by George Mann
But there is something more than just the absence of glass. Is she losing her mind, or do the window apertures look narrower than they used to do, as if the walls have begun to squeeze the window spaces tight like sleepy eyes?
She must call Katib.
She hurries back the way she has come, forgetting all about the coffee she has just paid for. But when she turns the bend in the corridor, the machine is standing there dark and dead, as if it’s been unplugged.
She returns to the basement. Under her feet the stairs feel rougher and more crudely formed than she remembers, until she reaches the last few treads and they start to feel normal again. She pauses at the bottom, waiting for her mind to straighten itself out.
Down here at least all is as it should be. Her office is as she left it, with the lights still on, the laptops still aglow, the gearwheel still mounted on its stand, the disemboweled Mechanism still sitting on the other side of the desk.
She eases into her seat, her heart still racing, and picks up the telephone.
“Katib?”
“Yes, my fairest,” he says, his voice sounding more distant and crackly than she feels it should, as if he is speaking from halfway around the world. “What can I do for you?”
“Katib, I was just upstairs, and...”
But then she trails off. What is she going to tell him? That she saw open gaps where there should be windows?
“Rana?”
Her nerve deserts her. “I was just going to say... the coffee machine was broken. Maybe someone could take a look at it.”
“Not until tomorrow, I am afraid—there is no one qualified. But I will make an entry in the log.”
“Thank you, Katib.”
After a pause he asks, “There was nothing else, was there?”
“No,” she says. “There was nothing else. Thank you, Katib.”
She knows what he must be thinking. She’s been working too hard, too fixated on the task. The Mechanism does that to people, it’s been said. They get lost in its labyrinthine possibilities and never emerge again. Not the way they were, anyway.
But she thinks she can still hear that crow.
“How CAN I be so sure about what?” Safa asks, with an obliging smile.
“That this is going to work the way you say it will,” the intense young man answers.
“The mathematics is pretty clear,” Safa says. “I should know; I discovered most of it.” Which comes less modestly than she had intended, although no one seems to mind. “What I mean is, there isn’t any room for ambiguity. We know that the sheath of alternate timelines is near-infinite in extent, and we know we’re only pumping the smallest conceivable amount of entropy into each of those timelines.” Safa holds the smile, hoping that will be enough for the young man, and that she can continue with her presentation.
But the man isn’t satisfied. “That’s all very well, but aren’t you presupposing that all those other timelines have order to spare? What if that isn’t the case? What if all the other Mechanisms are just as corroded and broken as ours—what will happen then?”
“It’ll still work,” Safa says, “provided the total information content across all the timelines is sufficient to specify one intact copy, which is overwhelmingly likely from a statistical standpoint.
Of course, if all the Mechanisms happen to be damaged in exactly the same fashion as ours, then the Fixation won’t work—you still can’t get something for nothing. But that’s not very likely. Trust me; I’m very confident that we can find enough information out there to reconstruct our copy.”
The man seems to be content with that answer, but just when Safa is about to open her mouth and continue with her speech, her adversary raises his hand again.
“Sorry, but... I can’t help wondering. Does the entropy exchange happen uniformly across all those timelines?”
It’s an odd, technical-sounding question, suggesting that the man has done more homework than most. “Actually, no,” Safa says, guardedly. “The way the math works out, the entropy exchange is ever so slightly clumped. If a particular copy of the Mechanism has more information to give us, we end up pumping a bit more entropy into that copy than one which has less information to offer. But we’re still talking about small differences, nothing that anyone will actually notice.”
The man pushes a hand through his fringe. “But what if there’s only one?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, what if there’s only one intact copy out there, and all the rest are at least as damaged as our own?”
“That can’t happen,” Safa says, hoping that someone, anyone, will interrupt by asking another question. It’s not that she feels on unsafe ground, just that she has the sense that this could go on all night.
“Why not?” the man persists.
“It just can’t. The mathematics says it’s so unlikely that we may as well forget about it.”
“And you believe the mathematics.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Safa is beginning to lose her patience, feeling cornered and put upon. Where is the museum director to defend her when she needs him? “Of course I believe it. It’d be pretty strange if I didn’t.”
“I was just asking,” the man says, sounding as if he’s the one who’s under attack. “Maybe it isn’t very likely—I’ll have to take your word for that. But I only wanted to know what would happen.”
“You don’t need to,” Safa says firmly. “It can’t happen—not ever. And now can I please continue?”
HER FINGER STABS down on Katib’s button again. But there is nothing, not even the cool purr of the dialing tone. The phone is mute, and now that she looks at it, the display function is dead. She puts the handset down and tries again, but nothing changes.
That’s when Rana pays proper attention to the gearwheel, the one she has been working on. There are thirty-seven wheels in the Antikythera Mechanism and this is the twenty-first, and although there was still much to be done until it was ready to be replaced in the box, it now looks as if she has hardly begun. The surface corrosion that she has spent weeks rectifying has returned in a matter of minutes, covering the wheel in a furry blue-green bloom as if someone has taken the artifact and dipped it in acid while she was out of the office. But as she looks at it, blinking in dismay, as if it is her eyes that are wrong, rather than the wheel, she notices that three teeth are gone, or worn away so thoroughly that they may as well not be there. Worse, there is a visible scratch—actually more of a crack—that cuts across one side of the wheel, as if it is about to fracture into two pieces.
Mesmerized and unsettled in equal measure, Rana picks up one of her tools—the scraper she was using before she heard the noise—and touches it against part of the blue-green corrosion. The bloom chips off almost instantly, but as it does so it takes a quadrant of the wheel with it, the piece shattering to a heap of pale granules on her desk. She stares in numb disbelief at the ruined gear, with a monstrous chunk bitten out of the side of it, and then the tool itself shatters in her hand.
“This can’t be happening,” Rana says to herself. Then her gaze falls on the other gearwheels, in their plastic boxes, and she sees the same brittle corrosion afflicting them all.
As for the Mechanism itself, the disemboweled box: what she sees isn’t possible. She can just about accept that some bizarre, hitherto-undocumented chemical reaction has attacked the metal in the time it took for her to go upstairs and come down again, but the box itself is wood—it hasn’t changed in hundreds of years, not since the last time the casing was patiently replaced by one of the Mechanism’s many careful owners.
But now the box has turned to something that looks more like rock than wood, something barely recognizable as a made artifact. With trepidation Rana reaches out and touches it. It feels fibrous and insubstantial. Her finger almost seems to ghost through it, as if what she is reaching for is not a real object at all, but a hologram. Peering into the heart of the Mechanism, she sees the gears that are still in place have fused
together into a single corroded mass, like a block of rock that has been engraved with a hazy impression of clockwork.
Then Rana laughs, for the pieces of the puzzle have just fallen into place. This is all a joke, albeit— given the pressures she is already under—one in spectacularly bad taste. But a joke all the same, and not a marker of her descent into insanity. She was called upstairs by a noise—how else were they going to get into her office and swap the Mechanism for this ruined half-cousin? The missing windows, the panicked bird, seem like details too far, random intrusions of dream-logic, but who can guess the mind of a practical joker?
Well, she has a sense of humor. But not now, not tonight. Someone will pay for this. Cutting off her telephone was the last straw. That was nasty, not funny.
She moves to leave her bench again and find whoever must be spying on her, certain that they must be lurking in the shadows outside, maybe in the unlit observation corridor, where they’d have a plain view of her discomfort. But as she places her hand down to push herself up, her fingers slip into the smoky surface of the bench.
They vanish as if she were dipping them into water.
All of a sudden she realizes that it was not the Antikythera Mechanism that was growing insubstantial, but everything around her.
No, that’s not it either. Something is happening to the building, but if the table were turning ghostly, the heavy things on it—the Mechanism, the equipment, the laptops—would have surely sunk through it by now. There’s a simpler explanation, even if the realization cuts through her like a shaft of interstellar cold.
She’s the one fading out, losing traction and substantiality.
Rana rises to her feet eventually, but it’s like pushing herself against smoke. She isn’t so much standing as floating with her feet in vague contact with the ground. The air in her lungs is beginning to feel thin, but at the same time there’s no sense that she is about to choke. She tries to walk, and for a moment her feet paddle uselessly against the floor, until she begins to pick up a deathly momentum in the direction of the door.
The corridor at the base of the stairs was normal when she returned from her visit to the next floor, but now it has become a dark, forbidding passageway, with rough-formed doorways leading into dungeon-like spaces. Her office is the only recognizable place, and even her office is not immune to the changes. The door has vanished, leaving only a sagging gap in the wall. The floor is made of stones, unevenly laid. Halfway to her bench the stones blend together into something like concrete, and then a little further the concrete gains the hard red sheen of the flooring she has come to expect. On the desk, her electric light flickers and fades. The laptops shut down with a whine, their screens darkening. The line of change in the floor creeps closer to the desk, like an advancing tide. From somewhere in the darkness Rana hears the quiet, insistent dripping of water.
She was wrong to assume that the things on the desk were immune to the fading. She began to go first, but now the same process of fade-out is beginning to catch up with her tools, with her notes and the laptops and the fabric of the bench itself. Even the Mechanism is losing its grip on reality, its gears and components beginning to dissolve before her eyes. The wooden box turns ash-gray and crumbles into a pile of dust. A breeze fingers its way into the room and spirits the dust away.
The Mechanism was the last thing to go, Rana realizes: the tide of change had come in from all directions, to this one tiny focus, and for a little while the focus had held firm, resisting the transforming forces.
Now she feels the hastening of her own process of fade-out. She cannot move or communicate. She is at the mercy of the breeze.
It blows her through the cold stone walls, out into the night-time air of a city she barely recognizes. She drifts through the sky, able to witness but not able to participate. In all directions she sees only ruin and desolation. The shells of buildings throw jagged outlines against the moonlit sky. Here and there she almost recognizes the fallen corpse of a familiar landmark, but so much is different that she soon loses her sense of direction. Even the shape of the river, shining back under moonlight, appears to have meandered from the course she remembers. She sees smashed stone and metal bridges that end halfway across to the other bank. Crimson fires burn on the horizon and flicker through the eyeholes of gutted buildings.
Then she notices the black machines, stalking their way through the warrens and canyons between the ruins. Fierce and frightening engines of war, with their turreted guns swiveling into doorways and shadows, the iron treads of their feet crunching down on the rubble of the pulverized city, the rubble that used to be dwellings and possessions, until these juggernauts arrived. She does not need an emblem or flag to know that these are the machines of an occupying force; that her city is under the mechanized heel of an invader. She watches as a figure springs out of concealment to lob some pathetic burning torch at one of the machines. The turret snaps around and a lance of fire stabs back at the assailant. The figure drops to the ground.
The wind is gusting her higher, turning the city into a map of itself. As her point of view changes direction she catches sight of the building that used to be the Museum of Antiquities, but what she sees is no more than a shattered prison or fortress, one among many. And for an instant she remembers that the shell of the museum was very old, that the building—or a succession of buildings, each built on the plan of its predecessor—had stood in the same location for many centuries, serving many rulers.
In that same instant, Rana comes to a momentary understanding of what has happened to both her and her world. The Mechanism has been wrenched from history, and accordingly—because the Mechanism was so essential—history has come undone. There is no Museum of Antiquities, because there is no Greater Persia. The brilliant clockwork that dispatched armies and engineers across the globe simply never existed.
Nor did Rana.
But the moment of understanding passes as quickly as it came. Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes. The worst thing about them is that they never quite recall the living people they used to be, the things they once witnessed.
The wind lofts Rana higher, into thinning silver clouds. But by then she no longer thinks of anything at all, except the endless meshing of beautiful bronze gearwheels, moving the heavens for all eternity.
Artifacts
Stephen Baxter
You SWIM.
Why must you swim? If you swim, where are you coming from, and where are you going to?
Why is there a “you” separated from the “not-you” through which you swim?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Who are you?
You cannot rest. You are alone. You are frightened by the swimming. And you are frightened that the swimming must end. For—what then?
MORAG’S MOTHER LAY dead, behind the flimsy curtain that veiled her hospital bed, only feet away.
This little waiting area wasn’t all that bad. It was carpeted, and had decent chairs and tables piled with newspapers and elderly magazines, Hello and Country Life and Reader’s Digest, and a pot plant that Morag had watered a couple of times. A little window gave her a glimpse of Edinburgh rooftops. She had been awake all night, and now it was a sunny June morning, which felt a bit unreal. There was even a little TV up high on the wall, stuck on a news channel that looped headlines about water riots in Australia. In the year 2014 the news was always dismal, and Morag, fifteen years old, generally did her best to ignore it. No, it wasn’t bad here, not as bad as you might have thought an NHS ward would be.
But it was all so mundane. It seemed impossible that the same reality, the same room, could contain curling copies of glossy celeb mags and the huge event that had taken place on the other side of that curtain, the final ghastly process as the bone marrow cancer overwhelmed her mother.
Her father, who always encouraged her to call him Joe, was helping himself to another cup of coffee. “Fucking th
ing,” he said, as, not for the first time, he had trouble slotting the plastic coffee pot back into its little groove. He glanced at Morag. “Sorry.”
“Like I never heard you swear before.”
“Yes.” He sat beside her.
They were silent a moment, both beyond tears, or between them. She hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. His break-up with her mother had seemed to get worse as time passed, and his visits had become more sporadic and more fraught, at least until these final weeks and days. He was only forty-five. Tall, thin, always gaunt, Morag thought he looked hollowed out.
On impulse she smoothed out his sleeve. “This shirt needs an iron.”
“Yes.” A flicker of a grin. “Actually I need a new shirt. Can’t afford it.”
They hadn’t talked, not to each other, while Mum was still here. “You quit your job, didn’t you?” Joe had been working on computer systems in the City of London—something like that. “Was it so you could be with Mum?”
“Partly.” He sipped his coffee, and grimaced at its strength. “That and the fact of the illness itself. When I understood your mother was dying, the reality of it sunk home, I suppose.”
“The reality of what?”
“Life. Death. The finiteness of it all. When you’re young you think you’re immortal. Forty was a big shock to me, I can tell you. And now this. Hacking predictive algorithms so some City barrow boy could get even richer suddenly seemed an absurd way to spend my life.”
She thought she understood. “It doesn’t make any sense. There’s a copy of the Daily Mirror sitting on that table. While behind that curtain—”
“I know. You go through life never facing up to the big questions. What is life? What is death? Why is there something rather than nothing? Anyhow, I’m going back to what I used to do.”
She frowned. “Back to university?”