Ghosts of Engines Past

by McMullen, Sean

  “Well, that would explain a lot if it had been you who had heard the sword speak in 2004. The question is who would be talking about supermarkets and the London Orbital six hundred years ago? In fact, how could the sword speak at all...”

  My voice trailed away as I recalled something from a yacht race, years earlier. I had been a member of the university yacht club. The club owned no yacht, but members volunteered to crew the yachts of people who could afford them, and the memory of one such vessel returned to me now. Through some freakish accident in its manufacture, the metal mast acted like a crystal set and picked up one of the coastal radio stations. Crystal sets work on the power of the radio signals themselves, so they need no batteries. If a mast could do it, why not a sword?

  “You were saying?” he asked.

  “There are documented cases of odd objects like false teeth and stoves picking up radio transmissions. I once heard music coming from the mast of a yacht.”

  “So it could be possible with a sword?”

  “Why not try testing it? Do you have one of those radio communicators handy?”

  He fetched his transceiver. It was a large, solidly built, handheld unit from before the days of cell phones.

  “Now that I think of it, Ellen did take the Don Alverin sword to London about a fortnight ago. It was something to do with an insurance assessment.”

  “So it would have been in the car with her if she called you with her radio?”

  “Well, yes. But she would have heard the sword picking up her words.”

  “Not if it was in the boot or on the back seat, buried under shopping. Take the sword into another room and put it on a table. I'll try transmitting something to you.”

  Sir Steven left with the sword. I waited a minute, then I turned on the radio unit and spoke my test message. Presently I heard footsteps approaching.

  “That was a naughty thing for Mary's father to do,” he laughed.

  “What? So the sword really did act as a sort of crystal set?”

  “Not very loud, but it was quite clear. What a thought! This could be quite a good tourist attraction for the estate.”

  “But we still have a problem. Radio transmitters are very sophisticated, and need a power source. Nobody could have built one in the early Fifteenth Century.”

  “I suppose supermarkets were pretty thin on the ground too.”

  “Not to mention the London Orbital. Anyway, I should get out my laptop and handheld scanner. Are you sure you have no problems with me copying the Tynedale Journal?”

  “Copy all you like, but try to publish it and you'll find me on your doorstep waving the Copyright Act.”

  He left me with the journal, and I began to unpack my laptop and handheld scanner. The actual idea of communicating with the past had an achingly strong allure. To save my life I could not estimate how many times I had played through the fantasy of stepping into the streets of late Fourteenth Century London, visiting the Tynedales' shop and introducing myself as a foreign student from some very distant land. I would be dressed as a boy, and I would gain the confidence of William by my great scholarship. I would suggest inventions to him, and convince him that all guns should be tested from behind a heavy safety barrier. That would save the brothers in 1406, and they would go on to great and fantastic things. Tynedale's theory of gravitation, Tynedale's laws of planetary motion, the Tynedale reflecting telescope, and the Tynedale methods of differential and integral calculus. It was at this point that the fantasies always broke down. I would reveal myself to be a girl, and William would fall in Love with me. Then what? Live as his wife in the Fifteenth Century, where I would not fit? Bring William to the Twenty First Century, where he would face a lifetime of being a curiosity at the very best? What else could there be?

  It was better to leave my fantasies as fantasies... yet it would be such a fine and splendid thing to save the brilliant Tynedale Brothers from their sad and untimely death in 1406. Still, nothing could go back in time, so the past was as dead as the Tynedales. I taught this sort of thing to my classes of teenagers year after year. Nothing could go faster than light, and nothing could go backwards in time. Suddenly I paused, hands poised above the keys of the laptop. Entangled particles. The memory of an article in some science journal stirred somewhere on the edge of my awareness. An experiment had been conducted, and entangled particles had been shown to communicate faster than the speed of light. If the lightspeed barrier was nothing of the sort, perhaps there was also hope for travel into the past. Even communication with the past would be enough to save the Tynedales.

  Entanglement. The word had a new, exotic feel to it, full of potential. Might objects be entangled in time as well as space? I stared at the words on the page open before me.

  Marry hat er litel lamb

  Hir father short y dead

  And now she takes hir lamb tisk oorl

  Bitweane two bittes off bret

  The style certainly did not belong to the early Fifteenth Century. No more than the London Orbital or supermarkets. I had recited those very words to test the Don Alverin sword as a radio receiver. They had been written as a Fifteenth Century listener might have heard modern words—especially quickly spoken, ill-perceived modern words. Had they existed on the page a few minutes ago? Now I remembered using them because they were on the page, but... my head began to spin.

  William Tynedale had heard my words, and had written them down in 1404. Some veterans of the Battle of Poitiers would have been alive, Joan of Arc had not yet been born. William Tynedale had heard my words! Without another thought I pressed the transmission key of the radio transceiver. I knew the English of the Tynedales reasonably well, so although I spoke in a contemporary style, I tried to speak slowly and to phrase and pronounce everything with an early Fifteenth Century audience in mind.

  “William Tynedale of London, I am speaking from six hundred years in your future. It is very hard to explain. Our philosophical scholarship is very advanced compared with yours. Think of it as dreaming about building a big and splendid house in ten years. The house exists in the future, but as yet there is nothing to see or touch. William, in two years you will die while testing a new culverin. It will explode, killing you and Edward. Please, please, test all your new culverins from behind a mound of earth.”

  I paused, the handheld radio before my lips. What next? I had warned him. He might not die young. He might turn out to be England's Galileo. I could hardly ask him for a date. Even under the best of circumstances he would die over five centuries before I would be born. Think of it like an Internet romance, I told myself.

  “William, I am a female scholar, and I greatly admire you and your work. We can never meet, yet I would like to give you a few little tokens of my esteem for you. Some principles of motion that govern the movement of the planets, a device using lenses and a large, concave mirror to magnify distant objects, an engine powered by steam that is more powerful than horses, and a flintlock that can discharge your culverins in an instant without the need for a smouldering fuse.”

  Being a science teacher, I knew the basic principles of a great many inventions. I was also quite skilled at teaching scientific principles and laws to classes full of teenagers who would rather be doing nearly anything else. What sort of pupil would William Tynedale be? He was brilliant, but he had been born and educated in the Fourteenth Century. I tried to gain his confidence with advice about corning gunpowder to improve its quality, rifling the barrels of his culverins, and of course quite detailed instructions on building a flintlock striker. I went on to describe the pendulum clock, several types of telescope, the microscope, hot air balloons, the principle of the blast furnace, and finally the steam engine. The steam engine might have been a mistake, as it took about half as long as everything else put together. I gave him several stern warnings about taking precautions against exploding boilers, then went on to describe the steam powered ship, and the use of steam engines in factories.

  A light began to wink on my h
andheld transmitter. The batteries were running down.

  “William, for now I must bid you farewell,” I concluded. “I hope with all my heart that my gifts to you are pleasing. Even more fervently, I hope that you adopt my advice on testing your culverins, and that you live to a great age. My heart and my words of scholarship are all that I may give you, but perhaps they will cause you to prosper and be honoured.”

  I put the transmitter down, but dared not look at the journal. Had he heard? Had my words affected history? Drop a stone into a river, and the ripples are soon lost. Build a dam across the river and everything downstream will be changed. I stared at the transmitter, its battery indicator light glowing steadily, beckoning to me. Had I changed the past before? Did I dare to do it again? Could I ever notice?

  Steven came in, followed by a servant carrying a coffee service on a silver tray. He was wearing an earpiece, and was paying me little attention.

  “The Voltaire is safely down on Europa,” he said aloud, but I had the impression that he would have said it whether I had been there or not.

  “A hundred years since Shackleton landed on the moon,” I sighed. “Who would have thought it would take so long?”

  “So long?” he suddenly exclaimed loudly, seeming to notice me for the first time.

  “The moon in 1902, Mars in 1957, and now the Jovian system,” I explained.

  “Yes, yes, quite so Michelle. You are not one who likes to wait for the future, are you—just a minute. They can see ice... and more ice... everywhere there is ice... liquid water beneath the engines... turning back to ice... glorious moment for France... they're opening the champagne—that's it! I can't take any more.”

  He removed the earplug and came around the table to look down at the journal. There were still thirty pages of text, all of it quite basic science, plus a lot of the principles behind various inventions.

  “Nothing more than Baker's three laws of motion and some practical advice for building as steam engine,” he said, sounding as disappointed as I was.

  “There is still the reference near the start, the bit about an enchanted sword speaking the wisdom to them. Also some words of endearment to the brave and clever lady speaking with the sword's voice.”

  “Hah! Nothing more than twaddle. Edward and William Tynedale were two of the greatest theoretical physicists and inventors of all time, and they were Brittanic! This has to be a hoax by the French.”

  “But why? The paper is genuine, and so is the ink. It was found in your library, after all.”

  “It may be an old hoax to denigrate Brittanic science. The technology to fake a journal like this has been around since the 1850s. You know, use early Fifteenth Century blank paper and contemporary ink, then use a molecular penetrating agent to accelerate absorption. Leave it for a century or so to simulate real aging, then have someone slip it into my library—what is so funny?”

  I managed to stop myself laughing with some effort.

  “As conspiracy theories go, that takes a lot of beating. A French plot to disparage the finest of Brittanic science of six hundred years ago, except that it was four hundred and fifty years ago when it started.”

  “Brittania did not exist six hundred years ago.”

  “You know what I mean. If this journal was to become public, why the Tynedale Dissertations on Nature would be proved to be a hoax.”

  “A hoax?” I laughed. “Darling, the earliest published copy of the Dissertations in the Brittanic Library of Congress is dated 1412.”

  “You know what I mean. They owned this sword,” he said. “That sword in the next room still receives radio transmissions, it's a sort of accidental crystal set. It could have received back in 1404. It has been known to be a receiver for over a century.”

  “Who could have had a radio transmitter back in 1404? Lavoisier did not make the first trans-Atlantic transmission until 1799, and even that was only in Watt code.”

  “Some people would say aliens.”

  “Steven, if it was aliens who provided the Tyndale brothers with all their inventions and laws of physics, it would cause a sensation.”

  “Ah, and that's it. Alien contact is that bait to lure us into questioning the Tynedales.”

  The trouble with my husband was that his eccentricity merged into his sense of humour. At some point, the worst of nonsense shared common ground with what he considered to be a real possibility.

  “Steven, as a professor of theoretical physics I can give you any number of other explanations. As a person with a lot more common sense than you I can make quite a few suggestions too.”

  “Name one—as a person,” he said, folding his arms and pouting theatrically.

  “The Tynedale brothers did this hoax themselves, as some sort of joke,” I suggested.

  This was a little too plausible for my husband.

  “All right then, name another, but this time as a professor of physics.”

  “Temporal entanglement.”

  “What? You mean like the quantum entanglement radios the astronauts are using on Europa to communicate instantly with Earth.”

  “Faster than light, not instantly,” I said automatically. “It's spatial entanglement, but just suppose there could be temporal entanglement too. This sword could be entangled with itself, but in an earlier century. Whatever radio transmissions it picks up in 2004 are also picked up by the sword in 1404.”

  “Preposterous.”

  “Oh yes, just like your alien theory.”

  “My alien hoax conspiracy theory, let us be precise about this.”

  “Well we have a way of testing it. The brothers would have been paying the sword very close attention if it had suddenly spoken. I'll prepare a little tutorial in thermodynamics, throw in Galvani's technique for measuring the speed of light, and then give an explanation of Faraday's Law of Relativity. Actually, I ought to include some mathematics as well, or they will not be able to make anything of it. I could give them the technology to make a primitive battery, and even instructions for an electric motor. Perhaps instructions for building a simple spark gap radio transmitter, too.”

  “All right, all right, for once you have out-weirded even me. What is the point?”

  “All of that will appear in their writings, and in this journal,” I said, tapping a blank page.

  “But history will have been changed. What will have been proved?”

  “Plenty. I shall have read out my own name during the transmission. It should show up in this journal. If it does, no French conspiracy.”

  Steven leafed through the pages, smirking. Whoever had made the transmission that William had transcribed had been besotted with him. She had described herself as a scholar, and later as a teacher of youths and girls. Much of her transmission was embarrassingly personal and mawkishly sentimental, yet I had a curious sympathy for her. I had decided to become a scientist after reading his biography at the age of twelve. I drew curious satisfaction from the fact that he had never married, and as a teenager I often fantasised that he had been saving himself for me. I dreamed of inventing a time machine and travelling back to the early Fifteenth Century to meet him. When I married Steven I almost felt as if I were betraying William Tynedale, and that his spirit would be watching sadly as I forsook him for someone else.

  “But if the Tynedales really did get all their science from the future, well, Britannic science and engineering be discredited anyway,” said Steven, sounding almost serious.

  “Ah, but we don't have to publish,” I pointed out.

  The Don Alverin sword had been known to be a crystal set for generations, and a radio transmitter was always kept in the manor house to demonstrate it to guests at dinner parties. It took me an hour or so to gather together some notes and draw up a programme for the transmission. William Tynedale's face stared out from a six hundred year old portrait on the wall. His good looks showed through, in spite of the rather primitive late-medieval style of the artist. Steven was asleep by now, with a half-empty decanter of
port on the coffee table beside his chair. I switched on the little radio transmitter.

  “William Tynedale, this is a message for you from six hundred years in the future. My name is Michelle Evelene Watson, and I am six hundred years in your future. As I sit here, I see your portrait on the wall, and your books are piled high around me. I know you so well that I have fallen in love with you, yet you do not know me at all. I have auburn hair, reaching to my shoulders, I am about your height, and I am thirty-five years of age as I sit here, speaking to you. Strange, is it not? I am thirty-five, yet I am not yet born, I am dead and long buried, and a gawky adolescent, all in your future. I wish to add to the principles spoken to you and your brother...”

  I hesitated. Who had done the earlier transmissions in the journal? Perhaps an alternative me? A Michelle Watson who no longer existed? Certainly the man had shaped my life. In a way he meant more to me than Steven.

  “First, I declare it true that the true speed of light is sufficient to cover one hundred and eighty six thousand miles in the interval between two heartbeats of a man at rest. The speed of sound is much slower, being about thirty times more than a fit man might run...”

  The transmission took some time. I had to speak slowly so that William might copy everything down correctly, and I had to be very careful to phrase everything so that an educated person in the Fifteenth Century could understand what I was saying if he thought about it for long enough. Finally I finished my strangely primitive dissertation on modern science, thumbed the transmitter off, stretched, then picked up the journal. It certainly was a contradiction of scholarship, yet my name appeared there. Not my rank, however. That made me suspicious. I would never give my name without my rank. My rank defined my position in the fleet, in a way my rank defined my existence. Still, there was my name between two detailed dissertations on science... yet some of it was science such as had never existed. Faraday's Law of Relativity? Nonsense. Lord Isaac Newton had discovered his Principle of Relativity in the Seventeenth Century.