Ash: A Secret History (198 page)

Subject: Ash

Date:    22/12/00 at 11.13 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

Sorry, yes you need to know, too busy talking to every contact I have, if there’s no other pressure we can bring to bear, at least let’s have the academic community and the media on our side!

Isobel’s team had barely STARTED their analysis of the Stone Golem. When I got there, they had it in the holding tank; there was an argument going on about some minor damage that had been done – or not done – by the divers. It can’t have been much more than two hours after that when the Tunisian navy moved in and confiscated everything. Everything apart from what Isobel and her people had on their backs! They stripped the ship bare. They removed the holding tank, and the Stone Golem.

I cannot BELIEVE this has happened. There was no need. I know Isobel: she will have had no INTENTION of removing any artefacts from Tunisian jurisdiction.

But there is one thing I can say without any possible contradiction – I saw it with my own eyes.

When I first reached the Stone Golem in the holding tank, I was quite literally speechless. Sound echoing off metal, light rippling off water, all the sounds of a modern ship at sea – and there, in the middle of it, in the tank, this great carved larger-than-human figure. With its plinth, it must weigh tons; I have every respect for the team who raised it from the seabed.

What I’d seen through the cameras didn’t prepare me for seeing it in reality. As you know, I’d seen it covered in debris, with a film of silt over it from the ROVs moving around, and encrusted with undersea life. By the time I got to the ship, a section had been cleaned up, and Isobel herself was in the tank working on others.

The MACHINA REI MILITARIS. Sightless eyes staring. Hinged bronze joints clustered thickly with verdigris. This much, as you know, had been visible underwater, on camera. The whole of it wasn’t clear.

Now it is.

The face, the limbs, the plinth: the SHAPE of all of them was clear on camera. But what we’ve been seeing has only been the surface-encrustations. With the encrustations removed, it’s become possible to see the surface of the stone.

Some of it still IS stone. The team says it was all originally a silicon-based conglomerate of some kind.

Ninety per cent of it is VITRIFIED silicon. Glass.

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 glass. It has FLOWED.

Silicon sand turns to glass 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 glass: I saw Isobel’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 manuscript. 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 analysis. 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:    Longman@

Pierce –

I’m worried I haven’t heard from you. Where are you? Are you still on the expedition ship? Mail me, phone me, something.

– Anna

  Message: #447 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    22/12/00 at 06.00 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

Still on ship, 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 Embassy here has been in contact to suggest WE stop causing trouble. God 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) ‘shit 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:    Longman@

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:    Longman@

Pierce –

Damn: 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 manuscript 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 █████████), or you can phone, if you can get a line. My number is ████████.

-Anna

  Message: #247 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    24/12/00 at 11.02 p.m.

From:    Longman@