The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
He laughed condescendingly. “Yes, well, just like, I suppose. Nobody
expected that that particular feat would become quite the craze it did. But
for centuries every ambitious and greedy fraud who knew how to read set
up shop as ‘an alchemist.’ Young men wasted family fortunes, kings and
princes threw away their reputations, playwrights and poets laughed at us.
But when you—”
“I’m sorry, but ‘us’?”
“Yes, us. Us including me, and including your late townsman. Alchemists,
as they call themselves but we never have—I am speaking now of the
figures from popular history and the idiots that exist even now, in grubby
little shops surrounded by crystals and cheap amulets with inscrutable
symbols—alchemists have always believed that they could bumble their way
forward, through trial and error, and eventually wind up at the goal. What
that goal is changes with the age: nobody today, for instance, takes up the
study of alchemy to get rich, though that was once the only reason to undertake
such arduous study. ‘Enlightenment,’ or ‘cosmic understanding,’ or ‘harmony,’
or some such nonsense: those are today’s worthy aims. But those will
change, too.
“Whatever the course they follow, I suppose there is a theoretical possibility
that one of these idiots could blindly and luckily make a few small steps
forward, but that possibility is far more remote than, for instance, the proverbial
monkey sitting down at a computer and managing, by chance, to type out
Hamlet. And nobody has unlimited time or patience. People have their allotted
threescore and ten. Besides, for sources they rely on other alchemists,
or on horrible misinterpretations of Bacon or Paracelsus. And they always
have this great faith that they are one small adjustment away, that success
awaits them the next morning if they simply believe harder and turn up the
burner a bit.
“Now,” said Tonu, or whatever his name was, “why don’t you tell me the
one thing that you found in both Jaan’s home and his office?”
“We found lots of things in both places. Books. Papers. Carpets. Dust,
lots of dust. Sophisticated locks—”
“Yes, locks. And also safes, did you not?”
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