Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  They were marched to the Marine Parade, beneath West Hill with its brooding castle. It was crowded; people were congregating, looking for somewhere to celebrate, and there was a sound of laughter, as if some vast party were about to start.

  The prisoners were halted and lined up regulation style, backs against a wall, too far apart to be able to conspire, faced with armed guards. It was a relief just to be able to lower your arms.

  An English officer called out, ‘Now you chaps just hold your horses here while we work out where you’re to be kept for the night. I know there’s no fight left in you, any more than in me, so let’s just get through this business without any more drama. All right?’ He called to a German officer, a hauptmann, who translated this for him.

  Ernst leaned against the wall, exhausted, relieved he hadn’t been called to translate.

  Still the violin played. It was coming from the sea front. Ernst looked that way. He saw a boy playing, at the centre of a circle of English soldiers, the smoke from their cigarettes rising up around them. They were drinking, watched tolerantly by a couple of MPs. The boy seemed to be in the uniform of a Jugend. And now there was a fuss, as a girl with a shaven head tried to break into the circle, shouting. It was very remote, and Ernst couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  Heinz, a couple of yards away, called to him, ‘Hey, Ernst. It’s the second time today we’ve run into the bloody Miller family.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The girl, the Jerrybag with the shaved head. Isn’t that Viv?’

  Ernst saw that it was true. And the boy at the centre of the circle of men must be Alfie. Looking closer now, he saw how Alfie wept as he played, and blood trickled from his fingers.

  Ernst didn’t think about it. He just ran, out of the line, across the road.

  He heard running footsteps behind him. ‘Oi! You get back here!’ There was a shot, but it was in the air. People scurried out of his way, a woman screaming. He saw military police and soldiers converging on him; if not for the crowds he would surely have been gunned down. He got to the circle of soldiers before he was grabbed by a huge military policeman. ‘That’s as far as you’re going, Fritz.’

  Struggling, he called, ‘Viv! Vivien!’

  The girl turned, confused. He saw how her scalp was scraped where it had been brutally shaved. A drunk soldier was holding her arm, trying to get her attention. Ernst had heard of this; soldiers from both sides saw a shaved head as a sign a girl was available. She called, ‘Ernst! Oh, Ernst! Make them stop, make them stop! They say they’ll kill him!’

  ‘Vivien!’

  ‘Now what the Sam Hill are you doing here, Obergefreiter?’

  Another familiar face swam before him. It was Gary Wooler from Richborough, who had taken him prisoner in the bunker. Ernst said, ‘Corporal - please—’

  The MP made to drag Ernst away, but the corporal held up his hand. ‘Hold on, Angus.’ He glanced at the girl, the boy who held the violin in his bloody fingers. ‘What’s going on here?’

  Alfie blurted, his accent strong Sussex, ‘I’ve got to play, and when I stop they’ll shoot me. That’s what they said. I’ve played for hours already, and I can’t, my fingers, I can’t—’

  ‘Oh, come on, Gary, it’s just a bit of fun.’ Another man came out of the circle of soldiers. ‘Look at the little prick. He’s a Jugend! I mean we weren’t really going to do it. But these lads say this pretty-boy took a pot-shot at them, out on the Folkstone road.’

  The corporal’s face darkened. ‘You asshole, Willis.’

  ‘Anyhow we’re celebrating. Think of it. England’s been invaded before, but not once have the invaders been chucked out. Boadicea couldn’t get rid of the Romans, the Saxons couldn’t kick out the Normans. We’re the first!’

  ‘Never mind bloody Boadicea.’ Wooler waded into the circle, dragged out the boy, and pushed him into the arms of his sister. ‘Just clear off home, and take that fucking Nazi jacket off. And you, Willis - come with me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Richborough. We’ve got another job to do.’

  Viv and Alfie walked away. Viv put her arm around her brother’s thin shoulders. She looked back once, at Ernst. Then she said, ‘Come on, Alf, let’s find Mum and Myrtle. But, listen, I have to tell you about Dad. Dad and Jack ...’

  The MP dragged an unresisting Ernst back across the street, and threw him hard against the wall, back in the line.

  ‘You arsehole,’ said Heinz. ‘Get your bloody head shot off doing that.’

  ‘If I hadn’t been here you’d have done the same.’

  ‘Well, that’s true. But it’s the principle. Hey, Tommy! How about a cigarette for an old man?’

  The MP ignored him.

  The soldiers who had been tormenting Alfie gathered in their circle again, passing around cigarettes and alcohol. A few girls came out to join them. One couple danced, though there was no music. The light was fading now, but the town was brightening, the lights of candles and oil lamps and even electric bulbs glowing out of windows, as for the first time in years blackout curtains were torn aside.

  And Gary Wooler was coming back to Ernst. ‘On second thoughts, Obergefreiter, I think you should come with us.’

  XIV

  6 July

  Ben woke to a symphony of gunfire: the boom of heavy artillery, the angry cough of mortars, the popping of small-arms fire. Was it 1940 again, had he finally come unstuck in time and drifted into the past?

  But he felt the bed under him, the prison-camp pyjamas that covered his nakedness. He was still here, still in the laboratory. Still embedded in the Loom, a Jewish fly caught in a Nazi spider-web.

  His mouth felt sour, and there was an edge to his consciousness, a brittleness - a kind of false colouring to his sight, a high-pitched ringing in his ears, a scent of antiseptic in his nostrils. He knew these signs. Julia had made him sleep again. She had put him under and brought him back with opiates and stimulants, controlling him with a smooth expertise that had grown over the months, and yet left Ben with a sense of fizzing disorder each time.

  And just as every time he woke, he felt a gathering dread of what Julia Fiveash might have used him to achieve while he slept.

  One big crump, a shell landing nearby, was enough to make the bed shudder. That gunfire was real enough, then. The war had come to this place of horror, at last.

  He opened his eyes.

  The hard light of the electric lamps above him glared into his head. The glass wall of his cage was only a foot from his face. It wasn’t as pristine clean as it used to be; a patina of dust covered it, plaster shaken from the roof. He could see his own reflection, a face half-buried in a pillow.

  And he saw another face beyond his. Beautiful, hard, on the other side of the glass, it was Julia. He remembered how in Princeton he had woken to see that lovely face looking back at him, blonde hair tousled, how his helpless heart had hammered. In the end it had been just another supine seduction by a monstrous figure who had sought only to use him, in a long line of such seductions, such monsters. But even so he would never have imagined then that the two of them would be reduced to this, that she would use him so.

  ‘He’s awake,’ he heard her say. ‘I think it worked. So that’s Aethelmaer’s Codex sent back, Josef.’ She glanced away; Ben saw the curve of her neck, the supple muscles above the collar of her uniform. ‘Step one complete. Come on, man, show a bit of enthusiasm. We have changed history - again!’

  Ben’s vision was misty, blurred by drugs and dusty glass. Beyond Julia he could see the calculating machine, a wall of glistening metal and wire, and the hunched figure of Josef Trojan before a flickering grey screen. There was another man too, in a dark blue uniform, sitting silent in a chair Ben was shocked to recognise George Tanner.

  ‘You might explain that to the Allied units who are even now besieging Richborough,’ Trojan said. ‘Whatever we’ve done hasn’t made a blind bit of difference, any more than the Menologium did.’<
br />
  ‘You know very well this is a two-part process. We have sent back the weapons; we must still send back the motivator, the Testament of Eadgyth. Then it will be done - America defeated before it is spawned. Kamen just needs a bit of time to get the drugs flushed out of his system and a brush-up from the mnemonic tapes before we send him under again.’

  ‘We may not have the time.’ He sounded panicky. ‘We have rushed this programme, rushed to complete the research, the calculations. And now it comes down to this, the last hours, and still it is not done—’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re drinking. At a moment like this!’

  ‘It is our last bottle of the Fuhrerwein. A gift from the Fuhrer to Himmler on his birthday, and from Himmler to me. Drink, drink! Do you want to leave it for the English? Maybe your pet policeman lover-hostage would like some too. Or Ben Kamen!’

  ‘Try to conceal your cowardice,’ Julia said. ‘You know, Josef, the only thing I ever admired about you, the only thing, was your brashness. The way you used to bully your brother pointlessly - I liked that. I saw something of me in you, I suppose. Now you merely disgust me. Ah, let us work; we still have that in common.’ She turned back to Ben, looking into his eyes. ‘The work! How marvellous it is, how intellectually bracing. Don’t you agree, Ben Kamen?’

  Ben, restrained and drugged, barely able to move a muscle, did his best to meet her stare. He knew what reaction she was looking for.

  She knew that Ben remained convinced that changing the past was an all-or-nothing affair. Every time he was put into his drugged sleep - if the Loom worked, and he still wasn’t prepared to concede that it did, that this wasn’t all some foolish illusion - then he died, as all of history folded away like a crumpled bit of paper. And the Ben who had just woken had, in a sense, existed for only a few minutes, since the implementation of the change, and all his memories were of a history that was entirely new, a fabrication. This was his conviction, and it filled him with a deep existential horror.

  And this hellish woman knew this. As she peered now into Ben’s head she was looking for the terror that penetrated his soul. She relished it, a connoisseur of pain.

  But the lab shuddered again. She still had Ben in a cage, but now it was Julia and all her projects who was under threat. He met her stare and grinned. Her face twisted into a snarl, and she turned away.

  ‘Look at this,’Trojan said. ‘The television broadcast is back! The Allies have taken over the Promi station.’

  ‘How enterprising of them,’ Julia said. ‘Ah. American and British soldiers shaking hands. How convenient that there was a camera there to record the historic moment when their twin thrusts met north of Hastings ... Oh, and here’s Churchill, walking the cliffs of Dover - of course he would be there. The great opportunist stands amid the ruins of his country, celebrates a victory that is not his, and looks out to sea towards his next conquests. And they call Hitler a warmonger!’

  ‘Do you think all this is a foretaste of what is to come, Julia? The resources assembled against us - is this the pattern we must endure for the rest of the war, until Americans shake hands with Russians in the ruins of Berlin?’

  ‘You are a fool, Josef Trojan. A fool and a coward. Just remember, now that we have got this far I can finish the job myself. I don’t need you. Not any more.’

  ‘I do not forget that,’ said Trojan. ‘Not for a minute. Oh, look - a flyby by Spitfires. Such a pretty aircraft, don’t you think? ...’

  Julia checked the dials on the monitors by Ben’s cage. ‘The specimen is ready. A few more minutes with the tapes and we can send him off on his final journey into the past.’She grinned. ‘Listen well, little fellow.’ Out of Ben’s sight she snapped a switch.

  A recorded voice began to speak in his ear. He tried not to listen, to think of other things, to empty his head. But he felt a mild sedative slide into his veins, washing away his determination, as the Testament of Eadgyth poured into his head:

  In the last days

  To the tail of the peacock

  He will come: The spider’s spawn, the Christ-bearer

  The Dove ...

  Send the Dove east! O, send him east!

  Another shuddering crash as a shell fell close, and the small-arms fire grew louder.

  XV

  The Sherman tank’s great gun fired one round after another into the carcass of the squat concrete tower, the central fortification of the Richborough complex. The defenders seemed to have nothing left to respond with, nothing but machine guns and rifles whose bullets rattled off the tank’s oblivious carcass. The booming of the tank’s gun was huge, and though Mary kept her hands clamped over her ears she could feel it in her chest, the cavities of her skull.

  Mary was huddled with Gary, Willis Farjeon and the young German prisoner, Obergefreiter Ernst Trojan, in a captured trench. More troops, a total of eight in the group, rested nearby. They were waiting for Tom Mackie. The trench smelled of blood and cordite, the stink of battle.

  Gary touched her shoulder. ‘Mom, are you sure you’re all right?’ He had to yell over the sound of the gun.

  ‘What do you think?’ she shrieked back. She felt self-conscious in her ’siren suit’, her blue WVS coveralls, and her pack on her back contained the results of her researches into Geoffrey Cotesford’s memoir - a pack of academic documents in a war zone.

  Gary said, ‘I never even got to see the arch I spent a year of my life toiling over. And now they’ve pulled it down to build a flak tower!’

  ‘Same thing happened to Claudius’s monument. When the tide turned against Rome, they tore that down too, to build the Saxon-shore fort.’

  ‘I guess England’s not a place you want to invade,’ Gary said.

  Perhaps that was true, she thought. And how strange it was that today, the last moments of one immense invasion might be played out on the scene of another nineteen hundred years earlier.

  Ernst Trojan stirred. He wore his grubby Wehrmacht uniform, but he had been given a British army helmet for his safety, and he had his hands tied behind his back.

  Willis yelled at him, ‘You OK, Fritz? Anything I can get you? How about a beer?’

  ‘Leave him alone, Willis,’ Gary said.

  There was another crash, and they all ducked.

  Tom Mackie came crawling along the trench. He crouched down with them, holding onto his Navy officer’s hat. ‘Afternoon all.’

  ‘About bloody time,’ Willis said. ‘Sir.’

  ‘We’re all doing our best, Farjeon,’ Mackie said, unperturbed. ‘Well, we’re fit to go at last,’ he said to Mary. ‘The boffins have arrived.’

  She risked a glance out of the trench. She saw that an armoured vehicle at the rear of the field was disgorging military types and civilians, some quite elderly. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Some of my MI-14 colleagues. There are a few chaps from Bletchley Park who want to see if the Nazis have made any improvements to their Colossus calculating machines. And some American boffins.’ He pointed. ‘That is John von Neumann. An egghead among eggheads. He worked at Princeton in the time of Ben Kamen and Gödel. Knows more maths and physics than they did, probably. Actually we have him on loan from the Americans’ atomic bomb project. And that is a man called Thomas Watson. Head of International Business Machines. You know - IBM, the big calculating-machine corporation in the States. Not terribly ethical, so the rumours go. Got a medal from Hitler.’

  Willis Farjeon said, ‘Bloody Yanks, Captain? Over here stealing our women and now our calculating machines. What can you do, eh, sir?’