Ash: The Lost History Part 152

Ninety per cent of it is VITRIFIED silicon. Gla.s.s.

At the front, which is what we've been seeing on the image-enhancers, the shape of the head and the front of the torso are clear. Most of the rest of it, including the plinth, is melted. Silt and sandstone fused into heavy, brittle gla.s.s. It has FLOWED.

Silicon sand turns to gla.s.s if you put it under sufficiently high temperatures. Imagine the strength of the lightning-discharge that could have done this; a bolt that would have - that did, from the underwater images - crack the building in which it stood wide open.

An electrical discharge powerful enough to sear the whole of this artefact into vitrified sand. The internal structure melted into impure, light-shattering, water-reflecting gla.s.s: I saw lsobel's face reflected in it like a mirror. - It IS the Stone Golem. It HAS been destroyed, in exactly the way that the chronicle relates. Anna, this archaeological evidence backs up this ma.n.u.script. The Sible Hedingham ms is our first history.

I can only pray that this is a temporary aberration on behalf of the government. I am happy for any artefact to remain in Tunisia, as long as Isobel's people have permission to carry on their a.n.a.lysis. A silicon computer. Even a destroyed one. What we can learn Interruptions. More later.

- Pierce * * *

Message: #241 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 22/12/00 at 02.24 p.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - I'm worried I haven't heard from you. Where are you? Are you still on the expedition s.h.i.+p? Mail me, phone me, something.

- Anna * * *

Message: #447 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash Date: 22/12/00 at 06.00 p.m.

From: [email protected] Anna - Still on s.h.i.+p, but I'm having to coax my way to accessing communications. The Tunisian patrol boat on station has been joined by two more. You have no IDEA how much this scares me. The idea of being caught up in an actual 'incident' - I know, as a biographer, one gets immersed in one's subject; this has cured me of any idea I might have had that I could have lived Ash's life.

Isobel says the British Emba.s.sy here has been in contact to suggest WE stop causing trouble. G.o.d help me, I know the Mediterranean is a sensitive area, but that's a bit rich! I wish I had a contact in the Foreign Office. Knowing several advisory professors on security affairs may help, but it's going to take time for me to get in touch with them.

Tami's colleague James Howlett informs me that the net traffic on this subject is now being 'monitored' , and to make sure I am always encrypted. I suppose he knows. I suppose it will be. What HAPPENED? Something that to me is an interesting matter of high physics is apparently making governmental agencies (as Howlett put it) 's.h.i.+t themselves stupid'!

Please, can you take time to talk with Vaughan Davies again, if he can talk at all? I am mentally putting together a provenance for the Sible Hedingham ms. There could be a connection between the ms, Hedingham Castle, the Earls of Oxford, and Ash's connection with the thirteenth earl, John de Vere. Vaughan Davies might shed light on this.

Far more crucially, for the immediate present - in his Second Edition, he promised us an Addendum, detailing the link between the 'first history' and our present day. He never published it before he disappeared. I think the time has come when I have to know what his theory is .

Plainly, we have to face the possibility now that reality did fracture in or about the beginning of the year 1477. Equally plainly, it is possible that fragments of that prior history have existed in ours, becoming gradually less and less 'real' as the universe moves on from the moment of fracture. I can accept this, and so can the theoretical physicists: both Burgundy and the Wild Machines obliterated in some catastrophic 'miracle', the Visigoths and the Wild Machines completely, Burgundy leaving a dream of a lost country behind it.

What is more difficult to accept, but is undeniably the case, given the underwater site, is that the universe is STILL changing. Reading what Vaughan Davies wrote in 1939, it seems to me that he knew this, then, and had developed a theory about why it is happening.

I want to know what it is. HIS theory may be right or wrong, but *I* don't have a theory at all! If I have to fly back from here, I will be asking you if William Davies will give permission for me to visit his brother.

- Pierce * * *

Message: #244 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 22/12/00 at 06.30 p.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - Please be CAREFUL. You never think it will happen to someone you know. It only takes some trigger-happy madman, a soldier with a rifle, by the time the governments apologise, it's too late. I don't want to turn on satellite news and watch a bulletin telling me you've been killed.

- Anna * * *

Message: #246 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 23/12/00 at 09.50 p.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - d.a.m.n: still no mail from you. I hope no news is etc.

There isn't much of a media fuss yet. It was well-timed, thinking about it; everyone's caught up in pre-Christmas frenzy here.

Weekend traffic's difficult (Christmas falling on the Monday), but I went down to Colchester again. I don't know what kind of a shock it would have to be to make a person wipe out all their memories after the age of fifteen. Profound trauma, William says. Perhaps fifteen was the last time Vaughan was happy. I hate to think what reduced him to this state.

William and I are taking it in turns to read your translation of the Sible Hedingham ma.n.u.script aloud to him. William is optimistic. I'm not sure Vaughan's taking it in. But William's the medical man, after all.

I intend to go down again tomorrow, and spend as much time over Christmas as I can with them, with Vaughan in the hospital, doing intensive reading. I'll watch the news broadcasts, and monitor e-mail.

You can always reach me at work or home e-mail (which is HHHHHHHHH) , or you can phone, if you can get a line. My number is HHHHHHHH.

-Anna * * *

Message: #247 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 24/12/00 at 11.02 p.m.

From: [email protected] 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 prewar movies, a kind of outrageous confidence, you don't see it any more. An English cla.s.s thing, I guess. And Vaughan thinks he's fifteen. Has there ever been a rich boy that age who didn't think he was G.o.d'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 pa.s.s me a mirror?'

I wouldn't have done it, but it wasn't up to me. William pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sisting 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 Ratclif f 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 d.a.m.nation.'

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 ma.n.u.script vanis.h.i.+ng, being cla.s.sified 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 ma.n.u.script. Maybe tomorrow - no, it's holiday season.

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

- Anna * * *

Message: #248 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject : Ash Date: 25/12/00 at 02.37 a.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - Did you get my last message?

Could you get in contact with me, just to rea.s.sure me?

- Anna * * *

Message: #249 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 25/12/00 at 03.01 a.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - Are you downloading your mail? Are you reading your mail? Is anybody reading this?

- Anna * * *

Message: #250 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 25/12/00 at 07.16 a.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - These messages must be stacking up. For G.o.d's sake answer.

- Anna * * *

Message: #251 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 25/12/00 at 09.00 a.m.

From: Pierce - I have been phoning the British Emba.s.sy. I _finally_ got through. No one there is prepared to give me any information. The university switchboard is closed, I can't get a contact number for Isobel Napier-Grant. I can't get through to you. No news station wants to know: it's the holiday. Please ANSWER ME.

- Anna.

PART SIXTEEN.