I began to read about weapons again. I had thought at first that the placing of the 'sword' and the 'revolver' together in the colonel's chest might have been an anachronistic mistake by the hoaxers, but I learned swords had been carried by 'officers' for ceremonies and rituals long after they ceased to have any practical use. Sometimes, in warrior cultures, they had been handed down from father to son. But in any case, by 1878, surely both sword and revolver would have been equally ceremonial?
I began to realize how little I knew. Take it that the original story at least was true: then Colonel Vaughn had shot the tiger-man in a primitive and dangerous hunt less than a hundred years before the beginning of the Space Age.
And then, it seemed, he had been in a war! Wars as recently as the nineteenth century? When every schoolchild had been taught that they had ended at the same time as, by definition, civilization and recorded history began?
We in ARM literary section knew they had ended later, but still hundreds of years before that. Before Columbus, before Galileo.
But everything I had read and researched recently – and this time it was not fiction like the old books I had been involved in destroying, but official records – showed armies in the 1870s. Granted that crime control had been primitive then, and the world dangerous and still partially unexplored. But all for police duties and tiger hunting? I was having trouble believing it.
Among the history taught and displayed in our museums the date 1943 was a touchstone. Every child knew that was when von Braun had launched the first successful rockets to study cosmic rays and weather: the Vetterraketen, or V-1 and V-2. Society must have made great advances in a short time during the twentieth century for wars and armies to have disappeared so quickly and space flight to have got under way. Improbably great.
Suppose those old books of pathological fiction and fantasy I had helped suppress had not all been fictions? And there had been so many of them!
There was something else: Apparently harmless books on comparative literature and ancient literary construction had had very high priority, not for suppression and concealment, but for total, immediate destruction. Why? Was it perhaps so operators like me would not be able to tell fictional techniques from documentary ones?
There had been the continual warnings, both overt and subliminal, when I first joined the literary section, warnings of the absolutely fatal career consequences of becoming too interested in the work.
Why hadn't I seen these things before when I saw them now? Because I had been off medication for days and that medication had included an intelligence depressant? How much intelligence did you need to recognize a fant book or infiltrate a fant cult? Not a lot, I began to understand. Schizies like Anton Brillov and Jack Strather, in a different section and with different personal programs, had had access to far more real history than I.
And the fant cults themselves… why were they so persistent and, within certain parameters, so consistent? Why had past generations manufactured bizarre artifacts like 'toy soldiers' and the plastic 'models kits', fragments of which still occasionally come to light?
The Lady Mays question on her way to memory-wipe came back to me: Had I known what I had been destroying?
The program had been to remove a strand of destructive madness from human culture, as its genetic aspect was to remove, eventually, a gene of destructive madness from the human gene pool. Useless and dangerous. But my own condition was madness without treatment, like the schizies ARM kept employed and did not medicate during working hours. Were we useless and dangerous? Presumably when the program was concluded we would be.
But too many things were not meshing. Or rather, too many of the wrong things were meshing. Things I had never thought about before.
I knew ARM kept forbidden knowledge even from its own people beyond what we needed to know, dangerous facts as well as dangerous inventions, but now I could not close my mind to all the inconsistencies displayed to me.
I tried to follow other thoughts: When the Angel's Pencil had left Earth, the program had been less far advanced. There might well have been crew aboard who had studied the more sensitive areas of history.
And the gross, glaring scientific errors in their descriptions of the alleged alien crafts capabilities: Were they deliberate signals, perhaps inserted by some crew member who did not want to be party to the business?
Bannerjee called again. He had been working on the artifacts in New Sydney.
"It's an electronic book," he said. "Look: you speak in here, and this is a memory bank of some sort. This is a display screen. Its a notebook. At least, I don't see what else it could be.”
"Can you read it?”
"It's damaged. I had it speaking back to me for a minute. At least I think it was speech, not just noise corruption. Sounded like a catfight. And it’s weird. The circuit design is quite odd. I can tell you the metal's been grown in space. Real high-tech stuff.”
"How old is it?”
"It would have to be pretty new, I'd say. Newer than it smells. It may be something the Belt dreamed up.”
"It's meant to have come from India," I said. "It's meant to be very old.”
"Umm… my father was keen on India. Brass bowls all over the house. This isn't brass though. Definitely Space Age. We had ancestors on the first Indian space program, you know. Well, the circuitry seems to be in order. I can give it power again, and see what happens.”
I stood by while he powered the thing up. There was a hissing, screeching sound. I couldn't tell if it was articulated or simply malfunctioning electronics. But it did seem varied and modulated as speech might be. Behind Bannerjee on the screen I could see other screens: banks of computers with endlessly changing arrays of numbers. I knew the class of those computers and felt awed and more than a little alarmed at what their use must be costing someone. This investigation of a hoax was getting out of hand.
"There's a relatively small group of frequently recurring sounds," said Bannerjee. "If its plain language and not encrypted, that might give us a start.”
"Keep me stitched in.”
I watched the groups of numbers and phonetic symbols dancing on the green sheets of glassine behind Bannerjee's dark face. The shape of the hoax was becoming clearer: I guessed that the tiger was to be presented as some sort of lost alien.
The Vaughn-Nguyens had used the story of their ancestors freak tiger as a starting point or inspiration for this. But why?
The 'language' in the 'book' was explained easily. A computer wrote it. Imaginary alien languages were a staple of some legitimate imaginative writing, and there were whole societies dedicated to concocting them, as there were societies of bored people dedicated to many things. ARM ran most of them. The language would have to be translatable eventually. It would be gilding the lily for those who had concocted it to have put it in cypher as well.
The 'relics', organic and inorganic? Easy enough to fake, given time and high-tech resources.
As far as I was concerned one possibility as least had been eliminated. That was that there might be a real space sickness and the reports of felinoid aliens had been products of genuine madness, triggered, perhaps, by some subconscious childhood memory of the story of the Vaughn Tiger-Man and too many hours in a virtual reality programmer. This had been deliberately constructed before the Angel's Pencil left Earth.
Was it an odd form of political rebellion, connected somehow with the Vaughn-Nguyens' notions of family pride? That was possible, too. Quite likely there were several motives.
An ancient tiger freak had been killed. That, as far as I could tell, had really happened. I did not think all the records I had searched could have been tampered with, or the direction of my searches anticipated. Apart from the accounts published later I had, after getting a special permit, retrieved the relevant part of the 4th Lancers' 'Regimental Diary' from underground archives in an operation more like archeology than historical research.