Ghosts of Engines Past (20 page)

“So what must I do, under this new plan?”

“Read your personal introduction, read the summaries of the most advanced sciences that humanity knows of, then instruct William and Edward Tynedale not to conceal the sword after they die, rather to leave it to their heirs as a treasure, as the salvation of humanity. It is entangled with itself, six hundred years in the past, it can pour the learning of the present into the past, spawning an infinite number of increasingly advanced pasts to lift us to unimaginable heights. The decision is yours, your majesty, and it holds the only means to fight a race a hundred million years more advanced than out own. What do you say?”

My mind was already made up, but I had been embroiled in court intrigues and politics ever since I had been able to hold a coherent conversation. I allowed a suitable dramatic pause, frowning and nibbling at my lower lip all the while.

“I agree to your plan,” I said abruptly, and was gratified to see expressions of mild astonishment flickering over his face. “Seal the door and shut down all communicators. I want no interruptions while I am transmitting to my long-dead friend.”

Chester called guards and lackeys, gave orders, then sent them away. He applied a seal card to the door, then bowed deeply to me.

“Your wishes have been carried out, your majesty,” he announced.

“Splendid. Now you may sit and listen to the show, but please refrain from wry expressions or silly giggles while I speak of intimate matters to my most platonic of friends.”

“I would not dream of it, your majesty.”

I lay the pad before me and began to read.

“William Tynedale of London, I know that you are listening, because I know that you had this sword within earshot every day of your life—after my first transmission, that is. For the fifth time, it is your most admiring Michelle, speaking to you from six hundred years in your future. This time you find me as Empress Michelle the Fourth, of the Solarian Empire. We find ourselves under attack, and pressed dangerously and desperately hard by very, very hostile and mighty aliens enemies. They are described in my previous communication. For all our military strength we cannot even hold our ground. Five years ago, a star cruiser captained by Duke Mandroniter was fired on and shattered by a small alien ship. Since then, all of humanity has found itself at war with a race far older than you could ever imagine. Certain principles and devices employed by the enemy must now be communicated to the philosophers and artisans of your time, in order to give us an advantage in this war that is to begin six hundred years in your future.”

I read on, detailing the principles of the very best of our weapons. Professor Chester had not yet realised that I had spoken no endearments to my soul mate and true love in medieval London. All was going well as far as Chester was concerned. What had not been factored in was the tradition that the supreme commander of the Solarian Imperial War Force had to go armed at all times. He thought he had everything under control, but the inhibition block that he had placed in the software of my ceremonial resonance pistol had shown up in a programming scan that I had conducted in secret. My father had taught me paranoia, even though he had managed to see very little of me before his death. All of my technical gentlemen in waiting had assured me that the weapon was fully functional and ready for use—and so I was certain that it was not.

My mother had taught me optronics, and by means of seventeen carefully placed optical fibres I had bypassed the control and regulation unit of my ceremonial weapon. It would not function as a resonance pistol, but the powerful initiation laser in the charge cell could cut through a half inch of steel. To an external software scan, my weapon looked harmless, but it was still a working weapon. I had originally thought an assassination attempt was being planned, but now I knew better.

“... and thus my technical missive is at an end, yet not my words to you William Tynedale, my true love, so far in my past,” I read as I approached my conclusion. “Please note that the greatest of my time's natural philosophers have determined that you must leave the Don Alverin Sword to your heirs, along with your Tynedale Journal. They wish to use it to continually advance the past from the future
—but they are wrong!
For the sake of humanity, publish
none
of this and hide the sword,” I cried, completely without warning, drawing my weapon as I spoke the words.

Chester was already in the act of drawing his own resonance pistol, but my laser cut diagonally across his body, messily slicing him and his chair apart. Next I fired at a spot beside the door which concealed the power coil that operated the door, jamming it. My third shot destroyed the monitor bubble. Those outside retaliated by cutting the power to the lights and flooding anaesthetic gas into the room, but by now I had activated the targetry lamp on my pistol and hurried across to Chester's body. In a coat pocket I found an oxygen bulb and mask. I took a deep breath, then continued my plea to William Tynedale.

“William, they are trying to stop me, and I have only moments to live. Hide the sword, destroy your journal, forget all of this and forget me!” I shouted at the RF communicator on the desk, then took another breath from the oxygen bulb. “The sword, the journal, they are a keyhole to the future that has been giving you
only
natural philosophy and weapons designs. Our modern world is a huge, medieval kingdom.” Another breath, and I could hear scrabbling as someone began attaching a power jack to the door. “The three alien civilizations that we have contacted have developed moral codes alongside their studies of natural philosophies. As a result they have lived in peace for tens of thousands of years, but
we
have had practically no advances in moral teachings since your own time.”

I breathed from the bulb, then aimed my targetry lamp at the door and fired the laser. There was a scream of pain, and a metallic clang as the power jack was dropped.

“William, the only way to stop the war with the enemy aliens is to make this future never happen.” A breath. The sound of more feet approaching. I turned the radio off. “I have the Don Alverin Sword, you traitorous vermin!” I shouted, then took another breath. “I'm wearing it. Fire a resonance gun at me and you destroy your only link with the past.” I turned the radio on again. “Sorry William, trying to buy time.”

I breathed again, straining my ears to catch anything at all, but hearing nothing. They were probably conferring outside, deciding on any of a dozen ways to break in.

“William, I think you are the greatest philosopher ever to live, but please, please, destroy this future. Never reveal any of what I have told you. Any moment now, my own courtiers will blast the door open. I am going to turn my gun on the sword and, destroy our entanglement link with your time.” One last breath. “I love you, William Tynedale, goodbye, and never forget me!”

“It just stops there,” said Sir Steven as I turned a few of the blank pages that followed the last entry.

I closed the book and stared at the words embossed on the cover. Tynedale Journal. I stared at the sword, then I stared at Sir Steven.

“I am a science journalist, not a science fiction editor,” was all that I felt inclined to say.

“It is no hoax,” he insisted.

“Steve, if you want to impress me with your writing, this is not the way to do it. What's the hidden agenda, getting me all the way out here? If you want to have an affair, the answer is no. I may be divorced, but—”

“This is serious!” he shouted suddenly, slamming his fist down on the edge of the table.

Sir Steven was normally mild mannered at best, and controlled at worst.

“Look, I don't understand what you are trying to do.”

“I had sample from a page analysed. The paper is genuine, the ink is genuine, and the ink shows all the right signs of slow chemical reaction with the paper over six hundred years. This is real.”

“Temporal entanglement?” I laughed, my nerve returning. “The very idea! What sort of fool do you take me for? I might only keep up with leading edge physics by reading
Nature,
but I still do it.”

“And what about your feelings for William Tynedale?”

That was the part that had me uneasy. As an undergraduate I had seen his only surviving portrait at an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I could not describe it as love at first sight, but I had bought a print and had it framed. I had also studied what little was known of the brilliant gunsmith and his brother. The references to them had continued until 1418, then they died when their house had burned after a gunpowder explosion.

“I admire them, and I think William was pretty cute.”

“Just like in all the other alternate futures that William and you created.”

“Steve, this is taking a clever joke too far.”

“This is no joke,” insisted Sir Steven. “Look back through the journal. We have the most fantastic technology laid out in a couple of hundred pages of text and diagrams. Michelle, if you will not take this seriously, I can and will go elsewhere.”

There was an awkward silence. I leafed through some of the middle pages of the journal. Some of the physics looked plausible, and could easily be checked experimentally. I began to feel uneasy. It was a chart for science without experiment. Only the true paths were chronicled, none of the blind alleys or pitfalls. The latest of the myselfs—the empress—had been right about moral codes and ethics as well. All of that was entirely absent.

“Listen Steve, just say all this really is genuine. What then? “

“The physics and tech in this journal could take us half a millennium in ten years, that's what! They could have us on Mars in a few months, and at Alpha Centauri in a decade.”

“And armed with weapons that could sterilise an entire planet between breakfast and morning coffee. We could look like Attila the Hun armed with thermonuclear weapons to any older, more advanced species out there. Check some of the designs. Some reasonably bright nut case could level a city block with his one, for example—the resonance culverin. You can buy most of the bits in any supermarket, and do the assembly in a garden shed.”

“So? It only means that access to what is in the Tynedale Journal must be restricted. Michelle, you have had your chance. Sorry, but we are talking about mankind's destiny here. I am going to take these to London right now. Some really serious work needs to be done on the science in these pages. See Thomson on your way out, he'll write out a cheque for your expenses.”

With that he picked up the sword and journal, then walked from the room. I was left with my thoughts. The Chesters in the alternate worlds of 2004 had a bad record when offered temptation. Upon feeling the hand on their shoulder, they did not look down to check for a cloven hoof. I had an odd feeling of loss as well. Of all the Michelle Watsons, only I had not spoken to William Tynedale through the Don Alverin Sword. There was a sound like a dull, distant thud somewhere. I heard footsteps outside. Thomson with my cheque, I guessed.

William Tynedale entered. He was wearing a red cloak and tunic over olive green trousers, and a sword hung from the belt at his waist.

“My lady, I am heer,”he said, spreading his arms and giving a bow. “What is youre wille?”

His speech and pronunciation of modern English was relatively sophisticated for someone from the London of 1418. This was probably because he had made an effort to learn to speak as I had. He had had several hours of my transmissions as tutorials, along with fourteen years to practise.

“I—William?” I gasped, thankful that I was sitting down.

“Yes, William, I am,” he replied, smiling shyly. “I am youre owne love.”

I stood up slowly, then walked around the desk and took his hand. When I could manage to speak I replied “And I am yours, no less. But—but I must explain—”

“All as was spak, I did attend,” he assured me, a finger to his lips.

He had been listening to everything Sir Steven and I had said. We left the room, hand in hand. I was not particularly surprised to find Thomson bound and gagged in the parlour. We walked from the house, and across the lawns to the visitors' car park. The Tynedale's craft was there, not far from the burning remains of Sir Steven's Range Rover. Sir Steven stood beside it, his hands held high. Behind him was a man bearing some similarity to William

“This is Edward,” William explained, and Edward gave me a little nod. “He hath no voice, yet he hath ways of speaking.”

William gestured to Sir Steven, the burning car, and to a thing in Edward's hands. It was an object that Dali might have painted had he been locked in an alchemist's workshop, given an near-overdose of some hallucinogen, and told to paint something interesting. It was all spiral tubes, frosty glass globes, ivory, obsidian, and crystal. The wooden stock might have originally belonged to an early gun, and a pearly glow was coming from within the complex. What was quite possibly a barrel was pointed at Sir Steven. On the ground beside him were the Tynedale Journal and Don Alverin Sword. Edward bowed curtly to me, but kept what I guessed was the makeshift resonance culverin pointed at Sir Steven.

The Tynedale Brothers had taken my warning and published nothing. In private, however they had studied and worked like men possessed, and by 1418 they had completed a starship.

The craft was about the size of a delivery van, but shaped a little like a pair of onions joined at their bases and resting on a lattice of satay sticks. It was all iron bands, barrel slats, copper sheathing, and oakwood rails. It had several arrowslit-style windows of quartz crystal, and by the smell of it the whole thing had been made airtight with bitumen. William gave me a tour of the interior. It was heated and powered by technology that could have won me the Nobel Prize for Physics every year for at least a decade, yet all of it had been built using materials and tools from Fifteenth Century London. Carbon dioxide was split into oxygen and graphite by something mounted in a wooden washtub bolted to the roof. The drive was what had been described in the Tynedale Journal as an asymptotic boundary, generated by squeezing quartz crystals in an electrum collar at a precise frequency by... even now I cannot quite understand precisely how it works. The Tynedales did not either, they just followed the designs that I had given them as a different self. In this thing they had used relativistic time dilation to travel six hundred years in a few months, making the trip over seventy times, and stopping to take on fresh air and provisions as they were needed.