'New ways of fighting wars were rehearsed. An imperial nation was reduced to a testing ground for the weapons of superior powers. So much for Spain!'
Ben snapped, 'You're damn cold, Julia.'
Julia laughed. 'No. Just realistic. Were you lovers?'
They spoke at the same time. 'No,' said Rory, and, 'Only once,' said Ben, more wistfully.
'And it was in pillow talk in Spain, I suppose, that you began to dream of time machines.'
'It was a pooling of interests,' Ben said.
Rory said, 'Studying history, I had come to feel a vast dissatisfaction. It need not have been this way! All the suffering, all the blood spilled – especially that provoked by religions, by prophets of peace. I wondered if it need be so – I longed for it not to be so.' He glanced at Ben. 'Then there was Ben's idle talk of Godel, this eccentric mathematical genius who twisted Einstein's equations and imagined it might be possible to reach out, around what he called 'closed timelike curves, to touch the past…'
'That and my dreams,' Ben said.
Julia eyed him. 'What dreams?'
'I have always had intense dreams. Often they are like memories of visits to scenes in the past – and the future. Once or twice-'
'Go on.'
Rory said, 'There was one dream, of the bullet which nearly killed me.' He touched his neck.
'You are precognitive,' Julia said to Ben.
'So John William Dunne might say. He might speak of my animus floating free in a multidimensional spacetime.'
'Is that what you believe?'
'No.' He sighed. 'I'm one of the most rational people you're likely to meet, Julia. I don't even believe in God. And yet others believe such powers of me. Isn't that an irony?'
'And so from all this,' Julia said, 'from hints of precognition, from Godel's speculation about travel into the past, you began to design a time machine.'
'Not a machine,' Rory said. 'Though we gave it a machine-like name.'
'The Loom.'
'Yes. But it's a method, really.'
'A method for touching the past. For changing it. Is that right? And after Spain you came to this institute, where you worked together on realising your 'method. You went so far as to wangle time on a calculating engine in Massachusetts. And you, Rory, began to work out, if you could make a change to the history that you found so unsatisfactory, exactly what change should be made.'
Rory fell silent. Ben stared at him.
'Oh, come now. If you don't tell him, I can – and will.' She patted her briefcase.
'Very well,' Rory blurted. 'It was Nicea.'
Ben was bewildered. 'Nicea?'
Julia smiled. 'You're clearly not as intimately acquainted with Christian history as your little friend here, Ben. Nicea, 325 AD. Where the Emperor Constantine convened his great Church council.'
'Constantine!' Rory spat. 'It was all his fault!'
IV
'Ah, the Romans,' Julia said. 'They were Aryans, you know, without a doubt. Hitler has the scholarship to prove it… Before Constantine,' she sneered, 'Jesus was a god of the slaves. By establishing the Church as the state religion of Rome, Constantine saved Christianity for the future.'
'Only by making it into a reflection of Rome itself! And it is that Roman autocracy and intolerance that has been at the root of the evil done in Christ's name ever since.'
'And so you had the temerity to cook up a plan. Didn't you? A scheme to use your Loom of time to unpick a few threads of history.'
'You told me none of this,' Ben accused Rory.
'Of course not,' he said miserably, still avoiding his eyes. 'Because you would have stopped me.'
'He worked out a message to send to the past,' Julia said brightly. 'A sort of retrospective prophecy, yes? You meant to send it to the age of Emperor Claudius, I gather, and his invasion of Britain. It was going to contain news about the future – and a little comical nonsense about democracy-'
'The republican age was the best of Rome,' Rory said defiantly. 'It inspired America centuries later. I wanted to give them hope.'
'Who?' Ben demanded.
'You know how it works, Ben. We can't target an individual in the past. We can only broadcast. And hope there are minds as receptive as yours – natural radio receivers, waiting to pick up news from the future.'
Julia said, 'You put in the prophetic stuff as a sort of lure, didn't you, Rory? You sent it back beyond Claudius to the year of Christ's birth, to catch the attention of the early Christians. You hoped to snag your dupe in the past by giving him a bit of foreknowledge that could make him powerful or rich, for instance about the building of Hadrian's wall. And you hoped that that power would be used as you intended: to fulfil your ultimate command.'
'To do what?' Ben asked.
Julia grinned. 'Why, to kill the Emperor Constantine!'
Ben found himself on the edge of panic. 'Rory – we discussed the dangers – what gives you the right to make such choices?'
'What gives us the right not to use such a gift?'
Ben thought fast. 'But this is just fantasy. Just talk. For Constantine was not cut down before Nicea, was he? And the Church was not restored to some state of innocence. The Pope still sits in Rome.'
'Rory failed,' Julia said.
'Well, I can't deny that,' Rory said.
'But he made the attempt, Ben.'
'That's impossible.'
'No.' She smiled. 'I have proof.'
Rory's eyes narrowed. 'What do you mean by that?'
'The Party has a rather good research institution. It's called the Ahnenerbe – it reports to Himmler, you know. Some quite innovative research into racial origins. I wrote to them…' She opened her briefcase and extracted a battered volume. It was a history of Rome.
Her Nazi scholars had not been able to retrieve Rory's testament in full. But elements of it had been recorded in an autobiographical work by the Emperor Claudius. That work too was lost, but there were references to it in other histories, from which, with a little care and some guesswork, some of Rory's lines had been reconstructed. She passed her book to Ben, opening it at a marked page. He read in disbelief, the text pale on old, yellowed paper:
Remember this: We hold these truths self-evident to be -
I say to you that all men are created equal, free
Rights inalienable assured by the Maker's attribute
Endowed with Life and Liberty and Happiness' pursuit.
O child! thou tapestried in time, strike home! Strike at the root!…
'By all that's holy,' Ben said, his heart hammering.
Julia smiled. 'Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How delightfully gauche!'
'It seems I did it,' Rory said, his own eyes wide. 'These are my own words, cooked up in 1940, transmitted through the centuries, and now written down in this battered old history book. I never saw the proof before. I failed in my plan – Constantine survived – but the Loom works.' He laughed, but it was a brittle sound.
'You could not have done this,' Ben said weakly. 'I am an integral part of the Loom – my supposed
