“In our own culture we simply ignore this early time travel and the memories that it leaves. In other cultures, those that believe in reincarnation or in the transmigration of souls, these things will be interpreted as memories of previous lives. They aren't. They are memories of early time travel with the young traveler identifying himself with someone he observed on that travel. So we have it in those cultures that children, when they come to the age of six or seven and are able to speculate and wonder and express themselves somewhat, will describe the deaths of children who lived before they were born, for these deaths have peculiar attraction for them. They will identify themselves with the one who had died. Sometimes they will insist that their parents should take them to places where they will call by name persons not known to them in present lives, where they will claim to be a dead child of certain persons there, and they will relate things that apparently only the dead child could have known.
“In our own culture, the same sort of early time travel happens, but other explanations or none at all are given for it. But the thing happens vividly and is remembered vividly by at least one child out of five. There are five of you here, so I suspect it has happened to more than one of you. Maybe to all of you. Maybe that is what has made time attempters out of each of you.”
“Yes, it's plain that there is this impediment,” Abel Roaring said, “and that we cannot ordinarily travel back into the years where we have already lived, ‘where we are already living,’ as a true time attempter would say. And the more maturity we bring to the problem, the longer is that treacherous first step back into time, over a threshold of thirty years or more. The shoal is in our way, but what do we do about it? Can the problem be solved?”
“Oh, I've already solved it,” Peter Luna said. “I've solved it by the time-satellite that I've built here. By it we are already beyond and previous to a shoal, and by using it you five are back before you were born. As to myself though, I'm still in my proper life, right at the end of it, as it happens.”
“You've hinted several times that you have this time satellite here, Luna,” Ethan Farquharson said, “but where is it? When can we see it and study it?”
“You can see it right now, almost right now,” Luna said, “and I hope you will apply yourselves to its study immediately. Ah, the time-shuttle, it's so close to you that you can reach out and punch it in the snoot. He who has ears, let him hear. He who has eyes, let him see. He who has the third eye, let him intuit!”
A taxi driver of the region had a wife who loved to go riding in the country. He loved her, so he indulged her in this love. Now he had gone off shift right after noon on a sunny summer day, so he took his wife for one of those rides in the country. “There's a beautiful big house out in the country that I saw today and I never saw it before,” he said. “Let's go see it now. You'll love it.”
They drove the taxi out into the country. They came to the crumbling stone and rusting iron entrance to the estate that was named “Moonwick” according to the flaking iron letters on the lintel of the gate.
“But where's the beautiful big house?” the taxi driver bawled. “It was there, right there, not a hundred meters back from the gate. No, Jemima, I'm not crazy.”
“Maybe it's all those ‘No-Doz’ pills you take to stay awake when you drive at night, Jacques,” Jemima said. “I think that's what's making you kind of nutty.”
They drove through the disintegrating entrance-gale and back to where the large and impressive house had been only a half hour before. And it wasn't there. Nothing was there except a weed-grown pile of old rubbish.
“I won't give up,” said the taxi driver whose name was Jacques Claxon. “Four other taxi drivers were here and saw it. And we let our five fares out at this entrance here. And here comes one of those drivers, Eustace Merleblanc, right now. We'll see what he thinks about this.”
3
Time, a facet of human consciousness felt both in psychic and physical experience, and an aspect of the observed environment metaphorically describable as a one-way flow providing, together with space, the matrix of events. Time can be viewed either as metaphysically ultimate (process philosophy) or as illusory (philosophy of the manifold). For centuries it has been viewed as a significant dimension in the philosophy of history and in the theology of redemption. It can be measured either as an epoch (the moment of an instantaneous event as marked by the clock) or as the interval of duration of a continuous event, and by reference either to moving bodies or to electromagnetic phenomena (atomic time). Its flow has been found, in contemporary physics, to be relative to the observer's velocity and acceleration perspectives, and in biology, to be affected by such factors as environmental rhythms, temperature, drugs, and (perhaps) brain rhythms.
—Encyclopaedia Britannica
“But why do you say it is a one-way flow?” Rowena Charteris asked angrily. “Oh, I'm sorry, people. I was responding to something else that I was rolling around in my mind. Yes, they call me the ‘Naked Ghost Lady’ because I so often ask ‘Did you ever see a naked ghost?’ Well, I've seen nine ghosts in my life, but I've never seen a naked one.”
Rowena, in that spacious noontime, had played three sets of tennis with Abel Roaring. Then she had had a shower and a pleasant nap, but the sun still stood where it had stood before, a very little bit after noon.
“All ghost appearances are time trips. But time is sticky stuff, it is tacky stuff, and it is always local,” Rowena lectured them. “We are in a galactic drift of several billion miles a year, so there is no way we could return to any spot on earth in any past time according to absolute location in space. The spot on earth now would be billions of miles away from the same spot on earth then. But time clings to local physical objects, like a world, and all physical objects are deeply imbedded in time. Time is very cohesive and it can only be moved in quantum hunks, and we can only move out of the common time stream by quantum pushes. So a ghost has to bring part of his ambient with him when he comes, and his minimal ambient is his own clothes. This makes a difficulty for those who believe that travel in time consists of reconstructing people and things, molecule by molecule, in the visited time. How much more difficult the clothes would make it! And yet ghostly time visitants are almost always clothed.
“And a ghost will always bring a sort of ‘datedness’ with him that is easier to recognize than to define. So a ghost expert is usually able to identify a nineteenth century ghost, or an eighteenth century ghost. Witches, of course, used to strip naked, smear themselves with pig-grease, and then slip through a tight place into another time; but they must have had a technique that I haven't discovered yet.
“But I do have my calculations as to what it takes to make a quantum push into clear past time, disregarding personal-life inertia. If you indeed have a time-shuttle established here, Luna, then that personal-life inertia and inhibition can be broken and bypassed, and my calculations will work. All of us here can make a quantum push into clear past time from a workable time shuttle here. Let's do it right now.”
“Oh, you'll do it within a second or two at the most,” Peter Luna said.
“But your ‘second or two at the most’ seems like a very long time when things are in an approximate time-stasis here,” Abel Roaring said.
Annabella MacBean and Ethan Farquharson and Abel Roaring took a rather extensive foot-tour around the Moonwick Estate. The house itself was an imposing place, loaded with libraries, museum rooms, art galleries, dens, studies, billiard rooms, music rooms, laboratories, machine shops and fabricating usines, one very large dining hall and three smaller snack rooms, a big country kitchen and several satellite kitchens, and an even dozen guest suites. There was a big cellar full of junk. There was a big attic filled with other junk. There was a morning sun-parlor and an afternoon sun-parlor. There was a swivel telescope up on the highest part of the house, the truncated main gable. It was all a distinguished piece of Gulf-of-Lions Gothic, and one of the big shaded porches had an area of a hundred and thirty
square meters.
And everything was open. There was not a locked door in the whole house. There was no place for any hidden rooms.
The explorers went into everything, and they didn't find what they were looking for. There was no trace of one, not of a little one, certainly not of a big one.
And the great rolling outdoors of the estate was about a square kilometer in area. It was in the fork of two branches of a small river that rolled chortling the mere twelve kilometers into the Gulf of Lions of the blue Mediterranean. The third and North boundary of the Moonwick Estate was a line of steep and sudden cliffs about fifty meters high.
By anybody's standards, this was a beautiful place. The folded, rolling hills were covered with clover, or they were covered with grapes. Everywhere the three explorers walked the air was pleasantly noisy with bees. There were a dozen heavy white cattle grazing belly-deep in clover, there were exposed rock strata of shale and slate and chalk. There were beech groves.
“I have never seen time piled up so deep in a place,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Not insufferably ancient time, but historical and para-historical time going back to the glaciations. These are the centuries and the thousands that we want to explore, and I never saw them piled up so beautifully. The banks of the North Border of the estate were once the shore of the Gulf of Lions. What a place to start from! If only ‘it’ is really here! But there are no hidden valleys on the estate, and we have seen everything big enough to matter.”
“No, there's nothing on the estate that could be a time-satellite,” Annabella said. “There is just no place here that even a mini-satellite could be hidden.”
“I can't imagine a time-satellite smaller than ten meters in diameter and five meters thick,” Abel Roaring complained. “Smaller than that it just wouldn't be workable. And it isn't here, it just isn't here. Do you think we are wasting our time here?”
“We're not wasting very much time here,” Annabella said, “something less than three seconds since we've been here. And we've had four good meals here and now I'm hungry again. I've had a good night's sleep here, though it was at bright noontime. This is really the most filled-to-overflowing less-than-three seconds that I ever spent in my life.”
“Intuition is the key to time,” Ethan Farquharson was saying (this was not discernibly later by watch or clock, and yet it was a little bit further along in the time stasis), “which is to say that time is quirky, that it is mental, that it is subjective. There is no such thing as time, certainly not any such thing as elapsed time, unless mentality is present. I realize that this is very near to saying that ‘time is illusion’; very near to it, but it is not the same thing.” They were all sitting on one of the largest of the great shaded porches of Moonwick Manor, and it was a little bit after noon on a sunny summer day. There was the intricate and genial, and curiously concerned, host Peter Luna. There was the speaker Ethan Farquharson, ‘the poet of the time-attempters movement’, who was Scotch and who had the hard untrusting eyes of an eagle combined with a cheerful hooked nose that had once been improved by being broken. He was good company in spite of the fits of absent-mindedness in which he acted as if he were the only person in the world.
There was Annabella MacBean ('the Clotted-Dream Woman'), a quite large young lady with only enough beauty for a middle-sized woman. So parts of her stuck out from under it and were not covered by that mantle. Her feet and her hands were too big, and her voice was a bit too large. She was entirely too ruddy, she was what is sometimes called rawboned (nobody knows exactly what that means though). Well, but her hair and her face and her disposition and her wit were excellent. And such largeness-in-reserve as was her's has never hurt anything.
There was Henry Kemp, blue-eyed and thick-bodied, with a shocky crest of hair sticking up to show that he was a Teuton. He was a designer and builder. He believed that it should be asked of the most abstruse idea “What does it really look like? Why cannot we make a working model of this thing?” And, to a greater extent than with most people, he had built himself, from the inside out; for his thoughts and predilections, coming through his pinkish and translucent flesh, had pretty well determined his appearance.
“As with anything built by an amateur builder, he's a bit lop-sided and rough-hewn,” Annabella said about him, “but not really bad, not bad at all.”
There was Rowena Charteris, too serious, and always peering intently into mysteries with her myopic eyes. The world itself was such a mystery to her, and she peered into it, taking her glasses off and putting them back on, and not able to see very deeply into it with all her peering.
But she had limitless faith in her chosen field. Limitless hope too. And, really, she had almost limitless love or charity. This time antic had to succeed now, if only for her sake. God and all the Jinni will make special efforts to accommodate such as was she.
Rowena was quite pretty. And, to one with eyesight as poor as her own, she would seem absolutely ravishing.
And there was Abel Roaring. He looked as if he were made out of stratified rock, but that was only his textured complexion. His voice also had this rockiness, like the good-natured clattering of stones. He wasn't a handsome man. He moved with the surety and well-balanced ungainliness of a bear. He looked to be the oldest of the five by some years; but they were all about the same age, all about thirty years old.
You'd like Abel. You'd like all of them. They all had the interior illumination usually seen in people with strong vocations. By their noble vocations, they were the Time Attempters.
“Time travel, either into the past, or beyond the set pace into the future, is not a natural human attribute.” Farquharson was talking. “Not natural, no. It is unnatural, or it is preternatural, or it is supernatural. But the attempting of it isn't illicit. If it were unlawful, it would not give such a feeling of exhilaration and joy. I am not able to put this into words at this moment in slow-jog time, but I have already put it into calculations. If you indeed have a time-satellite here, Luna (and we have not been able to find it anywhere on your estate), if you do have that take-off bank of time, then I have a bird here that will take-off backwards from it and fly backwards into the past.”
“Are these the calculations that you publish in the Spring of 1986 issue of ‘Time Returns Again Quarterly’, Farquharson?” Luna asked. “If so, I'm familiar with them and they will indeed serve for an epochal backwards flight from this bank or satellite of time which I have built here. Yours are really and essentially about the same as the calculations of Rowena Charteris that I perused earlier in the present second. The same, but phrased quite differently. By the way, how long did you look for my time-satellite without finding it?”
“Oh, by your local semi-stasis time, it was something less than half a second, Luna.”
“That's not very long, Farquharson. But I do have it built here, and I intend to have you all see it and know it very soon now.”
Another taxi driver drove into the Moonwick Estate and parked behind Jacques Claxon near the pile of weed-grown trash. His name was Eustace Merleblanc and he had his own wife Ermadine with him.
“Jacques, Jacques, what do you make of it?” he asked as he got out and stood there. “It isn't here, is it? What happened to the large and wonderful house? Was the whole thing a mirage? It looked solid enough less than an hour ago, odd-structured but solid.”
“Why don't you fellows just forget about it?” Ermadine Merleblanc suggested. “We all get nutty sometimes and see things that aren't there.”
“I'll not forget it,” Jack Claxon said. “I'm going to the authorities with the problem right now. I don't care if they do hoot me to scorn. There's something here that's too wrong to let pass.”
“I'll not forget it either,” Eustace Merleblanc swore. “There's the smell of something dislocated and hellish wrong here. Yes, we'll report it, Jacques, and we'll drive them bugs until they look into it. Something just plain swallowed that big house, Jacques.”
4
Complete visual p
ictures… can be reconstructed of anything whose light or shadow fell even indirectly on one of these stones. We can get detailed pictures of animals, of plants, of people as they lived and moved thousands of years ago. We can reconstruct color pictures of the clouds moving overhead, and we can read the spectra of those clouds. We can reconstruct anything that was ever discerned by any of the senses. Give us a dozen good stones from a site… and we can reconstruct a complete countryside for any period we wish… We can trap sounds and play them back with perfect fidelity. We can play the song of the ancestral cicada that had two more chromosomes than have its descendants… And smells! Of course they are even more simple than sounds to lift from the transparencies. We can go back and pick up nearly every scene complete for the past fifty thousand years… And patinas and transparency deposits on stones are only one of the dozens of tools that we have available for such historical reconstruction.
—Thunder-Colt
“I'm really curious about how slow a time-jog you have us on here, Luna,” Henry Kemp said. “I've shaved four times since we've been here, and we haven't completed the fourth second yet. It seems to me more like a second to twenty-four hours now, but I'm sure it wasn't that slow at the beginning. We had time on slow-jog at a time convention in Ghent last year, but that was mostly illusion and hallucination. I didn't grow a day's whiskers in a second's time there, nor get a good night's sleep, nor get this much of a sun tan. You are the original Peter Luna, the grandfather of Peter Bardolf Luna who lives in London now and who also dabbles in time, are you not? But that original Peter Luna is supposed to have died away back in the year 1928. If you did not die then, you would be—how old? —now. How did you avoid your death? And how did you avoid your ageing?”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 275
