Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘And who would live here? The racially pure like me, right? What the hell would we do all day? Listen to reruns of Hitler’s speeches?’

  She laughed. ‘What a card you are. No - you would farm. Party ideology is founded on ideals of purity, you see, Corporal. And one such ideal is the nobility of the farmer. In the east there’ll be no shortage of land, or indeed labour, and the farms could be quite extensive.’

  He picked up the tray and sat back with it on his lap, still eating. He had no scruples about being ill-mannered before this nutcase Nazi. ‘Party ideology?’

  She smiled. ‘Some of it can be a little baroque. But it’s hard to argue with Hitler’s fundamental thesis. There are three sorts of people in the world, Corporal. Those who create culture, those who preserve it, those who destroy it. There is overwhelming evidence in the historical record that those who create human culture are of the Nordic type.’

  ‘How about the Greeks? I didn’t know they were Scandinavians.’

  ‘No, but they were of Nordic extraction. There have been many diasporas.’

  ‘And these destroyers of yours?’

  ‘The Jews. All this Hitler has set out clearly in his own writings. Of course even Hitler drew on the work of earlier thinkers. We have libraries here, you should read up. It was an Englishman called William Jones who in the eighteenth century first identified the Aryan race, you know-indeed he coined the term - based on a comparison of languages, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin. Hitler and Himmler both refer to a recent work by another Englishman called Houston Stewart Chamberlain. A son-in-law of Wagner. Called Race and Nation, it—’

  ‘I’ll take the scholarship as read. Look, you’re English, I still can’t believe you swallow a word of this.’

  Her smile was thinner now. ‘But I have seen these ideas work themselves out in my own life.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘My father, and his father before him, served the empire in India.’

  ‘The white man’s burden?’

  ‘Under the British the Indians advanced more in decades than they had in millennia. But my father’s properties near Bombay were burned out by insurgents; he was forced to return to England. And then his savings, the fruit of the labour of generations, were destroyed through the criminal incompetence of a financier—’

  ‘A Jew?’

  ‘Almost certainly, though I could not prove it.’

  ‘So that’s it. To avenge Daddy, you joined the SS.’

  She flared, ‘My father died in poverty. Do you imagine that the lands my family had to abandon in India are better off than they were under us? Do you imagine that my family’s money is being put to good use by those who stole it from us? You see, I grew up amid living proof of Hitler’s thesis.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘So what do you want from me?’

  ‘We’re offering selected prisoners of war the chance to come here, lightly supervised at first—’

  ‘You want me to be your poster boy in the States.’

  ‘Well, if you took on the challenge it would create a lot of headlines. I’ve been over there; I know how it works. It could generate some goodwill.’

  ‘And it might neutralise the news my mother sent back about Peter’s Well. Right?’

  She leaned forward, crisp in her black uniform. ‘I won’t try to minimise the harm that has been done to you and your family, Gary. I’m well aware of it. Since I’ve been stationed in Hastings I’ve got to know your father-in-law. Rather well, actually.’

  ‘George?’ He couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re the SS!’

  ‘Well, I’m also a human being. And he doesn’t have anybody else. The civilian police are rather shunned, you know, by those who don’t understand. Some call them collaborators, and worse. George needs company - somebody who understands.’

  ‘“Company.” My God. So this was why you were detailed to recruit me.’

  ‘We often talk of Hilda—’

  ‘Don’t you dare speak of her.’

  ‘Try to keep calm, Gary.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this farce. I want to go back to the stalag.’

  She stood, setting down her coffee cup. ‘Well, that isn’t going to happen,’ she said with a touch of steel in her voice. ‘Not for now, at any rate.’ She made for the door. ‘Give it twenty-four hours. You’ll have the house to yourself. Enjoy. Eat, shower. Watch the television. Wash your clothes, for heaven’s sake. Walk around the village a bit; somebody will escort you. Twenty-four hours. Then, if you wish, I’ll take you back to the homosexuals and madmen of your precious stalag.’ She walked out, closing the door behind her.

  He stood there, alone, confused. He grabbed the last of the biscuits off the plate and stuck them in his coat pocket, a prisoner’s reflex. And he stared at the television, which gazed back at him, a glass eye focused on his uncertainty.

  XIX

  This November morning, as every Sunday morning, Ben was brought to Josef Trojan’s office. Ben was made to sit on a hard upright chair while Trojan read intently through his latest test results. An SS man stood at the door, a heavy automatic weapon in his arms.

  Ben had grown used to this routine. He was just as much a prisoner as in the stalag, but now he was sleeping for the Reich. Once that would have made him laugh. He had learned not to laugh, not at Trojan. He just sat still, trying to settle his breath.

  And, out of his windowless cell for these precious minutes, he drank in every scrap of stimulus. They were in Trojan’s research block at Richborough. He could hear no birdsong, not today; this was November. But there was a window high in the wall that revealed sky, a rectangle of bright blue, an intense colour never matched by any reproduction, and there was a feathering of high cloud, ice probably, which—

  ‘Rubbish.’ Trojan threw the file across his desk and sat back. ‘A week’s worth of results, and no correlation.’

  Ben snapped to alertness, ready to pay full attention to every word, to every nuance.

  Every morning, on the moment of waking, Ben had to recite whatever dreams he had had to a waiting psychologist. The transcript was analysed and matched with the results of deep interrogations of Ben’s past life, as well as a register of likely future events, all in the hope of finding some evidence of psychic dream-wandering. But no significant evidence had turned up.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Ben said.

  ‘You’ve been eating the programmed food, consuming the drink? The drugs - the aluminium cap?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The Nazi scientists had been varying the ‘input’ as they called it, his food and drink and other stimuli, even the stiffness of his mattress, to see if there was any change in the ‘output’, his dreaming. As if he were a machine producing sausages. And they had tried shrouding his skull in an aluminium cap, in order to see if there were tangible radiations that could be screened out, or perhaps focused.

  Trojan got up and walked around the room, hands behind his back. ‘I trust we’re not wasting time. At least the negative results prove you’re not lying about your dreams, which would be easy enough to do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare.’

  Trojan looked at him, surprised, then laughed. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t. And what’s next on the list of trials?’ He ran a finger down an open page in the files on his desk. ‘Human contact. Gach. I see these gun-shy dolts I employ propose putting a companion or two in your bed with you. Girls, a couple of plump boys. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you repellent little faggot? Pah, what rubbish it all is. But I need this experiment to work. I need my Loom! And you need it too, or you’re for the ovens, my friend.’

  Ben flinched.

  ‘If only you weren’t a Jew,’ Trojan mused now. He strutted around the room, a peacock. ‘If only you were a good German, even an English. You would then perhaps have the mental discipline to control this talent of yours, if it exists, to tame it. Of course if you were French you would only dream of pornography. Ha! All right.’ Trojan sat again. ‘I have been reconsidering our approa
ch here. After all this is an experiment in psychology, is it not? Your psychology in particular. And up to now you have been motivated entirely by fear. Would that be true to say?’

  Ben hesitated. ‘It’s undeniable, sir.’

  ‘Yes, it is. Undeniable. Good word, that. But there are other sorts of motivation, aren’t there? Look, Kamen, you and I are going to get to know each other a little better. I want you to understand what it is I want, and why I want it. Perhaps I can make you share my desires, to some degree, or at least sympathise with them. And if so you will have a positive motivation to make the experiment work, as well as negative. So what do you think? Will that work?’

  ‘I’ve no grasp of psychology, sir.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me. Do you know anything about me, Kamen? No, of course you don’t. Suffice it to say that I have been politically active since I was a boy, when I worked for a nationalist group in the Rhineland. I was motivated, you see, by the humiliations heaped on my father, who fought honourably in the last war, only to be betrayed by the very politicians whose lives he had protected.

  ‘My petty grouping was absorbed into the Party, and then - I was still only twenty - my true career began. I worked for a time as a reader in the Official Party Department to Protect Writing. But I was drawn to scholarship - I had studied history, you see. I was part of a research party that visited the Canary Islands. It is believed that these are fragments of Atlantis, and a homeland for an Aryan race. After that it was a natural step for me to join the SS, and come to work for the Ahnenerbe ...’

  ‘You need to find something to impress Himmler,’ Ben said. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Got a sharp tongue in that rodent head of yours, haven’t you, rat-boy? But, yes, it’s true. We are all jostling for position in the Reichsfuhrer’s court.’

  ‘And that is why you need the Loom.’

  ‘Yes.’ Trojan eyed Ben. ‘I wasn’t planning to reveal this to anybody, not until your precognitive abilities are proven - until we have proof the Loom can work. But in the interests of motivation - ‘ He opened a drawer and extracted a brown card folder. ‘You do understand,’ he said casually, ‘that if you ever breathe a word of this I will personally cut out your tongue and feed it back to you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good boy. Now, take a look at this.’ He spun the folder across the desk. ‘I know you’re no historian ...’

  Inside the folder was a kind of poem, nine stanzas with a prologue and epilogue, rendered in German and what looked like Old English. ‘The Menologium of the Blessed Isolde”,’ Ben read.

  These the Great Years / of the Comet of God

  Whose awe and beauty / in the roof of the world

  Lights step by step / the road to empire

  An Aryan realm / THE GLORY OF CHRIST ...

  He looked up. ‘What is this?’

  ‘A kind of calendar. Authentic-looking document for the time. And a prophecy, if you will - or it would be, if you were stuck in the sixth century. Entirely faked, of course. I’ve been working on it with various scholars - linguists, astronomers.’ He sounded paternally proud, and he wanted Ben to understand. ‘It must span centuries. My parapsychologists assure me that its most likely recipient will be a relative of the hapless pagan afflicted by O’Malley, generations before my own target. The document is encoded to ensure its own survival - for instance, in the hands of monkish scribes - and has an embedded chronology. Look - can you see? It is structured around the repeated visits of a comet to the skies.’

  ‘What comet? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Halley’s comet,’ said Trojan, and he grinned. ‘Now, Halley’s comet might not mean much to you or me, Kamen, but it means a lot to the English—’

  ‘The Norman Conquest.’ Ben looked at the Menologium, piecing it together. ‘Halley’s comet returned in 1066. This is what you want to send back to the past, isn’t it? This document.’ It seemed unbelievable. ‘Are you planning to, um, adjust the outcome of the Norman Conquest of England?’

  ‘Think of it,’ Trojan said ardently. ‘Hastings! What a catastrophe that October day was, so long ago! England, you know, was thoroughly Nordic. Why, only a generation before 1066 it had been part of Cnut’s Scandinavian empire. King Harold himself was half-Danish! But William, that creature of the Pope, defeated Harold; the Jewish-Christian conspiracy defeated the Nordic race that day. And now the Aryan stock of the English is polluted by cross-breeding with the degenerate French. Quisling, the wise leader of Norway, argues this cogently, by the way.’

  ‘And what if that could be reversed?’ Ben said evenly.

  ‘You have it,’ Trojan said. ‘Exactly! The Normans would have been smashed for a generation, and Harold secure on his throne. England, Scandinavia, Germany - the Nordic countries would have remained strong, and dominant over the Jewish-Christian south.’ His eyes were misty, almost as if his own rhetoric was making him cry. ‘Think of it. I would shine in Himmler’s eyes. And 1 could become a hero of the English - Harold’s grave was the first place I visited after the invasion. They would tear down the Objective wall and strew my path with petals ...’

  Ben saw that this man had no real idea what he was meddling with - no idea that if this prophecy did what he intended there was every possibility that he would be erased from existence, along with Ben, Himmler and the applauding English.

  Trojan turned to him. ‘Now do you see the scope of my ambition? Even a Jew can think. And I hope that you will share some of my intellectual excitement.’ Then his expression shifted, becoming more calculating. ‘Of course the gesture is the thing. Even if the Loom doesn’t work the very effort will grab Himmler’s imagination. So what do you think?’

  ‘I think I have no choice but to work with you.’

  ‘But I need you to want to work with me, Benjamin Kamen. Can you do that?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, I can do that,’ Ben said. He glanced down at the Menologium, thinking fast. ‘Perhaps I could study this draft. Polish it a bit. Make it more mine.’

  ‘Yes!’ Trojan clapped his hands. ‘Good idea. Keep it, work on it. Perhaps that will help you make the whole project part of you. I think that’s enough for today. I have other duties. But you have only one duty, Benjamin - sleep! And sleep well.’ He was already turning to other papers.

  Clutching the Menologium to his chest, Ben turned and made for the door. And he began to plan how he could use this opportunity to make a cry for help.

  XX

  There was bottled beer in the fridge.

  Bathed, wrapped in a dressing gown, having eaten his fill and then some, and mildly drunk after sipping his first alcohol in more than a year, Gary sat before the television. Earnest German voices spoke over images of spectacular advances in the east and in Africa. Gary had no way of working out how much of it was true. Other voices spoke of gloomy news from the rest of Britain, of a hungry, cold and demoralised population, the famine to come in the winter, the flight of the people from cities like Birmingham and Manchester. There were even pictures of queues at the Winston Line, defeated English folk clamouring to come into the Reich protectorate, smiling Wehrmacht troops handing out cans of meat and chocolate for the children.

  Now a documentary programme came on. Sponsored by the SS, it illustrated the cosmological ideas of one Hans Horbiger, an Austrian engineer. Gary understood little of the German commentary, but he soaked up the general ideas from the pictures.

  Horbiger said the universe was driven by heat, like a giant steam engine. A cartoon sky filled up with tiny stars so cool they were clad in ice, and hot giant stars. When the icy stars fell into their hot neighbours there were spectacular explosions that sprinkled planets and moons, like sparks from a firework. That was how the earth had been born. Initially earth had had a whole family of moons, which were made of ice - as was the existing moon, the last survivor. One by one the moons fell to the earth, causing immense cataclysms. Gary watched as the earth was repeatedly plated over by ice, save for a central belt where g
iant tides were raised by the falling moon. The most recent of these disasters had been eleven thousand years ago, said Horbiger; life had survived only in a few refuges.