Ash: A Secret History (187 page)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 08.58 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

You people are taking this seriously.

Let me talk to Dr Isobel.

– Anna

  Message: #216 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 09.50 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

Sorry, impatient – what’s happened on the flight?? Are you back?

Just heard from Jonathan: although they are unaware of the full extent of your discoveries, the independent film company want to start shooting with you, on site, as soon as they can – before the Christmas break, if possible. What will Dr Isobel say to this?

HAVE YOU FOUND ANYTHING IN THE DESERT?

– Anna

  Message: #383 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 10.20 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Ms Longman –

I hope you will not mind if I add something at this juncture.

I think it inadvisable for outside filming to begin here yet. Perhaps after Christmas and the New Year? I am keeping the expedition’s own video records up to date, however.

Please, call me Isobel.

I. Napier-Grant

  Message: #218 (ING)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 10.32 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Dear Isobel,

Has Pierce told you that the editor of the second edition of ASH, Vaughan Davies, has reappeared after being missing, thought dead, for sixty years?

Can you confirm what Pierce has told me about the status of your archaeological seabed site off the coast of Tunisia?

Does that have any connection with your reluctance to allow outside film teams in?

Or, is Pierce under a lot of stress?

– Anna

  Message: #385 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 11.03 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna,

From a cursory glance at the files, I do not disagree substantially with anything that Pierce has written to you.

This will perhaps answer your last question.

As for myself… I am stunned. Didn’t Pierce make a joke that one day he and I would send you the Ratcliff-Napier-Grant theory of Scientific Miracles? What Tami Inoshishi and Jamie Hewlett are speculating, now, is not so far from that, perhaps.

If my theoretical physicist colleagues are right, it is deep consciousness, at the level of the species-mind, that in a sense _creates_ the universe. Imagine a constant process by which the wave-front of Possibility (random unordered chaos) is, moment by moment, collapsed from all the states in which it _might_ exist into the one in which it _does_ exist. In short, a process by which the Possible is constantly becoming the Real. That is time: that is how we experience the universe. And, Tami states with amazing self-confidence, the cause of the wave-front’s collapse into a stable ‘present’ at the moment we experience as ‘now’ is the _perception_ of it, by the consciousness of a species (that perception being an active, not a passive perception).

And with Pierce’s translated manuscripts in mind, I mentioned jokingly, to both Tami and James this morning, that this possible ability to collapse the wave-front would have to be genetic ability. Tami, seriously, said that it would not even be difficult to see how this could arise. It would be one of the greater evolutionary advances possible, to have a universe which is stable, in which effect follows cause, in which what you did yesterday stands a good chance of being valid today.

Not a conscious ability, she said. It would take place on a subatomic level; on a level as instinctive as photosynthesis in a plant, or the heartbeat in a human being.

I wish Pierce were here on the ship, but I shall have to wait until the helicopter returns to ask him – I wonder if one can speculate that reality, before the human species became intelligent, was more flexible, less able to confine itself to one possibility out of the infinite number of states in which the universe can exist. I should like to ask him if this might not account for why every human culture has a mythic pre-history, a legendary past, before ‘history’ itself begins?

For all that I know – and this is why I am reluctant to confine these discoveries to a book or film documentary; I am seriously thinking of throwing this site open to interdisciplinary investigation: shipping in theorists from _every_ field – for all I know, all life has a certain limited ability to collapse random possibility into predictable reality. Plants, dolphins, birds: each tries to affect its environment favourably. The most basic form of this _must_ be the perception of the subatomic ‘building blocks’ of reality, at the moment of ‘now’, as neither unstable nor random, but as order and pattern and sequence.

I am an archaeologist, not a physicist; and I watch and listen to Tami and James with open-mouthed astonishment. Before he left this morning, Pierce said to me that they do sound like a Ratcliff-Napier-Grant Theory of Scientific Miracles. You have only to say that there could exist a genetic ability to _consciously_ collapse the possible states of the universe into the Real – would not that be a ‘miracle’? Posit that such an ability could carry sufficient genetic defects that it hardly ever survives conception and birth. And then I look at Piercers translations and find myself thinking, there you have the Rabbi, and Ildico, and the Faris, and (one supposes) the Visigothic ‘Prophet Gundobad’, who is unidentified in this history because it is not this history in which he existed.

I have spent most of my adult life aware of how very little solid evidence of our past there is left, and, how very _careful_ one must be in interpreting what does exist and can be discovered. Were you not in London – were you here, just off the coast of North Africa, with an _impossible_ site a thousand metres below your feet – then you might understand why I don’t dismiss these speculations of a ‘fracture’ in history.

I do not say that I give credence to them, either.

And then, of course, there are the practical consequences. I had hoped to get past Christmas before a public statement became necessary, but I can see that I may have to revise my opinion.

I. Napier-Grant

  Message: #219 (ING)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 11.36 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Isobel –

You loaned Pierce an assistant, and got him a helicopter. You must give credence to something.

– Anna

  Message: #388 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 03.15 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Pierce has radioed in. Transcript of relevant part of message.

I. Napier-Grant

> Everything’s grounded.

> It was bad enough getting off the ship.

> We are back in Tunis. If I can’t hire a jeep, or buy a bloody

> camel, I am prepared to WALK into the desert.

> Low-angled sunset light is as good as dawn.

  Message: #390 (Anna Longman)