Arcadia (24 page)

Once I had thought about it for a decade, I realised that the machine itself was not that difficult to construct; the version I had overseen for Hanslip had been over-designed because it passed through so many committees that it ended up being far more complex, expensive and cumbersome than was necessary. I needed no materials that weren’t easily available and I realised that the amount of power required could be greatly reduced with only a few modifications. Until I worked that out (in about 1957) I had the problem of potentially needing the output of an entire
power station to get it to function. After serious thought I reduced that requirement to a quantity I could get out of an ordinary plug socket, which meant I could finally start building properly, rather than just playing around.

I used an iron pergola as the basis for it – a piece of nineteenth-century garden furniture that you were meant to grow roses over. It was quite pretty in a rusty, decrepit sort of way. This became the framework for a matrix of carefully placed and shaped materials – from aluminium to zinc – arranged so the various elements in the body would be recognised and transposed in the correct order. Ideally I would have used refined aluminium, but I had to use aluminium foil in its place. Instead of sheets of pure graphite, I used lead pencils and old newspapers. Other requirements were satisfied by using patent medicines containing iron, potassium, sodium and all the rest as needed. Not quite as efficient, but a damn sight cheaper.

The result was most peculiar, and it took a lot of work to get it laid out properly, but first tests were satisfactory. I called it ‘Momentum’ and told anyone who saw it that it was a biting critique of modernity, representing how the culture of the past (the pergola) was contaminated and overwhelmed by the detritus of consumerist industrialism that was covering over the elegance of civilisation with mass-produced conformity. It was thus both a radical critique of capitalism and a nostalgic vision of traditional society. The essence of the concept lay in the inherent tension that existed between the two competing visions. The explanation, which sounded a lot better in French, was generally met with a look of panic and a rapid change of subject, which was just what I wanted.

*

I set up a base in Oxford in 1959. My work had advanced greatly by then, and I was ready to begin trials. I was pleased, but I needed to run tests to see if the theory held up.

My new habits of caution had not dissipated. I wanted no accidents. To be on the safe side, I aimed initially to create something so far removed from the actual future that it could not possibly become a viable alternative. For that, I decided a fantastical world would be ideal, so I could check the machinery and complete all the theoretical calculations without fear of any unpleasantness. Even that would be difficult enough at this early stage, but I could always shut it down in an emergency.

I should explain how my device worked. It operated by manipulating the ether, that non-existent substance which physicists had rationalised out of their theories on the usual grounds that if it could not be converted into one of their little numbers it could not possibly be there. Einstein’s biggest mistake. This assumption was what stopped the advance of human knowledge in its tracks for the better part of a century and a half. The collected material I converted into complex algorithms and then projected them into a static, neutral space which was as abstracted as it was artificial.

Particularly, I wanted to monitor the way imagination distorted the ether (which is really just an archaic term for the universal totality of information flows). Once properly processed I could (in theory) bring a universe to life by taking an imaginative invention, projecting the information it represented into a confined space and then allowing it to extend far beyond its original size by logical progression. For this I needed a robust but simple outline, a world of the imagination which, however incomplete, was coherent, structured and – most of all – possible. Not only that, it had to be different enough from the current strand that variations could be measured and contamination avoided. Put enough information in (and what are we all but information in peculiar packaging?) and the universe would construct itself in a sort of chain reaction. Simple.

I found nothing in France which met my requirements. There was almost no one with the fanciful, whimsical sense of invention that I needed. Modern French novels were either too rooted in a rather grim reality or increasingly obsessed with sober meditations
on the pointlessness of existence. The few writers of science fiction knew little science, and children’s books for the most part involved an awful lot of cooking. I considered seeing what would happen if I projected a world full of talking elephants, but decided that the improbability of success did not merit the effort.

The English were a different matter. As their lives were so dreary and constrained, the fanciful exuberance of the human spirit was forced to take refuge in the imagination, which was the only place it could exist without attracting disapproval. There it flourished like a wild flower in spring. Even so, my task was hard and frustrating until Henry introduced me to his friend Tolkien. One day when he and his family were out, I set up sensors in his house. The information they slowly harvested was then processed and decanted into the device to see what happened.

Alas, quite a lot. I nearly killed myself.

*

It took a long time before I could figure out what went wrong, but every time I tried, the whole thing shut down. I thought initially that it was the magic, the population of dragons, orcs, trolls and all those beasts that he used. So I edited them out, but it still did not work – every time I ran the test, the universe would come into existence, work seemingly well, and then suddenly the entire cosmos would implode, leaving nothing but a void.

Once I thought I had succeeded. I had decided that the problem was with his wizards, who every now and then exhibit magical powers. So I reprogrammed those passages to make them ordinary people with funny hats. A world without rings, hobbits, dwarfs, dragons, elves, wizards and very large eagles became more boring, but I was desperate by this time, and finally what I hoped was Middle Earth flickered into existence. Through the entry into the controlled space I could see a seaport set into a cove, with tall, ancient buildings shrouded in mist so thick they were scarcely discernible, climbing the hills. I could see a single strange
sailing ship, of a sort which fitted the style of the book but which was nowhere described in the actual text. I was excited. The device had taken the parameters of the story and extended them outside its own limits. In order to create that ship, it must also have assumed a history of shipbuilding, of carpentry, of seafaring, of past generations who had evolved the necessary techniques. It wasn’t perfect, though – the buildings were fog-bound because they were still ill-defined.

Still, it was there and was sturdy enough to prove that my work had been correct in most particulars. I left it running for a few days to go off and celebrate, and it both grew and remained stable. So I foolishly gave way to temptation, decided to take a closer look and very carefully stepped through.

Much about it was satisfactory. It was indeed real – there was air, wind, land, the smells of vegetation, a sun in the sky. The ground was firm and clearly defined. But there were no animals – no birds, no sign of any fish. That worried me. Such a world cannot be stable: someone had built the ship. If people did not exist, then the ship could not have been built, which was obviously a dangerous inconsistency.

I was right to be worried. As I stood there, I felt the temperature of the wind changing, from mild to freezing cold, then hot in a way that nature, no matter how constructed, could not possibly emulate. I saw the sun change colour, then seemingly begin to melt in the sky. The buildings turned into something resembling mud and slid down into a sea that was no longer made of water but was sticky and glutinous, shining with a light that came from deep underneath. Even the hills themselves began to turn fuzzy and smudged round the edges.

I ran. Luckily I had ventured in just a few paces, but even so I had only seconds to spare. I got through, back into the safety of the Tolkiens’ garage on Sandfield Road, and looked back just in time to see an entire universe collapse into chaos, then nothingness, before my very eyes.

*

I had worked hard for years, and the only thing to show for it was a universe that lasted a few hours. I had little choice – I shut down all the machinery, stashed it into a safe lock-away in a small village to the north of Oxford, and disappeared back to France to do a lot of work. It took me the better part of a year before I thought I’d worked out the difficulty. A whole series of issues had combined to make the creation of a universe derived from Tolkien’s imagination impossible. Luckily they had done so, because each of them was enough to create something unstable enough to collapse eventually. I was fortunate that it had done so speedily.

The first problem was with Tolkien’s world itself. In it he plays something of a trick with religion. For the most part, the tale unfolds without the divine, yet at the same time it is part of real history. As a human tale, of course this is normal. The Bible is both myth and history, and we do not know whether the ancient Greeks believed in the gods of Olympus or saw them merely as stories. Human beings can believe and disbelieve at the same time. Physics, alas, cannot, and faced with Tolkien’s indecision on the matter my machinery tried to summon the gods into existence. This was a little beyond its power; it could create a belief in them, but not the actual gods. So my world was empty. As long as I did no more than observe it from the outside, all was well, but the moment I entered, it was forced to confront the contradiction and shut down.

Another problem was that it needed to be located (theoretically at least) on the line which ran from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch through Oxford 1959. Before or after did not matter, but it had to be somewhere. Tolkien’s world was neither in our past nor in our future. Either it or the present had to go for the universe to be coherent. Oxford 1959 could not vanish as the machine controlling it was there, so Tolkien’s world had to.

The failure convinced me that this model was too much trouble and I abandoned it, although with the greatest reluctance. That
was why I thought of Henry, once he told me of his reawakened passion for fantastical tales. I realised instantly that because of his reluctance to do more than sketch out notes, his Anterwold would be perfect for my purposes.

*

Henry had returned to academia after the war and buried himself in an ideal past of words. Poetry became his reality, the people who wrote it his gallery of saints. His knowledge and imagination mingled to produce Anterwold. To the outside world, this might sound sad, even pathetic, but it was not so unusual. Many people nurse their own passions, which are the more valuable because of their privacy. In that time, some read novels or painted; still more dug their gardens or went fishing. All such activities were useless, if you define them in a purely utilitarian way. But they were also a form of contemplation in one of the last moments of humanity’s existence when people were allowed time to think. ‘A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’ A poem Henry recited to me once to explain a line of fishermen, sitting morosely in the rain, their lines dangled into a filthy and self-evidently lifeless canal. I pointed out there was no chance of them catching any fish, and it would be quicker to get them at the fishmonger; he pointed out that they didn’t want to catch anything. That wasn’t why they were there.

His story would never be completed, never published, never read. His hiding place would be snatched away if it ever was. Its purpose for him was to be forever malleable, evolving in his mind and in the innumerable notebooks in which he jotted thoughts and ideas. He wasn’t, in any case, trying to write anything as banal as a novel, nor was he trying to please anyone but himself. Rather, he wished to construct a world that worked, rather like some people labour away in their attics building model railways that are better (certainly cleaner and more punctual) than the real thing.

His withdrawal from active life was hardly monastic, though. Although he never referred to it directly, I gathered that he still dabbled, when asked, in the mucky ponds of intelligence work. He taught, attended dinner parties, went to the pub. These Saturday meetings became crucial, for they guided him, steered his mind away from unlikely fantasies, added layer upon layer of human knowledge and history so that his conception became ever richer and stronger.

When I was certain that Henry was doing something to bring all the notes and jottings that he had been making for nearly twenty years into a usable form, I persuaded him to let me store my equipment in his cellar. He had no idea what it was, of course, and I rarely went to check on it. I wasn’t particularly afraid of it being tampered with; it was of such a design that no one could even recognise it as a piece of machinery.

This time I planned a very cautious development. Once I got going – I finished the tests and switched the machine to autonomous operation in April 1960 – I spent weeks simply waiting for the ground to form; I didn’t anticipate anything like animals or people for months, if not years. My timetable was to have a perfectly static empty world in twelve months, evidence for the existence of people in about eighteen, and then – only then – would I risk venturing in to see how solid it was. But only for a few seconds, at the most, and I thought that sending in an animal on a lead might be a good start. I had my eye on that snarling, spitting abomination of Henry’s which had scratched my leg very nastily once. Exposing it to the dangers of cosmic annihilation seemed only fair.

*

My mistake – and it was a big mistake – was to omit to set the machine for a global prohibition. Henry had almost no visitors, and certainly no one who ever stayed overnight. I discounted the possibility of a stray burglar as it was an era of exceptionally
low crime, and he simply never mentioned the existence of the young girl who had begun to visit him and feed his cat. Besides, for the first few months nothing happened. The damn thing just sat there, occasionally humming to itself, but otherwise entirely inert.