After party consequences, p.14
The Plurality of Worlds, page 14
The Plurality of Worlds
Brian Stableford
Brian Stableford’s recent novels include The Wayward Muse (Black Coat Press) and Streaking (PS Publishing). Black Coat Press has also published his translation of Paul Feval’s Salem Street, one of the pioneering series of crime novels after which the press is named. His four hundred and sixty thousand-word reference book, Science Fact and Fiction: An Encyclopedia, will be out from Routledge in September. In his sumptuous cover story, he bids us bon voyage on our journey through the ether and into the age-old debate over…
*
The ethership stood on the launch platform at Greenwich, ready to blast off. The cabin set atop the massive rocket appeared tiny when viewed from the ground; the ladder by which the intrepid voyagers would reach it seemed exceedingly fragile.
Thomas Digges, the captain of the vessel’s five-man crew, stood on the street at the edge of the platform in company with its principal architect, John Dee, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Foxe. Thomas was not looking up but looking down at the cobblestones. They had been scoured and swept in the early hours; he had never seen a city thoroughfare less likely to offend his boots.
“Your father would be immensely proud, had he lived to see this day,” Dee said to the younger man. “This—more than the telescope, the laws of planetary motion, or even the theory of affinity—is the ultimate fruition of his work.”
“He was but one half of a great alliance,” Thomas said, meeting his mentor’s eyes. “Had you not introduced him to Roger Bacon’s works, he might not have begun to toy with the telescope or applied himself to the munitions of war that laid the groundwork for the ethership. Your mathematical expertise was every bit as important as his in proving and improving the Copernican system, and without your fluctual algebra he would never have been able to develop the theory of affinity.”
“You should not forget the inspiration of the Almighty, my son,” Foxe put in,
“nor the abundant financial support provided by our glorious queen.”
“No, indeed,” Thomas agreed, willingly. The queen had certainly been generous with her own funds as well as the nation’s, and her generosity had set an example that many of her courtiers had been anxious to emulate, competing among themselves to sponsor the New Learning. “Will the queen be here to witness the launch of her namesake?”
“Her carriage is en route as we speak,” Foxe assured him. “She would not miss it for the world. It means a great deal to her that England should be the first nation to send ambassadors to the moon.”
“We must beware of expecting too much of the expedition,” Dee observed, gravely. “The distance the ship will contrive to travel is entirely dependent on the conditions the crew will discover once they are beyond the upper limit of the air. We do not know whether ether is respirable—and if it is not, the crew will be forced to make a swift return to Earth. Preparations for a journey to the moon would then acquire a new dimension of complexity, more challenging in its way than the design of the ethership’s fuel-system.”
“That is a matter of God’s providence,” Foxe judged. “If the ether is breathable, then humankind clearly has God’s permission to travel between the worlds—but if it is not, the heavens are evidently out of bounds.” Thomas frowned slightly, but said nothing. Foxe was a powerful influence in the court—powerful enough to have added a man of his own, John Field, to the
“crew” of the Queen Jane. In reality, Thomas and Francis Drake were the only ones required—or able—to man the vessel’s controls. Edward de Vere and Walter Raleigh had petitioned the queen to be added to the company in the hope of impressing her with their boldness in quest of adventure. De Vere had a reputation as a playwright and Raleigh as a poet, but neither had any significant skill in mathematics, which put them at a definite disadvantage in a court where the greater part of everyday conversation was devoted to the progress of science. Foxe’s man, John Field, was no courtier—he was fervent enough in his Puritanism to make no secret of his contempt for the affectations of court life—but he was a man of refined conscience who would be able to report to the Archbishop on the potential theological consequences of any discoveries the expeditionaries might make.
Thomas would rather not have had Field aboard the ethership—but he would rather not have had de Vere and Raleigh aboard either, although Raleigh was always an amiable companion. Indeed, he would have been glad to go alone if he had not needed another pair of hands. Drake had an interest in winning the queen’s favor too—and had the advantage of maturity and previous accomplishment over his upstart competitors, being only three years younger than the queen—but he was a good calculator and a cool man under pressure.
“Speak of the Devil!” Thomas murmured, his voice far too slight to carry to the Archbishop’s ever-vigilant ear. Drake was emerging from the Black Bear Inn, his arms linked with those of de Vere and Raleigh; the three of them as merry as men could be who had been forbidden ale for breakfast. A fourth man, who was walking three steps behind them, was as disapproving as they were cheerful; John Field, Puritan firebrand, had a fine talent for disapproval and its display.
The three courtiers were finely clad and their beards were neatly trimmed.
Drake was the tallest as well as the oldest, but de Vere—ten years Drake’s junior—was the handsomest of the three. Raleigh, two years younger than de Vere at twenty-five, was not conventionally fair of face, but he had a certain dash in his attitude that had already made an impression on the queen, if Cripplegate rumor could be trusted. In reality, de Vere was probably the more reckless of the two—he was still suffering the bad reputation of having once had an unarmed man “commit suicide by running on to his sword”—but the queen was said to prefer a man who maintained a flamboyant attitude, while behaving politely, to one whose attitude was polite while his behavior resembled a loose cannon.
“The queen will be here in a matter of minutes!” Drake announced. “I saw her carriage from the attic with the aid of one of Tom’s telescopes, advancing from Rotherhithe at the gallop. Perfect timing, as always.” Digges bowed, as he murmured “Sir Francis, milord, Sir Walter, Mr. Field.” Although he was the captain of the ethership, three of his crewmen outranked him by birth—de Vere most extravagantly of all, having inherited the title of Earl of Oxford while still a boy. It was the three aristocrats who returned his bow most graciously, however; Field seemed to think such polite gestures akin to church vestments, and was a dedicated minimalist in their expression.
“Her majesty is doubtless anxious to see Master Dee again,” de Vere said.
“While he has been busy here, the Tower has been deprived of its fireworks and its horoscopes alike.”
Dee bowed in acknowledgement, although the remark had not been intended as a compliment. Field took up a position beside the Archbishop, making a row of three Johns in opposition to the three gallants. Thomas felt uneasily suspended between the two ranks. “If her majesty is missing Master Dee,” he dared to say, “it is more likely that she feels the need of her lessons in mathematics.” In 1568, when Dee had presented the queen with a copy of his Propadeumata Aphorisitica, the queen had gladly accepted his offer to give her lessons in mathematics to help her understand it. She had been a champion of natural philosophy since she had come to the throne in 1553—even more so since she had broken free of Northumberland machinations following her husband’s assassination by Elizabethans in 1558—but her generosity had increased in proportion to her comprehension.
Foxe, who seemed even less appreciative of Thomas’s remark than de Vere, might well have made some remark about Bible studies, but he was distracted by a buzz in the crowd that had gathered along the quay. They too had caught sight of the queen’s coach—or its escort, at least.
“Batman’s here, I see,” Dee observed. Stephen Batman, chaplain to the Master of Corpus Christi, was Dee’s greatest rival as a book-collector, although his interest in the manuscripts he accumulated was more antiquarian than utilitarian.
“Who’s that boy beside him?” Thomas asked.
“That’s one of Nick Bacon’s sons,” Drake answered. “Young Francis—a prodigy, they say, likely to eclipse Master Dee himself, in time.”
“Not if the Queen Jane makes a successful ascent into the ether,” Thomas opined. “Whether it is able to go on to the moon or not, that achievement will not be eclipsed for a hundred years … and Master Dee is its architect.” He added the last remark lest Drake—or anyone else—thought that he was blowing his own trumpet.
“Here she comes!” Raleigh crowed, immediately joining in with the tumultuous cheering. Everyone else did likewise, in slightly less Stentorian tones—even John Field.
Queen Jane’s carriage, pulled by four black horses, rattled south-eastward along the Thames shore behind the vanguard of a company of cavalry, whose second cohort was bringing up the rear. Their scarlet coats were ablaze in the morning sun, while their polished sabers reflected random rays of dazzling light.
Foxe and Dee hurried forward to greet the monarch, while de Vere checked his doublet and hose and Raleigh reached reflexively for the ornamental hilt of the sword that he would normally have been wearing. Like his breakfast ale, it had been forbidden.
The queen was only a few months short of her fortieth birthday, but she looked radiant as well as regal. Thomas blushed at the sight of her, as he always did, and stumbled as Dee hurried him forward in order to present him to her.
“Your majesty,” the Master
said. “Leonard Digges’s son shall make England proud this day.”
Queen Jane extended her hand for Thomas to kiss. “The captain will make us very proud indeed,” she said, “for there is nothing England admires more than courage—and the navigation of the heavens will require courage unparalleled.” Thomas stammered his thanks. The cavalry had formed a protective cordon around the party, although it was more a show of discipline than anxiety; the Elizabethans were a spent force nowadays, and no agent of Spain could have gotten within five miles of Greenwich on a day like this. Drake, de Vere, and Raleigh took the opportunity to form a cordon of their own, vying for the queen’s attention with effusive flatteries. For once, Thomas felt a pang of sympathy for the awkward and hesitant Field.
“Time is pressing, lads,” he said, when they had played their parts sufficiently.
“We’d best be mounting the ladder.” Without any more fuss than that he set off for the ethership, knowing that the others would fall into line behind him. He left it to them to wave to the crowd, while he contented himself with a last glance in the direction of John Dee, the greatest man of science the world had ever produced—or, at least, the man whose reputation to that effect was about to be subjected to the ultimate proof.
The first and more unexpected agony was the sound of the rocket’s ignition.
Thomas had known that it would be louder than any sound he had experienced before, and had suspected that its pressure might be oppressive, but he had not anticipated the seeming fury with which it pounded his eardrums, drowning out all other sensation and thought.
Then affinity took hold of him—or, more accurately, the rising ethership slammed into his back, while the affinity that bound him to the Earth fought against the force of the rocket’s explosive levitation, trying with all its might to hold him down. He had known that this sensation, too, would be bad, having experienced similar phenomena during the test launches. Those vessels had only ascended into the atmosphere, though, no higher than the summit of a mountain. His body had suffered no lingering ill-effects at all—but this pressure was twice as powerful, and he felt that it was crushing him.
Thomas heard a gasp as Field tried and failed to scream; the clergyman was the only crew member who had not taken any part in the testing program. The scientist could imagine the thought that must be possessing the Puritan’s brain: if God had made the affinity between man and Earth so strong, how could he possibly intend that men should ever attempt to break the bond? But the pressure passed, to be gradually replaced by a very different sensation: that of weightlessness. Thomas had a fine mathematical brain—near equal to his father’s, Dee said—and he had long applied his methods to the artillerist’s art of ballistics; he constructed a picture in his mind of the trajectory of the rocket as it curved away from the ground it had left behind, aiming for a circular orbit about its world.
Only a handful of men, as yet, had circumnavigated the globe in ships, and none of them was an Englishman—although Drake had sworn that if he had not been invited to take his place on the Queen Jane he would have made the attempt in the Pelican. Now, five Englishmen were about to circle the world not once but several times, in a matter of hours rather than months.
“Make sure your tethers are secure, lads,” he said—for Field’s benefit rather than that of his experienced crewmen. “Cleave to your couches if you can, and take care not to release anything into the cabin.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said de Vere, with a slight hint of mockery—but Thomas ignored him.
“Ready, Sir Francis?” he said.
“Aye, Tom,” was Drake’s entirely sincere reply. Drake had to supervise the course of the ethership while Thomas deployed the sampling bottles mounted to collect the pure ether that would soon be surrounding the ship, using mechanical arms to maneuver them into double-doored lockers. From there, if all went well, they could be brought inside without breaching the integrity of the hull. Thomas worked unhurriedly, but not without urgency; Drake was equally concentrated on his work.
Raleigh was closest to a porthole; he was looking out with avid interest, watching the curve of the globe’s horizon.
“I can’t see England at all, curse the clouds!” he said, “but I can see a landmass that must be Africa, and more ocean than I ever hoped to see in a lifetime.
The mystery of the Austral continent will soon be solved—or perhaps we’ll see Dante’s purgatory, towering above the ocean hemisphere in solitary splendor.”
“Papist nonsense,” muttered Field, who sounded as if he had spent a stint in Purgatory himself.
“Thank the Lord we have not collided with one of the Romanists’ crystal spheres,” Raleigh said, mischievously. “That would have been cause enough for protest.”
“Nor can I see Plato’s spindle of necessity,” de Vere put in, craning his neck to see through another porthole. “Does anyone hear the sirens intoning the music of the spheres?”
“We’re not as high as all that,” Thomas said, without breaking his concentration. “The planets are a great deal further away than the moon, which is still a long way off. The first of the Classic philosophers’ questions to be settled is the nature of space. If the void theorists are right, ours will have to be a brief excursion.”
“Now there,” observed de Vere, “Puritans and Papists are in rare accord.
There’s not an atomist in either orthodox company—they’re plenarists all, save for the occasional rogue. Remind me, please, Reverend Field: is it still orthodox to believe that the ether marking the extent of space is the breath of God?” Whatever his faults, de Vere had been well-tutored in Classics by Arthur Golding; he knew that the notion of gods breathing ether as humans breathed air was a pagan idea, of which Christian theology was bound to disapprove in spite of the Vatican’s approval of selected Aristotelian ideas.
“It is not a question,” Field retorted, icily, “on which the Good Book has any pronouncement to make.” His tone did not seek to conceal his awareness that de Vere was suspected of Catholic sympathies, nor the fact that he was Foxe’s eyes and ears, alert for any advantageous whiff of heresy.
Even so, Raleigh—whom similar suspicion deemed to have atheistic tendencies—felt sufficiently liberated to say: “Was it God’s negligence, do you suppose, or that of his amanuensis Moses, that left the point unclarified? It would be a great convenience to us, would it not, if the statutes of Leviticus had pronounced upon the permissibility or abomination of ether-breathing?”
“Hold your blasphemous tongue, sir!” the clergyman exclaimed. “God revealed to man what man had need to know.”
Thomas, who was busy capturing a bottle of ether within the transfer-hold, found time to think that God had been a trifle vague when it came to the necessities of mathematics, navigation, and engineering, let alone the still-impregnable mysteries of physiology. “Got it!” he said, as his manipulative endeavors bore fruit. “The Master’s contraption worked beautifully.”
“Did we decide who was to be first to inhale from the bottle?” de Vere asked, with a mischievous glance in Field’s direction. “Should we draw lots, or it is a clergyman’s prerogative to breathe the intangible sustenance of God?”
“If a lungful of void were likely to strike a man dead on the spot,” Raleigh said, “it might be best to give the task to a man of faith, under God’s dutiful protection.”
“Easy, lads,” Thomas said, as his nervous fingers groped at the interior catch of the hold. “It’s not faith in God that’s required here, but faith in the plenum, and the life-supporting virtue of the ether. Even if I lacked such faith, though, I doubt that I’d be struck dead by a single draught of nothingness.”
“You might be in more danger of drunkenness,” said Drake. “If ether is vaporous nectar, as some say, it might play tricks with your senses.”
“Aye,” Thomas agreed, extracting the sealed bottle from its cradle, “so it might. But as my father used to say: let’s try it and see.” He closed his mouth and set the bottle to his nose, released the stopper and breathed deep. He knew, even before his lungs responded to the intake, that the void theorists were incorrect; had the space beyond the atmosphere been empty, and the Earth’s air aggregated about it by affinity alone, he would not even have been able to remove the stopper; pressure would have held it firmly in place. The plenarists were correct, it seemed; there was no void, and space was full—but full of what?
