Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  “And that’s what you’re going to play tomorrow?” Escott asked.

  “No,” said the violinist. “What I shall play tomorrow, along with a solo violin piece by Bach, is two pieces by Pietro Locatelli, whose capricci enigmati were also inspired by von Biber’s sonatas, and are intermediate between them and Paganini’s capricci. They were published in 1730, but shunned by musicians of the day and forgotten until Paganini revived them, prior to composing his own adaptations. One I shall play as published, the other in a fashion that has never been heard before.”

  “You mean that it’s your own variation?” Hope enquired.

  “In a manner of speaking. I think that Locatelli might have been playing a game or a trick in the published version, adding an extra enigma to his caprice—or there might conceivably have been a misprint. I shall alter the scordatura—the tuning of violin, as Mr. Hope says—in the way that ought, in my opinion, to have been specified, but was not. I believe that I might be first to play the piece in public as it was really intended to be played. It is possible that even Locatelli never played it in public himself, given the great unpopularity of the sequence in his own day. It is risky, I know, but Carmela cannot play, and Paganini has made capricci popular again, so I feel that I must risk it now, or never. It is something that I have wanted to do for a long time. I hope you will all be tolerant of my whim.” He looked anxiously at Lady Phythian as he pronounced the last sentence, but he had lost her attention long before and she was staring out of the window again, watching the wilds of Cambridgeshire go by.

  “That’s fascinating,” Michael said, generously. “I shall look forward to it greatly.”

  “Thank you,” the violinist said, with more relief than genuine gratitude—but Carmela Monticarlo smiled at him again, more dazzlingly than before, and Michael blushed deeply, somewhat to James Escott’s amusement and Quentin Hope’s ironic delight.

  Almost as soon as Signor Monticarlo, having ridden his hobby-horse to exhaustion, had fallen silent again, Hope and Escott resumed their contest. Having killed off the topic of progress for the time being, they launched into a debate about mazes and labyrinths. Hope generously took time out to explain to Michael that a labyrinth, technically speaking, was a “unicursal” design in which there were no branches, so that anyone walking a labyrinth was bound to end up at the center, albeit by a tortuously roundabout route, while a maze was “multicursal”, thus creating the possibility that someone who kept taking wrong turnings might get lost indefinitely.

  “One has to bear in mind, of course,” Hope added, “that the Labyrinth—the one that Dedalus allegedly built in Crete for King Minos, was actually a multicursal maze, not a labyrinth in the stricter sense of the term. The Greeks mislabeled it, although they knew perfectly well what the difference was, as Plato makes clear in the Euthydemus, where Socrates likens logic to a labyrinth, in which the conclusion is always certain even though it seems to be the result of a roundabout process.”

  “Except, of course,” Escott was quick to put in—as Hope must have known that he would—“that Dedalus didn’t build the Labyrinth for Minos at all. In fact, he built it for Ariadne. The Greek myth of Theseus misrepresents the situation horribly, but that’s of late origin. Homer makes it perfectly clear in the Iliad, when he describes Achilles’ shield, which bore the design of the Labyrinth, and states in so many words that the Labyrinth was constructed for Ariadne. If that were not enough, when Hope and I were exploring the ruins of Knossos we found inscriptions to the same effect, which identified Ariadne explicitly as the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

  “Leading us to conclude,” Hope put in, “that Minos’ daughter Ariadne—like yourself, Lady Phythian—was named after a more prestigious figure, presumably a goddess. Minos’ daughter was probably a priestess as well as a princess, whose duties included dancing the Labyrinth, according to a prescribed ritual.”

  “Which would imply that Dedalus was a priest rather than an engineer,” Escott said, taking up the thread again. “Just as the fact that Achilles’ shield bore a Labyrinth design proves that the Cretan Labyrinth—and ancient mazes in general—were magical in purpose, intended as protective devices. Unfortunately the Cretan Labyrinth seems to have failed in its purpose, since the entire Minoan civilization was destroyed in an enormous catastrophe.”

  “Actually, it proves no such thing,” Hope objected, “since Achilles was naturally invulnerable—save for his heel—and had no need of protective magic in his shield. And although Minos’ daughter was, by virtue of her sex, the person who had to perform the maze ritual intended to evoke her namesake, the Mistress of the Labyrinth, it was undoubtedly Minos who commissioned his high priest, Dedalus, to construct the Labyrinth.”

  “Where did the Minotaur fit in?” Michael asked, innocently.

  “He probably didn’t, in any literal sense,” Hope opined, “although the Greek emphasis on his role in the myth has given rise to the popular idea that mazes were intended as traps for monsters and demons rather than—or as well as—tracks for ritual processions and dances. That idea is also supported by folklore from elsewhere that often sets dragons in the heart of mazes, but the Minotaur doesn’t seem to me to be a mere variant of a dragon. Personally, I suspect that Minos put about the story of Pasiphaë’s passion for a bull and subsequent motherhood of a monster in order to pay her back for poisoning some of his younger paramours. Then he used the myth of the Minotaur as a pretext for denying his priestesses—including his wife and daughter—access to the Labyrinth, where they might have used that privacy to hatch plots to threaten his increasingly tyrannical authority. It was presumably the same motive that led him to imprison the architect of the Labyrinth within it. While Escott and I were exploring, we actually found a subterranean cell with a curious high-walled roof-garden; we had no way of knowing whether that might actually have been Dedalus’ prison, but Old Harry Langstrade was very excited by it. At any rate, the volcanic eruption rendered the political issues surrounding Minos’ despotic tendencies redundant. The catastrophic destruction of the entire Cretan culture set the progress of civilization back by hundreds of years, until Athens.…”

  “Rose up to continue the tortured rigmarole of Hope’s vapid fancy,” Escott said, waspishly. “In fact—to get back to your original question, Laurel—the real key to the Minotaur’s supposed dual nature lies in the fact that the previous king of Crete, Asterius, had adopted Minos after he had allegedly been sired on Europa by the god Zeus, in the guise of a bull—so it was Minos himself who was accused, in vulgar parlance, of being a human/taurean hybrid when his reign became excessively cruel. The Minotaur was merely a symbol, invented to describe his monstrousness, but it was a particularly potent image in combination with the Labyrinth, partly because it did recall previous folklore placing dragons in the hearts of mazes. Mazes were associated throughout the ancient world with dragons and their mundane kin, as evidenced by Herodotus’ description of the Egyptian City of Crocodiles, in which mummified kings were laid to rest amid mummified crocodiles. Hope and I searched for the lost city while we were in Egypt, but never found it. In any case, the mysterious Mistress of the Labyrinth was probably more closely analogous to Circe than to Athene, and that may be why Pasiphaë is sometimes represented in Greek myth as kin to Circe.…”

  At this point, Michael followed Lady Phythian’s example and tuned out again, returning his gaze to the flickering telegraph-poles in spite of their seeming mesmeric threat, and consenting to drift into a light doze. While the conversation remained in such ostentatiously esoteric intellectual territory he deliberately reduced it to a mere buzz in his ears, akin to that of an irritating fly. He found, after a while, that he could ignore the telegraph poles too, by focusing his eyes on more distant points in the landscape—church steeples and belfries proved particularly useful—and tracking them as they retreated, relative to the speeding train, at a far more leisurely pace, as if they
too were making a polite withdrawal from an arena of conflict that they found uncomfortable.

  Michael did not consider himself to be stupid, or ignorant, but he always felt uncomfortable in the presence of naked erudition. He had not had the privilege of a university education, let alone of taking an exotic Grand Tour, and he knew that he would be at something of a disadvantage among the company assembled at Langstrade Hall, not only with respect to Hope and Escott but Gregory Marlstone, who had been studying natural philosophy at Corpus Christi while Hope and Escott were Classical scholars at Balliol. On the other hand, the present Lord Langstrade had apparently been a very undistinguished scholar at Merton, and had gone straight into the family business thereafter, while Marlstone had done likewise, following in his own father’s footsteps as a builder of church clocks, before his eventual inheritance had allowed him to divert his attention to the more esoteric mysteries of Time.

  Michael had never met Marlstone, and only knew of him by virtue of newspaper reportage of the failed experiments at Horton Lacey and Chatsworth. Apparently, the would-be inventor had not inherited his father’s money until 1819, and it was only then that he had been able to interest himself in John Dee’s speculative attempts to develop a theory of time. Marlstone was said to have demonstrated some of his own theories experimentally, but only on a very small scale and in private. His attempts to replicate his laboratory results on a much grander scale had gone sadly awry, occasioning much mockery from the hard-headed physicists who refused to believe in the possibility of perpetual motion machines and similarly paradoxical endeavors.

  Annoyed by this derision, Marlstone had apparently hunted high and low for a location more conducive to the functioning of his apparatus, whose failure he attributed to “quasi-acoustic feedback in the temporal field” resulting from the architectural design of the structures in which he had conducted his full-scale demonstrations. Apparently, the dimensions of the Langstrade Keep, although a trifle cramped, would be much more conducive to the establishment and maintenance of a stable “temporal field”—unless of course, Marlstone really was the kind of moonstruck fantasist that most people now took him for. At any rate, Marlstone’s enthusiasm for the potential location had found a resonant echo in Lord Langstrade’s enthusiasm for the tantalizing possibility that Marlstone’s endeavors held out: the possibility of seeing through time. Although Marlstone only claimed successes in his private laboratory extending over a matter of minutes, and was reluctant to promise that his large-scale apparatus might be capable of providing views extending over years, let alone decades, Lord Langstrade was enthusiastic to see the principle demonstrated, so that further progress in chronovisual technology might one day enable him to look back across a thousand years and more, in order to witness Harold Longstride’s combat with Emund Snurlson for himself.

  In spite of his recent vicissitudes, however, Michael suspected that Marlstone might look down on him in much the same way that Hope and Escott obviously did, considering him a shallow recorder of the world’s contents rather than an educated analyst of their nature and meaning. What chance did a mere painter have, he could not help wondering, of comparing with such men as Marlstone and Hope in the eyes of his host?—as he would presumably need to do if he were ever to obtain approval for the marriage he hoped to make.

  Lady Phythian was drawn back into Hope and Escott’s discussion again when it turned to matters of psychognosis, by which time the Sir Richard Trevithick was streaking through Lincolnshire. Escott, as might be expected, was scathing about the potential of the supposed new science, while Hope was far more hopeful that it might eventually generate a theory of the mind of Newtonian elegance and subtlety. Both men, however, were agreed on rejecting present-day Mesmerism as mostly poppycock, and its supposed practitioners—including, by implication, Augustus Carp—as self-deluding fools or mere charlatans. Lady Phythian objected to this characterization, insisting that Dr. Carp was an exceedingly wise man, who had used his undoubted psychic gifts to provided solace to many a widow—herself included—and would doubtless continue to do so if only he could find a more adequate replacement for his late and much-lamented somniloquist.

  “I don’t doubt that somniloquists really do hear voices, Lady Phythian” Hope opined, “but we shall not be able to make any true progress in psychognosis until we abandon the fantasy that those voices emanate from the spirits of the dead. I don’t doubt that Dr. Carp’s last somniloquist was able to supply you with a measure of solace following your husband’s death, probably spiced with a healthy dose of commonsensical advice, but the voice that bid her do so came from within, not from the realm of the afterlife.”

  “Hope is, as usual, half right,” Escott judged. “The voices somniloquists appear to transmit cannot emanate from the afterlife, but their origin in the mysterious depths of the human mind gives them no better access to wisdom, even of a commonsensical kind. In fact, the murky depths of the human mind are essentially chaotic, and their produce is essentially subversive and capricious. There is no possibility for progress there, but only one more proof that the idea of progress is a myth. What underlies the superficial order of the world is a deadly confusion, whose volcanic eruptions will always destroy the petty achievements of our constructive consciousness, and betray our fondest illusions of future happiness.”

  Once again, as he completed this florid speech, Escott caught Michael’s eye and raised his eyebrows in a quasi-conspiratorial manner, but the gesture left Michael at a loss. He did not know whether the thin man was soliciting his agreement, taking it for granted, or signaling that he did not really mean a single word of what he said.

  “What do you think, Laurel?” Hope suddenly demanded, although he could not have seen the raised eyebrows.

  “I don’t know,” Michael admitted, trying not to stammer. “Perhaps I’ll be able to form a better judgment when I’ve seen Dr. Carp in action. He’s due to entrance his somniloquist tomorrow night, I believe, immediately after Signor Monticarlo’s recital?”

  Signor Monticarlo obligingly nodded in confirmation of Michael’s presumption, but seemed pained at the thought that his pioneering revelation of a new variation of a Pietro Locatelli capriccio was to be followed by a display of Mesmeric somniloquism. Lady Phythian nodded too, with far greater conviction. Carmela Monticarlo smiled.

  “Very wise, Laurel,” said Escott. “Keep your powder dry. Don’t fire until you have the bird in your sights.”

  “For a man who’s never yet hit a bird in flight,” Hope put in, “Mr. Escott is very free with his sporting metaphors—but he’s right about your being wise to reserve judgment, Laurel. You might learn a great deal this weekend, if you’re lucky. When the Sir Richard Trevithick carries us home again on Tuesday, we might all be a little wiser. I certainly hope so.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE DISPIRITED MESMERIST

  By the time the Sir Richard Trevithick pulled into York station, dead on time, having failed to come off the rails yet again, Hope and Escott had tired somewhat of their perpetual performance, and had lapsed into a sort of weary torpor. No one had attempted to take on the burden of keeping the conversation going, so the last few miles had been covered in near-funereal silence.

  Rather than continue their journey immediately in the hired diligence that was waiting for them in the station forecourt, the company decided—with not a single dissenting voice—to take an early dinner. They voted to take temporary refuge in a Coaching Inn that was situated less than a hundred yards from the railway station, set back slightly from the road. It seemed rather as if the august institution were staring at its new neighbor, obliquely and resentfully, from what would henceforth be the wrong side of the dusty highway.

  While his companions from the carriage made ready to execute this plan, Michael went to collect his bags and equipment from the luggage van. Those of his traveling companions who had left trunks there were content to
rely on the labels they bore to ensure that they were transferred to the diligence. The only person who joined him was Augustus Carp, to whom he had just been introduced for the first time.

  Carp was considerably older than Hope, Escott or Monticarlo, or even Lady Phythian; Michael judged that he must be at least seventy, even if the snowy whiteness of his hair was slightly deceptive. Michael had expected the celebrated Mesmerist to have strikingly penetrative eyes, but Carp’s gaze actually seemed quite meek, and his dull pupils did not give the least hint of any capacity for flashing fire.

  “Have you been to Langstrade Hall before, Mr. Laurel?” Carp asked him, by way of making polite conversation, while the porters were busy unloading the luggage van.

  “This is my first time,” Michael admitted, “but I hope it won’t be the last.”

  “It’s my first time too,” Carp said, dolefully. “I’ve visited many places in Yorkshire, but never Langstrade. I wish I might share your hope, but when one reaches my age, the likelihood that everything one does is being done for the last time becomes difficult to dispute.”

  “Mastery of animal magnetism does not confer exceptional longevity, then?” Michael observed, a trifle mischievously—then cursed himself immediately for having allowed a little of Escott’s subversive personality to rub off on him during the train journey.

  Carp did not take seem to take offense. “Only to a small degree, I fear,” he said, with a faint sigh. “The effects of magnetism have kept me healthy and alert in the meantime, though, and have given me many other privileges denied to the ignorant and the contemptuous.”