Ghosts of Engines Past

by McMullen, Sean

  The screen had no answer, and neither did I. No matter how hard I tried to distract myself and let my subconscious produce a brilliant insight, my subconscious remained in bed with a pillow over its head. I made a salad washed in antiseptic for what was a sort of morning dinner, and arranged the individual pieces as the mosaic of a dragon eating an artist. It gave me no inspiration, so I in turn ate the image.

  Having made a mug of coffee, I turned my attention back to the television. It was now showing a comedy skit set on the beach in front of the dragon. A man wearing the stylised badge of three brushes in an A shape that was now imposed on artists was being tied to a pole that had been erected in front of a wall of sandbags. The camera panned across to a firing squad of people dressed only in blankets. It returned to the artist, who was shouting and struggling, condemning all art and swearing that he had never touched a paint brush in his life. The commentator read out his name, principal works, awards, and Arts Council grants. Somebody shouted “Fire!” No special effects could replicate what I saw next.

  “This is real,” I said aloud, numb with shock.

  The camera panned to a queue of artists waiting their turn near the sandbags. Some were on their knees, praying, others struggled with their guards, and a few actually managed a display of dignity. Two guards untied the body of the late artist from the pole and dragged him away. Another artist was dragged forward. The sandbags behind the pole had been so badly flayed by bullets that the sand had mostly leaked out and the wall was sagging in the middle. The commentator asked us to stand by for an important announcement.

  Suddenly my door was smashed in.

  The strangest thing about the raid was that nobody spoke to me directly. Someone called out “That's him!” and I was seized and secured by hands that had evidently become well practised at this sort of thing. Every twist and wriggle that I attempted was easily countered. People with cameras and sound booms crowded into my apartment.

  “Not only is he a highly qualified art critic and academic, he is also a virgin!” cried a journalist wearing a microphone headset who was bracketed by at least a dozen others with cameras.

  On my own television I could see myself being held down and bound. I was symbolic, according to the journalist. I held the very last PhD in art history to be issued before what was now being called the Age of the Dragon. He also kept saying I was a virgin, and from this I deduced that Glenda was involved. After that evening in the bar, she probably followed me for the whole night, learning about my secret identity's job and apartment.

  “A virgin artist, ladies and gentlemen, I know it sounds like a contradiction in terms, but there you have it,” babbled the commentator. “He is to be sacrificed to the dragon itself as proof of—”

  The one sure way to have the sound killed on a lunchtime TV show is to shout obscenities, and I now did precisely this.

  I have little shame when it comes to staying alive. I was dragged struggling and screaming from my apartment, and continued to make an undignified fool of myself in front of several dozen cameras on the street outside as I was held down by eight men and strapped onto a medivac stretcher. I screamed and shouted myself hoarse with some very nasty language until one of my guards inserted a roll of bandage into my mouth. This allowed the television coverage to broadcast sound again, so the journalists returned and explained repeatedly about me being a virgin. Relief from the humiliation came when one of the helicopters hovering above let down a cable, which was attached to my stretcher. I was winched up while other helicopters circled, doubtless transmitting high-definition images of everything to the television screens of everyone with an inclination to watch.

  Being unable to struggle or scream, I now lay limp. The irony was that I was actually not a virgin. I had experienced a single sexual encounter at the age of seventeen, from which I had contracted NSU. Being a person with a phobia of contracting anything at all, this had put me off further sexual encounters. The prospects of getting a sworn statement that I was not a virgin were not good, however. I could not even remember the girl's name, only that she had been the nude model for a painting class.

  On the other hand, distract yourself by screaming hysterically for long enough and your subconscious gets a chance to do some serious thinking. Perhaps my subconscious was just as averse to firing squads as I was, for I suddenly realised that I had the answer to the whole question of the dragon.

  The helicopter landed. From the television, I already knew to expect the pole, the wall of sandbags, the line of men and women wearing blankets and holding automatic rifles, the man holding a ceremonial officer's sabre, the naked Dragonist high priests, the television cameras, and the fluffy sound booms. Glenda was with the Dragonist priests, as naked as all the others but standing in front of them in some position of honour. Dragonist theology had now decreed that only those in the totally natural state could become saints of the dragon. I struggled as the guards began unfastening me. The camera crews crowded in, evidently this was good television.

  My academic record and achievements in art history were read out, it was announced yet again that I was a virgin, then I was invited to confess my sins to the dragon. The roll of bandage was removed from my mouth. Now I had the undivided attention of the world's media, but I did not give them inane babble, abuse, or pleas for mercy. Hoping that my voice would carry, and hoping that the dragon was paying attention, I looked straight up into the enormous face and blank, black eyes.

  “I know you,” I said with the defiance of one with nothing left to lose. “I know what you are. You are all of us. You have come from the combined subconscious of all humanity. We created you without knowing it. Our superconsciousness created you to tell us that art is a mistake. Humanity is on the wrong path! The glories of human art, everything artistic, all that we hold most dear, all of it is a terrible mistake.”

  I paused for breath. The man with the sabre looked to the Dragonist priests. Glenda frowned, then nodded. The sabre began to rise and the members of the firing squad released their safety catches.

  “Forty thousand years ago we started painting on cave walls, but we were on the wrong path!” I screamed desperately. “For a third of humanity's existence we've been building an enormous playground. Now it's time to start again, to get it right.”

  “Take aim!” cried the man with the sabre as I paused to try to remember what else I had thought of.

  I remember a brilliant flash of light and a blast of heat. For some moments I was convinced that I was dead and having an enforced out-of-body experience, then I saw the patches of melted sand and metal where the Dragonist priests, guards, helicopter, firing squad, and man with the sabre had been. Those with the cameras and boom microphones had been spared, along with myself.

  There was a great, deep rumbling, akin to some giant ship grinding against a reef. The dragon's head began to rise, the neck extended, and its face approached me. For an eternity it loomed larger and larger, then it stopped. Had my hands been free I could have touched its lower jaw, yet its eyes were hundreds of feet above me. Moments passed. I remained alive. I had made a claim, I recalled. It was showing that it was interested.

  “What do we do?” squealed one of the camera operators.

  “Keep covering all this,” I advised. “I think the dragon wants the world to hear what I have to say.”

  Every camera turned away from the dragon's head and onto me. I collected my thoughts as best I could and took a deep breath.

  “Why are humans special? Rats outnumber us. The krill have a greater biomass. Termites have survived at least a thousand times longer than humans.”

  Again I paused for breath, and the entire world watched me breathing. I had only one key point, and I had no idea whether it was enough.

  “Our brains did not evolve so that we could build a space station or hunt for microbes in the Martian permafrost. We can do those things, but we don't exist to do those things. We can produce beautiful art, but we don't exist to do that, either. We're like c
hildren who became so good at playing in the sand pit that we never left it. Now we're teenagers, and an adult has come along, kicked over our wonderful sand sculptures, and told us to get a life. Of course we're upset, of course we're confused, but that's tough.”

  I had no more to say, yet still the head the size of an office block loomed over me. For what? Was it waiting for me to tell the world what to do? If so, I was dead. Nothing was left to me but the truth, and the truth was that I knew nothing else. I prepared as best I could for vaporisation.

  “I don't know what the dragon wants us to do,” I confessed. “Maybe the dragon doesn't know either. Certainly the guy who throws the teenagers out of the sand pit doesn't know what they are destined to achieve, but sure as hell it's going to be way more than building sandcastles.”

  At these words the great rumbling began again as the head drew back and lowered itself to the sand.

  “Someone really ought to release me,” I suggested.

  There was an enthusiastic scramble to untie me. I walked to the patch of melted glass where Glenda had been standing.

  “This is what the dragon thinks of Dragonists,” I said, facing the cameras and pointing to the melted sand. “Stop the killing, disband your Dragonist cults, and find some proper clothes.”

  The authority of the dragon was behind me, so the carnage stopped that very hour.

  Since then the dragon has not moved. Every few weeks I make a pronouncement in front of it, and everyone decides that my words are true because I remain alive. I am a modern oracle, with all the advantages that come with such a position. Those who visit the dragon now are mostly tourists, although a few scientists still try to probe it with their instruments. Nobody has learned anything new, and I often wonder if they really expect to. Humanity has had some of its most cherished certainties shattered, yet people now seem oddly purposeful. Values cannot help but change while a two mile long, invincible dragon is monitoring what one does.

  Nevertheless, in the privacy of my study I often gaze at photographs of the Eiffel Tower as if it were a dead lover. This may sound strange, coming from the dragon's oracle, but understanding what the dragon wants is not the same as agreeing with it. In a century or so there will be no more people like me, so nobody will miss what has been lost. Nevertheless, I think it will still be a recognisably human world because our superconsciousness chose to secure our attention and declare its message using a two mile, invincible dragon with an annoyingly smug grin. That comforts me, because even though that vast collective mind cares nothing for our petty agendas and values, and is above even using language, at least it retains a very human sense of humour.

  5. VOICE OF STEEL

  It is 2004, but some people in 1404 are listening to our radio broadcasts.

  Changing the past can seem like a really cool idea until you have to live with the consequences of changing it. If only I had shown that very rich girl a bit more affection on that date, instead of watching the movie. If only I had used that story idea when I thought of it, instead of waiting until someone else thought of it and won that award. If only I had accepted that offer to join the band that later became famous. In my case, the girl's father had some alarming underworld connections, missing the award inspired me keep a sharper lookout for opportunities, and passing on the band probably saved me from getting lung cancer by years of singing in smoky pubs and clubs. When I started writing this story, I quite liked the idea of a time radio. By the time I had finished, I was not so sure.

  ~~~

  The Tynedal Journal ended with the sharp, shocking finality of an executioner's blade. Edward and William Tynedale had died in 1406 when the two-man culverin that they were testing exploded. That information was not an entry, it was on a photocopy that had been inserted by Sir Steven Chester. Up until 1404, most of the journal had been about gunpowder mixtures and alloys for gun castings. The remainder consisted of notes and observations on optics, astronomy, birdflight, and even the design of ships. Then, on the 4th of April, 1404, William noted that he had bought a singing sword from some stallholder in a market, and that he intended to keep it under observation until it sang for him. The sword was Spanish in general style, and he referred to it as the Don Alverin sword.

  The sword did not exactly sing for William, but it did speak. To William it must have been incomprehensible, but like a good scientific observer, he noted down what he had heard as best he could. Being a scholar of early English, I managed to translate the words into what had actually been said by the sword, as opposed to what William had written down. Part of the reason that interpreting thirteen words had taken over an hour was my own disbelief at what I was hearing.

  'Cor toop onter London orbetalle, steefee,' was very hard to explain. 'Wante some thing ater soopr marte?' was also a serious problem.

  Words obviously spoken in English, but transcribed by someone unused to English as we speak it and relying on phonetics very heavily. Either of the Tynedale Brothers might have transcribed the original sentences like this.

  “Of course I intend to have the journal checked for authenticity,” Sir Steven Chester told me as I first read the words that simply could not have existed, but nevertheless did.

  The Tynedale Journal and the Don Alverin Sword were lying on the desk before me. It was 2004, and I was in a country house near Chesterforth, north of London. Sir Steven had discovered the sword and journal sealed up in a grave while the ancestral crypt was being renovated as some sort of tourist attraction. Although he knew little about early English, he had recognised William Tynedale's version of 'supermarket' for what it was.

  “Have you any idea how it could have happened?” I asked.

  “You are the expert, Michelle, I had hoped you would have all the theories.”

  I had no theories. Sir Steven had found my name on the Internet when he had done a search on Edward and William Tynedale. Although I am a schoolteacher rather than an academic, the Tynedales had been almost an obsession of mine since my university undergraduate years. The few surviving records concerning them hinted that they had been quite brilliant scientific observers and innovators, at least the peers of Da Vinci or Galileo. I had copies of everything known about them, and even a few scraps of paper with their writing. I even had a print of the only known picture of William Tynedale hanging in my unit. My dream was to find evidence that they had invented something important, such as a microscope, but that the evidence had been lost after the accident that killed them.

  “I cannot provide any theories about why a sword would say 'supermarket' in 1404,” I admitted. “As for the Tynedale brothers, I thought I knew everything about them, but this journal is new to me. Do you have a family connection—like an ancestor or yours that was their patron?”

  “Not that I know of. What can you tell me about them?”

  “They were gunsmiths, although Edward was an alchemist as well. William had been apprenticed to a jeweler as a boy, then he went on to make several crown-wheel escapement clocks. He had also experimented with lenses, and constructed what he called a compound machine for drawing objects large. If that machine was a telescope, then it was two centuries before the first telescope was supposed to have been invented. If it was a compound lens microscope, well, they were still a long way ahead of everyone else.”

  “So William was the brains of the family?”

  “They were both bright, but William was the dreamer, while Edward did the management and merchandising. They were brilliant, successful, and comfortably wealthy when that culverin exploded and killed them. Had they even lived to their thirties, they might have revolutionised English science and industry. This journal proves it beyond doubt. There are notes on a working telescope, along with observations of lunar craters and the moons of Jupiter, the design for an iron foundry, and even the suggestion for an 'unsinkable' iron ship.”

  From my reading of the Tynedale Journal, I could imagine the consequences of the Tynedales living another three or four decades and transforming English
industry. The industrial revolution would have taken place in the late 1500s rather than the late 1700s, for example, and William would have transformed astronomy and physics two hundred years before Galileo. Where would humanity be by now? A single, stylised portrait of William had survived, and I now opened a folder and showed a colour print of it to Sir Steven. William had a dreamy look about him, yet he was well dressed and seemed quite dynamic as well. I actually fancied him in an odd sort of way, and I had even dated a string of men who resembled him. I did not let Sir Steven know any of that.

  “This journal could be one of the greatest finds in the scientific history,” I said as I gazed sadly at the page open before me, shaking my head as I spoke.

  “Could?” asked Sir Steven, who saw it as first rate publicity material to draw tourists to his estate.

  “This word is definitely 'could', rather than 'is'. All that material on the Tynedale telescopes and iron foundry designs is in the same journal as the words 'supermarket' and 'London Orbital'. Those words brand the entire thing to be a fake.”

  “But we could get it dated. Don't they use carbon or something?”

  “Yes, but even if the paper and ink was dated to around 1400, people would just say it was a clever fake.”

  “And an obvious fake. I mean my wife radios me from her car nearly every day about supermarket shopping or turning the oven on.”

  “Radio? As in cell phone?”

  “No, it's a pair of rather old-fashioned radio transceivers. It's cheaper to use them than run cell phone accounts. You know, belt tightening while we get the estate's finances back on an even keel.”