MASQUES OF SATAN (45 page)

Presently Dr Loring clapped his hands and ushered the group into a room which looked like a small cinema. To the Vice-Chancellor — who had been in his reckless youth a film critic for a highbrow journal — it brought to mind those little viewing theatres in Soho where one was taken to see the latest releases before they hit the big screens. The four academics settled themselves into the luxurious cinema
fauteuils
while Dr Loring mounted a small platform in front of a curtained screen. Everyone was now silent. The Vice-Chancellor wondered if their silence was not tinged with fear. Science, of all the academic disciplines, was in many ways the biggest beast: certainly the one which had the most visible effect on the outside world, for good or ill.

‘As you may know,’ said Dr Loring, ‘my department’s chief area of research over the last four years has been something called Crystal Oscillation. Briefly, in laymen’s terms——’ There was some unease in the ranks. The four academics, especially the Reverend Dr Semple, were not used to being looked on as ‘laymen.’ ‘We have found ways of oscillating silicone crystals in a vacuum up to speeds well in excess of the speed of light. The original purpose of these experiments was merely to observe how certain particles behaved at very high speeds, and whether the “breaking of the light barrier”, if I may put it that way, radically altered their properties. One of the things we discovered, much to our surprise, was that, at speeds beyond that of light, particles were refracting tiny sparks of coloured luminescence  from seemingly nowhere. It took us a long time to realise that what effectively was being thrown out at these high speeds was light that had been previously absorbed. In other words, light from the
past
.’

There was a small murmur of intelligent anticipation among his audience.

‘I won’t bore you with the details, but it was our idea that if, somehow, we could refine this process, we would be able to capture not simply these tiny disjointed scintillas of former light, but coherent images. In other words, we could see into the past. There then followed a long period of trial and error, and it was only by an accident that we discovered that the key to the process was an organic component. If the silicone particles were synthesised with decayed organic material and then allowed to form tiny crystals, then placed in what we called the Chronoscope and oscillated at high, but carefully regulated, speeds beyond the light barrier, then images from the past could be achieved. Of course, at first, these images were very crude and hardly recognisable as——’

‘Excuse me,’ said Professor Quoist, putting up her hand as if she were a pupil in class. ‘You mentioned “organic material”, more specifically “decayed organic material”. What kind of organic material would that be?’ Dr Loring’s supremely confident manner was marginally disturbed by the question.

‘It was animal tissue from certain parts of the body. After many trials we found that human animal tissue worked best. Brain synapses, parts of the eye. As we have progressed we have found that we can generate most of the necessary material from tissue cultures in the laboratory and genetic modification.’

‘Are you saying that you used cadavers?’ asked Professor Quoist.

‘Corpses, you mean? Yes, we have done in the past,’ said Dr Loring briskly, as if dismissing a matter of minor significance. The Vice-Chancellor understood the implications. The philosopher was making her bid for superiority over the scientist. The scientist, she was saying, was merely someone blindly engaged in the pursuit of knowledge; Professor Quoist the philosopher was there to point out the moral implications of that quest and to control it if necessary.

‘I can assure the Professor that no graves were robbed in the course of our research!’ Dr Loring added light-heartedly. A tiny ripple of laughter indicated that a point had been scored.

‘Well, the next thing that had to be decided was how to use the Chronoscope effectively, and, for that matter, economically because, as you can imagine, it takes a vast amount of energy to oscillate even a small number of crystals at such high speeds. I can now reveal that the blackouts of 2063 in Oxford and surrounding areas were caused by the very high demands made on the grid by our Chronoscope. My apologies, but you can understand that, had we revealed at the time what you now know, it would have put all our work in jeopardy. So we had a problem with the energy supply, added to which the Chronoscope itself is a vast, unwieldy mechanism. The obvious answer was space. If we could succeed in getting a Chronoscope into orbit round the earth, then we could train it on any part of the earth whose past we wanted to research. In addition, we could have as much power as we liked to drive the Chronoscope from the sun by means of solar panels and condensers. Well, to cut a long story short, at the end of last year we managed to get our Chronoscope launched into the upper atmosphere courtesy of the Trans-European Space Project, and since February it’s been sending back pictures.’

‘Of the past?’ said Dr Semple in a very shaky voice.

‘Of the past. It is only very recently that we have been able to achieve precision as to dates and location, but we can now be fairly sure of being able to see what is happening at a particular time and place in the past. Of course, these things take considerable time and effort to set up, so I have prepared two examples to show you tonight, but, I assure you, you will be watching “in real time”, as it were. Neither of these two examples has been pre-recorded.’

‘How do we know this isn’t all a gigantic hoax?’ said Jack Angleton. ‘It’s quite easily done, you know. My television experience has taught me a lot about computer generated images and so on. I bet I could——’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Loring. ‘But what would be the point? I can provide you with enough scientific data to prove it, but that would take an age. The chief reason why you should believe me is that I have nothing to gain from fooling you except the childish gratification of a hoaxer. I think the Vice-Chancellor here can vouch that I am not the sort of person who is  interested in playing futile tricks on distinguished academic minds.’ The Vice-Chancellor nodded, wondering at the same time whether his nephew’s last remark contained a veiled reference to
Shakespeare, the Urban Terrorist
.

‘As a tribute to the Vice-Chancellor,’ went on Dr Loring, ‘my first example is from the period of Ancient History in which he has specialised. All of you, I am sure, will at the very least have heard of his groundbreaking work,
Priestcraft and Society in Bronze Age Crete
.’

‘A poor thing, but Minoan,’ murmured the Vice-Chancellor. It got a good laugh; it nearly always did.

‘I am hoping to bring you some images of the city of Knossos in Crete from the summer of 1387 BC, shortly before its destruction by fire which, I can now reveal, the Vice-Chancellor, on the basis of Egyptian chronology and some recently discovered Hittite cuneiform tablets, correctly surmised to be the year  1386 BC.’ There was a little patter of applause at this, but the Vice-Chancellor was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable, though he could not quite articulate the reason for his unease.

The curtains drew apart to reveal a screen on which an infinite number of points of coloured light scintillated. Dr Loring muttered something through a microphone to some figures who inhabited a glass box above and behind the seated academics. It looked like a cinema projection box except that there was no projector. The Vice-Chancellor supposed that the images would be beamed directly on to the screen in front of them.

Slowly the points of light, like the dots on a pointillist painting, began to form themselves into the image of a deep blue disc on a black background, at first a vague adumbration, but becoming progressively sharper. Was this the Earth?

A line of poetry came into the Vice-Chancellor’s mind unbidden, as it often did in what he chose to call his ‘dotage’: ‘You small blue circle swinging in far ether.’ Where was it from? Byron’s ‘Cain’, that was it. He was not such an old dotard as he thought he was. Yet how did Byron know a century-and-a-half before man ventured into the ether, that that was how earth would look from space? Human science was always limping to keep up with the human imagination. But wait a minute, should the Chronoscope be that far out of earth’s orbit? There came a great pulse of light and the Vice-Chancellor, his eyes fixed on the screen, had the almost physical sensation of falling at high speed towards the globe. Green continents and seas of piercing blue began to engulf his vision. For a brief moment he saw the rag of Hellas fluttering its golden ribbons of land over the dark Ægean, then he was hanging about a hundred feet or so above a recognisable landscape.

On a plateau of land within sight of the sea a cluster of monumental buildings was gathered: gaudy, complex, the stout pillars of its colonnades and terraces painted the colour of red earth. In the centre of it all a wide flight of steps led up to a great courtyard with a smooth pavement of dressed stone. He recognised it at once. In its ruined twenty-first century incarnation he had seen it many times. It was the great ‘Bull Court’ at the palace of Knossos in Crete.

Around the wide paved space, lit by a high sun in a cloudless atmosphere, many people were gathered, some in the cool shadow of the red colonnades that flanked it, some on balconies and terraces above. At one end, in front of the main palace buildings, a wooden platform had been raised, canopied with cloth dyed purple from the murex shell. On it sat a group of palace hierarchs, male and female. The central seated figure, to judge from his heavy and powerful build, was a man, but his head was entirely covered by an uncannily lifelike black bull’s-head mask.

All the spectators were festively dressed. The men wore short tunics, extravagantly fringed and tasselled; the women wore long, brightly coloured flounced dresses which reached almost to the ground: above their tight, embroidered bodices their breasts were bare.

In the centre of the court stood a group of a dozen young men, aged, at a guess, between sixteen and twenty-one. Their black hair was oiled and worn in long ringlets, and they were naked save for a loincloth and a short, fringed kilt around their nipped-in waists. Facing them on the pavement was a great black bull, larger than any the Vice-Chancellor had seen in his century. Its immensely long, curled horns reminded him of pictures he had seen of aurochs, wild cattle which had become extinct, if his memory served him right, in the seventeenth century.

The tranquil, almost static scene, suddenly burst into animated life. The bull had begun to trot towards the knot of youths, who immediately fanned out into a perfectly formed semicircle. A moment later the dance had begun. From all sides the youths were vaulting over the bull in a disciplined preordained sequence. Last of all, the tallest of them, who had remained facing the head of the bull, took a short run and leapt at the animal, grasping as he did so the two great horns. For an astonishing moment he was suspended in the air above the bull’s head, legs pointing up to the sky, head looking down on the bull, at right angles to its glistening black back, maintained only by his grip on the two horns. Then he vaulted off them with a double somersault, to be caught by one of his companions stationed directly behind the great bucking monster.

The vision was silent, of course, but the movements of the crowd suggested a great shout of exultation at this moment. The Vice-Chancellor watched in a trance, so absorbed by the scene that he was now barely conscious of the miracle of it all. He was seeing things which he had envisioned a hundred times in a hundred different ways. Far from disappointing him, it had exceeded all conceivable expectations. And yet something was worrying him, he could not tell what.

Then the scene began to blur and flicker and waver, but just before it became indecipherable the Vice-Chancellor saw two white-winged objects a little like huge birds flash across the sky and turn away from the palace of Knossos towards the sea. The next moment the screen’s images were shattered into a million sparkling fragments once again.

‘Apologies for that,’ said Dr Loring, ‘but we’re still experiencing difficulty in maintaining an image for more than about ten minutes. It’s a minor technical obstacle which I’m sure we’ll overcome very shortly.

Professor Quoist, who had been sitting next to the Vice-Chancellor, turned to him and said: ‘You realise what you have just seen, don’t you, V-C?’ The Vice-Chancellor smiled wearily.

‘I think I know what you’re going to say, Simone,’ he said, ‘but tell us all the same.’

‘You have just seen the End of History.’

‘Explain,’ said Jack Angleton.

‘I would have thought even an academic media hack like you would have realised the implications,’ said Quoist. ‘This contraption will eventually — when Dr Loring’s little technical obstacles are overcome — reveal everything that ever happened in history. The result is that history will cease, because everything will be known. There can be no longer any speculation about causes, connections, consequences which are at the heart of what makes history a worthwhile discipline. All the causes will be known. Just one dam’ thing after another; that’s all you’ll be able to see. Everyone will have the power to access whatever they want, so they won’t want it any more: it’ll be like the early twenty-first  century Internet boom and bust, only worse. Wisdom will be lost in knowledge; knowledge will be lost in information. The intelligent people will desert history in droves; leaving behind only nerds and voyeurs. And don’t think you’re going to escape the consequences, Mr Celebrity Don Angleton. It’ll be just as bad for literary scholarship. If you know just when and where and how Shakespeare wrote the Sonnets — dammit, even what sort of a pen he used — if you can actually watch him rehearsing
Hamlet
at the Globe, who’s going to listen to Jack Angleton’s cock-eyed theories on the subject?’