A Blink of the Screen Read online

  … when matins were done the congregation filed out to the yard. They were confronted by a marble block into which had been thrust a beautiful sword. The block was four feet square, and the sword passed through a steel anvil which had been struck in the stone, and which projected a foot from it. The anvil had been inscribed with letters of gold:

  WHOSO PULLETH OUTE THIS SWERD

  OF THIS STONE AND ANVYLD

  IS RIGHTWYS KYNGE

  BORNE OF ALL BRYTAYGNE.

  from Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

  The copper wire. It was the copper wire that gave me the trouble.

  It’s all down to copper wire. The old alchemists used to search for gold. If only they’d known what a man and a girl can do with copper wire …

  And a tide mill. And a couple of hefty bars of soft iron.

  And here I am now, with this ridiculous staff in one hand and the switch under my foot, waiting.

  I wish they wouldn’t call me Merlin. It’s Mervin. There was a Merlin, I’ve found out. A mad old guy who lived in Wales and died years ago. But there were legends about him, and they’re being welded on to me now. I reckon that happens all the time. Half the famous heroes of history are really lots of local guys all rolled into one by the ballad singers. Remember Robin Hood? Technically I suppose I can’t, because none of the rascals who went under that name will be born for several centuries yet, if he even is due to exist in this universe, so using the word remember is probably the wrong, you know, grammar. Can you remember something that hasn’t happened yet? I can. Nearly everything I can remember hasn’t happened yet, but that’s how it goes in the time-travel business. Gone today and here tomorrow …

  Oh, here comes another one of them. A strapping lad. Legs like four beer kegs stacked in pairs, shoulders like an ox. Brain like an ox, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Hand like a bunch of bananas, gripping the sword …

  Oh, no, my lad. You’re not the one. Grit your teeth all you like. You’re not the one.

  There he goes. His arm’ll be aching for days.

  You know, I suppose I’d better tell you about this place.

  About this time.

  Whenever it is …

  I had special training for time-travelling. The big problem, the big problem, is finding out when you are. Basically, when you step out of a time-machine you can’t rely on seeing a little sign that says, ‘Welcome to AD 500, Gateway to the Dark Ages, pop. 10 million and falling’. Sometimes you can’t even rely on finding anyone in a day’s march who knows what year it is, or what king is on the throne, or what a king is. So you learn to look at things like church architecture, the way the fields are farmed, the shape of the ploughshares, that sort of thing.

  Yeah, I know, you’ve seen films where there’s this dinky little alpha-numeric display that tells you exactly where you are …

  Forget it. It’s all dead reckoning in this game. Real primitive stuff. You start out by checking the constellations with a little gadget, because they tell me all the stars are moving around all the time and you can get a very rough idea of when you are just by looking through the thing and reading off along the calibrations. If you can’t even recognize the constellations, the best thing to do is run and hide, because something forty feet tall and covered with scales is probably hunting you already.

  Plus they give you a guide to various burned-out supernovas and Stofler’s Craters of the Moon by Estimated Creation Date. With any luck you can pinpoint yourself fifty years either way. Then it’s just a matter of checking planetary positions for the fine tuning. Try to imagine sea navigation around the time of, oh, Columbus. A bit hit-or-miss, yeah? Well, time navigation is just about at the same level.

  Everyone said I must be one great wizard to spend so much time studying the sky.

  That’s because I was trying to find out when I was.

  Because the sky tells me I’m around AD 500. So why is the architecture Norman and the armour fifteenth-century?

  Hold on … here comes another one …

  Well, not your actual Einstein, but it could be … oh, no, look at that grip, look at that rage … no. He’s not the one. Not him.

  Sorry about that.

  So … right … where was I? Memory like a sieve these days.

  Yeah, the architecture. And everyone speaking a sort of Middle English, which was okay as it turned out because I can get by in that, having accidentally grounded in 1479 once. That was where I met John Gutenberg, father of modern printing. Tall man, bushy whiskers. Still owes me tuppence.

  Anyway. Back to this trip. It was obvious from the start that things weren’t quite right. This time they were supposed to be sending me to observe the crowning of Charlemagne in AD 800, and here I was in the wrong country and, according to the sky, about three centuries too soon. That’s the kind of thing that happens, like I said; it’s going to be at least fifty years before we get it right. Fifty-three years, actually, because I met this man in a bar in 1875 who’s from a hundred years in our future, and he told me. I told them at Base we might as well save a lot of effort by just, you know, bribing one of the future guys for the plans of the next model. They said if we violated the laws of Cause-and-Effect like that there’s a good chance the whole universe would suddenly catastrophically collapse into this tiny bubble .005 Ångstroms across, but I say it’s got to be worth a try.

  Anyway, the copper wire gave me a load of trouble.

  That’s not to say I’m an incompetent. I’m just an average guy in every respect except that I’m the one in ten thousand who can time-travel and still end up with all his marbles. It just gives me a slight headache. And I’m good at languages and I’m a very good observer, and you’d better believe I’ve observed some strange things. The Charlemagne coronation was going to be a vacation. It was my second visit, paid for by a bunch of historians in some university somewhere. I was going to check a few things that the guys who commissioned the first trip had raised after reading my report. I had it all worked out where I was going to stand so I wouldn’t see myself. I could probably have talked my way out of it even if I had met myself, at that. One thing you learn in this trade is the gift of the gab.

  And then a diode blew or a one turned out to be a zero and here I am, whenever this is.

  And I can’t get back.

  Anyway … what was I saying …

  Incidentally, the other problem with the copper wire is getting the insulation. In the end I wrapped it up in fine cloth and we painted every layer with some sort of varnish they use on their shields, which seems to have done the trick.

  And … hmm … you know, I think time-travelling affects the memory. Like, your memory subconsciously knows the things you’re remembering haven’t happened yet, and this upsets it in some way. There’s whole bits of history I can’t remember. Wish I knew what they were.

  Excuse me a moment. Here’s another one. An oldish guy. Quite bright, by the look of him. Why, I bet he can probably write his own name. But, oh, I don’t know, he hasn’t got the …

  Hasn’t got the …

  Wish I knew what it was he hasn’t got …

  … charisma. Knew it was there somewhere.

  So. Anyway. Yeah. So there I was, three centuries adrift, and nothing working. Ever seen a time-machine? Probably not. The bit you move around is very, very hard to see, unless the light catches it just right. The actual works are back at Base and at the same time in the machine, so you travel in something like a mechanical ghost, something like what’s left of a machine when you take all the parts away. An idea of a machine.

  Think of it as a big crystal. That’s what it’d look like to you if, as I said, the light was right.

  Woke up in what I suppose I’ve got to call a bed. Just straw and heather with a blanket made of itches woven together. And there was this girl trying to feed me soup. Don’t even try to imagine medieval soup. It’s made of all the stuff they wouldn’t eat if it was on a plate and believe me, they’d eat stuff you’d hate to put in
a hamburger.

  I’d been there, I found out later, for three days. I didn’t even know I’d arrived. I’d been wandering around in the woods, half-conscious and dribbling. A side-effect of the travelling. Like I said, normally I just get a migraine, but from what I can remember of that it was jet-lag times one million. If it had been winter I’d have been dead. If there’d been cliffs I would have thrown myself over one. As it was, I’d just walked into a few trees, and that was by accident. At least I’d avoided the wolves and bears. Or maybe they’d avoided me, maybe they think you die if you eat a crazy person.

  Her father was a woodcutter, or a charcoal burner, or one of those things. Never did find out, or perhaps I did and I’ve forgotten. He used to go out every day with an axe, I remember that. He’d found me and brought me home. I learned afterwards he thought I was a nobleman, because of my fine clothes. I was wearing Levi’s, that should give you some idea. He had two sons, and they went out every day with axes, too. Never really managed to strike up a conversation with either of them until after the father’s accident. Didn’t know enough about axes, I suppose.

  But Nimue … What a girl. She was only … er …

  ‘How old were you, when we met?’

  She wipes her hands on a bit of rag. We’d had to grease the bearings with pig fat.

  ‘Fifteen,’ she says. ‘I think. Listen, there’s another hour of water above the mill, but I don’t think the gennyrator will last that long. It’s shaking right merrily.’

  She looks speculatively at the nobles.

  ‘What a bunch of by-our-Lady jacks,’ she says.

  ‘Jocks.’

  ‘Yes. Jocks.’

  I shrug. ‘One of them will be your king,’ I tell her.

  ‘Not my king, Mervin. I will never have a king,’ she says, and grins.

  By which you can tell she’s learned a lot in twelve months. Yes, I broke the rules and told her the truth. And why not? I’ve broken all the rules to save this damn country, and it doesn’t look like the universe is turning into this tiny ball .005 Ångstroms across. First, I don’t think this is our timeline. It’s all wrong, like I said. I think I was knocked sideways, into some sort of other history. Maybe a history that’ll never really exist except in people’s heads, because time-travel is a fantasy anyway. You hear mathematicians talk about imaginary numbers which are real, so I reckon this is an imaginary place made up of real things. Or something. How should I know? Perhaps enough people believing something makes it real.

  I’d ended up in Albion, although I didn’t find out until later. Not Britain, not England. A place very much like them, a place that shares a lot of things with them, a place so close to them that maybe ideas and stories leak across – but a place that is its own place.

  Only something went wrong somewhere. There was someone missing. There should have been a great king. You can fill in his name. He’s out there somewhere, in the crowd. It’s lucky for him I turned up.

  You want me to describe this world. You want to hear about the jousts, the pennants, the castles. Right. It’s got all of that. But everything else has this, like, thin film of mud over it. The difference between the average peasant’s hut and a pigsty is that a good farmer will sometimes change the straw in a pigsty. Now, get me right – no one’s doing any repressing, as far as I can see. There’s no slavery as such, except to tradition, but tradition wields a heavy lash. I mean, maybe democracy isn’t perfect, but at least we don’t let ourselves be outvoted by the dead.

  And since there’s no strong man in charge there’s a little would-be king in every valley, and he spends most of his time fighting other would-be kings, so the whole country is in a state of half-hearted war. And everyone goes through life proudly doing things clumsily just because their forefathers did them that way, and no one really enjoys anything, and good fields are filling with weeds …

  I told Nimue I came from another country, which was true enough.

  I talked to her a lot because she was the only one with any sense around the place. She was small, and skinny, and alert in the same way that a bird is alert. I said I broke the rules to save this country but if I’m honest, I’ll have to say I did it all for her. She was the one bright thing in a world of mud, she’s nice to have around, she learns quickly, and – well, I’ve seen what the women here look like by the time they’re thirty. That shouldn’t happen to anyone.

  She talked and she listened to me while she did the housework, if that’s what you can call moving the dirt around until it got lost.

  I told her about the future. Why not? What harm could it do? But she wasn’t very impressed. I guess she didn’t know enough to be impressed. Men on the moon were all one with the fairies and the saints. But piped water caught her interest, because every day she had to go to a spring with a couple of wooden buckets on a yoke thing round her neck.

  ‘Every cottage has this?’ she said, eyeing me carefully over the top of the broom.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Not just the rich?’

  ‘The rich have more bathrooms,’ I said. Then I had to explain about bathrooms.

  ‘You people could do it,’ I told her. ‘You just need to dam a spring up in the hills, and find a – a blacksmith or someone to make some copper pipes. Or lead or iron, at a pinch.’

  She looked wistful.

  ‘My father wouldn’t allow it,’ she said.

  ‘Surely he’d see the benefits of having water laid on?’ I suggested.

  She shrugged. ‘Why should he? He doesn’t carry it from the spring.’

  ‘Oh.’

  But she took to following me around, in what time there was between chores. It’s just as I’ve always said – women have always had a greater stake in technology than have men. We’d still be living in trees, otherwise. Piped water, electric lighting, stoves that you don’t need to shove wood into – I reckon that behind half the great inventors of history were their wives, nagging them into finding a cleaner way of doing the chores.

  Nimue trailed me like a spaniel as I tottered around their village, if you could use the term for a collection of huts that looked like something deposited in the last Ice Age, or possibly by a dinosaur with a really serious bowel problem. She even led me into the forest, where I finally found the machine in a thorn thicket. Totally un-repairable. The only hope was that someone might fetch me, if they ever worked out where I was. And I knew they never would, because if they ever did, they’d have been there already. Even if it took them ten years to work it out, they could still come back to the Here and Now. That’s the thing about time-travel; you’ve got all the time in the world.

  I was marooned.

  However, we experienced travellers always carry a little something to tide us over the bad times. I’d got a whole box of stuff under the seat. A few small gold ingots (acceptable everywhere, like the very best credit cards). Pepper (worth more than gold for hundreds of years). Aluminium (a rare and precious metal in the days before cheap and plentiful electricity). And seeds. And pencils. Enough drugs to start a store. Don’t tell me about herbal remedies – people screamed down the centuries, trying to stop things like dental abscesses with any green junk that happened to be growing in the mud.

  She watched me owlishly while I sorted through the stuff and told her what it all did.

  And the next day her father cut his leg open with his axe. The brothers carried him home. I stitched him up and, with her eyes on me, treated the wound. A week later he was walking around again, instead of being a cripple at best or most likely a gangrenous corpse, and I was a hero. Or, rather, since I didn’t have the muscles for a hero, obviously a wizard.

  I was mad to act like that. You’re not supposed to meddle. But what the hell. I was marooned. I was never going home. I didn’t care. And I could cure, which is almost as powerful as being able to kill. I taught hygiene. I taught them about turnips, and running water, and basic medicine.

  The boss of the valley was a decent enough old knight called Sir Ec
tor. Nimue knew him, which surprised me, but shouldn’t have. The old boy was only one step up from his peasants, and seemed to know them all, and wasn’t much richer than they were except that history had left him with a crumbling castle and a suit of rusty armour. Nimue went up to the castle one day a week to be a kind of lady’s maid for his daughter.

  After I pulled the bad teeth that had been making his life agony, old Ector swore eternal friendship and gave me the run of the place. I met his son Kay, a big hearty lad with the muscles of an ox and possibly the brains of one, and there was this daughter to whom no one seemed to want to introduce me properly, perhaps because she was very attractive in a quiet kind of way. She had one of those stares that seem to be reading the inside of your skull. She and Nimue got along like sisters. Like sisters that get along well, I mean.

  I became a big man in the neighbourhood. It’s amazing the impression you can make with a handful of medicines, some basic science, and a good line in bull.

  Poor old Merlin had left a hole which I filled like water in a cup. There wasn’t a man in the country who wouldn’t listen to me.

  And whenever she had a spare moment Nimue followed me, watching like an owl.

  I suppose at the time I had some dream, like the Connecticut Yankee, of single-handedly driving the society into the twentieth century.

  You might as well try pushing the sea with a broom.

  ‘But they do what you tell them,’ Nimue said. She was helping me in the lab at the time, I think. I call it the lab, it was just a room in the castle. I was trying to make penicillin.

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ I told her. ‘And what good is that? The moment I turn my back, they go back to the same old ways.’

  ‘I thought you told me a dimocracy was where people did what they wanted to do,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a democracy,’ I said. ‘And it’s fine for people to do what they want to do, provided they do what’s right.’

  She bit her lip thoughtfully. ‘That does not sound sensible.’

  ‘That’s how it works.’