Ash: A Secret History (217 page)

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Sorry. Yes. Please. What is it?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: What happened to me, happened because of the Sible Hedingham manuscript. I discovered it in Hedingham Castle, in late nineteen thirty-eight. It is my belief that it had not – existed, if you like – much before that time.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: The probability wave being locally collapsed. An artefact becoming real.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Just as in North Africa, a few months ago.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Carthage.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: I had been staying at my brother’s house as I completed my second edition, and researching the Oxfords, because of the de Vere connection with Ash. I theorise now that the Sible Hedingham manuscript became reified, if you like, not long after I arrived. I stole the manuscript—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts, agitated]: Stole it!

VAUGHAN DAVIES: They would neither sell it to me, nor allow me to study it, what else was I to do, pray?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Well, I. You shouldn’t. Well. I don’t know.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: I stole the manuscript, and read it. My Latin is rather better than yours, if you will permit me to say so. Since it was too late in the printing procedure to include the Sible Hedingham manuscript, I wrote my Addendum, with the obvious conclusions, and made an appointment to deliver it to my publishers in London. I planned to arrange the publication of a revised edition, including the new manuscript. [Pause] I was embroiled in a bombing raid. A bomb landed quite close to me. I might have been killed. I might have been spared. Instead, I found myself unreal. Improbable.
Potential
.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: What’s this got to do with the manuscript?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Quite simply, I theorise that there is an energy field, a radiation of some kind, which attends the collapsing of a probability into a reality. When a very improbable thing becomes reified, the radiated energy is that much stronger.

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: It couldn’t be radiation, as such.

VAUGHAN DAVIES:
Will
you let me finish? Thank you. Whatever it is, whether a sub-atomic phenomenon of some kind, or an energy, I was most certainly exposed to it. I believe it to be stronger the more recently the artefact has become real. The exposure in some way destabilised my own reality. I was unaware of this at the time that I found the manuscript, of course. Then, with the bombing, with the point where the wavefront would have to collapse in a major way for me – I would live, or I would die – the destabilisation became acute. I became, and remained, a potential thing.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: And you’re warning me … because I’ve been to the sites at Carthage.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Yes.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I couldn’t tell if. There would be no way of knowing. Tests. Maybe tests of some kind.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: If what I shall call your cohesion has been impaired, you may be in danger.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: If the effect lessens the longer the artefact has been real, then I may not be – impaired. There’s no way of telling, is there? Unless I do have an accident, or hit some point of decision… What happened to you could happen to me. Isobel. The rest. Or it might never happen.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: We must hope for a test to be developed, to determine this. I would work on it myself, but I am conscious that I am not the man I was. A curious thing, to have youth and old age, but no maturity, [pause] I have been robbed, I feel.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I won’t know, will I? If I’ve been exposed.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff!

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I’m sorry.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Let us hope that no accident befalls you, Doctor Ratcliff.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: This is. [pause] Something of a shock.

[Long pause. Background noise]

PIERCE RATCLIFF: There are currently people doing experiments with probability, on a very small scale. I had two government departments debriefing me. The Americans actually took me off the ship in the Mediterranean. On Christmas Day! It was frightening. I was interviewed over several days. They’re still after me. I know it sounds paranoid—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Theoretical progress is being made?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Isobel’s colleagues, they seem to think so. I doubt I can talk to them without attracting more security attention. I just feel – if you’re right – they ought to know – someone ought to
look
at you. [pause] And me.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: I will happily be a subject for study, if it brings us closer to the truth.

PIERCE RATCLIFF:
Is
Burgundy failing to stabilise the probabilities now? Why
now
?

[Increased background noise. Specialist ██████████ enters; medical conversations deleted. Door noise. Long pause]

VAUGHAN DAVIES: [—inaudible—] these minor indignities inflicted by the medical profession. No wonder William became a doctor. Doctor Ratcliff, I know to what the incident in the manuscript refers. I know what became of Burgundy, in that sense.

PIERCE RATCLIFF [pause]: How can you know? Yes, we can speculate, theorise, but—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: I am perhaps the only man alive with reason to say that I know this.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: You have a documented history. Asylums, hospitals.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Doctor Ratcliff, you know that I am speaking the truth. I have existed for the past sixty years in – if you like – the raw state of the universe. The infinite possibilities, before the species-mind of man collapses them into one single reality. For me it was a moment of infinite duration and no time. I would need to be a theologian to describe, accurately, the moment of eternity.

PIERCE RATCLIFF [agitated]: What are you telling me?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: While I was in this state of existence – although it is improper to say ‘while’, since that implies time passing – but no matter. As I existed, merely potential, I perceived that among the infinite chaotic possibilities, there was another state of order.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: On a sub-atomic level? You
saw
—

VAUGHAN DAVIES: I saw that I had been correct. I was not overly surprised. You see, I theorised that the Burgundian bloodline, if we may now call it that, acted as an anchor or a filter; preventing any ability to manipulate quantum events. Any so-called miracles or prayer. And similarly, Ideal Burgundy—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: The sun. What about the sun?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: The sun.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Over Burgundy! They didn’t know why – I don’t know – it should have been – If the Wild Machines were reality as we understand reality. Complex structures in silicon compounds
might
give rise to an organic chemistry,
real
beings— [pause] Then it should have been dark.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Ah. Ah, now I see. You disappoint me, Professor Ratcliff.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: I
disappoint
– you – [loud]

VAUGHAN DAVIES: [-inaudible-] – if I may proceed? [pause] No, I imagined you would see it instantly – as Leofric did, albeit he conceptualised it in his own cultural terms. I theorise that the Ferae Natura Machinae bring about an initial quantum
disjuncture
, immediately the sun goes out. In Burgundy, the Real is preserved – Burgundy maintains the previous, more
plausible
, state. The world outside is scientifically real, if you like to put it in such simplistic terms, but it is a
subsequent
reality. Burgundy already forms a quantum bubble: already begins to be Ideal Burgundy. [pause] Doctor Ratcliff?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: And … oh, I … And when the skies go dark at the Duke’s death—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Precisely! The two unsynchronised quantum realities try to conjoin! The Ferae Natura Machinae striving to impose theirs with the Faris, have it be the only one! Although I had better, perhaps, say interlaced realities—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: The Wild Machines, forcing their version of reality, their quantum version, and it fails at Dijon, and then, with Ash— [pause] I should have seen it. No reality is privileged over another, they’re all real – except that some are less
possible
, more difficult to bring about – easier to
stop
—

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Precisely. Ratcliff, I know what Ash did. She shifted Burgundy—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: A phase-shift—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Altering it at some deep level, pushing it down – or forward – into the place where reality becomes
solidified
. Ratcliff, you must see it. She took Burgundy, and the nature of Burgundy, ahead of us – perhaps only a fraction of a second—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: Shifted it – a nanosecond—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: Where the Possible becomes Real, there is Burgundy. I
saw
it. That is what has preserved us, that is what kept the universe coherent for us. The nature of Burgundy, acting as an anchor, or a Filter—

PIERCE RATCLIFF [interrupts]: So that the ability to
consciously
collapse the wavefront can never reappear, it’s too
improbable
—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [interrupts]: For centuries after it vanished, no historian wrote of Burgundy. With Charles Mallory Maximillian, we begin to remember. But we do not remember, we
perceive
. We perceive that lost Burgundy has an existence in our racial unconscious, as a mythic image; and it has this because it has a genuine, scientifically verifiable existence as a part of our reality fractionally closer to the moment of Becoming.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Burgundy – really still there.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: To think I had imagined you a man of some intelligence. Yes, Doctor Ratcliff, Burgundy has been ‘still there’. Trapped in an eternal golden moment, and functioning as a guide or regulator or suppressor, if you will pardon an engineering metaphor. It filters reality into the species-mind. It has kept us real. Is that plain enough for you?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: What did you perceive? What – [Pause] What is it like, in Burgundy, now? I’d started to think what it might be like. [Pause] An endless court, an endless tournament, a hunt. Maybe war, off in the wildwoods. Their war a living metaphor, defeating the improbabilities pushing in from outside.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: No. That was not what I perceived. Burgundy has no duration. They are frozen, in an eternal moment of an act. The act of making real a coherent world.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Ash? Florian? The rest of them?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Odd that you should concentrate upon the people. It comes of being a pure historian, one would suppose, and having no grasp of science. My perception of the wavefront of probability was far more significant. However, it is true that I perceived minds, in that state of existence.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Could you recognise them?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: I believe that I could. I believe they were the people mentioned in the Sible Hedingham manuscript. You cannot understand. There is no duration, no action: only
being
. Burgundy does not guide the Real by what it does. It does not have to do anything. It functions by being; by what it
is
.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: A kind of hell. For the minds, I mean.

VAUGHAN DAVIES: I am here to tell you, Doctor Ratcliff, that you are perfectly correct in that. What I experienced was an infinite duration of hell. Or heaven.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Or heaven?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: In the sense that I have
directly
perceived the Real.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: An ideal Burgundy, is that what you’re saying?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Burgundy exists among, and governs the shape of, the Real. It is – or has been – the one true reality, of which we are the imperfect shadows. Good lord, man, does nobody read Plato any more?

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Plato wasn’t a theoretical physicist!

VAUGHAN DAVIES: These things have a way of soaking into the species-mind. They are in our blood, at a deeper level than Freud’s unconscious. Jung’s racial unconscious, perhaps. A level as deep and involuntary as the transmutation of cells in our body. It is unsurprising if our mythic mind produces ghosts and shadow images of the Real. After all, we do remember Burgundy.

PIERCE RATCLIFF: We remember it
now
. A little bit in the eighteenth century, then Mallory Maximillian’s first edition; then you; then me, and Carthage, and—

VAUGHAN DAVIES [indistinguishable: weak]

PIERCE RATCLIFF: [—inaudible—] gradually
failing
in what it does. Are you
sure
that that’s what you saw? Five hundred years after what she did, Burgundy is starting to weaken, to fail? Is that it?

VAUGHAN DAVIES: Yes. I am certain of it.

[Long pause. Tape hiss. Footsteps. Door opens and closes]

PIERCE RATCLIFF: Sorry. Had to go out and walk.