Greenbeard (9781935259220) (22 page)

“If Mr Locke's philosophising ever gets translated into French then
le Roi Soleil
might find himself punctured by a pitchfork,” said Captain Greybagges, “which would not lead to a vigorous nation but to civil war, and I would not wish that upon even the French, much as I despise King Louis.”

“Ah! but France is an old nation, so that the King would be killed by a settling of ancient accounts, not by the mere desire for new philosophy of governance. A new nation, with no old scores or grudges, might prove a more fertile garden in which such an idea might grow, might it not?”

“You argue your case very well, Frank,” said the Captain, “and I say that as a lawyer. I may also hazard a guess that your ‘new nation' is the north American colonies. Am I right?”

“You are, but not at the present moment or under the present circumstances. I don't think I shall live to see it, but the spread of an idea is unstoppable, if it is a good idea, so I suspect that it will be adopted when the right moment comes, when it is a useful idea and not a destructive one.” Mr Benjamin drained his ale. “I must
bid you adieu. We cast a copper test-piece this afternoon in a mould of sand and china clay, and I wish to observe its rate of cooling, and also to prevent any rogue of an empirical nature from breaking open the mould prematurely through mere impatience or idle curiosity.”

Captain Greybagges watched Mr Benjamin leave. Blue Peter finished his stew, cleaning the bowl with a piece of bread, topped up his ale from the jug and selected an apple from the basket in the middle of the table.

“He is a clever fellow, is Frank,” said Captain Greybagges, “and he may well be right about Locke's ideas. Mind you, Peter, the Dutch do away with their kings, and yet they seem always to get them back again, but under a different name. The present fellow is called the
stadthouder
, meaning ‘place-keeper' or steward, but they are a republic so they cannot decide how much notice to take of him. A democratic utopia such as Frank envisages may be hard to build. I like his notion that such a place would resemble piracy, though! An entire nation of buccaneering entrepreneurs giving not a hoot for anything except freedom and happiness, their eyes always on the far horizon, always on the next gamble! What a thing that would be!”

“I am still cold,” said Blue Peter. “I stand by the fire, then eat a tureen of hot stew and drink a stoop or two of strong ale, and yet I am still cold.” Blue Peter crunched the apple. The Captain's beard glowed green in the light from the oil lamps. It's funny, thought Blue Peter, but I hardly notice it now. He coloured it brown to go into Liver Pool, but now he has washed it off – the boot-polish makes it itch, he says – and I didn't really notice until the lamp-light caught it. How easily we become accustomed to the bizarre if we see it every day.

“Do you feel the time is right to reveal more of your plans?” said Blue Peter softly, almost without thinking. Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges looked at him with raised eyebrows, then nodded.

“You are cold, Peter,” he said. “There are too many freezing draughts in here!” He stood up and kicked the thick rug against the gap at the bottom of the door, and stuffed a napkin into the keyhole. “There, the parlour will warm up a little now,” he said loudly, and in a lower voice; “If we talk quietly we cannot be understood from outside the door. I got Izzie to test it by standing outside while I sang ‘Spanish Ladies'. We both pretended to be drunk. Well, drunker than we were, anyway. Sailors, pirates or not, are always nosey blighters, I have found.” He
rummaged in a desk, sat down and beckoned to Blue Peter to draw his chair closer.

“So, Sylvestre, you will enlighten me further? I am agog!” Blue Peter murmurred, screeching his chair on the stone-flagged floor as he shuffled it next to the Captain. The Captain opened a bottle of Madeira and poured two glasses.

“Indeed yes, Peter. Perhaps it is overdue. I have discussed some of what I am going to tell you with Bill, but only the algebraical and geometrical aspects, which he will need to understand for navigation. Oh, I am not making much sense! It's difficult to know where to begin. Anyway, the point with Bill is that he knows nothing of the extramundane creatures, but he does have some knowledge of their natural philosophy, which I will now explain to you. Don't mention the extramundanes at all to anybody just yet, is what I mean to say.”

Captain Greybagges stared blankly for a moment, composing his thoughts. Blue Peter stayed silent, sipping the sweet wine.

“Time is an awkward thing.” The Captain took a sheet of paper from the sheaf he had taken from the desk and dipped a quill. “Imagine a tree. Here is the ground” He drew a line across the paper. “Here is the trunk of the tree.” A line up from the first line. “Branches, the trunk divides in two, thus, and again, and again, so. But below ground there are roots.” A line drawn down from the groundline. “Roots that also branch, and again, and again, so. Imagine that the air, light and free, is the future, and that the ground, solid and permanent, is the past. The present is the surface of the ground. The tree represents something with a future and a past - you, me, a ship, a rat, a rock - so that the branching represents the choices that are taken in the future, you see? This choice leads to that, that one to this, and so on. In a similar way for the past; these roots represent the narrowing pattern of choices that lead to the present.”

“I see what you mean, I think,” said Blue Peter slowly. “They are lines in time, leading from the past into the future through the nexus of the present.”

“Well put! The Arab scholars wrote of an
aleph
, where all time and space are coincident, and some necromancers claim that there is one in the pillar of a temple in Jerusalem, and that you can hear it buzzing if you put your ear to the rock. I think that is all hogwash, though, and that the Arab savants really meant the
aleph
to represent the constriction of choices as the future turns into the past, alike to several streams joining to rush through a culvert.”

“It is indeed a compelling picture,” said Blue Peter thoughtfully.

“However, it is more complicated.” The Captain drew another tree next to the first. “It is a forest, not a single tree. If that tree is you, and this tree is me, then if our futures are entwined so are the branches of the trees, and if our pasts are entwined then so are the roots, and so for a hundred, a thousand other trees.”

“Ah, yes, that begins to be complicated.”

“Not only that, but although you are one man you are made of parts, so the tree could represent only one of your arms, or a finger, or a fingernail, and so on down to the atomies that compose your corporeality. Each atomie with its own tree, its branches and roots entwined with a million others.”

“Hmm, that is complicated. A dance of atomies weaving the present like a tapestry.”

“Precisely! The next part you will have to take more on trust.” Captain Greybagges refilled their glasses.

“Why?”

“Because I don't really understand it myself. The whole notion of atomies was thought up by the old Greek cove Democritus. He thought it unreasonable that something could be divided up infinitely. Cut a piece of string in half, cut the half in half, and so on. He deduced that sooner or later one would encounter an indivisible particle, or atomon, and be able to cut no more.”

“That does indeed sound reasonable,” said Blue Peter, sipping the Madeira wine.

“Ahh! But that implies a general principle!” said Captain Greybagges. “If matter is granular, then maybe everything else is, too. Time. Distance. Heat. Nothing continuous, but everything doled out as in coinage, with no change from a groat. A groat, or no groat. No half-groats.”

“These small increments of time, distance or heat,” said Blue Peter, “must be very tiny, or we would notice them. The tick of a clock seems to chop up time, but that is an illusion, time itself seems continuous.”

“They are very small, but they have an effect nevertheless.” The Captain held up his hand. “No, let me finish. I said I did not understand it fully myself. The granular or grainy nature of everything on a small scale has the effect of making the present a little elastic, or deformable. Since there are no half-groats, then at the moment of reckoning - the present - things must be rounded up or rounded down, and that is a roll of the dice, not a calculation. Imagine the atomies as
soldiers running out to the parade-square to form up in ranks; they shuffle into lines, they stand to attention, then break up again and run off for their breakfast. Just before they form up, though, there is a period of pushing and shoving - ‘this is my position', ‘no, it's mine', ‘budge up a bit' and so on - then every soldier finds a place and the parade is perfect. That instant of perfect order is the present, but either side of it there is chaos, and the precise position of each soldier depends partly on chance.”

“But that is only one instant in time, surely?”

“Yes, but time itself is grainy, so the flow of time is an endless succession of such moments. There are more atomies than are apparent, too. As in a play on a stage, for example, you see the play, but you don't see the actors waiting in the wings, or the stagehands, yet they are there. If you took a bottle and pumped the air out - like that fellow did in Magbeburg, Otto von Guericke - then inside the bottle is nothing, yet little miniscule atomies pop up in there all the time from out of nowhere just in case they are needed. Pop up, say ‘anyone need an atomie? No? Oh, well, I'll be off then,' and disappear again back to the dressing-room, or wherever it is that atomies go when they're not here, or there. The constant but
fleeting
presence of atomies means there is empty space in the bottle's vacuum, but not
nothing
. Think of it as alike to moonlight on a dark and choppy ocean; one sees the white foam, but not the vast dark ocean upon which the foam floats. There is no foam in the empty bottle, but the dark ocean is still there.”

“My head hurts, Sylvestre,” said Blue Peter, “and this Madeira isn't helping. Have you any brandy?”

Captain Greybagges rose from his armchair, put another log on the fire and rummaged through a chest. He came back with a bottle of brandy, and poured two glasses.

“Your head will only hurt, Peter, if you try and understand it, for common sense does not help very much. Anyways, the effect of it is that the present is slightly plastic or elastic. Given that time and distance are the same thing, too, it is possible to tinker about with time to some extent. The extramundanes, or at least the influential ones like the Glaroon, have discovered how to do this. The lizard people and the little grey buggers have not, so they are as much their victims as us. There are constraints on messing about with time, though. If one went back one hundred years in time - which is quite possible - and murdered one's grandsire,
then there would be no consequences when one returned to the present, one would only have created a dead-end time-path, and that would heal itself and disappear. By the same token, if one went a week into the future, found the result of a horse-race and came back to the present and wagered on it then one would surely lose, because one would only have seen a
possible
future, one of many.”

“Then there is little point in moving through time, surely?”

“Not entirely. It is still possible to cheat a little bit, if one goes with the natural fall of events. For example, I myself was away on Mars for about three years, but I travelled back in time to the very point at which I left. This was a breach of the laws of time, so to speak, but me being displaced from my normal time-line was a bigger one, so I continue with my existence here and the closed loop in the timeline which I took when I was abducted to Mars is what shall wither away from history, or it would except that it is kept open by my beard, which is in contact with the Glaroon's library.”

“I'm not sure I follow that,” Blue Peter sipped brandy.

“Nobody could. As I say, common sense is inadequate to deal with these matters. I will give you another example.” Captain Greybagges handed him a piece of coal. “Note that this lump of sea-coal has the impression of a leaf in it, where it has been split.”

“I see it quite clearly.”

“The leaf is several tens of millions of years old, yet it remains recognisable, for not much has happened to disturb it. If one were to travel back in time and collect a leaf and bring it to the present then it would be only slightly wilted because it would be travelling in the rough direction of its own time-line, much as that more-decayed leaf has done, and so not much harm would be done by that. It would not, of itself, create an anachronistic problem.”

“Tens of millions of years?”

“Yes. The world is much older than is currently assumed.”

“Not an anachronism?”

“Not really. Other leaves have made the journey, you have one in your hand, so what odds does it make if another one does? If one was to take something back in time, then there could be a huge consequence, even if the something was only as insubstantial as a mere idea. Take the secret of gunpowder back in time and give it to the ancient city of Carthage, the Romans lose the Punic wars and the
whole of history would be different from then on. It's too much disruption, so it can't happen and won't happen. I travelled back three years, but it was a small anachronism as it restored a timeline, which is a good thing, and it was only three years so the past wasn't properly hardened, and so it did happen, and so here I am.”

“How does this affect your plans?”

“Now we get down to it, Peter. The Glaroon, having mastered the laws of time, can travel back and bring things forward, and so it does. Inanimate things are best – objects of marble and bronze, jewellery of diamonds and gold – they can be stolen from the past with ease because they could have been lost or buried and then found again, so no problem with them arriving in the present. The Glaroon, as you may imagine, has a large collection of such things stolen from the past, a collection worth more than all the money in the world's coffers, bank-vaults, exchequers and treasuries put together. Is that not a cheery thought, shipmate? We go to plunder the biggest treasure of all!”