Ascent of the Aliomenti (34 page)

“It’s a joke, Will,” Adam said, laughing, a few months after the new rule and William’s speech. “If somebody makes a mistake, they get jeered at a bit, and then it’s over. I highly doubt anyone will actually test the rule anyway. It’s not as if we’ve had massive numbers of people out there trying to spread the word, and everyone’s exceptionally careful now. Sure, we’re spreading the word about our business stuff, our financial arrangements and our top-quality goods for sale. But no one says, hey, buy this chair and I’ll throw in a fruit that will enable you to fly at no extra cost. Right?” He laughed again.

Will sighed. “What happens when someone
does
, though, or is accused of doing so? We live a long time, Adam. Many don’t see the thrill any more after eighty or ninety years. Who’s to say that someone who wants to commit suicide wouldn’t go for one last big hurrah, and show off in front of a crowd, so that they’re executed for practicing witchcraft? What if that crowd figures out where they live, who they associate with, and what that might mean?” He shook his head. “I don’t share William’s pessimism about the entirety of humanity, but human beings, including Aliomenti, are often irrational for just long enough to make horrific errors in judgment. I think it’s better to get the news out, on purpose, with intent, so that we are prepared for the possible problems.”

“That’s the point of the rule, though, right?” Adam replied. “You’ve said it yourself before. If we tell enough people, they’ll start to accept it, but it only takes one person, Will. One person who gets terrified, who thinks we’re doing something awful here, and suddenly a mob attacks us.”

“Like that village you visited?”

“What?” Adam looked confused.

“The village. The one where you found the morange berries, right before you came home and, ah, cleaned house.”

Adam’s baffled look slowly cleared. “Oh, right. I do remember that now.” He smiled. “I
am
getting old, you know.”

Will laughed. “Right. But I remember the story you told back then, and it sounds like what you just described as our possible future.”

Adam nodded again, but it was clear that his memories of the experience weren’t sharp. “I suppose so. Perhaps that’s why I’m not opposed to this idea, Will. There are bad experiences in my past as well, just as there are in William’s. Though those experiences aren’t quite so recent for me.”

Will shook his head. He glanced up at the twilight settling in, watching the stars coming out, and wondered if the light he suspected Anna and Sarah were developing would ever illuminate every mystery of the Aliomenti.

XXVI

Vessel

1450 A.D.

One hundred fifty years later.

Will checked the instrument panels, not daring to believe it was finally happening.

He’d spent decades working on the propulsion system, the material for the hull, the cabin design. He’d spent additional decades focusing just on creating a clear material able to withstand the pressure of the depths, just like the exterior hull. But even when he’d built the final, full-sized version of his submarine, he still struggled to accept that it was done.

It was the middle of the fifteenth century, a time when much of Europe was entering the Renaissance era, and a few decades before a man named Columbus would lead a trio of ships on a journey of discovery that would forever alter the European continent. Will had provided his own contribution to the advancement of human civilization, in secret lest he be “jailed” for violating an Aliomenti oath he’d never sworn. He’d traveled quietly to a portion of Germany and, while using Energy to simulate rays of light, nudged a man named Johannes toward a revolutionary idea. One of the original Gutenberg Bibles was stored in a metal safe he’d specially built on the island, a memento of the occasion, an act about which history would remain forever ignorant.

Will was now about to set sail on the maiden voyage of his submarine, a vessel complete with a salt-water based propulsion system, a craft able to dive a thousand feet below the surface of the water. He’d even created a map with sensors that could project his location and gauge his depth.

The map was visible thanks to the electric lighting system inside the cabin.

Truly, it was a marvel, a ship that would not see its equivalent in basic concept until the
Monitor
and the
Merrimack
in the American Civil War. The technology inside would not be met until after the Second World War in the twentieth century. It was only then that submarines would become a key part of naval strategy. It was only then, five centuries into the future, that the general population would have sufficient technology to match what Will had completed this day. It was an immense accomplishment, one that filled him with a deep sense of pride.

The only downside was the fact that Hope was not here with him.

With several centuries spent in private contemplation, Will knew she’d been right in her decision on many levels, painful though it might be for both of them. If Will had spent significant time in her presence, hiding her existence from his own thoughts would be an immense challenge in communities of powerful telepaths. While he didn’t fear Arthur Lowell, he knew the man had survived until the twenty-third century, and he knew that Hope had survived as well. Time travel was a strange beast, though. It worked in a loop, and unless what had happened before happened again, in exactly the same fashion, there was no guarantee that he’d ever be born. The fact that he existed now was no guarantee that the future would unfold correctly. It was the reason he’d been asked to promise he’d harm no one, kill no one, for the repercussions over a millennium could be catastrophic.

Will had made his no-kill promise, but Arthur had not. It was best to keep Elizabeth’s survival and transformation to Hope a secret to a man he wished was dead, a man he had to ensure remained alive. They’d keep him ignorant for as long as they possibly could, and the best means to do so was to stay apart.

Staying apart meant he’d need something creative and inspirational to stay productive, and for him, the design and creation of the submarine served that purpose.

The happenings of this time and beyond would be among the most intriguing and influential in human history. Will hoped the diary would alert him to key events, giving him the opportunity to travel into the vicinity and become an invisible eyewitness to history. He’d soon spend time in Italy, where he hoped to watch the Italian masters create the most famous artwork in history. The submarine would enable him to travel undetected to the nearest shore. From there, he could teleport or fly invisibly to the proper location, then watch history unfold and be amazed. Perhaps, he mused, the amazement would come from the seeming normalcy of such historic endeavors. The famous paintings were not slapped together, nor were the marble statues carved in a few minutes. The normalcy of the grind to create would, he felt, be the most powerful lesson he’d see at work.

But first, though, he needed to make sure his
own
creation worked.

To his surprise, he was incredibly nervous. He’d worked on every aspect of this craft, built every single piece and component himself by hand, had worked on perfecting every single system for over a century. He’d built upon the new generators that Anna and Sarah had developed over the past few decades to aid the propulsion system and provide the interior lighting for the craft. He’d even created basic instruments, though the devices weren’t as advanced as a digital watch back in the twenty-first century. Still, the entire craft was a technological marvel.

He wasn’t worried about dying, though many who built machines of such advanced capability would literally give their lives before seeing their dreams become a reality. It wasn’t a possibility in his case. He’d surrounded himself with his nanos, creating a protective exoskeleton to shield him from any type of structural malfunction that would injure him more quickly than he could react. Should the hull leak or the clear “window” material shatter during the maiden voyage, Will could teleport himself – and the entire craft – back to the surface and to the island. He also had plenty of provisions on board, including fresh water. He certainly wouldn’t suffer any harm due to dehydration or poor nourishment.

No, he was primarily worried about failing.

Since traveling to the distant past, he’d done nothing new and innovative that had failed. From the Wheel, the duct system, from concrete to gears, from the heating systems they’d created, all of it had worked. His ideas on ways to use their money, not as loans, but as what amounted to shares of stock, enabled the Aliomenti to invest in hundreds of businesses, overcoming the powerful objections and concerns over money lending. That idea was now the core Aliomenti business, and it had accelerated the growth of their wealth to ever-greater heights. They’d also expanded into nearly thirty locations, primarily of his choosing, all of which were located in what would become major trading and economic powers, for Will knew where such future hives of activity would be found.

But he’d never tried to build something quite so complicated before. There was a very real chance the craft wouldn’t move, wouldn’t turn, or would simply rupture and sink to the ocean floor. And he wondered if that would shatter his confidence more than Hope’s continued absence.

He glanced to the painting on the wall of the craft. He could recite from memory the number of years, the tens of thousands of days, since he’d last seen her, but his memory of Hope hadn’t faded. He’d taken to painting, and had created what he considered a reasonable effort at capturing both her appearance and her personality. The painting was the only ornamentation allowed aboard the ship. It was the one item he’d rescue if the craft went down.

He’d prefer to have the real Hope with him to run the sub through its maiden voyage, but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, he pretended that those occasions over the past several decades when he thought he was being watched meant she was secretly near him. It was a delusion preferable to the idea that his centuries-old brain growing weary with age and fatigue.

Will glanced around. The cabin area was clean and simple. A small galley and food storage area had provisions sufficient for several weeks. He’d built a machine that could lower temperatures and used that to construct a basic icebox, where he could store meat and produce for a week or more without the risk rotting or spoiling. Casks of fresh water stood near the galley.

The large panoramic window surrounding the main cabin was his proudest accomplishment. He’d managed to work a compound of metals over time until it became a strong, transparent alloy, and it retained that transparency regardless of thickness. Additional “mixing” increased the clarity, so he built a machine to stir the alloy continuously, until the alloy poured like liquid glass that he could shape much as they did concrete. He used his nanos to create the forms for both the hull and the window material, and used Energy to sear the mix into its final shape. The hull and window materials had, in testing, proved strong enough to withstand the pressures generated by hundreds of feet. The materials were, in many ways, like plastic, but they were formed of metal ores rather than petroleum byproducts.

The craft was sleek, without any rough edges, for it was poured and molded, not riveted together. It looked like a craft he’d see in the twenty-first century. He lacked modern electronic instrumentation and the auto-pilot capability he’d so desired, however. Though he could lock the “steering wheel” and fix his depth, he could not provide the craft with a destination and let it take care of plotting a course and navigating to his chosen destination. He’d moved that to the list of enhancements for the first major overhaul.

The concept of electricity had taken hold in many Aliomenti outposts, most notably in Watt where Anna and Sarah had continued their innovative streak, one started with magnifying lenses. They’d built out systems of electric lighting throughout most of the outposts, careful to keep exterior lighting low enough to prevent visibility outside outpost walls. As constructed, passers-by would think the inside lighting came from fires. What had impressed him the most, however, was not the generators they’d created once they’d realized the futility of trying to “catch” lightning on a regular, predictable basis. Rather, he marveled that they’d realized they could use the electricity to track numbers, and many villages these electronic counters to keep track of inventories. They were crude, attempting to match the operations of an abacus rather than using the binary systems of modern computers, but the Aliomenti were still the inventors of an incredibly basic electronic “computer” centuries before Babbage and others hypothesized about the idea. They weren’t sure what more could be done with electricity beyond basic inventory counting, and that wasn’t anything that they had not, or could not, do by hand.

Will laughed at the grumbling. “Years ago, people thought having a large wheel turned by the water of a moving river was enough. Then we figured out how to use that moving wheel to transport fresh water to our village on a constant basis, and
that
became enough. We then figured out how to use that same technique to forever rid our villages of latrines dug into the ground, and
that
became enough. And then we figured out how to make and use gears, and
that
became enough. I’d say we cannot yet fathom just how important and valuable this electricity will be for our future.”