Lily’s first thought is for her cat. Who will feed her now? Then she reflects on the day, or is it three days altogether? She has survived her first two timespace journeys, that’s a positive. Then she remembers Doctor’s words about her body wearing out and coming to an end at a fixed time. She thinks she now knows the date of her own death and, rather unexpectedly, it’s 12Oct1582.
“Was Livy’s Pool anywhere near Paradise Street?” Doctor asks Lorenzo.
“You talked of Paradise Street earlier and that shows me I was right to make the inscription I did. For a long time, that street down by Livy’s Pool was called Paradox Street for all the strange happenings that were contrary to common sense. Goods appeared and disappeared without explanation. In fact, they travelled in both directions through tunnels by the dock that lead straight into the fracture. The very word dock comes from that street-name. The men who loaded and unloaded the ships would never say “I’m going to Paradox Street”, they would say in that thick accent of theirs, I have heard them myself: “I’m goin’ down the ‘dox.” Over time that became ‘dock’. But you want more than etymology, Doctor.”
Lily cocks her head and points with an open palm to Lorenzo, while looking at Doctor, as if to say: “Now, that’s what a scouse accent sounds like.”
“Just relax and look at the pretty paintings.”
That’s what Lily has been doing. The room they are in is rather luxurious for a prison cell. The sumptuous sofas are surrounded by an eclectic mix of furniture including French, Art Deco, Japanese, and Bauhaus. But it’s the walls that draw her attention. Undimmed by the centuries, she gasps to see works by Titian and Raphael, and grabs John’s arm in her excitement, expecting that he too will be blown away by the vibrant freshness of Salome’s mantle as she holds the head of John the Baptist. She moves along the line and there are Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene and Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Further on, she sees the magnificent portrait of Innocent X by Velazquez. She frowns. She might be a bit shaky about Caravaggio’s dates, but she knows that Velazquez was definitely first half of the seventeenth century. Then, she looks hard at a portrait by Rubens.
“I have been here before, you know,” she offers. “It was a field-trip from college. We had a week in Florence and a week in Rome. We spent ages going round the galleries and the churches and the remains of the ancient city. But this place was my favourite. These paintings were, or will be, in a different gallery. They are just stunningly vivid. This painting was one I kept coming back to because the subject was my own age at the time. It’s a portrait by Rubens of Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria. She’s just married into the Doria family at the age of twenty-two. To me she seemed so confident and happy in her finery and I couldn’t help comparing her life with mine. She knew exactly who she was and where she fitted into society, whereas I am the opposite. She had everything and I had nothing. I wanted to be this woman. Now, here’s my problem. She was married in 1606, yet here is her portrait in 1582. She won’t even be born until…”
“1584,” calculates the physicist and Guinness-drinking darts player, “or not for another two years.”
“Exactly. Here’s a portrait of a twenty-two year old two years before she was born.”
“I see what he did, that clever Clavius. To have achieved this with what I told him is truly admirable. He’s created a self-contained bubble that nobody can see and nobody thinks exists, even timespace travellers like me. Picture it like this: you have a sheet of something elastic, like the rubber that balloons are made of.”
“That’s normal timespace,” suggests Andy.
“That’s right. Very good. And the elastic is stretched out, but flat. If you pour water in the middle it starts to sag, and the more water you put in the more it sags. It reaches the point where it’s sagging so much if you give it a quick twist it makes a bag of water that’s hanging down beneath the sheet. Timespace above the bag looks fairly normal again, but down here you’ve got your own little hideaway. Genius.”
“Except that instead of water he used gravity or something,” says Andy.
“More ‘or something’ than gravity, but yes,” Doctor replies.
“But why,” asks John, “what’s the point?”
“I haven’t got that far yet. That’s why we’re headed this way,” and he leads on around the Palazzo Madama.
A man leaves Liverpool Lime Street station by the north exit and climbs into the taxi at the head of the rank.
”Where would you like to go, pal?”
“Paradise Street, please.”
The driver’s eyebrows rise slightly and he looks at his passenger in the rear-view mirror.
“And, when would you like to go?”
“Well, now, of course, I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.”
The eyebrows sink and a look of resignation flashes across the driver’s face.
“OK, we’ll get you there in time.”
The taxi pulls away.
Abercromby Square is one of the pleasanter precincts of Liverpool University. It provides a grassy, tree-lined area for lunchtime walks and contemplation, and presents an attractive view to the occupants of The Senate House which sits to the east of the square. At its north-eastern corner, between Earth & Ocean Sciences and the Research Unit for English, a footpath becomes a passageway under a building that leads to Chadwick Tower and the central area of the campus. The building houses the Surface Science Research Centre.
In a third floor laboratory Andy, a research assistant, is running a probe over a specimen and finds a curious result. He checks it, then checks it again. He takes a hard-copy, switches off the probe, and removes the specimen. Instead of returning it to his supervisor and head of department, he slips it into his bag and heads for the exit. His scientific career is based on the search for truth and this dishonest act leaves him feeling guilty and self-conscious. Surely the others in the lab, and those in the corridor, and on the stairs must see the message stamped on his forehead:
“IT’S IN MY BAG”.
He tries to look nonchalant but he is unpractised at dissimulation and instead he looks furtive. But other minds have other cares and he passes unnoticed. He leaves the building, walks through the passage, and follows Peach Street to Brownlow Hill. He’s headed for the bookshop. As he walks, he pulls a handheld computer from his bag and does some web-based research before he gets there. As a scientist his life is the pursuit of answers to questions that the universe poses, but this is different. This is an anomaly for which physics has no explanation.
John calms himself, closes his eyes, then opens them slowly. There’s a sort of harmony to the space. The proportions are pleasing in a way he couldn’t feel while the others were there. He sits down. Is it Zen or feng shui, but he feels he wants to move. So he slides towards one end and over to one side of the chamber. There, sitting like a boulder in a Japanese garden, he feels good. He closes his eyes again and relaxes, only to be disturbed by Andy bursting in, excited by his own discovery.
“What does 1.618 mean to you?” he demands of John.
“What?”
“1.618 metres. That’s the length of the room isn’t it, a shade under 1.62 metres you said? To me that’s a lot like one plus the square root of five all over two.”
“And I thought you didn’t know any Greek!” Lily smiles in mock surprise. “What are you on about?”
“To you artists, it’s the Golden Section or the Golden Mean, but in science and mathematics it has lots of other meanings. This room is 1 metre by 1.618 metres so it’s sides have that special ratio.”
“This gets weirder by the minute,” says John. “It’s a really well hidden room, lined in oak, with a floor plan in the golden ratio, and its dimensions in metric units give a strong hint to that fact.”
“I don’t know why, but I think we are meant to find the harmonious point on the floor,” muses Lily. It’s the only contribution she feels she can make in this world where the square root of five seems to be so important.
“I think I’m sitting on it,” says John, who slides to one side.
“Clavius, Clavius, it’s coming back to me,” says Lily. “Wasn’t he something to do with changing the calendars?”
“Yes, that was me,” says Doctor. “I told him how to do it. He was really floundering until I set him straight. I really do talk too much when I get drunk.”
“What was the change?” asks Andy.
“It was when we moved from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian,” says Lily. “The date of Easter was drifting about all over the place and the Church didn’t like it, so Pope Gregory introduced the new calendar.”
“When did that happen?” asks John.
“Fifteenth of October, 1582 was when it was adopted by the principal Catholic countries,” says Doctor who knows the date well. “Other countries adopted the calendar much later. In England, for instance, it wasn’t accepted until 1752. It’s a very tricky period for timespace travellers. You can’t visit timeplaces that don’t exist locally. So, although I could go to 12Oct1582-England, I couldn’t take my machine to the same time in Rome. That date didn’t exist because they went straight from the fourth of October to the fifteenth.”
“What would happen if you tried?” asks Andy, who is quick to pick up new concepts and now wants more than anything to surf timespace. “Have you tried?”
“No, I haven’t,” Doctor replies. “It’s drummed into you at flight school. Early timespace-machines had a programming error and they crashed if you selected one of those time-places. They would say: ‘your timespace browser has performed an illegal operation and will now shut down’. Then you had to reboot. What a pain that was. Nowadays, most machines are hard-wired so you can’t select them.
“Is this one hard-wired?” Andy continues, half-wishing he wasn’t going to stop the connection attempt tomorrow. He is beginning to get his tenses right, but he still doesn’t know if he has any choice over what will happen tomorrow, or if it will even be the same him that does it. Doctor hesitates, reluctant to give the answer because he senses where it will lead.
“Er, no, it’s not. Like I said, I picked this machine up in Taurus in the year 875,000. They’re not really interested in eleven day anomalies in an insignificant solar system far, far away.”
