Curse of the Purple Pearl

by Adrian Speed

  I wasted no time. I was out the door and up the stairs to the top deck even as I heard my younger self scrabble into clothing. I held the pearl under my arm, grabbed the grappling hook, pulled it under the railing and slid down the rope as fast as I dared, pulling up the slack I'd left earlier. The kayak bobbed in the swell and I struggled to get back into it without dropping the pearl box into the water. I cut the grappling hook off the rope, pulled the slack back into the boat and pushed myself free of the Livingstone. I barely needed to paddle; the swell pushed me to the river bank.

  All the way there I thought about Mr Peterson. He had been a very nervous, kind little man. He'd died with his Arabic primer in his hand, learning the language so he could better educate the children of the desert. Then I'd blundered in and he'd died. It had happened before and it happened again exactly the same way.

  I couldn't help but feel responsible. The whole business with the pearl was ghastly. I had half a mind to throw it overboard and let it sink to the bottom of the river and never let it be found again and to hell with the paradoxes.

  But if I did that Sir Reginald would die in the ninety-ninth century, and it wasn't Sir Reginald's fault all this had happened. He had just tried to help people as well as he could. It wasn't his fault Genesis had been created with an unachievable task.

  I pulled myself out of the kayak and dragged it onto the bank. I didn't want to have to drag it back to the time-machine, but it was made of fibreglass. If I left it there it would probably pollute time, and I'd been taught to give a hoot and not pollute. The soft glow of the firebox told me where the time-machine was. I dropped the muddy, wet kayak onto the time-machine and looked myself over.

  I was completely unhurt by the bullet. Not a single Newton of force had hit me. My legs below the knee were drenched from the river where I'd had to wade ashore, and the rest of me was drenched in sweat. I needed a shower, a change of clothes and, perhaps, a night's worth of sleep.

  The thing about being a time traveller, I realised as I set the controls for a travel lodge in the early twenty-first century whose address I vaguely remembered, was you had all the time you needed to prepare for the moments when there was never enough. Sir Reginald could wait for me a thousand years, if I needed them, trapped in an instant that would never continue until I reappeared.

  But I only needed a few more hours.

  Chapter XXXII

  No sooner had the time-machine disappeared from the ninety-ninth century than it reappeared, lightning crackling and flames shimmering. Most of Genesis ignored the reappearing time-machine. Sir Steven and his knights encircled the time-machine and drew their swords.

  I stood stony-faced in the centre of the time-machine. Kendo armour covered my shoulders and the robes flowed over me. In my right hand I held a basket-hilted sword, long as a short man, its edge shining with sharpness. I had two nearly invisible things. Over the robes the bullet proof vest glistened as thin as gossamer. In my left hand, hidden from sight, I held the Purple Pearl.

  “We told you if you tried to save him again we would kill you,” Sir Steven's hologram held its sword ready.

  In answer I lowered my sword point to him.

  “You think you can defeat holograms?” Sir Steven laughed. “Your sword has no meaning here, Hannah. There is no way you can harm us.”

  “I disagree,” I held up my left hand, revealing the Purple Pearl to the world.

  Giving Genesis a second to see it, I hurled it as far as my arm could throw. The holograms moved like clouds caught in the wind. I sprinted to where Sir Reginald was being held in crystal tentacles. Through the glass I could see his limbs. They were bent several more times than humanly possible.

  “Sir Reginald,” I whispered as I reached him. Only his head was free.

  “My dear,” Sir Reginald smiled so warmly it was as though the sun had come out. “I would take my hat off to you, but, well–” Sir Reginald wiggled.

  “I'll get you out of here, just give me a—”

  “It...it’s the pearl.” That was the blonde bombshell's voice. I whirled around, expecting attack. There was none. All the holograms had vanished but one. The blonde bombshell held the pearl with both hands like it was a sacrament.

  Machinery burst out of the ground, the blue glass-sand transformed into giant scanners, spectrometers, X-ray machines, machines to test the pearl under every spectrum of light, its smell, its taste. Everything to prove this really was the Purple Pearl of Marcus Aurelius, formerly of the Parthian Empire and plucked from the ocean over ten thousand years ago.

  “It really is the pearl,” the bombshell closed her hands over it and closed her eyes.

  “But if you think we're letting Sir Reginald go just because you gave us the—” the schoolboy hologram had appeared and began threatening him when he just froze. He twitched, not like a human. The entire top half of his body glitched sideways and he hung, mid-sentence.

  “What is happening?” Sir Reginald struggled to see.

  “Genesis is just realising that after nine thousand, seven hundred years of wars, dark ages, human migration, differing inheritance practices and racial interbreeding almost everyone on Earth and across the galaxy is the next legal heir of Vologases,” I said with a smile. With a flourish I rolled my sword over and over in my hands and drew it down into a scabbard. “So now the subroutine to return the pearl is eating up more and more resources, analysing the DNA and family history of every human on earth, returning more and more perfectly equal results.”

  “Am I to understand you have given Genesis a mystery that is impossible to solve?”

  “Well she did tell me to give her a hard one,” I turned away from the frozen holograms to look at Sir Reginald with a smug smile. There it met Sir Reginald's deathly serious face.

  “Genesis being a super-computer, which is the earth itself? That is the device you just gave an impossible task to?”

  “Yes.”

  Something cracked loud enough to shake the time-machine itself. The mists of New York disappeared in an instant. Without the mist, the only feature on the flat, featureless landscape was the access tower, five hundred yards away. It cracked and the furious heat of the earth spewed out. I stared in horror at a distant volcano bursting out of the surface of the earth, spewing lava up into the sky.

  The glass tentacles holding Sir Reginald shattered into powder sending him tumbling to the ground, limp like a dead jellyfish.

  The ground shook as though the tectonic plates were moving, but the nearest plate was the mid-Atlantic, surely. I looked around. “What's happening?”

  “As you said, more and more of Genesis's computational resources are being brought in to solve an impossible problem,” Sir Reginald said from the floor. “I believe the twenty-first-century term for what it is doing is over-clocking itself.”

  “It's tearing the world apart!”

  “Not... quite, but it's only going to get worse,” Sir Reginald tried to hoist himself up on his elbow. There was a snap and Sir Reginald fell to the ground wincing. “So I rather suggest we leave.”

  Something ripped open the ground fifty yards away. The distant sea rushed in to fill the crack.

  “No arguments there.” I sprinted to Sir Reginald and hoisted him up. He was worryingly light. Holding him around the chest and under the arms I was able to half-run, half-waddle back to the time-machine.

  Even as I did the ground beneath me was melting. The blue crystals that had littered the surface of the planet were disintegrating into powder and blowing away in the breeze while the sky above darkened. Thunderclouds swirled and lightning forked across them.

  I moved quickly but still laid Sir Reginald down gently on the ironwork. He refused to let me see the pain he was in, but I could feel his muscles spasming under my fingers. A silent scream of flesh.

  “The pearl,” I turned around. The hologram of the blonde bombshell was still holding it, flickering like a broken old television.

  “There's no time,” Sir Reginald po
inted to the controls.

  “There's always time for a time traveller!” I steeled myself, turned on my heel and ran out one more time to retrieve the pearl.

  Hot gasses burst out of the ground as the entire earth began to cook. If there was this much chaos on the surface, how much was going on deep down? How much was Genesis changing as it tried desperately to compute an impossible problem. Genesis could deal with everyday impossible questions, like solving pi to the last digit, but I'd overloaded a subroutine buried too deep in its programming. There was no defence against the very core of your nature. Genesis couldn't live with this unsolved question any more than I could live without oxygen.

  I could hear screaming. Distant shapes were running and cowering. An entire generation of humans had lived with a super-computer solving every problem, giving them every desire from the cradle to the grave, and I'd just destroyed it.

  I pushed my legs with all the energy I had. My muscles screamed from the effort but I reached the pearl and skidded to a halt on the vanishing remains of the pebble-sand. I grabbed at the pearl but the hologram of the blonde bombshell was still as hard and human-feeling as ever. Whatever gave them strength, force fields, or the pebble-sands, it was still there and it was as impossible to move as stone.

  “Oh come on,” I wrenched on the hands. A tiny sliver of the pearl was visible, tempting as the five-minute snooze button. I cursed, drew my sword and brought it smashing down on the bombshell's arms. The sword bounced off, edge blunted.

  “I–I–I–” the bombshell stuttered into life, like a slowly loading video.

  “Genesis.”

  “I–I'm dying,” it whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “G-g-g-” The bombshell stuttered, then died. The hologram disappeared, the pearl dropped to the floor with a plop.

  I didn't think about what Genesis had been going to say. I scooped up the pearl and ran, the ground quaking beneath me like quick-sand. I reached the time-machine and clung to it like a life-boat. My hands moved over the controls in a flurry, not caring about exact dates, just any time but here.

  Another explosion rocked the planet as I hauled on the time-travel lever. I stared up, hair and sweat falling in my eyes. A column of fire shone bright as the sun itself, lava pouring up into the sky and down the sides – all that was left of the access tower. Almost like fresh jam in a saucepan, as if I just reached out I could scrape it off.

  “I just ended the world, didn't I?” Sparks burst into life around the time-machine.

  “Oh, not at all, a world is hard to kill,” Sir Reginald said, his voice warbling as he spoke, unable to keep to a consistent register. “Certainly, it's not been a very good day for a great many people. But as Genesis dies Old Earth returns. It might be the end of their civilisation but the human race will find itself in a new Eden, I think.” He coughed awkwardly. “I am terribly sorry, but I’m about to pass out.”

  “I'll get you to a hospital.” I felt a wave of nausea run through me. The lightning enveloped the time-machine and rocketed us back in time. The last image of the 99th century fixed itself in my mind as it faded: the access tower exploding in a torrent of molten metal and the first droplets of rain falling on the Earth.

  Chapter XXXIII

  Smoke and steam billowed around the Mombasa railway station in 1932. Whistles blasted and echoed across the city. The rails rang with the hue and cry of hundreds of labourers. Freight was hauled off trains and ferried over to the port to be loaded onto ships bound for England. Emptied of engines, teachers, electronics and the products of empire, it hungered for raw materials to fuel Britain's ever-expanding reach.

  Nothing more than a brick warehouse that sprawled across the city and straddled the port formed the station. The Post Office sat next to it like a doll’s house by comparison. Breezes flowed through an octagonal entrance hall full of windows in front of the rectangular block that contained the sorting office.

  A fussy man, Postmaster Graves bustled around the Post Office in pince-nez glasses, a waistcoat ten years out of date and iron grey hair, thick at the back and fading at the front. He stood at the front desk fiddling with the paperwork of his subordinates, sucking on an old pipe and glancing suspiciously at the telegraph machine.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?” The postmaster adjusted his pince-nez.

  “I need to send this box back to England,” I smiled at him and did my best to seem as dim as possible. I hefted the box containing the Purple Pearl up onto the desk. “I'm headed inland to Nairobi and there simply isn't room in the rail car.”

  The Postmaster looked down at the trunk. The wood around the lock had been broken, but it still caught the eye with its majesty.

  “Er, certainly, we can do that for you madam,” He took the trunk from me. “Do you want it to travel as it is?”

  “Oh no, wrapped for protection, please.”

  “Certainly. Anwar?” Graves called over a subordinate who deftly wrapped it in brown paper and string.

  “And could this letter go with it, please?” I handed over an envelope. It had taken me three attempts to write with the ungainly fountain pens of the time.

  “The address, madam?” Graves took the letter from me and passed it to Anwar who wrapped it up in brown paper and fastened it into the box packaging.

  “Mr Albert Fairfax, Coldwold Park, Hertfordshire, England,” I recited. The Postmaster wrote this down on the packaging then moved the box onto the scales.

  “27lbs all in all. That is...” The Postmaster didn't need to check his postal rate book. “Five shillings and eight pence, madam.”

  I handed over a number of coins that were unusual to me even by the standards of English coinage. For a start, they had a king on them, not a queen. Then, without any further discussion, I swept from the Post Office, leaving them to frank the parcel and put in for transport to England.

  I walked towards the station where I'd left the time-machine. Provided it was not in the way, no-one would have noticed another steam engine. 1932 was leaving it later to return the pearl to Albert than I would've liked. I'd intended to return it in 1929.

  I looked down at the newspaper cutting I'd taken from my brief visit to that time. Albert had married Mildred Osborne, the aeroplane enthusiast, much as he suspected he would. I didn't want to send the pearl back to him at that happy time, especially when I peaked inside the trunk. The papers that Sir Reginald had been certain would be his father's notes on the Order of the Pearl weren't. They were letters. From an Evelyn who missed her little brother. I couldn't send back such sad letters so close to Albert's wedding day. When the pearl had been stolen it had lifted a great weight from Albert's shoulders. Perhaps now he could take on that burden again.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me madam!” someone shouted at me as I crossed the freight yard to where the time-machine waited. “A young lady shouldn't be back here! Madam!”

  “I won't be long!” I waved a hand to him, jumped on the time-machine, pulled on the time-travel lever and disappeared with a faint pop of sparks.

  *****

  It took me more than a month to follow the Purple Pearl through its history. In hundred-year jumps along its timeline from the twenty-third century I watched the British-Lunar Museum’s first centenary, the Lunar Independence movement coup d'état, and the formation of the Solar Union. I watched it go on loan to the Museum of Titan, and I followed it to its disappearance onto the black market after a botched transport to Alpha Centauri.

  It took until the fiftieth century to find the pearl's final resting place, and the reason that Genesis could never find it. I observed it only through a security recording, the event itself I couldn't witness in person without interfering.

  The second colony ship to Andromeda, the Picus, was one of the fastest faster-than-light ships ever built, capable of breaking 25,000 times the speed of light, but it still took a hundred years to reach the Andromeda galaxy. Fifty thousand humans slept for a century while a hundred thousand robots tended to
their care, with a crew of thirty humans to look after the robots.

  The Purple Pearl travelled with Keith, Crown Prince of Mars and Duke of Meridiani as one of his crown jewels. He would be king of the first colony of Andromeda when they landed. The Captain of the Picus was a member of the Order of the Pearl. The moment he saw the pearl he knew he had to take it, for the good of the Order.

  I watched the footage from the safety of the established colony of New Mars in the fifty-first century. It was engrossing. The Captain had taken the pearl easily. It merely had to be plucked from the cargo bay. Everyone who could stop him was either his subordinate or in cryo-sleep.

  Here the Captain had faced the same conundrum as Genesis many thousands of years later. He cradled the pearl like a baby and sat in the cargo hold, wrestling with his own thoughts. He'd argued with himself. He'd punched a bulkhead. He'd spent a while looking like he would cry.

  Even by the fiftieth century no-one could claim to be the true heir of Vologases. The Picus computer assured the Captain of that. The pearl had no rightful owner except the man the Captain had stolen it from. The Order of the Pearl had no purpose left.

  The Captain hadn't been able to put it back, though. Too many had died for the pearl for too many years to let the Crown Prince of Mars keep it. The Captain had placed it into an air lock and blown it out into space.

  From the ship's exterior sensor logs, I'd been able to watch the Purple Pearl drift away in the dead space between galaxies. In this distant space it was as though every galaxy was a star of a thousand colours, and the Purple Pearl flew through space amongst them.

  It would be impossible to ever find it, even if you knew its exact position and tracked its trajectory perfectly. It was a pearl two inches across lost in two and a half million light years of empty space between the Milky Way and Andromeda.

  The Captain of the Picus had one thing that Genesis did not, for all Genesis's power: the ability to choose his fate. For all Genesis's appearances it was still no more human than the Mona Lisa. It did not have the ability to choose. It followed its program to its end, and its program had destroyed it. The Captain had gone back to his life and lived it, raised a family on the Picus, died on the Picus, and his family still lived on in New Mars.