Ghosts of Engines Past (17 page)

I managed to stop myself laughing with some effort.

“As conspiracy theories go, that takes a lot of beating. A French plot to disparage the finest of Brittanic science of six hundred years ago, except that it was four hundred and fifty years ago when it started.”

“Brittania did not exist six hundred years ago.”

“You know what I mean. If this journal was to become public, why the Tynedale Dissertations on Nature would be proved to be a hoax.”

“A hoax?” I laughed. “Darling, the earliest published copy of the Dissertations in the Brittanic Library of Congress is dated 1412.”

“You know what I mean. They owned this sword,” he said. “That sword in the next room still receives radio transmissions, it's a sort of accidental crystal set. It could have received back in 1404. It has been known to be a receiver for over a century.”

“Who could have had a radio transmitter back in 1404? Lavoisier did not make the first trans-Atlantic transmission until 1799, and even that was only in Watt code.”

“Some people would say aliens.”

“Steven, if it was aliens who provided the Tyndale brothers with all their inventions and laws of physics, it would cause a sensation.”

“Ah, and that's it. Alien contact is that bait to lure us into questioning the Tynedales.”

The trouble with my husband was that his eccentricity merged into his sense of humour. At some point, the worst of nonsense shared common ground with what he considered to be a real possibility.

“Steven, as a professor of theoretical physics I can give you any number of other explanations. As a person with a lot more common sense than you I can make quite a few suggestions too.”

“Name one—as a person,” he said, folding his arms and pouting theatrically.

“The Tynedale brothers did this hoax themselves, as some sort of joke,” I suggested.

This was a little too plausible for my husband.

“All right then, name another, but this time as a professor of physics.”

“Temporal entanglement.”

“What? You mean like the quantum entanglement radios the astronauts are using on Europa to communicate instantly with Earth.”

“Faster than light, not instantly,” I said automatically. “It's spatial entanglement, but just suppose there could be temporal entanglement too. This sword could be entangled with itself, but in an earlier century. Whatever radio transmissions it picks up in 2004 are also picked up by the sword in 1404.”

“Preposterous.”

“Oh yes, just like your alien theory.”

“My alien hoax conspiracy
theory, let us be precise about this.”

“Well we have a way of testing it. The brothers would have been paying the sword very close attention if it had suddenly spoken. I'll prepare a little tutorial in thermodynamics, throw in Galvani's technique for measuring the speed of light, and then give an explanation of Faraday's Law of Relativity. Actually, I ought to include some mathematics as well, or they will not be able to make anything of it. I could give them the technology to make a primitive battery, and even instructions for an electric motor. Perhaps instructions for building a simple spark gap radio transmitter, too.”

“All right, all right, for once you have out-weirded even me. What is the point?”

“All of that will appear in their writings, and in this journal,” I said, tapping a blank page.

“But history will have been changed. What will have been proved?”

“Plenty. I shall have read out my own name during the transmission. It should show up in this journal. If it does, no French conspiracy.”

Steven leafed through the pages, smirking. Whoever had made the transmission that William had transcribed had been besotted with him. She had described herself as a scholar, and later as a teacher of youths and girls. Much of her transmission was embarrassingly personal and mawkishly sentimental, yet I had a curious sympathy for her. I had decided to become a scientist after reading his biography at the age of twelve. I drew curious satisfaction from the fact that he had never married, and as a teenager I often fantasised that he had been saving himself for me. I dreamed of inventing a time machine and travelling back to the early Fifteenth Century to meet him. When I married Steven I almost felt as if I were betraying William Tynedale, and that his spirit would be watching sadly as I forsook him for someone else.

“But if the Tynedales really did get all their science from the future, well, Britannic science and engineering be discredited anyway,” said Steven, sounding almost serious.

“Ah, but we don't have to publish,” I pointed out.

The Don Alverin sword had been known to be a crystal set for generations, and a radio transmitter was always kept in the manor house to demonstrate it to guests at dinner parties. It took me an hour or so to gather together some notes and draw up a programme for the transmission. William Tynedale's face stared out from a six hundred year old portrait on the wall. His good looks showed through, in spite of the rather primitive late-medieval style of the artist. Steven was asleep by now, with a half-empty decanter of port on the coffee table beside his chair. I switched on the little radio transmitter.

“William Tynedale, this is a message for you from six hundred years in the future. My name is Michelle Evelene Watson, and I am six hundred years in your future. As I sit here, I see your portrait on the wall, and your books are piled high around me. I know you so well that I have fallen in love with you, yet you do not know me at all. I have auburn hair, reaching to my shoulders, I am about your height, and I am thirty-five years of age as I sit here, speaking to you. Strange, is it not? I am thirty-five, yet I am not yet born, I am dead and long buried, and a gawky adolescent, all in your future. I wish to add to the principles spoken to you and your brother...”

I hesitated. Who had done the earlier transmissions in the journal? Perhaps an alternative me? A Michelle Watson who no longer existed? Certainly the man had shaped my life. In a way he meant more to me than Steven.

“First, I declare it true that the true speed of light is sufficient to cover one hundred and eighty six thousand miles in the interval between two heartbeats of a man at rest. The speed of sound is much slower, being about thirty times more than a fit man might run...”

The transmission took some time. I had to speak slowly so that William might copy everything down correctly, and I had to be very careful to phrase everything so that an educated person in the Fifteenth Century could understand what I was saying if he thought about it for long enough. Finally I finished my strangely primitive dissertation on modern science, thumbed the transmitter off, stretched, then picked up the journal. It certainly was a contradiction of scholarship, yet my name appeared there. Not my rank, however. That made me suspicious. I would never give my name without my rank. My rank defined my position in the fleet, in a way my rank defined my existence. Still, there was my name between two detailed dissertations on science... yet some of it was science such as had never existed. Faraday's Law of Relativity? Nonsense. Lord Isaac Newton had discovered his Principle of Relativity in the Seventeenth Century.

The door opened, and I immediately stood up and saluted. Baron Steven Chester entered, with my fleet's war-master and two women in civilian clothes.

“Baron, I should like to introduce Commander Michelle Evelene Watson,” said my war-master.

The baron smiled and gave a greeting flourish. The women stood behind him with their eyes down. They were certainly scientists, and probably from some unit so secret that its name was not even public knowledge.

“You have a good record, and come from a long line of military heroes,” said the baron. “There was a Watson aboard the Invincible when the fleets of Sir William Magnus and Don Miguel clashed off the orbit of the moon in 1793.”

“Yes sir.”

“They traded broadsides for eleven hours, flaying each other with cannon shot. It was quite a fight.”

“Quite so, sir.”

“Then again, a voidfarer named Lady Geraldine MacGregor was deputy commander of the third landing on Mars, in 1818.”

“Quite so, sir.”

“Robert the Third of Scotlandia was captain, as I recall. What do you say to that?”

“I am a loyal officer of the Caledonian Empire of—”

“Commander, please, be at ease,” he laughed. “Your loyalty to Brittoria is beyond question. As is your bravery. Why, you were the first woman to set foot on Centaurus Skye, were you not? Following in Lady Geraldine's first-footsteps, ha ha.”

“Quite so, sir. But I was only a Science Technician First Class on that expedition. “

“But getting back to this journal, it was discovered while your phase induction starship was still a year from its triumphant return with the relics from that dead alien civilization. Your name is mentioned, and you are described with considerable accuracy.”

“I cannot account for any of this, sir.”

That was true, I was quite confused. I had never seen the Journal, yet my full name certainly was Michelle Evelene Watson, I was about the height that William Tynedale had been, and my auburn hair reached to my shoulders on the rare occasions when it was brushed out. The baron now asked my war-master to take over. He introduced a woman named Dr Becker. Becker was a tense, nervy person. She spoke very quickly, and continually moved her hands in little circles

“You have a very... how shall I put it?” she began. “Your background is very solidly based on a broad range of scientific fields. If anyone was going to dictate those two passages to William and Edward Tynedale, there could not have been anyone better qualified than you.”

“With permission, Madame Doctor, it was certainly not me,” I declared.

“Oh, and we all believe that, but things are not always what they seem. My colleague Doctor Cassin and I have done a lot of work on the mathematics of temporal paradoxes and probability fields. We think it is possible to have a past that ceases to exist, yet can be detected. A person, possibly in Tynedale's future, helped him to change the future. In that future, she did not write all these pages, yet she still exists. Possibly she is you. Yet the words have been written. How is that?”

“With permission, Madame Doctor, I cannot say.”

“The question was merely rhetorical, commander. Were you able to give the answer, you would not be the mere commander of a patrol cruiser. You would be the head of—well, the head of a very important research facility. Getting back to the problem, however, we have hypothesised the idea of multiple pasts, like tributaries of a river. One past will supersede another, but there will always be a single present. These pages were possibly written in two or three alternative pasts that combined to make up our present. The mathematics—”

“If you please, we should come to the point,” interjected Dr Cassin. “We have developed a computational model to show that you can travel back in time, murder your father, and still exist. Much of that model's mathematics is based on records found amind the ruins at Centaurus Skye.”

We had found an entire civilization, cut down in its very prime. There had also been outposts and colonies on nine of the other bodies in the Centaurus system. All had been destroyed with almost surgical precision in some very ancient conflict. There was evidence that it had been a widespread, interplanetary nuclear war, yet the ruins displayed very little evidence of radiation. Only a nuclear war millions of years in the past would have allowed enough time for the radiation to have died away to such an extent. The Centaurus Skye civilization had been considerably more advanced than ours. Our weapons technology had always lagged our ability to build and power our spacecraft. The earliest of our space wars had actually been fought with gunpowder weapons.

“The Centaurians were destroyed by outsiders,” Cassin continued. “Sooner or later we shall meet the descendants of the victors, and when we do...”

She shrugged her shoulders, then turned to the war-master.

“Commander Watson, both the weapons and weapon designs found on that dead, defeated world were centuries ahead of what we can build today, yet they were still annihilated,” he explained. “Our war laboratories have reverse engineered what your expedition brought back, yet even these are the weapons of a defeated race, as well as being millions of years old. We have been thinking that if we can, ah, engineer a different past, then we can be far more advanced in our weaponry by this year, 2004. We can also warn those in our new future not to make the radio broadcasts that could alert the victorious race about our presence.”

“That is where you come in,” said the baron.

“Your pardon, sir, but I do not follow,” I confessed, almost reeling with the strangeness that was battering me.

“Did you read the margin notes in the Tynedale Journal?”

“Ah, I only had time for the main text, sir.”

“It seems that William was very fond of you—or the alternative you, that is. Your 'image' from an alternate past was in love with him as well, that is just as obvious. To come straight to the point, we need you to read a dissertation on advanced physics, chemistry, weaponry, and electronics to the Tynedales. Oh, and a warning about the race that ashed the Centaurian civilization as well.”

I agreed. There was no word other than
yes
when it came to orders. Again I was left alone with the portrait of William Tynedale and his journal. 'My' words were on the pages. My words as transcribed by him. Then there was my declaration of love for a man who had died in 1465, when he was eighty eight years old. Somehow he was still twenty-two for me, however, and the year was 1404.

William Tynedale had changed the world with his theories, along with the inventions of his brother. They were the first of modern scientists. I was about to ask him to foresake the credit for so much scientific brilliance. Could he do it? Would he and his contemporaries even understand the warning about never using radios, because of the danger from the outsiders? For all of my life I had  worked to live up to the standards of my ancestors. Now I had done it, and where was there to go? Produce heirs with the aid of a suitable partner—or be impregnated with the seed of someone famous and brilliant. A suitable partner had been chosen by my baronial sponsor house, a fleet admiral's son. I had nothing more to do, I merely had to lie back and reproduce.