The combinations, p.17
The Combinations, page 17
curtains, now turning the flaps over the pockets of his suit jacket, now sitting
back down to begin the whole charade anew in another register, another key. It
became impossible not to watch the Prof’s fingers as he spoke — like a concert
pianist playing Tchaikovsky — as a way of listening, it was all Němec could do
to keep the Old Man’s words from melding into pure sound.
‘The cryptanalysts…’ the Prof was saying, & the words crypt & analyst
drifted apart & back together at the same time, the way he said it, voice
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dropping a register, grave, thinking a pickaxe and a spade, a spade, exhuming by
statistical analysis, hehe, ‘have nothing to tell us about the Manuscript at all,
except its significant randomness. Which means, in layman’s terms, the script
might contain elements of any language at all — but still a language, mind you,
& not just sounding brass & tinkling cymbals. But,’ he fingered the crown of the
black king, ‘they can hardly even agree on that. As for the rest…’
Did Voynich fake it?
Possibly.
Did it resemble other forgeries of the same period?
Well, no-one knew what period it came from, but supposedly not.
Did anyone have the faintest idea what it was all about?
None. At. All.
Němec stared at the chessboard & made some desultory response to the
Prof’s apparent retreat, shifting a rook’s pawn in lieu of anything meaningful.
The next move would probably be the clincher, the one he couldn’t see — it was
always like that, you stalled for time & time suddenly ran out & you got to stare
Inevitability in the face once again. Pretty, eh kiddo? As pretty as a Sphinx
combing her hair in a mirror. He sank back in the armchair with its musty dust-
of-the-attic smell & sipped some more of Eurydice’s bittersweet tears. In every
sorrow a joy begins. So why stall, when you can throw yourself joyously into the abyss?
The black queen seemed to smirk at him. Something stirred across the room. A
draught perhaps. And Němec had to fight the impulse to glance over his
shoulder, knowing full well what he’d find & thinking how the Prof had left out
the other half of the story…*
* About how Orf in his secondhand grief, penning heartbroke haiku at an exponential rate (his Grief
= his Art, hard to suppose he’d’ve wanted it otherwise), charming the stones to weep but getting a bit
on the nose as far as the would’ve-been in-laws are concerned, not to mention the local sorority who
could bare a bit of breast-beating in the right spirit, but the man was set to make a career out of it —
only a matter of time before the indecent spectacle of that bawling bard day-in, day-out, lousing the
place up with his oxters unwashed & Rastafarian sidelocks, wrecking the view out past the playing
fields where even sheep now feared to tread, sleeping bollock-naked under the stars & only himself to
keep company at night, harping on about that love-that-dare-not-look-over-its-shoulder & blowing
snots at any skinnylegged shepherd girl gormless enough to give him a flash of her drawers…
Well it was only a matter of time, & that running out fast, before Orf here aroused once & for
all the deep-seated, so to speak, ire of every man-hungry suffragette within cooee, who, spurned
beyond forbearing & righteously indignant at the crooning bard’s endless blather from the
bleachers ’bout a Love Ideal, came at him one perfect sea-breezed mid-afternoon pell-mell out of
the proverbial nowhere to take wee Orf, shaking himself off after his post-siesta micturation, in
what you might call an unguarded moment — long suppressed passions running high by now,
each of his femmenly assailants fully prepared to play below the belt, drop the hand for a bit of a
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Meanwhile the Prof was still going with his lecture about the mystery
Manuscript. The biggest names in War-time cryptognometry, he was saying,
had butted their eggheads against it & come up with something called a
continuum —
‘Meaning it could be Greek for all they know.’*
grapple, a cinch of the offending article, a punch in the ars longa, a paw-full of sweaty thigh, a
headlock on the short&curlies — launching in unison into a bosom-heaving tackle at the fey fairy’s
size eights, toothy slobbers over sideswiped kneecaps, a bitesize of skinny rump, a flayed falsetto,
the wholesale savaging of coccyx & vertebrae, a stiff lick of the salt from his ears, gobble of his
yardarm, a fervid frottage over every square inch of babyfaced butter-wouldn’t-melt licksomeness…
Easy to see how the whole thing might get out of hand with all that hotblooded groping,
gripping, grinding womanhood, each out for a first go at our mate Pudding&Pie there,
gobstopped & pop-eyed — one end of him taken out of touch while the other’s being put to rights
on the ten-yard line, rucked in a scrum from all sides simultaneously & — before he can so much
as squeak foul or a high-C abracadab in hope of turning their Amazon-ardour to butterfly kisses,
their loins to quivers — have him by his eunuch’s tonsure, twisted into a figure-eight, scalped head
gouged-off at the neck, snatched from the seething mass by the most colossal butch of a prop-
forward yer ever liable to clap eyes on & in one fell swoop booted the length of the pitch clear over
the cross-bar, stands, scoreboard & seagull perched on the satellite dish, far, far, a speck arcing
through the blue, out over the red-flagged gusty beach, the lifeguard’s eerie, past the breakers, splat
into the sea. Dürer called the poor headless bastard the first Thracian sodomite — since having
once gone down the backroad with Eurydice, he refused all other offers of the fairer sex, & loved
only altar-boys — gushing-on all the while about that prissy little belle-de-jour he was forever
spared the morning-after pout of. Adrift upon the tides — food for fishes & way-station for
migratory gulls — Orf’s head, unabashed, lovingly wave-lapped, last seen, washed-up some
mythical eight months hence, on the very Sapphic isle of Lesbos, briny, tanned as a coconut,
mouth ajar, tongue wagging in its own wind, a curate cunnalinguist. Poetic justice? [:]
* Ain’t that always the way? Picture taciturn public school types: men in beige sitting about in
Victorian country mansions as if the War’s just an extension of junior commonroom antics,
doodling on napkins, watching the Buckinghamshire weather through fogged mullioning —
jejune graduates of the Government Code & Cipher School making smalltalk out of algebraic
geometry, one-time pads & modular additions — it’s dull monotonous work, but someone’s got to
do it (you can picture the type). They’re busy, though no-one would guess from looking at them,
building a Colossus to beat the Krauts with — a giant Golem of a thing, wired into a captured
Wehrmacht encryption machine, spirited out of Poland by members of the resistance —
codename E.N.I.G.M.A. Like Babbage, the boys at Bletchley are looking for ways to mechanise
the number-crunching, put a crank in the job of calculation, turn randomness into information.
Down in a bunker with their data bombs churning-out strings of gibberished probability which,
given time & an infinite spreadsheet, provided eerie contours of the unfolding of events: Wolf-
packs gathering in the Atlantic, trans-continental freight routings, deployments on the Eastern
Front, all the mental twitchings of an enemy fast spiralling into madness. Who knows if the
Voynich Manuscript wasn’t exactly that, a map of chaotic reason, the madness of the Dark Ages
gasping its last, in a tongue no-one would ever be able to speak again? But to the mechanics of
modern reason, pure fancy, of course. They’d reckon anything dreamt-up by a medieval monk ought
to be child’s play — & so it ought — rudimentary adding-tables & substitution ciphers, nothing by
their standards: they’ll lounge about on deckchairs during R&R & dash off a solution like doing the
Evening Standard crossword. But even their hundred-million-permutation machines won’t give
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Outside, it’d begun to rain again. The insistent tapping of the rain at the
windows sounded like someone impatiently wanting to have their say. Muted
timpanies gonged in the background, becoming stifled thunder, becoming a car
passing in the street. The Prof, having made the seemingly unremarkable gesture
of edging his queen’s bishop along a short diagonal, stood & went around to the
far side of his desk, pulling a brown leather attaché case from under it. Němec,
resigned to a state of affairs that no longer concealed itself, could tell the Old
Man was about to launch into a technical dissertation on this or that facet of the
accursed Manuscript. Everything so far might just as well’ve been a pretence for
exactly this: the revealed check & the inevitable checkmate.
‘Certain ideas,’ the Prof began, wasting no time, ‘had been in the wind for
some time. Ada Lovelace, countess & daughter of the poet Byron, wrote
programmes back in the th century already, designed to compute socalled
Bernoulli polynomials.* There were no computers back then, but there was
Babbage’s theoretical Difference Engine, which was the closest thing to a
mainframe before the boys at Bletchley Park built the Colossus during the War,
to crack the Nazi’s “Enigma” codes.
Babbage was a kind of mathematical Frank N. Furter who began by
designing machines that could reckon logarithms & do pushups at the same
time, instead of leaving it to chimpanzees with slide-rules who were prone to get
their decimal points mucked-up when the numbers got too big: rudimentary
stuff, you might say, but you have to start somewhere. He even invented a steam
engine to drive the thing. Ada Lovelace was his personal muse. She provided the
software, so to speak, while he hard-wired it, only he never quite got there. The
Difference Engine wasn’t built till after he was well & truly dead (brought on, as
ill-luck would have it, by renal calculus). In the meantime Boole came along &
rewrote the book — from then on it was only a matter of time before someone
had the bright idea to plug an automated telephone exchange into a bank of
them a shred of an outcome to go on, which makes this particular codebook more than just a little
unusual, unique in fact, as far as the E.N.I.G.M.A. boys are concerned (& though there’re bombs
falling they’ve gotten themselves obsessed with this sideline, trying to outwit each other between
sorties with the day’s E.N.I.G.M.A. key-change) — that’s to say, if it is a codebook, but of course they’re not even sure about that. The sort of code that gives Bletchley Park novices the heebiejeebies — a code that only exists because it can’t be broken, whose decrypt’s only ever true on condition it can’t be verified. Blind, like faith or the search for the Philosopher’s Stone: with this simple qualification — the Manuscript was real. [:]
* B'r=r!Br(O) (r=,,,,…) [:]
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cathode tubes & create the world’s first Electronic Brain.’*
The Prof grinned down at Němec who’d managed to keep his face
studiously blank throughout.
‘Back in the day, the transcripts Babbage made looked remarkably like
Voynich’s, crude as they are.’ The Prof’s grin dissolved. ‘What you’d expect
Frankenstein’s notebooks to’ve looked like, if they’d ever existed. Confections of a
delusional mind, perhaps, or perhaps not delusional at all. The real miscegenated
with the socalled imaginary, the organic & inorganic, species & genera. What else
is Creation but evolution by other means — which is to say, a perversion?’
The Prof set the attaché case on the edge of his desk.
‘For her part,’ he went on, fidgeting with the clasps, ‘the countess refused
to accept any such thing. Babbage might dream of a machine imbued with life,
but Ada Lovelace dreamt only of programmes that produced nothing but
numbers: beautiful numbers, like a Jacquard loom weaving algebraic patters, but
not the sacred number, the Pythagorean soul, capable of moving itself. Was she
afraid of creating a monster? What if the programme discovered a motive of its
own, some hidden idea it would only require a catalyst to transmit from
algebraic particle to intelligent design? Did she suspect such a thing might
already’ve happened, if yet only as dark whisperings of Masonic adepts, of
Babbage himself perhaps, ancient member of the Cambridge Ghost Club — &
not to mention her own begetter, whose unholy cohabitations were the stuff of
legend.’*
* “Fact is, there was nothing wrong with the plan. Oh the plan was alright. The plan would’ve
worked.” J. Higgins, CIA Deputy Director, NY. [:]
* Another glass of Eurydice’s tears, rebalancing the ratios, bloodsugar alchemistry, transmutation of
enzyme to alcohol, to see spiralling out from a vanishing point behind the eye, aurora-like, a .μs
sync-pulsed flicker across the brain-mosaic, scan-lines of static ridging into silhouette, from which,
tuning the dials, emerged a picture of Ada Lovelace snapping her garterstrap ( sonnez les cloches,
comme on dit dans les classiques), lewd-mouthed & myopic-eyed — small of the back club-footed
Byron might’ve tapped-out tight incestuous hexameters on had he but lived (he died, alas, when
his poor slip of a daughter was only eight, of fever, at Missolonghi, in the middle of someone else’s
war) — braced there against the heavy machinery, Babbage’s psychotronic doodad-in-progress:
knobbed gearshift leaving its impress through the light calico of her skirts, inching their way up
ever so slightly now she’s got the old goat’s attention by the horn… What sort of image was this?
Some kind of blackbook smutty Victoriana creeping in? As with birch switch the old
numbercruncher approaches, tumescent to his muttonchops — tickles the girl’s spindly shins, his
Enchantress of Numbers he calls her — hum of lovelaced voice softly in his ears, harking back to
memories of long walks from Porlock Weir to Culbone, fading now. Of course the whole thing’s
an octogenarian’s folly, pretending himself in these penurial last days Master of Situations, as Lady
Fate comes to meet him perhaps for the last time, & dear Ada, long dead, all so long, how time
doth fly — unacknowledged ghost in his machine, its genius loci, had it ever existed beyond the
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So saying, the Prof fumbled a thick folder from the attaché case & laid it
on his desk. Removing a sheet of paper from it, he beckoned Němec over —
‘See for yourself.’
Němec got up & stood beside the Prof — he was pointing at something
& Němec leaned forward to see what it was. On the page in front of him was a
lot of mystical glossolalia surrounded by diagrams, word lists, tables, like a
defaced version of what you’d find in a schoolboy’s grammar book. Strange
conjugations unfolded in logarithmic progression:
An, ain, aiin, aiiin…
Ar, air, aiir, aiiir…
Al, ail, aiil, aiiil…
Ey, eey, eeey, eyeee…
Edy, eedy, eeedy, eeeed!
Němec looked at the page blankly.
‘Curious, mnnn?’ the Prof said. ‘The pattern’s not simple repetition —
there’re cycles, loops, permutations & recombinations, like a routine performed
by a primitive computer. Call it a grammatron, if you like: a word-machine
whose use, or even existence, has long been forgotten.’
Němec did his best to envision echoes of machined angelspeak blown by
cosmic winds, of agonies & bewailings, fall of Babel, toppling stone & shattered
page, in the intermingling of their minds — that immeasurable exultation of cogs & wheels, to
out-evolve Darwin with. No mere boy’s-own gynaecological crudescence but a celestial symphony of
hydraulic cockstands & turbined cunts, in sublime transport of, etc. The machine-to-end-all-
machines! And more! All the as-yet unformed future life of those generations-to-come — spawned
of this instant, terminal though it be (as prodigious as the club-footed poet himself!), like tadpoled
gnomes of a difficult-to-imagine parallel universe, barely resembling this one, which goes on though
we end: from cell-division to siamesed suturation, birthing a whole host of (horrific to behold!)
machined Morlocks, genetic pariahs cast out of Paradise to geodesic subterrains, post-apocalyptic
cyboreal molemen — as remote from what you’d expect of an innocent bit of laboratory
slap&tickle as Babbage himself from a mutated mainframe: timewarped in analoguese, the
Creator’s DNA coded by a room full of copyists working 8-hour shifts at just above the minimum
wage, to feed all of everything-known-to-man into a virtualised jism to be fed, cryogenically, into
countless Ada clones: moulding & shaping that hypostatised wombfruit like a zillion typehammers
