Voice of Steel
by Sean McMullen
The Tynedal Journal ended with the sharp, shocking finality of an executioner's blade. Edward and William Tynedale had died in 1406 when the two-man culverin that they were testing exploded. That information was not an entry, it was on a photocopy that had been inserted by Sir Steven Chester. Up until 1404, most of the journal had been about gunpowder mixtures and alloys for gun castings. The remainder consisted of notes and observations on optics, astronomy, birdflight, and even the design of ships. Then, on the 4th of April, 1404, William noted that he had bought a singing sword from some stallholder in a market, and that he intended to keep it under observation until it sang for him. The sword was Spanish in general style, and he referred to it as the Don Alverin sword.
The sword did not exactly sing for William, but it did speak. To William it must have been incomprehensible, but like a good scientific observer, he noted down what he had heard as best he could. Being a scholar of early English, I managed to translate the words into what had actually been said by the sword, as opposed to what William had written down. Part of the reason that thirteen words had taken over an hour was my own disbelief at what I was hearing.
"Cor toop onter London orbetalle, steefee," was very hard to explain. "Wante some thing ater soopr marte?" was also a serious problem.
I read the two sentences aloud several times. The faster I read, the more they sounded like "Caught up on the London Orbital, Steffy" and "Want something from the supermart?" The words had obviously been spoken in English, but transcribed by someone unused to English as we spoke it, and relying on phonetics very heavily. Either of the Tynedale Brothers might have transcribed the original sentences like that.
"Of course I intend to have the journal checked for authenticity," Sir Steven Chester told me as I first read the words that simply could not have existed, but nevertheless did.
The Tynedale Journal and the Don Alverin Sword were lying on the desk before me. It was 2004, and I was in a country house near Chesterforth, north of London. Sir Steven had discovered the sword and journal sealed up in a grave while the ancestral crypt was being renovated as some sort of tourist attraction. Although he knew little about early English, he had recognised William Tynedale's version of "supermarket" for what it was.
"Have you any idea how it could have happened?" I asked.
"You are the expert, Michelle, I had hoped you would have all the theories."
I had no theories. Sir Steven had found my name on the Internet when he had done a search on Edward and William Tynedale. Although I am a schoolteacher rather than an academic, the Tynedales had been almost an obsession of mine since my university undergraduate years. The few surviving records concerning them hinted that they had been quite brilliant scientific observers and innovators, at least peers of Da Vinci or Galileo. I had copies of everything known about them, and even a few scraps of paper with their writing. I even had a print of the only known picture of William Tynedale hanging in my unit. My dream was to find evidence that they had invented something important, such as a microscope, but that the evidence had been lost after the accident that killed them.
"I cannot provide any theories about why a sword would say 'supermarket' in 1404," I admitted. "As for the Tynedale brothers, I thought I knew everything about them, but this journal is new to me. Do you have a family connection—like an ancestor of yours that was their patron?"
"Not that I know of. What can you tell me about them?"
"They were gunsmiths, although Edward was an alchemist as well. William had been apprenticed to a jeweler as a boy, then he went on to make several crown-wheel escapement clocks. He had also experimented with lenses, and constructed what he called a compound machine for drawing objects large. If that machine was a telescope, then it was two centuries before the first telescope was supposed to have been invented. If it was a compound lens microscope, well, they were still a long way ahead of everyone else."
"So William was the brains of the family?"
"They were both bright, but William was the dreamer, while Edward did more of the management and merchandising. They were brilliant, successful, and comfortably wealthy when that culverin exploded and killed them. Had they even lived to their thirties, they might have revolutionised English science and industry. This journal proves it beyond doubt. Notes on a working telescope, along with observations of lunar craters and the moons of Jupiter. The design for an iron foundry, even the suggestion for an 'unsinkable' iron ship."
From my reading of the Tynedale Journal, I could imagine the consequences of the Tynedales living another three or four decades and transforming English industry. The industrial revolution would have taken place in the late 1500s rather than the late 1700s, for example, and William would have transformed astronomy and physics two hundred years before Galileo. Where would humanity be by now? A single, stylised portrait of William had survived, and I now opened a folder and showed a colour print of it to Sir Steven. William had a dreamy look about him, yet he was well dressed and seemed quite dynamic as well. I actually fancied him in an odd sort of way, and I had even dated a string of men who resembled him. I did not let Sir Steven know any of that, however.
"This journal could be one of the greatest finds in the scientific history," I said as I gazed sadly at the page open before me, shaking my head as I spoke.
"Could?" asked Sir Steven, who saw it as first rate publicity material to draw tourists to his estate.
"This word is definitely 'could', rather than 'is'. All that material on the Tynedale telescopes and iron foundry designs is in the same journal as the words 'supermarket' and 'London Orbital'. Those words brand the entire thing to be a fake."
"But we could get it dated. Don't they use carbon or something?"
"Yes, but even if the paper and ink was dated to around 1400, people would just say it was a clever fake."
"And an obvious fake. I mean my wife radios me from her car nearly every day about supermarket shopping or turning the oven on."
"Radio? As in cell phone?"
"No, it's a pair of rather old-fashioned radio transceivers. It's actually cheaper to use them than run cell phone accounts. You know, belt tightening while we get the estate's finances back on an even keel."
"Well, that would explain a lot if it had been you who had heard the sword speak in 2004. The question is who would be talking about supermarkets and the London Orbital six hundred years ago? In fact, how could the sword speak at all …"
My voice trailed away as I recalled something from a yacht race, years earlier. I had been a member of the university yacht club. The club owned no yacht, but members volunteered to crew the yachts of people who could afford them, and the memory of one such vessel returned to me now. Through some freakish accident in its manufacture, the metal mast acted like a crystal set and picked up one of the coastal radio stations. Crystal sets work on the power of the radio signals themselves, they need no batteries. If a mast could do it, why not a sword?
"You were saying?" he asked.
"There are documented cases of odd objects like false teeth and stoves picking up radio transmissions. I once heard music coming from the mast of a yacht."
"So it could be possible with a sword?"
"Why not try testing it? Do you have one of those radio units handy?"
He fetched his transceiver. It was a large, solidly built, handheld unit from before the days of cell phones.
"Now that I think of it, Ellen did take the Don Alverin sword to London about a fortnight ago. It was something to do with an insurance assessment."
"So it would have been in the car with her if she called you with her radio?"
"Well, yes. But she would have heard the sword picking up her words."
"Not if it was in the boot or on the back seat, buried under shopping. Take the sword into another room and put it on a table. I'll try transmitting something to you."
Sir Steven left with the sword. I waited a minutes, then I turned on the radio unit and spoke my test message. Presently I heard footsteps approaching.
"That was a naughty thing for Mary's father to do," he laughed.
"What? So the sword really did act as a sort of crystal set?"
"Not very loud, but it was quite clear. What a thought! This could be quite a good tourist attraction for the estate."
"But we still have a problem. Radio transmitters are very sophisticated, and need a power source. Nobody could have built one in the early fifteenth century."
"I suppose supermarkets were pretty thin on the ground too."
"Not to mention the London Orbital. Anyway, I should get out my laptop and handheld scanner. Are you sure you have no problems with me copying the Tynedale Journal?"
"Copy all you like. Try to publish it, and you will find me on your doorstep waving the Copyright Act."
He left me with the journal, and I began to unpack my laptop and handheld scanner. The actual idea of communicating with the past had an achingly strong allure. To save my life I could not estimate how many times I had played through the fantasy of stepping into the streets of late fourteenth century London, visiting the Tynedales' shop and introducing myself as a foreign student from some very distant land. I would be dressed as a boy, and I would gain the confidence of William by my great scholarship. I would suggest inventions to him, and convince him that all guns should be tested from behind a heavy safety barrier. That would save the brothers in 1406, and they would go on to great and fantastic things. Tynedale's theory of gravitation, Tynedale's laws of planetary motion, the Tynedale reflecting telescope, and the Tynedale methods of differential and integral calculus. It was at this point that the fantasies always broke down. I would reveal myself to be a girl, and William would fall in love with me. Then what? Live as wife in the fifteenth century, where I would not fit? Bring William to the twenty-first century, where he would face a lifetime of being a curiosity at the very best? What else could there be?
In a way it was better to leave my fantasies as fantasies … yet it would be such a fine and splendid thing to save the brilliant Tynedale Brothers from their sad and untimely death in 1406. Still, nothing could go back in time, and the past was as dead as the Tynedales. I taught this sort of thing to my classes of teenagers year after year. Nothing could go faster than light, nothing could go backwards in time. Suddenly I paused, hands poised above the keys of the laptop. Entangled particles. The memory of an article in some science journal stirred somewhere on the edge of my awareness. An experiment had been conducted, and entangled particles had been shown to communicate faster than the speed of light. Several orders of magnitude faster than light. If the lightspeed barrier was nothing of the sort, perhaps there was hope for travel into the past. Even communication with the past would be enough to save the Tynedales.
Entanglement. The word had a new, exotic feel to it, full of potential. Might objects be entangled in time as well as space? I stared at the words on the screen, then checked back at the original page.
Marry hat er litel lamb Hir father short y dead And now she takes hir lamb tisk oorl Bitweane two bittes off bret
The style certainly did not belong to the early fifteenth century. No more than the London Orbital or supermarkets. I had recited those very words to test the Don Alverin sword as a radio receiver. They had been written as a fifteenth-century listener might have heard modern words—especially quickly spoken, ill-perceived modern words. Had they existed on the page a few minutes ago? Now I remembered using them because they were on the page, but … my head began to spin.
William Tynedale had heard my words, and had written them down in 1404. Some veterans of the Battle of Poitiers would have been alive, Joan of Arc had not yet been born. William Tynedale had heard my words! Without another thought I pressed the transmission key of the radio transceiver. I knew the English of the Tynedales reasonably well, so although I spoke in a contemporary style, I tried to speak slowly and to phrase and pronounce everything with an early fifteenth-century audience in mind.
"William Tynedale of London, I am speaking from six hundred years in your future. It is very hard to explain. Our philosophical scholarship is very advanced compared with yours. Think of it as dreaming about building a big and splendid house in ten years. The house exists in the future, but as yet there is nothing to see or touch. William, in two years you will die while testing a new culverin. It will explode, killing you and Edward. Please, please, test all your new culverins from behind a mound of earth."
I paused, the handheld radio before my lips. What next? I had warned him. He might not die young. He might turn out to be England's Galileo. I could hardly ask him for a date. Even under the best of circumstances he would die over five centuries before I would be born. Think of it like an Internet romance, I told myself.
"William, I am a female scholar, and I greatly admire you and your work. We can never meet, yet I would like to give you a few little tokens of my esteem for you. Some principles of motion that govern the movement of the planets, a device using lenses and a large, concave mirror to magnify distant objects, an engine powered by steam that is more powerful than horses, and a flintlock that can discharge your culverins in an instant without the need for a smouldering fuse."
Being a science teacher, I knew the basic principles of a great many inventions. I was also quite skilled at teaching scientific principles and laws to classes full of teenagers who would rather be doing nearly anything else. What sort of pupil would William Tynedale be? He was brilliant, but he had been born and educated in the fourteenth century. I tried to gain his confidence with advice about corning gunpowder to improve its quality, rifling the barrels of his culverins, and of course quite detailed instructions on building a flintlock striker. I went on to describe the pendulum clock, several types of telescope, the microscope, hot air balloons, the principle of the blast furnace, and finally the steam engine. The steam engine might have been a mistake, as it took about half as long as everything else put together. I gave him several stern warnings about taking precautions against exploding boilers, then went on to describe the steam powered ship, and the use of steam engines in factories.
A light began to wink on my handheld transmitter. The batteries were running down.
"William, for now I must bid you farewell," I concluded. "I hope with all my heart that my gifts to you are pleasing. Even more fervently, I hope that you adopt my advice on testing your culverins, and that you live to a great age. My heart and my words of scholarship are all that I may give you, but perhaps they will cause you to prosper and be honoured."
I put the transmitter down, but dared not look at the journal. Had he heard? Had my words affected history? Drop a stone into a river, and the ripples are soon lost. Build a dam across the river and everything downstream will be changed. I stared at the transmitter, its battery indicator light glowing steadily, beckoning to me. Had I changed the past before? Did I dare to do it again? Could I ever notice?
Steven came in, followed by a servant carrying a coffee service on a silver tray. He was wearing an earpiece, and was paying me little attention.
"The Voltaire is safely down on Europa," he said aloud, but I had the impression that he would have said it whether I had been there or not.
"A hundred years since Shackleton landed on the moon," I sighed. "Who would have thought it would take so long?"
"So long?" he suddenly exclaimed loudly, seeming to notice me for the first time.
"The moon in 1902, Mars in 1957, and now the Jovian system," I explained.
"Yes, yes, quite so Michelle. You are not one who likes to wait for the future, are you—just a minute. They can see ice … and more ice … everywhere there is ice … liquid water beneath the engines … turning back to ice … glorious moment for France … they're opening the champagne—that's it! I can't take any more."
He removed the earplug and came around the table to look down at the journal. There were still thirty pages of text, all of it quite basic science, plus a lot of the principles behind various inventions.
"Nothing more than Baker's three laws of motion and some practical advice for building a steam engine," he said, sounding as disappointed as I was.
"There is still the reference near the start, the bit about an enchanted sword speaking the wisdom to them. Also some words of endearment to the brave and clever lady speaking with the sword's voice."
"Hah! Nothing more than twaddle. Edward and William Tynedale were two of the greatest theoretical physicists and inventors of all time, and they were Brittanic! This has to be a hoax by the French."
"But why? The paper is genuine, and so is the ink. It was found in your library, after all."
"It may be an old hoax to denigrate Brittanic science. We led the world for five hundred years, then the French came along and used our industrial achievements to reach into space. They want to pretend that the Brittanic people were never great."
"As conspiracy theories go, this lacks—"
"The technology to fake a journal like this has been around since the 1850s. You know, use early fifteenth-century blank paper and contemporary ink, then use a molecular penetrating agent to accelerate absorption. Leave it for a century or so to simulate real aging, then have someone slip it into my library—what is so funny?"
I managed to stop myself laughing with some effort.
"As conspiracy theories go, that takes a lot of beating. A French plot to disparage the finest of Brittanic science of six hundred years ago, except that it was four hundred and fifty years ago when it started."
"Brittania did not exist six hundred years ago."
"You know what I mean. If this journal was to become public, why the Tynedale Dissertations on Nature would be proved to be a hoax."
"A hoax?" I laughed. "Darling, the earliest published copy of the Dissertations in the Brittanic Library of Congress is dated 1412."
"You know what I mean. They owned this sword," he said. "That sword in the next room still receives radio transmissions, it is a sort of accidental crystal set. It could have received back in 1404. It has been known to be a receiver for over a century."
"Who could have had a radio transmitter back in 1404? Lavoisier did not make the first transatlantic transmission until 1799, and even that was only in Watt code."
"Some people would say aliens."
"Steven if it was aliens who provided the Tyndale brothers with all their inventions and laws of physics, it would cause a sensation."
"Ah, and that's it. Alien contact is the bait to lure us into questioning the Tynedales."
The trouble with my husband was that his eccentricity merged into his sense of humour. At some point, the worst of nonsense shared common ground with what he considered to be a real possibility.
"Steven, as a professor of theoretical physics I can give you any number of other explanations. As a person with a lot more common sense than you I can make quite a few suggestions too."
"Name one—as a person," he said, folding his arms and pouting theatrically.
"The Tynedale brothers did this hoax themselves, as some sort of joke," I suggested.
This was a little too plausible for my husband.
"All right then, name another, but this time as a professor of physics."
"Temporal entanglement."
"What? You mean like the quantum entanglement radios the astronauts are using on Europa to communicate instantly with Earth."
"Faster than light, not instantly," I said automatically. "It's spatial entanglement, but just suppose there could be temporal entanglement too. This sword could be entangled with itself, but in an earlier century. Whatever radio transmissions it picks up in 2004 are also picked up by the sword in 1404."
"Preposterous."
"Oh yes, just like your alien theory."
"My alien hoax conspiracy theory, let us be precise about this."
"Well we have a way of testing it. The brothers would have been paying the sword very close attention if it had suddenly spoken. I shall prepare a little tutorial in thermodynamics, throw in Galvani's technique for measuring the speed of light, and then give an explanation of Faraday's Law of Relativity. Actually, I ought to include some mathematics as well, or they will not be able to make anything of it. I could give them the technology to make a primitive battery, and even instructions for an electric motor. Perhaps instructions for building a simple spark gap radio transmitter, too."
"All right, all right, for once you have out-weirded even me. What is the point?"
"All of that will appear in their writings, and in this journal."
"But history will have been changed. What will have been proved?"
"Plenty. I shall have read out my own name during the transmission. It should show up in this journal. If it does, no French conspiracy."
Steven leafed through the pages, smirking. Whoever had made the transmission that William had transcribed had been besotted with him. She had described herself as a scholar, and later as a teacher of youths and girls. Much of her transmission was embarrassingly personal and mawkishly sentimental, yet I had a curious sympathy for her. I had decided to become a scientist after reading his biography at the age of twelve. I drew curious satisfaction from the fact that he had never married, and as a teenager I often fantasised that he had been saving himself for me. I dreamed of inventing a time machine and travelling back to the early fifteenth century to meet him. When I married Steven I almost felt as if I was betraying William Tynedale, and that his spirit would be watching sadly as I forsook him for someone else.
"But if the Tynedales really did get all their science from the future, well, Britannic science and engineering would be discredited anyway," said Steven, sounding almost serious.
"Ah, but we don't have to publish," I pointed out.
The Don Alverin sword was known to be a crystal, and Steven kept a radio transmitter in the manor house to demonstrate it to guests at dinner parties. It took me an hour or so to gather together some notes and draw up a programme for the transmission. William Tynedale's face stared out from a six-hundred-year-old portrait on the wall. His good looks showed through, in spite of the rather primitive late-medieval style of the artist. Steven was asleep by now, with a half-empty decanter or port on the coffee table beside his chair. I switched on the little radio transmitter.
"William Tynedale, this is a message for you from six hundred years in the future. My name is Michelle Evelene Watson, and I am six hundred years in your future. As I sit here, I see your portrait on the wall, and your books are piled high around me. I know you so well that I have fallen in love with you, yet you do not know me at all. I have auburn hair, reaching to my shoulders, I am about your height, and I am thirty-five years of age as I sit here, speaking to you. Strange, is it not? I am thirty-five, yet I am not yet born, I am dead and long buried, and a gawky adolescent, all in your future. I wish to add to the principles spoken to you and your brother …"
I hesitated. Who had done the earlier transmissions in the journal. Perhaps an alternative me? A Michelle Watson who no longer existed? Certainly the man had shaped my life. In a way he meant more to me than Steven.
"First, I declare it true that the true speed of light is sufficient to cover one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles in the interval between two heartbeats of a man at rest. The speed of sound is much slower, being about thirty times more than a fit man might run …"
The transmission took some time. I had to speak slowly so that William might copy everything down correctly, and I had to be very careful to phrase everything so that an educated person in the fifteenth century could understand what I was saying if he thought about it for long enough. Finally I finished my strangely primitive dissertation on modern science, thumbed the transmitter off, stretched, then picked up the journal. It certainly was a contradiction of scholarship, yet my name appeared there. Not my rank, however. That made me suspicious. I would never give my name without my rank. My rank defined my position in the fleet, in a way my rank defined my existence. Still, there was my name between two detailed dissertations on science … yet some of it was science such as had never existed. Faraday's Law of Relativity? Lord Isaac Newton had discovered his Principle of Relativity in the seventeenth century.
The door opened, and I immediately stood up and saluted. Baron Steven Chester entered, with my fleet's war-master and two women in civilian clothes.
"Baron, I should like to introduce Commander Michelle Evelene Watson," said my war-master.
The baron smiled and gave a greeting flourish, the women stood in the background. They were certainly scientists, and probably from some unit so secret that its name was not even public knowledge.
"You have a good record, and come from a long line of military heroes," said the baron. "There was a Watson aboard the Invincible when the fleets of Sir William Magnus and Don Miguel clashed off the orbit of the moon in 1793."
"Yes sir."
"They traded broadsides for eleven hours, flaying each other with cannon shot. It was quite a fight."
"Quite so, sir."
"Then again, a voidfarer named Lady Geraldine MacGregor was deputy commander of the third landing on Mars, in 1818."
"Robert the Third of Scotlandia was captain, as I recall. What do you say to that?"
"I am a loyal officer of the Caledonian Empire of—"
"Commander, please, be at ease," he laughed. "Your loyalty to Brittoria is beyond question. As is your bravery. Why you were the first woman to set foot on Centaurus Skye, were you not? Following in Lady Geraldine's first-footsteps, ha ha."
...
widez2