Sim looked sheepish and made his excuses before bowing to the professor and leaving quickly.
They walked behind the austere figure down the length of the hall towards the giant clock. Josh tried not to be distracted by the amazing mechanical systems around him, but it was virtually impossible.
‘What does all this actually do? Other than tell the time.’
‘Omnia fieri possunt — all things can happen,’ said Eddington without turning around. ‘To calculate the near-infinite possibilities and probabilities of the future and select the best course for the continuum.’
‘But why not use computers?’
Caitlin grimaced, and Josh immediately realised he’d said the wrong thing.
Eddington spun on his heels to face him, his placid expression replaced with a red flush of anger. When he spoke it was through gritted teeth.
‘Ms Makepiece, please be so kind as to explain to our young friend here why we cannot use ELECTRONICS!’ He turned back and strode off at an even faster pace.
Caitlin sighed and pulled Josh along after the disappearing form of the professor.
‘You can’t bring that kind of technology back here.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘You can’t go back to before it was invented. But you could set all this up in the twenty-first century.’
She shook her head. ‘Too close to the present. The frontier has a distorting effect on the convergence of random variables the closer you get to it.’
‘The frontier?’
‘Where the present and the future converge.’
‘So why can’t you just bring back the plans for computers and build them here?’
She coughed. ‘That’s possibly the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. Can you imagine what would happen to the future if we built advanced technology and it got out into civilisation?’
Josh shrugged.
‘Second rule of the Order: “No advancement of earlier milieu by imparting of future knowledge or events.” It screws up all their calculations for a start.’ She waved around at the Copernicans.
‘And what was the first rule again?’
She made an exasperated groan, then saw that he was joking and punched him in the arm.
Professor Eddington had calmed a little and was waiting impatiently in front of a large door with a globe embedded at its centre.
‘The map room. You should be honoured. Not many get to see beyond these doors,’ she whispered.
‘If you are quite finished with your horseplay, perhaps we could proceed?’ Eddington said, taking out a strange-looking key that hung from a chain round his neck. He placed it into the centre of the globe.
The doors ground open slowly. They were over a metre thick and made from some kind of metal. Josh assumed this was a kind of vault, the room beyond the doors was dimly lit, and he couldn’t make out the details of what lay beyond.
‘Follow me,’ Eddington said, putting the key back round his neck, ‘and don’t touch anything.’
Josh’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the low light until he could recognise some of the shapes around him. At first, he thought it was a planetarium: there were large spheres on metal rods that idled around each other on rotating discs, and pinpricks of tiny white light shone down from the high ceiling, creating a star field of constellations he couldn’t name.
‘This is the Orrery, or Universal Engine as some refer to it,’ echoed the voice of Eddington from somewhere out of the darkness. ‘With this model we are able to show the arrangement of the universe at any given time in the last twelve millennia.’
As impressive as the machine was, Josh had no idea how this was going to help them find the colonel and was about to say something to that effect when Caitlin’s hand slipped into his and squeezed it gently as if to say, ‘Wait and see.’
He heard the professor move a series of unseen levers, and the silent spheres began to whir around above their heads. Like a carnival ride, they watched the universe turn round a central orb, which began to glow, obviously signifying the sun. As the illumination intensified, Josh tried to work out exactly where the earth was. A minute later he spotted a small insignificant blue sphere the size of a golf ball in comparison to the gas giants of Jupiter and Venus.
‘This model is of course not to scale,’ the professor said from the pulpit of controls on the far side of the model. ‘It has been a somewhat contentious issue over the last few hundred years. The fourteenth century was still debating whether or not the earth was flat, let alone the centre of the universe.’
Josh couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live in a time that didn’t understand basic stuff like how the solar system worked — things that any six-year-old took for granted. To not know that the earth was round or that the reason the sun came up every day was because the planet was spinning round it at 1,000mph. The knowledge was so fundamental that it seemed as if it had always been there. This was the first time Josh actually appreciated the little education he had received; he realised he knew more about the universe than most of the scientists of the fourteenth century.
‘Now, those co-ordinates if you please,’ the professor requested.
‘Seventeen to the fourth, Tiberian. Twenty-five. Nine. Fourth branch, ninth parallel,’ Josh repeated, and Eddington manipulated the controls of the machine to send the universe spinning backwards in time.
The shape of the model changed before their eyes; the Earth grew larger as the other planets shrank and disappeared beneath the floor. As the blue sphere expanded, the metal plates of its shell slid over each other like layers of an onion, each adding more detail until he could make out the continents, oceans and topographical details of the various land masses. Place names appeared over the surface in old-fashioned copperplate — Josh saw the coast of England flash by with ‘German Sea’ written in place of the channel. France was called ‘Gaul’ and there were other older terms for other places, but their outlines were unmistakeable.
‘This is Earth circa 9.914.’
Josh tried to do the maths in his head.
‘Eighty-six BC,’ Caitlin whispered in his ear, her breath sending a tingle down his spine.
‘The co-ordinates that Rufius gave you refer to Ogylos in Greece, now known as Antikythera.’
A brass-ringed magnifying glass larger than their heads swept round and centered on the small island just above Crete. Josh could see model buildings, trees and even ships in the harbour.
‘At this time it was being used as a base by a band of Sicilian pirates, but Rome was very dominant and still had a permanent fleet stationed off the coast.’
‘And this is where the colonel is?’
‘Perhaps,’ answered the professor, appearing out of the dark. ‘It is most certainly where he wanted you to go.’
‘Why Greece?’
‘That, Mr Jones, is what you are about to find out.’
43
The Antiquarians
Caitlin thanked the professor and took Josh down a series of winding stairs to an underground train station where the platform was nothing more than a waiting room with a few benches.
‘The Copernicans aren’t collectors,’ she said once she’d checked to see if they were alone. ‘We’ll have to go to the Antiquarian department before we can make the jump back to ancient Greece.’
‘Aren’t the Antiquarians the ones who run the museums?’
‘That is one of their roles.’ She tried not to sound too condescending. ‘They are essentially the custodians of all historical artefacts, and their collection goes well beyond what you see in a museum.’
The windows of the waiting room began to rattle. Josh felt the ground beneath his feet shudder as if some massive juggernaut were passing through. A moment later, a gleaming black steam locomotive slowed into the station. It was pulling a single metal carriage. Josh could see a rather eccentric-looking man standing at the controls, wearing an old leather flying hat and goggles. He spoke into a tube, and a tinny voice came through
a metal grille in the ceiling. ‘Next stop: Antiquarian Archives. Please have your designations ready.’
‘That’s us,’ Caitlin said, standing up.
Josh followed her into the carriage, which was empty except for a strange collection of railway memorabilia. They sat down on one of the less uncomfortable-looking benches as a bespectacled old guard appeared through the back door.
‘Tickets, please.’
‘So the Antiquarians are based in the same century as the Copernicans?’ he said, trying to sound as if he wasn’t a complete newbie.
Caitlin handed the guard a ticket, and he inspected it through thick-lensed glasses. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘They use redundant timelines to deal with the storage issue. It’s the only way to keep everything organised.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘You’ll see.’
The guard clipped their ticket and announced, ‘Grecian,’ in a monotonous tone into a speaking tube, moving a series of dials on the device that hung round his waist. Seconds later the train set off at speed.
The Grecian archives of the Antiquarians was equally as impressive as the Hall of the Copernicans. It was like a museum but hundreds of times bigger. Caitlin explained there were thousands of artefacts carefully catalogued and stored in rooms spanning centuries from 5000 BC.
They were deep underground. There was a sense of the subterranean about the place: no natural light, the air smelt old and there was an oppressive feeling of thousands of tonnes of rock suspended above your head. The walls were made from white stone blocks that were more than a metre square and formed hexagonal rooms over twenty metres in diameter. Each wall had a large arch leading to another similar space.
There were no maps or signs, only a Roman numeral above each arch. Josh assumed they were supposed to indicate the century the artefacts belonged to.
They wandered from one room to the next. Every so often Caitlin would stop and admire a piece of art or pick up a manuscript. Nothing here looked that ancient. Many items looked as if they were new — which made them look like replicas. Josh found it hard to believe that these three-thousand-year-old antiques could actually be in such pristine condition, but that was a linear way of looking at the world, and he knew he would have to learn to think differently about history.
They saw no one. Caitlin told him that unlike the Copernicans, who seemed to be everywhere, the Antiquarian was a solitary calling, and those who chose this vocation tended not to play well with others. There was probably only one supervisor assigned to this part of the collection. Josh thought back to the guard in the Louvre, who had seemed genial enough, but when he mentioned it to Caitlin she laughed.
‘Marfanor isn’t an Antiquarian. He’s probably been assigned guard duty as a punishment.’
‘Like a detention?’ Josh asked, his voice sounding lost in the volume of silence around them.
‘Kind of. He tends to get himself in trouble on a regular basis. Think of it more like a community-service order. There aren’t that may Antiquarians, for obvious reasons, and so the council use guard duty of the more accessible archives as punishment.’
‘What did he do?’
She screwed up her eyes as if thinking really hard. ‘I think the last time was stealing from the US government. He caused some kind of financial crisis back in 12.008.’
‘They put a thief in charge of valuable treasures?’
‘Yeah, it’s kind of ironic when you put it like that.’
They reached an arch with the numerals IXMVIICL carved into the stone.
‘This is our century. Now we need to find something from Antikythera.’
It took a few hours of searching before they found a some coins from the island. There were scarcely any other options, and Josh realised how difficult it must be for Draconians to find their way back into the forgotten periods in time. Once you went back further than the printing press it was like being a detective on a case without any clues, all you had to go on was money, art and the odd clay tablet. The trouble with knowledge was that unless you wrote it down on something that could last, there was a damn good chance it would get lost.
Clothes from that time were hanging on the usual set of rails next to a set of screened changing booths. These Antiquarians were methodical if nothing else, he thought, as he changed into a rough woollen toga.
When he reappeared, Caitlin was already waiting for him with an impatient look on her face.
‘What took you so long?’ she asked.
‘The bloody shoes,’ he said, pointing at the leather thonged sandals. ‘They’re like some evil puzzle dreamed up by a knot fetishist!’
Caitlin looked stunning. Her hair was coiled into ringlets and tied back behind her head. A necklace of small golden coins hung around her neck, and she wore a thin blue cotton dress that was slightly transparent. The memory of the way her body had felt against his came flooding back.
‘What? Is this too much?’ she asked, fiddling with the necklace.
‘No,’ he replied with a smile, ‘you look like a perfect little Greek princess.’
‘Γιατί σας ευχαριστώ είδος κύριε,’ she said with a mock curtsey. ‘How is your Hellenistic Greek?’
He pulled a face. ‘I’ve never been any good with languages.’
‘I take it the colonel never showed you how to intuit?’
Josh shook his head.
‘No,’ she frowned, ‘it would have been too early in your training.’
‘What does it do?’
She tapped the side of her head. ‘Allows us to share memories.’
‘How?’
‘They’re another form of energy, just like your personal timeline. Seers do it all the time. It takes a lot of practice to isolate the branch you want. Otherwise, it can get a little too personal.’
‘So you can teach me to speak Greek just by giving me the memories.’
‘No. Language is hard. It uses so many different parts of the brain.’
Josh looked disappointed.
‘But,’ she added, ‘we do have specialists that can help us with that.’
She turned and walked over to a shelf of glass jars with what looked like large pickled walnuts inside. She went along the row, reading the labels out loud.
‘Dianthus, Peteor, Jullian de Meer. Ah, here we go — Janto Sargorian.’ She lifted the jar down from its resting place and set it on the table, then began attaching electrodes to metal contacts on each side of the glass.
‘That’s not —’
‘A brain? Of course it is. What else would you store memories in?’
‘But . . .’ He couldn’t think what to say next.
‘They donated their minds to the Order. It’s seen as a very noble gesture.’
‘But they’re dead!’
She opened a drawer in the table and pulled out a metal crown to which she attached the other ends of the wires.
‘Stop being a pussy. Sit down and put this on. It’s not like I’m going to make you eat it!’
Josh sat on the edge of the table and let Caitlin place the crown on his head.
‘Now, according to the label, this mind has been dormant for the best part of four hundred years, so he’s not going to take too kindly to someone banging around in his personal space. Try to tread lightly, and whatever you do don’t let it get too deep into your mind — just keep thinking about the coin. Okay?’
Josh nodded nervously, playing with one of the metal discs. ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to mess in other people’s timelines?’
‘Not living ones. These are more like filing cabinets of accumulated knowledge. Not as systematic as a library, but a hell of a lot faster for acquiring knowledge than a book.’
Josh fell the contacts on the crown warming against his temples.
‘Now lie back. I find it helps to close your eyes and focus on your breathing,’ she said as bubbles started to form in the liquid around the brain. ‘He’s waking.’
Josh fel
t the presence of the mind gently reach out to probe his own; it emoted warmth and friendship — like a child waking. Colours and shapes began to form on the edge of his consciousness, not like the timelines of an object: these were more abstract, more organic. It was impossible to make out any distinct branches.
WHAT/WHO/WHEN?
The questions formed inside his head. There wasn’t a voice; the words were not exactly like speech, but more like the meanings of a thought.
HELP? Josh replied without speaking.
The shapes changed, reformed and flowed into one another as if searching for the right response.
WHO.WERE/ARE. YOU?
JOSHUA JONES.
There was a stillness and the colours faded into purples and blues as the mind contemplated his answer.
I. JANTO. LAST. SARGARIAN. YOU. REQUIRE/NEED. HELP/ASSISTANCE/GUIDANCE?
The mind was probing him now. Josh could feel it spreading across the surface of his mind. He concentrated on the image of the coin as Caitlin had instructed — imagining the small round disc spinning over and over like the Copernican flipping it in the hall.
HELLENIC COIN > CIRCA 9th MILLENNIA?
‘Tell him you need a lexicon memory for Hellenic Greek,’ she whispered in his ear.
Josh did exactly as he was told.
WHY? Came the response.
‘He wants to know why,’ Josh repeated to Caitlin through gritted teeth.
‘He’s playing games. Tell him it’s a temporal imperative. Level Nine-Beta-Five.’
ACCEPTED>PREPARE> LEXICON FOLLOWS:
Josh saw a complex geometric form appear from the abstract swarm of information. It was full of sounds and symbols, and flashes of imagery. As it solidified, he felt the usual sensation that he experienced with a timeline, and allowed his mind to enter it.
It was like watching a thousand movies at once. His head ached as the information flowed into his memory. He felt like his mind was going to burst, and he reached up to pull off the crown, but Caitlin stopped him.
‘It will pass,’ she said. ‘Just relax.’
A few minutes later it stopped, just as if someone had pulled out the power. Josh felt able to breathe again and opened his eyes.
Anachronist Page 23
