Ash: A Secret History (216 page)

But this is a younger wood, a different valley; there are no broken windows, no holly trees.

She has time to smile.
Fortuna. Just chance.

As if her mind expands, she feels the immense ratiocinative power of the Wild Machines flow through her, envelop her, become a tool she can command. She can calculate, with the precision of the finest cut, what must become improbable – what must be reified, what made merely potential.

“Don’t let me down now.” Her hands grip Floria’s; her hands touch Burgundy. “Come on, girl!” And, quietly, in the dark, “To – a safe place.”

She wonders momentarily what every priest with God’s grace has felt, and if what she feels is the same.

Love for the world, however bitter, grief-stricken or brutal it may be. Love for her own. The will and the desire to protect.

In the authoritative voice that people obey, she says, “Do it!”

She
moves
Burgundy.

OBSERVATION TAPE ████████

Authority ████████

No. ████████

[tape hiss; noise of electrical switch]

WILLIAM DAVIES: [—inaudible—] a man with photosensitive epilepsy should not be watching the television.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Indeed. A man unaware of the last sixty years, however, should. I confess myself amazed. I had thought the popular tastes of the nineteen-thirties degraded. This is nothing but the vilest kind of mob entertainment.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: If I could introduce myself, Professor Davies –

[indistinguishable: background room noise]

VAUGHAN DAVIES: You are Ratcliff. Yes. If I may say so, it’s taken you long enough to come and see me. I see from your previous publications that you have a mind with some degree of rigor in its reasoning. May I be so happy as to suppose you have treated my work with adequate intelligence?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I hope so.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: All men live in hope, Doctor Ratcliff. I believe I could drink a little tea. My dear, do you think you could manage that?

ANNA LONGMAN: I’ll ask the nurse if he can arrange it.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: William, perhaps you…

WILLIAM DAVIES: Don’t mind me. I’m quite comfortable here.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: I would prefer to speak with Doctor Ratcliff in private.

[Indistinguishable: room noise, voices outside]

ANNA LONGMAN: [—inaudible—] some coffee, in the cafe here. Do you need your stick?

WILLIAM DAVIES: Good lord, no. A matter of a few yards.

[Indistinguishable: door opens and closes?]

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff, I have been talking to that girl. Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me where you have been for what, I understand, is the better part of three weeks?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Girl? Oh. Anna said that you appeared to be worried about me.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Answer the question, please.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I don’t see the relevance of this, Professor Davies.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Damn you, young man, will you answer a question when it is put to you!

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I’m afraid I can’t say much.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Have you at any time in the recent past been in danger of your life?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: What? Have I what?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: This is a perfectly serious question, Doctor Ratcliff, and I would be obliged if you would treat it as one. I will make the matter clear in due course.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: No. I mean. Well, no.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: You returned from your archaeological expedition—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: Not mine. Isobel’s. Doctor Napier-Grant, that is.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: So many
women
. We appear to have become very degenerate. However. You returned from North Africa; you were not at any time in danger of an accident of any kind?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: If I was, I was unaware of it. Professor Davies, I really don’t understand you.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: The girl told me you have read the Sible Hedingham manuscript. That this somewhat idiosyncratic translation of it is your work.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Yes.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Then it is plain, to the meanest intelligence, what has been happening here! Do you wonder that I show some concern for a professional colleague?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Frankly, Professor Davies, you don’t seem like a man who shows much concern about his fellow man.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: No? No. Perhaps you are right.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I didn’t come before because I was being interviewed—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: By whom?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I don’t think it’s wise to go into that too much at the moment.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Is it possible that any member of your, archaeological expedition has been in an accident? An automobile accident, or something of a similar nature?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Isobel’s expedition. No. Isobel would have mentioned it. I don’t see what this has got to do with the Sible Hedingham manuscript.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: It is plain, from that document, what has occurred to us.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: The fracture in history, yes. [—inaudible—] this what you wrote in your Addendum to the second edition, if you did write it?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Oh, I wrote it, Doctor Ratcliff. I had it in my pocket when I travelled to London. Any sensible publisher would have removed himself from London during the German bombing, but not—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: If we can get back to this. You read the Sible Hedingham document, you wrote about the fracture, and the ‘first history’—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Yes, and it obviously needed publication as a matter of the greatest urgency. I had been so nearly right in my edition of the Ash papers. It was clear to me from the Sible Hedingham document that Burgundy had been, as it were,
removed
from us. Taken to a level of matter we cannot as yet detect – a happy thought: perhaps we may detect it, now?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: There are experiments going on in particle physics and probability theory, yes.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: You have reached the same conclusions as myself. It seems to be the case that, before this fracture, we were capable of consciously doing what other forms of life unconsciously do.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Collapsing the improbable and the miraculous into the
real
. The solid world, [pause] But it had me puzzled! The universe is real, yes, we see that. But the universe is uncertain. Ever since Heisenberg, we’ve known that; down on the sub-atomic level, things are fuzzy. Observing an experiment alters the results. You can know where a particle is, or its direction; never both. This isn’t solid, this isn’t real as the manuscript talks about it—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: If you would kindly stop
pacing
.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Sorry. But I see it: it
is
real. What Burgundy does is keep us
consistent
. If it was uncertain today, it will be uncertain
in the same way
tomorrow! Unchecked unreality is what it prevents.
Randomness
. We may not have a good existence, but we have a consistent one.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Of course, before we would have been able consciously to
undo
such stabilisation, such consistency. If you look at the twentieth century, Doctor Ratcliff – and I, at least, look on the latter half of it with a stranger’s eyes – you cannot claim this to be the best of all possible worlds. Man’s lot is still suffering, in the main. But it is a
consistent
reality. Human evil is limited to the possible. We have much for which to be thankful!

PIERCE RATCLIFF: The obvious example. I’ve thought about it. Think what Hitler would have done to the Jews, if he had been a wonder-worker, a man able to literally manipulate the stuff of reality. It would be all blond Aryans. There would have
been
no Jewish race. A Holocaust worse than the Holocaust.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: What Holocaust?

[Pause]

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Never mind. There would have been military research. People bred as weapons. Like Ash, yes, like Ash. A probability bomb – worse than a nuclear bomb. VAUGHAN DAVIES: Nuclear? Nuclear bomb?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: That’s – oh: difficult, that’s a – a bomb that—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Rutherford! He did it, after all!

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Yes – no – never mind. Look.

[Pause]

VAUGHAN DAVIES: It is one of the more interesting paradoxes, don’t you think? That war, by nature of the organised thought required to wage it, reinforces the nature of a rational reality – while, at the same time, the destruction it causes in its effects leads to chaos.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: That’s why she understood it, isn’t it?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Ash? Yes. I believe so.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I couldn’t understand it, you see. Until I understood that Burgundy’s still there, still doing what it’s been doing. We have it in the species-mind, and in our unconscious, as a lost and golden country. But at the same time it has this quite genuine scientifically verifiable existence on a different level of reality, and it carries on with its function.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff, are you aware of the possible reason why things are coming back?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I understand how things could be left over. No process is perfect, the universe is large and complex, and what Ash and the Wild Machines did – it’s not surprising if some of the evidence of the first history wasn’t expunged. Reality has its own weight. It’s been gradually squeezing the anomalies out – things becoming legendary, mythic, fictional.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: The manuscript evidence.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: A statue here, a helmet there. Ash’s words turning up in someone else’s mouth. I can understand all of that. There was a single fracture, it did what it did, and we see the evidence as it – fades.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: The false history that appeared with the fracture – in which, for example, Charles the Bold dies after a siege, but at Nancy – has, here and there, some fragments of the true history embedded in it. For example, the chronicles that the del Guiz family
would have
written, after fourteen seventy-seven.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Not as they existed before the fracture, but as they
would have
existed, if history had just carried on. Five-hundred-year-old evidence sliding back into the interstices of history. The Fraxinus manuscript too. It might quite reasonably have existed.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Yes. That is quite clear. I wonder, Doctor Ratcliff, if you quite appreciate the significance of the Sible Hedingham document in this respect?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: You remind me very much of my old professor, if you don’t mind me saying so, Professor Davies. He used to ask me a trick question just like that.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Do you know what is most strange to me? You are giving me the respect you believe is due to an older man. In my mind, Doctor Ratcliff, I am a younger man than you are.

[Indistinguishable: traffic noise – window open? Tape hiss. Pause before speech resumes]

PIERCE RATCLIFF: The Sible Hedingham document is more improbable. It’s what Ash would have written – no, she’d have to have dictated it to someone – but done it after fourteen seventy-seven, after the fracture. Perhaps left it in England after a visit to the Earl of Oxford.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff, I intended to warn you, and now I will do it. The possible reason why things are coming back. My theory is that the reappearance of these highly improbable artefacts is a consequence of Burgundy’s function failing in some way.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I’d thought – I was afraid –
Yes
. Improbable happenings, things that aren’t rational, predictable. But – why would it be breaking down? Why now?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: For that, you will have to understand how lost Burgundy does what it does; and I believe, since I am sixty years behind current scientific development, that I am not qualified to put forward a theory. What I will do, if permitted, is to give you my warning.