Einstein’s Apple:  Entanglement


1


Aidan Prydudd took another sip of his coffee. It was one of the many  things he had been surprised to enjoy in his new time. He put down the porcelain cup that would not even graced the table of a king in his old time, and picked up another of the new time’s wonders: his Lenovo Chrome Tab. Every time he used it in public he had to suppress a gasp of surprise. Lighter and smoother than any slate he had known, it was entirely magical. Kenneth had given it to him thinking it would be a quick way for him to not only learn English but also to learn about contemporary customs and events and artifacts. It was all of those. It was also a way he could write, and he had quickly started a sort of career as a writer of fantasy stories. Writing and performing at live poetry/story-telling events let him continue the role he had hoped would be his when he had set off with Owen Redhand nearly seven hundred years before. His career also helped him develop an identity beyond the strange boy that Kenneth Owens had mysteriously brought back from a week-end adventure one Halloween three years ago.


Explaining Aidan to his mother, Kenneth had said that he was older than he looked, and that he had known him for a long time, actually. He hadn’t mentioned that Aidan was pushing 700. After she was better acquainted with her son’s new companion, she asked  him his age. Aidan had blushed and said it must be 679 or so. She said that next he would be telling her that he was one of the faery folk. No, he had said, but he felt as if he had spent some time with them. She knew she had to introduce this one to her mother. No  one enjoyed a good yarn better than did Blanche Davidson.


Yanto Owens and Aidan had gotten on well immediately. No one had ever seemed so interested in Yanto’s metallurgical antiquities as Aidan. Yanto was very impressed when Aidan showed him his own knife. It was the best reproduction of a medieval knife he had ever seen. Did Aidan know who had made it? It had been his father’s, Aidan said. The man who had made it was dead, as was his father.

ndeed one of the mysteries of Aidan Prydudd was that all his family were dead. He offered no explanation, and no one was rude enough to ask, how they had died. Yanto wondered if their deaths had happened in a rare auto accident. Although cars almost never had an accident, there were occasional failures in the ancient infrastructure that remained the pride and bain of Britain, especially in the fringe areas like Wales. Still, it was odd that he didn’t even have any photos of them on his phone.


Aidan took another sip of his coffee and pondered the irony of his situation. He pondered that irony often. He had left his home on the banks of the Tefi when he was only eighteen, taking the presumptuous name of Prydudd--Bard--in hopes for adventures beyond what he might have had as a fisherman and farmer. His family were indeed dead. His parents had lived to what seemed  ripe ages in his little village of Cenarth. His mother had died one cold winter when she was in her mid-forties, having given birth to seven children, three of whom had survived childhood. His sister Anwyn, the oldest of the three, had died in childbirth when she was fifteen. His brother Dewi had gone off east to work in a mine, which had caved in. His father was a broken man after his wife died, and joined her in the holy ground of St. Llawddog when he was fifty. It was then that Aidan had set out, and he had indeed adventured beyond his wildest imaginings.


2


While Aidan sipped coffee at Costa, Kenneth asked Home for a cup of tea. Since returning from what must certainly be one of the most amazing adventures anyone could have, he had sunken further into academic obscurity. Before setting off to the Tor in Atilla that fateful Samhain evening, he had not thought much about publishing his discoveries. He had not known if he would have any discoveries, or if he would survive the journey. He had expected it to be a solo journey. But, he had come back with a companion, and he had no desire to expose Aidan to the scrutiny and insanity that would follow the story that a reclusive Pilton scientist had built a time machine by modifying a Korean car, and had traveled back in time to retrieve a 700-year-old Welshman.


Kenneth analyzed and organized his data. There was a lot of it. One of the things he had not really considered when he started his awesome adventure was how places wander through time. He had thought if he could travel through time that he would still be in the place of the Glastonbury Tor parking lot. Owain and his companions woke up in what they thought would be France. Neither of these expectations proved to be true, and when Kenneth and Aidan returned, they still were not at the Tor but at a shopping center in Burnham-on-Crouch. They might have ended up in the English Channel. If he were ever to try to go surfing in Atilla again, he wanted better tide tables, so to speak. So he was studying the variations and progressions in the earth’s rotation and revolutions. He was beginning to think that he would have to join the ranks of many discoverers and scientists before him who had not allowed their findings to be published until after their deaths


It had been both a joy and a challenge returning with Aidan, who had saved his life, and with whom he had shared an intimacy he had never had with anyone else. There had been almost no discussion about whether Aidan would accompany him on the attempted return. But when they returned, the identity of Aidan would be a continuing problem. It was easy to dress him as a contemporary Englishman, to give him a cell phone and earbuds. Any sort of identity card was a much bigger problem. Aidan had no birth certificate. No national diploma. No National Insurance Number. No embarrassing stream of Instagram photos of his growing up, posted by a loving mother. Kenneth could share things, like a debit/credit card. He resorted to forging a few documents to obtain Aidan a ValidateUk Card. With no passport, Aidan would remain a sort of prisoner in Great Britain.


Then there was the problem of friends. Aidan had none, at least none living. And whenever Kenneth introduced him to his friends, they were often full of unanswerable questions. It was easy enough to say that they had met on a hiking trip in Wales. It did not, however, seem like Kenneth to invite someone he had known only a few days to move in with him. And why did Aidan not return home? The story of a dead family and wish to study the lore of Glastonbury was true, but seemed as slight as his luggage.


Aidan’s arrival was particular difficult, understandably, for Marcus Rutschman. He--and Nora Davidson--had hoped that he might become more than a some-time lover for Kenneth. Kenneth’s hiking partner from Pembrokeshire seemed to put an end to that hope. Yet Marc, too, admitted to himself that Aidan had a particular charm and could not dislike him.


Indeed it was not long before Nora was suggesting to Aidan what a good father she thought her son would be, a suggestion that implied things Aidan could not begin to understand.