by Mary Gentle
The sky is full of helicopters, and the military have a patrol ship on station. At the land-site, a lot of the local arrangements for food and transport have dried up. Colonel ██████ arrived back there, far less jovial, and with far more men. Trucks all over the place. ‘Perimeter security’, he says. They haven’t had any severe security problems in the last weeks, so why now? Why all these men in uniform, who don’t care WHERE they put their feet?
Isobel says Minister ██████ is becoming concerned about ‘Western exploitation of local cultural resources’. Well, as a Westerner, I hardly expect to be popular in this part of the world, and I can see their point. But, Isobel signed a contract with the government when this expedition was first mooted, agreeing that no artefacts should be removed from Tunisian territory. What kind of a person do they think she is?
Cynicism might lead one to think this is all about who will gain financially, but I may be doing the Minister a disservice. Whether his concern is genuine or not – and I suspect it is perfectly genuine – what I can’t see is any way of pointing out that this site’s remains are not from HIS culture!
I have had to leave the translation. I have to be here when they bring up the Stone Golem.
You have my full permission to show this partial translation of the Sible Hedingham ms to William Davies. If it helps Vaughan Davies, then that would only be a small repayment for the debt of scholarship we owe to him.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #236 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 21/12/00 at 01.07 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I’m worried. When I got back from East Anglia, I found that someone had broken in and been through my personal files. And my hard disk. When I got to the office this morning – same thing. And not like a burglary. Too neat.
I think I would just have stayed puzzled if I hadn’t phoned a friend of mine. Yes, I’m in a fairly obscure area of academic publishing, but I do have friends in investigative journalism. He’s one of them. His first reaction was, this must be some kind of ‘security’ thing.
I hadn’t thought it through, before. The Middle East has been nothing but terrorism and war for years; if you have found something on the seabed that records say isn’t there – my friend suggests there are bound to be ‘spooks’. People are bound to be investigating, aren’t they? Especially if the news is getting out.
Pierce, I KNOW this sounds alarmist. But it wasn’t just somebody breaking in and trashing my place. Depending on how you feel about being interviewed by security people, if you’ve been keeping copies of these messages, you might want to wipe your (or Isobel’s) disk. And if you’ve got hardcopies, shred them.
I don’t usually keep copies of my mail, I don’t have the disk space, but I do usually keep a paper copy in a file. Because you were so concerned about academic confidentiality, I’ve been even more careful; hence public-key encryption of the actual messages. In fact, I had taken the paper copies and floppy disk in a folder down to the sheltered accommodation in Colchester with me, yesterday, thinking I might need them to refresh my memory if Vaughan did finally say something – you know I’m not an academic myself. So I still have them.
I’m putting them in store, somewhere safe. If this IS something official, then they can come to me officially, with a warrant. Then it’s fine. But not before.
I’m going to talk to the MD in an hour, see what his position on this is. He’d better stand by me on this one.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #430 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 22/12/00 at 09.17 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
We’re out.
Things have been so confused, I don’t know if it’s been on the media, given Christmas will be taking over the UK – we’re supposed to be out of Tunisian territory completely now, they don’t even like us hanging about in offshore waters.
I’m putting this out on the net to as many people as I can reach. Talk to your media contacts. Kick up a fuss. They CAN’T shut this site off from scientific excavation! They can’t KIDNAP archaeological evidence! It just isn’t right: we have to know.
On consideration, of course, we don’t ‘have’ to. That is a preoccupation very much of our time. ‘Nothing must stand in the way of the discovery of the truth.’ In other parts of history, of course, there are other priorities: ‘nothing is as important as’ ideology, say, or commerce, or military force.
GOD DAMN IT, I WANT TO KNOW. They can’t do this to us!
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #240 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 22/12/00 at 10.04 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Had you got the Stone Golem up from the ruins of Carthage? Where is the messenger-golem from the land-site? Pierce, what is happening, I can’t do anything if I don’t know the _facts_.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #431 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 22/12/00 at 11.13 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
Sorry, yes you need to know, too busy talking to every contact I have, if there’s no other pressure we can bring to bear, at least let’s have the academic community and the media on our side!
Isobel’s team had barely STARTED their analysis of the Stone Golem. When I got there, they had it in the holding tank; there was an argument going on about some minor damage that had been done – or not done – by the divers. It can’t have been much more than two hours after that when the Tunisian navy moved in and confiscated everything. Everything apart from what Isobel and her people had on their backs! They stripped the ship bare. They removed the holding tank, and the Stone Golem.
I cannot BELIEVE this has happened. There was no need. I know Isobel: she will have had no INTENTION of removing any artefacts from Tunisian jurisdiction.
But there is one thing I can say without any possible contradiction – I saw it with my own eyes.
When I first reached the Stone Golem in the holding tank, I was quite literally speechless. Sound echoing off metal, light rippling off water, all the sounds of a modern ship at sea – and there, in the middle of it, in the tank, this great carved larger-than-human figure. With its plinth, it must weigh tons; I have every respect for the team who raised it from the seabed.
What I’d seen through the cameras didn’t prepare me for seeing it in reality. As you know, I’d seen it covered in debris, with a film of silt over it from the ROVs moving around, and encrusted with undersea life. By the time I got to the ship, a section had been cleaned up, and Isobel herself was in the tank working on others.
The MACHINA REI MILITARIS. Sightless eyes staring. Hinged bronze joints clustered thickly with verdigris. This much, as you know, had been visible underwater, on camera. The whole of it wasn’t clear.
Now it is.
The face, the limbs, the plinth: the SHAPE of all of them was clear on camera. But what we’ve been seeing has only been the surface-encrustations. With the encrustations removed, it’s become possible to see the surface of the stone.
Some of it still IS stone. The team says it was all originally a silicon-based conglomerate of some kind.
Ninety per cent of it is VITRIFIED silicon. Glass.
At the front, which is what we’ve been seeing on the image-enhancers, the shape of the head and the front of the torso are clear. Most of the rest of it, including the plinth, is melted. Silt and sandstone fused into heavy, brittle glass. It has FLOWED.
Silicon sand turns to glass if you put it under sufficiently high temperatures. Imagine the strength of the lightning-discharge that could have done this; a bolt that would have – that did, from the underwater images – crack the building in which it stood wide open.
An electrical discharge powerful enough to sear the w
hole of this artefact into vitrified sand. The internal structure melted into impure, light-shattering, water-reflecting glass: I saw Isobel’s face reflected in it like a mirror.
It IS the Stone Golem. It HAS been destroyed, in exactly the way that the chronicle relates. Anna, this archaeological evidence backs up this manuscript. The Sible Hedingham ms is our first history.
I can only pray that this is a temporary aberration on behalf of the government. I am happy for any artefact to remain in Tunisia, as long as Isobel’s people have permission to carry on their analysis. A silicon computer. Even a destroyed one. What we can learn
Interruptions. More later.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #241 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 22/12/00 at 02.24 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I’m worried I haven’t heard from you. Where are you? Are you still on the expedition ship? Mail me, phone me, something.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #447 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 22/12/00 at 06.00 p.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
Still on ship, but I’m having to coax my way to accessing communications. The Tunisian patrol boat on station has been joined by two more. You have no IDEA how much this scares me. The idea of being caught up in an actual ‘incident’ – I know, as a biographer, one gets immersed in one’s subject; this has cured me of any idea I might have had that I could have lived Ash’s life.
Isobel says the British Embassy here has been in contact to suggest WE stop causing trouble. God help me, I know the Mediterranean is a sensitive area, but that’s a bit rich! I wish I had a contact in the Foreign Office. Knowing several advisory professors on security affairs may help, but it’s going to take time for me to get in touch with them.
Tami’s colleague James Howlett informs me that the net traffic on this subject is now being ‘monitored’, and to make sure I am always encrypted. I suppose he knows. I suppose it will be. What HAPPENED? Something that to me is an interesting matter of high physics is apparently making governmental agencies (as Howlett put it) ‘shit themselves stupid’!
Please, can you take time to talk with Vaughan Davies again, if he can talk at all? I am mentally putting together a provenance for the Sible Hedingham ms. There could be a connection between the ms, Hedingham Castle, the Earls of Oxford, and Ash’s connection with the thirteenth earl, John de Vere. Vaughan Davies might shed light on this.
Far more crucially, for the immediate present – in his Second Edition, he promised us an Addendum, detailing the link between the ‘first history’ and our present day. He never published it before he disappeared. I think the time has come when I have to know what his theory is.
Plainly, we have to face the possibility now that reality did fracture in or about the beginning of the year 1477. Equally plainly, it is possible that fragments of that prior history have existed in ours, becoming gradually less and less ‘real’ as the universe moves on from the moment of fracture. I can accept this, and so can the theoretical physicists: both Burgundy and the Wild Machines obliterated in some catastrophic ‘miracle’, the Visigoths and the Wild Machines completely, Burgundy leaving a dream of a lost country behind it.
What is more difficult to accept, but is undeniably the case, given the underwater site, is that the universe is STILL changing. Reading what Vaughan Davies wrote in 1939, it seems to me that he knew this, then, and had developed a theory about why it is happening.
I want to know what it is. HIS theory may be right or wrong, but *I* don’t have a theory at all! If I have to fly back from here, I will be asking you if William Davies will give permission for me to visit his brother.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #244 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 22/12/00 at 06.30 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Please be CAREFUL. You never think it will happen to someone you know. It only takes some trigger-happy madman, a soldier with a rifle, by the time the governments apologise, it’s too late. I don’t want to turn on satellite news and watch a bulletin telling me you’ve been killed.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #246 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 23/12/00 at 09.50 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Damn: still no mail from you. I hope no news is etc.
There isn’t much of a media fuss yet. It was well-timed, thinking about it; everyone’s caught up in pre-Christmas frenzy here.
Weekend traffic’s difficult (Christmas falling on the Monday), but I went down to Colchester again. I don’t know what kind of a shock it would have to be to make a person wipe out all their memories after the age of fifteen. Profound trauma, William says. Perhaps fifteen was the last time Vaughan was happy. I hate to think what reduced him to this state.
William and I are taking it in turns to read your translation of the Sible Hedingham manuscript aloud to him. William is optimistic. I’m not sure Vaughan’s taking it in. But William’s the medical man, after all.
I intend to go down again tomorrow, and spend as much time over Christmas as I can with them, with Vaughan in the hospital, doing intensive reading. I’ll watch the news broadcasts, and monitor e-mail. You can always reach me at work or home e-mail (which is █████████), or you can phone, if you can get a line. My number is ████████.
-Anna
* * *
Message: #247 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 24/12/00 at 11.02 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
We have our breakthrough.
It was a bit of a shock. The doctors have taken William into hospital here overnight for observation. He’s a rotten patient, but I think retired medical men often are. I’ve been zipping around between his ward and the neurological ward where Vaughan is; I’m completely worn to a frazzle; but I don’t think William’s in any real danger now.
It just breaks my heart to see him there. When he’s awake, he’s a sharp old man; when you see him asleep in a hospital bed, you can see how frail he is. I guess I’ve come to like him a lot. I never knew either of my grandfathers.
Vaughan is quiet now. I’m not sure if he’s still under sedation or sleeping naturally.
I’m in the waiting room, sitting among the sad Christmas decorations, typing on my notebook-portable, drinking the appalling black coffee that comes out of the machine. Every so often the nurses come around and give me _that look_. I’ll have to go soon, to drive back through the Christmas Eve traffic, but I don’t want to leave until the doctors give William the final OK.
It’s not like they have any other next of kin.
William was the one reading when it happened. It was during part of the Fraxinus manuscript, the section on what happens to Ash in Carthage. He reads very well. (I have _no_ idea whether he thinks this is ‘history’ or complete rubbish.) Vaughan was listening, I think, although it’s been difficult to tell. He has a lean face, and I think must have been good-looking when he was a young man. Very arrogant. No, not arrogant; it’s a look I’ve seen in old pre-war movies, a kind of outrageous confidence, you don’t see it any more. An English class thing, I guess. And Vaughan thinks he’s fifteen. Has there ever been a rich boy that age who didn’t think he was God’s gift?
All of a sudden, that face sort of _crumpled_. I was watching, and it was like sixty years just dropping down on him, like a weight. He said, ‘William?’ As if William hadn’t visited him every day. ‘William, may I beg you to pass me a mirror?’
I wouldn’t have done it, but it wasn’t up to me. William passed him a mirror from the bedside cabinet. I got up to call a nurse – I was half expecting Vaughan Davies to go into hysterics
. Wouldn’t you? If you thought you were fifteen, and saw the face of a man in his 80s?
All he did was look at himself in the mirror and nod. Once. As if it confirmed something he had already thought. He put the mirror down on the bed and said, ‘Perhaps a daily paper?’
It staggered me, but William reached over and picked up a paper left by one of the other patients. Vaughan examined it very carefully – what I think, now, is that he was puzzled because it was a tabloid, not a broadsheet – and glanced at the headlines, and the masthead. He said two things: ‘No war, then?’ and ‘I am to assume victory was ours, or else I should be reading this in German,’
I don’t think I took in the next few sentences. William was asking questions, I know, and Vaughan was answering in this amazed tone, a ‘why are you asking me all these stupid questions?’ voice, and I remember just thinking, Vaughan doesn’t like his brother very much. What a shame, after sixty years.
The next thing I can remember is Vaughan saying testily, ‘Of course I wasn’t injured in the bombing. What on earth would make you think such a thing?’ He’d picked up the mirror and was studying himself again. ‘I have no scars. Where did you get yours?’
If he’d been my brother I would have slapped him.
William ignored it, and went through the neurological report stuff, and told him he’d been locked up in a home for years – which isn’t something I’d have sprung on somebody, but he still knows his brother, even after all these years, because Vaughan just _looked_ at him, and said, ‘Really? How curious. ’ And, in a voice like I’d just crawled out from under a rock, ‘Who is this young person?’
‘This young lady, ’ William says, ‘is assisting the man who is rewriting your mediaeval book. ’
I expected him to go nuclear at that point, especially as William wasn’t being untactful by accident. No wonder those two didn’t live under a family roof. I braced myself for a screaming row. It didn’t come.
Vaughan Davies picked up the tabloid paper again and held it at arm’s length. It took me several seconds to realise he was looking for the date, and that he couldn’t read the small print. I told him what date it was.
