But since then, her whole A-grade student train had derailed: and once bad boy boyfriend #1 had morphed into worse boyfriend #2, it was surely just a matter of time before her steadily-growing drink, drugs and abusive partner habits all conspired to help her paint herself into a truly dismal corner of society. All that Voynich research graft lay long behind her: why bother about history when you can see no future?
Countless times since she’d tried to fit herself into straight-ass day jobs, but the minute she got asked to work extra, she’d elevate the royal middle digit… and then it was just a matter of days before the order came from on high to clear her desk. And so, like Michael Palin, Jena’s life now danced defiantly from inhospitable pole to pole – though she somehow doubted Palin could shake his aging Pythonic tush half as as well as her. It’s a skill, she liked to console herself, however minor in the big scheme of things.
So, welcome one and all to her latest home from home, the Green Lizard Club in Muskogee, Oklahoma – ‘Green’ because the owners had replaced all the seedy lighting with LED lamps, thus helping its patrons to feel as though they were saving the planet while stuffing high-denom bills into pole-dancers’ lithely minimalist underwear. Sure, it’s a big fat eco-gimmick: but everybody loves eco-gimmicks, right?
All the same, tonight had been shaping up to be a stultifyingly mediocre night to cap a shockingly shabby week. Jena’s only ray of hope left was the bunch of startup guys – no, not the wind turbine crew (who came in once with some terrified-looking VCs but never returned), but the social media gaggle on Table 3. Bright people, no doubt, but… social media in Muskogee? As if Dave McClure is ever going to drop by here, of all places. Well, not unless he’d absolutely insisted on a live demo from some MIT Star Trek teleportation spin-out. How vividly Daveski would swear if he found himself unexpectedly re-materialized on Okmulgee Avenue, eh?
So, when the lanky one with a testosteronal chin (a bit like a pumped-down Matt Damon) called over to her, she twisted her mouth into her second-best smile (“positive, life-affirming, it’s-great-to-make-money-off-you-geeks”) and danced towards the group. As you’d expect, they knew her name already, but of course she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about theirs. Life is easy when you just don’t care.
“Hey Jena”, Matt Jnr shouted over Hooverphonic’s sweet music, “I think there’s a problem with your tattoo.”
Well, she thought, m-a-y-b-e: but that was when she noticed The Handsome But Odd Guy in the group, mouth slightly open, looking straight through her with his puppy-dumb X-ray eyes. “A problem?” she replied, her PanAm Smile still intact.
“Our guy Rain Man wants to know why you have a Latin poison book for a tattoo”, the tall guy continued. “Oh, and just so you know, Nate’s got Asperger’s, which for him means he codes like an angel but doesn’t like to get out of the office much.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s not a poison recipe”, Jena replied turning towards him, a wave of minor cracklets starting to break round the edge of her working smile. “It’s from an astronomical page of…”
“multa michi circa venenorum materiam“, Nate was reading, “dubia occurrent quorum declaratio nixi. Pretty funny tattoo you’ve got there, Miss.”
There was an odd, whooshing sound in her head, as clusters of Jurassic synapses creakily reassembled a fossilized memory from way back when she was still a basically whole person. Yes: it was an incipit she’d seen before, back in her Voynich research life. And if so, then it was probably from Thorndike’s History of Magic & Experimental Science, most likely her favourite Volume IV. So, it would be… the second half of Antonius Guaynerius of Pavia’s twin treatise on plague and poison, composed before 1440. Might Guaynerius have been the Voynich Manuscript’s author? The raw electricity of the possibility surged up and down her, like lightning trying vainly to reach ground. But… even if the idea just happened to be consistent with the radiocarbon dating, nothing that speculative could be true, it was all some spooky coincidence. It had to be, right?
Against her will, Jena was starting to get just a little freaked out. If any of this was even remotely right, the guy Nate must be some kind of idiot savant, unable to tie his shoelaces but able to read the frickin’ Voynich Manuscript. She sneaked a sly glance at his shoes: slip-on Vans. As if I couldn’t guess, she thought. “Does your friend actually know Latin?”, she asked as casually as her quickening pulse would allow.
“Latin?” the lanky guy replied. “He’s always seemed happier talking in Python or C++ than English. But anyway, what is that crazy shit alphabet on your back?”
“Oh, it’s from the Voynich Manuscript, a kind of weird cipher mystery thing”, she said in the best noncommittal voice she could muster. “But I think I’d better show your man the next line down, see if he can read that too.”
She moved down to the startup guys’ table, and turned to face away from them. Down went the already skimpy silver lamé pole dancing underwear an extra two inches to reveal the only line of red writing in the whole of the VMs. Way back in her Voynich research days, she’d often wondered whether this might be the single line that would some day serve to crack its cipher system. So what would Asperger’s Nate make of it?
“It’s a beautiful thing”, the Odd Guy mumbled. “But I can’t make out the first word, may I move closer, Miss?”
“Uhhh… sure”, she said.
Nate moved right up close, and ran his index finger tenderly over the red letters with a kind of Braille-reading intensity. Instantly, her long-submerged memories of holding the Voynich Manuscript at the Beinecke Library surfaced, and exploded in the physicality of his touch. For that moment, her skin was the Voynich’s vellum, her tattoo was the Voynich’s ink, and she felt utterly entangled in time and space with the Voynich’s author (whoever he or she happened to be).
But… then Jena noticed out the corner of her eye that all the other startup guys were taking out their wallets, placing hundred dollar bills into a pile on the table, and shaking their heads.
“Sorry”, said Nate in a completely different (and totally normal) voice as he stood up, “I can’t make it out, Miss.”
“Hey…”, said Jena as each of the guys high-fived Nate, “what’s going on here?”
One of the group’s regulars, a bald-headed guy with comedy glasses – perhaps the in-house web designer?, she wondered – was laughing into his hand. “Sorry, Jena, it was just a joke. Nate bet us a hundred bucks each he’d get inside your panties tonight, and we all thought he had precisely zero chance.”
“You did this for money?” Jena spat at Nate. “You made a fool of my ass to make yourself some freakin’ money?”
“Oh no”, said Nate handing her the cash, “the money’s for you. These guys work for me, I just enjoyed the challenge. When Larry” – he pointed at the bald-headed guy – “showed me a picture of you on his cameraphone, I thought you looked cute, and – you know – one thing led to another.”
“But all that Antonius Guaynerius stuff”, Jena spluttered, “how on earth did you…”
“Ah, all your old postings to the Voynich mailing list are still online”, Nate smiled. “Didn’t take long to find something to bait the line.”
“You bastard”, Jena said sotto voce, “you… smart bastard” – but this time she could feel her eyes twinkling, for the first time in a couple of years. “You… gonna come back soon?”
“I think I will”, said Nate. “I rather like the view from this table.”
All of a sudden, Jena fancied doing some problem-solving herself.
[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]
* * * * * * *
Chapter 3 – “Unjust Desserts”
“I suppose you just happened to pick this up at a rummage sale?”, said Emm, minutely scrutinizing the jacket’s material through her Swiss army knife’s magnifying glass.
“No, it was my grandfather’s – Mani Harvitz, he was a WWI codebreaker. He knew John Manly well, so must have known all about the Voynich Manuscript, I guess.”
“Hmmm… so why’s it in such good condition?”
“Ah”, said Graydon as he leaned over to pick up his club sandwich, “there’s a family story. On the boat back to the US from some European trip in the late 1920s, my grandpa fell seriously ill – and that turned out to be the tail end of the whole encephalitis lethargica epidemic.”
“Oh my God”, said Emm appalled, “the whole Oliver Sacks ‘Awakenings‘ thing, right?”
“Right. My grandfather stayed in a kind of catatonic state for decades – he died before I was born. Somehow I ended up inheriting his favourite jacket.”
Emm paused, looking at him through narrowed eyes, furious mental calculations plainly rattling through her head. The moment she turned her magnified gaze around to the small piece of parchment. Graydon stuffed an ungraciously large lump of sandwich into his mouth, trying hard not to moan with pleasure at his accelerated relief from starvation.
“Well, at least we know what he was doing”, Emm said, her shoulders relaxing a little as she began to take off her white cotton gloves.
“Errrm… which was… what?” Graydon replied, trying hard not to open his overfilled mouth too widely.
“For a start, he was visiting the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze – the Czech National Library, you can tell from the handwritten shelfmark. And here’s the giveaway he was stealing this”, she continued, pointing at the vellum’s left hand side , “the clean edge where Mani cut it out – probably with a smuggled-in razor blade – before stashing it in his secret pocket.”
“Jeez, so now I’m on a lunch date with Gil Grissom. Did you happen to notice any anomalous beetle larvae?”
“You ate your sandwich first, you tell me. Was the salad unusually… crunchy?”
But now it was Graydon’s turn to go vague and starry-eyed, triggered by a cascade of half-memories from his capacious mental warehouse of Voynich trivia. “I reckon the connection here is… Edith Rickert. See, my grandpa had had this massive crush on her from the codebreaking office, but she was utterly devoted to working with John Manly and so turned him down: basically, Mani got married on the rebound. I went through Rickert’s letters in the archives: the last one from him promised to travel up and show her something she’d be very interested in. Didn’t say what it was, though.”
“So, if Edith Rickert was into the Voynich…”
“Way back then, Wilfrid Voynich called it his ‘Roger Bacon Manuscript’, but I don’t think she was ever fooled.”
“OK, whatever the damn manuscript was called, it seems pretty likely to me that the thing hidden in this jacket was a Voynich-related fragment your grandpa stole from the Czech museum library to try to impress Rickert.” Emm said as she finally reached over to her plate. “You know, exciting her mind to get her into bed.”
“People do recommend that, but honestly, it’s never worked for me yet”, said Graydon. “Personally, I tend to find a nice lunch far more effective.”
Emm laughed, nearly choking on her sandwich, before frowning and pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Don’t you get any ideas – it would take much more than a club sandwich to get me into bed.”
“Whatever you say, Scully. Oh, the desserts here are pretty good, by the way.”
“Cheeky bastard!”
“And you’d definitely have to promise not to wear those cotton gloves”, continued Graydon grinning. “That would be wrong on so many levels.”
“Well, as long as I get to keep my magnifying glass and ruler, though.”
“Cheeky bastard!”
They both paused awkwardly, eyes scanning the other, resolutely reading between each other’s lines.
“Look”, said Emm as she began putting her things back into her clutch bag, “I’ve… I’ve got to get back to work now, before Mrs Kurtz starts punching the film crew. Could turn ugly.”
“That’s good”, said Graydon, noticing that even he didn’t believe the sound of his own words. “Ummm… thanks for dismantling my jacket and giving me a whole new research lead. Might even save my PhD. Oh, and I’d be very happy to help you with your cleaning, any time.”
“That’s great”, she replied, but her face was looking away as she stood up to leave. “Anyway, the Voynich film crew are filming an interview with Marina Lyonne this afternoon, I guess you probably know her, right?”
Graydon’s face dropped faster than a Wile E. Coyote grand piano. “Yeah, I know her”.
Ouch-a-rama.
His Voynich über-skeptic ex-wife was in town.
Oh, Marina, Marina, Marina: she knew the Beinecke curators very well – far too well, in fact – and she had a score of scores to settle with him. And this was more than just a bad moment for her to turn up wielding her +10 Axe of Grudgery, this was surely the worst imaginable moment.
Whoever said “one step forward, two steps back” was surely wearing X-ray specs, looking at the workings of the heart…
[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]
* * * * * * *
Chapter 2 – “Game On”
Vivid dreams of a towering manuscript library on fire: the Renaissance inks and paints boil, become gas and swirl upwards into an angry elemental wind, textual spirits entombed for centuries but now set free to roam the atmosphere, their haunting transmuted into a gigantic elemental pall above New Haven, a Jovian minium spot written upon the Earth’s skies, a full stop in the book of the sky for many-parsec-distant alien telescopes to read…
“Hey, Mr Graydon Harvitz! I nearly didn’t recognize you!”
He started from his mid-day café reverie, nearly knocking his second half-cold latte over onto the sprawl of Voynich Manuscript scans as he half-rose, no less surprised by the sensation of his newly-shaven chin on his fingertips than by Emm’s voice.
“Yeah, well, what with my committee appearance coming up, it was time I cleaned up my act. A bit, anyway.”
Emm reached over to his shoulder, her long fingers swiftly transcribing the diagonal weft and weave of his grandfather’s ancient twill jacket, one of the few things Graydon had inherited. She paused for a second longer than he expected, reading the material’s texture as if it were a familiar book, her eyes briefly absent from the room. “Ah”, she said, “you like antiques as well”.
“When history surrounds you, you can’t really avoid it”, he replied grimly. But the truth was, he wore it in a superstitious half-hope that his grandfather’s whisky-soaked ghost might lend a hand on those occasions when he particularly lacked cryptographic inspiration. Which had been… most of the time this last few months. “Hungry?”
“As a horse – any protein-rich House Specials on today?”
“Naah”, he replied, “it’s all carbohydrates à la mode. But their Club Sandwich is pretty good.”
“Good call!”, she smiled, “I’ll be the hunter-gatherer, back in a minute…”
Graydon watched with no little curiosity as she lightly sashayed across to the counter, attracting both jealous and covetous eyeballs from the other customers as she went. Yet… even though Graydon had survived his epic (and admittedly much-delayed) battle with the razor this morning, he still felt like nothing whereas Emm really was something: where was the balance in the equation? What was in it for her? And moreover…
“What exactly does a cleaner do?” he asked as she carefully squeezed a fresh latte and her cappucino into two of the polygonal gaps between the printouts on the table.
“Well… we clean things – old things. Such as your favourite manuscript. The Beinecke’s curators have put off fixing it up for years, but let’s face it, the Voynich does need a bit of TLC, right?”
“I guess so”, he said. “I must admit my heart’s in my mouth every time I have to unfold the rosettes page. On balance, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who trashed the VMs‘.”
“Just so you know, sorting it all out is my next job, once ze feelm crew ‘az returned to La Belle France. Their director has already annoyed Mrs Kurtz, so I don’t think they’ll be here long.” She snatched a brief sip of her coffee, looking sideways through the café’s glass front. “Technically, I should just be able to get on with it, but… I’m going to need your help.”
Graydon exhaled relief as a smile rolled across his face. “And there I was thinking it was my eyes you were lusting after.”
“No, it’s your mind, you fool. Ordinary manuscripts are easy to tidy up because everything has its place. But in the case of the Voynich, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who wiped the code off the VMs‘. Without knowing what might be hidden where, being a cleaner isn’t such an easy gig.”
“Ordinarily”, he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I’d be a sucker for a beautiful woman so blatantly calling me to adventure, but… I also have the not-entirely-small issue of a ticking clock and a funding gun pointed at my head. And it’ll probably be no big surprise to you that my work on the manuscript is not quite as advanced as had been hoped.”
“So… is that a yes or a no?”
“Actually, as with everything else with the Voynich, it’s an ‘I-don’t-yet-know‘. I need to figure out in my mind whether hanging out with a supermodel doing cool codicology is worth risking my PhD for.”
“OK, no problem”, Emm said, quickly resting her forehead forwards onto her hand. Despite the amused self-deprecating smile on her face, Graydon could not help but notice a wave of stress flash through her eyes. “Maybe it’s not an either-or thing. Anyway, I’m just dying to ask you – what is that bulge in your pocket?”
“Jeez”, Graydon gagged,”what finishing school did you go to?”
“No”, she sighed, “not your pants, your jacket. If – as I’m pretty sure – it’s pre-1950, it really shouldn’t have a purely decorative pocket on the front. So… what’s it for?”
Graydon looked down at it as an oddly restrained silence fell over him: even though he’d worn his grandfather’s jacket countless times, he realised that he’d never properly looked at it before.
“Come on, then, pass it over”, she hustled, getting out a pair of white cotton gloves, a small ruler and a tiny flashlight from her Biba chainmail clutch bag. “I’ll have a closer look. Do you have a cameraphone?”
“Errr… yes I do”, he said, taking his Nokia out of the jacket as he passed it over the table to Emm, her eyes alive with the detail. “Though, I haven’t actually used it yet.”
“Here’s your chance to learn. You’ll need to photograph this seam here before and after I cut the thread, so I can restore it later.” Shining her light on the top seam with the ruler placed alongside it, she waited impatiently while Graydon haltingly navigated through the phone’s Byzantine user interface all the way to its camera submenu. At the clatter of the fake shutter sound effect, she lurched into action, selecting a microscopic pair of scissors from a diamante-studded Swiss army knife. One deft snip later, she was tweezing out the single long thread that had fastened the top edge in place for God-knows how many decades.
“Keep photographing, Gray… yup, we’ve got a hot one for you, Penny…”
The waiter arrived with their Club sandwiches, but Graydon slid them to one side of the table: for all their previous hunger, suddenly neither had any appetite for food at all.
At first, all they could see was a sliver of a pale brown edge: but this grew one tiny fraction at a time until Emm had finally pulled out a small scrap of aged parchment, covered in fingerprints and dirt. At its top was an inventory reference written in a mid-Victorian European copperplate hand – but in the centre there was an 8×8 table of unusual letters.
Up until now, these curious letter-forms had – for all their study – been unique to a single historical document.
But not now.
Unmistakeably – incredibly – the grid contained letters from the Voynich Manuscript.
“Game on!”, moaned Graydon, shaking his head in disbelief. “Game on!”
“Wow”, gasped Emm, her mouth dry with the tension, “even I didn’t really think codicology could beat sex.”
“But… maybe it’s not an either-or thing?”
“Can you stop being so goddamn Voynich?” Dan shouted down the phone at her continued silence. “I’m sick of reading between your lines, playing guess-what-Marie-means like our whole off-line life is some afternoon quiz show. Since our shared New Haven hajj, you’ve been no fun – zero fun – and all I’m getting from you are stupid little clues that even the Cipher Mysteries guy wouldn’t be able to spin into a story. So… what’s the goddamn deal, Em?”
Across the Skypey quiet, he could hear her breathing tighten, hear her holding her head in her head, even hear her throat quiver with the tension. And then: “Jeez, Danski,” she lurched, “I feel like… like… that whole Quire 13 thing.”
“What, floating in a pool that can’t decide whether it’s green or blue?”
“No, damnit, like… like I’ve been turned inside out and… had a second creation phase added… similar but distinctly different from the first phase.”
“Christ”, Dan choked, “that makes me…”
“Yes, second phase co-author. And the scans say… it’s going to be a girl. Our girl!”
There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand…
* * * * * *
The Brazilian girl’s plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely notice a curious mélange of hard-to-pin-down antique odours: spirit of hartshorn, hepatic air, green vitriol, all distinct yet merging awkwardly between one another, like jelly and ice cream in a child’s pudding bowl. They both feel the nausea slowly roll over them, but neither thinks to raise the alarm, as the aqua tofani weaves its dizzying, nauseous, near-fatal spell on them both. Of course, we don’t intend killing them: tonight’s sacred mission is one of life, not death.
Our filter masks firmly in place, we silently ease out of the concealed block behind the disabled toilets and past the sabotaged air-conditioning unit. The girl’s preparation has been good, for there is no klaxon, no lights, no alarm: following her confident lead, I guide the wheely bag carefully past the two tumbledown security-suit mannequins and onwards through the exhibition. Looking ahead, always ahead, we glide swiftly past countless Ouroubos-filled stands and up the wheelchair ramp to the locked glass plinth in the arena’s central raised area – yes, to the book. Or rather, to ‘The Book’.
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the diamond-edged ring we made together over the shimmering orange dawn-lit fire on the mountainside: looking in her eyes, I take it and slide it quickly onto my middle finger. The girl – is she young, or old? Suddenly I can’t tell any more – nods, flicking her renegade, emptily-hungry eyes at me, and deftly touches my shoulder, her fingertip feeling for all the world like a butterfly landing and quickly gently launching itself away, far away into the curious half-light. On cue, I turn my attention to the security glass, and carefully use the hard-edged symbol of our union to etch its front face with four good-size concentric circles.
The hall is starting to fill, now: our small army of alchemists is emerging one by one from their hiding places behind occult bookstalls, beneath pagan stall covers and carefully-positioned wizard cloaks, each with a red or yellow hood and a surgical mask tightly fastened down, just as she had specified. As the last of the twelve completes the circle around us, I step sharply forward and punch the ring’s diamond tip right at the centre of the design. The glass buckles a little, yet doesn’t quite give way – No, I think, something is wrong, and for an instant a cloud of burnt cinnamon doubt swirls around me, enveloping me in the riptide of fears I’ve worked so hard to suppress these past three years.
Yet perhaps sensing my edginess, the alchemists start to clap and chant, and before long I feel their resolve coursing through my veins. The bull in my soul charges forward and I punch, punch, punch the toughened glass until it starts to yield to my attacks, and its etched central circle finally gives way. Impatiently, I widen the glassy gap with my bare hands just enough to remove the book and to raise it over my head in triumph, tersely spattering its centuries-rigid vellum cover with my blood as I do so. The alchemists swoop in too to hold it aloft and to turn it to The Page, that one, marvellous page we have been waiting to see all our lives.
I look over to the girl: she nods once again and I bring out the ceremonial firebowl from the bag. Adam – dear, ever-reliable Frater Adamus – deftly removes the page with his pocket knife, folds it to shape, fills it with regulus of antimony, and ties up its gathered top using aqua vitae-impregnated handmade blue twine from his workshop. We are all trembling now, for everyone (even Baresch) was right – the Philosophers’ Stone is indeed hidden inside The Book: yet this is neither a metaphorical truth nor a pharmacological truth, but instead a literal truth. For once you have – as we have, over so many decades – worked to decode its carefully layered and allusive visual symbolism, the Voynich’s pages form a map spiralling in on itself… all pointing to one place, the single slightly-thicker-than-average vellum herbal bifolio inside which the tiny fragments of Stone were sealed all those centuries ago. We, then, are its 21st century liberators, its alchemical revolutionary freedom front: all we have to do now is light the blue touchpaper, and see the long-promised fireworks. And this ceremony marks the end of alchemy’s epic struggle, the chequered flag at the finishing line of two millennia of The Work. My queen nods once more for me to step forward with my lit taper, so that we can all make the ultimate step – beyond History, beyond pain, beyond Time itself. And I do, but…
* * * * * *
There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand… In this moment, I don’t know if I’m living forever or dying forever, if the girl is really human or some selfish dark spirit that is guiding me I know not where. Am I releasing her or creating her? Is she part of me or am I part of her? A flash from the the burning vellum page suddenly lights up our faces and I lay down beside her on the floor, the alchemical king and queen finally together, just as the Ancients foretold. A fire alarm finally goes off, its sprinklers lurch into action with a indoor cloudburst, but it is all too late, far too late, the Stone is here, The Stone Is Here! For all the burning, twisting sensations, we know for certain that the Stone is merely giving us a taste of ultimate Death to deliver its promise of ultimate Life. Yet though the colours in its flames are more intense than ever now, so too is the agony: I turn to the girl and see the same things I’m feeling reflected in her sprinkler-soaked face, and as we hold each other tightly I know it is both the end and the beginning, and our eternal future together lies in and beyond the Stone…
* * * * * *
Why on earth, mused the firemen, policemen, and paramedics, would anyone have gone to the trouble of placing all those strangely-posed lifelike statues in the middle of the hall? And why was just a single page missing from the precious Voynich Manuscript, on a rare two-day loan to this alchemy conference? File it under ‘M’ for ‘mystery’…
So there I was in my first awesome week working at the B: my room mate Lynina kept saying that I was so ‘Legally Blonde’, and I was like “but do I have a dog? No? Well, I don’t think so”. And then she just kept on about the East Coast / West Coast thing, and I’m like “so now I’m Tupac? Well, duh.” But working in the cube is just so cool that it, like, transcends all that stuff in an totally I.M.Pei way. And when I say that, Lynina just rolls her eyes and I say “what? what?” and she lifts up her Renaissance News and Notes so I can’t see her face and we both laugh until we cry and then we both have to do our makeup again.
Actually, I always do well at interviews because, you know, I bought those totally serious-looking frames (even though I don’t need glasses at all, don’t tell anyone) and I think really hard of that guy who said “never make the interviewer laugh, but never let them forget you either” so I frown and try to conjure up the most like wild high cultural stuff I can until their head is spinning. Works for me, anyhow.
So anyway, I’m like four days (nearly a whole week, if you’re counting) into the job, and I’ve done the induction and the cleaning and the coffee round, and it’s my turn on the desk, and there’s a buzz from the guard upstairs and only The Maddest Mad Guy Ever turns up. You know, the one at the top left of the Do Not Let These People See The VMs montage pinned to the drawer that holds the snakes and the magnifiers, ringed in like red felt pen and stuff. But I’m new there and I don’t know this yet, so I’m like “Sure you can see MS 408, sir. Do you have a particular research question you’re trying to answer?”
At this point I notice he’s shaking, and I’m thinking he’s got some kind of palsy but actually it’s because he can’t believe he might actually be able to get to see the manuscript, what with it being digitized so that the curators can Just Say No To Mad Guys Like Him. So I say, you know, making light conversation, Sir, what kind of Oil is your hat made of? And he stops dead, looks at me as though I’ve just torched his favourite pet, and replies “what?”
So I say, when I was inducted here they told me that people who ask for MS 408 often wear some kind of rare oil-based hat, all the while I’m looking at his cap which, like, just happens to be for the Edmonton Oilers hockey team. He says “there’s nothing under the cap” in this totally intense way, and I’m thinking of Forbes Smiley and say can I check your cap, sir, and he says what exactly are you looking for and I say it’s this really rare oil, Tynph Oil or something, that we mustn’t let near our manuscripts.
And so he half-lifts up a corner of his cap and there’s just this balding head thing underneath (pretty gross, he must have been like fifty or something), and I’m thinking about people cutting out maps with concealed blades and someone said that there was this weird map-like fold-out page in MS 408, so I say can I see inside your cap?
He’s shaking even worse now and lifts up his head and there’s this flash of crinkly metallic light under there and I’m thinking it’s a blade, it’s a blade, omigod it’s a blade, so I reach down into the drawer for a miniature LED flashlight to look closer at it but when I turn back he’s gone – disappeared, running up the stairs. And that’s when I notice his red-ringed face on the top left of the whole Do Not Let These People page and I feel really stupid, for the first time since like 3rd grade or something, when I got my own name wrong in a test. OK, so I was just a kid and my mom had remarried, and I felt under pressure to carry on maxing my grades: but all the same.
Like, I can’t believe I actually nearly completely let a blogger handle MS 408? So how totally bad is that?
I remember when I first saw the “Roger Bacon Manuscript”: Wilfrid Voynich brought it with him to Philadelphia for his lecture back in 1921 – my old friend Bill Newbold was there, taking in every word, nodding like the crazy-but-brilliant spiritualist and Antioch-obsessed nutter he was. So it just had to be Bacon behind it all, right? I sat at the back, laughing quietly: but all the same, I couldn’t help but notice that there was something rather disconcerting about the whole thing that demanded being checked out at a convenient point…
My big break came in late 1929, in a chance visit to New York: though charming as ever, Voynich was already sickly, well along the path to his own deathbed. Though he was unwilling at first, I convinced him to let me take a closer look at his manuscript’s oh-so-boring quire 13 – why not, what could a lowly UPhil Italian academic possibly find of interest there? Yet behind the scenes, I’d had help from Johnny Manly and Edith Rickerts: though they’d initially tried to dissuade me from looking closely, I’d carefully zoomed in on the bits they were most intrigued by – and with stunning results. They’d been so utterly wrong to think it was Latin (hardly surprising, given that they were arch-Latinists), when I’d instead worked out it was mostly an abbreviated Italian scribal shorthand…
But honestly – how could I not remember the day when Hans Kraus pitched up to Yale with the 1428 Albergati bible ($204,000, and worth every cent) along with Wilfrid’s “ugly duckling” manuscript. Old man Beinecke had come along for the ride, too: everyone there was trembling with excitement – but I swear nobody could have been sweating like me. If only they knew how I felt! Once dear old Annie Nill had sold it to HPK, I’d worked out where things were leading and had networked my way into the position as Beinecke curator – so my first unofficial job was to remove it from the stacks, to give myself the opportunity of making sense of quire 20‘s recipes for myself. But sad to say, I never quite did, and so my last job there was to retire.
All the same, I have to give a big hooray for the Beinecke’s hi-res scans: though I’d really thought my second act was over (and so did wife #7), with a bit of help from Steve Ekwall I finally managed to get Voynich’s other fountain working. Whoever it was that said that diligence has its own rewards was really onto something – it certainly works for me!
And so here I am once again, back to square #1 and wife #8. Sure, I do my best to prevent anyone on the Voynich mailing list from coming even close to reproducing what I found: but everyone thinks I’m just some kind of ultra-informed troll, and they back off from the truth. Which suits me 100%.
Here’s to wife #9!
EXT. Shadow of a European castle. A balding bloke in dark glasses is laying on a gold-plated deckchair next to a gold-plated swimming pool. Behind him, workmen on ladders painstakingly paint gold leaf over the castle’s swallow-tail merlons. A gold-plated mobile trills.
NIC CAGE (picking up phone)
Manny, I’m busy.
AGENT
Hey, Nicky – looked at the proposal yet?
NIC CAGE
You gotta be kidding me – $6m and four points above the line, all for some book nobody can read?
AGENT
It’s “Da Voy-nitch”, Nicky. A real life Da Vinci Code – no joke! Right now it’s a hot cake, everybody wants a slice of it.
CAGE
But I don’t get it: how does this fit my whole “Joe Schmo” schtick?
AGENT
Don’t sweat the small stuff, that’s what I get my 15% for. Just look at your fax machine…
CAGE pulls page after page of unreadable text from his gold-plated fax machine.
CAGE
Hey, I can’t read a thing – this doesn’t make any sense…
AGENT
So…
CAGE
You mean… I get to make up basically all my lines and nobody cares?
AGENT
Like, bingo. An unreadable script for an unreadable book. Genius high concept. Spielberg loves it. We all love it.
CAGE
Right… and my character’s back story is… what?
AGENT
You play international bookseller and revolutionary man of mystery ‘Wilfrid Voynich’ …
CAGE
So do I finally get to be married to Helena Bonham Carter this time?
AGENT
Do NOT call her “Johnny Depp’s sloppy seconds”, or I’ll haveta call the u-n-i-o-n. But yes, she’s Lily Boole.
CAGE
Boole is cool. Roger Ebert will love it, again. Are there lots of…
AGENT
…implausible action sequences that add nothing to the plot? Check.
CAGE
And…
AGENT
…yes, Wilfrid Voynich is charming, devoted to his wife, yet strangely unsure of his own sexuality.
CAGE
And…
AGENT
…yes, you get to fight against the drone armies of the Conspiracy, both for gold and for glory.
CAGE
I don’t know… can they go to five points? I’m getting a good feeling about this…
Excitement surged loudly through Imperial College’s Great Hall as the announcer belatedly bellowed those four terrifying words, signifying what for one side would be the beginning of the end: “Sssseconds out, Rrrrround One!”
Danny grabbed Charles Hope’s arm: “Am I going to be able to do this?”, he asked. “Do you really think I’ve learnt enough to last five rounds… against him?”
“Relax“, said the Professor languidly as he stepped out through the ropes, “Iconologists are a pushover – they’re all talk. Your informed historical cynicism should win every time.”
“That ‘should‘ word again”, thought Danny with more than a flicker of fear. “Why couldn’t he use something stronger, at a time when I really need moral certainty?”
He rose slowly, trying not to look intimidated by the leviathan bulging menacingly out of the far corner. Sure, Raza Reema was ‘only’ a student iconologist at the Courtauld Institute – but, let’s face it, the guy had an extra stone, two inches of reach and a whole extra post-doc year on Danny. Raza’s second, the formidable Joscelyn Godwin, flicked Danny a hostile glance as he eased himself out of the ring – yes, this was going to be every bit as tough as the TLS preview had predicted.
Yet for over three years, Danny had trained hard for this by grinding his way along each open shelf of the Warburg Institute, exhaustively dredging every book and photo for scraps that might prove decisive tonight – ironically using Aby Warburg’s creation to try to defeat its own research programme. With Hope as his mentor, wimpy post-grad Danny had bloomed into a research golem, equal parts fighting machine and rabbinical debating monster. Under the glare of the Channel 4 cameras, with the funding of the two institutions balancing precariously on the outcome, now was no time to be entertaining doubts.
Rather, it was time to fight – to kill or be killed.
And so the two boxers lurched defiantly towards the centre of the ring, the bell and the crowd’s roar ringing in their ears.
“Iconology is a joke“, snapped Danny as he jabbed quickly at Raza’s ribs, “and you know what? The joke’s on you.”
“Cynicism is a losing path“, retorted Raza flashing shots close to Danny’s face, “that’s more about supposed intellectual safety than bravery. And lamers such as you are neither safe nor brave.”
Danny snapped his head back as a fast cross punch came close to his nose. For an instant, he paused: he thought he could smell something strange and pungent – Paco Rabanne? Juicy Fruit? Myrrh? No time to wonder, as he launched himself back to the fray.
“Speculation without evidence is wasted research funding“, Danny barked grimly through his gumshield, circling lightly around the ring, “and you’ve wasted your life on a dream.”
“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” pingponged Raza, feinting to the left. “But funnily enough, you and your crew are pretty short of persuasive evidence too.” Uncoiling quickly, he unwound a powerful right hook that skidded off Danny’s ear.
“For someone so convinced by their thesis, you’re taking a notably nihilistic position“, sneered Danny, tucking himself down inside Raza’s defences to snatch a fast body blow, rocking him on his heels. He smiled to himself as he glimpsed Professor Hope in the corner nodding in obvious appreciation. “Are we really debating in an evidential vacuum?”
Raza pulled back, slowing the tempo right down. “You know there’s evidence”, he sneered, “it’s more a matter of what evidence you choose to believe. Authoritas, eh?”
The bell sounded and the two fighters decamped to their respective corners. “You need to start landing more body blows on the guy“, urged Professor Hope, rubbing Danny’s shoulders briskly with a Mnemosyne-emblemmed towel. “He’s got the reach, but you’ve got the research focus – time to take the fight right to him.” Danny narrowed his sweat-filled eyes across the ring: though Professor Godwin was fingering his bow-tie agitatedly, Raza seemed unmoved, as grimly powerful as ever.
“Rrrrround Two!” shrieked the announcer, the two professors vacated their corners, and the contest started once more.
“Splendor Solis“, Danny called out as he surged forward with a string of jabs towards his opponent’s chest, “is merely eye candy for the soul, feel-good alchemy for the rich: a Renaissance God’s way of telling you you have too much money and too little sense.”
Raza stumbled, taken aback by the force of Danny’s full-frontal attack on his 2007 paper. His mind darted through his extensive bibliography reaching for an obvious refutation, but it all came far too late as Danny ploughed in with a tight one-two to Raza’s solar plexus and chin, sending the Courtauld man backwards onto the canvas and up again for a standing count.
Out of the corner of his eye, Danny could Professor Hope gesticulating to him with his hands, as though he were kneading some kind of symbolic dough. Dough? Meaning money? But surely it was time to finish Raza off?
Immediately the referee signalled for them to resume, Danny hurled himself forward at his opponent, trying to capitalize on his momentary advantage. “What’s the matter?“, he taunted. “The Rosicrucians got your tongue?”
“Cheap trick, Warburg kiddy“, blocked Raza, quickly clubbing Danny’s leading shoulder – the sheer force from the straight blow sent him reeling backwards to the ropes, the shock wave rattling right through to his knees. All at once, he felt his will to win this contest waver, even though four years’ research funding for the Warburg was at stake on its outcome. Has there ever been a fairer way to allocate resources?
However, a steel-edged glance from Professor Hope was enough to push him back to his full height. He then realized his mentor had just now been signalling him to slow the pace down, and not to get too excited – of course, he should have known that Hope wouldn’t try to communicate symbolically, particularly in an arena like this.
The two fighters now stood just beyond an arms’ length from each other, slowly pedalling around, regrouping their thoughts, angling to finding their key technical points of differences.
“So… do you accept that Cesare Ripa made up his emblems“, Danny jabbed quickly, trying to tuck himself beneath Raza’s long reach, “and hence that Panofsky built his iconological castles on sand?”
“I’m cool with that“, scowled Raza as he dropped back a step, firing off a whistling blow close to Danny’s head, “but are you OK with the idea of Lorenzo de’ Medici being a uber-revivalist, a politicking Platonist insider?”
“Uh huh“, Danny nodded darkly, stepping sideways around Raza, “so… what exactly is the difference between us? Do you accept that your Splendor Solis paper was perhaps an over-positivistic iconological presentation of a medieval conceit?”
“Well…“, Raza pondered, also slowing down in the ring, “three years on, I would take a very much more nuanced view of it. My funding specified that I had to construct an iconological case, but it really wasn’t easy.”
Danny suddenly stopped in his tracks, dropping his guard. “So they set you up for this whole thing?”, he said in disbelief. “They locked down your PhD subject, even seconded Joscelyn Godwin in… just because you had ripped abs and could punch for their money?”
“Basically, yes. And what about you?”, queried Raza, similarly dropping his gloves to his sides. “I heard that in your first year at the Warburg you were ‘pagan this’, ‘Edgar Wind that’. How did they get you to switch sides so comprehensively?”
“Yeah…“, replied Danny, “even though all that stuff ‘felt right’, I just couldn’t construct an historical case to support it, and in the end felt I had to drop it. As always, the truth lies in the cracks between.” By now, the packed crowd was starting to boo at the lack of action, and even the referee was edging over to see what was wrong. “Anyway, what aftershave does Professor Godwin wear?”
“Aftershave?“, said Raza in surprise. “Ummm… Paco Rabanne, I think. Why’s that?”
“Actually, I think I smelt some on your gloves“, said Danny.
“Really? On my gloves?” said Raza, reaching down to sniff them.
It was at that precise moment that Danny’s devastatingly strong uppercut hit Raza square beneath his chin, knocking him clean out cold.
“Job done!“, shouted Danny in triumph, as the referee and Charles Hope held up his arms.
“I told you iconologists are a pushover“, said the Professor sideways.
“Yeah, they’ll believe anything you tell ’em“, said Danny, “Anything at all!”
* * * * *
[PS: all names, places, and institutions in this story are utterly fictitious, even when they’re plainly not.]