Ash: A Secret History (199 page)

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Authors: Mary Gentle

Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy

BOOK: Ash: A Secret History

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Pierce –

We have our breakthrough.

It was a bit of a shock. The doctors have taken William into hospital here overnight for observation. He’s a rotten patient, but I think retired medical men often are. I’ve been zipping around between his ward and the neurological ward where Vaughan is; I’m completely worn to a frazzle; but I don’t think William’s in any real danger now.

It just breaks my heart to see him there. When he’s awake, he’s a sharp old man; when you see him asleep in a hospital bed, you can see how frail he is. I guess I’ve come to like him a lot. I never knew either of my grandfathers.

Vaughan is quiet now. I’m not sure if he’s still under sedation or sleeping naturally.

I’m in the waiting room, sitting among the sad Christmas decorations, typing on my notebook-portable, drinking the appalling black coffee that comes out of the machine. Every so often the nurses come around and give me _that look_. I’ll have to go soon, to drive back through the Christmas Eve traffic, but I don’t want to leave until the doctors give William the final OK.

It’s not like they have any other next of kin.

William was the one reading when it happened. It was during part of the Fraxinus manuscript, the section on what happens to Ash in Carthage. He reads very well. (I have _no_ idea whether he thinks this is ‘history’ or complete rubbish.) Vaughan was listening, I think, although it’s been difficult to tell. He has a lean face, and I think must have been good-looking when he was a young man. Very arrogant. No, not arrogant; it’s a look I’ve seen in old pre-war movies, a kind of outrageous confidence, you don’t see it any more. An English class thing, I guess. And Vaughan thinks he’s fifteen. Has there ever been a rich boy that age who didn’t think he was God’s gift?

All of a sudden, that face sort of _crumpled_. I was watching, and it was like sixty years just dropping down on him, like a weight. He said, ‘William?’ As if William hadn’t visited him every day. ‘William, may I beg you to pass me a mirror?’

I wouldn’t have done it, but it wasn’t up to me. William passed him a mirror from the bedside cabinet. I got up to call a nurse – I was half expecting Vaughan Davies to go into hysterics. Wouldn’t you? If you thought you were fifteen, and saw the face of a man in his 80s?

All he did was look at himself in the mirror and nod. Once. As if it confirmed something he had already thought. He put the mirror down on the bed and said, ‘Perhaps a daily paper?’

It staggered me, but William reached over and picked up a paper left by one of the other patients. Vaughan examined it very carefully – what I think, now, is that he was puzzled because it was a tabloid, not a broadsheet – and glanced at the headlines, and the masthead. He said two things: ‘No war, then?’ and ‘I am to assume victory was ours, or else I should be reading this in German,’

I don’t think I took in the next few sentences. William was asking questions, I know, and Vaughan was answering in this amazed tone, a ‘why are you asking me all these stupid questions?’ voice, and I remember just thinking, Vaughan doesn’t like his brother very much. What a shame, after sixty years.

The next thing I can remember is Vaughan saying testily, ‘Of course I wasn’t injured in the bombing. What on earth would make you think such a thing?’ He’d picked up the mirror and was studying himself again. ‘I have no scars. Where did you get yours?’

If he’d been my brother I would have slapped him.

William ignored it, and went through the neurological report stuff, and told him he’d been locked up in a home for years – which isn’t something I’d have sprung on somebody, but he still knows his brother, even after all these years, because Vaughan just _looked_ at him, and said, ‘Really? How curious. ’ And, in a voice like I’d just crawled out from under a rock, ‘Who is this young person?’

‘This young lady, ’ William says, ‘is assisting the man who is rewriting your mediaeval book. ’

I expected him to go nuclear at that point, especially as William wasn’t being untactful by accident. No wonder those two didn’t live under a family roof. I braced myself for a screaming row. It didn’t come.

Vaughan Davies picked up the tabloid paper again and held it at arm’s length. It took me several seconds to realise he was looking for the date, and that he couldn’t read the small print. I told him what date it was.

Vaughan Davies said, ‘No. The month is July, and the year, nineteen forty.’

William leaned over and took the paper away from him. He said, ‘Rubbish. You never were unintelligent. Look around you. You have been in a traumatised state, conceivably since July nineteen forty, but it is now over sixty years from that date. ’

‘Yes,’ Vaughan says, ‘evidently. I was not in a state of trauma, however. Young woman, you should warn your employer. If he continues to pursue his researches, he will end where my researches brought me, and I would not wish that upon my worst enemy – had I one yet alive. ’

He was looking mildly pleased at this point. It took William to point out to me, in a whisper, that Vaughan had just realised that he’d probably outlived all his academic rivals.

William then said, ‘If you weren’t in a state of trauma, where have you been? Where is it that you suspect Doctor Ratcliff will end up? ’

As you know, the paperwork following Vaughan Davies around the asylums is intact. He _is_ William’s brother. The family resemblance is too close for anything else. I mean, we _know_ where he’s been. I wondered where he _thought_ he’d been. California? Australia? The moon? To be honest, if Vaughan had said he’d stepped out of a time machine – or even walked back into our ‘second history’ after visiting your ‘first history’, I don’t think I’d have been surprised!

But time travel isn’t an option. The past is not a country we can visit. And the ‘first history’ doesn’t exist anymore, as you say. It was overwritten; wiped out in the process.

If I’ve understood it, the truth is much less exciting, much more sad.

‘I have been nowhere, ’ Vaughan said. ‘And I have been nothing. ’

He didn’t look sharp anymore, the acidic expression was gone. He just looked like a thin old man in a hospital bed. Then he said impatiently, ‘I have not been real. ’

Something about it, I can’t explain what, it was utterly chilling. William just stared at him. Then Vaughan looked at me.

He said, ‘You seem to have some apprehension of what I mean. Can it be that this Doctor Ratcliff of yours has replicated my work to that degree?’

All I could do was say, ‘Not real?’ For some reason, I thought he meant that he’d been dead. I don’t know why. When I said that, he just glared at me.

‘Nothing so simple,’ he said. ‘Between the summer of nineteen forty and what you claim to be the latter part of the year two thousand, I have been – merely potential. ’

I can’t remember his exact words, but I remember that. Merely potential. Then he said something like:

‘What is unreal may be made real, instant by instant. The universe creates a present out of the unaligned future, produces a past as solid as granite. And yet, young lady, that is not all. What is real may be made unreal, potential, merely possible. I have not been in a state of trauma. I have been in a state of unreality. ’

All I could do was point at him in the bed. ‘And then be made real again?’

He said, ‘Mind your manners, young woman. It is impolite to point.’

That took my breath away, but he didn’t stay vinegary for long. His colour got bad. William rang the bell for the nurse. I stepped back and put my hands behind me, to try and stop aggravating him.

He was grey as a worn bed-sheet, but he still carried on talking. ‘Can you imagine what it might be like, to perceive not only the infinite possible realities that might take shape out of universal probability, but to perceive that you, yourself, the mind that thinks these thoughts – that you are unreal? Only probable, not actual. Can you imagine such a sensation of your own unreality? To know that you are not mad, but trapped in something from which you cannot escape? You say sixty years. For me, it has been one infinite moment of eternal damnation.’

Pierce, the trouble is, I CAN imagine it. I know you need to get Isobel’s theoretical physicists over here to talk to Vaughan Davies, because I don’t have a scientific understanding. But I can imagine it enough to know what made him go grey.

I just stood there, staring at him, trying to stop a hysterical giggle or a shudder, or both; and all I could think was, No one ever asked Schrodinger’s Cat what it felt like while it was in the box.

‘But you’re real _now_, ’ I said. ‘You’re real _again_. ’

He leaned back on the pillow. William was fussing, so I bent down to try and soothe him, and Vaughan’s forearm hit me across the mouth. I’ve never been so shocked. I stood up, about to rip off a mouthful at him, and he hadn’t hit me, his eyes had rolled up in his head, and he was fitting, his arms and legs jerking all over the place.

I ran for a nurse and all but fell over the one coming in the door.

That must have been a couple of hours ago now. I wanted to get it down while it was clear in my memory. I may be out by a few words, but I think it’s as close to the truth as I can get.

You can say it’s senile dementia, or you can say he might have been a boozy old dosser for years and rotted his brain, but I don’t think so. I don’t know if there are words for what happened to him, but if there are, he’s got doctorates in history and the sciences, and he’s the person best qualified to know. If he says he’s existed in a state of probability for the past sixty years, I believe him.

It’s all part of what you said, isn’t it? The Angelotti manuscript vanishing, being classified as history, then Romance, then fiction. And Carthage coming back, where there was no seabed site before.

I wish Vaughan had stayed with it long enough to tell me why he thinks he’s ‘come back’ now. Why NOW?

I’ve been thinking, sitting here. If Vaughan was going to ‘come back’, it’s _possible_ for him to have had amnesia. The same way that it’s _possible_ for him to have vanished without trace. So this is just a different possible state of the universe. This is what he is, now, here – but before ‘now’ was made concrete, it was possible for other things to have happened to him. His disappearance could have meant anything.

It’s one thing to talk about lumps of rock and physical artefacts coming back, Pierce. It’s another thing when it’s a person.

I feel as if nothing under my feet is solid. As if I could wake up tomorrow and the world might be something else, my job would be different, I might not be ‘Anna’, or an editor; I might have married Simon at Oxford, or I might have been born in America, or India, or anywhere. It’s all _possible_. It didn’t happen that way, it isn’t real, but it _might_ have happened.

Like ice breaking up under my feet.

I am frightened.

Vaughan’s old, Pierce. If people are going to talk to him, it ought to be as soon as possible. If he becomes conscious again, and he’s alert, I will ask him about his theory that you mentioned. I’ll have to go by the medical advice. I’ll ask him how he got the Sible Hedingham manuscript. Maybe tomorrow – no, it’s holiday season.

Contact me. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO ABOUT THIS?

– Anna

Message: #248 (Pierce Ratcliff)