All Men of Genius

XXXVIII.



THE night before last, Ernest had stepped cautiously out of his father’s train. The ride had been long—he had forgotten to put his watch back on after the bath, so wasn’t sure how long—and he might have fallen asleep once or twice, he wasn’t sure. He was eager to explore, but his brain told him to be wary—he did not know where he was, or who for certain had built the train to begin with.

The room was dark, but from the feeling of the air and the echo of his footsteps, he could tell it was large. The light from the train, and from his lantern, barely made a dent in the darkness. He walked forward slowly, lantern in front, and soon came to a set of elegant but dirty stairs that seemed to be made of marble, with graceful curved banisters. He laid his hand on one of them, intending to start climbing, but the moment he touched the banister, the room sprang to life with an audible electrical snap. Lights came on from wall sconces and a chandelier that hung from the ceiling. The platform was large, and many boxes were piled up on one side of it, as if they had recently been delivered. Up the stairs was a landing lined in marble columns that went from floor to ceiling, giving it the appearance of a cage. From somewhere beyond that, the sound of an out-of-tune violin scratched softly in the air. After a moment, an out-of-tune piano joined it. Ernest felt a bead of sweat run down his neck, and heard his heart beating faster. Where had he come to?

Nervous, Ernest clenched and unclenched his hand, then climbed the stairs. The tune the violin and piano played was one he recognized, an old tune from his father’s childhood that he would often hum while walking about Illyria. At the top of the stairs, beyond the landing and marble columns, was his father’s lab. Ernest knew it instantly. It was giant, a tower that plunged upward with a huge circular staircase in the center and windows all along the sides, many of them stained glass. Scientific accoutrements—beakers, bottles, gears, electrical engines, bones—were scattered around the open floors of all the stories but the ground story, which was covered in dust. A large banner hung from one wall bearing a version of the Illyrian seal—a shield against a red background with a gear inside it. Normally, the gear bore the symbol of one of the five sciences Illyria taught and it was worn on the jackets of graduates to show mastery in their scientific form. But this version of the seal showed a globe, seeming to suggest mastery of the earth itself. And the motto, written on the image of the gear, had been changed to ARTIFICES DOMINATORES HOMINI SUNT—“Inventors Are the Greatest of Men.” No … not quite greatest. More like rulers. Ernest clenched his jaw and frowned. This banner felt like a mockery of everything he loved about Illyria.

Under this banner was a stand, and on that, an open book. Ernest approached the book, blew the film of dust off it, and read the top page—a list of signatures:



Algernon Illyria

Pierre Frett

Gremio Walle



John Snow

Jan Weever

Tarquin Whittaker



Alfred Kingsberry

Adam Volio

Beau Dogberry



Henry Voukil

Orlando Canterville

Uriel Barbicane



Marcus Pluris

Marcellus Knox

Walford Cowper-Cowper



Arnost Bonne

Randall Grey

Kingston Pontefract



Langston Verges

Franz Umney

Howard March



Abelard Alroy

Quimby Rastail

Daniel Ghatan



Ernest recognized some of the names: his father’s, a few of the professors who had taught at Illyria years before. Many of the names he knew belonged to men who were dead now. After the top page was a manifest of sorts, saying that the group had been formed to rule the world, to impose their superior intellect on humanity for its own good. In many places, various hands had gone back, crossed things out, and written more in between the lines. The manifesto had clearly been changed over the years. After that, there were monthly meeting minutes, each in a different hand. There were notes on the progress of various members’ experiments, notes on arguments among members of the group, notes on ways to overthrow the Queen, and the best way to conquer Ireland. The minutes were all dated, but ended a year or so before his father’s death. It seemed that by that point, the group had fallen into disarray. Members stopped coming to meetings, some were kicked out, and several had mysteriously vanished, probably the victims of other members’ machinations. Then, the book went blank.

Done with the book, Ernest climbed the central spiraling staircase. Each level was open to the floors below it and hugged the walls, more like a very wide balcony than like an actual floor. One floor was a library, and another was a place for storing supplies like bottles of chemicals and eyes floating in jars—human eyes. On another floor was a huge slab with arm restraints and various wires hooked up to it, and a single human bone lying still on the surface. Another floor was covered in gears and metal parts and had a huge forge. And another floor had a small analytical engine, and another, half taken apart, or only half put together. On the very top floor were the violin and piano, both being played by mechanical hands, and both sadly out of tune. Ernest looked out one of the windows of the top floor. It had a crack in it, and a strong draft came through, blowing his hair back. He was in a tower in the middle of the countryside, but where, or which countryside, he could not tell. It was all green, with nothing but woods and plains in every direction. He could see no sign of other people, except for a wandering cow, which he supposed might have escaped from a nearby farm.

He spent a day thoroughly exploring the tower. His father had left notebooks everywhere—piles and piles of them, all meticulous, far more detailed than Ernest’s own notes. Ernest read them all in a huge dusty armchair on the top floor, and when he finished, he knew something new: His father was not the genius Ernest had thought. He had been a genius, certainly, but what Ernest had thought had set him apart—his ability to pull his inventions seemingly from the air already perfected, as though he had just thought of the idea and then calculated how it would best work—did not exist. His father had worked at least as long and hard as Ernest did before he even announced an invention. Keeping his workings secret had been intentional, to enhance the appearance of his genius, as well as his mystique.

Ernest found philosophical notes written in the margins of the notebooks, as though, when his mind couldn’t stand scientific computations any longer, he would step back to muse on science in a more general sense. “Always keep your working secret,” his father had written. “No one wants to see science made. It makes people think they can do it themselves, that it is just a matter of hard work and trying over and over until they get it right. It is not. Some men are born with the genius for science. Some are not. Therefore, a society in which those born with that genius rule over those born without it, or at least those born with some genius rule over those without any, would be for the betterment of mankind.” Ernest did not agree with his father on any of these points, but he felt satisfied to be delving into his psyche.

In other notebooks, he found more scribblings, such as “The stupid should be sent to Australia and kept in cages” and “Ideally, the Queen would cede power to us willingly, but if taking it is what we must do, it shouldn’t be difficult. And once we have control of England, the continent shan’t be far off.”

In the final notebook, the one dated a few months before his father’s death, Ernest found a note in the margin about him. “Ernest—should I let him into the Society? There is so much infighting. They would eat him. Better to let him live happily, making his little toy rabbits. He does not have the spine for real science.” Ernest bit his lower lip when he read it and, for a moment, swelled with rage, but then it subsided. He knew what the Society was now, knew his father’s dark secrets, his philosophy and goal of world domination, and Ernest knew that even had his father offered this legacy to him proudly, he would have wanted no part of it.

Most satisfying, though, were the places in his father’s notes where Ernest could see his father struggling to understand something Ernest grasped easily. Of course, in many instances, it was due to the progression of the sciences since his father had written the notes, but there were many principles that Ernest knew innately which his father seemingly had to discover. Ernest wouldn’t venture to say he was smarter than his father, but knowing his father was only human made Ernest gasp deeply, as though suddenly rising off the ground. He started to laugh, loudly and for a long while, drowning out the playing of the disharmonic instruments.

His father had also left many experiments unfinished, such as a new analytical engine that did not just predict numerical equations, but also retained information from previous equations, and built on them, interacting with the user to figure out a problem. He had attempted many experiments on human resurrection, which Ernest found distasteful and only glanced at; and many chemical experiments attempting to find a cure for, as well as a replication of, what he called “Curio’s Condition.”

After finishing his inspection of the lab and reading many of the notebooks, Ernest returned to the banner and the list of names. This had to be the “Society” to which many of his father’s notes referred. The Society was long gone now, and held no more threat to England, or anywhere else, than a bunch of disgruntled old men, working away in their labs and mumbling about how they had almost ruled the world.

It took him another day to look at everything, but when he was done, Ernest felt completely changed, as though he had somehow dissolved a layer of himself in acid and emerged fresh and stronger, uninhibited by whatever had been clinging to him. He began thinking of new things he could do with Illyria, things he wouldn’t have tried before, because his father would have disapproved. His father was dead now, and Illyria belonged to Ernest. Changes could and should be made.

As he rode the train back and walked through the college, he was lost in his plans, unaware of the dreary silence of the place until he walked into the dining hall, and saw everyone staring at him, and then felt Cecily squeezing him with joy. He felt happiest at that moment, and wished only that Violet could be there as well, to make it perfect. And somehow, he thought, he felt she was there. He would write to her immediately, to tell her of his plans for Illyria. There were so many changes to be made, and he knew she would bring out the best ideas in him, if she didn’t come up with them herself.