Ash: A Secret History (154 page)

Subject: Ash

Date:    15/12/00 at 03.23 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I know. It seems unbelievable. But it appears to be nothing less than the truth. No previous survey shows this sea trench. Not before we started looking here.

Isobel brought one of the tech people to the meeting I’ve just come out of, and showed us downloaded satellite surveys. Not that there are many, the Tunisian military being as sensitive as any other military – but what we have are unambiguous.

Shallow water here. No deep trenches below the 1000-metre mark.

And yet, our ROVs are down there now, as I’m typing this.

I don’t like this, Anna. The Middle East and the Mediterranean have been far too closely surveyed to say, now, that this could all be down to lost or misinterpreted evidence, distorted analysis, fake documents, or fraud.

I cannot genuinely deny this. According to recent satellite scans, and according to British Admiralty charts, the seabed where we found the trench used to be flat. Not silt, not a trench; nothing but rock. God knows, given the submarine warfare in the Mediterranean sixty years ago, the Admiralty charts are pretty substantive! It isn’t a geological feature anyone could have missed.

I have just suggested, in Isobel’s meeting, that we look for seismograph readings: there may have been a recent earthquake. She tells me that’s what she’s been doing over the last ten days: pulling in all the favours she has with various colleagues, to check the most up-to-date satellite reports and geological surveys.

No earthquake. Not so much as an undersea tremor.

I’ll post to you again when I have had some time to think this over – it’s only been a few hours since Isobel called her meeting; she and her physicist colleagues are still at it, talking into the small hours of the morning.

I went up on deck. Looked into blackness, tasted wet air. Tried to come to terms with this idea – a hundred ideas going around in my own mind – no: I’m not making sense.

One line of Florian’s haunts me. Mediaeval Latin translation can be hell – is ‘dn’ an abbreviation for _dominus_ or _
domina
_: masculine or feminine? Or it is in fact ‘dm’, for _deum_? Context is all, handwriting is all; and even then a sentence may have two or three perfectly viable different translations, only *one* of which is what the author wrote!

I _know_ the ‘hand’ of Fraxinus/Sible Hedingham: I have for eight years. I can’t realistically make it read anything else.

What Floria says *is* “You hunted a myth. I made it real.”

– Pierce

  Message: #199 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    15/12/00 at 05.14 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

_Physicists_?

Just checked back in your mailings, and yes, you did mention this before. I missed it. Why has an archaeologist like Dr Isobel got physicists with her? Is it purely a ‘social’ visit, Pierce? It doesn’t look like it.

I really don’t want to ask this, but I need her to mail me to confirm what you’re saying.

I wouldn’t take one person’s word for this. Not even my mother’s.

– Anna

  Message: #365 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    15/12/00 at 06.05 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

The physicists? Tami Inoshishi and James Howlett: Isobel’s friends from artificial intelligence and theoretical physics. I suppose they’re here quasi-unofficially, at her request? They’ve been offering help to the expedition – they desperately want to get the Stone Golem up, and off-site, for examination – tests at CERN, the whole works.

I’ve been trying to talk to them, but they’re astonishingly dismissive. Or perhaps preoccupied. The strange thing is that Ms Inoshishi isn’t at all interested in the concept that the machina rei militaris may be a primitive ‘computer’ of some sort, and Howlett isn’t really interested in the golems that we found at the land-site.

What they *are* interested in are my chronicle texts, and the seabed surveys.

They seem very interested in the concept of evidence changing.

What I find disturbing, I suppose, is that when I speculate that the nature of the del Guiz and Angelotti documentary evidence may have undergone some kind of a _genuine_ change, they take me seriously.

Talk to me, Anna. You’re a person who’s not here, not caught up in the enthusiasm. Do I sound mad to you?

– Pierce

  Message: #202 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    15/12/00 at 06.10 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

*Are* Ms Inoshishi and Mr Howlett there in an official capacity? It sounds as though they are colleagues of Dr Napier-Grant there in a private capacity. Is she going to report back to her university soon? What’s going to happen _officially_?

Pierce – what do _you_ think of all this? My head is spinning.

– Anna

  Message: #372 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    15/12/00 at 08.12 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I don’t think. I have nothing like enough evidence as yet to allow me to think.

Anything else would be unfounded speculation.

I’m going to be busy with the people here; I will get back to you as soon as I can.

And I’m going to continue translating.

I have a further section of reasonably adequately translated material from the Sible Hedingham ms, I’ll attach the files with this message.

I need to resolve some of the apparent anomalies in the next part of the text. I feel that I cannot say anything definite until the whole of the Sible Hedingham ms has been translated.

– Pierce

  Message: #204 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    15/12/00 at 10.38 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Enough shit, Pierce (pardon my French). Enough havering, enough sitting on the fence–

You’ve got Dr Isobel’s friends there on the ship, she obviously thought it was important enough to call scientists in; there are maps that don’t show the site you’ve found on the seabed; Pierce, _what do you believe is happening_?

Enough academic caution. Tell me. Now.

– Anna

  Message: #376 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    15/12/00 at 11.13 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I am forced to believe a whole series of self-contradictory facts.

– That the Angelotti and del Guiz texts have been classified as ‘Fiction’ for the past fifty years – and yet, Anna, when I last consulted them a few months ago, they were shelved under normal Late Mediaeval History.

– That the ‘Fraxinus’ text is a genuine fifteenth-century biography of Ash, that has enabled us to find evidence of post-Roman technology in a ‘Visigoth’ settlement, and the ruins of a ‘Carthage’, on the Mediterranean seabed – and yet, that when we study the previous sixty years of surveys, there is no geological feature on that seabed that matches the one we have found. And there has been no recent seismic activity that could have produced it.

– That a ‘messenger-golem’ with wear-marks _on the soles of its feet_ can be classified, by a reputable department of metallurgy, as a fake made after 1945 – and now as a genuine artefact with its bronze cast between five and six centuries ago.

Because I’ve now actually seen the report, Anna. What they’re presenting isn’t an apology for a mistake.