Prelude to Eternity. Brian Stableford
that is, not the supposedly supernatural phenomenon itself.”
Signor Monticarlo was manifestly mystified, the terms of this speech having far exceeded the competence of his English but he nodded anyway and said: “Si.”
“There was no illusion involved,” Lady Phythian insisted, her voice becoming frosty in spite of the sultriness of the carriage, whose atmosphere was becoming rather oppressive. “What I saw was quite real.”
Michael judged that the built-up tension was in need of relaxation. “Unlike Signor Monticarlo and his daughter,” he said, “I’m vaguely familiar with the legends surrounding Langstrade Hall, but I really ought to obtain a fuller and more accurate account of them before I take on the task of painting the Keep. Would you be kind enough, Lady Phythian, to explain to us in a little more detail what you mean by the Dedalus design?”
“The original representation of the maze,” Lady Phythian said, apparently glad to be able to say something that could not call her honesty or perspicacity into question, “or, at least, the oldest surviving representation, is a piece of parchment that now hangs over the mantelpiece in the large drawing-room, carefully framed and protected by glass. The old Hall was built in the ruins of a Cistercian abbey that had been built in the thirteenth century and destroyed during Henry VIII’s abolition of the monasteries. The abbey had been reputed to have custody of several holy relics and a number of scriptural documents. The relics had all been stolen, along with their reliquaries, and the documents removed—with one exception, which had been hidden in a niche in the old crypt. When the crypt was converted into a cellar during the building of the old Hall, that surviving parchment was unearthed.”
The dowager hesitated briefly, presumably because she was about to move back into the realm of rumor and fancy, but soon took the plunge. “The diagram on the parchment was thought at first to be a sketch for one of the mazes that decorate the floors of so many Gothic churches, but the diggers working on the new Hall’s foundations also found evidence of a stone maze that far antedated the Abbey and must have been prehistoric. There were not enough stones left to allow the design or precise extent of the prehistoric maze to be calculated, but there was sufficient similarity to encourage the conclusion that the design antedated the Abbey too. The parchment itself must be Medieval, but what it represents is apparently much older than the thirteenth century—or, indeed, the ninth.
“The former Lord Langstrade came to believe that the design depicted in the document was a representation of a maze designed to fulfill some magical or mystical purpose, connected to the first settlement of the valley by refugees from Minoan Crete, including the great engineer Dedalus, whose escape from imprisonment before the catastrophe that destroyed Knossos is plaintively symbolized in the myth of his manufacture of wings and the subsequent death of Icarus. I believe that Harry once considered recreating the Maze in the same local sandstone of which the Keep at its center was to be—and is—constructed, but the cost of construction would have been prohibitive, so his son contented himself with hawthorn hedges. The central hexagonal space is some fifty yards across in the actual version, and the distance between the two outer hedges is almost twice that; the total length of all the hedges is, I believe, more than a mile.”
“Why did Lord Langstrade build the Maze around the Keep?” Michael asked, helpfully. “Does he imagine that Harold Longstride built his own Keep within a maze that was still present in his own day, or merely that he was aware that a maze had once existed there?”
“Harold Longstride would presumably have been aware that there had once been a stone maze on the site where he built his Keep,” Lady Phythian opined, cautiously, “even if it had been broken up long before his own era. Legend would have told him as much.”
“In respectful recognition of his own legendary status, no doubt,” Escott murmured, so softly that Michael was not sure that anyone but he had heard the remark.
Carmela Monticarlo spoke in English for the first time, to say: “I hope that I shall see the ghost. I should like to see a ghost.”
“Unfortunately, my dear young lady,” said Escott, in his normal voice, “you might have to go into the Maze to do that, since the hedges have now grown so tall as to cut off the view from the first-floor, where I have stood by a window more than once by night, in the hope of catching a glimpse of phantom lights—in vain, alas.”
“I look forward to seeing the design,” Michael said, thoughtfully. “Indeed, I shall need to consult it very carefully, since I shall have to get to the heart of the Maze in order to set up my easel there.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Escott, with a mischievous sideways glance at Hope. “I’m sure that Miss Cecilia will be only too pleased to guide you, as she has previously consented to guide Hope and myself—not only into the heart of the maze, but out again, when you need release.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SIGNOR MONTICARLO AND THE CAPRICCI ENIGMATI
When the educational discussion of ghosts and the Langstrade Maze had concluded, Hope and Escott resumed their debate about progress almost seamlessly, as if the change of subject had been as good as a rest, giving them time to recharge their argumentative Voltaic piles.
Hope argued that any reasonable man ought to accept that technological and social progress were inextricably linked, marching forward in step, and cited as proof the fact that England, which had been in the forefront of technological progress for more than two centuries, had also maintained its position in the vanguard of social progress, having been the first major European nation to dispose of its monarchy. Indeed, he went further than that, arguing that the Glorious Revolution of 1642 could not have been wholly successful had it not been for the previous scientific and technological advances made by the members of John Dee’s secret college, nor maintained in their absence.
The emergence of the ruling triumvirate comprising the First Sea Lord, the President of the Academy and the Leader of the Commons was, Hope contended, entirely dependent on the technological advantages that Dee had been able to donate to the Navy and the transformation of the esoteric college into a publicly accountable and meritocratic Academy. Without such balancing factors in place, he suggested, Oliver Cromwell might easily have made himself king, or might have been deposed by a Restoration, rather than paving the way for True Democracy.
Escott, by contrast, maintained that the Revolution, whose gloriousness he begged leave to doubt, had been based in religion rather than politics, and that its true parents had been Protestantism and Puritanism. He did admit that John Dee had played a crucial role in laying its groundwork, but as a protestant rather than a mathematician. According to him, democracy had no advantages over monarchy, because the essential function of government—the extortion of the many for the benefit of the few—remained exactly the same, and always would. Technology, in this view, was merely an aspect of the instrumentality of this extortion; although it seemed to be improving continually, as the power and cleverness of machines advanced, all that really changed was the intricacy of methods of political exploitation, which were bound eventually to reach a genuinely revolutionary breaking-point.
Even if England’s apparent stranglehold on naval traffic—the Empire of the Oceans—were genuinely unbreakable, Escott claimed, the seeds of the nation’s destruction had already been sown in its native soil, where the First Sea Lord was nowadays no more than a figurehead. The only way the nation could be saved and perpetuated, in his view, was by a reversion to Medieval values and a system of craftsmen’s guilds, supported by a rigid imperial hierarchy.
Michael listened to all this intellectualizing rather diffidently, not caring much which of the two philosophical combatants might be right, if either of them were. It all seemed rather abstract to him, totally irrelevant to his personal concerns and problems—although he felt slightly ashamed of himself for thinking so, given that it made him seem a trifle small-minded. His eyes continually drifted to the window, in search of the peaceful green landscapes of rural England. Somewhat to his annoyance, though, his gaze was continually trapped by the telegraph poles that flitted past the fast-moving window with metronomic regularity—an effect that was curiously mesmeric.
Michael had only been