Knowing all of this, Below felt slighted that he had not been chosen to learn the book. From the time Scarfinati and Anotine began on their private lessons concerning the text, the young man tried to get her to talk about what she had learned. They would still meet at night and would discover the moment, but even in the throes of passion, or the dreamy time that followed, Anotine never uttered a word about the book. She told him flatly one day that if he were to keep interrogating her about it, she would have to stop seeing him. At her words the secret knowledge he was being left out of became in Below's mind almost like a secret lover whom Anotine was surreptitiously seeing.
Scarfinati noticed the young man's new sullenness and confronted him about it. Below asked why he was not also chosen to learn the book. The great adept told him he was not ready. "You have made great strides in the acquisition of knowledge, but that is only the beginning. I am leaving you an incredible legacy in what I am teaching you, and I don't want it squandered by impatience and immaturity." "But I'm ready," he told Scarfinati. "The very fact that you say that means you are not," said the old man.
Below tried to ignore the issue of the book and dedicate himself to his studies. He neither asked Anotine nor Scarfinati about it, but went through his lessons with a false smile and an exaggerated show of determination. Still, the book always worked its way back into his thoughts, and it began to drive him insane. It was his belief that when Anotine had finished with the special course of study, she would be so superior that she would no longer notice him. Then it struck him that Scarfinati had been planning all along to make her his wife. Such machinations led Below to one overriding desire—he must see the book.
He sneaked into Scarfinati's private study one night when the others were asleep and found it lying on the table, where it had been left from the day's lesson. The cover was fashioned from stiff leather boards with only three straps of leather serving as the spine. Upon opening it, Below saw that the pages were not sewn together as with a bound book, but were merely placed between the covers. There were no numbers in the corners or on the bottoms of the pages, and he wondered how Scarfinati kept track of their arrangement. The text was handwritten in black ink, rows of symbols (stars, circles, squares, florettes, depictions of animal paw prints, a water droplet, the sun, etc.) followed by equal signs and either other symbols or numbers. He carefully perused each page, bringing all his vast knowledge to hear on the system, but in the end found it meant nothing to him.
He was not content to leave things as they were, though, and so he decided to steal one of the pages. Searching through Scarfinati's study, he located the old man's paper and ink. With great care, he produced a facsimile page, using symbolic designs that were much like the others in the book, but of his own invention. The forgery of his mentor's drawing style was exquisite, driven to excellence by the idea that he now had insinuated himself into Anotine and Scarfinati's secret. When he finished, he folded the original page and placed it in his pocket. After returning the book and the writing implements to their appropriate places, he sneaked quietly back to his room. The mask of affability he wore for Anotine after this theft was his first true work of genius.
In his private moments away from the others, he would pore over the original sheet from the memory book. Days passed and he tried to implant some of the symbols that he found on the page into his already-existent memory palace, hoping they might imbue it with creative energy. He felt as if he was really beginning to understand the strange system when one day, while reaching into his mind to retrieve a basic mathematical formula, he discovered that his mnemonic world was slowly disintegrating. The steady forgetting confused him and made him physically dizzy.
He grew concerned when it became evident that he would not be able to halt the dissolution of all the knowledge he had worked so hard to acquire over the years. The idea of confessing what he had done to the old man in hopes that there was some way to reverse its effects was quickly becoming his only option. During this time, Anotine could sense there was something wrong with him. She promised that if he could be patient for a few more days, she would beg Scarfinati to let them go on a vacation. During one of their midnight meetings, she wondered if it wasn't time they should be married.
The feelings of jealousy began to disintegrate along with his memory, hut they were replaced by a sense of guilt. Anotine s concern for him, her desire to he with him, showed that his paranoia had
been unfounded. During a particularly troubling night, he decided to confess the following morning. He only hoped that even if Scarfinati could not forgive him, Anotine might find it in her heart to.
The next day, before he could present himself to his mentor, he heard Scarfinati calling to him from the private study on the second floor. As he mounted the stairs, he wondered if his theft had been discovered. When he reached the closed door of the study, he knocked meekly on it. "Enter," Scarfinati said from the other side.
He opened the door and saw Anotine sitting at the study table in front of the open book. She looked straight ahead with a perfectly blank expression, her mouth slightly open. Next to the open book was the original page that Below had stolen. How it had gotten there, he could only surmise. Scarfinati must have been aware of the theft all along and taken it back through some act of magic. The mysterious old man was nowhere to be found.
Scarfinati never appeared again at Reparata. Below came to realize that the bogus symbols he had inserted into the book on the forged page had been studied by Anotine and put to use in her mind. Because of their ill effect, her thoughts had seized. She could neither think ahead nor remember, but sat perfectly still, staring into that moment when everything came to a halt. He now could no longer deny the truth of his selfishness, and this plunged him into a great depression.
Using a formula the old man had taught him, he entombed Anotine in a chemical ice that was impervious to heat. In that way he hoped to preserve her until he could conceive of a way to free her mind. With the last of his own fading knowledge, he set about learning the symbology of the memory book. This he finally mastered and, almost at the last second, was able to reverse the effects of his mnemonic disintegration. Even when his thought processes had returned to full efficiency, and he was using his mnemonic world as a creativity engine, he still could not discover a cure for Anotine, who lay completely immobilized in her clear sarcophagus.
Her presence tormented him so that he invented a drug that would, for the short time it took control of his body, make him forget the pain of his guilt. Sheer beauty, as he called it, became his refuge, but when even that lost its effectiveness against his anguish, he knew he had to escape. He finally sold Reparata, and with the fortune it brought, he hired a ship and a crew in Merithae. Anotine was loaded into the hold of the ship, and Below gave orders to the captain that he was to stay perpetually out on the ocean. Once a year they would be allowed to dock in order to take on supplies and change crews. It was an odd request, but he had the wealth to back it up. The thought of not knowing with any certainty where Anotine was at any given moment came as a great relief to him.
He spent the next few years searching for Scarfinati, but never found him. The lessons the old man had taught him proved exceedingly valuable, though, and he sold his services to the wealthy and powerful in order to survive. Each spring, he would make his way back to Merithae and wait for the ship to put into port. Then he would visit the hold where Anotine lay like a beautiful insect in amber. It was on his last visit to the coastal town, as he was watching her sail away again toward the horizon, that all at once his mind conceived of a magnificent city. This seed of a thought began to sprout behind his eyes right there on the dock as the outgoing ship diminished against the horizon to a speck of white sand and then fell through the neck of the hourglass.