The Science-Fantasy Megapack: 25 Classic Tales from Fantasy Adventures

THE TAPESTRY OF TIME, by Eric Brown

That spring, with winter well past and summer on the way, I decided that the time had come to visit Simon Cauldwell.

I had delayed our meeting for a number of reasons, some obvious but others hidden in the depths of my psyche: fear, of course, was dominant I didn’t want to confront Cauldwell with my findings for fear of what I might learn.

I was forty-five, happily married with a ten-year-old daughter, and I held a secure post as a senior lecturer in medieval archaeology at Oxford. I had reached the stage in my life at which I was confident that the future would hold no surprises. Perhaps I was complacent.

Fiona guessed that something was amiss. One evening in April she appeared at the door of my study. She must have been watching me for a while before I looked up and noticed her.

I smiled, tired.

“It’s that skull, isn’t it?”

I massaged my eyes. “What is?” I said, not for the first time amazed at my wife’s perspicacity.

“Dan, ever since you found the thing, you’ve been different. Morose withdrawn. If I believed in that kind of thing, I’d say it was cursed “

I managed to smile. “It’s not cursed,” I said. “Just misplaced. The skeleton was found with artefacts that date from a hundred years later. “

She pushed herself from the jamb of the door and kissed the top of my head.

I said, “The paper I’m writing, trying to explain the anomaly, just isn’t working.…”

“I’m sorry, Dan. Dinner in ten minutes, okay?” She kissed me again and left the room.

Whenever I lied to Fiona, which wasn’t often, I always wondered if she’d seen through me.

Misplaced artefacts, indeed.…

The truth was far more perplexing, and worrying, than that.

A few days later I e-mailed Cauldwell, telling him that I’d had second thoughts about his offer.

He phoned later that afternoon. “Dan, so persistence pays off! You’ve seen sense at last. Good man. Look, when’s convenient for you?”

“I’m free all this week.”

“Excellent. Come over to the research station and I’ll show you around the place. It’s all hush-hush, of course. Top secret and all that.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Tomorrow at one suit? Excellent, see you then.”

I replaced the phone, very aware of my thudding heartbeat. There was no turning back, now.

The headquarters of Sigma Research Inc. was buried away in the Oxfordshire countryside, miles away from the prying eyes of bustling Oxford.

I drove slowly through the tortuous, leafy lanes, considering my imminent meeting with Cauldwell and, despite myself, reviewing my dealings with the man. Despite the tone of bonhomie he had affected on the phone the day before, we had always been sworn rivals. Not to put too fine a point on if I detested him.

He had been one of those old-fashioned academics ensconced in a sinecure at Oxford’s richest and most conservative college. His resistance to theory, his inability to see the worth of research ideologically opposed to his own narrow views, had won him many enemies. Much to the surprise and envy of his colleagues, last year he had been headhunted by Sigma Research, a big American outfit with a lot of dollars and a market-led excavation theory.

A few months after Cauldwell left Oxford, I discovered the eleventh-century skull at a dig near the village of Sheppey, Herefordshire.

And a couple of days after that, Cauldwell himself phoned to invite me to join his team at Sigma Research. More than a little suspicious, I had told him I was quite happy at Oxford, thanks all the same.

Now I was following up his invitation — purely in the interests of research, of course.

Cauldwell met me in a plush reception area resplendent with thick crimson carpet and a jungle of potted-palms. It looked more like the foyer of a multi-national bank than the reception area of a private archaeological company.

He came smiling towards me, hand outstretched. “Dan, so pleased.…”

Everything about him was big. He had a big, square head on big, wide shoulders. Even at college his dress had been eccentric: now he wore a loud shirt with a pattern a la Pollock, a pair of those ridiculous knee-length khaki shorts, and sandals from which his big, bare toes protruded obscenely.

He passed me a small plastic identity card. Next to an entwined SR was my name, and above it a small photograph he’d obviously downloaded from the college website.

“Follow me. I’ll give you the tour. You’re privileged, of course. Not every Tom, Dick or Harry gets this. Just prospective employees.”

I followed, not a little disgruntled at his assumption that I would be impressed.

He showed me into his office, a spacious area with few books but the latest computer technology.

What took my attention, however, was the plate glass window at the back of the room. It looked out over a big sunken chamber in which a dozen white-coated scientists were working at terminals.

He was saying, “I didn’t know what research was till I began working for Sigma, Dan. I take it you read my last paper in Historical Review?”

I nodded, I had been impressed, despite myself.

Cauldwell smiled. “Ground-breaking, even if I do say so myself. Less to do with me than with the work of my team.” He gestured through the glass at his ‘team’.

I glanced at him. Such modesty was not usually his forte.

“Come, I’ll show you the working end of the business.”

He led me through a door and down a flight of steps into the sunken chamber.

Even at this stage, of course, I had my suspicions.

The chamber looked like the futuristic set of some sci-fi blockbuster: ranked computer terminals and banks of silver devices like lasers. At the far end of the room, however, and seeming out of place, was a tall, arched aperture that resembled nothing so much as a stained glass window.

I stared, surprised, for that was what I had assumed it to be: a stained glass window, however inappropriate that might be in this secular setting.

Closer inspection revealed a rectangle of polychromatic tesserae, constantly shifting.

A woman in a white lab-coat came up to Cauldwell and passed him a small com-screen.

She smiled at me.

“Sally,” I said. Would the surprises never end?

“Dan, fancy meeting you here.£

“I was about to say the same!”

Sally Reichs had been one of the finest post-grad students to come out of Oxford in years. By her mid-thirties, she’d written a couple of far-sighted books on her subject, the metallurgy of Anglo-Saxon Britain — and then disappeared from the scene.

Now I knew why. Headhunted.

The odd thing was, she had professed an intense dislike of Simon Cauldwell while they were both working in the archaeology department at Oxford. More than once she had confided to me that she found his views, both professional and personal, detestable.

She must have seen my confusion. She gave me a look — a lop-sided, almost resigned smile — which signalled that she would tell me all at some point.

“Sal’s quite brilliant,” Cauldwell said as she returned to her terminal. “But of course you know that.”

I ignored him, and gestured at the multi-coloured screen at the far end of the chamber. A low hum, almost on the threshold of audibility, filled the air — along with what felt like a static charge.

I guessed, of course, but even then never really believed that my guess was correct.

Cauldwell gestured, and we walked along an aisle between ranked terminals.

We paused beneath the aperture — it was perhaps three metres high — like supplicants.

Cauldwell said, “Did you wonder how I came to write such a revolutionary paper?”

I looked at him. “It wasn’t quite what I’ve come to expect from you,” I said.

He smiled at that. “Ah, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

A question caught in my throat. i was suddenly aware that I was sweating. “Tell me what’s going on here,” I almost pleaded.

Cauldwell nodded, not looking at me but staring at the shifting patterns on the surface of the screen. Seen closer to, the colours had about them the slick sheen sometimes seen on petroleum.

“What do you know about quantum physics, Dan?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I admitted.

“Planck theory? Gupta’s updating of Einstein?” He waved away mv admission of ignorance. “No matter. Theory isn’t required — merely the appreciation of the end result.”

“Which is?”

He paused, then said, “Sigma Research has managed to break down the barriers that have hitherto prevented our access to other times.”

He stopped there and looked at me, smiling. The word smug might have been coined to describe his self-satisfied expression.

“They do it with super-conducted tachyons and hyper-charged baryonic particles — I know, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either. The result, at any rate, is a passage into the past, though never into the future. Once a month — as the expenditure of energy is prohibitively high — very briefly the portal is opened: three months ago onto 1050, last month 1052. We’re going for 1054 in a few days from now.”

I had known all along, of course. At least I told myself as much. How else to explain the anomaly of the skull?

I considered telling Cauldwell about my discovery, but something stopped me.

He was saying, “The only real problem, Dan, is that we can’t open the portal onto any time more than once. For the period of a year, the tachyon vectors specific to that time are seriously weakened and won’t support passage. I mean, it would be wonderful to revisit specific times, but alas that’s impossible.”

I stared at him. “You mean, you actually visit, physically visit, these times?”

He nodded, smug again. “We do, though only for strictly allotted periods of up to thirty minutes. The power-drain, you see.…”

I nodded, as if he had been explaining the cost of running an expensive car.

“At any rate, it would be superfluous to explain quite what a benefit to historical understanding this breakthrough has been.…” Nevertheless, unable to pass up the opportunity for a lecture, Cauldwell proceeded to tell me all about his latest discoveries.

He conducted me around the chamber, interleaving his historical lecture with complex scientific explanations.

One hour later I found myself back in his office.

Over a coffee, Cauldwell said, “So, Dan, let me at last get to purpose of showing you around. Despite our differences, I respect your work. I think you could be a great asset to my team here at Sigma Research.”

He passed a folder across the desk. “A contract. I think you’ll find it more than a little enticing. Of course, I don’t want an immediate answer. Go away and think about it for a few days. You have my e-mail if you have any questions.”

A little later, he rose and shook my hand.

I made to return the ID he had given me.

“Keep if Dan,” he said. “You’ll need it, if you do decide to join the team.”

I emerged into the bright summer sunlight not a little dazed — a few questions answered, of course, but others remaining tantalizingly opaque.

I drove slowly home, and decided that I would tell Fiona everything when I returned. It would help to talk, and her insight might shed light on aspects of the situation I was too blind to perceive.

That evening, over dinner, I told Fiona about my discovery of the skull and my subsequent investigations, then Cauldwell’s offering me a job and showing me around the Sigma Research station.

She pushed her glass of wine aside and stared at me. “But…I mean, are you sure the bullet—”

I interrupted, “Of course I’m sure. The bullet passed through the left orbit and scoured a groove around the back of the skull. Death would have been instantaneous. The groove had aged over the centuries — it hadn’t been made recently.”

“But how would that be possible in the eleventh century? Perhaps it wasn’t a bullet.”

“It was. I found it lodged in the nasal cavity, eroded but recognizably a modern.02 bullet.”

Fiona shook her head. “So this time-travel device at Sigma research.… It must be connected, right? Someone goes back to that time — to, when was it, the 1070s? — and shoots dead some poor bloody innocent Anglo-Saxon.…”

I massaged my eyes, wearily “Fiona, there’s more.” I ordered my thoughts. “Although the skull dated from that time, circa 1070, it was the skull of a modern man.”

“You aren’t making sense, Dan!”

“Its upper jaw showed signs of contemporary dental work. A couple of fillings.…”

Fiona nodded. “So it was someone from the research team who travelled back in time and was shot dead?”

“That’s what happened. I made enquiries, accessed dental records. I found out who the skull belonged to.”

She stared at me. “Whose, Dan?”

“Simon Cauldwell’s.” I said. “That isn’t all.” I swept on. “I consulted a ballistics expert, and from the bullet I found in the skull we identified the weapon used to kill Cauldwell.”

She opened her mouth. I think she knew what was coming.

Last year, after a spate of violent robberies in the area, I had insisted that we purchase a pistol for the times when Fiona would be alone in the house.

“Not ours?” she said in barely a whisper.

I nodded. “Ours.”

We went through all the possibilities over the course of the next hour or two. Did I kill Simon Cauldwell when I accepted the offered post and traveled back in time with him to the eleventh century? Why would I do such a thing? Granted, I didn’t like the man — but I would never dream of shooting him dead.

And anyway, I had no intention of accepting his offer. Despite the amazing possibilities opened up by Sigma Research’s temporal breakthrough, I could not see myself as some kind of Wellsian time-traveller.

But the fact remained — Cauldwell was shot dead, at some point in the eleventh century, with my pistol.

We went to bed late that night, and Fiona held me and made me promise that I would not take the Sigma post.

I promised…and tried to sleep, but my mind was full of temporal causality and paradox, and I passed a fitful night.

Fiona was out at yoga the following evening when the doorbell chimed.

I made my way from the study and pulled open the front door.

Sally Reichs stood in the April shower, looking determined.

“Sally, what on Earth—?”

“I’m sorry. I had to see someone. It’s important. I thought of you — I knew you’d listen.” She stared at me, as if challenging me to deny her access.

“Of course, come in.”

Bemused, I led her through the house to my study and sat her in the leather chair behind my desk. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Something stronger?”

“You don’t happen to have a brandy?”

“On its way.”

I fixed a double Remi Martin in the lounge, and one for myself, and ferried them back to the study.

Sally was drying her face with a tissue. She took a breath, composing herself.

I sat on the armchair beside the desk and said, “Now, how can I help?”

“I can’t confide in friends. They’d hardly believe me if l told them about what’s going on at Sigma Research. Then I thought of you — Cauldwell’s trying to recruit you, right?”

“He did ask if I’d like to join his team, yes.”

“Don’t!” Her vehemence was surprising. “I mean, you don’t know what it’s like. Cauldwell isn’t sane—”

“Sally, slow down. Take it easy. Now, what do you mean?”

She took a deep breath. “I’ve been back with him on two sorties now, to 1050 and 1052. They were mainly reconnaissance, observation.”

I nodded, amazed at my calm reaction to something so amazing as this casual talk of time travel.…

“And?”

“He wants to conduct an experiment. He has a theory — something to do with causality. Quantum physics. String theory. I don’t honestly understand, but he thinks that there’s more to existence than just this reality. He thinks that this world is one of an infinite number of similar worlds, and that every event in history somehow creates new, divergent time-lines — in effect, new realities, new worlds.”

I vaguely recalled watching an episode of Horizon on TV about something similar, though it had gone way over my head at the time.

“And Simon intends…?” I began.

Sally nodded. “He wants to do something back there that would prove the theory one way or another. Maybe introduce an invention, something the Anglo Saxons didn’t have back then. I don’t know.… But you see, I’m afraid that if he does go through with it.…” She paused there, staring at me.

“If he did this, and it changed things.… Christ, I can’t work it out. If he did change things, would that mean we’d be changed, this reality? Or would it mean that we’d simply go on as before, but that another reality would spring into existence, diverging from his intervention in the eleventh century?”

l stared at her, my head spinning. “If his theory of multiple realities is correct, then his intervention would merely create just another reality. But if he’s wrong, if there’s only one reality.…” I pressed my temple, trying to work through the logic, “then wouldn’t that mean that if he did make a change, then things would change here, too?”

Sally smiled. “But if his intervention back then changed the future, our present — then possibly Sigma Research might never come into being. But then how would he have been able to travel back to make the change!”

“The irresolvable paradox,” I murmured.

She nodded. “But do you see why he has to be stopped? If there is only one reality, and he changes it…then who knows what chaos he might wreak on our time!”

I said, “Tell the high-ups at Sigma, okay? They won’t let him go through with it.”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll do that. We’re activating the interface to 1054 tonight, at midnight. I’ll talk to someone before we go.”

I fetched Sally another brandy, and we went through the mind-bending complexities of the situation once again. Towards ten o’clock, as she made to leave, I urged her again to confide in her superiors at Sigma.

At the door she gave me a quick hug, and ran out into the rain.

I watched her scarlet Renault speed into the night, then made my way back to the study. I fixed myself another brandy and sat for an hour, going over what Sally had said and trying to untangle the convoluted skein of paradox with which she had presented me.

I should have made the connection earlier, of course, Perhaps the alcohol had dulled my senses.

Belatedly, I stood and crossed to the bookshelf where, next to the skull, I had kept the pistol.

It was not there, of course. In the time I had taken to fetch Sally a brandy, she had seen the pistol…the answer to her dilemma.

I hurried from the house and drove away at speed, though I knew the pursuit was futile. Sally had more than an hour on me, and, anyway, wasn’t Simon Cauldwell’s death pre-ordained, a fact ineluctably woven into the tapestry of time?

I reached the Sigma Research station at twenty minutes after midnight.

I flashed the ID Cauldwell had given me at the bored security guard on reception and made my way into the chamber.

The scene through the interface stopped me in my tracks.

The portal framed a vivid sunrise over rolling hills, with a wattle-and-daub village in the middle-ground. As I watched, transfixed, the scene shimmered like a heat haze.

“They should be back by now!” a technician called.

I walked forward, unnoticed by the white-coated staff who had their attention on more pressing matters. We gazed up at the shimmering scene as if in awe.

“Communication’s down!” someone called. “We’ve lost contact. If they don’t get back.…” She left the sentence unfinished.

“I can’t hold it any longer! It’s going!”

“They knew how long they had out there!” someone cried in despair.

The scene flickered, then. It stuttered like the image on a silent movie. It stabilized for a few seconds, showing the pristine, bucolic scene. Then the image winked out, to be replaced by the stained-glass effect of the interface in its deactivated phase.

The scene returned again — and I saw two small figures in the distance. They were standing face to face on a hillside perhaps a hundred metres away, and I judged that if they had moved themselves to sprint towards the interface they might have reached safety before the final shutdown.

But it appeared that they had other concerns. They faced each other in obvious confrontation, gesticulating: one figure moved forward, attempted to grab the other. Sally backed away, gesturing.

She reached for something in her jacket—

And the interface closed for the very last time.

The aperture could not be opened to exactly the same period, of course: no miraculous rescue of the time-travelers could be affected, for now.

A technician tried to calm his colleagues. He said that in the morning they would attempt to open the portal to the closest time possible to 1054, which would be 1056.

He was confident that Cauldwell and Reichs would be awaiting salvation.…

Only I knew that only Reichs would be waiting.

I was wrong, as it happened.

Sally Reichs never returned to the twenty-first century. The disappearance of Cauldwell and Reichs was reported in the Oxford papers, briefly picked up by the national dailies, and then quietly forgotten.

Later that year I read that Sigma Research was closing its British base and relocating to the States, and I assumed that that would be the end of the affair.

A year after their disappearance, I received a call from my deputy at the dig near Sheppey.

They had, she said, made a truly astounding discovery.

I drove out to the site in record time, and beheld with wonder the shallow pit which cradled the skeleton of a woman judged to be in her seventies — old for the Middle Ages. And the truly astounding discovery?

In a clay amphora wedged beside the corpse was a crude paper scroll, covered in minute handwriting.

The script, of course, was in contemporary English.

The following night I sat with Fiona in the conservatory, drank a glass of red wine and read a copy of Sally Reichs’ eleventh-century journal.

I stared through the conservatory window and considered Sally Reichs. I tried to decide if she was a fool or a hero, whether she had unjustifiably killed Simon Cauldwell on irrational grounds, or if her premeditated murder had indeed saved the future from some unknowable chronic catastrophe.…

Outside, the sun went down in a blaze of crimson glory.