Ash: The Lost History Part 168

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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 HHHHHHH 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 G.o.ds.

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 rea.s.serted 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 a.s.sociated 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 Inos.h.i.+s.h.i.+, James Howlett, and the a.s.sociated staff of many other inst.i.tutions - 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.

This fourth edition of the 'Ash' papers is intended to set the record straight on the background to Project Carthage. The course of the project, and the various findings it has released over the past nine years, are too well known to be repeated at length here. We now have a staff of over five hundred people, with more due to be taken on. Next year, on our tenth anniversary, I plan to publish a history of the Project.

I intend the preliminary publication of these papers both to present the background to Project Carthage, and to provide a conclusion to the 'Ash' narrative - in so far as there can be a conclusion.

It took me the better part of two years to work out what we should be looking for.

Protracted UN negotiations with the Tunisian government allowed a team of scientists back on site at the seabed ruins of Carthage, working with the Inst.i.tute at Tunis itself. The artefacts have since been subjected to extremely intense a.n.a.lysis, both there and abroad. (We were robbed of our Russian and Chinese members by the Sino-Russian 'Millennium War' of 2003-2005; but thankfully they have since returned.) At the same time, the history of the 'Visigoth Empire' became more and more apparent in doc.u.mentation stretching from the 1400s to the late nineteenth century. A fascinating paper by a historian from the University of Alexandria detailed how the Iberian Gothic tribes after ad 416 maintained a settlement on the North African coast, and were later integrated into Arab culture (in a process akin to the later crusaders' 'Latin Kingdoms of the East').

Traces of the invasion of Christendom have been excavated outside Genoa, in northern Italy, where there appears to have been a considerable battle.

The universe receives, into its interstices, the instances of the 'first history' which it can comfortably accommodate. There are discrepancies: there always will be. The universe is hugely complex, even in the 'local conditions' that are what we as a species perceive.

This reintegration of the first and second histories was observed by all of us on the Project, and took place roughly from 2000 to 2005, with the greatest concentration of activity in the 2002-2003 period. That the failure of 'Lost Burgundy' should result in a kind of historical debris being swept back into our reality was not, we thought, theoretically impossible. Indeed, here it was, with more appearing every day. More evidence - undeniable, factual evidence - that had not been there the day before.

We lived, in those early days of the millennium, in the daily expectation of the world crumbling away under our feet. It was not unusual to wake, every day, and wonder, before one opened one's eyes, if one was the same person as the day before. All of us on 'Project Carthage' bonded closely, in almost a wartime mentality.

I wrote, in 2001, that we were not fit to be G.o.ds. Any study of history may convince the student that we are barely fit to be human beings. At the end of a century of unparalleled ma.s.sacre and holocaust, we knew, on Project Carthage, that there are worse things possible. Given the power to manipulate probability, a vision of holocaust and high-tech war haunted us: human cruelty carried to an infinitely high degree. Endless human degradation, suffering, dread and death. If this is what the 'Wild Machine' silicon intelligences predicted, then their refusal to let it come into existence can only be seen as a moral act.

At Project Carthage, we knew we were the front-line troops in the war against unreality: either we would find some way to stabilise 'Burgundy', or we would - if not now, then twenty or two hundred years in the future - find wars of improbability sweeping away the fabric of the universe.

As a historian, I led the team responsible for doc.u.menting the return of the first history. By 2002, I had realised that each of the occurrences that I was doc.u.menting was possible. As I said in conversation with Isobel Napier-Grant on the net, >> The artefacts that are appearing are no less >> rational than one might demand of a causal universe.

> > We have a ruined Carthage, five hundred years old. We > > do not have a fifteenth-century Carthage appearing in >> present-day Tunisia, full of Visigoths - or alien >> visitors, or something human senses cannot perceive.

>> It is Carthage as it would have been now, had the >> first history continued on from 1477.

Plainly, what was reintegrating itself into reality was possible events, possible artefacts, probable history. No miracles.

No miracles.

It took me nearly seven years to find her.

I had my hunch in the summer of the year 2002. The arc of the moment -that five-hundred-year eternity in a Burgundy made both mythic, and more real than reality - was ending. We would be unprotected; should be subject now to increasing truly random phenomena. And yet, plainly, the coherence of the universe we perceive had not degraded between 2001 and 2002.

Lost Burgundy must have failed or be failing: how else to account for the reappearance of so much 'Burgundian' history? But how to account for the stability of that reappearance? The autonomic reflexes of the species-mind, collapsing the wavefront to coherent reality? Undoubtedly; but that could not account for all. The theoretical physicists at this time lived in daily horror of the potential instabilities they observed at sub-atomic levels. They monitored these randomnesses - which became coherent again.

It was a literal hunch. It came to me not long after the funeral of Professor Vaughan Davies - a man who lived to see the strange existence of his middle years a.n.a.lysed and confirmed, but who never restrained himself from a caustic remark until the day he died. (He said to me in a lucid moment of his final coma, "It is rather more interesting than I had antic.i.p.ated. I doubt that you would understand it, however.") On the plane, flying home from his funeral with Isobel Napier-Grant, I suddenly said, "People come back."

"Vaughan 'came back'," she said, "in that sense. Complete with ghost-history of his probable existence for his missing years. Are you suggesting it's happened to someone else?"

"Has happened, or will have happened," I said; and put myself on the course of my next seven years' research. By the time Isobel left me to get the Fancy Rat cages from the rear of the plane, I had mapped out a potential programme.

In May of this year, I flew to Brussels, and the headquarters of the Reaction Rapid Force Unite. The military establishment is outside Brussels itself, in flat Belgian countryside; and I was driven out by a Unite driver, and provided with an interpreter - in a Pan-European armed force, this can still be a necessity.

I had been picturing it on the flight over. She would be in an office at HQ; modern, bright with the natural light of a spring day in Europe; maps on the walls. She would be wearing the uniform of a Unite officer. For some reason, despite the record I had in front of me, I pictured her as older: late twenties, early thirties.

I was driven to the edge of a pine forest, and escorted on foot up a rutted track in grey drizzle. The rain ceased after the first mile or so.

I found her calf-deep in mud, wearing fatigues and combat boots and a dull-red-coloured pullover. She looked up from the group of men at the back of a jeep, poring over a map, and grinned. I suppose I looked very wet. The sky was clearing overhead, to duck-egg blue, and the wind whipped her short hair across her eyes.

She had black hair, and brown eyes, and dark skin.

The RRFU had given me permission to film and record: I had done this on several previous occasions, when it proved to be the wrong woman. On this occasion, I almost switched off the shoulder-cam and terminated the interview there and then.

"Sorry about this," she said cheerfully, walking over to me. "d.a.m.n exercises. It's supposed to be good for efficiency if we have them without warning. Rapid deployment. You're Professor Ratcliff, yes?"

She had a slight accent. A tall woman, with broad shoulders, and a major's insignia. The spring sunlight showed faint silvery lines on her right cheek. And on the other side of her face.

"I'm Ratcliff," I said, to the woman who looked nothing like the ma.n.u.script descriptions; and on impulse added: "Where is your twin, Major?"7 The woman was Arab-looking in appearance, in a RRFU major's uniform, with an expansive way of taking up her personal s.p.a.ce - a presence. She put her muddy fists on her hips and grinned at me. There was a pistol at her belt. Her face lit up. I knew.

"She's in Dusseldorf. Married to a German businessman from Bavaria. When I'm on leave, apparently, I visit. The kids like me."

One of the men by the jeep hailed her. "Major!"

He had a radio mike in his hand. A man with sergeant's stripes; in his late thirties or early forties, bald under his beret; in a uniform that looked as though it had seen use. He had the look that sergeants have: that nothing is impossible to do, and that no senior officer knows enough to change his own nappy.

"Brigadier wants you, boss," he said briefly.

"Tell Brigadier Oxford I'll get right back to him. Tell him I'm up a tree or something! Tell him he'll have to wait!"

"He'll love that one, boss."

"Into each life," she announced, with cheerful vindictiveness, "a b.l.o.o.d.y great amount of rain must fall. His d.a.m.n fault for staging the exercise. Professor, I've got a flask of hot coffee; you look as though you could use it."

I followed her to the front of the jeep, dazed, thinking, It is. It is her. How can it be? And then: Of course. The Visigoths are - have been - integrated into Arab culture after the defeat of Carthage. And Ash was never European by race.

"What's your sergeant's name?" I said, after drinking the sweet, strong brew.

"Sergeant Anselm," she said, with a grave, dead-pan humour, as if she and I shared a joke that no one else in the world understood. "My brigadier is an English officer, John Oxford. The men call him Mad Jack Oxford. My name-" she jerked a thumb at her name-tag on her fatigue jacket. "-is Asche."

"You don't look German."

"My ex-husband's name, apparently." She still had the smile of someone with a secret joke.

"You've been married?" I was momentarily startled. She didn't look more than nineteen or twenty.

"Fernando von Asche. A Bavarian. An ex-cavalry officer. It seems that he married my sister, after our divorce; I kept the name. Doctor Ratcliff, the wire said you wanted to ask me a whole lot of questions. This isn't the time: I've got manoeuvres to run. But you can satisfy me about one thing. What gives you the right to ask me questions about anything at all?"

She watched me. She was not uncomfortable with the silence.

"Burgundy," I said. "Burgundy is now a part of the human species-mind. Bedded in so solidly, if you like, that the 'ghost-past' arising out of the fracture can fall away into improbability. Our first past is returning. Your true history."

Major Asche took the steel flask and drank from it. She wiped her mouth, her dark eyes still fixed on me. The wind moved her short hair against her scarred cheeks.

"I'm not history," she pointed out mildly. "I'm here."

"You are now."

She continued to watch me. Somewhere back in the woods, shots cracked. She glanced back at Sergeant Anselm, who held up a rea.s.suring hand. She nodded. Far out on the muddy plain, hover-tanks nosed into view.

I asked, "How long have you been here?"

Raised eyebrows. A slantwise look. "About two days. For the duration of this, I'm stuck in a military tent about two miles that way."

"That isn't what I mean. Or perhaps it is." I called up data on my wristpad, and read through it, slowly. It was spa.r.s.e. "I think you have a 'ghost-history', if I can put it that way. You're very young to have achieved the rank of major. But war is a time of rapid promotions. You grew up in Afghanistan, under the Taliban. Their att.i.tude to women is - mediaeval. You joined resistance forces, learned to fight; and when that was crushed, you joined the bushwars on the borders. There, all that was necessary was that you be able to lead. To command. By the time you were sixteen, they'd made you a captain. When the Eastern European forces united with the RRFU, you joined Unite."

Net footage of the fighting along the Sino-Russian border is still clear in my mind.

"At the end of the Sino-Russian war, two years ago, you'd made major." I looked up from the little wrist-screen and the scrolling data. "But I'm fully prepared to believe that you've only been here two days, in a military tent, in a field somewhere."

Major Asche gave me a long look.

"Let's walk." She set off briskly. "Roberto! Where's the f.u.c.king helicopters? Do they think we're going to wait around here all day? We need to move up within the hour."

As we pa.s.sed him, Robert Anselm grinned at her. "Don't fret, boss."

The new gra.s.s was slippery underfoot. I was not wearing boots. Cold- and wet-footed, I quickened my stride to keep up with her. We pa.s.sed a truck, unloading armed soldiers; and she stopped for a word with the corporal before moving on down the track.

"You get a mixed force in Unite," she remarked. "That lot are mostly Welsh and English. I've got a gang of local Brussels lads; and a lot of East and West Germans. And a lot of Italians."

She flicked a look at me out of the corner of her eye. There was still a quiet amus.e.m.e.nt in her expression. I looked back at the men, only to find -camouflaged; expert - that they had merged into the edge of the wood.

"What was that corporal's name, that you were speaking to?"

"Rostovnaya."

"Is the whole company here?" I said, without thinking, and then she was looking at me, shaking her head, her eyes bright.

"All but the dead," she said. "All but the dead. Life and death are real, Professor Ratcliff. There are faces I miss."

I began to see tents, up ahead, in a clearing at the side of the track. Green military tents. Armed men, and men in white overalls, ran from tent to tent.

"Angelotti. Rickard. Euen Huw." She shook her head. "But we came so close to losing everybody."

"I think I know what's been happening," I said. "Why you're back. Burgundy's - failed. I suppose."

She stopped, boots in one of the ruts, the creamy brown mud halfway up her ankles, looking ahead at the tents.

I said, "Time moves differently closer to the probability wave. The moment in which you and the Wild Machines both calculated, powered, and willed human history to change - is ending. Has ended. You've managed to bypa.s.s the immediate danger. But the process by which that happened is withering away. Fragments of the true past are fitting in among the interstices of the past we know - it's possible to foresee a time when the history that we know of Burgundy will be the history of 'Ash's Burgundy'."

She smiled at that.

I went on, "But it's over. Isn't it? I believe that we have been in the process, over the last six or eight years, of reintegration with Lost Burgundy. Burgundy's gone, hasn't it?" I said. "We're not protected any more."

"Oh, we are."

She gave me that grin, head c.o.c.ked, eyes creasing and bright; and she was, for one moment, as I had seen her in my mind as I read the ma.n.u.scripts: the woman in armour, dirty, pragmatic, unable to be crushed down.