An Elegant Solution(42)

“I’m to go to Master Gottlieb next.”

“Do as he bids. I’ll be at the Inquiry myself.” No function of the University would suffer a woman to attend, but the intricacies of Basel’s laws and traditions allowed matriarchs of Mistress Dorothea’s position to attend the public events of the Town Council. “I’ll see if you shirk your duties.”

She knew I wouldn’t, though.



I left that house and kitchen for the streets. It was still mid-morning but the time would pass and noon would come. As I walked, the clocks rang through their hours; hours waiting in line since the beginning, entering, walking past, and exiting to where they would remain until the end. The designated hour was in place to take its turn and I had to be ready. In Basel, though, even time was changed.

The city had Basel Time. Stand outside the city until the sun is highest, and it was noon. Faint chimes from far off village clocks would confirm this. But enter any gate and walk to the Munster Square. The journey would seem to only take a few minutes, but the shadow of that same sun fell on the sundial at well after one o’clock. The Cathedral’s dial was the Master of time in Basel and it bowed to no clock carried in from outside. If an outside clock disagreed, that one was wrong, even if it had been set by every church warden in Europe.

It might be that the city Walls have had some effect on time, and when a traveler passed through a gate, an hour of his life would be taken. Some people have wondered what happened to the hour lost at the gate. I’d found from experience that it’s not lost, it was just kept for safekeeping, a ransom held against a visitor’s good behavior. When the visitor left, the hour would be regained from hiding. A man born in Basel would find this reversed. He’d be given an hour when he left the city, but must surrender it to return.

Others claimed that there wasn’t an hour lost or changed, just that the clock was kept to a different time. This was more than true, though. It was kept to a different time. Anyone in Basel knew that the city was not fully attached to the world around it. It had a different time and was a different place. The city was tied to some other foundation than the countryside, and the time was a telltale that it was a different world.



There was a battle fought two hundred years ago in the Swabian war, within sight of the city Walls, between the Swiss and the Emperor Maximilian. Men from Bern and Zurich and Solothurn were in danger of defeat when reinforcements from Lucerne arrived with trumpets and shouting, bursting from the forest and routing the mercenary Germans. The people of Basel just watched from their Walls. The war was outside their Walls and so it wasn’t theirs. They hosted the armistice and treaty afterward to conclude the war, and took the opportunity to secede themselves from the Empire to join Switzerland. But they still kept all the gates, north and south, guarded. The city was really no more part of the Swiss than it was of the French or the Germans. The world was outside their gates, and so it wasn’t theirs.

And the time that was outside their gates wasn’t theirs, either. They had their own.

What else was different inside and outside? What was greater than the Walls? Even Basel couldn’t have one Mathematics inside its Walls, different than the Mathematics outside. No war, no clock, no machine, no plague, no death could change it. That alone made Mathematics beautiful and mysterious. There were other laws, laws of good and evil, laws beyond men, that again Basel couldn’t change. What from outside Basel could Basel’s Inquiry find the truth of?

I’d stood on the Wall of Small Basel, farthest northeast in the city, and listened to the Munster bell sound twelve, then faint moments later heard the clock in Riehen five miles away answer with eleven. In Riehen, I’d heard that church, just outside my parents’ house and where my father is pastor, sound three, and then I’ve walked out into their garden to hear the Munster clock’s dim four.

But I listened to distant clocks for another purpose than contemplating the separateness of Basel. Knowing the distance and the time between Basel and Riehen, I’d calculated the speed that sound moves through the air. Even sound had laws to obey.



But now the bells were tolling for Knipper. It was his time. He was neither in Basel nor outside it.

I stopped in the Barefoot Church to think a moment, and pray, but only briefly. And when I came out into the Square, Daniel was coming out of the Boot and Thorn opposite me. He almost turned away but then his compulsion to talk overcame and he came over. He was jittery and tense.

“Now Leonhard,” he started, “for this Inquiry.” He was the most changeable man, all different from his morning cockiness, different again from his morning urgency.