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.’