Colony worlds, p.39
Colony Worlds, page 39
Norman looked at Ralph with scepticism, tempered with hope. I really should have paid more attention. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"It was only last month and they haven't sent the vase yet. They don't have one."
"What about that one?" Norman pointed.
"That's the one that arrived." Harry said. "We can't send that. It would create a paradoxical loop, in which the vase doesn't actually exist."
Ralph added, "They haven't even scheduled sending a vase, let alone by one." None the wiser, Norman stared at the vase. If they buy another vase, there will be two. That vase has wind up in the shop they buy it from. Bemused, he concentrated on today's experiment, or was it next month's experiment?
The four men watched as the second hand eroded the remaining minute. Except for a brief flash on the glass as it passed through twelve, nothing happened. The cage at the centre of the machine remained empty. The professor exchanged a glance with his student. Ralph shrugged his shoulders. In some sense, Norman felt relieved. Finding his identity was not as urgent as it had been. He had created a life for himself from nothing. It might not be the one he was born to, but it was his.
Future
A meow behind them made them jump. The others were soon so engrossed in the kitten's sudden arrival that no one noticed Norman pale. He clutched at a crushing pain in his chest, suddenly afraid. It passed slowly, leaving beads of sweat on his forehead. When he recovered and joined them, he couldn't see what was causing all the fuss. It was just a harmless kitten. Someone must have left a door open. It staggered appealingly around the control room barely able to stand on the polished floor. From the animated discussion, he gathered his researchers thought the demonstration had been a success except for some unexpected side effects.
Ralph shakily picked the kitten up by the scuff and explained. "This kitten just made history," he said. "It has just travelled one month backwards in time."
"I thought..." Norman stopped his mouth too dry to speak.
"Are you all right, Norm?" Ralph looked at him full of concern.
Norman swallowed, started again as the colour slowly returned to his face. "They said they would send a cat?"
"You really don't look well."
"I'm fine, don't fuss." He licked his lips. "Why is it a kitten?"
"Ah," said Ralph sagely, "that we won't know until next month." He hesitated, perhaps rehearsing what he wanted to say. "The problem is they can't be sure everything they plan will happen according to plan. If a cat isn't available, they may have to send a kitten?"
Harry interjected. "In fact, Ralph, we still plan on sending a cat."
Norman nodded. He thought he was coming to grips with the paradoxical concepts.
"So," continued Ralph, stroking the kitten. "We now know something of the future. For example, we know this facility will exist and be operational next month. The experiment must happen, but we will..."
"... send a kitten instead," Harry added, but his tone suggested scepticism.
Norman's old passion for returning stirred.
"What will be of particular interest, Mr Ember," said Sharpe, "is what caused us to change the animal."
"Prof and I disagree on this point," Harry said.
"You'll see I'm right Harry. Your field works and the kitten has fixed the future. It will force us, either deliberately or accidentally, into making the corresponding changes."
"With respect Prof, I can't see any reason to vary anything. For example, we have yet to buy and schedule the vase that arrived. If we change nothing, today's events are the natural outcome of the original plan, not the other way round."
Two weeks later, a determined Norman came alone to the Lab. He could wait no longer. The specialist had been frank; his heart would not withstand another such seizure. He refused to wait around for death, preferring to make one last attempt at finding his true identify even if it killed him.
"I want you to send me back today," he told Sharpe and Leyland.
"My dear Mr. Ember," said Sharpe, "you don't seem to realise that we only think we can send you back forty years."
"Forty-three," Norman said.
"Quite," said Sharpe, peeved at the interruption. "My point is we have no way to prove it works until the current experiment completes two weeks from now. Even if..."
"I'm prepared to risk it," interrupted Norman. "If I don't go now, I may not live to the end."
"But even if we succeed, we can't get you back. It's a one-way trip."
"That hardly matters now; I'm living on borrowed time. My whole life has driven me towards finding out who I am. I established this lab in the hope it would help me achieve that goal. Who are you to deny me?"
"Norman, Norman," said Harry, his tone conciliatory, "what you fail to understand is that there is no receptor back then."
Norman again interrupted, "The kitten showed you didn't need one. It arrived out here, not in your receptor."
"The spatial displacement is a worry. I can assure you, when we start the experiment, we will aim the kitten at the receptor."
"Cat," said Sharpe.
Harry glanced at the ceiling. "The displacement was for a short time jump, less than a month. We are flying blind with a forty-three-year jump and no receptor. It may be impossible." He enumerated on his fingers. "Even if it works, you could arrive above ground and fall to your death, or worse. You might arrive underground, buried alive, or half inside any of the buildings."
"I don't care," Norman said. "It's my only chance of finding my true identity before I die." He held up his hand to forestall any further objections. "Be assured gentlemen I will take it. I own this facility."
"Now see here," Sharpe blustered. "We will not be..."
Norman didn't let him finish. "I can have your replacements here within the hour. They will do exactly as I ask without question. It's not a difficult operation now. Crudely put, gentlemen, get onboard or get the hell out."
Past
Norman knew he was in the past. He just found it hard to believe. Unlike the virtual scenario 'Remember Inc.' had created from Ralph's sequence of photographs, the past smelt. He breathed in the reality of pre-electric traffic fumes. After forty-two years, ten months and four days, he could finally answer the question that had both sustained and frustrated him for all his recollected life. This past week, immersed in VR, memorising all the elements, was time well spent. Everything around him was as it should be, everyone in their allotted place, moving as expected.
In getting here, none of the dire possibilities canvassed by his researchers had eventuated. He had arrived in the narrow Post Office Lane without incident. An unexpected side effect of the temporal field relieved the aches and pains of age. He strolled casually to the front of the alley and scanned the street. He had fifteen minutes to wait before his younger self would arrive.
Norman hoped to spot him well in advance, before he walked under the scaffolding around the GPO. Somewhere up on the second platform, a pipe was ready to shake loose, roll off, freakishly drop between the planks above and strike young 'Norman' in the temple. He had to intercept his pre-amnesiac self and ask him his real name. He still embraced doubts. Suppose his interruption of the sequence of events delayed young Norman long enough that the pipe missed him. Surely, that couldn't be possible. His entire future, as he remembered it, depended on this event. All he needed was the name. With the correct name, he could die in peace. Then, despite the pain and suffering he knew it would cause, he had to let his younger self walk under the scaffold and complete the sequence so that the future, his future, remained intact.
The town hall clock opposite drew his eye. Seven minutes left. Any second now he should see young Norman, or whatever his real name was, cross King William Street at the lights then come south up the west side towards him. Where had he been going back then? No, not 'back then'. Where was he going today - now? More importantly, where had come from. Yet nobody would ever come forward to claim him or claim knowledge of him. All reports of missing persons, employee absences, and suddenly vacated hotel rooms did not include him. He had arrived forty-three years ago, into a nightmare void where nobody knew him and nobody wanted him. He needed to know why.
As the tiny window of opportunity narrowed, Norman forced himself to remain calm. For him, memory and identity began here. Play it cool. Get the name. Get away. Again, he glanced at the town hall clock. One minute.
Where was the little turd?
He cringed at the self-abusive thought. Or was it? Wasn't his younger self as a separate entity. Reality and the images from VR simulations were coalescing at an alarming rate and still the separate entity was nowhere in sight. The 196F bus that the police report said vibrated the pipe loose waited at the traffic lights.
He saw young Ralph Bates step through the doors of the Advertiser Building and begin framing shots with his camera.
There are only seconds left.
He should have passed me by now.
I've missed him.
Norman frantically searched the lunchtime crowd as they headed towards the passage under the scaffolding, recognised the back of a head as the lights changed. Norman raced after him. The 196F rumbled across the intersection. As he cried out for the man to stop, the pipe vibrated loose. The receding form turned mid-tunnel, but the youthful face was not his. It turned away, making a comment Norman didn't hear through the pounding in his ears.
Where is he?
As the bus passed, he saw his younger self repeatedly reflected in its windows. He spun around, but there was no one behind him. With heightened awareness, he heard the pipe rolling across the boards overhead.
Comprehension dawned. Going back reversed aging. The kitten became the cat that became the kitten it had been. Then who the hell am I?
Inevitably, he looked up and saw the falling pipe slip through the gap.
12 The Mound
Written Feb 2008 | Submission #22 | 1st quarter 2020
Silver Honorable Mention #2
* * *
I spent my formative years 10-18 in Woomera, a village in outback South Australia for people working on the adjacent rocket range. I frequently saw this mound on annual trips to Adelaide and thought it resembled an archaeological Tel or Tell that might cover layers of successive settlements.
Figure 7: On the Pt Augusta-Woomera Road
Half the story came from imagining what lay beneath. The other half came from reading Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and wondering what really happened to Victor’s creation.
I didn’t write it as a comedy but it got my writers group laughing. Nor was I writing horror yet it was published as that in Leaves of Blood 2009, a horror anthology by the late Robert N Stephenson (1961 ~ 2019), of Altair Australia, edited by Mike Brown, one of the Blackwood Writers Group members who found it so funny.
Over a decade later I submitted it the contest, not really expecting much, for despite my group liking it, I don’t. To me is a mishmash of ideas that don’t really fit together.
To my surprise, it earned my second Silver Honorable Mention.
The Mound
.
Eric Randall stopped the Rambler in the lake and opened the door. Heat assaulted him. Bright burning heat, bouncing off the salt. From out of nowhere, as if lying in wait, a cloud of flies enveloped him. Eric waved them off, his arm flashing backwards and forwards in front of his face, clipping the brim of his hat. He wanted to take a photo of the mound and send it to the ABC's weather photo page. At least the flies weren’t interested in the camera's lens.
His subject heaved up from the desert floor about a half a mile away. At the northern end, it rose like a loaf of bread that had overflowed its baking tin. From this position, the rest of the mound appeared flat-topped. To Eric's mind the mound resembled a desert tell, hiding the ruins of a buried city; the mound built up over centuries of repeated destruction and reconstruction until the inhabitants gave up and abandoned the site.
Between the mound and the salt lake he had parked on, sunlight glinted off the rails of the Indian-Pacific line. He had stopped at this spot many times on previous trips to the opal fields and had often wondered why no one had thought to do a trial excavation of the mound. Perhaps his picture would spark some interest.
The flies, which seemed intent on getting into his eyes, up his nose, and through his tightly clenched lips, were more annoying than usual. Eric set the camera on burst, took several quick brackets, and then hurriedly packed away both camera and tripod. He used his wide brim hat to brush away as many flies as he could before jumping back into the Rambler's air-conditioned comfort. As always, a small cloud of the annoying insects clung to his back, and moments after he shut the door seemed determined to get in his face. The sooner he got out of here and on his way to Coober Pedy the better he'd feel; the bloody flies weren't giving him time to think.
Once he was up out of the lake and onto the road, Eric wound the driver's window down an inch and batted the flies towards the gap, letting the airflow suck them out. He drove one handed, occasionally glancing away from the empty road to brush flies towards the gap. The Rambler drifted from side to side, but his attempt to rid himself of the flies failed. When he took a breath, several entered his mouth. Yecch. He cursed and gagged, swerving as he coughed them up, yet even after he spat the last of them, he could still feel a small tickle in his throat as if he had missed one.
Placing his water bottle between his knees, Eric unscrewed the lid with his free hand and dropped it into a side pocket. Head tilted back and peering down his nose at the road, he took a swig and gargled to dislodge the irritant. Another fly flew into the corner of his eye. His hand came up instinctively, finger extended to scratch it out. The Rambler veered and skidded on the gravel verge.
"Bloody hell," Eric screamed, desperately steering into the skid. It didn’t work. The back swung around and the Rambler headed backwards off the elevated road, careering across the donga. When it came to rest, Eric was breathing hard and he could feel his heart thumping against his ribs. He cursed when he realised, he'd made almost no progress. He could still see the mound. A fly flew up his nose. He sneezed and his forehead hit the steering wheel.
Needing to get out and check the Rambler for damage, he was reaching for the door when he noticed the gap in the window. Flies were zooming in. He now had more in the cab than when he'd started. Quickly changing his mind, he wound the window up. Mouth shut in a grim line, eyes squinting, and snorting files, he cast around for something to attack them with and spotted the small fire extinguisher.
* * *
Once his counter attack had worked, Eric drove on but found he had to stop again ten or eleven miles further on, desperate now for a pee. He was hesitant about getting out, but the alternatives didn't appeal. He opened the car door a fraction, ready to slam it shut again at the first sign of trouble. The air outside was cooler and fresher than that in the air-conditioned cab. No flies zoomed through the gap. His bladder became insistent.
As he relieved himself against the back tire, a cloud of flies descended; normal desert flies, annoying, persistent but easily dismissed with a wave of the hand. Briefly he wondered if he had imagined the episode until he saw the inside of the Rambler. It looked like a snowstorm had hit it. He sat back in the powdery mess for a moment, wondering why the flies back near the mound were so different, but only for a moment. He really didn’t care, although he vowed not to stop there on the way back.
By the time he reached Pimba and saw the Woomera turn off, he'd had enough for the day and decided he needed a night to recuperate. Woomera was only five miles away. Bloody flies. He had never known them to be so aggressive. It had felt like a deliberate and coordinated attack.
The quickly deepening dusk found him, bruised, tired, and dishevelled. White powder and dead flies puffed out of the air vents when he bumped over the last cattle grid on the outskirts of Woomera and headed into Blue's Roadhouse for petrol before finding accommodation. He wanted to get away early.
With its tree-lined streets, the Woomera village was like an oasis in a stony desert. In its heyday, when the Village serviced the rocket range, it had been a thriving community. Now it was almost a ghost town, dying but not quite dead. The town was roughly square, a mile a side and the roadhouse sat on the corner of the road from Pimba. Eric pulled up in front of the pumps and got out, stretching to relieve cramped muscles. Like the slowly dissipating heat, the flies had gone with the setting sun.
Blue's Roadhouse was quiet, too quiet and Eric wondered if the place had closed permanently not just for the night. The bowsers looked to be in working order however, and the pump came on as soon as he squeezed the handle. While he filled up, he scanned the area, surprised at how empty and forlorn everything looked. The street lights flickered to life. Pink had turned to orange by the time Eric had filled the tank and went in search of someone to pay.
On the screen door's top panel was a masking tape cross. The top panel in the door glass behind had gone, leaving jagged bits of glass stuck in putty along the edges, implying the panel had suffered from crude and hasty removal. Even before Eric knocked, his nose wrinkled from the putrid smell that emanated through the patched screen. The only light inside came from an almost empty display fridge. Thinking he could leave the money on the counter he tried the door and found it locked.
"Hello, anyone in there?" asked Eric, banging on the screen.
He heard a grunt and a shuffle. A light came on in a back room and spilled into the roadhouse, highlighting a bloated body lying between shattered displays of chocolate bars and potato chips as if the person had grabbed at the display as they fell. He heard a click and the fridge light flickered in sympathy with the intermittent firing of the overhead fluorescent lights. Someone still in attendance, sitting in the dark, ready to turn on the lights, didn't fit well with a rotting corpse. Why hadn’t they removed the body?
