“I wonder what would have happened if I had lost my tenure. Where would the currents of fate have taken me, eh lad?”
But the question was rhetorical. For a while the professor continued speculating of what might have been. None of the alternatives sounded as good as the present reality.
“Bit of luck, eh lad?” he concluded.
“You know, Grandpa,” Sacha said when the professor had finished dissecting his own fate. “You would be the first to agree that time is a dimension which is very relative.” Had Sacha been talking to his father, he would have said that time is a dimension of the lower realities. To the professor he chose his words more carefully. “If you are destined for greatness, it might take you a few incarnations to realize it and a few more to do something about it. When you do, I believe it is called self-realization. And by the way, we are all destined for greatness. Only greatness, as I am sure you agree, is not measured on the scale of material success. For now, Grandpa, let us be content that you are destined for immortality.”
Had Sacha the ability to predict the future, he would have known that he would be voicing the above sentiment on a number of occasions. Almost word for word.
But at this time, it was the one and only time that Sacha actually sounded as if he was teaching the professor the facts of life. Or perhaps of living? But the lad, about thirteen then, noticed that his grandfather, of late, tended to bend his back a little more, to look for a place to sit down the moment he had a chance. Life, as people thought of it, was so transient. So ephemeral. Why do people attach so much importance to biological existence?
This was one enigma Sacha could not as yet master. He’d watched the youngsters at Grandma ‘Licia’s school, he’d watched his grandfather. There was a paradox there. One should be getting more and more detached as one grew older. More carefree.
And yet...
Sacha supposed he had always liked to watch people. He discovered that no amount of reading could tell him the truth about the real person lurking behind the mask of daily activity. Lately the aging process fascinated him. He watched Grandma and Grandpa. What a difference. Alicia was still in the process of self-discovery. Her orientation was forward. She still dreamed of new horizons, new vistas to expose to her the mysteries of the universe. Her universe may have been limited to a very small galaxy, but it was still unfolding.
Not so with Grandpa. Oh, he read the very latest scientific magazines, kept up to date with the latest theories, latest trends in his field. But really they were the fields of others. In his own life, Grandpa looked only backwards.
“Ah, yes. I remember...” So many sentences have begun with this verb. “I remember...”
And then followed the past, often distant past, yet unfolding as though it were almost new. As though he’d been not recalling the events, but reliving them. Perhaps life, here, on Earth, was a bit like a scroll. You could roll the parchment either way. Recall, remember, relive, or scroll it forward and fill in the blank pages with yet not-experienced events. It did seem flexible. At least, at the memory level. Sometimes Grandpa even shared with him little snippets of memory from his own, so distant, youth. From the time when the doctor wasn’t even a doctor. Nor even a student. Before he even imagined he’d ever fall in love with physics, well before it became his life’s passion. It was like a different life. A life of innocence where nothing mattered much.
The stories did not matter. It was the light in Grandpa’s eyes…
Sacha wondered if he, himself, was so innocent. To him many things were important. He felt the need to learn. Not physics, but also physics. He refused to specialize. Except in people. People to him always were an enigma. An embodiment of consciousness, which, as yet, didn’t make too much sense. There had to be more to all this. He didn’t think of himself as being destined to become immortal. He knew that he was. His daily visits to the Undiscovered Kingdom attested to that. And it was there that none of this made any sense. Perhaps this was his problem. Perhaps if he planted his own feet a bit more firmly on the ground, he would find it easier to understand people. But the price was too high. He would rather give up all than stop spending timeless moments up there, in the land of ineffable freedom, of luxuriant light, of merging with all other individualizations at will, even as a wave in the ocean merges with other waves.
No, the price was much too high.
And with Grandpa it wasn’t just his memory. He watched his grandfather with an unaccustomed feeling of compassion. He never experienced that emotion until he saw his grandfather facing little fragments of life, which made that very life more difficult. Of no importance individually, but when rolled into a scroll of life, they added to the hardship that wasn’t there before. Getting up from the sofa, climbing the stairs, avoiding irregularities in the surface of the sand on their morning walks, when it was Grandma’s turn to sleep in. Or even getting in and out of the car. Such simple activities, so taken for granted for so many years. And now, almost suddenly...
“So I am going to be immortal, am I lad?” Grandpa’s voice seemed to come out of some Machu Piccean fog.
Sacha realized that he’d said too much. There was no easy way out.
“You are immortal, Grandpa. Believe me. You are.”
Dr. McBride looked at Sacha for a long time. He wondered what it was that the lad was trying to tell him. There was no doubt that the lad was a very, very exceptional child. But regardless how bright he was, was he always right? No one he’d ever met was always right. Not Einstein, not Feynman, nor any of the great men he’d met over his impressive career.
But if so, why did Sacha sound so very, very right?
Chapter 5
Mr. and Mrs. Norman
The Normans were not the ‘Normans’. They were the JJs. In the past they’ve been mostly John and Joan. Lately, it gravitated towards Joan and John. John has slowed down. A lot. Tempus fugit. Things change.
The first time Sacha visited Mr. and Mrs. Norman, he was only seven years old. Until then, the JJs came over to spend Christmas with the Baldwins at the McBrides beach-house. With three bedrooms they were all reasonably comfortable. When Suzy took Sacha to visit her parents, in June or July, he acted as though he’d traveled alone. He thought he could have, perhaps should have. After all, it wasn’t as though he would step out of the airplane, and get lost somewhere. Had he been given half a chance, he would have flown the plane himself.
During the weeks preceding the flight, Sacha had spent hours in the Public Library, thumbing through everything he could find on aeronautics. As he became––what can only be described as––a speed-reader by the time he was six, going through the whole subject matter in a little over two weeks was relatively easy. Des doubled with laughter when Sacha called it ‘child’s play’. Sacha couldn’t quite understand why people would want to travel by such an uncomfortable, noisy, spatially restricted and badly ventilated container. It felt like a thoroughly unpleasant mode of travel. Even in the smallest car he’d ever been in, he’d had more room to move around, enjoyed more diverse views, and dad or mom could stop practically at any time, for whatever purpose. In an airplane, once you got to a certain altitude, even on a clear day, there was nothing much to see. He understood that occasionally people might be in a great hurry, but in his opinion the vast majority of people had a very twisted, virtually unreal concept of time. He had all the time in the world to play, all the time he needed for books. And even then there was time leftover for other pastimes.
Sacha’s idea of seeing the far away places had been limited to closing his eyes and in the same instant being there. And until his first visit to Canada, he couldn’t quite reconcile this new concept of travel with the exigencies of not only time but also space; or more accurately of distance.
“Distance is a factor of time, Mom, and time is flexible,” was his only comment on the subject.
He’d learned only recently that people wanted to take their bodies, their physical bodies, with them on their journeys. For him, thi
s need had only presented itself at that first trip to see his Canadian Grandma and Grandpa. That’s where the yacht was. He needed his body for the experience. It wasn’t the same as the Home Planet, dad told him. He had to find that out for himself.
Later Sacha would also realize that here, in this reality, if he wanted to see the results of his creative endeavour he was limited, in some measure, by his physical senses.
“More’s the pity,” he once told his dad. “After all, when you create something in your mind, you already know what the results will be.”
At the time, Alec didn’t quite understand his son’s comment.
That trip to experience sailing was the first of what would become annual visits to Canada. Each individual trip left a lasting impression on young Sacha. Not the travels as such. Flying in a metal can was not his favourite pastime. The impressions were generated after he got there, on the expansive waters of Lake Ontario. There, from the first moment Sacha had stepped on board, the bug of sailing infected him. He succumbed to it under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather, John Norman. And his mother, of course. But in the years he could still keep his balance at the wheel, Grandpa John struck a captain’s pose that commanded respect and obedience. Mother may have been more adept at handling the sails, in fact doing almost everything on board, but Grandpa remained undeniably the skipper. The Master of the ship. Grandma Joan, was indispensable to preparing Sacha’s favourite snacks when the wind permitted. She liked sailing, but she liked it mostly because she was of help to her husband. There was very little she wouldn’t have done for John.
Open waters of Lake Ontario were the nearest Sacha came, on Earth, to the sense of freedom. Not just the waters, but he claimed the wind as his own, personal playing field. The endless horizons were the nearest he could get to the Far Country. Even the Home Planet was not as rewarding as the open waters. There, in the inner realm, it was, well, it was too easy; you did not have to pay for your mistakes. In fact there was very little payment extracted in the upper realms. Perhaps some disappointments? You just started again, discarding your less successful creative endeavours. Here, the rules were quite different. Unforgiving. In some ways, more exciting.
Here you learned a lot faster.
And it was on the water that Sacha felt, for the first time, really alive. Until then, his body was more of a hindrance. He regarded it as a necessary evil impeding his freedom of movement. He would forever remain grateful to Grandpa John for letting him hold the wheel, to feel the spray on his cheeks, to balance his stance against the waves attacking the gunwales.
Yes, on board the Princess, Sacha felt truly alive.
Other than being the second kindest Grandma he had, Grandma Joan served to diversify Sacha’s insatiable need to study people. He’d met other people, of course. He’d been presented, not to say ‘shown off’, to the JJs’ friends. But to really study people you must get to them up close. You must see them react to different circumstances, to different, often trivial, events in their everyday lives. From the very beginning, virtually from infancy, he felt like an outsider looking in. He peered at people, almost desperately trying to make sense of them, to make head or tail of their behaviour.
“Why do people worry so much, Grandpa?”
This was his greatest enigma. Why do people take their ‘life’ so very seriously? He touched on the periphery of the answer that very first time they went sailing. You had to take life seriously the way you take any game seriously. Even when he played with his Strato Set, he remembered, he tried as best he could to build something interesting.
So life was a game, but it didn’t explain why people worried all the time.
By his fourth birthday, he’d noticed that people regarded their physical bodies, as their actual selves. That they identified with their physical envelopes. At first he couldn’t believe his own discovery. When you’re four, all things are new, all things are surprising, but this? This was out of this world. Or, perhaps this was of this world, whereas he was not. At least he didn’t feel he was.
Some years later, Grandpa John had an enigma of his own to resolve.
“Why,” he wondered, often aloud, “why does a seven-year-old talk like an adult?”
What Grandpa didn’t know was that Sacha was equally capable of talking ‘his age’ vernacular to other boys. In fact, by the time he was seven, there were very few things that Sacha was not capable of—by “normal” peoples’ standards.
Very few, indeed.
And thus, the trips to see the JJs became annual events. They had to be in summer, because Sacha could not imagine visiting Grandma and Grandpa JJ and not spend a week or two on board the boat. It wasn’t Kingston that was his destination. It was the Princess. Princess the Third, the 36-foot Bayfield cutter, which looked much more like a real ship of yore than a pleasure yacht.
Yet pleasure it was.
On two occasions his dad came with them. When he did, they spent the whole time aboard the ship. They actually slept there, ate there, woke up and gazed at the stars there. Sacha loved that. Again, it was that sensation of freedom that he’d never experienced anywhere else... on Earth.
“You have an opportunity to learn as few other children have, my boy. There are few sailors with Grandpa Norman’s experience. He’d crossed the Atlantic, you know, single handed!”
His father repeated this admonition on a number of occasions, always stressing the ‘single-handed’ aspect.
Sacha wasn’t quite sure what crossing the Atlantic single-handed entailed, but Grandpa John rose in his eyes to new heights. Already then Sacha admired singularity of achievement, though, for himself, he tried to narrow his many interests to manageable proportions. Whatever he did he threw all his energies into the endeavour. He offered a quiet demeanour, but he was passionate about everything he did. He did not believe in half-measures. Whatever he could learn, increased his understanding of the Phénomene Humain, as he remembered Theihard de Chardin had put it.
And that last passion, man, was his most powerful of all. He still couldn’t figure out what it was that the members of the human race were really after.
When his son turned thirteen, Alec implanted a skipper’s hat on Sacha’s bushy crown. Two years had passed since John’s last sail. He’d lost his sea legs. He’d lost the call of the sea. But he also found something that hadn’t been apparent before. He’d gained a certain elusive air of innocence. His commanding, somewhat dominating, features gave way to a most disarming smile. It manifested in the way he looked you in the eye. Sacha thought that perhaps what they said was true. Perhaps we start and finish in childhood. Perhaps it was all meant to be. What a pity the JJs could not be here, right now, Sacha thought. He really loved his ‘other’ Grandpa.
“I was about your age, son, when the command of the ship fell in my lap. That was brought about by fate, after my own father had been injured. Happily, I’m still in one piece. But now your time has come. I name you captain of this vessel.”
As Alec made the announcement, Suzy stood up and saluted the new skipper. It was all quite official. If it weren’t for the deep tan, Sacha’s blush of pleasure would have embarrassed him.
“Prepare to cast off!” Sacha said, his first words of command as he assumed his position behind the wheel. It reached practically to his neck, but he seemed to tower behind it. His eyes resolute, his smile crooked, as was his jaunty hat with captain’s insignia.
The deep throb of the diesel was churning the water at low revs. Suzy and Alec walked the finger dock holding on to the bow and stern lines. When they jumped on deck and pulled in the fenders Sacha gunned the engine. The Princess moved slowly in reverse gear, then came to a momentary stop as the forward gear reversed her direction and took her out of the marina. Minutes later Sacha pointed the bow into the wind.
“Prepare to hoist sail,” he said in a calm, confident voice. Like his father did, only yesterday.
Alec pulled furiously on the mainsheet, while Suzy extended the furled Genoa. A
s the wind filled the sails, Sacha cut the engine. This was his favourite moment. All true sailors love the eerie silence when the throb of the engine dies down.
There were no dramatic events under Sacha’s first command. But it was the first time that Sacha understood the difference between crewing and commanding the boat. Everyone was carefree, looking here and there, sipping cool drinks, enjoying the fresh breeze. Only Sacha had to keep his eye forward and aft, to port and to starboard, making sure no one was on a collision course, making sure the sails were rigged just so. A good two hours later, after he had his fill, he issued his second command.
“Dad, take over the wheel, please.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” his father replied instantly.
“Keep her on 210 SWS,” Sacha added.
“210 SWS, she goes, Skipper.”
Being called a skipper sounded very good to Sacha’s ears as he went below to look at the charts. It took him quite a while to orient himself to his destination. They had agreed, before boarding, to sail to a spot some miles East of Rochester, on the US side of the lake. With the West wind, it would be a good ten-hour sail, assuming they could average seven knots. The wind was perfect, practically on a broad reach. They should make their destination by around 1900 hours. The JJs had friends there who’d invited them over for dinner. Later they would sleep on board and, at sunrise tomorrow, make their way back. But that wasn’t the important part. The trip was important because Sacha was learning to be responsible for the lives of other people.
He never realized how absorbing it was. They were not in any danger, the wind forecast was 15-18 knots, an easy sail for a yacht this size. But the sense of responsibility was something Sacha had not experienced before. Perhaps he led too sheltered a life. Perhaps that was the danger of being an only child. But he was grateful to his father for letting him take the helm. He steered the boat many times before, but this was different. This time he really felt the weight resting on his young shoulders.
Sacha—The Way Back (Alexander Trilogy Book III) Page 6
