by Alex Scarrow
1937, 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, London
FROM THE JOURNAL OF H. G. WELLS
What an extraordinary few days passed in that exotic hidden city. Now in my autumn years, with old age playing tricks on my memory, I do wonder if what I vaguely recall of that time are chapters of a story I dreamed up, intending one day to set down on the page as a fictional adventure, and yet somehow I have managed to fool myself into thinking those events actually occurred to me.
Dr Anwar and his curious cohort of ‘assistants’ I believe decided to include me in their confidence, to share all their secrets with me, because they intended at some later date to devise a way of ensuring I would never recall this adventure. (Such is the way time travel works, it is possible to retrospectively prevent events from happening as easily as an artist erases undesired pencil marks from a finished drawing.)
The American girl, Madelaine, and her colleagues were somehow able to establish, with the help of their guide, a rudimentary way of communicating with those natives and their elderly leader, Pat-ishka. Through signing and drawing and much gesturing it became apparent that these primitive people believed us to be gods, or at the least the messengers or errand-boys of gods. The elderly leader of these people showed us stone carvings that we did our very best to interpret. It seemed that the ancestors of these savages were visited long, long ago by beings they presumed to be gods. These ‘gods’ supposedly built the subterranean circular chamber, then instructed the natives living there to guard the chamber with their lives until such time as they returned.
Thus it was, they believed our arrival to be that long-awaited return.
And so we were treated as gods for those few days. Treated as living, breathing deities. Afforded every luxury and comfort they could offer. Meanwhile I, fascinated by the science of my newfound friends, learned of the rules that govern travelling through time. What is possible – infinite alternative versions of the world we know today. Time itself being like a river that almost consciously ‘wills’ itself to flow a certain way, but can also, with some effort, be redirected to a new course.
Now, in my old age, I do wonder if those magical few days ever truly happened. Whether the horrific events that followed are merely the darkest part of my imagination manifesting a demon that never existed. Part of me would like to think that what occurred in that jungle city is just that – a product of the mind, a nightmare I have conjured up to torment myself.
But I suspect – no, I do not ‘suspect’, I know – deep down, I know those horrific things actually happened. What I saw with my own eyes – that vast shimmering outline – was the Devil himself.
Chapter 49
1479, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
Liam was sitting on the low stone wall of the temple building, looking down on the busy plaza. He’d watched the morning routine: the arrival of traders bringing their wares on the backs of llamas in through the passage and down the thoroughfare to the plaza, setting up their trade stalls in the middle.
Adam was off making rubbings of the various engraved flagstones in the chamber just beneath the plaza. The stones were far more distinct than they would be five hundred years from now, their images crisp and easy to determine. Maddy was in one of the temple buildings somewhere armed with a sketch pad, attempting to copy the murals painted along the tops of the walls. Rashim and Bertie were somewhere nearby. Poor Rashim’s ears were being bent with incessant questions from the young man, keen to learn everything he could about the far future of the twenty-first century.
‘Why the hell has he latched on to me?’ Rashim had complained to them last night. ‘Every five minutes another damned question from him to have to answer!’
‘Because out of us lot, you come from the furthest point in the future,’ Maddy had replied. ‘He’s obviously a futurist; obsessed with the shape of things to come. If he’d been born in my time, he’d probably be writing Star Trek fan-fiction.’
‘Marvellous,’ he’d huffed. ‘You do know we will have to go back in time and correct this? Make it so that he does not end up coming out here and learning about all these things?’
She’d nodded. ‘I know. We’ll get round to that.’
‘So in the meantime what do I tell him about the future?’
‘The truth, if you like. It won’t make any difference.’
Now, Liam was watching Billy sitting on the wall beside him, smoking his pipe. Of all the people they’d met, whom they’d had to let in on their dirty little secret of time travel, he’d been the most casually accepting about it all. Calmly absorbing the knowledge that there were people busy hopping backwards and forwards through time and that the course of history and present-day reality were as fragile an existence as the transient shape of a low cloud in a blustery sky.
‘Billy?’
‘Yes, Mr Connor?’
‘What do you make of all this? Hmm? The fact that you’ve travelled back in time five hundred years before you were even born with a brief stopover on the way in Victorian London?’ He smiled. ‘You seem to take it all in your stride.’
Billy puffed out a cloud of acrid smoke. ‘My uncle was Tawahka holy man. He believe in life shaped like big circle. He teach me what go round, come around again. So time travel is –’ he paused and shrugged – ‘not so strange thing to me.’
‘The whole merry-go-round thing, hmm?’
‘He believe all that happen, will happen again, just like last time. Just like first time. This world, he believe, do this again and again until man learn to be better. To be good.’
‘We’re doomed to be going around forever and ever then, I fancy?’
A boy with face and neck decorated with swirls of bright blue paint and head shaved to the scalp nervously approached them, bearing a platter of fruit. He set it on the wall beside them and withdrew backwards, bowing deferentially, not daring to make eye contact with either of them.
‘Thank you, young man.’ Liam watched him go, then leaned over and helped himself to a papaya. ‘You know? I feel guilty pretending to be a god. Feels like I’m asking for a bolt of lightning to zap down and fry me to a crisp.’
‘Mr Connor?’ Billy puffed out smoke again. ‘What is that place? The white place …?’
‘That you passed through?’
He nodded.
‘We call it chaos space. It’s what scientist fellas call extra-dimensional space.’ He realized that probably didn’t mean much to Billy. He tried to explain it in the same way Rashim had explained it to him.
‘See, Billy, we can understand, comprehend, only three dimensions – height, width, depth? You get me? Imagine for example the inside of a box. Inside it you can move up and down, left and –’
Billy nodded. ‘My English not good. But I not stupid man.’
Liam conceded with a guilty bow of his head. ‘You’re right, I’m sorry. So …’ He continued. ‘So that white stuff we stepped through is made up of eleven dimensions. We can’t comprehend dimensions beyond the first three, so I suppose our minds kind of give up trying to make sense of it and just show us something we can get – a white mist. I think it’s a self-defence mechanism. What our minds can’t make sense of, they block out, to stop us going completely mad.’
He wondered what their eyes were really seeing, before internal ‘circuit breakers’ intercepted the signal somewhere between the eye and the brain? Censored it and replaced it with something more bearable – that dreadful, featureless white mist. He recalled reading an article in one of the science books lying around the archway. It was about visual perception and the mind. As an example of how the mind and the eye can sometimes ‘agree on’ interpreting or misinterpreting an image, it cited the example of when Native Americans encountered white men for the very first time. The Native Americans thought these curious pale visitors to their shores had emerged straight out of the ocean simply because their minds could not even begin to fathom the notion of their enormous square-rigged sailing ships on the horizon.
They simply blanked them out. Didn’t see them.
Not for the first time, Liam wondered if the faint wraith-like objects they’d all seen at one time or another in the swirling mist – or thought they’d seen – might be a glimpse of what their ‘uncensored’ eyes were actually seeing. Perhaps if they could switch off their minds – instruct their minds not to be so damned protective of their sanity – they might be bombarded with a spectacle of impossible worlds, geometry beyond comprehension, pan-dimensional beings twisted and strange, perhaps even unspeakably horrifying.
He wondered if maybe that’s what some people were actually able to see. Clairvoyants? Mediums? Poor dribbling lunatics locked away in asylums and medicated to a dull-eyed stupor? People whose perception, whose minds were that bit more agile and capable of seeing beyond the three Cartesian axes within which regular humans could comprehend their daily lives.
A curse that, perhaps. Rather than a gift.
‘Information.’
Liam was jerked away from his thoughts. He spat some papaya seeds out into his hand and turned round to look up at Becks. She seemed to move – no, to glide – around in complete silence. ‘Jay-zus! Can you not sneak up on me and then bark out an announcement like that! You nearly made me fall off the wall!’
‘I apologize, Liam. My type was originally engineered for stealth and reconnaissance.’
At least with Bob, heavy-footed, one could hear him coming, like a lumbering steam engine.
‘What is it you want to tell me?’
‘We have managed to recalculate our tachyon readings.’
Both the support units had been working on refining their calculations as to when precisely the energy burst from that beam below ground would occur. By visiting the beam in 1894, Bob had been able to give them an approximate estimate. Since their arrival the pair of them had been down in the chamber quietly counting stray particles, noting their trajectories and decay rates, and promising Maddy a more precise estimate.
‘Well now … what have you got? Have we arrived close in time to that energy discharge? Or have we got to wait around for weeks?’
‘We calculate the energy fluctuation will occur anywhere between thirty-nine and fifty-one hours from now.’
Chapter 50
1479, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
Adam held out the sheet of paper for Maddy to see. ‘So, this is a rubbing from one of the flagstones in the first-level chamber.’
She recognized the rough outline of the image. This was the one she and Adam had been studying by torchlight when they’d been here in 1994. The least eroded and worn flagstone. The image in this rubbing, taken from the same stone five hundred years earlier, was far more clearly defined.
‘I think it’s safe to assume this is an image of one of the Archaeologists.’ That was the term they had all recently got into the habit of calling the visitors from the future. The name seemed to fit. Why would humans from the distant future want to come back so far in time if it wasn’t to satisfy an insatiable curiosity about their ancestors?
Adam continued. ‘So, I think it’s an image of one of them interacting with the tachyon beacon somehow. See those wavy lines?’
Maddy nodded.
‘My guess is that’s a representation of the column opening or activating in some way.’
She squinted at the wavy lines. ‘You saying those lines symbolize an energy discharge?’
‘These ancient Indians would not understand the concept of “energy”, but light perhaps. Something glowing?’
‘And that vertical line to the right represents the column?’
Adam nodded.
She narrowed her eyes. The wavy lines were emanating from it. It actually did seem to quite clearly represent something like that. She wondered if the column did actually ‘open’ somehow. Whether a door in the smooth mica-like material would slide to one side. ‘My God, that’s what it must be: a representation of an opening!’
‘I can imagine our visitors from the future were going about their work, in much the same way archaeologists from our time would, perhaps using the locals as manual labour, quite happy to let these ancient primitives watch them from the sidelines with wide-eyed awe. Just as long as they weren’t getting in the way.’ He nodded at the rubbing. ‘These Indians were simply recording what they saw.’
Maddy squinted at the paper. ‘So it looks like he’s holding his hand out?’
‘Uh-huh. Palm outward, it looks like to me. And with those wavy lines coming out I think it’s reasonable to assume he’s in the process of activating it. Perhaps they were coming and going all the time, ferrying equipment back to build that chamber?’
‘The figure …’ She leaned over, studying the pencil marks of the rubbing more closely. ‘The Archaeologist doesn’t look very much like a person from the future. You sure that’s one of them?’
Adam smiled. ‘Why? What are you expecting? Spacesuits? Some kind of bleepy-bloopy aerial stuck on top of his head?’
‘No, of course not, but … look, he seems to be wearing, I dunno, like old-fashioned armour or something? It just looks like it could be … I dunno, a Spanish explorer or something?’
‘This is a symbolized depiction. It may well have been carved long after the Archaeologists departed. It might be a carving made from word-of-mouth recollections handed down generation after generation after generation. The story might have evolved in the telling and retelling – in the centuries after Columbus first landed here – to be a visitation by the conquistadors. After all, to these Indians, the Spanish would have appeared like visitors from a far more advanced future. The artist carving this stone might have interpreted the figure as looking like a Spanish conquistador because that would be the only frame of reference he would have.’
Maddy settled back on the cool stone floor. She could hear the faint noises of the Indians outside, the clop of animal hooves walking across the plaza above them. Trickles of dust and grit skittered down from above on to the floor every now and then.
It amazed her how well constructed the low roof of this chamber was. Clearly it had been built by this people’s ancestors as an homage to the futuristic chamber directly below it. The stonework and the joins were so fine and precise. The ceiling, held up by one hundred and sixty-two stone columns (she’d counted them) had withstood the attrition of God-knows how many centuries’ worth of footfall, what with the plaza being used as a marketplace and an auditorium. So well constructed that there appeared to have been no cave-ins nor even any wobbly columns.
The collapsed sections of the plaza they’d witnessed in 1994 must have occurred at some point after these people had abandoned their city. Perhaps the result of a tremor or an earthquake.
Maddy studied the image on Adam’s pencil rubbing again. ‘It’s not much to go on, though. I can’t see how that helps us figure out how to activate the column and get in.’
‘I think the answer is somewhere in this image. And I think the answer is all around us.’ He grinned excitedly. ‘I think this whole mini-civilization was built on what they once observed of the Archaeologists at work. They watched, they recorded what they saw without understanding any of it, they codified it and now it exists in all the murals, the decals, even the patterns in those bead ponchos they wear. It’s seeded in their cultural DNA.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, all right … the pattern. Tell me you’ve noticed that repeated pattern everywhere?’
‘What pattern?’
He drew it on a corner of the paper. Then she nodded. She knew what he was talking about. The same motif seemed to be repeated everywhere: the three-line shape, the backwards ‘L’ with a diagonal line emerging from the conjunction of the horizontal and vertical lines – like the left half of the way you might depict the starburst rays of a sun-rise.
‘OK, yeah. I’ve seen lots of that.’
‘In a primitive culture like this – where the only form of recorded “media” or stored cultural
information is in the way patterns and decorations are used – those things are always important. Always – always – deeply symbolic.’
‘You’re saying that “L” shape actually means something?’
‘Of course it does. Its meaning may have become lost over time, but originally it would have represented something incredibly important to whoever decided the shape needed to be recorded, embedded into their culture over and over.’
‘OK, so, just for argument’s sake, let’s say that shape means something.’ She shrugged. ‘Where are you going with this?’
‘It might be the key to unlocking the column. All those glyphs on the surface of the column? Maybe it’s a clue as to which ones to press? I think those glyphs are like some elaborate combination lock; we just need to press the right glyphs in the right order.’
‘There are thousands of them, Adam. Come on, you’re a codebreaker, you know the number of combinations would be in the billions.’
‘Yeah, I know that … but I think it’s crackable.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course it is. Your Sal, with that pattern-spotting ability of hers clearly managed to do it. If she can … so can –’
‘Did she?’ Maddy looked at him. ‘Or did it just open up for her?’
‘Why would it?’ He looked again at the rubbing on the paper. ‘Unless there are some kind of live sensors down there.’
‘Sensors tuned to open for a specific person?’ She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. ‘Or some kind of frequency signal? Maybe just a codeword?’ She looked at him. ‘An “Open Sesame” of some kind?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Pandora? What if that’s the magic word?!’
‘Yes. Or perhaps it’s this symbol?’ Adam replied. He held up his left hand and splayed his thumb to point horizontally, his middle finger vertically and his index finger at an angle in between them: the half-a-sunray shape. He nodded down at the image on the paper. ‘A figure holding out his hand towards the column?’
