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.