Bosworth Field

Bosworth Field

“Bring the prisoner!” the bailiff shouts.

The man in strange, ragged clothes is hauled into the King’s chamber with rusty chains clanging as he shambles. His head and arms are in wooden stocks. He has a smile on his face, and fine teeth. There were few men the onlookers had ever seen his age that had such fine teeth.

He stops before the King, and bows a little farther, struggling to remember what he was told about averting his eyes. The King stares him down, then stands from his throne.

“The man is charged,” the bailiff begins, “with trespass, conspiracy, and witchcraft.”

“What say ye?” the King asks the prisoner.

“I am your servant, my king. May the King live forever!” the prisoner replies. “I should never wish to harm you, but to aid you in every endeavor. I could never be guilty of conspiracy.

“I admit that I trespass, but only to offer aid to my King in his hour of need. I hold special information of utmost value to His Highness. I come to save the King’s life.”

“Woudst thou save me?” the King asks. “From whom?”

“Henry Tudor, milord. He is to land on August the Second, and your forces shall meet his at Bosworth Field on the Twenty-Second. Without my aid, my King, I fear you shall die there.”

“Do his forces outnumber mine?”

“No, milord. There are a number of factors that lead to your demise.”

The king laughs. “Such strange speech, this one. Thou speakest as if thou knowest the future.”

“Aye, my King,” the prisoner says. “The strange speech, the strange garments, the device they say is some demonic trinket. These are all easily explained, though they may be difficult to believe. I am from the future.”

The King lets out a mighty roar of laughter that takes nearly a minute to subside between him and all his court. The prisoner stands unaffected, expecting this response to his claim.

“The news will come soon, and you shall know when Henry Tudor landed. And that I knew it in advance, my King. Our arts and industry have advanced as they have always advanced, but faster, and faster, and faster still. We have gained much knowledge of science – or do you call it ‘natural philosophy’? At any rate, I offer all that I know to the King. I can your alchemists how to make a substance that will bring shame to the black powder you use in your cannon. It will make you the greatest power in the world, hundreds of years ahead of your time, and unconquerable. I give it to you freely, so that you may defeat Henry Tudor. Only that you live, and that Henry Tudor dies is my goal.”

The King smiles. “Why would you offer me this unlimited power freely?”

“You are Richard the Third, the last of the Plantagenets. Your death at Bosworth Field changes the whole course of world history forever. The impact of the Tudor kings stretches throughout all history for a thousand years, until my time. Not only this, but I am descended from Henry Tudor himself.”

“Traitor!” cries out an armored man standing to the side. The King lifts a hand to stop him. “Why would you seek to kill your relative? How could I believe you?” the King asks.

“Surely, even in this time, mankind has dreamed of traveling to the past, meeting the mighty heroes of old, and seeing for themselves events of which they have only been told. Would you not wish to see the battle of Hastings, or see Herod’s Temple in the fullness of it’s glory before it had been destroyed by the Romans? I think men have always sought to understand the nature of time, to see if they could break free from it’s relentless forward push. Well, we have unraveled many of the secrets of the universe and it’s workings, but not all of them. I am one of the very first to travel into the past. I am the very first to travel so far into the past, fully a thousand years before I was born.”

“So it will take mankind a thousand years to gain the means to travel through time? How soon does man travel to the moon?” the King asks half in jest.

“In the year of our lord, Nineteen Sixty-Nine, a little more than five hundred years hence.”

“So you have traveled a long way,” the King says, “A thousand years, all to kill my foe?”

“That is correct, precisely to change history, to see how history changes. Now that we can travel through time, we can finally understand what happens WHEN you travel through time.

“You see, there has long been a paradox that men have argued means that traveling into the past must be impossible. Say you were to travel into the past, and kill your own grandfather before your father had been conceived. Of course, my lord the King would never do such a thing on purpose, but suppose that you were to do it on accident, while in the past. Then you would never be born. And so would not travel into the past, and then there would be no danger to your grandfather. So his son and grandson would be born after all, and you would be free to travel back in time and kill your grandfather. And you would die, and so be too dead to do the deed, and so you would be alive. And dead, and alive, and dead. Both alive and dead at once.”

“That makes no sense at all!” the King shouts.

“Precisely. To kill one’s grandfather would lead to an impossibility. So it must be impossible to kill one’s grandfather. This is what lead men for certainly hundreds of years to assume that time travel was impossible. Or, perhaps that you cannot change the past, but only do what you had already done in the past. That everything you do in your future is unchanging, because it has already happened in the past. But this would mean that if men have free-will, they lose it when they travel back in time.

“Plus, I’m speaking to you. I’m presenting these strange ideas to Richard the Third, who in history had never had such a conversation. So I can change history. So how does the universe get out of the paradox? How can I kill my ancestor, ensuring the paradox must happen? How will the universe respond?

“Thou art mad.”

“Not simply mad because I say I am from the future, my King, but mad AND actually from the future.”

“Thou wouldst risk unmaking thyself to prove a theorem?”

“Your Highness understands me perfectly. I have to know. There is a chance that I cease to exist. There is a chance I disrupt the space-time continuum. I know you don’t know what that means. There is a chance I create or have already created a parallel universe. I could kill my ancestor and yet remain. If that’s how it works, the only way to know is to kill my ancestor and yet remain. I shall pry open the universe’s mouth and force it to tell me how it works. And that means saving your life, and killing your mortal enemy.”

“What is this power thou seekest to give me? What should thou provide me to achieve our mutual goal?”

“It is called TNT, a trifle to my civilization, but a weapon of unimagined destruction to anyone in this time, invented roughly four hundred years hence. It’s several times more powerful than the black powder used in your cannons. I know the layout of Bosworth Field. I know where Henry will camp, how his lines shall be arranged, how they shall move, and the cadence of the battle. I know that he will be standing near the marsh that blocks the left flank.

“We can go to the field ahead of the battle and bury TNT in the ground. At the right moment, when he stands in the trap we’ve set, we can detonate it, and your enemy will be no more. For he is dust, and to dust he shall return, instantly. There will be nothing of that whole company left to bury.”

“Would that I believed thee, how should I trust thee?”

“I would make but a trifle, but a pittance of this TNT, and offer to demonstrate its power to the King. Then others who work alongside me would already know how to make it, and those loyal to the King could certainly make the rest, and do all that the King orders them to do with it. I need only do very little, and that I could easily manage under guard.”

The King pauses and ponders, pacing back and forth a couple of times. “Very well. I seem to have little to lose, and much to gain.”

“One more thing, my liege. That wand, which was taken from me, is not a wand but a computer. If you are aware of an abacus, think of that mechanical aid to arithmetic being improved upon again and again for over a thousand years. It is an advanced device for aiding in all manner of thinking, and I need it to assist me in creating the TNT for you. Also, I would need any alchemists in your court to aid me and learn the process. We don’t have much time to prepare for the battle.”

The King motions to one of his aides, that produces the article, which he examines very thoroughly. It is a square prism, roughly two feet in length, and covered in small wires tracing angled paths across it’s faces, just beneath a layer of blue resin. The thing looks a little like an enormous sapphire crystal.

“Thou art certain this is not a demonic instrument, a tool of witchcraft?” the King asks.

“A wise man who lived in the time between us once said, ‘Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.’ Could Pharaoh, who released Moses and the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, have seen your cannons in battle and think THEM anything but magic? I assure you, it is simply an aid. A machine that acts like one of your scribes.”

The King smiles. “Release him. If he be untrue to his word, he dies. If he be true, then my kingdom is saved.”

After guards release the man from the wooden stocks, the king hands him the device. The time traveler carefully activates the computer, which glows faintly blue, and then hovers vertically at his side. “It appears we’re successful,” he says to the computer.

“That’s good to hear. I assume they think me to be wizard magic,” the computer says with a calm, mechanical woman’s voice.

“Devil magic, actually. We will need to begin manufacturing TNT. We have little time to spare. Henry Tudor is already approaching.”

Blue lights of the most intricate shapes dance across the surface of the device. “TNT could be produced by alchemists in this time. That is a good strategy. If Richard the Third alone has access to the formula for TNT, his odds of being defeated at Bosworth become a number not appreciably different from zero.”

The time traveler smiles with a polite bow to the King.

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Richard the Third sits mounted on his most trusted horse, surrounded by a company of elite mounted bodyguards. The time traveler is there among them, on horseback, but with no arms nor armor. Richard’s cannons have torn through Henry’s infantry, and his vastly superior forces have been engaged in a melee for a significant time. Everything has gone according to the report given by the time traveler. Richard has grown to find him reliable. It was given to him that Northumberland would do nothing to help, and it had proved true.

Henry now approaches the appointed spot. The time traveler seems to have taken to his accusation of being a warlock in commune with the devil, because it’s with a flurry of his computer, as though waving a magic wand, that he activates the detonator.

The air is filled with an almost deafening boom. It is good that King Richard was so far away at that moment, or his hearing could have been permanently impaired. It was just as the man had said. A massive circular crater was all that remained of that section of the battlefield. There wasn’t a single bit large enough to be said to be a single trace of Henry Tudor, or any of his men. They had all more or less been vaporized in the blast.

A significant number of his infantry too were cut down, dumbfounded and unable to move by the sheer awe and terror of the power that they witnessed.

The King patted the time traveler on his shoulder, and clapped with great glee. A smile unlike any seen before lit his face. Then, they looked over to the crater and saw a very curious sight.

It glowed like a star, a single white point of light. It hovered over the center of the crater, about five feet over level with the ground. It cast harsh rays that hurt the eyes; it was a brilliant white, but strangely did not seem to make the ground below it brighter. It increased in intensity, then appeared to be a small orb.

As it grew, the inner part of it appeared as black as the night sky. It grew and grew, and suddenly they could see a multitude of stars of every color swirling within the orb. It seemed to have depth, like a great bottomless pit opening before them. Red and blue and purple swirled within the blackness of the orb, now green and gold.

The time traveler turned to his computer. “What am I looking at?” he asked with great alarm.

“It appears to be a tear in the fabric of space-time. You are looking through a hole you just punched in the universe,” the computer said. “Scans suggest the optical effect might be the three-dimensional edges of other universes that we can see across five-dimensional or higher-dimensional space.”

“It’s growing.”

“Yes, the hole is growing at an exponential rate. It’s a cascading failure, centering on where Henry Tudor, your ancestor was when he died. It seems you have successfully obtained a result in your experiment. When you create an untenable paradox, and the time-like curve cannot close, the whole timeline shatters like a Prince Rupert’s drop; a wave expands from the point of failure outward to the farthest end turning the whole structure to dust.”

“Shatters the timeline?!” the traveler asks. “Is there nothing we can do to stop it?”

“The failure is not only expanding in space, but also in time. Forward and backward in time. It’s even larger in the past, and larger still in the future. It will keep accelerating until it swallows the entire universe.

“So I kill my own grandfather, and the universe ceases to exist?”

“To our perspective, the universe ceases to have ever existed. Not only were you never born, in a moment no one was ever born. Perhaps it’s the fate of all life-permitting universes, that at some point they create life that becomes intelligent and discovers time travel, and soon afterward pop out of existence. At least we have no reason to suspect your actions destroyed all of the universes; just this one.”

The tear in reality, perfectly spherical and glowing white at the edge, and deepest black in its center, is now nearly five feet wide and expanding faster. As all stare dumbstruck at this terrifying thing, it swallows the crater that was in the ground below it, and begins expanding toward them.

The King doesn’t even think to run; he already knows better. “So, thou hast slain me after all,” the King says without turning. It’s the size of a house, the size of a castle keep, the size of a small town.

Just before it sweeps them all away, the time traveler, trembling, manages to quietly say, “I had to know.”