Slice the tenth

19

Owain had wakened with his men, feeling dazed and confused, and not a little hungover, although he had not drunk anything stronger than water on the last day he remembered. Looking around in the mist, he saw only his loyal Cymraeg companions. None of the Aragonese mercenaries were to be seen. But there was another man emerging from the mists, a stranger. Owain studied him carefully.

The stranger was dressed much as a peasant, but he was wearing very new and expensive-looking clothes. His neck was circled by a strange torque that also looked expensive but made of something besides normal metals. His hair was closely cropped. Perhaps he was on pilgrimage, perhaps as a penance.

‘Dia duit,’ said Owain to Kenneth. ‘Dia is Muire duit,’ responded Kenneth. The two men stood regarding one another warily. Neither one knew how confused the other was, nor did either one want to reveal too much. Owain felt as if he had slept for years, or at least he had dreamed of years passing, and Kenneth knew only that he was in some other time than he had left. He thought he should avoid the alien cliche of ‘take me to your leader’, but he wasn’t quite sure how to elicit the information he wanted so badly.

Again, Owain broke the silence between them. ‘A fine day for travel, it seems. Have you far to go?’

‘I am a Glastonbury pilgrim’, said Kenneth, consciously choosing not to say if he were a pilgrim from or to Glastonbury.

Owain recognized none of he more common pilgrim badges. The stranger might be on his way to Santiago, but he wore no scallop shell. Perhaps the medallion hanging on his chest might contain a relic or image of some saint. ‘So, is it to Campostella that you are headed?’

‘Not really. I have saved for a long time to be able to wander just to go where I might go and to see what I might see. This morning my trip has brought me to you. I am Kenneth ap Yanto ap Owain’

‘And I am Owain ap Thomas ap Rhodri. These are dangerous times to be a Welshman. Perhaps we should travel together.’

20

When Marcus opened his files of recent correspondence with Kenneth on the Table, it woke to reveal many other open tabs. Kenneth had chosen not to close those files before he left. If he got back soon, or if he failed to leave, there would be no need to have them hidden. And if he didn’t get back, soon or ever, he was sure that at least his mother and perhaps Marcus would come to investigate. There was no need to hide his project when it would be too late for them to try to dissuade him, and he didn’t want anyone to think there had been any foul play. It didn’t take long for Marcus to surmise what the project was.

Min-seo Lee had just started eating a bit of dinner in her kitchen in Chandigargh when she was surprised by a Duo call from Marcus Rutschman. She had been at the Kenstal labs in Kunli most of the day, talking with production production engineers about possible ways to manufacture her next concept micro-antennae. She was sure her theories about resonance were correct, but putting them into materials presented a lot of problems, and the Kenstal engineers weren’t sure they could be overcome. She was happy, she admitted to herself, to have an excuse to get back in touch with Rafael from the Connectivity Conference. His company specialized in manufacturing solutions.

Marcus Rutschman was well enough known that she accepted his call, even though she would usually have just let a bot reply for her, offering to save any message for later. Besides, she was familiar with his work in nano-printing, and she had taken several of his pubs with her to show to the engineers in Kunli.

‘Please forgive me calling with no notice, Miss Lee, but I have a sort of  potentially emergency mystery here in England, and you may have the clues I need to solve it.’

‘Please forgive me if I eat while we talk. I have had a long day at the lab, and oddly enough, your work came up then, so this may be a helpful call for both of us. What’s your mystery?’

I am at Kenneth Owen’s house. The woman here with me is his mother. Kenneth seems to have disappeared. He  had no presence, physical or virtual, since last Halloween at about midnight.  He left a lot of files open here, and a lot of them involve you and your work on resonance to allow small antennae detect very large waves.’

‘Ah. Yes. We had many conversations about that project of his. I shared my theoretical data, but I have not been able to make the antennae. I never quite understood what particular sorts of waves he was trying to detect.’

‘I think I made the antennae for him. And it seems he was looking for time waves. He thought he could travel on them.’