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Site content may offend. Content includes horror, murder, torture, lawlessness, military carnage, Anglo Saxon crudities, occasional adult incidents and George Bush |
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| But, when they finally headed down to the village, which they presumed to be a proto-Basque village, there was indeed a motorbike sitting in the middle of the place. Not a real motorbike, however. A carving. Made from wood. Mud. Rain. Drifting woodsmoke. The cry of a rooster, sharp and clear. Marion noticed that her white jeans were already splattered with mud. Amazing, how mud spreads itself around. Someone should write a paper on it. "Look," said Suzy. A man was coming out of one of the huts. He was wearing a rain cape of sorts, woven from what might conceivably be flax. A local guy, swarthy, wild hair, uncut beard. "Hi," said Terry, holding up a hand in a gesture copied from Star Trek. "Doctor Livingstone, I presume," said the local guy. "Say what?" said Marion. "It's a joke," said Suzy. But, if that was true, Marion certainly didn't get it. "Welcome to Wales," said the swarthy guy. "What is this?" said Terry. "Some kind of film set?" "No," said the swarthy guy. "You have come back in time, just as Colin said you would. Come. Follow me. Colin is waiting to explain things to you." Colin Telbrent was a paraplegic. He had gotten his neck broken in a fight with one of the locals shortly after arriving. "That was twenty years ago," said Colin. "Twenty years?" said Marion. "Twenty years ago, the Chronoclick didn't exist!" "Time is a tricky place," said Colin. "I've had time to figure out some things while I've been here. But tell me about yourselves." "We," said Terry, heavily, "have come back to the past, at great trouble and expense, to study Basque." And he explained. Basque was one of the languages which had been spoken in Europe before the Roman Empire rolled over everything, obliterating the local languages. "The Basques kept their own tongue, here in the Pyrenees," said Terry, "but by the time the science of linguistics got round to the study of Basque, it'd been contaminated by a couple of thousand years of rubbing shoulders with Romance languages." "So you're here to study the uncontaminated strain?" said Colin. "Kind of," said Terry. "We want to get a handle on syntactic borrowing. Do languages borrow syntax from their neighbors? That's why we're here, to find a pre-Roman baseline. Then we can compare it with the modern, uh, thing. Or could have. But you've screwed it up." "Yes," said Marion. "You've gone and taught these people English, and that's totally trashed the data base." "Not guilty," said Colin. "As I believe you've already been told, this isn't the Pyrennes. This is Wales." "Could you explain?" said Marion. "Sure," said Colin. And he did. Although none of the others had heard of him, Colin Telbrent had been a high-powered theoretical physicist. After the loss of Valkyrie Seven, he had come back to the past on an independent mission of exploration. "Then I met with disaster," said Colin. "But it hasn't been all bad." For the past twenty years, Colin's life had been sustained by the locals. In return, he had taught them a bunch of tricks. How to make the woomera, for instance - the throwing stick, a device invented by the Aboriginals of Australia, which allows a spear to be hurled with devastating force. How to manufacture crossbows. How to make a better bronze alloy. "And how to play chess," said Colin. "Chess is now the ruling religion of the British Isles." "Chess is a religion?" said Luke. "How come?" "When your neck's broken," said Colin, "you do what you can to stay alive." While only a couple of years had passed in Marion's world, Colin had endured two decades in the past. During that time, apart from modernising warfare and introducing rock and roll to the ancient Celtic peoples of the British Isles ("we now have this local electric guitar choir, it's just fantastic") he had figured out a bunch of stuff about time travel. "Let me pack twenty years of mathematics into one crude analogy," said Colin. "My arrival began the process of, as it were, magnetising this portion of the space-time continuum. After twenty years of residence I have become, to continue this crude analogy, a kind of magnetic focus. Consequently, your Chronoclick was automatically pulled toward this location. Hence you found me." "Fascinating," said Terry. "Let's go back to the ship and get our recording gear. I'd like to do an interview with you before we try to move you." "In case you kill me," said Colin. "Yeah, well, we're none of us doctors," said Terry. "Or do you want to stay here forever?" "Oh no," said Colin. "It's one of the doctrines of Chess that the Lords of the World of Games will arrive one day to uplift the Prophet of Chess and transport him back to his own true time. This moment has been very carefully prepared for for the past twenty years, believe you me." "But," said Suzy, "if we leave at all, won't we destroy this, this ... um, what do you call it? Timeline? This present reality?" The paralyzed man looked at her without blinking for what seemed a long time, then spoke, very carefully. "I have no evidence that that would be the case," he said. "Besides, you weren't planning on staying here forever, were you?" On the way back to the ship, Terry exaulted. "This is it!" he said. "We come back as heroes! The technicalities, they're not going to matter. We'll get grants, we'll get tenure - " " - and someday you might even hit a hole in one," said Luke. "Yeah, sure," said Terry cheerfully. "Who can tell what strange and unpredictable effects time travel might yet have in store?" By the time they had got to the ship, the men had convinced themselves that interviewing the God of Chess was a boy's job. The girls could keep house while the boys were busy. "Just in case," said Terry. Leaving unspoken the possibility that the ancient Welsh might yet scalp them, cannibalise them and use their bones to build pinball machines. "Lock the door behind us," said Luke. "And don't unlock it until we get back." Suzy locked the door, sure. But then she went one step further. She started up the Chronoclick. "What do you think you're doing?" said Marion, shocked and amazed. Outside, the two men heard the time machine powering up. Shocked, they turned to face it. Suzy punched the "go" button. The ship began its countdown. "Ten. And. Nine. And. Eight." "Suzy!" screamed Marion. "That's my husband!" So saying, Marion made a dive for the controls. But Suzy intercepted her. With a wrench. As Suzy swung the wrench, Marion threw up an arm. She took the blow on her forearm. The pain was staggering. She fell back, wet tears of agony leaping to her eyes. And Suzy was at the porthole, camera in hand, the camera making a machinegun clatter as it took shot after shot, as the Chronoclock began to vibrate, as the world around the time machine dissolved away. On the way back to the present, Suzy showed Marion the photographs. Marion studied the evidence, all the while holding an ice pack to her damaged forearm. You could see it plainly. As the Chronoclick powered up, the world around warped and fragmented. Her husband twisted into ghosts and was gone. It was as if he was converted to smoke then torn into pieces by a malicious blast of wind. "If this is for real," said Marion, her voice barely a whisper, "then how come nobody saw this before." "There are no secrets," said Suzy. "There are only things that we choose to see and things that we don't." "What's that supposed to mean?" said Marion. "You can see this kind of photograph on the Internet," said Suzy. "If you're really interested in finding out." "The Internet is notoriously unreliable," said Marion. "Don't you understand that?" "Oh, yes, I understand real well," said Suzy. "You've got an escape clause. The great Houdini." "Houdini?" said Marion, blankly. "Try Hitler, then," said Suzy. "That name might be a bit more familiar. We are Hitler. Don't you understand that?" This was so off-base that it made Marion furious. The fury was so violent that it overwhelmed even the pain. Marion's words came together, passionately coherent. "We are doing this for science!" "We used to do this," said Suzy. "But I think we're going to find that we've learnt better." |
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This story, "Basque", was first published in Challenging Destiny No. 11, December 2000 (St. Marys, Canada, ISSN 1206-6656) (pp 89-104; 5,139 words). It was first posted online in 2002. |
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