Weaver (46 page)

Mary fell on the body of her son, and the woman who had killed him. Her face was contorted, a mask of grief and rage. She clawed at Julia’s throat, her hair coming loose from its tie, a cloud of grey around her twisted face.

Mackie dragged her away. He grabbed Julia’s hand and crushed it, making her scream, until he had forced the silver pistol out of her fingers. He looked across at George. ‘Sergeant. Help me. Hold this woman.’

. George willed himself up onto his elbows. His head rang, and his vision was blurring. But he rolled over and lay on top of Julia. Mackie dug keys out of Julia’s pocket and released George from his cuffs. His hands free, George got her by her wrists, his heavy arse pinning her legs. She stared up at him, stunned, the bloody marks of Mary’s hands on her throat.

Mackie pulled Mary to her feet. ‘Mary. Mary! Listen to me. Listen. I know it’s hard, my God. But you have to help me. The job’s not done yet. The mission.’

Slowly she replied, ‘The mission.’

‘The Loom. You heard what George said. God, how can I have been so stupid? She was stalling - why didn’t I see it? They didn’t finish the job. Fiveash sent back the Codex. But she’s still in the middle of sending back Eadgyth’s Testament. We still have a chance.’

‘But Gary, look at him, he’s not even got his face covered—’

‘Mary, we have to make his loss worthwhile.’

She pulled away from him. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that, you manipulative prick.’

He held up his hands. ‘All right. I deserved that. But, Mary, for now - please.’ He began to tinker with the bank of controls beside the tank. ‘What if we stop the supply of opiates? Fiveash, which is the switch?’

‘Too late for that,’Julia said, pinned on her back, her mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘Too late! The Jew will be under in a minute, and everything will change.’

Mackie looked around. ‘Trojan? Is she right?’

‘I am afraid so,’ said Josef Trojan.

‘Plan B,’ Mary whispered. ‘Turn Columbus west. Not east.’

‘Yes.’ Mackie said. ‘That’s it. Good. Good, Mary. Come on, work with me now. We prepared for this eventuality, didn’t we? If you can feed him your alternate version of the Testament, maybe that will be enough. Trojan, is this a microphone? Can Ben hear us? You can do it, Mary. Come on. Speak into his ear as he falls asleep. Do you remember what you worked out? The Aztec feathered serpent, the Chinese dragon—’

‘They could just kill him. Kill the little fucker. But that hasn’t occurred to them, has it?’ Julia whispered this to George, as once she had whispered erotic promises.

He pinned her down harder. ‘Shut up. For the last time, shut up.’ He held his face over hers, close, as if he might kiss her. But a drop of blood from the wound she had inflicted rolled over his scalp and splashed on her cheek.

Mary lowered her head to the microphone. The body of her son was sprawled at her feet, and George could see how she was drawn to him, as if by elastic cables. But she spoke into the mike, improvising. ‘Egilsson. Orm Egilsson. Can you hear me?
Are you there
? Are you there, Orm Egilsson? Orm Egilsson! Listen to what I have to tell you. Listen, and remember, and let your sons and their sons remember too ...’

Mackie whispered, ‘Mary. Old English. Speak to Egilsson. Make him hear you through Eadgyth.’

‘Yes ... Egilsson. Orm Egilsson. Hierst pu me? Bist pu ðær?
Bist pu ðœr,
Orm Egilsson? Orm Egilsson! Hlyston ond mune, for pon ic pu recce. Hlyston ond mune, ond giefst to pin sunum ond to hira sunum...’

EPILOGUE

JULY 1943

‘My son didn’t deserve this, George.’

‘I know, Mary, I know.’

‘To be killed by practically the last shot of the conflict.’

‘Oh, the war’s not over yet, Mary. And, look - well - he’s with my Hilda now. His Hilda. That’s something, isn’t it?’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘I was brought up to believe it. And, you know, I think if I try really hard I can believe it again.’

‘Well, you’re going to have to teach me.’

‘Mary - George - please.’

‘Tom? What now?’

‘I know you don’t want me around. But I have to show you this...’

If he could hear their voices, Ben knew he must be waking. If he was waking, he had been asleep.

And if he had been asleep, he must have implemented another of Julia’s grisly historical changes. He had died and had been reborn. Again. That deep fear stabbed at him. It was a fear at the transience of life, at the impermanence of it, the fragility. A fear like being suspended over a thousand-foot cliff.

He put it aside, and kept his eyes closed. Sleep hovered about him, a loose blanket. Perhaps if he willed it he could bring it back, fall away from the world again.

But if he slept again, could he control his dreams?

‘Mary. Look. These are your own notes - look, your transcription of Eadgyth’s testament, taken from Geoffrey’s memoir, written out
in your own hand.
Can you see?’

‘It’s changed. It no longer reads as it did. Send the Dove west! O, send him west!“ West, not east.’

‘History has shivered around us, Mary. The past has changed.’

‘And yet we remember.’

‘And yet, yes. It may take a century of tinkering with this Loom of Trojan’s, and even more theorising, before we understand any of this ...’

Ben had a good memory. He always had. It had only been enhanced by Julia’s hypnotism and the mnemonic tapes. He thought he could remember every word of the time-manipulating chunks of doggerel she had beaten into his head, every one of the attempts she had made to change history. Even the ‘dry runs’, as she had called them.

And Mary’s Dunkirk counter-history had intrigued him. He’d had plenty of time to think this over, lying in his tank.

What might have happened if, for some reason, the Germans had not pressed home their advantage in the spring of 1940, and had allowed the BEF to survive? There would have been a ripple of changes, he had conclu
ded in the end, a chain of different decisions on both sides. People would have died. Of course they would. Ben knew the Nazis. If they could not conquer a slice of England, they would have struck at it another way - with terror, probably, with bombs on London and the other cities, a blitzkrieg against civilians. People would have died. But not the same people. Not Hilda Tanner, for instance.

And, perhaps, not Gary Wooler. Gary who had kept his promise to save Ben, Gary who would not have had to grieve over a young wife butchered by a Nazi thug. And he, Ben, would not have had to lie in this absurd glass box and listen to Gary being shot dead, his life unlived. Gary whom Ben had always loved above anybody else. All he had to do was fall asleep, and dream of an eccentric astrologer at Hitler’s court. If he did that Gary might be spared all that pain.

He could do this, Ben Kamen, the helpless boy in the box, who had been used and abused by all of them. Even now he could save them all, and himself. Perhaps he could create a tapestry of time with a little less blood on it, a little less Weltschmertz, a world with a little less sorrow. Even though he would have to die, once again, to do it.

‘You know, Mary, if we could find a way to control this technology - I mean, to compute and moderate the effects on history correctly - perhaps we can exploit it to make limited, controlled changes. I’m still drawn by my scenario of the 1938 war. If we were to implement that, all of this suffering could be avoided—’

‘No. Listen to yourself, Tom! We must stop this now. Demolish this monstrous thing, this Loom. Why, it’s what Geoffrey Cotesford begged us to do in his memoir. I mean, even if you could be sure your change was pure, your motives just - what happens when somebody else gets hold of this technology? Stalin, another Hitler? What then?’

‘Um. I suppose you’re right. We’ll let the sappers take it apart, and the man from IBM can have the Colossus.’

‘Are you serious? Do you promise me?

‘Of course. Just as soon as the medicos get Ben Kamen out of this glass box.’

‘Speaking of whom—’

‘Yes, George?’

‘Is Ben smiling?’

The boy slept beside the calculating engine.

And then—

Possible alternate outcomes of Dunkirk have been analysed by, for example, Andrew Roberts in his essay in
Virtual History,
ed. Niall Ferguson (Picador, 1997). Panzer General Heinz Guderian (in his book
Panzer Leader,
1952) said he believed the order to hold back at Dunkirk was a mistake, and that ‘only a capture of the BEF ... could have created the conditions necessary for a successful German invasion of Britain’.

Hitler’s planning for ‘Operation Sea Lion’, the invasion of Britain, was recorded in German archives and has been well documented, not least by Churchill himself in
Their Finest Hour,
the second volume of his monumental six-volume history of the war (Cassell, 1949), and by Peter Fleming in
Invasion
1940 (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957). More recently Derek Robinson’s
Invasion,
1940 (Constable, 2005) focuses on the importance of naval power in the defence of Britain.

The first speculative accounts of a successful Nazi invasion of Britain appeared during the Second World War, for example the novel
When the Bells Rang
by Anthony Armstrong and Bruce Graeme (Harrap 1943). Norman Longmate’s
IfBritain
Had
Fallen
(Hutchinson 1972) is a careful account of a successful invasion. Richard Cox’s
Operation Sea Lion
(Thornton Cox, 1974), based on a war game played out by veterans from both sides, post-predicted a German failure. More recent studies include Martin Marix Evans’
Invasion!
Operation
Sea
Lion 1940 (Pearson, 2004).

Sir Samuel Hoare, ambassador to Spain in 1940, had been a favoured candidate of Hitler’s to take over as Prime Minister had Britain fallen (see
Hitler’s Table Talk
, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (1953)). Himmler’s SS did establish
lebensborn
Aryan breeding camps in the occupied territories, notably in Norway. A recent reference on Nazi science and pseudo-science is
The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust by
Heather Pringle (Fourth Estate, 2006).

A useful reference on conditions in wartime Britain is
Wartime Britain 1939-1945
by Juliet Gardiner (Headline, 2004). A recent reference on the German occupation of France (my model for some of the portrayal of ‘Albion’ here) is Richard Vinen’s
The Unfree French
(Allen Lane, 2006). My sources on prisoner-of-war camps included P.R. Reid’s Colditz books, particularly
The Latter Days at Colditz
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1953). The Germans had a habit of referring to their British enemies as ‘the English’, and I have reflected that here.

Kurt Gödel’s speculations on the nature of time in rotating universes were published as ‘An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solutions of Einstein’s Field Equations of Gravitation’ in
Reviews of Modern Physics
vol. 21, pp447-50 (1949), and the philosophical implications explored in ‘A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy’, in
Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist,
ed. P.A. Schilpp (La Salle, Illinois, 1949). In a recent review of Gödel’s work and his relationship with Einstein,
Palle Yourgrau argues passionately that the implications of Gödel’s insights have yet to be fully assimilated by the scientific and philosophical establishment
(see A World Without Time,
Basic Books, 2005).

J. W. Dunne’s notions of ‘dream travelling’ in time were taken seriously in the interwar years (see his An
Experiment With Time
(1927), recently republished by Hampton Roads Publishing, Charlottesville, VA). J.B. Priestley dedicated plays including
Time and the Conways
(1937) to Dunne. H.G. Wells was interested in Dunne’s ideas and corresponded with him, but was critical of some of Dunne’s notions.

British researchers really did build Differential Analysers with the toy kit Meccano, beginning in Manchester in 1934 and continuing until the 1950s. Their most significant use during the war was probably in developing Barnes Wallis’s ‘bouncing bombs’ for the Dambusters raid (see
www.dalefield.com/nzfmm/magazine/differential_analyser.html
). The machines have been studied by ‘Meccano men’ ever since.

I’m very grateful to Adam Roberts for his expert assistance with the Old English of the ‘Testament of Eadgyth’, and his invaluable support throughout this series.

Any errors or inaccuracies are my sole responsibility.

Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
May 2007