Ghosts of Engines Past (16 page)

“I cannot provide any theories about why a sword would say 'supermarket' in 1404,” I admitted. “As for the Tynedale brothers, I thought I knew everything about them, but this journal is new to me. Do you have a family connection—like an ancestor or yours that was their patron?”

“Not that I know of. What can you tell me about them?”

“They were gunsmiths, although Edward was an alchemist as well. William had been apprenticed to a jeweler as a boy, then he went on to make several crown-wheel escapement clocks. He had also experimented with lenses, and constructed what he called a compound machine for drawing objects large. If that machine was a telescope, then it was two centuries before the first telescope was supposed to have been invented. If it was a compound lens microscope, well, they were still a long way ahead of everyone else.”

“So William was the brains of the family?”

“They were both bright, but William was the dreamer, while Edward did the management and merchandising. They were brilliant, successful, and comfortably wealthy when that culverin exploded and killed them. Had they even lived to their thirties, they might have revolutionised English science and industry. This journal proves it beyond doubt. There are notes on a working telescope, along with observations of lunar craters and the moons of Jupiter, the design for an iron foundry, and even the suggestion for an 'unsinkable' iron ship.”

From my reading of the Tynedale Journal, I could imagine the consequences of the Tynedales living another three or four decades and transforming English industry. The industrial revolution would have taken place in the late 1500s rather than the late 1700s, for example, and William would have transformed astronomy and physics two hundred years before Galileo. Where would humanity be by now? A single, stylised portrait of William had survived, and I now opened a folder and showed a colour print of it to Sir Steven. William had a dreamy look about him, yet he was well dressed and seemed quite dynamic as well. I actually fancied him in an odd sort of way, and I had even dated a string of men who resembled him. I did not let Sir Steven know any of that.

“This journal could be one of the greatest finds in the scientific history,” I said as I gazed sadly at the page open before me, shaking my head as I spoke.

“Could?” asked Sir Steven, who saw it as first rate publicity material to draw tourists to his estate.

“This word is definitely 'could', rather than 'is'. All that material on the Tynedale telescopes and iron foundry designs is in the same journal as the words 'supermarket' and 'London Orbital'. Those words brand the entire thing to be a fake.”

“But we could get it dated. Don't they use carbon or something?”

“Yes, but even if the paper and ink was dated to around 1400, people would just say it was a clever fake.”

“And an obvious fake. I mean my wife radios me from her car nearly every day about supermarket shopping or turning the oven on.”

“Radio? As in cell phone?”

“No, it's a pair of rather old-fashioned radio transceivers. It's cheaper to use them than run cell phone accounts. You know, belt tightening while we get the estate's finances back on an even keel.”

“Well, that would explain a lot if it had been you who had heard the sword speak in 2004. The question is who would be talking about supermarkets and the London Orbital six hundred years ago? In fact, how could the sword speak at all...”

My voice trailed away as I recalled something from a yacht race, years earlier. I had been a member of the university yacht club. The club owned no yacht, but members volunteered to crew the yachts of people who could afford them, and the memory of one such vessel returned to me now. Through some freakish accident in its manufacture, the metal mast acted like a crystal set and picked up one of the coastal radio stations. Crystal sets work on the power of the radio signals themselves, so they need no batteries. If a mast could do it, why not a sword?

“You were saying?” he asked.

“There are documented cases of odd objects like false teeth and stoves picking up radio transmissions. I once heard music coming from the mast of a yacht.”

“So it could be possible with a sword?”

“Why not try testing it? Do you have one of those radio communicators handy?”

He fetched his transceiver. It was a large, solidly built, handheld unit from before the days of cell phones.

“Now that I think of it, Ellen did take the Don Alverin sword to London about a fortnight ago. It was something to do with an insurance assessment.”

“So it would have been in the car with her if she called you with her radio?”

“Well, yes. But she would have heard the sword picking up her words.”

“Not if it was in the boot or on the back seat, buried under shopping. Take the sword into another room and put it on a table. I'll try transmitting something to you.”

Sir Steven left with the sword. I waited a minute, then I turned on the radio unit and spoke my test message. Presently I heard footsteps approaching.

“That was a naughty thing for Mary's father to do,” he laughed.

“What? So the sword really did act as a sort of crystal set?”

“Not very loud, but it was quite clear. What a thought! This could be quite a good tourist attraction for the estate.”

“But we still have a problem. Radio transmitters are very sophisticated, and need a power source. Nobody could have built one in the early Fifteenth Century.”

“I suppose supermarkets were pretty thin on the ground too.”

“Not to mention the London Orbital. Anyway, I should get out my laptop and handheld scanner. Are you sure you have no problems with me copying the Tynedale Journal?”

“Copy all you like, but try to publish it and you'll find me on your doorstep waving the Copyright Act.”

He left me with the journal, and I began to unpack my laptop and handheld scanner. The actual idea of communicating with the past had an achingly strong allure. To save my life I could not estimate how many times I had played through the fantasy of stepping into the streets of late Fourteenth Century London, visiting the Tynedales' shop and introducing myself as a foreign student from some very distant land. I would be dressed as a boy, and I would gain the confidence of William by my great scholarship. I would suggest inventions to him, and convince him that all guns should be tested from behind a heavy safety barrier. That would save the brothers in 1406, and they would go on to great and fantastic things. Tynedale's theory of gravitation, Tynedale's laws of planetary motion, the Tynedale reflecting telescope, and the Tynedale methods of differential and integral calculus. It was at this point that the fantasies always broke down. I would reveal myself to be a girl, and William would fall in Love with me. Then what? Live as his wife in the Fifteenth Century, where I would not fit? Bring William to the Twenty First Century, where he would face a lifetime of being a curiosity at the very best? What else could there be?

It was better to leave my fantasies as fantasies... yet it would be such a fine and splendid thing to save the brilliant Tynedale Brothers from their sad and untimely death in 1406. Still, nothing could go back in time, so the past was as dead as the Tynedales. I taught this sort of thing to my classes of teenagers year after year. Nothing could go faster than light, and nothing could go backwards in time. Suddenly I paused, hands poised above the keys of the laptop. Entangled particles. The memory of an article in some science journal stirred somewhere on the edge of my awareness. An experiment had been conducted, and entangled particles had been shown to communicate faster than the speed of light. If the lightspeed barrier was nothing of the sort, perhaps there was also hope for travel into the past. Even communication with the past would be enough to save the Tynedales.

Entanglement. The word had a new, exotic feel to it, full of potential. Might objects be entangled in time as well as space? I stared at the words on the page open before me.

Marry hat er litel lamb

Hir father short y dead

And now she takes hir lamb tisk oorl

Bitweane two bittes off bret

The style certainly did not belong to the early Fifteenth Century. No more than the London Orbital or supermarkets. I had recited those very words to test the Don Alverin sword as a radio receiver. They had been written as a Fifteenth Century listener might have heard modern words—especially quickly spoken, ill-perceived modern words. Had they existed on the page a few minutes ago?
Now
I remembered using them because they were on the page, but... my head began to spin.

William Tynedale had heard my words, and had written them down in 1404. Some veterans of the Battle of Poitiers would have been alive, Joan of Arc had not yet been born.
William Tynedale
had heard my words! Without another thought I pressed the transmission key of the radio transceiver. I knew the English of the Tynedales reasonably well, so although I spoke in a contemporary style, I tried to speak slowly and to phrase and pronounce everything with an early Fifteenth Century audience in mind.

“William Tynedale of London, I am speaking from six hundred years in your future. It is very hard to explain. Our philosophical scholarship is very advanced compared with yours. Think of it as dreaming about building a big and splendid house in ten years. The house exists in the future, but as yet there is nothing to see or touch. William, in two years you will die while testing a new culverin. It will explode, killing you and Edward. Please, please, test all your new culverins from behind a mound of earth.”

I paused, the handheld radio before my lips. What next? I had warned him. He might not die young. He might turn out to be England's Galileo. I could hardly ask him for a date. Even under the best of circumstances he would die over five centuries before I would be born.
Think of it like an Internet romance,
I told myself.

“William, I am a female scholar, and I greatly admire you and your work. We can never meet, yet I would like to give you a few little tokens of my esteem for you. Some principles of motion that govern the movement of the planets, a device using lenses and a large, concave mirror to magnify distant objects, an engine powered by steam that is more powerful than horses, and a flintlock that can discharge your culverins in an instant without the need for a smouldering fuse.”

Being a science teacher, I knew the basic principles of a great many inventions. I was also quite skilled at teaching scientific principles and laws to classes full of teenagers who would rather be doing nearly anything else. What sort of pupil would William Tynedale be? He was brilliant, but he had been born and educated in the Fourteenth Century. I tried to gain his confidence with advice about corning gunpowder to improve its quality, rifling the barrels of his culverins, and of course quite detailed instructions on building a flintlock striker. I went on to describe the pendulum clock, several types of telescope, the microscope, hot air balloons, the principle of the blast furnace, and finally the steam engine. The steam engine might have been a mistake, as it took about half as long as everything else put together. I gave him several stern warnings about taking precautions against exploding boilers, then went on to describe the steam powered ship, and the use of steam engines in factories.

A light began to wink on my handheld transmitter. The batteries were running down.

“William, for now I must bid you farewell,” I concluded. “I hope with all my heart that my gifts to you are pleasing. Even more fervently, I hope that you adopt my advice on testing your culverins, and that you live to a great age. My heart and my words of scholarship are all that I may give you, but perhaps they will cause you to prosper and be honoured.”

I put the transmitter down, but dared not look at the journal. Had he heard? Had my words affected history? Drop a stone into a river, and the ripples are soon lost. Build a dam across the river and everything downstream will be changed. I stared at the transmitter, its battery indicator light glowing steadily, beckoning to me. Had I changed the past before? Did I dare to do it again? Could I ever notice?

Steven came in, followed by a servant carrying a coffee service on a silver tray. He was wearing an earpiece, and was paying me little attention.

“The Voltaire is safely down on Europa,” he said aloud, but I had the impression that he would have said it whether I had been there or not.

“A hundred years since Shackleton landed on the moon,” I sighed. “Who would have thought it would take so long?”

“So long?” he suddenly exclaimed loudly, seeming to notice me for the first time.

“The moon in 1902, Mars in 1957, and now the Jovian system,” I explained.

“Yes, yes, quite so Michelle. You are not one who likes to wait for the future, are you—just a minute. They can see ice... and more ice... everywhere there is ice... liquid water beneath the engines... turning back to ice... glorious moment for France... they're opening the champagne—that's it! I can't take any more.”

He removed the earplug and came around the table to look down at the journal. There were still thirty pages of text, all of it quite basic science, plus a lot of the principles behind various inventions.

“Nothing more than Baker's three laws of motion and some practical advice for building as steam engine,” he said, sounding as disappointed as I was.

“There is still the reference near the start, the bit about an enchanted sword speaking the wisdom to them. Also some words of endearment to the brave and clever lady speaking with the sword's voice.”

“Hah! Nothing more than twaddle. Edward and William Tynedale were two of the greatest theoretical physicists and inventors of all time, and they were
Brittanic!
This
has
to be a hoax by the French.”

“But why? The paper is genuine, and so is the ink. It was found in your library, after all.”

“It may be an old hoax to denigrate Brittanic science. The technology to fake a journal like this has been around since the 1850s. You know, use early Fifteenth Century blank paper and contemporary ink, then use a molecular penetrating agent to accelerate absorption. Leave it for a century or so to simulate real aging, then have someone slip it into my library—what is so funny?”