Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  The most spectacular bomb site of all was the minster itself. In one week in the summer of 1942 the Luftwaffe had launched a series of particularly spiteful raids against the grand old building, evidently meaning to make a symbolic strike against Halifax’s seat of power. When they reached it, Mary and Mackie stepped cautiously through the main entrance on the northern side, with flags of St George, Britain, the United States, Poland and France flying over their heads, and into the shadow of ruin. The central tower had been pretty much demolished, and the rest of the roof was blown in, the stone floors smashed to shrapnel. But the minster was still a working church. A small open-air altar had been set up beneath the Great West Window which had, by luck or a miracle, survived the bombing. But most of the interior, cleared of rubble and swept for unexploded shells, had been dug up to form allotments. Today squads of Land Girls toiled in the shadows of the broken walls.

  Mary and Mackie sat on a fallen pillar in the shade of the ruined north transept, their feet in the long grass, and watched the girls working. They were cheerful enough, their young voices echoing from the stone walls.

  Mary said, ‘Looks as if they are fighting a losing battle against the rosebay willow herb.’

  Mackie shrugged. ‘I’m told it’s more a symbolic effort than anything practical. Morale booster, you know. I mean it’s rather too shady in here to grow anything worthwhile. Of course the archaeologists have been crawling all over this place since Hitler conveniently blew it up for them.’

  ‘Well, they would. There are roots here going back to a Roman military headquarters, the centre of power in the whole of the north of England.’

  ‘And now York finds itself the locus of a world empire. Remarkable how things come around. I wonder what archaeologists of the future will find of our time. A layer of ash, I suppose. Rubble and bones.’

  ‘Geoffrey Cotesford visited the city many times, according to his memoir. In fact his first monastery was just outside the walls.’

  ‘Ah, our friend Brother Geoffrey! I thought he might have done. So to business, Mary.’ He dug out his pipe and began the usual rather theatrical business of filling it, shred by tobacco shred. It occurred to Mary that she hardly ever saw Mackie without the pipe. Perhaps he needed this prop for reassurance; perhaps he was less calm than his urbane British surface would have led her to believe. ‘Tell me first how you are getting on with your counter-history. What was your hinge of fate?’

  ‘Dunkirk,’ she said immediately.

  This was an exercise the two of them had set themselves. In an effort to delve into the minds of history-meddling Nazis, Mackie had proposed that they try to devise their own ‘counter-histories’. If you had a Loom, what tweaks to history would you consider making? It was not so much the results that were of interest, he argued, but the habits of thinking and the types of research, a bit removed from the conventionally historical, that he wished to understand.

  Mackie nodded sagely. ‘Dunkirk. I should have guessed you would wish to spare your son the consequences of living through that horrendous defeat.’

  She said fiercely, ‘Let it be done to someone else’s son, not mine.’

  ‘Fair enough. How could that calamity have been averted?’

  ‘If Hitler had hesitated ...’

  She had had access to remarkably thorough briefings. Mackie’s MI-14 had moles that penetrated all the way, it seemed, to the top of the Nazi Party. And she had learned that in those dark days of May 1940, when the BEF and the remnant French forces were trapped on the beaches, it had been a full day before Guderian had been authorised to unleash his Panzers for the final assault and his resounding victory. The delay was obvious even to the allied soldiers on the beaches; Gary had spoken of it.

  ‘There seems to have been a debate at all levels within the military and the Party,’ she told Mackie. ‘Guderian himself had some concerns about the nature of the ground they would have to cover. The blitzkrieg had advanced so fast he was short of proper intelligence.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mackie said around his pipe. ‘Germans never did like a heavy pitch.’

  ‘Meanwhile Guderian’s superiors were well aware that France was not yet conquered. The BEF was beaten; so let it go, and keep back Guderian’s forces, let them rest and re-equip for the French campaign. And then Hitler was still dreaming of peace with England. He thought that sparing the BEF from slaughter might demonstrate to you Brits that he was a civilised kind of guy after all. But in the end they concluded that the destruction of the BEF was too good an opportunity to miss.’

  ‘So how would you make the change? You remember the rules we set. You’re allowed to go back and whisper in one person’s ear.’ This was, from Geoffrey’s evidence, how the Loom seemed to operate.

  ‘I’d reach back to Hitler’s court in those hours when they were debating whether to unleash Guderian. And I’d mess about with the head of Karl Ernst Krafft.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘An astrologer.’

  ‘I thought Hitler didn’t believe in astrology.’

  ‘Yes, but there are those around him who do, Himmler and Goebbels to name but two. In 1939 this guy Krafft sent a prediction to Himmler’s intelligence service that there would be a bomb attempt against Hitler. Well, the prediction came true.’

  Mackie snorted. ‘Pure coincidence!’

  ‘Of course. But it gave him an in at court. Mess with him, and you can influence at least two Nazi barons.’

  ‘And if the decision about Guderian was so close, that might be enough to swing it. What would you say to him, though?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘Some suitable gobbledygook, couched in Aryanmythos phraseology. Hitler is a Taurus, which is supposedly ruled by the element earth. Hitler is a lion on land but lost in the water - so he should spare Britain, an island nation, and concentrate on the ground he can conquer, which after all stretches all the way to Russia. Something like that.’

  ‘Um. So what next? If the BEF had been reprieved—’

  ‘I think everything would have been different,’ Mary said. She hesitated, then plunged on, ‘I think the German invasion might not have happened at all.’

  Mackie raised his eyebrows.

  A different Dunkirk would have altered the mood on both sides of the Channel, she argued, and so affected the chains of decision-making that led up to the invasion itself. A saved BEF might have boosted British morale. Churchill might have survived politically - and then, emboldened, he might have forced through such belligerent actions as disabling the French fleet, to prevent it being absorbed by the German navy. As for the Germans, facing a tougher, more resolute Britain, and with the balance of power less in their favour on both land and sea, the invasion might have seemed that bit more daunting.

  ‘They were always disunited at the command level,’ she said. ‘Each service seeking to shuffle off responsibilities onto the others. If the invasion had seemed more difficult, the infighting might have got that much worse.’

  Mackie nodded, but looked doubtful. ‘You know, actually I’m not sure how much difference the invasion has made, up to now at any rate, in the bigger picture of the war. Essentially the land war in the west has been stalled since September 1940. It doesn’t matter much whether Hitler’s troops were held up on this side of the Channel or the other. Without an armistice, he couldn’t have withdrawn too many units for the eastern front - I doubt if he could have launched Barbarossa any earlier or more violently. And in the meantime he still had the Luftwaffe. He would have been able to strike at us even without an invasion. Hammer the cities - London especially. And he could attack the Atlantic convoys. In some ways we might have suffered more.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Mary insisted, ‘but with an unoccupied British mainland the allied western front would have been a hell of a lot stronger. You wouldn’t have to go through a W-Day counter-invasion to scrape the Germans back into the sea before you could even contemplate going into France, for instance.’

  ‘Perhaps. And with Britain intact
, the Japanese might not have been bold enough to launch their invasion of Australia, for instance...’ He pulled his lip, clearly not convinced. ‘The trouble is, Mary, all the military logic of the time dictated invasion. In that summer the Germans had the momentum of blitzkrieg, and we were the last pawn to be taken. One way or another they’d have had a go, I think, whether the BEF was spared or not. Nice try, Mary, but invasion was inevitable, whatever happened at Dunkirk! Tell you what, though: if I may, I’ll hand this to my tame boffins back at Birdoswald. See what they make of it. All right?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll give you my notes. So how did you get on? Where would your turning point be?’

  ‘1938,’ he said without hesitation.

  It was hard to think back that far, to remember what was going on in the world before the great shock of the war. ‘That was the year Britain was trying for peace, right?’

  ‘We call it appeasement now,’ Mackie said, his face hard. ‘Bloody great mistake. We should have declared war when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, thereby tearing up all the guarantees he’d given up to that date.’

  ‘But Britain wasn’t ready for war - was it?’

  ‘We were in a damn sight better shape than Hitler. He couldn’t have mounted a blitzkrieg. He didn’t have the tanks or the trucks. Why, he only had three months’ fuel! He’d placed orders for ships, for instance, that could have overwhelmed the Royal Navy a few years later. But he couldn’t wait, had to move fast. His Nazi economic expansion was heading for a bust, and at court there was plotting against him, according to our spies. And that’s also why he’s kept on moving - it was no surprise to me when they took on Russia. Nazism is a bankrupt ideology sustained only by endless expansion and conquest. In retrospect we muffed it; we should have struck when the balance of power was at its most favourable for us. By waiting another year we gave him the chance to arm to the hilt.

  ‘As to what would have followed if we had gone to war then, there are many uncertain factors. I can’t imagine the French poking their noses much beyond the Maginot Line, for instance. But at worst it might have been a war like the close of the last show, a lot of infantry manoeuvres. And at best it could all have been over by Christmas, and that would have been that for Hitler and his crew. It certainly would not have been the catastrophic collapse in the west that we actually saw.’

  But it would have been politically impossible to have gone to war then, Mary thought. She remembered the mood in Britain, and indeed America. Only twenty years since armistice, another European war was a horrible prospect, and Chamberlain had been a hero, briefly, when he produced what looked like a peace deal. But Mackie was showing a side of himself she had perceived among other Brits, especially in the military. These were a people who believed themselves destined to rule the world. Hitler had humiliated them the first time he put a tank-tread on a south coast beach. Anything to reverse that.

  She asked, ‘So how would you make the change?’

  ‘Actually we haven’t got that far. Not as far as you! I must sack my historians.’

  But he was being cagey, and suddenly she wondered if he was lying, if he had some team of military thinkers working on this counter-history for real, just in case. Which made him as bad as the lunatics in Richborough - and as bad as herself, for she had been seduced into seriously contemplating how her Dunkirk project would work. The power implicit in the idea of the Loom was just too tempting.

  He smiled. ‘Well now, look - enough of the fun stuff. Tell me what you’ve found out about this old fossil Geoffrey, and his inventory of history-botherers.’

  V

  She opened her handbag and drew out a stack of papers, neatly folded. She spread these out on the pillar between them.

  ‘Not such an old fossil. Quite an imaginative chap, our Geoffrey. Look - this is the summary table he appended to the front of his memoir.’ It had been translated into modern English: ’Time’s Tapestry: As mapped by myself ...’ ‘We have a couple of versions, actually, but the earliest seems to have been written down in 1492.’

  ‘The year Columbus sailed.’

  ‘Yes - and as it turns out that’s no coincidence. I’ll come to that. The last version was found in Geoffrey’s coffin, though that copy has been lost.’

  ‘This was a man determined to speak to the future,’ Mackie murmured.

  ‘Oh, yes. He was asking for our help, actually; he wanted rid of the menace he called the Weaver“. Now, look. Geoffrey has listed no less than six deflections of history, revealed to him by his researches - and, he says, deriving from his own experience. But I’m going to propose, Tom, that we neglect two of these ...

  She spoke of Geoffrey’s account of the ‘Testament of al-Hafredi’, in which a strange visitor to the court of a petty Frankish duke had deflected an eighth-century Muslim invasion of France.

  ‘And an entirely Muslim Europe,’ Mackie murmured.

  ‘Quite so.’ And she described the ‘Amulet of Bohemond’, through which a time meddler appeared to have arranged the murder of the Mongol Khan in the thirteenth century. ‘If not for that the Mongols would surely have swept on into western Europe, laying waste our cities - wrecking Europe for all time to come, as they wrecked so much of the east.’

  ‘Good God almighty,’ Mackie said. He worked at his pipe. ‘So why do you say we should exclude these possibilities?’

  ‘Because the technology seems to have been different. The Loom depends on feeding information directly into a subject’s brain. But the Amulet of Bohemond was some kind of gadget that spoke“ to its subjects.’

  ‘Like a recording device. A tape or a phonograph.’

  ‘Perhaps. Sent back to the thirteenth century.’

  ‘All right. And this al-Hafredi?’

  ‘He seems to have been a man who was hurled bodily across time - the man himself, not just his words.’

  ‘Well-gosh. Hard to know what to say to that. But look here, if these cases are not to do with our Nazis and their Loom, then what are they to do with? Who else is building a time machine - the Japs?’

  ‘I think it’s stranger than that,’ she said carefully. ‘I can think of two possibilities. One, that these interventions come from our own future. More advanced technologies. Or, two—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That they come from different histories. Ones that were, um, obliterated by the changes in the past. Geoffrey seems to hint that this al-Hafredi was a witness to a Muslim empire that stretched as far as Hadrian’s Wall.’

  ‘Which never came to pass in our world.’

  ‘No. But his own history vanished, when he went back in time and blocked the Muslim expansion in France. And that left him stranded, I suppose. The last relic of a reality wiped into oblivion, into non-existence, the moment he threw himself back in time.’ She said all this forcefully, hoping Tom Mackie would find it as scary a thought as she did.

  ‘Oh my good golly gosh.’ He got up and walked around in the long grass, his right hand cradling his pipe, his left slapping at his uniformed leg. ‘Every so often - these extraordinary matters - speak to me, oh spirit of Mr Wells!’ But he sounded more excited than appalled. ‘All right. Then Geoffrey’s remaining four instances, you believe, are to be dealt with.’

  ‘I think so.’ She spoke of the Prophecy of Nectovelin, which was apparently the result of meddling by Rory O’Malley, using a prototype of the Loom in Princeton before the war. And then there was the Menologium of Isolde, sent back by the Nazis at Richborough - and with Ben Kamen’s name surreptitiously coded into it.