Ash: A Secret History (219 page)

This fourth edition of the ‘Ash’ papers is intended to set the record straight on the background to Project Carthage. The course of the project, and the various findings it has released over the past nine years, are too well known to be repeated at length here. We now have a staff of over five hundred people, with more due to be taken on. Next year, on our tenth anniversary, I plan to publish a history of the Project.

I intend the preliminary publication of these papers both to present the background to Project Carthage, and to provide a conclusion to the ‘Ash’ narrative – in so far as there can be a conclusion.

It took me the better part of two years to work out what we should be looking for.

Protracted UN negotiations with the Tunisian government allowed a team of scientists back on site at the seabed ruins of Carthage, working with the Institute at Tunis itself. The artefacts have since been subjected to extremely intense analysis, both there and abroad. (We were robbed of our Russian and Chinese members by the Sino-Russian ‘Millennium War’ of 2003-2005; but thankfully they have since returned.)

At the same time, the history of the ‘Visigoth Empire’ became more and more apparent in documentation stretching from the 1400s to the late nineteenth century. A fascinating paper by a historian from the University of Alexandria detailed how the Iberian Gothic tribes after
AD
416 maintained a settlement on the North African coast, and were later integrated into Arab culture (in a process akin to the later crusaders’ ‘Latin Kingdoms of the East’).

Traces of the invasion of Christendom have been excavated outside Genoa, in northern Italy, where there appears to have been a considerable battle.

The universe receives, into its interstices, the instances of the ‘first history’ which it can comfortably accommodate. There are discrepancies: there always will be. The universe is hugely complex, even in the ‘local conditions’ that are what we as a species perceive.

This reintegration of the first and second histories was observed by all of us on the Project, and took place roughly from 2000 to 2005, with the greatest concentration of activity in the 2002-2003 period. That the failure of ‘Lost Burgundy’ should result in a kind of historical debris being swept back into our reality was not, we thought, theoretically impossible. Indeed, here it was, with more appearing every day. More evidence – undeniable,
factual
evidence – that had not been there the day before.

We lived, in those early days of the millennium, in the daily expectation of the world crumbling away under our feet. It was not unusual to wake, every day, and wonder, before one opened one’s eyes, if one was the same person as the day before. All of us on ‘Project Carthage’ bonded closely, in almost a wartime mentality.

I wrote, in 2001, that we were not fit to be gods. Any study of history may convince the student that we are barely fit to be human beings. At the end of a century of unparalleled massacre and holocaust, we knew, on Project Carthage, that there are worse things possible. Given the power to manipulate probability, a vision of holocaust and high-tech war haunted us: human cruelty carried to an infinitely high degree. Endless human degradation, suffering, dread and death. If this is what the ‘Wild Machine’ silicon intelligences predicted, then their refusal to let it come into existence can only be seen as a moral act.

At Project Carthage, we knew we were the front-line troops in the war against unreality: either we would find some way to stabilise ‘Burgundy’, or we would – if not now, then twenty or two hundred years in the future – find wars of improbability sweeping away the fabric of the universe.

As a historian, I led the team responsible for documenting the return of the first history. By 2002, I had realised that each of the occurrences that I was documenting was possible. As I said in conversation with Isobel Napier-Grant on the net,

>> The artefacts that are appearing are no less

>> rational than one might demand of a causal universe.

>> We have a ruined Carthage, five hundred years old. We

>> do not have a fifteenth-century Carthage appearing in

>> present-day Tunisia, full of Visigoths – or alien

>> visitors, or something human senses cannot perceive.

>> It is Carthage
as it would have been now
, had the

>> first history continued on from 1477.

Plainly, what was reintegrating itself into reality was
possible
events,
possible
artefacts,
probable
history. No miracles.

No miracles.

It took me nearly seven years to find her.

I had my hunch in the summer of the year 2002. The arc of the moment – that five-hundred-year eternity in a Burgundy made both mythic, and more real than reality – was ending. We would be unprotected; should be subject now to increasing truly random phenomena. And yet, plainly, the coherence of the universe we perceive had
not
degraded between 2001 and 2002.

Lost Burgundy
must
have failed or be failing: how else to account for the reappearance of so much ‘Burgundian’ history? But how to account for the
stability
of that reappearance? The autonomic reflexes of the species-mind, collapsing the wavefront to coherent reality? Undoubtedly; but that could not account for all. The theoretical physicists at this time lived in daily horror of the potential instabilities they observed at sub-atomic levels. They monitored these randomnesses – which became coherent again.

It was a literal hunch. It came to me not long after the funeral of Professor Vaughan Davies – a man who lived to see the strange existence of his middle years analysed and confirmed, but who never restrained himself from a caustic remark until the day he died. (He said to me in a lucid moment of his final coma, “It is rather more interesting than I had anticipated. I doubt that
you
would understand it, however.”)

On the plane, flying home from his funeral with Isobel Napier-Grant, I suddenly said, “
People
come back.”

“Vaughan ‘came back’,” she said, “in that sense. Complete with ghost-history of his probable existence for his missing years. Are you suggesting it’s happened to someone else?”

“Has happened, or
will have
happened,” I said; and put myself on the course of my next seven years’ research. By the time Isobel left me to get the Fancy Rat cages from the rear of the plane, I had mapped out a potential programme.

In May of this year, I flew to Brussels, and the headquarters of the Reaction Rapid Force Unite. The military establishment is outside Brussels itself, in flat Belgian countryside; and I was driven out by a
Unite
driver, and provided with an interpreter – in a Pan-European armed force, this can still be a necessity.

I had been picturing it on the flight over. She would be in an office at HQ; modern, bright with the natural light of a spring day in Europe; maps on the walls. She would be wearing the uniform of a
Unite
officer. For some reason, despite the record I had in front of me, I pictured her as older: late twenties, early thirties.

I was driven to the edge of a pine forest, and escorted on foot up a rutted track in grey drizzle. The rain ceased after the first mile or so.

I found her calf-deep in mud, wearing fatigues and combat boots and a dull-red-coloured pullover. She looked up from the group of men at the back of a jeep, poring over a map, and grinned. I suppose I looked very wet. The sky was clearing overhead, to duck-egg blue, and the wind whipped her short hair across her eyes.

She had black hair, and brown eyes, and dark skin.

The RRFU had given me permission to film and record: I had done this on several previous occasions, when it proved to be the wrong woman. On this occasion, I almost switched off the shoulder-cam and terminated the interview there and then.

“Sorry about this,” she said cheerfully, walking over to me. “Damn exercises. It’s supposed to be good for efficiency if we have them without warning. Rapid deployment. You’re Professor Ratcliff, yes?”

She had a slight accent. A tall woman, with broad shoulders, and a major’s insignia. The spring sunlight showed faint silvery lines on her right cheek. And on the other side of her face.

“I’m Ratcliff,” I said, to the woman who looked nothing like the manuscript descriptions; and on impulse added: “Where is your twin, Major?”
⁷

The woman was Arab-looking in appearance, in a RRFU major’s uniform, with an expansive way of taking up her personal space – a presence. She put her muddy fists on her hips and grinned at me. There was a pistol at her belt. Her face lit up. I
knew.

“She’s in Dusseldorf. Married to a German businessman from Bavaria. When I’m on leave, apparently, I visit. The kids like me.”

One of the men by the jeep hailed her. “Major!”

He had a radio mike in his hand. A man with sergeant’s stripes; in his late thirties or early forties, bald under his beret; in a uniform that looked as though it had seen use. He had the look that sergeants have: that nothing is impossible to do, and that no senior officer knows enough to change his own nappy.

“Brigadier wants you, boss,” he said briefly.

“Tell Brigadier Oxford I’ll get right back to him. Tell him I’m up a tree or something! Tell him he’ll have to wait!”

“He’ll love that one, boss.”

“Into each life,” she announced, with cheerful vindictiveness, “a bloody great amount of rain must fall. His damn fault for staging the exercise. Professor, I’ve got a flask of hot coffee; you look as though you could use it.”

I followed her to the front of the jeep, dazed, thinking,
It is. It
is
her. How can it be?
And then:
Of course. The Visigoths are – have been
–
integrated into Arab culture after the defeat of Carthage. And Ash was never European by race.

“What’s your sergeant’s name?” I said, after drinking the sweet, strong brew.

“Sergeant Anselm,” she said, with a grave, dead-pan humour, as if she and I shared a joke that no one else in the world understood. “My brigadier is an English officer, John Oxford. The men call him Mad Jack Oxford. My name—” she jerked a thumb at her name-tag on her fatigue jacket. “—is Asche.”

“You don’t look German.”

“My ex-husband’s name, apparently.” She still had the smile of someone with a secret joke.

“You’ve been married?” I was momentarily startled. She
didn’t
look more than nineteen or twenty.

“Fernando von Asche. A Bavarian. An ex-cavalry officer. It seems that he married my sister, after our divorce; I kept the name. Doctor Ratcliff, the wire said you wanted to ask me a whole lot of questions. This isn’t the time: I’ve got manoeuvres to run. But you can satisfy me about one thing. What gives you the right to ask me questions about anything at all?”

She watched me. She was not uncomfortable with the silence.

“Burgundy,” I said. “Burgundy is now a part of the human species-mind. Bedded in so solidly, if you like, that the ‘ghost-past’ arising out of the fracture can fall away into improbability. Our first past is returning. Your true history.”

Major Asche took the steel flask and drank from it. She wiped her mouth, her dark eyes still fixed on me. The wind moved her short hair against her scarred cheeks.

“I’m not history,” she pointed out mildly. “I’m here.”

“You are now.”

She continued to watch me. Somewhere back in the woods, shots cracked. She glanced back at Sergeant Anselm, who held up a reassuring hand. She nodded. Far out on the muddy plain, hover-tanks nosed into view.

I asked, “How long have you been here?”

Raised eyebrows. A slantwise look. “About two days. For the duration of this, I’m stuck in a military tent about two miles
that
way.”

“That isn’t what I mean. Or perhaps it is.” I called up data on my wristpad, and read through it, slowly. It was sparse. “I think you have a ‘ghost-history’, if I can put it that way. You’re very young to have achieved the rank of major. But war is a time of rapid promotions. You grew up in Afghanistan, under the Taliban. Their attitude to women is – mediaeval. You joined resistance forces, learned to fight; and when that was crushed, you joined the bushwars on the borders. There, all that was necessary was that you be able to lead. To command. By the time you were sixteen, they’d made you a captain. When the Eastern European forces united with the RRFU, you joined
Unite.
”

Net footage of the fighting along the Sino-Russian border is still clear in my mind.

“At the end of the Sino-Russian war, two years ago, you’d made major.” I looked up from the little wrist-screen and the scrolling data. “But I’m fully prepared to believe that you’ve only
been
here two days, in a military tent, in a field somewhere.”

Major Asche gave me a long look.

“Let’s walk.” She set off briskly. “Roberto! Where’s the fucking helicopters? Do they think we’re going to wait around here all day? We need to move up within the hour.”

As we passed him, Robert Anselm grinned at her. “Don’t fret, boss.”

The new grass was slippery underfoot. I was not wearing boots. Cold- and wet-footed, I quickened my stride to keep up with her. We passed a truck, unloading armed soldiers; and she stopped for a word with the corporal before moving on down the track.

“You get a mixed force in
Unité,
” she remarked. “That lot are mostly Welsh and English. I’ve got a gang of local Brussels lads; and a lot of East and West Germans. And a
lot
of Italians.”

She flicked a look at me out of the corner of her eye. There was still a quiet amusement in her expression. I looked back at the men, only to find – camouflaged; expert – that they had merged into the edge of the wood.