Now that I think about it further, if I had just taken tea like a respectable gentleman, I would not be in this position. One week ago I had a mindless, quotidian choice between taking tea with the fellows in Post-Newtonian Physics or going back to my office to mark papers. At that time it appeared that either choice would not have any lasting effect, but as they say, appearances are deceiving.
While I was sipping tea and reading a poorly-composed précis on Marx, a courier entered my study without so much as knocking. Before I could say anything, the weathered courier (tracking mud all over my Indian carpet) placed a single oilskin envelope on my desk and left, without saying a word. The note, as it turned out, was a tersely written request for my presence in the study of one Doctor Zhivorad of Macedonia, in precisely three days.
Three days is hardly enough time to travel from London to Kumanovo, but the urgency of the note and Zhivorad's renown (he was a Most Highly Esteemed Fellow of the Royal Society) seemed sufficient reason to pillage my expense account and hire a private airship.
I vaguely remember entering the study of the professor with some degree of apprehension. The doctor, a swarthy man of maybe thirty years, sat at his desk smoking a pipe of something that smelled too sweet to be tobacco, and yet too sour to be a derivative of Cannabis sativa. Smoke filtered up through the dying light that trickled through the venetian blinds. He was smiling, well, grinning really, and made no attempt to rise. I sat down quickly and exchanged pleasantries.
"I am glad you have come," said Professor Zhivorad in an accent thick as Turkish delight, "especially on such short notice." Who calls two days' notice to travel half-way around the world short notice? "May I offer you anything before we get started? I'm afraid once I've started, I won't be able to stop until I reach the end."
"I'm fine, really. Thanks."
"Well then, where can I begin? I wish I could start from the beginning, but that would take entirely too long. You're aware of most of my research in biological phenomena, anyway, so perhaps I should start from my first meeting with Neval. I had been researching the effects of — oh, damn it; what's the scientological term for it? Röntgenstrahlen? On living tissues." At least, I think he said Röntgenstrahlen; his German was even worse than his English.
"We weren't using animals, of course, but live cultures of Escherichia coli. Neval was one of my research students, recently transfered from the Sorbonne. She was radiant, truly radiant, like a bird caged in its youth that is freed before it has forgotten what freedom is. By this I mean she was a Muslim, but of the new generation that are not so tied to tradition. Oh, you needn't look at me like that; I knew I shouldn't have gotten involved with a student but — well, as your people say, 'one thing led to another.'"
My mind wandered as he recounted the too-familiar tale of their relationship. It occurred to me that his pipe had started to smolder pitifully as its phlogiston exhausted itself.
"Of course, I didn't allow our romance to interfere with my — well, our — research. As Nevi and I repeated our experiments, we discovered the most amazing thing: using samples from the same batch of bacteria produced different results. I'm sure you're aware of your countryman Darwin's theory that predicts such things in genetic lines, but our host batch had never been exposed to the rays. There was no linear natural selection; as it were, it was as if the host culture sensed the remote death of its progeny."
Some part of me was shocked at this momentous revelation, but that part was buried under wooly blankets and tuckered up next to a fireplace. A final wisp rose bravely from the dead embers. I felt thoroughly numb.
"Then, one night, as I was completing a paper on the theory, I discovered a note in her belongings. Two words:
'ihn umbringen'
And suddenly everything fit together. Her encyclopedic knowledge of my research, my papers, despite the gaping holes in her understanding elsewhere, horribly confirmed my theory. Even the mumbling in her sleep, that seemed suddenly less Turkish and more Teutonic — Oh, I should have known. Or perhaps I did all along and just refused to admit it. She was no doubt a seductress, an assassin...!"
I blinked, exanimate, as the pipe fell and clattered on the desk. Doctor Zhivorad's mouth was half open, but the musculature reminded me not of a living being that had spoken a second before, but of the teaching cadavers at Cambridge. I stood, too numb to be concerned. For the first time, I saw the knife jutting out of his abdomen, covered in what appeared to be week-old blood.
I walked, dimly, out of the study. But there she was, holding the mate to the jagged kris that slayed her lover and teacher. How could Zhivorad have known she knew about his last trump card? No time for questions, I could not resist; she stabbed me through the chest. But death did not come. As I lie here in my own blood and bile, I make one last hypothesis: the recovery of emotion marks the end of Doctor Zhivorad's herbal remedy for death. And now, I feel regret at not taking tea with the post-Newtonians.
There's nothing more Victorian than a masquerade ball...