Ash: A Secret History (218 page)

VAUGHAN DAVIES: The chaotic fabric of the universe is strong. Perhaps, eventually, it reasserts itself whatever one can do.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: She did it all for nothing, then.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Five hundred years, Doctor Ratcliff. It has all been over for five hundred years.

PIERCE RATCLIFF [agitated]: But it hasn’t. Not if your perceptions were correct. It’s been an eternal, infinite moment. And now it’s failing.
Now
, it’s failing. Now!

VAUGHAN DAVIES: In that sense, yes. Your archaeological reappearances, at Carthage. This manuscript. Even myself, I believe. My re-entrance into the Real is a function of the weakening of Lost Burgundy. It must be. There can be no other explanation.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: There are experiments being done in probability. Only on an infinitely small level, but – is that why? Do you think? Are
we
destabilising them? I need – no, Isobel’s people won’t talk to me about this, not with the security clamp-down.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: An arc of five hundred years for us, a moment for Lost Burgundy. A moment which is ending, now. The universe is vast, powerful, chaotically imperative, Doctor Ratcliff. It was bound to reassert itself.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: What happens when Burgundy fails, finally? The end of causality? An increase in entropy, in chaos, in
miracles
?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: They subject one to an interesting variety of tests on this ward. Between tests, one is left with considerable time. I have devoted much of it – despite William’s assertion that I watch that televisual box – to analysing what the loss of Burgundy might mean. I believe you have reached the same conclusion as I.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: The species-mind will continue to collapse the probable into a predictable real. But eventually, without Burgundy, enough random chaos will filter through, we’ll become able to manipulate the Real again consciously – or technologically. There will be wars. Wars in which the Real is the casualty.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Someone’s reality is always a casualty in wartime, Doctor Ratcliff. But yes. It is what the Ferae Natura Machinae foresaw. The infinitely unreal universe. If you like, the miracle wars.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I have to publish.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: You intend to include this in your edition of the Ash papers?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Once it’s made public, it can’t be ignored. There has to be an investigation! Do we need to stop performing experiments on the sub-atomic level? Do we need more experiments? Can we reinforce Burgundy?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: You will sound, if you forgive me, like a blithering lunatic to them, Doctor Ratcliff.

PIERCE RATCLIFFE: I don’t care, anything’s better than ‘miracle’ wars—!

[Door opens. Footsteps; an indistinguishable number of people entering]

WILLIAM DAVIES: I think that’s enough for today.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Really, William. I believe I may be allowed to know my own state of health.

WILLIAM DAVIES: Not as well as your doctors. I may be retired; I know exhaustion when I see it. Doctor Ratcliff will come back tomorrow.

VAUGHAN DAVIES [indistinguishable]

PIERCE RATCLIFF [indistinguishable]

ANNA LONGMAN: We need to talk, Pierce. I’ve been through to the office. We need to make some hard decisions about publication, before the weekend.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Professor Davies. [pause] It’s an honour. I’ll call again tomorrow.

[Indistinguishable door noises, noises of chairs being moved]

VAUGHAN DAVIES: [—inaudible—] publish as soon as possible. We need the help of the scientific community. [Tape garbled] [—inaudible—] further investigation on a world-wide scale.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: [—inaudible—] we have no idea, do we? How long we’ve got? Before it fails completely?

[Tape terminates]

SUBJECT “VAUGHAN DAVIES” REMOVED 02/02/01 TO ██████ HOSPITAL FOR FURTHER TESTS AND INTERROGATION

Afterword

With the abrupt termination of the Sible Hedingham manuscript, the documentation of these events comes to a close.

It is now evident that a significant change in the nature of our universe occurred on 5 January 1477.

To summarise: at that point, the events of human history up to that date were altered, and a subsequent different history was thereafter perceived to have occurred. It was neither the prior history of the human race, nor the desired future of the ‘Wild Machine’ silicon intelligences. Whether our history from 1477 onwards is a random result of the ‘miracle’, or a desired one, it is difficult to say.

Whichever is the truth, what is undeniable is that the ability of human minds to consciously alter the wavefront of probability at the point where it is collapsed into one reality was eradicated. Human existence continued: the consistent and rational universe supported by the human species-mind, and protected and preserved by the altered previous history – the ‘lost Burgundy’ that remains with us as the memory of a myth.

If not an ideal universe, it is at least a consistent universe. Human good and human evil are still in our own power to choose.

I realise that these conclusions, drawn from these texts and from the available archaeological evidence, will give rise to some controversy. I believe, however, that it is essential that they become widely known, and are acted upon.

The laws of cause and effect operate consistently within the human sphere of influence. What the universe is like otherwise, in other places, we do not know. We are one world among millions, in one galaxy among billions, in a universe so vast that neither light nor our understanding can cross it. What local laws we have here, and can observe, are rational, consistent, and predictable. Even where, as on the sub-atomic level, causality becomes ‘fuzzy’, it becomes fuzzy in accordance with scientific reality, and not in accordance with random chaos. What is an uncertain particle today will be an uncertain particle tomorrow, and not a dragon. Or a Lion, or a Hart.

If this were all, then while ‘lost Burgundy’ would be a deeply significant discovery about how our universe is constructed, it would nonetheless be a closed discovery. Ash’s decision was made, Burgundy ‘shifted’, the nature of Burgundy anchors us in causality, and that is where we are.

Except that, as recent events have proved, ‘Burgundy’ is failing. It is an unavoidable fact that some things that are improbable (in the technical sense of the word) have, in the last sixty years, again become collapsed into a state of objective reality. The archaeological site at Carthage, although current investigations have been suspended, is eye-opening in this respect.

For whatever reason, the nature of Burgundy has changed again; it is perhaps failing, or has ceased to exist. I believe the evidence suggests that this is indeed the case.

I suspect that what Vaughan Davies (in conversation with the author) has reported perceiving is the moment of the change itself. According to his observations, the change no longer ‘still continues’ – or, for those in it, ‘has not ended’. What we are seeing now
is
the end of that moment. The time between 1477 and now was the period of linear time needed for that one out-of-time moment to end.

What has been necessary has been done. Burgundy, shifted out as a kind of ‘spur’ of advancing reality into the probability wave, has made this human universe causal.

It may not now keep it that way. The spontaneous mutation of the ‘miracle gene’ may arise again. A means to technologically alter the collapse of the wavefront may be discovered.

What does this mean for us, now?

Without Lost Burgundy, the species-mind of the human race will continue to do what it has done since we became conscious organic life. It will manipulate reality to be constant, coherent, consistent. Tomorrow will follow today; yesterday will not return. This is what we do – what all organic life does, on no matter how low a level – we preserve a constant reality.

What Burgundy did, however, was to protect our reality from the return of the ability to
consciously
collapse the wavefront of probability into a different, formerly improbable, reality.

With Burgundy failing, with the complex chaos of the universe merging Burgundy back into the reality from which – for an eternal moment – it was the ‘forward edge’, then what is to prevent us becoming, as our ancestors were, priests and prophets, miracle-workers and recipients of grace? What is to prevent us developing this in our organic consciousness, or our machines?

Nothing.

Unless the fabric of the material universe is to be put in danger of unravelling, fraying out into entropic chaos, mere quantum soup, then we must do something now.

I intend the publication of these papers to act as a call to arms to the scientific community. We must investigate. We must act. We must prevent, somehow, the failing of Lost Burgundy; or create something we can put in its place. Or else, as Ash herself wrote in manuscripts that should not, in this second history, have an existence – if not, then at some day in the future, all we have done here will be undone, as if it had never been.

I am setting up a web-site at ████████ for a cyberconference: any sufficiently accredited organisation or individual is hereby invited to log on. I will make my data available.

We are not yet, and perhaps we never will be, fit to be gods.

Pierce Ratcliff
London, 2001

Afterword

(Fourth edition)

I have left unaltered the words of a much younger man.

History is very much a matter of interpretation.

Nine years is not a long time – and yet, sometimes, it is long enough to change the world out of all recognition. Sometimes nine minutes will suffice.

I suppose I should have remembered what Ash herself said.
I don’t lose.

Plainly, the ‘Afterword’ to the 2001 edition was written by a man in a panic. I have reprinted it here essentially untouched, although I have deleted my old URL to prevent confusion. I was, to be frank, in a state of fear for most of the winter of 2000 and the spring of 2001; a state only made worse by the abrupt withdrawal of all copies of
Ash: The Lost History of Burgundy
on 25 March, five days before they were due to appear in the bookshops.

I am indebted to Anna Longman for the sterling defence of my work that she put up in editorial meetings. Without her, the book would not have reached the printing stage. Even she could not prevail, however, once her then Managing Director, Jonathan Stanley, had pressure put on him by the Home Secretary.

Two days later, my own author’s copies
of Ash: The Lost History of Burgundy
were removed from my flat.

A week after that, I received a visit from the police; and found myself being interviewed, not by them, but by staff from the security services of three nations.

Fear, no doubt, clouded my judgement.

Reality reasserted itself, however.

I found myself confronted by a bound copy of my third edition, into which had been placed a floppy disc, and hardcopy print-outs of my correspondence, neatly annotated by some security officer. They were not my copies: I had destroyed mine.

I was informed that they had been watching Anna since December 2000. A second – unnoticed – search of her Stratford flat found no trace of the editorial correspondence, since she carried the copies on her person, until the late spring of 2001, when they disappeared.

A close study of CCTV footage and observers’ reports finally confirmed that on 1 March 2001 she had been seen leaving the British Library without a book. This would not have been remarkable, had she not been witnessed an hour earlier entering
with
a book – which CCTV stills show to have been her editor’s pre-publication copy of
Ash: The Lost History of Burgundy.

Even knowing it must be there, it took the security forces a month to find it. While the chance of stealing a book from the British Library is extremely low, no one thought to make provision for someone coming
in
with a book, and leaving it amid the chaos of the British Library’s move from its old building to the new one.

I dare say it would have been found and catalogued within a decade.

Confronted with our correspondence, I realised, a few seconds before I was told, that this was not some paranoid plot by which I might be ‘silenced’, but, in fact, a job interview.

It was not my expertise with fifteenth-century manuscripts that encouraged them to co-opt me on to ‘Project Carthage’, but my personal eye-witness experience of the return of the artefacts of the ‘first history’, as detailed in that correspondence between Anna and myself.

In fact, as Anna sometimes says to me – with rather more humour than I have previously associated with her – I
am
history.

As are we all.

Fortunately, we are the future, too.

I flew out of London for California at the end of the following week, having handed in my resignation at my university. In the years that followed, I entered on the second career of my working life (discovering an unsuspected talent for administration); a career in which – with Isobel Napier-Grant, Tami Inoshishi, James Howlett, and the associated staff of many other institutions – I have seen the frontiers of human knowledge expanded to an astounding degree. On a personal level, I have found it exacting, exciting, frustrating, and illuminating, by turns; and I still do not grasp all the advances made in quantum theory!

The present staff of Project Carthage is, of course, made up of the ‘official’ scientists that Isobel Napier-Grant hoped for when she decided she should throw open the Carthage site to investigation; with the expectation that there must be physicists who could both do the maths, and sort out the terminology; and free us from our dependence on speculation and metaphor. Nine years on, I have to say that they have done everything that could be hoped, and more.