Ghosts of Engines Past

by McMullen, Sean

  “Your lordship, I would never—”

  “Do not disappoint me, Sister Michelle. You have immense talent and drive, I have studied your file in detail. We need you, to put it bluntly. We need to advance the power and technology of our fleets and defences, and very, very quickly. As it stands, we can only guess how advanced this new species might be. It could be thousands of years ahead of us, or even more. The scans of its ship show only a twisted warp in space, and motion. Their first gunpowder weapons are probably embedded in sandstone that is millions of years old. The question is, do we stand a chance?”

  “With respect, lordship, the question is do we deserve a chance?”

  Instead of flying into a rage, the battle-maestro laughed.

  “Probably not, Sister Michelle, but there is yet another and more important question: will we be annihilated for what we have already done? Studies done on the Centaurus worlds have shown evidence of vaporisation without energy blasts.”

  “As with our missionary cruiser?”

  “Yes. Surviving records indicate that they were a proselytising species, just like we are. Steps have been taken to redress our centuries of religious bullying and bigotry. The pope will die later today, along with selected cardinals. Heretics will be blamed, but a far more liberal set of replacements has been arranged. Already and edict has been sent out to all worlds for everyone with 'Inquisitor' in his title to be executed at once, and for all Christian missions to be abandoned and destroyed, but I fear that none of this will be enough. Five drones have suddenly gone silent, and at least a dozen missionary ships have ceased to report back to their parish stations. We are going to have to fight. Again I ask, do we have a chance?”

  The supreme commander of the armed forces of an interstellar empire was asking me if we had a chance against a super-civilization millions of years old. Convent education was not geared to cope with matters like this, but I had a long history of studying forbidden truths and theories.

  “Wasps have had an fairly advanced social structure, and have been building elaborate honeycomb nests for millions of years, yet they did not go on to invent laser cannons and starships,” I pointed out. “Just think about it, they had advanced organisation, communication and their versions of cities long before humans evolved—”

  I caught myself before uttering the heresy that humans were descended from apes, but Battle-Maestro Rodrigarian just smiled and nodded.

  “What you are saying is that a society that was at our level millions of years ago may not have advanced so very far in all the time since. Yes, that is a possibility. Blind chance may also be on our side.”

  “I do not follow, Lordship.”

  “The Earth-Luna system is the only one known in three thousand worlds that provides a perfect solar eclipse. That is blind chance. Perhaps the Don Alverin sword is a similar act of blind chance. Perhaps no scientist of any species on any world in the history of the galaxy has ever been able to build a transmitter of temporally entangled matter—including those who fly the twist-warp ships. We may have something truly unique.”

  “So, we may have an advantage that even the aliens of the twist-warp ship do not. We can advance ourselves time and again, and develop have better and better weapons between the years 1404 and 2004.”

  “Your reported powers of comprehension are no exaggeration, sister. I am truly gratified. Well now, do I have your cooperation? Will you read our tracts on weapons technology to William Tynedale?”

  There was a pause in our dialogue, but it was not for dramatic effect. This might be a monstrous hoax. No order to destroy the missions might have gone out, and no conspiracy to kill the pope might exist. I glanced at his hands. He wore no ring.

  “I agree, Battle-Maestro, but under one condition,” I announced.

  “Name it. The entire industrial might and wealth of the empire is at my command.”

  “You will marry me and declare me to be your personal strategic advisor.”

  This time it was the battle-maestro's turn to pause and contemplate his reply.

  “I could have your vows annulled within a quarter hour, then arrange your appointment to my personal staff... but is marriage really necessary? I am a career eunuch after all, and I would have to sign a solemn oath to have a testicular transplant from cloned tissue before the church would sanction any marriage.”

  “I have an interest in neither children nor consummation, Lordship. If the truth be known, I love the dead William Tynedale more than I could ever love you.”

  “Then why?”

  “As a gesture of good faith. Look on the positive side, Lordship. This way you will have the only person who can influence the Tynedale Brothers by your side and totally within your control for as long as we both shall live.”

  The ceremony took place within that very hour. Fifty seconds after concluding my vows, I was sitting with a radio transmitter in my hand and a prepared tract on weapons science and technology in front of me. My husband was sitting by my side.

  “I had never imagined myself married,” the battle-maestro admitted, perhaps a trifle unhappily.

  “Do not fret, Lordship. After I have broadcast this to my true love nothing will be the same. Look at the Journal. I have been a teacher, scientist, explorer, and now a nun.”

  “Ex-nun.”

  “Ah, indeed. In a few minutes I may be a pope, while you become a scientist.”

  “Do you really love William Tynedale? He has been dead for over five centuries.”

  “Yet when I press this transmission key he will be alive and listening, in his shop near Dowgate Wharf in London. It will be 1404, he will be twenty two.”

  “So, you fancy younger men, yet you marry me?”

  “Ah, but he is thirty five, just as I am, and he is eighty three and on his deathbed. I have always admired him, and thought his portraits quite enchanting. Not a very seemly thing for a woman of the cloth to do, but then I am hardly the ideal template for the Scholastic Brides of Christ.”

  “You had best begin the transmission, my dear. Will you declare as much affection as your other, alternative selves?”

  “I shall speak with my heart. William knows the sound of its voice, after all.”

  I picked up the little RF transmission unit and clicked it on.

  “William, it is Michelle once again. Please heed my words, for this time our world is in great peril from a terrible enemy. I have even more advanced principles for you to pass on to the generations who will follow you, and who will have developed the more advanced scholarship required to understand them. William, in this future... no, you would not believe my fate in this one future of many. How I wish that I could hold you in my arms and be yours alone. Still, at least you can hear my voice and I may read your words in the Tynedale Journal, which seems always to have been rediscovered in 2001. William, we have love, and how many other who have each other in flesh truly have love? Listen now to these principles, and write with great care.”

  William always wrote with great care. Reviewing the journal, I could not see any mistakes of importance in the many dozens of pages. I had been reading aloud, trying to imagine myself as myself of the earlier, alternative futures.

  “It is quite surreal to hear you read the words of your other self, your majesty,” said Professor Chester as I put the Tynedale Journal down on the table. It was still open at the last page.

  The floor of the impact shelter shuddered beneath our feet as yet another near-lightspeed impactor slipped past out defences and detonated. We had countered the molecular disruption weapon of the twist-warp ships, yet it was only one of many. Although none of their weapons were absolutely invincible, they seemed to outnumber us by many orders of magnitude. Earth and humanity were running out of sheer resources.

  “I wonder why they bother,” I said, thinking aloud. “Most of our industry and all of our weapons systems are in space, and carefully dispersed.”

  “Then why do we pour resources into defending the place?” Chester asked
, as sharp as ever. “There must be a reason.”

  “Very soon we shall not, my loyal and trusted friend. The fabrication asteroids can be defended, and even moved, as can the hatcheries and maintenance ships. Then even your university will be doomed.”

  “Surely not, your majesty. We are nine miles deep.”

  “A direct hit overhead would destroy the access shafts. Even if you survived the shockwaves, you would be marooned down here forever. I cannot allow that. The university staff and data lattice libraries will be dispersed to our factory strongholds. Then Earth will be left to its fate.”

  There was no reply that was quite appropriate to a pronouncement like that. Chester sat in silence, looking glum and lost in his thoughts. I picked up the textpad with the latest transmission to the Tynedale Brothers and began to read.

  “Be it known that her royal highness, Princess Michelle of the House of Watson has found just and well-founded cause—”

  “Ah, technically that should be 'majesty', not 'highness'. You are now the ruling monarch.”

  “True, but the date on the header is eleven days ago, before my brother was killed. Back then I was highness, not majesty.”

  “Most unfortunate, but he died bravely.”

  “Steven, I cannot read this. In all my other selves' transmissions I have just been a clever girl, telling a boy that she rather fancies him, and expressing her regrets that she cannot ask him for a date. William Tynedale knows those Michelles, he does not know me.”

  “You may say what you will, your majesty. You are the empress now, you answer to nobody under the rule of the Solarian Empire.”

  I say down at the desk and put a sensor against my forehead, then thought a few new lines of text into the pad. The room shook as another NLS impactor detonated, and the lights dimmed for a moment. As I looked up, Chester was already on his feet, and staring nervously at a long crack in the ceiling.

  “Do you really think this will do any good?” I asked as I put the sensor aside.

  “We have managed to gain an advantage, that is why they are bombarding us now. They never suspected that we would put our entire battle fleet into capturing one of their twist-warp ships intact. Now we have reverse-engineered some of their basic technology, and they want to annihilate us before we can fabricate a twist-warp fleet.”

  “That operation was a near thing. The twist-warp ship was just a scout, yet it took three of our heavy cruisers with it. Even then I suspect that we only disabled it with a lucky shot.”

  “Lucky of not, we know a little of their technology now—and a little of their physiology as well. Our weapons are the equal of theirs, it is only in their phase-hysteresis shields and space distortion cloaking technology that they are seriously ahead. Transmit the principles back to William Tynedale, and the physics will be folklore by the time humanity reaches the next version of 2004.”

  I had no doubt of that. Apart from the introduction, the text had been prepared by our very finest educators. In theory the Tynedale Brothers would be able to construct a crude resonance pistol, and perhaps even a gravity induction unit capable of propelling one of their wooden warships through the air and even into space. Warnings about flying too high and not being able to breathe had been included, of course. With the knowledge in my hands England might have conquered the entire world by the next 1470. Even a lunar landing might not be out of the question within the Tynedale Brother's lifetime. But then what, and why? I glanced at Chester. Manic, headlong progress had been his entire existence. The word 'why' was reserved only for experimental results that did not quite match expectations.

  “In that 2004 we shall have met with the twist-warp ships on an equal footing, or better, your majesty.”

  “So everyone tells me, but it is my place to ask why.”

  “Why, your majesty?”

  “Why, Chester. What if the twist-warp ships are only one of several dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of levels of response?”

  “I am not sure that I follow.”

  “Take this example. A wasp stings you. You swat it. Its nest-mates swarm after you. You retaliate with insecticide. They breed immunity into their warriors. You resort to a flamethrower. They then start to breed prodigiously, and hide their nests in places that you cannot afford to burn. You blanket the continent with thermonuclear warheads. They learn to build ocean-going nests. Need I continue?”

  “You say that the twist-warp ships may be only the swatter layer, your majesty?”

  “Perhaps. They may well have had hundreds of millions of years to develop their weapons, Chester, and it does not seem likely they will be armed with only swatters. Perhaps we can counter their swatters, perhaps we can even tell William Tynedale about their insecticides and flame throwers, but where does it end? Perhaps when one of them decides that we are too advanced, and bypasses several layers of defence to the anti-wasp thermonuclear bomb.”

  “It... ah, I disagree,” said Chester, showing rare uncertainty for a moment. “They will always go layer by layer, and that we shall always keep learning from them. We have the Tynedale Journal and the Don Alverin Sword. The aliens in the twist-warp ships do not. Our temporal entanglement link is our only advantage, but it is a massive advantage.”

  “I wonder. Analysis of the Journal indicates that we have advanced our technology by an estimated thousand years since my first words to William Tynedale, yet where has it taken us?”

  “It has taken us a long, long way. We are like mice challenging tigers, yet we are holding our ground.”

  “Holding our ground? The surface of the Earth has been reduced to gravel by the NLS impactors. We do not even know the location of the aliens' home planet, or even if they have one. We have damaged a dozen of their ships, destroyed three and captured one in the five years since the war began. They have disintegrated seven thousand of ours.”

  “The war was inevitable. They attacked our ships first. It was completely unprovoked, our commanders, captains and admirals have been under absolutely binding orders to approach the twist-warp ships with their weapons powered down. Ninety ships were vaporised while approaching them in friendship, before we began to fight back.”

  “Was it possible to be friendly? Since Prince Isambard Brunel commissioned the Solarian Interstellar Battle Fleet in 1851, it has grown to ninety five thousand ships. We Solarians look dangerous. The twist-warp ships may be piloted by shepherds, who protect their peaceful client worlds. We must seem like wolves, all ready to prey on anything weak with our warships.”

  “Without the battle fleet we would already have been annihilated.”

  “The twist-ship aliens have not harmed the Esgrr, Volderrii or Sgort, and they have civilizations tens of thousands of years old.”

  “They're spineless philosophers. They are no threat, they do not even have starships. We are different, and we are not beaten. Now it is time to strike back. It is within your power alone, your majesty. William Tynedale listens to you. That gives you unimaginable power.”

  “What do you mean? What are you proposing?”

  “The Tynedales hid their Journal, and the sword itself, they only released the scientific principles and inventions. The physical journal and sword were only discovered months ago, when the Chesters' crypt was opened. Why had they been hidden? Hidden they certainly were. The sword and journal were sealed into the lead coffin of Sir Percy Chester, a man who had nothing to do with the Tynedales. That grave is always discovered in 2001. You are always born, and you are always a great admirer of William Tynedale. You are what the physicists call a temporal immutable.”

  “I know, I know. The pasts are unchanging, but can be added to. I have a general idea of the theoretical principles, even if I do not follow all the mathematics.”

  “Yes, and this is how we can accelerate the sciences of humanity by many orders of magnitude. Tell the Tynedales not to hide the sword. That way we can continuously communicate our advances to those who follow them, we can have a constant feedback. In six hundred
years we could advance ten million years, even a hundred million! By the time we are standing here in 2004, humanity could be the master race of the galaxy, or even the entire Proxiarate Cluster of galaxies.”

  “This is just conjecture, professor.”

  “Not so. A committee of the finest minds in the Solarian Empire was commissioned to study this very proposition. Their computer models are the basis of what I say to you now.”

  All of this was new to me, and I found it alarming.

  “Why was I not told?”

  “There has not been time, you have been Empress and Supreme Commander of the Solarian Empire for only eleven days. Even your coronation has not yet taken place, you are technically still a princess, not an empress.”

  “I am aware of the intricacies of imperial law and protocol, professor,” I replied coldly. “There has not yet been time for a formal coronation.”

  “Or for this briefing, until now,” he said with a forced smile. “Your majesty, there is no conspiracy. All this was put in a queue behind matters of higher strategic priority. The NLS impactors, most obviously.”

  “So what must I do, under this new plan?”

  “Read your personal introduction, read the summaries of the most advanced sciences that humanity knows of, then instruct William and Edward Tynedale not to conceal the sword after they die, rather to leave it to their heirs as a treasure, as the salvation of humanity. It is entangled with itself, six hundred years in the past, it can pour the learning of the present into the past, spawning an infinite number of increasingly advanced pasts to lift us to unimaginable heights. The decision is yours, your majesty, and it holds the only means to fight a race a hundred million years more advanced than out own. What do you say?”

  My mind was already made up, but I had been embroiled in court intrigues and politics ever since I had been able to hold a coherent conversation. I allowed a suitable dramatic pause, frowning and nibbling at my lower lip all the while.