Pyrotechnicon: Being a TRUE ACCOUNT of Cyrano de Bergerac's FURTHER ADVENTURES among the STATES and EMPIRES of the STARS

By Adam Browne

Cyrano de Bergerac: lover, poet, inventor, swordsman - man of ferocious blade and pretty talent. Now it can be told: his final, most daring adventure - a fight to the death against the dread Master of Secrets, with the life of his beloved Roxane in the balance.

'A rich dessert of a novel, filled with finely crafted wit and adventure - Adam Browne

• Language: English
• Publisher: coeur de lion
• Release date: Aug 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9780987158734

Book preview

PRAISE FOR PYROTECHNICON

‘A rich dessert of a novel, filled with finely crafted wit and adventure — Adam Browne has resurrected Cyrano in fine form. Delightful!’ Greg Bear — Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction author

‘Cyrano de Bergerac returns to science fiction after far too long an absence. PYROTECHNICON is a shadow play of clockwork whimsy, strange invention, and baroque puns. Browne zestfully steers his lighter-than-air word-balloons through a vast and improbable universe of plot. Sit back and enjoy the ride.’ Michael Swanwick — bestselling author of The Dragons of Babel

‘It is three centuries before Apollo 11, and there are half-angel-power spaceships, angst engines, and even perfumed cannons. PYROTECHNICON is a fantastically surreal and entertaining tale of improbable sciences, unheard-of technologies, and very original adventures.’ Sean McMullen — Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning author of the Greatwinter and The Moonworlds Saga series

‘The title does not mislead. PYROTECHNICON is a literary cabinet of curiosities filled with lush imagery and exotic notions. A delicious concoction of swashbucklery and delight. Highly recommended.’ Jeff Vandermeer — World Fantasy Award-winning author of Finch

‘Simply dazzling. PYROTECHNICON is an audacious triumph of the imagination.’ James Maxey — author of the Bitterwood Series

PYROTECHNICON

PYROTECHNICON

Being a TRUE ACCOUNT of

Cyrano de Bergerac’s

FURTHER ADVENTURES

among the STATES and EMPIRES of the STARS

by

Himself (dec’d)

(Englished from the French by Adam Browne)

For Julie

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text

Chapter the Zeroth

1st DAY

Chapter the First

Chapter the Second

Chapter the Third

Chapter the Third-and-a-Halfth

Chapter the Fourth

Chapter the Fifth

Chapter the Sixth

Chapter the Seventh

2nd DAY

Chapter the Eighth

Chapter the Ninth

Chapter the Tenth

Chapter the Eleventh

Chapter the Twelfth

Chapter the Thirteenth

3rd DAY

Chapter the Negative-Fourteenth

Chapter the Fifteenth

Chapter the Fifteenth-and-a-Halfth

Chapter the Sixteenth

Chapter the Eighteenth

Chapter the Nothingth

Chapter the Nineteenth

4th DAY

Chapter the Twentieth

Chapter the Twenty-First

Chapter the Twenty-First-and-a-Halfth

Chapter the Twenty-Second

Chapter the Twenty-Third

The HAPPY DAY

Chapter the Twenty-Fourth

Chapter the Lasth

Acknowledgements

Copyright

A Note on the Text

Although Cyrano de Bergerac’s sprightly space adventures, posthumously published in two volumes in 1656 and 1661, belong to the tradition of all fantastic tales, ultimately they came to be classed as science fiction. We can imagine Cyrano himself finding this categorisation restrictive, a quality the genre characteristically abhors, as did he, a notorious freethinker.

Perhaps it was because science fiction publishing seems so enamoured of trilogies that speculation arose about the existence of a third volume in Cyrano’s series. When efforts to find it came to nothing, however, the consensus was that the manuscript was lost or destroyed, if it had ever been written at all.

Then came the United States MER-V Mission to Mars, its rover robot famously rolling aside a small boulder on the Meridiani Planum to uncover the text you are about to read. Predictably, doubts have been raised about the discovery and the authenticity of the text. As one observer has commented, aside from its innumerable scientific, cultural, linguistic, social and political anachronisms, it appears to be legitimate in every way.

This is a debate best left to others. We present the story found there without speculation or comment, except to quote the Demon of Socrates in Cyrano’s first adventure: If there is something you men cannot understand, you either imagine that it is spiritual or that it does not exist. Both conclusions are quite false. The proof of this is that there are perhaps a million things in the universe which you would need a million quite different organs to know . . .

Adam Browne

Chapter the Zeroth

Dawn

Le 28 juillet de l’an 1655

Dear Reader:

My nose surfaced first, rising from slow waves of sleep, from darkness into darkness.

The hour was early. My feet were cold.

I heard a baker’s horse clopping through the Toulouse streets, and a costermonger’s soft singing as he prepared his stall. Then a ragged clatter of footsteps, and the laughter and drunken shouts of revellers leaving a tavern after a long night. I heard one of them spewing into the gutter, and by the grunts forced out of him as he heaved — the shapes of them, as it were, the grunted consonants, the bowely vowels — I knew the fellow for a Gascon.

I smiled in the dark, remembering my confrères, d’Artagnan and le Bret and all the others at Arras.

The revellers departed. There was silence.

My eyes wandered, focusing for a moment on my nose, proud, flexuous, faintly luminous in the gloom — and ah, reader, what a nose!

Had you been there, you might have missed me in the darkness, but never my nose, the most eminent member, great in size and noble of form, and conspicuous to the highest degree.

Did not a wise man once declare that a large nose is the mark of a witty, affable, generous and liberal soul?

Is it not said that the Emperor Heliogabalus made choice of big-nosed soldiers, who are known to possess stout hearts sure as redheads are fair of skin?

Mine is the bravest of appendages, always going before me into peril. Had I a selection of noses, I would pick this one every time.

It is my mark, my emblem; it is my grande panache.

By my nose you may know me. Cyrano de Savinien Hercule de Bergerac, lover, poet, inventor, swordsman — the great Captain Satan — a man of ferocious blade and pretty talent!

Là! I threw aside the covers, threw on this item of clothing, and this. Thus, I strode to the balcony, facing east, with a view of the fields past the town.

Where I sensed a softening of the night on the horizon, the first pink hints touching the sky. A fine glimmer against the most distant hills, approaching, touching a ravine, now a knot of cascades, brawling waters flinging rainbows skyward.

I returned the dawn’s grin.

For the approaching day, I knew it, would be a splendid one, as would all my days forevermore, since I had proposed marriage to the choicest of earthly beings. Mademoiselle Magdelaine Robineau de Neuvillette, known as Roxane.

My kissing cousin, a lady so fair that even her mirror was jealous of her beauty.

My dawn, my Juliet . . . That she returned my love in good favour was still a source of wonder to me.

But with the fact of the wedding settled, there remained the question of when. I confess, reader, to an odd reluctance.

I was the hound who corners the lion, then wonders if it is up to the next step . . .

But enough. More of that in its place . . . For here it was. Here, now. The sunlight, its molten colours spilling over the fields to the outskirts of the town. I readied myself for a ritual in which I sometimes indulged, and which I share with you now.

You should know, reader, that as other men were samplers of wines, I was a connoisseur of dawns. A fine nose is of benefit to both pursuits.

’Twas a matter of length. Of distance . . . Isaac Beekman purposed to reckon the speed of light with twin cannon, mirrors and a measure a mile in length — any less, and the readings would have been impossible to take . . . (Beekman’s conclusion was that light be extraordinarily rapid, a result agreed upon by subsequent experimenters).

So it was for me, with the reach of my nose such that I could stand in yesterday while the tip extended into the morrow, the sensitive member dipping into the day to come, wherewith to judge its qualities . . .

As for those who insist, against reason, that this practice is but one of my jests, or worse, a delusion, I have but this to say . . . but ah, no time! For here it was! The dawn!

The day! Coming! Dashing and gushing! Splashing over the grounds of the château!

Which would it be? A red, a white? Crisp as a Chardonnay? Earthy and oaken as an old sherry? Would it possess, like to the day I proposed to Roxane, a scent of dusky roses and cherries with glints of liquorice . . .?

It was upon me, it was here, it was now . . . The moment. The shimmering instant with sunlight warming the end of my nose, but not yet touching the plane of my face.

I smelt futurity. I drew it in, warmed it in my sinuses. I asked of it the question: Would the morrow be a happy one?

And even as the negative, the bitter, the stinging answer came, I saw, over the château wall, the façade of the neighbouring hôtel — Roxane’s hôtel — and a darkness, a creatured darkness descending upon it . . .

1st DAY

And still upward in my elephant I rose, away from that oozy zoo; up, up, delivered from the fog, nimbly, trunkfirst into a lightly nightingaled sky.

Chapter the First

The Confraternity of the Passion

Make haste, reader! What, you are still in the room? Là! Long empty! Look you, through the window! See, I am already racing through the château’s courtyard, barrelling through the property owned by my friend and patron the Baron de Colignac, once the home of M. Adhémar Montiel de Sainte-Blandine, the Mad Count of Toulouse . . .

Past the observatory, the tumbledown library, the château and grounds a mazy map of madness writ in stone and wood. Now past the famous pond, its water imported from the pool outside the Taj Mahal, skimmed from the pool’s surface with infinite care; but whether the Count had achieved his goal of acquiring the reflection of the Taj (a glimpse of minarets in the stagnant water, perhaps, a hint of the hot white skies of Ind in the strew of lilies?), I could not say.

For already I was gone, out the gates, rushing through the streets of Toulouse. Now an avenue, now a boulevard, now the rue Gambetta. Now the hôtel where my love was residing, where I had seen that darkness, descending . . .

I banged at the front door. I pushed past the sleepy domestic who answered, through the entry hall, past more startled factotums and dogsbodies of various breed and pedigree — up the staircase, into her bedchamber.

Quiet. The cats asleep, the curtains drawn, the candles snuffed . . . but there was a light in here nevertheless.

Roxane.

She stirred, glowing, pinkling roundnesses and roundling pinknesses, my precieuse in delicious déshabillé.

Cyrano? She rubbed her eyes.

I stepped closer, rapt as any astronomer, gazing on the firmament of her face, the orbits of her eyes. The world upon which my destiny turned, drawing me down.

Forgive me, my dear, for entering unannounced.

Her hand was milk-cool in mine — Cyrano, your entry will always be welcome. — but in her eyes was a hot look, and she leaned forward, her nightgown parting to offer the merest hints of the terrain beneath: the soft hills, the furzy dales.

She smiled.

She touched a finger, just once, to the length of my nose, a sensation of such unique and delicate pleasure that the Church would have declared it a sin on the instant had it known.

My earlier urgency was forgotten, replaced by another. That we must wait was intolerable, a nonsense. It would be sin not to sin.

I moved to meet her lips . . .

Sir! She sat back, scandalised. Not until we are wed! She clutched one of her cats to her breast as a shield.

But, my dear, I —

And when will that be, may I ask? Oh dear, I forgot, Patapouff! — this to the cat. He has not set the date! What’s that? she said. You say he does not love me? You think he is not resolved to marry me at all? Oh, Patapouff!

I assure you, Patapouff, my resolve is of the stiffest sort.

Roxane glared. She said nothing. She did not need to. She had said it too many times: When first you asked for my hand, I refused, do you recall? — this was what she did not say. Not because I did not love, but because I loved too much, she did not add. I feared I would be your widow almost as soon as I was your bride. But you vowed you would forgo your sword, Cyrano, she did not go on to say. And now I see you stumbling about, sword in hand —

But hold —

I looked about.

What is it? Roxane said.

Something. I stood away from the bed.

She stared. What folly is this?

There is some danger . . .

Fie! You are drunk! You have been on a carouse with your friends again!

I am in earnest, Mademoiselle. There is something terrible . . .

Truly? She laughed suddenly. Is this the beginning of one of your adventures?

I hope not.

Oh, you love adventure!

Not a bit of it.

"Will I be in this one?"

As children, I had sometimes allowed her along on a quest — the two of us in a forest or meadow, playing as musketeers or crusader knights or soldiers, armed with reeds and helmeted with cooking pots.

I had regretted it every time. I forever had to remind her not to titter while we were locked in combat with some imagined foe; nor could I insist that she not treat it as a game, for she would return that it was a game, was it not . . .?

What is that smell? she said.

Yes . . . How could I have missed it? That yellow smell: opium, no question. A strong blend, by the scent; no dross, thick, potent. My eyes burned . . .

And now, swelling from the shadows, a gallery of grotesques . . .

How now! I cried. How durst you to enter this room?

The figures moved not, nor answered: a tableau vivant of strange, staring fellows dressed as for a masque; actors, by their habits, of the type called Frantics, some in close cuirasses to signify Madness; others costumed as for female rôles, disquietingly pretty, their bodices contrived into well-favoured forms.

Come . . . I coughed. The air was thick, the tarry, Eastern sweetness reaching into my blood. Come, I began again. Open your throats and answer, lest I open them for you. How come you to enter this maiden’s chamber?

One might ask you the same question, Monsieur de Bergerac.

Through a wrack of corrupt clouds there stepped a man.

My sabre flashed an inch from his throat. My mustachios bristled. My nose (I knew) was terrible to see.

The man smiled, a yellow crescent. Fat he was, as an Amiens pâté, and cue-ball bald. His costume was less splendid but more curious than those of his confrères, with culottes and jerkin of gooseturd-green baize scuffed and dusted with pale blue chalk, the whole cut from the playing surface of an old billiard table.

Nor was he unlike a billiard table in heft and general geography: massy, oblong, set upon heavy pedestal legs.

Calm yourself, Monsieur, he said. "We are but harmless entertainers, members of La Confrérie de la Passion, engaged to stage Mystery Plays in this establishment."

I care not a cucumber for your plays. The point of my sword pricked his bosom at the spot where the white ball is placed at the start of play. You will tell me, Sir, why you are in this lady’s room.

Fie. He chuckled around his long and elaborate pipe. Why do you protest? See, your Dulcinea is unharmed.

I made out Roxane in her bed. I saw fear in her eyes, but also a measure of excitement . . .

I noticed the fat man looking at her also. I lowered my blade to his breeches. Have a care where your eyes wander, Sir, for what is a billiard table without its balls?

Pray, allow me to explain, the billliardman said, I am a student of sleep, and of dreams. This substance I am smoking, for instance, it is not opium, but a gum derived from dreams. ’Tis the brownish resin one finds accreted upon old pillowslips and unwashed nightcaps, collected and rendered into an intoxicating paste. He puffed away, the pipe’s fumes wreathing bluely. Pipe dreams, Monsieur de Bergerac. They make for a sovereign smoke . . .

The fumes thickening, entering my senses; a fizzy, fatty, eelish feeling, a slow swell of liquid electricity salamandering up the staircase of my spine. You know my name, I managed, but who are you?

I am the guild’s Master of Secrets, he said with a bow. With my mechanisms, my smoke and my mirrors, I bring life to the theatrical dreams our public so enjoys. But they are fools who think the proscenium keeps those dreams from oozing out into the world. You, Cyrano, are you sure you did not wake this morning to find yourself still asleep? To me it seems a most dreamish situation.

This is no dream, I said. This is the wake-a-day world.

As to that, we shall see.

He glanced at his watch, a heavy, misshapen mechanism which I will not trouble to describe except to say it was exactly the timepiece one would expect a billiardtable to carry. ’Tis time, he declared. A five-act play, I think — five days in one, a million years in a moment — the hero suffering many and various reversals . . .

Roxane gathered her bedclothes about her. What is he prating about, Cyrano?

He is speaking his last words, my dear, I said. As a rule, Sir, I am loath to kill an unarmed opponent, but I shall allow the exception to prove the rule.

I leapt and swung . . . or made to do so . . .

Was it my blade or my hand that was so hesitant, wavering as if viewed through water?

Again I tried to strike. Again I could not.

I glared at my blade. Still it lolled weakly, as if drunk. My sabre was not sober.

The Master of Secrets laughed. "Well, then! This has been most satisfactory as a prologue, but as with all dreams and scenes, our meeting must come to an end. We should strike the set strikingly, I think. I believe periaktoi are the best mechanism here."

Cyrano! Roxane’s voice. They are coming closer!

I could not see her . . . the mists, the darkness.

Again I lunged. I stumbled; I who had put a hundred men to the rout at the Porte de Nesle. I staggered like an infant. My sword was one half of Fate’s Shears. It flailed. I tripped over a cat.

If you are unfamiliar with the term, Cyrano, the Master of Secrets said, "periaktoi are those collapsible equilateral flats one sees at the rear of the stage, closed like a set of shutters — thus! " And he reached up and plucked at the corners of the darkness and folded it and, with a creak of canvas and hemp, packed it neatly away, folding it all, the Frantics, the smoke, even himself, into a rectangle that closed in and in on itself until it was no more.

The Master of Secrets had vanished, and Roxane, her voice trailing behind her: Cyrano . . . Help me . . . he is taking me . . .

She was gone. The bedchamber was empty. I was alone.

Chapter the Second

Omnium Somnium

I remember bursting from the room; downstairs; the lobby, hoping there to see sign of her or her abductors, in vain.

I remember thundering curses, raining threats.

I remember staff rushing out, some with umbrellas, thinking a storm must have entered the