Piranesi(22)

He fixed one bright, hooded, malevolent eye on me.

‘We all paid a terrible price in the end. Mine was prison. Oh, yes. That shocks you, I imagine. I wish I could say that it was all due to a misunderstanding, but I did all the things they said I did. To be perfectly honest I did quite a lot more that they never knew about. Although – do you know? – I rather liked prison. One met such fascinating people.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Did Ketterley tell you how this world was made?’ he asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘Would you like to know?’

‘Very much, sir,’ I said.

He looked gratified by my interest. ‘Then I will tell you. It began when I was young, you see. I was always so much more brilliant than my peers. My first great insight happened when I realised how much humankind had lost. Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology! But it seemed to me that the wisdom of the ancients could not have simply vanished. Nothing simply vanishes. It’s not actually possible. I pictured it as a sort of energy flowing out of the world and I thought that this energy must be going somewhere. That was when I realised that there must be other places, other worlds. And so I set myself to find them.’

‘And did you find any, sir?’ I asked.

‘I did. I found this one. This is what I call a Distributary World – it was created by ideas flowing out of another world. This world could not have existed unless that other world had existed first. Whether this world is still dependent on the continued existence of the first one, I don’t know. It’s all in the book I wrote. I don’t suppose you happen to have read it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Pity. It’s terribly good. You’d like it.’

All the time that the old man was speaking, I was listening with great attention and trying to understand who he was. He had said that he was not 16, but I was not so naive as to believe him without further evidence. The Other had said that 16 was wicked, so it was possible that 16 would lie about who he was. But as the old man talked, I became more and more certain that he was telling the truth. He was not 16. My reasoning was this: the Other had described 16 as being opposed to Reason and to Scientific Discovery. This description did not fit the old man. The old man was as passionately fond of science as we were. He knew how the World was made and was eager to pass that knowledge on to me.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘does Ketterley still think that the wisdom of the ancients is here?’

‘Do you mean the Great and Secret Knowledge, sir?’

‘Exactly that.’

‘Yes.’

‘And is he still searching for it?’

‘Yes.’

‘How amusing,’ he said. ‘He’ll never find it. It’s not here. It doesn’t exist.’

‘I was beginning to wonder if that might be the case,’ I said.

‘Then you are a good deal brighter than him. The idea that it’s hidden here – I’m afraid he got that from me too. Before I had seen this world, I thought that the knowledge that created it would somehow still be here, lying about, ready to be picked up and claimed. Of course, as soon as I got here, I realised how ridiculous that was. Imagine water flowing underground. It flows through the same cracks year after year and it wears away at the stone. Millennia later you have a cave system. But what you don’t have is the water that originally created it. That’s long gone. Seeped away into the earth. Same thing here. But Ketterley is an egotist. He always thinks in terms of utility. He cannot imagine why anything should exist if he cannot make use of it.’

‘Is that why there are Statues?’ I asked.

‘Is what why there are Statues?’

‘Do the Statues exist because they embody the Ideas and Knowledge that flowed out of the other World into this one?’

‘Oh! I never thought of that!’ he said, pleased. ‘What an intelligent observation. Yes, yes! I think that highly likely! Perhaps in some remote area of the labyrinth, statues of obsolete computers are coming into being as we speak!’ He paused. ‘I must not stay long. I am all too well aware of the consequences of lingering in this place: amnesia, total mental collapse, etcetera, etcetera. Though I must say that you are surprisingly coherent. Poor James Ritter could barely string a sentence together by the end and he wasn’t here half as long as you. No, what I really came here to tell you is this.’ He wrapped his cold, bony, papery hand round my hand; then he jerked me sharply towards him. He smelt of paper and ink, of a finely balanced perfume of violet and aniseed, and, beneath these scents, a faint but unmistakeable trace of something unclean, almost faecal. ‘Someone is looking for you,’ he said.

‘16?’ I asked.

‘Remind me what you mean by that.’

‘The Sixteenth Person.’

He put his head on one side to consider. ‘Yeh-e-es … Yes. Why not? Let us say that it is, in fact, “16”.’

‘But I thought that 16 was looking for the Other,’ I said. ‘16 is the Other’s enemy. That was what the Other said.’