Stephen Baxter
Weaver
Time's Tapestry
AD 1492
'As mapped by myself; in which the long warp threads are the history of the whole world; and the wefts which run from selvedge to selvedge are distortions of that history, deflected by a Weaver unknown; be he human, divine or satanic…'
The Prophecy of Nectovelin
4BC
(Free translation from Latin, with acrostic preserved.)
Ah child! Bound in time's tapestry, and yet you are born free
Come, let me sing to you of what there is and what will be,
Of all men and all gods, and of the mighty emperors three.
Named with a German name, a man will come with eyes of glass
Straddling horses large as houses bearing teeth like scimitars.
The trembling skies declare that Rome's great son has come to earth
A little Greek his name will be. Whilst God-as-babe has birth
Roman force will ram the island's neck into a noose of stone.
Emerging first in Brigantia, exalted later then in Rome!
Prostrate before a slavish god, at last he is revealed divine,
Embrace imperial will make dead marble of the Church's shrine.
Remember this: We hold these truths self-evident to be -
I say to you that all men are created equal, free
Rights inalienable assured by the Maker's attribute
Endowed with Life and Liberty and Happiness' pursuit.
O child! thou tapestried in time, strike home! Strike at the root!
The Menologium of the Blessed Isolde
AD 418
(Free translation from Old English, with acrostic preserved.)
Prologue
These the Great Years
Whose awe and beauty
Light step by step
An Aryan realm
I
The Comet comes
Each man of gold
In life a great king
Nine-hundred and fifty-one
II
The Comet comes
Number months thirty-five
See the Bear laid low
Nine-hundred and eighteen
III
The Comet comes
The blood of the holy one
Empire dreams pour
Nine-hundred and thirty-one
IV
The Comet comes
In homage a king bows
Not an island, an island
Nine-hundred and seven
of the Comet of God
in the roof of the world
the road to empire
the glory of Christ
in the month of June.
spurns loyalty of silver.
in death a small man.
the months of the first Year.
in the month of September.
of this Year of war.
by the Wolf of the north.
the months of the second Year.
in the month of March.
thins and dries.
into golden heads.
the months of the third Year.
In the month of October.
at hermit's feet.
not a shield but a shield.
the months of the fourth Year.
V
The Comet comes
Great Year's midsummer
Old claw of dragon
Nine-hundred and twenty-one
VI
The Comet comes
Deny five hundred months five
Even the dragon must lie
Nine-hundred and five
VII
The Comet comes
Less thirty-six months
Know a Great Year dies
Nine-hundred and twenty-six
VIII
The Comet comes
A half-hundred months more.
Match fastness of rock
Nine-hundred and eighteen
IX
The Comet comes
End brother's life at brother's hand.
Noble elf-wise crown.
The north comes from south
Epilogue
Across ocean to east
Men of new Rome sail
Empire of Aryans
New world of the strong
in the month of May.
less nine of seven.
pierces silence, steals words.
the months of the fifth Year.
in the month of February.
Blood spilled, blood mixed.
at the foot of the Cross.
the months of the sixth Year.
in the month of July.
the dragon flies west.
Know a new world born.
the months of the seventh Year.
in the month of September.
At the hub of the world
against tides of fire.
the months of the eighth Year.
in the month of March.
A fighting man takes
Brother embraces brother.
to spill blood on the wall.
and ocean to west
from the womb of the boar.
blood pure from the north.
a ten-thousand year rule.
The Testament of Eadgyth of York
(Free translation from Old English.)
(Lines revealed in AD 1070)
In the last days
To the tail of the peacock
He will come:
The spider's spawn, the Christ-bearer
The Dove.
And the Dove will fly east,
Wings strong, heart stout, mind clear.
God's Engines will burn our ocean
And flame across the lands of spices.
All this I have witnessed
I and my mothers.
Send the Dove west! O, send him west!
(Lines revealed in AD 1481)
The Dragon stirs from his eastern throne,
Walks west.
The Feathered Serpent, plague-hardened,
Flies over ocean sea,
Flies east.
Serpent and Dragon, the mortal duel
And Serpent feasts on holy flesh.
All this I have witnessed
I and my mothers.
Send the Dove west! 0, send him west!
PROLOGUE
I
The boy slept beside the calculating engine.
Rory walked into the room. The sleeper, Ben Kamen, lay slumped over his desk, bulky volumes of physics journals opened around him, pages of foolscap covered with his spidery Germanic handwriting.
Crammed full of the components of the Analyser, the room smelled sharply of electricity, an ozone tang that reminded Rory of the wind off the Irish Sea. But this was Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was in MIT, an oasis of immense concrete buildings. He was a long way indeed from Ireland. Nobody knew he was here, what he was doing. His heart hammered, but his senses were clear, and he seemed to see every detail of the cluttered, brightly lit room.
He turned away from Ben to the bank of electromechanical equipment that dominated the room. The Differential Analyser was an engine for thinking. There were tables like draughtsmen's workbenches, and banks of gears and wheels, rods and levers. This clattering machine modelled the world in the spinning of these wheels, the engaging of those gears. Earlier in the day Rory had fed it the data it needed, carefully tracing curves on the input tables, and manually calculating and calibrating the gear ratios. He ripped off a print of its results. The Godel solutions were ready.
And Ben Kamen was ready too. Sleeping, Ben looked very young, younger than his twenty-five years. There was nothing about him to suggest his origin, as an Austrian Jew. One hand still held his fountain pen; the other was folded under his left cheek. His features were small, his skin pale.
Rory looked over what was assembled here: the brooding machine, the boy. This was the Loom, as he and Ben had come to call it, a machine of electromechanics and human flesh which – so they believed, so their theories indicated – could be used to change the warp and weft of the tapestry of time itself. And yet none of it was his, Rory's. Not the Vannevar Bush Analyser which was being loaned to the two of them by MIT; they were students of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, and they had come here to Cambridge ostensibly to run complex relativistic models with the Analyser. Not the dreaming boy himself – and still less the contents of his head. All that Rory O'Malley owned was the will, to bring these components together, to make it so.