by Anthology
He got back into the cab and gripped the steering wheel. His head spun and ached, but he felt himself on the verge of a marvelous conclusion, a simple answer to all of this. There was evidence, yes, even though the bodies were gone, there was evidence that he had hit those people. He had not imagined it.
They must, then, be (he stumbled over the word, even in his mind, laughed at himself as he concluded:) angels. Jesus sent them, he knew it, as his mother had taught him, destroying angels teaching him the death that he had brought to his wife while daring, himself, to walk away scatheless.
It was time to even up the debt.
He started the engine and drove, slowly, deliberately toward the end of the road. And as the front tires bumped off and a sickening moment passed when he feared that the truck would be too heavy for the driving wheels to push along the ground, he clasped his hands in front of his face and prayed, aloud: “Forward!”
And then the truck slid forward, tipped downward, hung in the air, and fell. His body pressed into the back of the truck. His clasped hands struck his face. He meant to say, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” but instead he screamed, “No no no no no,” in an infinite negation of death that, after all, didn't do a bit of good once he was committed into the gentle, unyielding hands of the ravine. They clasped and enfolded him, pressed him tightly, closed his eyes and pillowed his head between the gas tank and the granite.
“Wait,” Gemini said.
“Why the hell should we?” Officer Manwool said, stopping at the door with Orion following docilely on the end of the lovecord. Orion, too, stopped, and looked at the policeman with the adoring expression all lovecord captives wore.
“Give the man a break,” Gemini said.
“He doesn't deserve one,” she said. “And neither do you.”
“I say give the man a break. At least wait for the proof.”
She snorted. “What more proof does he need, Gemini? A signed statement from Rodney Bingley that Orion Overweed is a bloody hitler?”
Gemini smiled and spread his hands. “We didn't actually see what Rodney did next, did we? Maybe he was struck by lightning two hours later, before he saw anybody—I mean, you're required to show that damage did happen. And I don't feel any change to the present—”
“You know that changes aren't felt. They aren't even known, since we wouldn't remember anything other than how things actually happened!”
“At least,” Gemini said, “watch what happens and see whom Rodney tells.”
So she led Orion back to the controls, and at her instructions Orion lovingly started the holo moving again.
And they all watched as Rodney Bingley walked to the edge of the ravine, then walked back to the truck, drove it to the edge and over into the chasm, and died on the rocks.
As it happened, Hector hooted in joy. “He died after all! Orion didn't change a damned thing, not one damned thing!”
Manwool turned on him in disgust. “You make me sick,” she said.
“The man's dead,” Hector said in glee. “So get that stupid string off Orion or I'll sue for a writ of—”
“Go pucker in a corner,” she said, and several of the women pretended to be shocked. Manwool loosened the lovecord and slid it off Orion's wrist. Immediately he turned on her, snarling. “Get out of here! Get out! Get out!”
He followed her to the door of the crambox. Gemini was not the only one who wondered if he would hit her. But Orion kept his control, and she left unharmed.
Orion stumbled back from the crambox rubbing his arms as if with soap, as if trying to scrape them clean from contact with the lovecord. “That thing ought to be outlawed. I actually loved her. I actually loved that stinking, bloody, son-of-a-bitching cop!” And he shuddered so violently that several of the guests laughed and the spell was broken.
Orion managed a smile and the guests went back to amusing themselves. With the sensitivity that even the insensitive and jaded sometimes exhibit, they left him alone with Gemini at the controls of the timelid.
Gemini reached out and brushed a strand of hair out of Orion's eyes. “Get a comb someday,” he said. Orion smiled and gently stroked Gemini's hand. Gemini slowly removed his hand from Orion's reach. “Sorry, Orry,” Gemini said, “but not anymore.”
Orion pretended to shrug. “I know,” he said. “Not even for old times' sake.” He laughed softly. “That stupid string made me love her. They shouldn't even do that to criminals.”
He played with the controls of the holo, which was still on. The image zoomed in; the cab of the truck grew larger and larger. The chronons were too scattered and the image began to blur and fade. Orion stopped it.
By ducking slightly and looking through a window into the cab, Orion and Gemini could see the exact place where the outcropping of rock crushed Rod Bingley's head against the gas tank. Details, of course, were indecipherable.
“I wonder,” Orion finally said, “if it's any different.”
“What's any different?” Gemini asked.
“Death. If it's any different when you don't wake up right afterward.”
A silence.
Then the sound of Gemini's soft laughter.
“What's funny?” Orion asked.
“You,” the younger man answered. “Only one thing left that you haven't tried, isn't there?”
“How could I do it?” Orion asked, half-seriously (only half?). “They'd only clone me back.”
“Simple enough,” Gemini said. “All you need is a friend who's willing to turn off the machine while you're on the far end. Nothing is left. And you can take care of the actual suicide yourself.”
“Suicide,” Orion said with a smile. “Trust you to use the policeman's term.”
And that night, as the other guests slept off the alcohol in beds or other convenient places, Orion lay on the chair and pulled the box over his head. And with Gemini's last kiss on his cheek and Gemini's left hand on the controls, Orion said, “All right. Pull me over.”
After a few minutes Gemini was alone in the room. He did not even pause to reflect before he went to the breaker box and shut off all the power for a critical few seconds. Then he returned, sat alone in the room with the disconnected machine and the empty chair. The crambox soon buzzed with the police override, and Mercy Manwool stepped out. She went straight to Gemini, embraced him. He kissed her, hard.
“Done?” she asked.
He nodded.
“The bastard didn't deserve to live,” she said.
Gemini shook his head. “You didn't get your justice, my dear Mercy.”
“Isn't he dead?”
“Oh yes, that. Well, it's what he wanted, you know. I told him what I planned. And he asked me to do it.”
She looked at him angrily. “You would. And then tell me about it, so I wouldn't get any joy out of this at all.” Gemini only shrugged.
Manwool turned away from him, walked to the timelid. She ran her fingers along the box. Then she detached her laser from her belt and slowly melted the timelid until it was a mass of hot plastic on a metal stand. The few metal components had even melted a little, bending to be just a little out of shape.
“Screw the past anyway,” she said. “Why can't it stay where it belongs?”
COME-FROM-AWAYS
Tony Pi
Madoc was a striking man in his thirties, his eyes bluer than the sea. I could well imagine him as an ancient prince.
I sat next to his hospital bed and smiled. “Siw mae, Madoc.”
He paused, the way I would whenever I heard a phrase in Newfoundland English to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then he sat up and spoke excitedly, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Contrary to what people believe, linguists don’t all speak twenty languages or pick up a new language instantly. Where we excel was figuring out linguistic patterns.
Doctor Liu smirked. “Did you call him pork dumpling?”
I understood the confusion. Siw mae sounded like siu mai in Cantonese, which meant pork dumpling. “I
t means how are you in modern Southern Welsh. Madoc would have been from Snowdon, Northern Wales, so I should have said sut mae.”
Two weeks ago, on December twenty-sixth, a strange ship had drifted into the Harbour of St. John’s. Found aboard the replica of the Viking longship were four dead men and one survivor. Will Monteith from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary contacted me to help him pinpoint the man’s origin through his language. Analyzing the tapes of the man’s speech, I came to the strange conclusion that the man who called himself Madoc had been speaking two archaic languages: Middle English and Middle Welsh.
To be certain, I asked Will to arrange a face-to-face interview. Sometimes linguistic evidence was visual. For example, the v sound in Modern Welsh was produced like in Modern English, with the upper teeth against the lower lip, but the v in Middle Welsh was produced with both lips, like in Spanish.
I turned on the tape recorder and pointed to myself. “Kate.” I indicated Detective Monteith and Doctor Liu. “Will. Philip. Meddic.” Doctor, in Middle Welsh. The double ddsounded like the first sound in the English word, they.
He repeated the names and grinned.
Madoc was a puzzle indeed. The theory that made most sense was that he and the other men were trying to recreate the Madoc voyage. Prince Madoc of Gwynedd was a Welsh legend, believed to have sailed west from Wales in 1170. He returned seven years later to tell of a new land of untouched bounty across the sea. Intending to settle the new land, he set out with a fleet of ten ships of settlers, and disappeared from history.
This man could be a Middle Ages scholar with damage to Wernicke’s area. Wernicke’s aphasics had no problems with articulation, but their utterances made little sense. For the most severe cases, sounds were randomly chosen, spliced together to sound real, but contained few actual words. ‘Madoc’ might be suffering from a similar jargonaphasia. However, the MRI and PET scans showed no such damage to his brain’s left hemisphere.
But how authentic was Madoc’s command of Middle Welsh? I had two tests in mind.
I gave Madoc two poems I had found, one by Gwalchmai ap Meilyr, another by Dafydd ap Gwilym, both printed in a font called Neue Hammer Unziale. The font seemed closest to Insular Majescule, the script a twelfth-century prince might have been familiar with. “Darlle.” I prompted him to read.
Madoc read the first poem easily, but tripped over some of the words in the second.
Will raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t he be able to read both poems?” he asked, his detective’s instincts coming to the fore.
“I made it difficult on purpose,” I explained. “The first poem was by a court poet who lived around the same time as Madoc. The second poem, however, was poetry written in the fourteenth century, and is usually designated as early Modern Welsh. I expected him to have more difficulty with that one. It’s like Chaucer trying to read Shakespeare, or Shakespeare reading Tennessee Williams; different time, different language.”
“You’re trying to trip him up! Police work and linguistics are a lot alike,” Will said. “Patterns and mistakes.”
“I’ve never quite heard it put that way, but you’re right.” Will and I shared a smile.
Second test was a production task. I took out a colour pictorial of England, and opened it to a photograph with nine men in a pub.
“Gwyr. Pet?” Men. How many?
“Naw.” Nine.
I shook my head. “Naw wyr.” Nine men. I prompted him to use compounds, as I wanted to test a phenomenon called lenition or mutation. In Welsh, if a word came after a number, the first sound sometimes changed or was dropped, as in the case of gwyr to wyr. Mutations appeared elsewhere as well, but seeing as I was only dabbling in Celtic, I kept it simple for myself.
Madoc caught on fast; we went through the book counting people and things. When we came to a picture of a boat, Madoc pointed to it, then himself. “Gwyr. Pet?” How many survived from his ship?
I cast a sidewise glance at Will.
“Un,” I answered. One.
A shocked expression overtook Madoc’s face.
“That’s enough for today,” I said. I gave him a bottle of ink, a sketchbook, and a seagull feather I had cut into a quill pen, and mimed writing motions. I wanted to analyze his writing.
Madoc took my hand and drew it close for a kiss.
Will smiled. “He might not be able to say it, Kate, but I think you’re after making a friend for life.”
A week of interviews later, at Detective Will Monteith’s request, I presented my findings to the other experts at the R.N.C. Headquarters downtown: Doctor Birley from the Provincial Coroner’s Office; Rebecca Shannon, a lawyer working pro bono for Madoc; and Professor Connon from the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University.
I had reservations about coming. My linguistic analysis had led me to a strange and inescapable conclusion: there was no doubting Madoc’s native fluency in Middle Welsh. Even if a hoaxer had learned Middle Welsh, he might pronounce words wrong, or not know the words for common things. Madoc never tripped over syntax or vocabulary, except when it involved a modern object. Could he be the genuine Madoc, lost at sea over eight hundred years ago, found at last in St. John’s?
Was it a mad fancy? Perhaps. The academic in me scoffed at the idea. But the romantic in me wanted to believe. Here in Newfoundland, it seemed like anything was possible. I didn’t know how to describe it, but there was something magical and mystical about this place. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a leprechaun at my house, for instance. Time had stopped this winter, snow falling every day like the weather was stuck and couldn’t move ahead to anything different. I felt like I was living in a snow-globe, and the same guy kept turning it upside-down and shaking it. In his world it was only five minutes of playing; but inside the snow-globe, an entire month passed.
But could I convince the others?
“He’s a native speaker of Middle Welsh, with some training in Middle English,” I said. “He did quite well on the reading passages, and the way he pronounced his vowels and consonants were consistent with my expectations. The written evidence further supports it.”
“Preposterous!” Connon said. “A good scholar could learn a second language well enough to fool you. It’s a hoax by someone in the Society of Creative Anachronism, I wager.”
“We spoke to the Seneschal at Memorial University and contacted everyone on their Shire Roll, but no one from their group is missing, and no one heard about any re-enactment of the Madoc voyage,” Will said.
“I hear he’s learning English,” Connon continued. “How do we know that it wasn’t his plan, fake the Madoc story long enough to ease back into English?”
“You can’t stop someone from learning a new language. He’s a human being, not an artifact from some dig!” I said.
“ ’Ang on, ’Arry,” said old Doctor Birley. He had that Newfoundlander tendency to drop his h’s and add them back on words that shouldn’t have them. “It might be plausible that h’one man didn’t ’ave vaccination scars or dental work. I meself was vaccinated in ’72, but I don’t ’ave a scar. But h’all four bodies, plus Madoc? The h’odds of that are right slim. Unless they were h’all raised in the backwoods, of course. But a person who ’as the wherewithal to pull off an ’oax like this wouldn’t be so isolated from society. Or do you think someone planned this for forty years?”
“I’ll admit the boat is the work of a meticulous forger.” Connon passed out some photographs of the ship and items found aboard. “The design’s consistent with what we know about twelfth-century ships. A Viking longship with a high prow, carved with a lion’s head. That’s an interesting point. You might have expected the red dragon typically associated with Wales, but the Lions of Gwynedd were in use in the Gwynedd arms, up until the time of the Tudors.”
I set aside a picture of a twisted iron nail and studied the weather-worn red lion’s head that Professor Connon described.
“I was expecting a coracle,” Philip Liu interjected. “I was reading
Severin’s The Brendan Voyage about the seaworthiness of oxhide boats, and whether they were used to reach North America.”
Connon shook his head. “That was sixth-century Ireland. By the twelfth century, the Welsh made alliances with Norse raiders, and there were Norse settlements in Wales. Legend has it that the Gwennan Gorn, Madoc’s ship, was made from oak, but held together with stag’s horn instead of iron. The seafaring myths of those times warned of magnetic islands, which would have spelled doom to ships built with iron nails. The ship’s authentic in that respect. Nice touch, that. However, I have concrete proof that it’s all an elaborate hoax.” He showed us a photograph of a pipe. “One of the artifacts recovered from the ship. Note the five-petal white rose on top of the five-petal red, stamped on its heel.”
Philip recognized it. “A Tudor rose.”
“Right! Henry the Seventh created it to symbolize the union of the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York. But the Tudors didn’t begin their reign until 1485. If Madoc’s from the twelfth century, where did this anachronism come from?” Connon asked.
“Maybe he stopped off to have a smoke,” Rebecca joked.
Everyone laughed, but an intriguing idea came to mind. “Why not?” I said. “We’re thinking a single trip. Maybe it’s not his first and only trip through time?”
Connon snorted. “We’re scientists! The very idea of time-travel . . .”
“It’s not impossible,” Philip said. “Einstein’s theory of relativity allows for time-travel in the forward direction. Time dilation will keep a man from aging as fast, if he’s too close to a serious gravity well. Who knows? I’m starting to wonder if he isn’t the genuine article!”
Connon shook his head. “You’re on your own. I won’t jeopardize my reputation with a cockamamie time-travel theory. I’m denouncing him as a fraud, Detective Monteith. Good day.” He grabbed his photos and stormed out.
Connon’s departure left us all in a state of unease. Will sighed. “He’s right. If we announce that Madoc is a time-traveler, they’ll call us crackpots.”
