Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  Mackie sat again. ‘Well, we know all about those. And Geoffrey’s two remaining cases, then -’ He squinted at her document. ‘The Codex of Aethelmaer“. The Testament of Eadgyth”. Ah. And I see that Geoffrey links them both to the destiny of Christopher Columbus.’

  ‘That’s the idea. Columbus was a significant figure, but one striking point is that Geoffrey couldn’t possibly have known how significant Columbus would become - he wrote down his account in the year Columbus sailed.’

  ‘Um. And the purpose of these deflections?’

  ‘I’m speculating,’ she said warily.

  He smiled. ‘Speculate away.’

  ‘I think the Nazis have moved on from all those baroque Aryan dreams - the reversal of Hastings, the establishment of a northern empire deep in the past. They’re too bruised by the war for all that. So what is the problem for the Germans right now? America, with all her resources and might. I think Trojan and Fiveash are trying to muck about with the founding of modern America - to abort it completely, or at least change history to such a degree that no entity like the modern United States could emerge. And they’re doing it by meddling with Columbus.’ She described the Codex of Aethelmaer. ‘It’s essentially a weapons programme,’ she said.

  ‘A very Nazi idea!’

  ‘They seem to be trying to implant seeds of weapons technologies, anachronistically advanced, centuries before Columbus - giving them enough time to come to fruition.’

  ‘Ready to be placed in the hands of Columbus, yes? But after centuries of development, who would know what to do with the stuff?’

  ‘That’s where the Testament of Eadgyth comes in. The second of the Columbus prophecies. Unfortunately it only survives in fragments.’ She showed him some of this. The Testament“, supposedly whispered into the ear of an eleventh-century Christian woman, was a kind of poem in old English. ‘It refers to Columbus, I think, if elliptically.’

  ‘Not that elliptically. The Christ-bearer“ - Christopher. The Dove” - Columbus.’

  ‘It mightn’t have seemed so obvious to contemporaries, and certainly not to anybody in the eleventh century. There are lots of references to God’s engines“ and coming wars, and finally the main commandment: All this I have witnessed / I and my mothers. / Send the Dove east! O, send him east!”’

  ‘And these two messages would, you’re arguing, set up chains of events which will converge in the career of Christopher Columbus. And then what?’

  ‘You have to remember that Columbus was a militant Christian as much as an explorer. He thought he was going west to Asia, yes? He was after wealth from new trading routes. But he also dreamed of taking on Islam, which was then on the march across Europe. He carried a letter from the Spanish monarchs to the Mongol Khan, hoping they could team up.’

  ‘And squeeze Islam in a pincer movement. Good plan. Shame for him the Americas were in the way! But I think I see where you’re going with this. If he had these super-weapons from friend Aethelmaer—’

  ‘He mightn’t have felt the need to enlist the Mongols. With such weapons he could conceivably have given up his dreams of sailing west, and turned east instead, to launch a direct attack on Islam. Europe would have been consumed by a new age of crusading and jihad, fuelled by anachronistic weaponry. The destruction would have been horrific. And though others would surely have sailed to the Americas, nothing like the modern United States might have emerged.’

  ‘So, America aborted - but Europe destroyed in the process. Why would the Nazis want that?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘They don’t approve much of Islam, or the Jewish-Christian conspiracy“. The usual Aryan nonsense. It’s a bit drastic, but they might be quite happy to see medieval history expunged.’

  ‘Remarkable. Intricate. Audacious! But it didn’t work, did it?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ she said. ‘But then, in our present, these messages may not yet have been sent back.’

  ‘But we see traces of them in Geoffrey’s memoir.’

  ‘Well, we saw the Menologium before Trojan sent that back. I don’t pretend to understand it all, Tom!’

  ‘All right. I’ll put the squeeze on my intelligence sources, and try to find out what Trojan is up to - in particular if he’s working on anything like these messages you’ve discovered in the record. And then we must decide what to do about all this.’

  Mary folded up her notes. ‘I’d say that’s clear enough. Destroy the Loom before it can be used again.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said sagely. ‘And that’s why I’ve asked for your son Gary. Security around Richborough has been as tight as a mouse’s arsehole since our raid in ‘41. But Operation Walrus gives us an excellent chance. If we send in a small team, highly trained and motivated, going in perhaps ahead of the main counter-invasion front - hit them before they even know we’re there.’ He tapped his teeth with his pipe stem. ‘But we must plan for all contingencies. Suppose, for instance, we’re too late to stop this Codex being sent back. What then? Do we block the Eadgyth material?’

  She frowned. ‘I’m not sure. I’ve no idea what harm the Codex engines might do to history without the Eadgyth testament. It might be better to make a minimal change in the record. Sabotage the testament rather than destroy it. Turn it into a mandate to send Colombus west, not east.’

  ‘In war it always pays to have back-up plans. I wonder if you’d work through these possibilities for me.’

  She thought that over. ‘Perhaps I could work out a warning about what might have followed a destructive fifteenth-century European war. A conflict with China, perhaps. A counter-invasion by the American cultures, the Incas or the Aztecs ... But I’m no expert, Tom.’

  ‘Well, who is, in this peculiar field?’ He sucked on his pipe, and brushed bits of ash from his trousers. ‘You know, all this mucking about with the past by one side or another - it’s as if our modern war with the Nazis is folding down into the past. Remarkable thought. Tell me this, though,’ he said. ‘Purely hypothetically. If you had the power to make a change - say, your Dunkirk intervention - if it was just a matter of pushing a button - would you do it?’

  She’d thought about that, long and hard. Having studied Geoffrey’s agonised testimony, she’d become convinced that nobody really understood the deep structure of the tapestry of time, even though so many hands eagerly plucked at it. And when they did meddle, they left flaws. She didn’t want to mention to Mackie evidence she thought she had unturned of holes, where it seemed entirely plausible a figure had been torn from the weave of centuries. Robin Hood, for instance - a shell of legend around a character that ought to have existed. Bubbles of remnant causality.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I think it’s possible that even the slightest change might wreak the most devastating consequences. You might be like al-Hafredi, deleting your own history entirely, cut away at the root you tamper with. You might create a world in which nobody like you would ever be born ...’

  ‘That seems a drastic point of view,’ Mackie murmured. ‘My gut feel is that history might be a bit more resilient than that. I mean, it seems to me it’s possible that if you were to make some sort of change, the consequences would just sort of ripple through. The tapestry of time must be a hefty piece of work. The patterns would persist, wouldn’t they, even if you pulled out the odd thread? The physicists have nothing to say, incidentally. Nothing sensible anyhow, which is typical of that crew.’

  ‘So if you could push the button?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘I’d like more data. But it seems to me that it might be possible to calibrate the effects of interventions.’

  ‘Calibrate?’

  ‘It would mean turning history from an art to a science, but still! Think what a boon for good such power could be.’

  And there, she thought, was the difference between herself and men like him. Mackie was an instrumentalist, who saw in this technology only a weapon. She saw horror. But then she thought of her own Dunkirk counter-history. Only if one w
ere sufficiently desperate, she thought. Only then ...

  ‘Of course,’ Mackie said, ‘all this mandates us to keep this technology, if indeed it exists at all, out of the wrong hands.’

  ‘You mean the Nazis, the Russians—’

  ‘And the bally Americans, my dear, no offence! Now come, let’s get out of here. Can I offer you a lift anywhere?’ She stood. He took her arm, and guided her out of the ruins of the minster.

  A liberty bus drew up outside the minster, a ‘passion wagon’ that took young women to dances at the GIs’ bases. The Land Girls flocked that way, colourful, grimy, laughing.

  VI

  3 July

  The marshalling area for the British Second Army was south of Guildford.

  It was late afternoon when Gary reached Guildford, having been driven down from Aldershot with Willis Farjeon and Dougie Skelland and the rest of their platoon in the backs of studebakers. When they got there a river of men and machines was pouring through the town’s old centre. MPs and NCOs stood at every junction, directing the flow according to some complicated scheme. Even the roads had had to be rebuilt to take the traffic, bridges strengthened, junctions widened, the tarmac reinforced to withstand tank tracks. Gary could smell the fumes of the engines, like a vast traffic jam.

  It was like this all the way along the Winston Line, from coast to coast.

  South of the town, as they neared the marshalling area, the spectacle was even more amazing. The column broke up, and the vehicles swarmed off the road looking for a bit of hard standing to park up. From the elevation of his troop carrier Gary saw vehicles crowding as far as he could see, their backs glistening green or American olive in the dusty afternoon sunlight, with men moving everywhere and dumps of weapons and ammo covered in camouflage netting. There were more complicated machines too, such as the bridge-building gear of the Royal Engineers, who had been training to provide roadways over the concrete trenches of the Winston Line. Tanks moved through this crowd like elephants at a waterhole. Gary recognised the profiles of Shermans and Centaurs, and even a few squat Soviet T-34s; the Russians had insisted on making a contribution to this crucial push in the west. All this was going on under a cloud-littered sky through which fighter planes soared, Spits and Hurricanes and Mustangs and a few Soviet MIGs, there to deter the Luftwaffe from any ideas it might have entertained of disrupting the build-up. It was a spectacle that battered all the senses.

  There was no secrecy now, no creeping around in the dark. Gary, lost in the middle of it, had a sense of huge energies gathering, a vast coiled spring about to be released. The war had turned. The Germans had been defeated in Africa and at Stalingrad, the Allies were winning the Atlantic war against the U-boats, and the Japs were held at Midway. Now Roosevelt and Halifax had done a deal, to sort out Europe first before resolving the Pacific war. This July the Allies were effectively opening four fronts against the Nazis. In the Mediterranean an invasion force was closing on Sicily, the beginning of an operation planned to knock Mussolini’s Italy out of the war. British and American bombers were beginning an intensive campaign of assault on the German homeland; the first great target was Hamburg. In the east the Russians were taking on the Germans in a gigantic tank battle on the Kursk salient.

  And here in Britain Operation Walrus was ready to be launched. Gary knew there had been plenty of muttering in the British press about the time it had taken to get the Nazis out of England. But you wanted to assemble an overwhelming force before you could consider such an operation. Here, today, was the result. And it was remarkable to think that all this was just a prelude to the main event, when England would be used as the platform to launch the invasion of Europe itself, next year or the year after.

  Marshalling Area A-C, only a few miles north of the great gash of the Winston Line itself, consisted of two camps set out to either side of Quarry Street, the main road that led south out of Guildford and on to Horsham. The camps were surrounded by triple fences of barbed wire, and the troops, lugging their gear, were marched through gates manned by American guards. The sappers had colonised Pewley Green to the east of the road and a golf course to the west, and in the distance Gary saw water glisten; the camps tapped into the River Wey. NCOs directed the troopers through a city of tents clustered around central wooden buildings. Everything was green and brown, canvas and khaki and paint, the colour of the English ground.

  They found the bell tent Gary was to share with Willis and Dougie Skelland. Inside, duck boards covered the grass, and there was a tortoise stove. The three of them dumped their gear. ‘This isn’t bad,’ Willis Farjeon said. He inspected the stove. ‘Anybody got any water left? We could have a quick brew up.’ The others handed over their canteens.

  Dougie Skelland already had his boots off, and a fag in his mouth. Dougie was a veteran of campaigns in Africa and the Middle East. He’d been reassigned after a spell at home recovering from malaria. His skin was weather-beaten dark, with ingrained dirt that didn’t seem to shift no matter how hard he washed, and his eyes were narrowed from too much wind and sun, so that he had an oriental look about him. They were all misfits, in a new battalion welded together from survivors of other, long-disrupted units: Gary the Dunkirk veteran, Willis a POW escapee, and Dougie who had fought with Montgomery. Dougie didn’t seem to care where he was sent, save that he was aggrieved to have missed el Alamein, which the commentators all called the first great victory of the war. But he could get his boots off and a fag in his mouth faster than any other man Gary had ever met.

  ‘Americans manning the fence,’ Dougie said now. ‘See that?’ He had a faint Scottish lilt. ‘Security over W-Day, see. The Yanks don’t trust anybody.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Willis asked. ‘In American camps you get the best, that’s what I heard. A great big NAAFI.’

  ‘P X,’ Gary murmured. ‘They call it the PX.’

  ‘Briefing halls like theatres. Hot showers. Cinemas!’

  Dougie growled, ‘You really are a wanker, aren’t you, Farjeon?’

  ‘I sure am,’ said Farjeon cheerfully. ‘But it’s a big camp. I’m hoping for a bit more action tonight than Johnny Five-Fingers, frankly. I hear some of the Poles are up for it for the price of a packet of fags.’ He winked at Gary. ‘Just like the stalag.’

  Dougie looked disgusted.

  Gary shook his head. ‘Don’t let him get to you, Dougie. He just says this shit to wind you up.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Dougie said coldly, ‘I don’t know if you’re a bloody sodomite or not, Farjeon. I saw you trying to pull those Yank bashers in Aldershot. What do you want a bird for if you’re a shirt lifter?’

  ‘He goes both ways,’ Gary said.

  ‘Well, I’ve never heard of bloody that,’ said Dougie.

  Willis grinned. ‘Don’t they have people like me in Edinburgh, Dougie? I’m a breaker of hearts. And of sphincter muscles.’

  Gary said, ‘It’s all just a game to you, isn’t it, Willis?’

  ‘I’ve seen men like him,’ Dougie said. ‘Who can kill a man hand to hand and make a sport of it. Arseholes like him don’t live long in combat. That’s what I’ve seen.’

  Willis laughed at him. ‘I’ll remember that when I’m singing Auld Lang Syne“ and shovelling dirt on your cold dead face, Dougie. Give me your mugs.’

  Danny Adams stuck his head into the tent. ‘Evening, ladies. I see you’re settling in.’ Gary had known Adams since the stalag, from which the former SBO had escaped in 1942 with Willis; his accent was as broad Scouse as ever.

  ‘Could be worse, Sarge, could be worse,’ said Willis.

  ‘Shut up, Betty Grable. Right, two things you need to know. This is a sealed camp. That means if General Brooke himself tried to leave he’d get his arse shot off by the US Army. Security. Got that?’

  ‘Noted,’ said Gary.

  ‘Second. You’ll get your final operational instructions in briefing marquee F.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the golf course. ‘You’ll find it, just follow the other ladie
s. Eighteen hundred, and if you’re late I’ll shoot your arse off. Oh, and at twenty hundred the padre is coming round. Any questions?’