Iain Pears - Arcadia

‘Think of the new data you will gather, the organisational expertise. Think of the gratitude as well. You will recoup the cost in no time, and most will be research expenses you would incur anyway.’

‘What a shame,’ Oldmanter said appreciatively, ‘that you are a renegade. If only my employees had half your imagination. I don’t suppose I could tempt you...’

‘No.’

‘Ah well.’

‘Ah well, indeed,’ Emily said. ‘That’s the deal. Accept and you can have the data. Refuse and you can’t.’

Oldmanter was not a man to hesitate. His success had been built on seeing an opportunity and grabbing it wholeheartedly.

‘Obviously I accept. As you say, it is greatly to my advantage.’

‘Good.’

He nodded. ‘We will go to Mull, set up and calibrate. As long as there has been no substantial damage and my people haven’t gone overboard and razed the place, it will take a couple of weeks. Then we will have to test it with a few volunteers to make sure it is functioning properly. We will construct a bigger machine, building in what we have learned. Then perhaps five thousand a day, working up to ten thousand as more machines come on stream. This will continue until all volunteers have gone.’

‘Then you will leave us alone.’

‘Oh, certainly. We will switch to a different universe for our purposes. You may have a life of rustic bliss festering in primitivism until the day every single one of you dies.’

‘One more thing. I would like that poor man to have the chance of coming too. Hanslip.’

‘Why?’

‘Just a pointless act of kindness.’

‘If you want him, you can have him. We can say he died in captivity. Suicide or something. It may be as good as suicide anyway. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I am quite aware of the risks.’

Emily walked over and gave him the Devil’s Handwriting, hesitating for only a fraction of a second before putting it into his hand. ‘We have established, by the way, that it is of very recent vintage. It looks old and was evidently meant to convince people it is old. It defeats most tests, but it is quite definitely a fake. Don’t believe anyone who tells you differently; we are experts in this field.’ She gave Kendred a severe look as she turned away again.

Oldmanter flicked through its pages with deep interest for several minutes, then let out a sigh of satisfaction. ‘We will leave for Mull in an hour.’

For Oldmanter, having the girl voluntarily give him the manuscript was yet another extraordinary piece of good fortune. A more sentimental man would have wondered if fate wanted him to have this technology.

He could most definitely afford to appear generous, not least because no generosity was involved. He would dispose of the renegades and they would make the task easier by rushing to volunteer. They would herd themselves into the transportation device, beg to be dispatched. If anything demonstrated their unfitness to live, that was it.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. There were the needs of research as well. This was brought up the following day, when he settled down to map out the schedule with his closest advisers.

‘Every single one?’ they asked. ‘There must be millions of them.’

‘It will be spread over a period of years. I agreed to send them; I did not agree to a timetable. We get rid of them, at any rate, and subsequent developments can be kept pure of social infections. In due course proper colonists will arrive and they will need labour. Has there been any work on which period is best suited for colonisation?’

‘As you know, sir, the greater the distance, the greater the amount of power needed.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Ideally we would send people to an epoch when there are no human settlements, but that would require huge amounts of power and they would arrive with nothing. If we could commandeer existing infrastructure and send them less far, then we could keep costs down dramatically.’

‘I thought that was ruled out because of the difficulties of dealing with the indigenous population. I remember talking to Grange about it.’

‘Yes, sir, but that was when the plan was to invade and conquer, then use the indigenous population as slave labour. Hanslip sketched out an alternative which makes this notion more viable. He was toying with the idea that the cheapest approach would be to encourage the native population to kill themselves by exploding a bomb at a period of heightened tension during the nuclear age. Each side would blame the other, and the subsequent war would do most of the work for us; if need be we could unleash biological weapons on any survivors. When the world is clean and empty, we can begin transporting the settlers. It would mean moving people only a couple of hundred years, and despite the damage there would be substantial infrastructure still available. It is a highly imaginative solution, and very cost-effective. The added virtue of the plan is that we could begin almost immediately.’

‘What period?’

‘The memorandum pinpointed the most vulnerable moments, running from 1962 to 2024. We will use one of them.’

‘No moral objections from anyone? I don’t want to be hauled in front of some ethics committee.’

‘There can be no moral obligation to people who are both long dead and, as far as we are concerned, do not exist. We have tested that hypothesis thoroughly.’

‘No safety issues? For us, I mean.’

‘No. Again, the panel of physicists has reviewed the matter and finds no problems. They dismissed Angela Meerson’s theories as absurd.’

‘Then I suggest you start the preparations. The sooner we see if this thing works, the better.’

‘There is one other thing. We only got the vote from the physicists by promising one of them that we would conduct experiments into future transportation. He is preparing a paper based on some of the captured material and wants to ensure that we can send people forwards, as well as back. We’ll need to do something to keep him happy, and we will have to explore this in due course anyway to maintain proper communication between worlds.’

‘I do hate these people,’ Oldmanter said. ‘Still, give him what he wants. And I think it would be best to terminate Dr Hanslip. It occurs to me that if we send him with the renegades, he may have sufficient knowledge to re-create the machine eventually. If I am going to spend a fortune to get rid of them, I don’t want them turning up again in a few generations.’

Pamarchon walked hand in hand with Rosalind on his way to the meeting hall, neither saying much for some time, and both merely content that the other was there.

‘Better than I could have hoped for,’ she said. ‘One might even say it is a miracle.’

He took his hand away from hers and looked at her with a worried expression.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It is a miracle. So how can I ask you to be my wife now?’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘I have seen who you are. How could I presume to ask for your hand now?’

‘Oh, stuff and nonsense, Pamarchon, son of whoever. Stuff and nonsense. Don’t you dare talk to me like that,’ Rosalind replied in alarm. ‘Listen, I will tell you once, and once only. There is nothing magical about me. There is nothing even particularly special or beautiful about me either, unless you choose to see me like that.’ She paused. ‘You can, you know,’ she hinted. ‘If you want to.’

‘But back there...?’

‘It’s a long story, and a strange one. I know it seems very unlikely and everything. That’s just because you don’t know the whole story, you see? Everybody only knows a bit of it. So they think there must be something incredibly meaningful about it. Why, Henary thought the world was going to end.’