Curiosities' End

Back at the dressing table after not having had room for a muffin because she had eaten so much corn bread, she once more surveyed her afternoon haul.

Mill was sure that she had put No. 895 in a bag before going to supper. Now it was out of the bag, and seemed a different colour from what she had remembered. And, there seemed to be a sort of cloud of tiny insects around it, barely large enough to see. What were they, and why would they gather around an old golf ball.

The sound of the water running in the bathtub told Mill that she would have to study No. 895 later. Aunt Buck liked for Mill to take her bath early so the ancient hot water heater would have time to recover for her own bath. Picking up the ball for a quick closer look before going off to her bath,

Mill felt a slight tingling, almost like a bite from an ant. Whatever those tiny insects were, they had a big defense. By the time she reached the bathtub, she had a slight rash on her arm. Aunt Buck saw it and wondered if she had found some poison ivy.

‘No,. I watch for poison ivy. I think I just got bitten by a gnat or something.’

‘Well, let’s put some baking soda in your bath  water. That should help.’

And the sting and the  itching did pass very quickly. Aunt Buck wanted Mill to stay in the tub for a while to ‘take away the poison’, but Mill was anxious to get back to her specimens, especially No. 895. Dried off in one of the thin and rough towels that it seemed only Aunt Buck liked, except that Mill liked them because Aunt Buck did, and in her seersucker pajamas, Mill returned to the table by the window. The ‘gnats’ were gone. The golf ball seemed the colour it had been when she had found it. It did match the photo she had on her phone. She wished she had taken another picture when it had seemed a different colour. She made a mental note to document her specimens better in the future. This time she was certain to bag No. 895, and put it in line with her other finds of the day. The corn snake skin, No. 896, was a problem. She needed a long bag to hold it without damaging it. Maybe Aunt Buck had a spaghetti wrapper she could use. She did. Aunt Buck knew that her favourite niece often needed special equipment.

The bed felt especially good that night, with the delicious cool of the sheets enhanced by the warmth that remained from the hot soda bath. Mill was quickly asleep.

She did not sleep for very long, it seemed, before a strange noise woke her, a slight buzzing, like bees or a very large cloud of gnats. At first she thought that there must be more of those gnats, and she wondered if she should have shut the window.

But then she saw No. 895. It was out of the bag, again, and glowing again, brighter this time, and humming slightly. Mill sat paralyzed by wonder as her golf ball lifted off the table and swept out the window, gathered speed, and disappeared.

A new story, from the blue ball

Stories from the Blue Ball

Curiosities

Mil carefully spread the finds of the day on Aunt Buck’s curious table. Buck said it had been a dressing table until she took off the mirror. Now it was in front of the window in the spare bedroom, which Mil thought of as her own. There was a curtain on arms that swing out from the edge of the table which made it a perfect puppet theatre.

 Aunt Buck’s house was full of curiosities. It was older and smaller than any of the houses near it. Once it has been a farmhouse, and the had been a cotton gin between it and a highway, but now the farm was a subdivision with a golf course and a little lake. The farm had behind to Buck’s brother Cedric, who has died before Mil was born. He has given the farmhouse and a half acre to his sister. After his death, the family had developed the rest of the farm.

Aunt Buck was the oldest person Mil knew, but she didn't act much like most adults. She was short and trim, and in her jeans and sweatshirts and tennis shoes, could pass as a teenage if you saw her from the back. She was also the only person who called Mil by her full name, even if she weren't angry, which she never was anyway, and which she did now, calling from the kitchen.

‘Mildred Cedric Davidson, you better start washing up. Dinner’s almost ready.’

'I will, Aunt Buck. Just let me bag my specimens.’

Mil collected specimens. She was a naturalist. She always took a picture of them in situ before gathering them, recording when and where she found them. That information she stored on her phone as a description of the specimens. They were all assigned numbers which  she wrote carefully on the plastic bags in which she kept them.

Today's finds started at number 892, a bit of a bird's wing. She could not identify the species yet, but thought it was from an immature robin. It has been under the privet hedge that separated her aunt's yard from the golf course, and robins often nested there.

Number 893 was part of what seemed to be a receipt from the cotton gin. It has also been under the hedge, blown the apparently by some long ago wind. There wasn't much left of it, but the heading, 'Needham Gin’, was still clearly visible. The date seemed to be 9/14/63, but it was pretty faint. Only  two numbers on the receipt, ‘17’, were left. Mil could not guess what else it might have said.

A bottle cap, too rusted to identify the brand, was Number 894. Mil's grandfather had run a sure back when this was still out in the country, and there were many bottle caps around. They were therefore not a major find, but this one still showed a bit of purple color that Mill liked. She would research what soda pop had purple caps later.

Number 895 was a golf ball, but an unusual one. It was a sort of dull metal color instead of the white or yellow that Mill usually found. That fact was why she kept it instead of returning it to the club house for a small reward. It also send unusually heavy, and a little warm. More research for later, about golf ball materials.

The prize find of the afternoon was Number 896: a corn snake shed, still with most of its colors and in one piece.

'Mildred Cedric Davidson, dinner's ready.’ 'Here I come, Aunt Buck.’

Mill tripped to the table, happy that her brother was of at scout camp and she had her favorite aunt to herself. Thomas was alright as brothers go, but still. He was just two years older, but he made it seem like decades, and he called her Dred. She got slight revenge by calling him Theodore, which was no part of his real name but which bugged him delightfully.

Meals were always just about the best part of staying with Aunt Buck. She didn't cook anything unusual, really, except maybe her lemon meringue pie, but all her cooking just tasted special somehow. Tonight's dinner was simple, with tomatoes and cucumbers sliced and soaked together in a mild vinegar, Lambertson green beans cooked with ham, and not corn bread. No pie, but there were muffins, the kind Aunt Buck called just muffins because there was nothing filling  or frosting them. Everything tasted lovely, and Buck asked Mill about her specimens with genuine interest. She thought the bottle cap was probably from a Grapette, a soda long discontinued, but delicious in its day.

Buck, who had acquired her unusual name because she had married a man named Rogers and she had always been interested in space travel, let Mill bring her phone to the table so they could explore their questions. They discovered that the Grapette caps has not been purple. Probably Nugrape, then, was Buck's suggestion. Mill was surprised that Grapettes had come in six ounce bottle, since she had grown up in a world that mostly started with sixteen ounce bottles. She had learned something from collecting an old bottle cap even if it wasn't rare.

Back at the dressing table after not having had room for a muffin because she had eaten so much corn bread, she once more surveyed her afternoon haul.

23. Forks in time

V

45

Nora and Yanto remained disappointed, as did Marcus, and as did, to a slightly lesser degree, Min-seo and Rafael. They kept watching waves for a year, and none of them carried a Hyundai named Attila carrying Kenneth Owens.

Min-seo and Rafael were married, not at Glastonbury in May  but at Seoul in October, a traditional time for weddings in Korea and the anniversary of their meeting. They both wore hanbok, a traditional wedding dress, so again they were in costume. They exchanged not only rings but watches, a recent tradition in Korean weddings which seemed particularly appropriate for them. Rafael had joined the engineering staff at Kenstel, and they made their home in Chandigarh.

As Rafael collected more and more data on time waves, he became less and less expectant that Kenneth would return to the place he had departed. Time and place move independently of each other. So, he quit going to the Home in Pilton. He remained at the University of Sheffield, but worked as a consultant to Kenstel and became one of the best friends of the Acosta-Lees.
Nora Owens continued to keep her son present virtually, with deposits and withdrawals to his account and purchases from Home. If anyone asked about him, she would say, truthfully, that he was off on a trip about some secret project on which he was working and about which he had told no one any details, but that it seemed likely to be very important.


46

In Attila Kenneth and Aidan awoke from what at first seemed a very strange shared dream, but they quickly realized that however much their memories might be a dream, they were indeed together in a Hyundai Harmony which displayed the time and date as  05:00 on 1 November 2039, and their location as a parking lot of a market in Burnham-on-Crouch.

‘We did it! We really did it!’ Kenneth was a little amazed but very happy.

‘You did it!’ Aidan was awed.

‘Open the doors,’ Kenneth said, as if he were just going on a normal shopping trip. Attila was not parked very squarely, so he asked it to repark, now that it had access to all the ‘normal’ satellites on which it relied.

‘We should probably get you some new clothes,’ Kenneth said as he saw Aidan for the first time in the twenty-first century. ‘You look great, but a bit old-fashioned, even for East Anglia.’

So, Aidan learned some of the other things the slab of glass Kenneth carried would do: purchase clothes and food. Play music. He wondered where he could get such a thing. Kenneth reassured him that he would have one before the day was over. If he didn’t have one, people would think he were an alien. Aidan also found out that the thing, which Kenneth called a ‘phone’, could talk to people who weren’t there.

Kenneth called his mother a little early. It wasn’t Sunday, but he wanted her to meet someone.

22. Thin times at Avalon

43


Part of the calculations Kenneth worked on that January had to do with calendrical problems. He had not, when he first arrived in 1704, thought much about the fact that the English would not adopt the Gregorian calendar for nearly half a century. To save electricity, he had turned off the date and time function of his phone and other computers, and had been keeping count of the days the old-fashioned way, with marks on paper. There had been no calendar hanging on the wall of the porch he had visited in Pengenffordd, so he had never really thought about  calendars. But as he was thinking about the upcoming ‘thin time’ of Imbolc, he did. Ancient celtic calendars had not been printed. They were sun dials. Huge sundials, Stonehenge being the most famous. The modern (i.e., 2039) version of the Gregorian calendar, with leap years and leap centuries and occasional adjustments of a few seconds as necessary meant that his devices were pretty close to the time-keeping of Stonehenge. Which meant that if they were going to make a leap this Imbolc, they needed to be ready on 20 January.

Aidan asked how Attila would help them ‘catch a wave’, since he and the other companions of Owain Lawgoch had had nothing like an automobile.

‘I suppose anyone or anything anywhere could be caught up on a time wave. But the special painting on the top of the car lets me see a wave and try to catch up to it. In ‘my time’, there are people who ‘surf’ on sea waves, and they use fast boats to take them to catch waves that are still far from land. Attila helps me try to do the same thing.’

So it happened that an hour  before midnight on Tuesday, the 19th of January, Kenneth turned on all the systems of Attila the Hyundai as he and Aidan squeezed into it to try to catch a time wave. Everything seemed to work fine. Aidan had never before seen all of the displays that Kenneth had at his disposal, but he had long been convinced that this beautiful man he had seen walking through the mists was the greatest mage of all time, so he was amazed but not surprised. The clock clock on the display read 31 January, just as Kenneth had expected. As midnight approached, they drifted off to sleep.

44

Nora’s parents had taken the news of their grandson’s ‘trip’ with little surprise. They had always thought that the boy would go far. Blanche Davidson was almost smug that someone still took her old stories seriously. Min-seo and Rafael had called from Chandigarh to share that they were engaged, and thanked Nora and Marcus for giving them so many excuses to get together, something they probably would not have done on their own.

With everyone gathered around their Duo screens at once, it seemed like a good time to plan for their next trip to Pilton and Glastonbury. The Davidson’s thought that they were a little old for such a field trip, but were happy to have been included in the secret, and asked that Kenneth call them as soon as he returned. Min-seo and Rafael hoped that Kenneth might make an appearance again so they could invite him to their wedding, since his project had been so important in their getting to know one another.

And so it happened that the four original time-travel detectives and Yanto Owens stepped out of one of the Apple Tree’s Volvo Estates into the thick mist of Avalon about an hour before midnight on 31 January 2040 with a piece of kit that looked like a medieval shield made of black carbon fibre. They were in the parking place next to the one where/when Kenneth Owens’ Hyundai had last reported its location to House.  Marcus Rutschman opened a kick-stand on its back, put it on a firm bit of turf, and ran his finger along one edge. It began to glow slightly with a pale green light. Patterns began to be displayed in blue and red and white lines on it’s glassen surface. Occasionally one of the patterns would glow in orange.

‘That one!’ Marcus pointed to a particularly bright orange line that crossed Merlin’s display as a diagonal sine  wave. That’s exactly what Kenneth had hoped to use. If it is, and if he’s trying to return, he might be on it. We need to be ready to move if we’re in his parking place.

They waited. There were some other of the orange waves, not quite so strong, but still hopeful. But nothing came to occupy the parking space they kept open. After about an hour, with only blue and white lines on the display, they decided that perhaps they should try again at Beltane. Or that maybe Marcus should start coming to stay in House more often and monitor the area on a regular basis. Maybe they had put too much faith in ley lines and thin times.

Next morning, they all returned to their scattered homes, Marcus and Rafael and Min-seo with USB drives of the data gathered by Merlin, Nora and Yanto with disappointment.

21. A new year begins

41

The eve of the new year 1705 was a quiet time for Kenneth and Aidan. There was not much celebration going on around them on the farms or in the mines or in the villages, and if there had been, they would not have joined in. The solstice had been a cheerful time for them. Even though the nights were not much shorter yet, they did feel that they had more time to work on preparation for the next stage of their journey. But somehow a new year made them realize how far away from anything they had ever called home before really was. Just over two months ago, it had been 1378 for Aidan Prydudd and 2039 for Kenneth Owens. As 1705 began, Aidan wondered whether he was dead and that the dead do dream, and Kenneth wondered if he had drifted off to sleep in the Glastonbury parking lot and was having the strangest dream of his life. How could any of this be real?

Still, holding each other seemed real enough. Kenneth wondered whether he would have survived the past two months in this strange time without Aidan. Aidan wondered whether he would have survived two months of warfare in the old time, Each was  happy to have the other with whom to share this strange new life-time.

For the next month, Ken went over his data and graphs, becoming more and more sure that they might be able to leap through time again, but also more and more unsure whether the next leap would be to the past or to the future, or whether either one would be a past or future with which either of the would be familiar. But they reassured each other that they would gladly face whatever time or world it might be with each other.


42

The eve of the year 2040 was an exciting time for the five people who shared what they hoped was the secret that time travel had been successful. A week before the end of the year, Raf Acosta had sent Min-seo Lee an e-mail to her private account, which now she almost never used. He had said that he had something he wanted to show her.  Might he come to Chandigarh?  She of course said yes. He said he would be on an Alliance Air flight from Dubai at 15:30 on the 31st. Where would it be convenient to meet her? She said she would be waiting at the terminal in Mohali.

Nora Owens had invited Marcus to join her and Yanto in London for a little family celebration. She had even persuaded her parents, Blanche and Aubrey, to join them from Whitby. There was not yet a Teslatube from Whitby, so they would come by train, arriving at King’s Cross. Marcus would get his own Uberdu from St. Pancras, but Nora thought that she should meet her parents.

Yanto was glad to have a bit of time to talk with Marcus with no fear of worrying his wife. ‘Do you really think someone could survive time travel?’

‘Honestly, I have no way of knowing. Some people thought that train travel would be too fast for safety. Many people thought that super-sonic travel would be fatal.  Compared to super-sonic airplanes, Kens theory of time travel seems hardly dangerous at all. It’s not so much traveling fast as it  it is hopping from one place to another. It’s just that the places are waves, traveling at the speed of time. More like hopping from one slow-moving train to another. But of course also of course we don’t know if he pulled it off. It seems that if he had failed, there would be wreckage, and we haven’t found any.’

‘Ah, but there’s the rub. When might the wreckage be.’

Nora arrived with the Davidsons, who were re-introduced to Marcus Rutschman, and who then asked where Kenneth was. ‘Was he arriving later?’

‘Sit down, please. We have something to tell you.’

20. Time and tide await no man

39

Nora and Marcus had another task while they waited for what they hoped would be an Imbolc window of opportunity: keeping Kenneth Owens alive virtually. They of course did not really know if he were alive in the ‘normal’ sense, but since he seemed to live in abnormal times, they didn’t want him to return to their present and find himself dead. That was not a very difficult task, since Kenneth was pretty much a hermit. His Home did all of his shopping. It was not at all unusual for him to leave the Hyundai in the garage for months. All of his bills were paid and his income deposited  electronically. So, they hoped to make  him seem to be around by doing a few things for him. Nora would go over twice a week to take in deliveries from his locker, and Marcus, with Min-seo, published a paper naming him a co-author. It described printing techniques for nano-antennae, with emphasis on applications for wearable electronic devices. There was no mention of space travel. Ken had not bothered to post anything on any social sites for years, and most of his correspondence before his disappearance had been to either Min or Marcus, so none of his colleagues noticed any lack of activity. Nora called Home every Sunday and talked to the smart house. She found the internet of things more and more normal each week.

40

In the old country, Kenneth and Aidan were also preparing for Imbolc. Attila the Hyundai had large batteries, and there were some solar panels, but the panels were small compared to the area of the car because of elaborate antennae Marcus had printed on the roof. If they were going to be able to make the leap back to the future in any sort of controlled manner, it might not be possible to delay it much longer than three months. Kenneth had to admit to himself that he wasn’t really sure that his trip had been in any way controlled. He had just put himself in  spot where he thought time waves might break and hoped he could ride one. Since he had landed where and when he had, he hoped the break might happen twice. He did hope that he might be able to publish his work in a time that would understand it. Aidan found the possibility of time travel far more exciting than fighting in French-English-Welsh wars, but he wasn’t sure to whom he might tell his tales. He did hope that if they made a leap, it would be into the future. He had already lived in the past, and he was certain that his family and friends thought he was dead. His return would be really hard to explain.

19. Time-traveling hermits

Kenneth slowly became aware just how unprepared he had been for time travel. He had not really expected that it would work, despite what he had told himself. Now that he was nearly 330 years into the past, with lots of data to analyze from his trip, he realized that he might never be able to share it with anyone who would believe it or really benefit from it. He wondered if he might write a book, detailing how he had come to make the trip. Writing was one technology that had survived. But he had no money for paper or ink or pen. And he quickly realized that his food supply, packets of dehydrated camping food, would not last forever, especially now that he was feeding two.

Fortunately, Aidan proved to be a helpful second mouth to feed. He quickly learned to speak ‘modern’ English, and found folk ready to pay him for singing and telling stories. He helped Kenneth build a lath house a short distance from the Hyundai. Fortunately it had come to rest above any land that was used for farming, and before enclosures had begun. Kenneth they passed off as a scholarly hermit. Fortunately  hermits were not entirely unknown in Wales at that time.

And so they passed the winter, Kenneth telling stories of the future to Aidan as they lay together in their tiny cell, Aidan telling stories of the past to the folk gathered around the fires of taverns.


38

In the future, Marcus was not encouraged. He came more and more to think that time travel was possible, and that Kenneth had achieved it. But the data they were beginning to gather with their Merlin was like the discovery of some ancient (or future) library by some archaeologist, written in an unknown tongue. Rafael was more hopeful. He set his deep learning algorithms loose on the data and waited for them to find a new Rosetta Stone.

18. Precedents of time travel

35

It took Kenneth and Aidan two nights to get back to Attila the Hyundai. It had been twenty years since Kenneth had hiked in the Brecons. Now the A470 had not been built, and it was not a park with marked trails, and there were a lot fewer built landmarks, but the ridges and valleys hadn’t changed.  By the second night, staying up on the ridge, Kenneth was able to get a radio connection to the Huyndai, so the part he had thought would be most difficult, finding a small, dark, lozenge hardly 12 feet long in acres of dark brush.

It had not been so difficult to explain who he was and when he had come from to Aidan as he had expected. Aidan had grown up in an age that still accepted magic, and he had heard tales of people disappearing through thing space or waking from long, unexplainable sleeps before. He knew enough about harmonics from harps and enough about waves from paddling in corracles that Ken’s theory didn’t seem outlandish at all. It was easier for Ken to explain it to him than it had been when he had suggested it to his modern friends before he had built his own craft. Besides, if Aidan had thought traveling with Owain Lawgoch might give him stories to tell, he was certain that traveling Kenneth Owens, a mage from the future with raven-black hair and ocean-blue eyes would give him stories unimaginable.

Kenneth’s Hyundai shared with the corracles of Aidan’s youth that it was sized for one occupant. The nights on the ridge, they had snuggled together for warmth amongst beds of leaves, far enough from any trail that they hoped to avoid discovery. Now that they had recovered Ken’s timeship, it seemed best to sleep in it. It had enough proximity sensors that it could do a far better job of detecting visitors than they. Ken did not expect everyone he might meet to be so accepting of his situation as Aidan had been. And if they were detected, he thought did not want to be separated from his only possible way to return home. That meant they they continued to sleep snuggling together, a circumstance neither of them found very troublesome.

What he might do if he were detected, Ken didn’t know. He somewhat regretted that the flying cars he had been promised in his childhood had not become common. His little Attila would not be the best escape vehicle in rough slate ridges around them.

36

Back in 2030--forward in 2030?--time seemed to move too slowly for the four folk who were trying to rediscover Kenneth. The hardware part of their project had been fairly simple. There were no components that were at all difficult for Marcus to requisition. Yanto had followed the work closely, even going up to Sheffield to check out the finished prototype, which Marcus’ colleagues at the Institute thought might have uses in space exploration. Min-seo had convinced her colleagues that India, though it was now a far more powerful manufacturing nation than Great Britain, might still be able to benefit from working with the folks at Sheffield. She had even suggested that Rafael Acosta of Panjiva,  in Brazil, might help them market ‘her’ project. She mentioned of course that she had met him at the Connectivity Conference in Dublin.

The software was more difficult. Here Rafael was very helpful. He was a data analysis wizard. With the new ‘shield’, which Marcus called Merlin, because Merlin had also been said to be a sort of time traveler, and which Min-seo called Jantar Mantar, after the ancient observatory in Jaipur, they thought that they could detect the sorts of waves that Kenneth had called time waves. Rafael was certain that he could isolate them. But, there was no data base for such waves to begin to let him isolate a wave that Kenneth might have surfed. He therefore suggested another trip to Glastonbury, this time with their new device. Marcus suggested the beginning of February, the ancient celtic time of Imbolc, another ‘thin time’.