Ash: A Secret History (188 page)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 06.15 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

Nothing.

– Pierce

  Message: #221 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 06.36 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

What do you mean, NOTHING?

– Anna

  Message: #391 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 07.59 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I mean the quotidian, I suppose. The everyday, the mundane. Nothing to get worked up about. No, there is nothing in the desert south of here. Isobel’s worn out her welcome with my use of military helicopters, trailing – once flight restrictions were finally lifted – through the airspace between here and the Atlas Mountains.

There may be something buried under residential areas, or under industrial plants; who knows? Certainly there were no archaeological teams on hand when some of these places were built. If there were remains, they’re gone, obliterated. Or, more likely, there was nothing; the manuscript ‘evidence’ is mere symbolism, the metallurgy reports simple human error.

What did you expect me to find you, Anna? A glowing pyramid?

Sorry.

I must confess, I had hoped for SOMETHING. A few ridges in the earth, visible at sunset or dawn. It wouldn’t be much to ask, would it, that a shadow in the ground should ‘come back’? Just to let us know the ‘Wild Machines’ were not what they plainly are: a mediaeval literary conceit. A mere device.

Isobel’s team are keeping the survey material, but naturally, the land area isn’t their priority right now. Underwater remains, ‘Gothic Carthage’, that’s the priority.

Your book-and-film deal is on course, don’t worry.

– Pierce

  Message: #222 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 08.45 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

Damn the ‘book and film deal’. What about you? Are you all right?

I know I’ve done very little, but I’ve talked to the Davies family, in person; I’ve got drawn into this too.

I can’t imagine how you and Dr Isobel are feeling right now, but this isn’t just another book as far as I’m concerned. If there’s anything I can do to help, I will. You know I mean it.

– Anna

  Message: #392 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 08.57 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I know. Thank you.

Yes, I suppose it is difficult to see Tami Inoshishi and James Howlett knee-deep in the image files of this project; talking at machine-gun speed to everybody on the team. I confess that, yes, no one has much time for a mere historian at this point, and yes, my nose is out of joint. I suppose my time will come with the textual evidence.

None of that really matters, I suppose, beside the crashing disappointment. I was so CERTAIN that we were going to find remnants of the ‘Wild Machines’, or at the very least, the site where they existed. The ‘machina rei militaris’, when we get it free for examination – and I imagine that’s going to take months, if not years – will answer some questions. But, like Isobel’s golem, I fear it will be dumb about how and why it moved.

E pur si muove: Nevertheless, it moves. As Galileo said, in rather different circumstances!

Scholarly jests aside, I feel very bitter. I was so sure. You see, once the basic premise is accepted, none of it is unreasonable. My first draft of the ‘Afterword’ says as much, and I am going to let you see it. This was based on ‘Fraxinus’, and the discovery of the ‘clay walker’, before we found the Sible Hedingham document, so it is unrevised:-

AFTERWORD to the 3rd edition: ASH: THE LOST HISTORY OF BURGUNDY

(Excerpt:) (iii) THEOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY: THE IMPLICATIONS OF ‘FRAXINUS ME FECIT’

…the mediaeval mind behind the ‘Fraxinus’ manuscript couches its description of the various Carthaginian machines in quasi-religious, quasi-mythological terms, where, for example, it speaks of the ‘soul’ of Fr Godfrey Maximillian becoming ‘trapped in the Stone Golem’. We, with the benefit of a vocabulary belonging to twentieth-century artificial intelligence, would more properly refer to this in terms of the neural pattern of his personality becoming uploaded into, or imprinted on, the
machina rei militaris
at a moment of great physical and mental trauma. One might speculate that the proximity of Ash at the moment of Godfrey Maximillian’s death, herself a genetic conduit to the
machina rei militaris,
might have some as-yet-undetermined causal link with this unique event.

Similarly, the autonomous ‘Wild Machines’ are described in spiritual and religious terms. However, it is possible to make another translation, different from the dramatised one I have used in the body of the text, translating ‘Fraxinus’ literally, but with a vocabulary not yet available in 1476. This is an amended excerpt from Ash’s ‘download’ at Carthage:

The Wild Machines do not know their own origin, it is lost in their primitive memories. They suspect it was humans, building religious structures ten thousand years ago, who accidentally ‘put rocks in order’ – constructed ordered, [pyramid-]shaped edifices of
silt-bricks and stone
[silicon]. Large enough structures [of silicon] to absorb
spirit-force
[electromagnetic energy] from the sun. From that initial order and structure came
spontaneous mind
[self-aware intelligence]. The first primitive sparks of [electromagnetic] force began to organise [in solid state networks], creating the
ferae natura machinae
[silicon-based ‘machine’ intelligences].

Five thousand years ago, those
primitive minds
[proto-intelligences] became conscious. After that, they could begin to evolve themselves deliberately. The Wild Machines
manipulated the energies of the spirit-world
[drew upon solar electromagnetic energy], to the point where [visible-spectrum] light began to be blocked out in the immediate region around them. As they become more structured, organised and powerful, so their ability to
draw power from the nearest and greatest source in the heavens
[extract and store this form of solar energy] became more efficient: the darkness spread. This [North African coast] became a land of stone and
twilight
[solar-energy ‘shadow’]: vast monuments and pyramids under an eternally starry sky.

[The machine intelligences] knew that humanity and animals existed; they registered their
weak little souls
[neuro-electric fields]. They were unable to establish direct communication until the advent of the Prophet Gundobad. After Gundobad’s death, it was not until Leofric’s family developed the
Stone Golem
[solid-state tactical computer] that the Wild Machines had a reliable channel by which they could communicate with humanity, and not just its
wonder-workers
[human minds capable of consciously collapsing the local quantum state]. They hid behind the voice of the [tactical computer], easing their suggestions [into the data], manipulating Leofric’s ancestors into beginning a breeding programme.

The Visigoth saint, Prophet Gundobad, whose
relics
[surviving DNA material] were used in the
machina rei militaris
and whose bloodline eventually produced the Faris and Ash, was one of those very, very few people (like Our Lord the Green Christ) [first history] who have the power to
perform miracles
[individually alter the basic fabric of reality]. What the
secret breedin
g [genetic engineering] was designed to produce was not someone who could
speak at a distance to the Stone Golem
[perform an at-a-distance neuro-electric or neuro-chemical? download from the tactical computer] – although it was necessary they be able to [communicate through the computer], since that is the only link between the Wild Machines and humanity. What the Wild Machines were trying to breed was another
miracle-worker
[human capable of consciously affecting the quantum foam]. A Gundobad. One that would be under their control, and subject to the
command
[immense electromagnetic pulse] they planned [to emit] to trigger their
evil miracle
[consciously guided alteration of the basic fabric of probable reality].

* * * * * * * *

(Excerpt:) (vi) GENETICS AND THE MIRACULOUS: BREEDING SCHRODINGER’S CAT

(Revised passage, after discovery of the Sible Hedingham ms:)

…In this past history which we have lost, the ability to consciously, deliberately collapse the wave-front could arise spontaneously. In that first history, despite the catastrophic genetic links, it is just possible that a tiny conscious talent could be bred, to be strong enough to be effective – hence the priests’ genuine small miracles; hence the bloodline that House Leofric produced among its slaves and the Faris.

Conversely, the ability to prevent the ‘miraculous’ happening, to prevent the wave-front being collapsed into anything but the most probable quotidian reality, might also conceivably arise as a spontaneous genetic mutation: hence the nature of the Ducal bloodlines in Burgundy.

But, what happened
after
everything changed?…