54
I hadn’t been in prison since an unfortunate evening in late 1938 when I got into a brawl in a bar in Marseilles. I badly misinterpreted the friendliness of some strangers, one thing led to another, and I spent the night in jail. We all became good friends eventually.
The police being the British police of course were terribly good at arresting me, but hadn’t got a clue about what they should do after that. Questioning, they said. By whom? What about? Three of them stood in the corner, muttering to each other and occasionally glancing in my direction, while I smiled sweetly and fondled the old shopping bag I had brought as a prop. Bolt upright, knees together, I was the embodiment of innocence, which was fair enough; I hadn’t a clue why I was there, but I was sure I hadn’t done it.
Eventually one of the officers came over. ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Meerson...’
‘Miss, Miss,’ I said. ‘Once spoken for, never collected, that’s me. Just an old spinster, you know.’
‘Very far from that, I’m sure, miss. I’m afraid we must ask you to stay here for a few hours, until Mr Wind returns to question you.’
‘How exciting. Will you lock me in a cell? It’ll give me something to tell the girls at our next luncheon.’
Lovely. A nice quiet cell and a few hours of undisturbed rest. I persuaded them to bring me some water, popped another half tab and settled down to do a bit of serious work.
I should explain how this operates. What you do is unpack all the raw material and turn it over to the stimulated part of the brain. The result is presented a little like the memory of a dream; that is, through symbolism and association. The knack is to unwrap the significance of the images afterwards in order to retrieve the detailed calculations underlying them. In that sense it is a bit like the Tsou script, but vastly more subtle.
I assembled my information, inserted my problems — the arrival of Chang, an entire transcript of his conversation, Rosie, the difficulties of shutting down the machinery, Lucien Grange, Emily — and lay back.
What I had at the end was the most complex piece of work I had ever achieved. A railway line with points, and a train waiting. I, Rosie and Henry were passengers. Henry was shouting something about Shakespeare, but Wind was hitting him, rather like a Punch and Judy show. On the ground, an old man was reading a book given to him by a young girl dressed like a peasant. He pulled a lever and the train began to move. As it went over the points, the girl laughed, ran to the train and jumped on. Rosie tried to get off, but couldn’t open the carriage door. The old man was left behind as the train vanished down the tracks.
So what did this mean? Henry shouting about Shakespeare was the easiest. Once, in the South of France, he gave me an impassioned discourse defending Shakespeare’s plots, saying that outrageous coincidence was more natural than carefully formed, reasoned action.
Rosie was also simple; she couldn’t come back. I had set the machine to prevent anyone from Anterwold wandering into this world. Rosie had come back and the machine would now think the copy was indigenous to Anterwold. Changing that would mean rebuilding the entire machine and there wasn’t going to be time. If she stepped through, then she would simply vanish, from this world and from Anterwold.
Next came the image of the train. The old man looked triumphant as he changed the points and the train went forward again, down a different track. The girl jumped onto the train. She looked a bit like Rosie in my mind, but was not.
That took the real work to understand, but the result was devastating. All causes are balanced by consequences, and each is merely a different form of the other. They are interchangeable, like energy and matter. What I had done by creating Anterwold was not just the cause of history changing; it was the consequence of it as well.
There is no difference between cause and effect. That is an illusion created by belief in time. If I drop a cup, the cup breaks. The dropping is the cause, the breaking is the effect, because one happens after the other. Remove the notion of time and that no longer works. Each is the required condition for the other to take place. As the cup breaks, I am required to drop it. It is like the pair of scales again, where conditions in one pan determine the state of the other one.
Ordinarily, it is relatively simple to calculate such things as there is only one line of existence. However, my experiment had created another one and they were interacting. I could not close Anterwold because Rosie was in it. If she had come back then I might have kept control. But she split in two, because she was wearing rings on her toes.
The same applied to the Devil’s Handwriting. It existed because of actions taken in my future. But those actions equally depended on its existence.
That was it. In my vision, nothing was done by any of the actors on the train. They just watched out of the window. The central actions came from outside, from the man pulling the lever.
It was obviously Oldmanter; I had never met him nor seen a photograph but my unconscious always had a weakness for poor puns. The girl telling him what to do could only be one person. That’s why I was worried. I wasn’t battling Hanslip, or even Oldmanter; I could outthink them easily. I wasn’t certain I could outthink my daughter. I’d seen her file. She was possibly smarter than I was.
From that point it was fairly simple to sketch out a potential chain of events. Chang told me Hanslip knew of the Devil’s Handwriting. Hanslip would assume there was a reason this document was hidden where only a historian would be able to find it. So he sends More to contact Emily. Of course he does.
More goes south. Oldmanter would certainly track that; it was clear from Grange he wanted my project. Emily would be attracted to More — I found him rather handsome and we would have a similar outlook on the subject. Besides, she would be intrigued by the connection to me.
But how does the data get to Oldmanter, and why would he not conduct rigorous checks to ensure it was safe? Here conjecture had to come in, but the only variable I had left was Emily.
I could not see her agreeing to help find the data unless she knew what it was; she would discover it was not only valuable but also dangerous. Of course she would; she would not assist merely so some institute could make money. To get her help, someone like More would have to tell her that finding it was important for the safety of the planet. She would understand immediately that it offered the chance of accomplishing in an instant what she was otherwise prepared to wait for over centuries. As a renegade, she believed the world of science would bring about its own ruin; this would be a spectacular demonstration of that.
Rather than making sure it was never used, she would do her best to ensure it was. But at the cost of her own life, and of those who thought like her? Not if she was like me. How could she possibly accomplish that, though? That I couldn’t figure out. I didn’t have enough information. What was Oldmanter going to do to change the points on the railway line? What form would his intervention take?
I was getting close now, I could feel it, but I would have to test the conclusions thoroughly. What I had was only marginally more likely than many alternatives; it was not solid enough to rely on.
Then that stupid man Wind arrived and interrupted me yet again. Worse still, I was heavily under the influence, so I didn’t make a very good impression.
‘I need some answers,’ he said as he came into Angela’s cell and sat down. ‘Are you all right?’
Angela was sitting on the bench that doubled as a bed. Her eyes were wide and her pupils dilated, and she twitched almost uncontrollably as he spoke to her. She seemed to him as though she was having a panic attack. Guilt? Or just plain fear? he wondered.