Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [6]
‘Here! Here they are! Fascistas!’
And he could sense the rack was falling away from them, crashing on to the dirty floor.
* * *
He was freshly arrived in Barcelona, still unpacking. He automatically started to make connections, to note and correlate the little details which would go towards documenting this era, these events.
Parts of him were still in Paris, he realised. He could still see young women walking poodles in la Rue de la Bourse, the events still playing in front of him like the grainy films of the Lumière brothers he had watched back in the 1890s. He shifted his focus.
Spain in the 1930s. It was a huge area to cover but he would record the events as accurately as ever. It was his purpose for being here: his vocation. He was, after all, an Absolute. Non-partisan, unbiased, unfettered by the narrow perceptions of the humans around him. What was that comment he’d found in Paris? Something about cameras? He sent a quick pulse down the line to the Hub, requesting a search through early twentieth century European literature. He watched as the query crackled down the central synaptic connection, the search parameters perfectly reproduced as they leapt from electron to electron. It would return with the correct data when it had been processed at the Hub.
He turned his concentration outward from the System, to see Spain through an infinite prism of locations. Barcelona shimmered in the sunlight of a July day as workers marched triumphantly through the streets, their red and black banners flying. At the same time he saw it as winter and rationing began to bite, the air bitter. In Madrid, people ran for cover as Franco’s bombers approached and the soldiers defending the city looked on, unable to fire their anti-aircraft batteries for lack of shells. Up in the Pyrenees, ten men huddled together, sheltering from the harsh night as they crossed the closed border from France on foot. In a café, a Canadian sold arms to the Republicans. Priests in a village were shot against their own church walls. Young troops scurried to remove posters deriding Generallisimo Franco as tourists in flares photographed the cathedral.
No, that was too far forward. That was not within his remit. He had been assigned to report on the time period 1930-1940, in colloquial terms. The 1970s were too far ahead: they were another Absolute’s patch of events. He was spread too wide in time and too narrow in space. Like all of his kind, he knew he had only limited superposition. That he could only observe from all possible positions within a limited range. He withdrew the elements of himself that were looking that far forward, reset the parameters of his research. He would start with Barcelona in 1936.
‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’
– Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939
The response from the Hub had taken some time, the search fields he had entered had been wide, after all, and the Hub was always thorough. Always produced the correct and accurate answer. Information-gathering was their business and had been since the System had been created. Questioning why, or who could now access the data with their creators now long gone, was not part of their programming.
Barcelona. Looking about he immediately identified the wildly different architectural styles that divided the city into distinct visual districts. He noted with interest the port that opened into the Mediterranean sea and that mainly industrial