Mister B. Gone

'We don't copy books here,' he said, his tone far from friendly.

I felt the weight of the Archbishop's hand and rings upon my shoulder. He was behind me, blocking my exit with crook and girth.

'Why so many questions, Botch?' he said.

'I like to learn.'

'But you've walked through Gutenberg's dreams. Or at least you claim you have. How could you possibly pass through the mind of a man consumed by one great labor, and not see that labor?'

I was trapped, caught by the His Holiness behind, the genius in front, and my own foolish mouth in the middle.

It was my tongue that had got me into this little mess, so I silently entreated it now to get me out.

'You speak of your Reprodukagraph, I assume,' I said, my eyes, I'm certain, registering a certain shock at hearing this five-syllable bizzarity emerge from between my lips unbidden.

'Is that what I should call it?' Gutenberg said, the ice that had been in his voice moments before now melted away. He took the final step down into the workshop floor and turned to look at me. 'I was thinking I'd call it a printing press.'

'Well, you could, I suppose,' I replied, glancing back at the Archbishop as I spoke and giving him a look of aristocratic ill-temper. 'Would you be so kind as to lift your hand off my shoulder, your bejewelledness?'

There were a number of barely suppressed guffaws from the workers in the immense room behind Gutenberg, and even the stern genius himself allowed laughter to bloom in his eyes when he heard my addressing the Archbishop in this fashion. His Excellency duly removed his hand, not without first harshly digging his fingers and thumb into my flesh to inform me silently that he would be keeping a close watch on me. Gutenberg, meanwhile, turned at the bottom of the stairs, inviting me to follow. I did so, stepping down into the workshop itself, finally laying eyes on the apparatus that was the cause of all the conflict around, above, and below the Gutenberg house.

The invention looked very remotely like a wine press, but there was a great deal about its construction that was purely of Gutenberg's design. I watched as one of the three men attending to the operation of the press took a sheet of paper and carefully placed it on a bed of ink-stained wood.

'What are you printing now?' I asked the genius.

He arbitrarily plucked a page from the dozen or so that were neatly pegged up to dry on lengths of string above our heads.

'I had wanted to begin with the Bible.'

'In the beginning was the Word,' I said.

Luckily for me, Gutenberg knew the rest of the line, because all I recalled was those first six words from the Gospel according to John. Not long after reading them, I'd thrown the book back amongst the garbage on the Ninth Circle, where I'd first found it.

'And the Word was with God,' Gutenberg went on.

'The Word,' I murmured. Then looking back at the Archbishop, I said, 'Was it any particular Word, do you think?'

He gave me a silent sneer, as though to reply to me was beneath him.

'Just asking,' I said, shrugging.

'This is my foreman. Dieter. Say hello to Mister B., Dieter.'

A young bald man working on the press, his apron and hands liberally decorated with smears and handprints of ink, looked up and gave me a quick wave.

'Dieter convinced me that we should start with something more modest in scale than the Bible. So I'm testing the press by printing a school grammar book — '

'The Ares Grammatica?' I said, having spotted the words on the title page, which was drying at the other end of the room. (My demonic vision saw what most human eyes would never have been able to read, so Gutenberg was delighted that I could name the book.)

'You're familiar with it?'

'I studied it, when I was much younger. But, of course, the copy my tutor had was very precious. And expensive.'

'My printing press will put an end to the great expense of books, because it will make many in the same way, from a plate, set with all the letters. In reverse of course.'

'In reverse! Ha!' This pleased me for some reason.

He reached up and pulled down another of the sheets drying overhead. 'I persuaded Dieter that we might print one thing that was not so boring as a grammar book. So we agreed to print out a poem from the Sibylline Prophecies as well.'

Dieter was listening to all this. He looked up briefly and cast a loving, brotherly smile in Gutenberg's direction. Clearly Gutenberg was one of those men who inspired devotion in his employees.

'It's beautiful,' I said as Gutenberg handed the page to me. The lines of the poem were neat and legible. There was no elaborate illustration on the first letter, such as monks often took months to create on a manuscript. But the page had other virtues. The spaces between the words were precisely the same size and the design of the letters made the poem marvelously easy to read.

'The paper feels slightly damp,' I observed.

Gutenberg looked pleased.

'It's a little trick somebody taught me,' he said. 'The paper is dampened before being printed on. But you know this, of course. You told me in the dream.'

'And was I right?'

'Oh yes, sir. You were quite right. I don't know how I would have fared without the gift of your knowledge.'

'It was my pleasure,' I said, handing the sheet with the poem on it back to Gutenberg and wandering on down the length of the chambers, past the printing press to where two other men worked feverishly to arrange lines of mirror-image letters on wooden trays. All the necessary parts of a sentence — the letters in both upper- and lowercases, the empty spaces between the words, all the numerals, and, finally, of course, all the punctuation — were laid out on four tables, so that both could work without one getting in the way of the other. Unlike Dieter and his colleagues working on the press, all of whom took a moment from their tasks to look up at us when we entered, and even laugh when I made fun of the Archbishop, these two were so profoundly immersed in their work, referring constantly to a hand-scribed copy of the text they were concentrated on, that they did not even glance up. Their labor was as fascinating to watch as it was surely demanding to do. I found myself removed into an almost trancelike state by watching them.

'All the men have signed an oath of silence,' Gutenberg said, 'so that none but us should have the power of this press.'

'Quite right,' I replied.

* * *

It occurs to me now that the revelations, such as they were, are almost over; that there's only one Secret of any consequence left to tell. And given that fact perhaps a wise soul such as yourself, tired of petty games and schoolyard threats that have on occasion issued from me — mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — that you may think this is not an inappropriate time to forsake the book entirely.

Yes, I'm giving you one last chance, my friend. Call me sentimental but I don't have any great desire to murder you, as you know I will if you get to the final page. I am so much closer to you now than I was when I first told you about matching my strides; to the number of pages you turned, I can hear you muttering to yourself as you turn the page; and, of course, I can smell you and taste your sweat. You're uneasy, aren't you? Part of you wants to do as I have requested and burn the book.

If I may offer a little advice: That's the part to listen to. The other part, the part that feels defiant and is putting your life at risk just to play a dangerous game of dare, that part is just the willful child in you, speaking out, demanding to be heard. That's understandable. We all have these slivers of who we were when we were very, very young left in our heads.

But please, don't listen to that voice. There's nothing left in the pages to come that's of any great interest. It's just the politics of Heaven and Hell from here.