Extract from Chapter 1 of Seekers of the Golden Matrix by Roman Gail, published in 2004 by a local press in Auldhabn.
From the distance Auldhabn resembles little more than fleeting light and sound, so many mirages that you half-perceive from the deck of a gently swaying boat. I had come to the city to seek that which I desired, of course, and would not leave until my desires were satisfied. So it transpired that at the dawn of the new millennium I was many, many kilometres from my Taipei home and gradually approaching that dimly-lit isle known as Havland, a suitcase filled with papers and various texts with me, and little else. The captain was a gruff Havlandic man who took the wheel with nary more than a word as we set off from the Danish mainland (Havland having no airport) except that the weather was, and I quote, “fine”. A grey sky begged to differ, pregnant with swirling clouds.
[...]
What can one say about such an old city, besides that profound byronic sense of scale we call the sublime? Auldhabn’s streets were a mixture of weaning tradition and industry, cold concrete sitting side by side with colder stone. There was a sense, altogether, that the city was much to dense and much too old to care for my presence, its permanent inhabitants the eidolons of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of man, building, and the urban rather than any independent agent. The University seemed to scowl at me, its great doors sternly closed, while I quailed on streets that lacked any sense of human proportion or comfort, gleaming in the cold light of midday. It was under these circumstances that I ducked into a small store that purported to sell various antiquities and old books, its dusty windows offering a wan display of faded blue china and frail yellow paper.
It would be a great understatement to say that the interior of the store differed greatly from the streets without. Where the roads demonstrated a sort of consistent, masterminded even-handedness that was the mark of a meticulous city-planner, the store offered only barely restrained chaos, books and trinkets bulging from every corner – packed into shelves, squeezed onto and beneath tables, hanging from racks and buried inside glass-fronted cabinets. Descending the steps I almost immediately tripped over a stack of antique magazines, showing long-gone smiling faces and written entirely in Havlandic. It was the vintage documents, however, that interested me the most: maps of Auldhabn in the various stages of its constitution were framed, dated back to 1618, showing the ten numbered quarters that would become four districts over time. The owner, fragile, bespectacled and fraught with whiskers, gingerly pointed at a small and unfriendly section of English titles hidden in the corner. I nodded politely, then went back to my old books. As I tugged a ratty volume out of the case (just about the only word on the cover I could make out was the utterly incomprehensible “Rasanerens”), a small slip of paper folded into three fell out.
It was a handwritten letter, of that much I could tell, with an officious looking seal of state affixed to the top left, yet it also bore something I did not expect. A red, square ink-stamp in the bottom where a signature might have gone, an angular pattern of undoubtedly east asian design, barely legible after years of wear.
On some sort of strange impulse I immediately purchased the book with the letter inside, and left the store. The owner, distracted with a bird outside of his window, simply pointed to a badly written english sign that listed the price. The only word he spoke was at the end of our transaction, seemingly to nobody, was “Rasaneren.”
That night I took it out again, sitting in a small hotel bedroom that faintly reeked of fish. The letter was no doubt written in Havlandic, and featured some words I could recognise scattered throughout, etched into the parchment with a thin, spidery hand. One of these words was Kongenshabn, the old name for the city, and the other Rigsrasaner, which I took to be related to the subject matter of the book. The room featured no amenities besides an ancient table, a lamp that resembled either an 18th century ornament or a fire hazard, and a dejected navy pamphlet labelled “The Bookbinders’ Privilege for 2001”, which was some sort of almanack and tourist’s guide written in English. There I found another incidence of the word Rigsrasaner, and (to my surprise) a Japanese name attached:
During the reign of Stefan the Learned, his reputation for treasuring knowledge spread across Europe, attracting admirers from afar. Amongst these was the Japanese mathematician Mori Koyu, who entered into Stefan’s court after travelling with a Dutch merchant for several years, during which he had picked up German and French. Mori’s skill in mathematics and rhetoric stunned the court, and Stefan appointed him the Royal Mathematician (Rigsrasaner), using the Havlandic romanisation of the Japanese term wasan, meaning “Japanese Mathematics”. Mori was given a residence in Auldhabn, and collected several students (the Rasaneren) to whom he taught mathematics and languages.