The Complete Enderby (99 page)

‘How long was he there?’

‘He was sending signals through within three days. But he had to wait a year, poor devil, before we could get him out. He was in a dungeon, you know. They got suspicious of his Middle English
or
something. White-haired and gibbering when we got him aboard. His jailors had been a sort of tripodic ectoplasm.’

‘That wasn’t in System B303, though, was it?’

‘Obviously not.’ The old man came out in Swenson’s snappishness. ‘It was a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago System B303, or at least the K2 part of it, was enjoying the doubtful benefits of proto-Elizabethan rule. As it still is.’

‘Sorry. Stupid of me.’

‘Some of you young men,’ Swenson said, going over to the bank of monitor screens, ‘expect too much of Time. You expect historical Time to be as plastic as the other kinds. Because the microchronic and macrochronic flows can be played with, you consider you ought to be able to do the same thing with –’

‘Sorry, sorry,
sorry
. I just wasn’t thinking.’ With so much else on his mind, was it surprising that he should be temporarily ungeared to the dull realities of clockwork time, solar time?

‘That’s the trouble with you young – Ah,’ said Swenson with satisfaction, ‘that was a beautiful changeover.’ With the smoothness of the tongue gliding from one phonemic area to another, the temporal path had become a spatial one. The uncountable megamiles between Earth and System B303 had been no more to their ship than, say, a two-way transatlantic flipover. And now, in reach of this other Earth – so dizzyingly far away that it was the same as their own, though at an earlier stage of history – the substance vedmum had slid them, as from one dream to another, into a world where solid objects might exist that were so alien as to be familiar, fulfilling the bow-bent laws of the cosmos. Swenson, who had been brought up on the interchangeability of time and space, could yet never cease to marvel at the miracle of the almost yawning casualness with which the
nacheinander
turned into the
nebeneinander
(there was no doubt, the old German words caught it best). So far the monitor screens showed nothing, but tape began to whir out from the crystalline corignon machine in the dead centre of the control turret – coldly accurate information about the solar system they were now entering. Swenson read it off, nodding, a Nordic spruce of a man glimmering with chemical youth. Paley looked at him, leaning against the parferate bulkhead, envying the tallness, the knotty strength. But, he thought, Swenson could never disguise
himself
as an inhabitant of a less well-nourished era. He, Paley, small and dark as one of those far distant Silurians of the dawn of Britain, could creep into the proto-Elizabethan England they would soon be approaching and never be remarked as an alien.

‘Amazing how insignificant the variants are,’ Swenson said. ‘How finite the cosmos is, how shamefully incapable of formal renewals –’

‘Oh, come,’ Paley smiled.

‘When you consider what the old musicians could do with a mere twelve notes –’

‘The human mind,’ Paley said, ‘is straight. Thought travels to infinity. The cosmos is curved.’

Swenson turned away from the billowing mounds of tape, saw that the five-manual console was flicking lights smoothly and happily, then went over to an instrument panel whose levers called for muscle, for the blacksmith rather than the organist. ‘Starboard,’ he said. ‘15.8. Now we play with gravities.’ He pulled hard. The monitor screen showed band after band of turquoise light, moving steadily upwards. ‘This, I think, should be –’ He twirled a couple of corrective dials on a shoulder-high panel about the levers. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Free fall.’

‘So,’ Paley said, ‘we’re being pulled by –’

‘Exactly.’ And then: ‘I trust the situation has been presented to you in its perilous entirety. The dangers, you know, are considerable.’

‘Scholarship,’ Paley smiled patiently. ‘My reputation.’

‘Reputation,’ Swenson snorted. Then, looking towards the monitors, he said: ‘Ah. Something coming through.’

Mist, cloudswirl, a solid shape peeping intermittently out of vapour porridge. Paley came over to look. ‘It’s the Earth,’ he said in wonder.

‘It’s
their
Earth.’

‘The same as ours. America, Africa –’

‘The configuration’s slightly different, see, down there at the southern tip of –’

‘Madagascar’s a good deal smaller. And, see, no Falklands.’

‘The cloud’s come over again.’ Paley looked and looked. It was unbelievable.

‘Think,’ Swenson said kindly, ‘how many absolutely incomputable systems there have to be before you can see the pattern of creation starting all over again. This seems wonderful to you because you just can’t conceive how many myriads upon myriads of other worlds are
not
like our own.’

‘And the stars,’ Paley said, a thought striking him. ‘I mean, the stars they can actually see from there, from their London, say – are they the same stars as ours?’

Swenson shrugged at that. ‘Roughly,’ he said. ‘There’s a rough kinship. But,’ he explained, ‘we don’t properly know yet. Yours is only the tenth or eleventh trip, remember. To be exact about it all, you’re the first to go to B303 England. What is it, when all’s said and done, but the past? Why go to the past when you can go to the future?’ His nostrils widened with complacency. ‘G91,’ he said. ‘I’ve done that trip a few times. It’s pleasant to know one can look forward to another thirty years of life. I saw it there, quite clearly, a little plaque set up in Rostron Place:
To the memory of G. F. Swenson, 1963–2094
.’

‘We have to check up on history,’ Paley said, mumbling a little. His own quest seemed piddling: all this machinery, organization, expertise in the service of a rather mean inquiry. ‘I have to know whether William Shakespeare really wrote those plays.’

Swenson, as Paley expected, snorted. ‘A nice sort of thing to want to find out,’ he said. ‘He’s been dead six hundred and fifty years, is it, and you want to prove that there’s nothing to celebrate. Not,’ he added, ‘that that sort of thing is much in my line. I’ve never had much time for poetry. Aaaah.’ He interposed his own head between Paley’s and the screen, peering. The pages of the atlas had been turned; now Europe alone swam towards them. ‘Now,’ Swenson said, ‘I must set the exactest course of all.’ He worked at dials, frowning but humming happily, then beetled at Paley, saying: ‘Oughtn’t you to be getting ready?’

Paley blushed that, with so huge a swathe of the cosmos spent in near idleness, he should have to rush things as they approached their port. He took off his single boilersuit of a garment and drew from the locker his Elizabethan fancy dress. Shirt, trunks, codpiece, doublet, feathered French hat, slashed shoes – clothes of synthetic cloth that was an exact simulacrum of old-time weaving, the shoes
of
good leather handmade. And then there was the scrip with its false bottom: hidden therein was a tiny two-way signaller. Not that, if he got into difficulties, it would be of much use: Swenson was (and these were strict orders) to come back for him in a year’s time. The signaller was to show where he was and that he was still there, a guest of the past, really a stowaway. Swenson had to move on yet farther into timespace: Professor Shimmins had to be picked up in FH78, Dr Guan Moh Chan in G210, Paley collected on the way back. Paley tested the signaller, then checked the open and honest contents of his scrip: chief among these was a collection of the works of William Shakespeare. The plays had been copied from a facsimile of the First Folio in fairly accurate Elizabethan script; the paper too was an acid-free imitation of the coarse stuff Elizabethan dramatists had been said to use. For the rest, Paley had powdered prophylactics in little bags and, most important, gold – angels firenew, the odd portague, écus.

‘Well,’ Swenson said with the faintest tinge of excitement, ‘England, here we come.’ Paley looked down on familiar river shapes – Tees, Humber, Thames. He gulped, running through his drill swiftly. ‘Countdown starts now,’ Swenson said. A syntheglott in the port bulkhead began ticking off cold seconds from 300. ‘I’d better say goodbye then,’ Paley gulped, opening the trap in the deck which led to the tiny jetpowered very-much-one-man aircraft. ‘You should come down in the Thames estuary,’ Swenson said. ‘
Au revoir
, not goodbye. I hope you prove whatever it is you want to prove.’ 200–199–198. Paley went down, settled himself in the seat, checked the simple controls. Waiting took, it seemed, an age. He smiled wryly, seeing himself, an Elizabethan, with his hands on the controls of a twenty-third century miniature jet aircraft. 60–59–58. He checked his Elizabethan vowels. He went over his fictitious provenance: a young man from Norwich with stage ambitions (‘I have writ a play and a goodly one’). The syntheglott, booming here in the small cabin, counted to its limit. 4–3–2–1.

Zero. Paley zeroed out of the mothership, suddenly calm, then elated. It was moonlight, the green countryside slept. The river was a glory of silver. His course had been preset by Swenson; the control available to him was limited, but he came down smoothly on the water. What he had to do now was ease himself to the
shore
. The little engine purred as he steered in moonlight. The river was broad here, so that he seemed to be in a world all water and sky. The moon was odd, bigger than it should by rights have been, with straight markings like fabled Martian canals. The shore neared – it was all trees, sedge, thicket; there was no sign of habitation, not even of another craft. What would another craft have thought, sighting him? He had no fears about that: with its wings folded, the little airboat looked, from a distance, like some nondescript barge, so well had it been camouflaged. And now, to be safe, he had to hide it, cover it with elmboughs and sedge greenery. But first, before disembarking, he must set the time-switch that would, when he was safe ashore, render the metal of the fuselage high-charged, lethally repellent of all would-be boarders. It was a pity, but there it was. It would switch off automatically in a year’s time, in twelve months to a day. Meanwhile, what myths, what madness would the curious examiner, the chance finder generate, tales uncredited by sophisticated London.

Launched on his night’s walk upriver, Paley found the going easy enough. The moon lighted fieldpaths, stiles. Here and there a small farmhouse slept. Once he thought he heard a distant whistled tune. Once he thought he heard a distant town clock strike. He had no idea of the month or day or time of the night, but he guessed that it was late spring and some three hours or so off dawn. The year 1595 was certain, according to Swenson. Time functioned here as on true Earth, and two years before Swenson had taken a man to Muscovy, where they computed according to the Christian calendar, and the year had been 1593. That man had never come back, eaten by bears or something. Paley, walking, found the air gave good rich breathing, but from time to time he was made uneasy by the unfamiliar configurations of the heavens. There was Cassiopeia’s Chair, Shakespeare’s first name’s drunken initial, but there were constellations he had not seen before. Could the stars, as the Elizabethans themselves believed, modify history? Could this Elizabethan London, because it looked up at stars unknown on true Earth, be identical with that other one which was known only from books? Well, he would soon know.

London did not burst upon him, a monster of grey stone and black and white wood. It came upon him gradually and gently,
houses
set in fields and amid trees, the cool suburbs of the wealthy. And then, a muffled trumpet under the sinking moon, the Tower and its sleeping ravens. Then came the crammed crooked houses, all at rest. Paley breathed in the smell of this late spring London, and he did not like what he smelled. It was a complex of old rags and fat and dirt, but it was also a smell he knew from a time when he had flipped over to Borneo and timidly touched the periphery of the jungle: it was, somehow, a jungle smell. As if to corroborate this, a howl arose in the distance, but it was a dog’s howl. Dogs, dogges, man’s best friend, here in outer space; dog howling to dog across the inconceivable vastness of the cosmos. And then came a human voice and the sound of boots on cobbles. ‘Four of the clock and a fine morning.’ He instinctively flattened himself in an alleyway, crucified against the dampish wall. The time for his disclosure was not yet. He tasted the vowel sounds of the bellman’s call – nearer to the English of Dublin than of his own London. ‘Fowr vth cluck.’ And then, knowing the hour at last and automatically feeling for a stopped wristwatch that was not there, he wondered what he should do till day started. Here were no hotels with clerks on allnight duty. He tugged at his dark beard (a three months’ growth) and then decided that, as the sooner he started on his scholar’s quest the better, he would walk to Shoreditch where the Theatre was. Outside the City’s boundaries, where the play-hating City Council could not reach, it was at this time, so history said, a new and handsome structure. A scholar’s zest, the itch to know, came over him and made him forget the cold morning wind that was rising. His knowledge of the London of his own day gave him little help in the orientation of the streets. He walked north – the Minories, Houndsditch, Bishopsgate – and, as he walked, he retched once or twice involuntarily at the stench from the kennel. There was a bigger, richer, filthier, obscener smell beyond this, and this he thought must come from Fleet Ditch. He dug into his scrip and produced a pinch of powder; this he placed on his tongue to quieten his stomach.

Not a mouse stirring as he walked, and there, under rolling cloud all besilvered, he saw it, the Theatre, with something like disappointment. It was mean wood rising above a wooden paling, its roof shaggily thatched. Things were always smaller and more
ordinary
than one expected. He wondered if it might be possible to enter. There seemed to be no protective night watchman. Before approaching the entrance (a door for an outside privy rather than a gate to the temple of the Muses) he took in the whole moonlit scene, the mean houses, the cobbles, the astonishing and unexpected greenery all about. And then he saw his first living creatures.