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’.
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