‘Why should they be noticing it?’ said the Vice-Chancellor ‘The ship “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”.’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Quoist. ‘Am I missing something here?
‘Yes. Read your Auden, baby,’ said Angleton complacently.
‘Professor Quoist to you, buster! And read our William Carlos Williams.’
‘More importantly,’ said Dr Loring, ‘the thing is quite out of the question from an aerodynamic point of view. A human being simply cannot fly by attaching a lot of feathers to his arms with wax of all things. It is a scientific impossibility.’
‘With science it is impossible,’ said the Vice-Chancellor, ‘but with the human imagination all things are possible.’
‘What are you getting at, Uncle Allan?’ said Dr Loring, whose manner suddenly reminded the Vice-Chancellor of a time twenty or so years ago when his favourite nephew was a boy and came to ask him questions.
‘I mean that whatever we see in past, present, or future is conditioned by our human nature. That does not make it false or true. It means it contains truth and falsity, and we have to use our judgement to separate the two. You had to use organic material in your Chronoscope, because all you would have got otherwise would have been meaningless shards of light. Something was needed to shape those fragments of former luminescence, to bind them together into patterned images, into hills and seas and bodies. There is no such thing as a perception without a perceiver.’
Dr Loring frowned and said: ‘Does that mean that everything we see through the Chronoscope is purely subjective?’
‘Neither purely subjective nor purely objective, but a very human mixture of the two,’ said the Vice-Chancellor. ‘History is not the extraction of truth from legend, it is the extraction of a truer legend from an older truth. I rather think that applies to all academic disciplines, from theology to the physical sciences. This is not the End of History after all, just the beginning of a rather interesting phase.’
Sources
‘The Children of Monte Rosa’ was first published in Dark Horizons (No. 51, Summer 2007).
‘Mr Poo-Poo’ was first published in At Ease with the Dead (Ash-Tree Press, 2007).
‘The Silver Cord’ was the winner of The Arthur Machen Short Story Competition and was first published in Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, No. 12 (Summer 2005).
‘Mmm-Delicious’ was first published in ‘Zencore’ (Nemonymous 7, June 2007).
‘Blind Man’s Box’ was first published as a limited edition chapbook in the Haunted History series, Swan River Press, June 2007.
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MASQUES OF SATAN Page 33