Sixth Slice

11

It began to rain in Aidan’s dream. The rain seemed very realistic, so realistic he felt he should go out of the cave to take a piss.

12

Min and Raf left the Odeon to find a gentle mist had replaced the rain. They decided to walk the 15 blocks or so back to the Gresham. There were still many ghouls and spirits about, and in the mist they seemed quite proper. It was easy to think that this night might really be a thin time, and that some of the visions in the mist were not in costumes at all, but inhabitants of some other world who were celebrating the night with the young engineers.

Min and Raf, however, paid them little attention. The night had become a serious date, but neither quite wanted to admit it. If their feelings were not mutual, there would only be disappointment. So they talked about other conferences and gatherings coming up, when they might meet again, ‘to talk about their theories’.

Too quickly they were back in the lobby of Min’s hotel. She did not invite him up, of course. He bowed, knight-like, and kissed her hand, holding it a little longer than necessary, and returned to the night.

The Fifth Slice

9

In Dublin, too, it had begun to rain. Rafael suggested the fireworks at  midnight might be a soggy affair. Perhaps instead they might find something to do indoors. It could be fun  to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was playing at the Odeon, and they were almost there. They were both virgins. It seemed a good idea to Min, who hadn’t put on her best hangnok to get it soaked. And so, two brilliant and reserved scientists found themselves surrounded by a crowd of enthusiasts with lighters and newspapers,  water pistols and noise makers, wearing fishnet hose and throwing rice and confetti and toilet paper at each other. They danced the timewarp, again.



10

There were parts of Ken’s theory that he himself didn’t understand. It was not even a theory that he could quite explain, and he wasn’t sure whether his experiment tonight would disprove it if he remained in the same time and place. He was not even sure that there was any advantage to his coming to Glastonbury to try it. Glastonbury did have a reputation for being a ‘thin space’ going back more than 2,000 years, a place where people traveled between the worlds. If Ken were right about being able to ‘surf’ on gravity waves, then this place was the Mavericks of timespace surfing. Maybe.

Most accepted laws of physics suggested that time is reversible. But that seemingly possible phenomenon had never been observed, or so it seemed. But if the reversal of time happened not in this universe but in a parallel one, one separated from us by a very small distance, it might be real but unobservable. Roger Penrose had thought such a thing might be possible, and might account for dark matter. Indeed, Ken thought, it had been encompassed by Newton’s third law. If one thought of gravity waves as breaking, as do waves of water on a beach, there would also be an undertow. Ken thought such a similarity was probably accurate, and that just as many other waves, when they collapse,
become observable as particles, gravity waves collapsed as observable ‘particles’ of time. Ken found it fascinated by how clearly some of the problems of understanding such things had been expressed as long ago as 1915 by Bateman in his Mathematical Analysis of Electrical and Optical Wave-Motion, as he wondered what ‘medium’ light and electricity moved through: ‘If we abandon the idea of a continuous medium in the usual sense, only two ways of explaining action at a distance readily suggest themselves. We may either think of the aether as a collection of tubes and filaments attached to the particles of matter as in the form of Faraday’s theory . . . ; or we may suppose that some particle or entity which belonged to an active body at time t belongs to the body acted upon at a later time t+T. . . .if particles are continually emitted from an active body they will form a kind of thread attached to it. . . . At present we are unable to form a satisfactory picture of the processes . . . .’ (Cambridge, 1915, pp. 4-5) Ken hoped that there were some sort of thread attached to ‘an active body’ because he hoped to be one of those active bodies, and he hoped, like Theseus in the Labyrinth, to follow the thread back home.

Einstein's Apple, Slice Four

7

Ken had liked the idea of the Hyundai Harmony when he first heard of it. It was harmony that had been among the first discoveries about waves, made by the Pythagoreans or their teachers. It was also the first affordable car made of BoeingBus’s  carbon-fibre/microlattice materials. It was strong and light and stiff, and able to absorb shock. Since he didn’t know exactly what he was getting into, Ken thought he would need all the help he could get. It was a very small but very smart car, with all the navigational and information capabilities one could hope for in 2039, responding to voice or gesture, and piloting itself.  It was also very adaptable. He had removed the jump seat, leaving only one, so he would have room for extra batteries and water generators and air purifiers. He didn’t expect to need them, but he would have them if he did. And then there was his special take on  Min-sao Lee’s antennae array that he hoped would turn his Atilla the Hyundai into a surfboard. Because he knew, he thought, what he was looking for, his antennae were not very large, but they were printed directly onto the upper surfaces of the Hyundai. Not only was living in a tiny pre-fab in Pilton cheaper than living in an ‘historic’ cottage, it also provided for much better atmospheric control for nano-printing, which he had been able to afford because of his savings in rent. The Hyundai came with what should be plenty of on-board computing power for his tuner, which was a damper, actually. He had added another, parallel NVIDIA Gamma one, and a 10 terabyte SSD on which he had stored profiles of his expected waves.  Because the waves he was looking for were extremely long with relatively  low amplitude, they were easily drowned out by the noise around them. So he used the data gathered by calibrating the usual background noise to make dampers that would show only the variations in noise that gravity waves would cause, and in real time so he could ‘see’ his wave rather than analyze it from the data later.

He was sitting in this parking lot at Glastonbury Abbey on Halloween because he, like Min-sao Lee, had spent summers with his grandparents. His grandparents, especially his mother’s mother, had filled him with celtic folk tales. Before Ken was born, Blanche and Aubrey Davidson had retired to Whitby, a town Blanche considered the site of betrayal for the celtic tradition. The basketball team might be saints, but she was certain the term was misused for Hilda. As a child, he had found his grandmother’s stories amusing, and her clinging to them quaint. But as he grew, he wondered what might be the physics behind some of the  phenomena she described.  There were so many heroes who disappeared, who were said to be not dead but asleep, who would return. Aubrey had given him his first appreciation for waves when he took Ken out in his sailing dinghy. There was no end to the variety of waves,  nor of what they could teach. They not only were the condition for sailing, they could tell what conditions to expect. Their interactions could be spectacular, and it was from clapotis that Ken began to learn how waves might be modulated and even made to stand still. The air, too, operates in waves, and they could be read in the clouds above but also on the surface of the water.

Now the parking lot around Atilla the Hyundai was beginning to be a surface of water. Would, Ken wondered, the rain be a variable he had not considered?


8

Owain Lawgoch, Owen the Red Hand, was not the only one who dreamed he was waking that Samhain evening. He was surrounded by twelve of his warrior companions. He would have been happy to know that legend had made him a greater leader than he could honestly claim to be, with a band of forty to hundreds of warriors. But few had been brave or foolish enough to follow him into the storm in which they fell asleep.

One of them was Aidan Prydudd, hardly more than a boy,  not really a warrior at all but, as his name suggested, a bard, and a romantic bard at that. He had accompanied Owain into France to be able to sing of his glories and to gain a valuable patronage. But the English had found out their plan, and now they were assumed dead. Indeed, Aidan sometimes wondered in his dreams, might they be dead? How could one know whether one were dead or but asleep. Sometimes it seemed he might be waking, but always someone would say ‘sleep on’ and he would, perchance to dream. Sometimes he dreamed himself not a bard but a fool. Perhaps he was misnamed. Perhaps he should be called Aidan Ffwl.

The Third Slice

5

The Hyundai had parked in the lot at the Glastonbury Abbey at 20:40 GMT. A warm rain had begun to fall. Ken had plenty of time to go over his checklist again, not that he really needed any more preparation.

Ken had retired early from LIGO/NANO a year ago. For twelve years he had worked at the University of Sheffield, but he had moved to a little cottage (a new cottage, true, but small) in Pilton when he had convinced the University and LIGO/NANO that he could work as well at home as in the lab, not a difficult task in the time of high-speed optical cables. He had wanted to be close to Glastonbury. For three more years he had stayed on, but now he had no official duties. His parents and many of his friends had tried to convince him to continue in what they called his career. His parents, who lived in London, had repeatedly told him that he was wasted at Sheffield, that he would be welcome at Cambridge or someplace in the United States. His mother had hoped for Cambridge, where she could see him more often. His father had hoped for the University of Washington, where there was more money. But Ken liked where he was, in the backwater of Sheffield. He had access to any work anyone was doing with gravity waves anywhere, but his required contributions were low. He had enough money and enough time to pursue what interested him most.

There had been other protests about his move to Pilton, and not even into some historic weaver’s cottage but into a new prefab unit that could have been anywhere. His father thought it was not suitable for a young man about whom everyone had had such great expectations. (Is one still a young man at 37? There wouldn’t be much more time for him to do the Great Work that would result in a Nobel Prize.) His mother was more concerned that he was leaving behind the person she had chosen as the great love in her son’s life, Marcus Rutschman. Marc did nanotech research, exploring biological based semiconductors. Everyone said he was a genius. Nora Davidson liked his eyes, and how polite he was. Although it seemed to her that Ken and Marc were an obvious pair, Ken had never seemed to be as interested in a mate as she. She never quite understood what it was that interested him.

What interested him were waves. LIGO had ‘discovered’ gravity waves in 2016, but there were still many things about them that were understood only theoretically. Now, if we live in spacetime, as we clumsily have said more or less since Schopenhauer, and maybe since the Incas, then the wave is a perfect analogy, Ken thought: it has a spatial extension, its amplitude, and a time extension, its frequency.

Human beings had long developed sensors to detect many kinds of waves. Our skin picked up heat. Our inner ears detected seismic waves. Our eyes detected a range of light waves. Our ear drums resonated with sound waves. And we had learned to detect many kinds of waves with post-meatware evolution. Thermometers and microphones and seismic sensors and microphones and photography all extended the range of waves far beyond those known to us with our biological senses. Radio antennae of many kinds allowed us to use a broad range of frequencies. Sometimes we would discover a wave with our new extra-biological senses, as Roentgen and Curie did with photographic plates. Sometimes our theories of physics would lead us to look for ways to detect waves. It was the theory of gravity waves that had led to the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration of which Ken’s work at Sheffield was a part.

But Ken’s work there had been as much that of a spy as a collaborator. He had certainly done his fair share of analysing the often thin and sometimes almost contradictory data about gravity waves that the Observatory had accumulated. But he was also always looking for ways to build a detector for time waves. Ken expected time waves to have very long periods--that is, very low frequencies--so that we would hardly notice them at all, just as we hardly notice the tides, which usually have a frequency of about twelve hours, much shorter than Ken predicted for time waves. But he also expected them to have very small amplitudes, so again we would hardly notice them. And yet, everything
we do, we seem to do in time. It was his search for a way to detect time waves that had attracted him to the work of Min-seo Lee at Kenstel, an Indian company that had started building antennae dishes and repeaters for home data systems, and had grown with the support of the Indian government and the Bharatiya Janata Party to be a leader in just about anything that catches a wave except surfboards. They were taking up the tradition of the Janta Mantars. Whatever the excuse, they had made some helpful devices.

What Ken hoped he was riding at the Glastonbury Abbey parking lot was a sort of gravity wave surfboard. He thought he could surf on gravity waves, and that he could ride on time.


6

When the search for gravity waves had begun, the apparatus to detect them was huge. LIFO used two antennae with two 4 km arms each, separated by several thousands of kilometres. NANO had used radio telescopes the size of football fields or bigger. But that had been twenty-four years ago. LISA had planned for three antennae five million kilometres apart. Now miniaturization of long wave--really long wave, since gravity waves might have a period as long as the width of the solar system--antennae had begun, based on the constructions of the gwishin one could now see walking along the Liffey River on the arm of a tall white angel with a silver helmet. Both the ghost and the angel were nerdy enough that despite their efforts, they had less interest in the costumed revelers around them than they did in what had started the reveling. Had it been some sort of revelation, a reveiling? Were there other worlds brushing against ours everywhere and all the time, or did they come closer at some times, as the traditions behind Samhain and the other celtic cross-quarter time traditions suggested. Min and Rafe knew little of the celtic traditions, but they were aware of the vast arrays of data moving through the universe, most of which are assumed to emanate from some past time in our universe. But, what if they were instead immigrants, so to speak, waves that had come from some other universe. And so it was that they stopped off at a cafe by the old convention center, not so much for food and drink as for cocktail napkins to draw their invention on. Raf folded his wings and removed them so he could sit down. Min removed the void that had hidden her face. They ordered ‘Halloween Brain Dip’, ‘Spiced Bat Wings’, and a bottle of Malvasia Bianca. It began to feel like they might be on a date.

Min’s big engineering breakthrough had been a kaolin matrix of strands of clay just a molecule thick onto which were printed extremely fine meshes of other materials, or of a pair of materials, usually but not always a semi-conductor and superconductor. An array of these matrices with different combinations of mesh were lined up sequentially and could together detect an immensely wide spectrum of waves. The results were recorded and analyzed not electronically, but photonically. The antennae then could be used under ‘normal’ conditions, i.e., outside of a lead box or a deep hole, and the data searched for any waves whose behaviour had not been predicted in the calibrations. Min’s antennae, which had brought a great deal of business to Kenstrel, had the advantage of being able not only to search for what was expected, but also to detect anomalies that were not expected.

How, Min and Rafe were now wondering, would anomalies that came from some other universe present themselves.

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The Second Slice

3

Owain was having a dream. It was not unpleasant, or even strange, but he was acutely aware of it. He was dreaming that he was waking. He had dreamed that he was awake--what an odd thing, when one thought of it--before. Then someone had rung a bell, and he had awakened to find a stranger walking away with lumpy pockets. Once the stranger had told him to sleep on, and he had. Once he had found the stranger to have pockets full of gold, and Owen had thrashed him soundly before sleeping again. He was not yet awake enough to know what was happening. He felt as if he were riding on a mighty wave.



4

When they reached the Liffey, Min and Rafael turned left, towards the Convention Center, and the part of Dublin they knew from the Connectivity Conference. They weren’t sure where they were going, but felt certain there would be plenty to see along the quay, and fireworks later above the river. They were right. On this night when the veil between the worlds is thin, there were plenty of Dubliners about to celebrate in nearly as many ways as there were Dubliners, which in 2039 was nearly one and a third millions of people, many of them new to Britain and to Dublin.
Most were as awed by the spectacles of Samhain as the two young techies,  who seemed to be enjoying it all. There were ghosts and ghouls and witches, but also a very large number of very high-tech frankenstein-like creatures, robots and androids gone bad and wandering the streets a bit drunk.

‘What,’ Raf asked, ‘do you make of all this whole ghosts wandering about stuff? Do you think there’s really anything behind the myth, some memories of real events that have gotten embroidered over the years?’

‘It’s odd. When I was wondering how I might dress for tonight, immediately I thought of the Korean stories of gwishin, spirits that live in this world although their ‘place’ is somewhere else. As a scientist, I wonder. Could some energetic field have a ‘personality’ and exist with no body as we understand them? If there are, as we have come more and more to accept, other universes besides the one of which we are aware, is there communication between them?’
‘I think the reason I wonder about the basis of such celebrations as this is the difficulty we have measuring events that are very subtle. Just think of all the radio waves that we’re walking through right now, but we never notice them. There could be all sorts of other forces that we’re walking through that we would also never notice, and with no clue how to build detectors for them. But you might have a clue. You’ve made some pretty subtle discoveries.’

‘Your helmet reminds me of the people who wear aluminum foil on their heads to keep secret agents from reading their minds. No offense, I hope.’

‘Well, it’s 3-d printed from thin plastic and weighs nothing compared to the real thing. It doesn’t even block my bluetooth earbuds. But, maybe crosses made of some alloys, perhaps with specific ratios between the two parts, did detect or fend off malignant force fields. Interrupt them some ways.

We didn’t have a lot of crosses in Seoul when I was growing up. Did you see them in Sao Paulo? Did there seem to be anything special about the way they were made? ‘

‘If there was, I didn’t notice it. But I wasn’t looking at crosses as scientific instruments.’

‘And holy water. Water, holy or not, is used to destroy witches and vampires in a lot of legends. Maybe it dampens some sort of vibrations.’

‘You seem to know a lot more about ghosts and goblins that I.’

‘When I was a very young girl, I would spend summers with my grandparents in Yongchon, up by the Chinese border. It had been a center for metals and chemicals for many years, and my grandfather had become a collector of ancient lore about metallurgy and what we now call alchemy. Some of his lore, actually, led me to try different alloys to develop the antennae that we make to detect gravity waves.’

‘My family prided itself on its heritage as scholars, but I was never encouraged to value the old folkways. It was all science and football. We were resolutely looking to the future. Did I miss something?’

‘I don’t know. You seem to be doing well enough now. You have convinced your company to build the sorts of antennae most manufacturers tell us are impossible. But enough family history. Let’s see what we can see on this night that begins the darkness.’

Slices of an Apple

I have been working on a time travel novel for a while, but I am stumped because I don't think it is possible to select a time and a location target for the same trip. So, I have decided to publish it in bits and bobs, hoping someone wiser than I might come up with a solution to my problem.

I

1

Min had considered her costume carefully. Halloween had never been a big deal in Korea, although she had taken a zombie walk in Hongdae a few times. She felt double dislocated. Here she was, a Korean working for an Indian company known for its nationalism, which had built its singular role in the antenna business by playing on nostalgia for ancient Indian advances in astronomy, in Dublin. Although the Connectivity Conference was over, and she was officially on her own time, she still felt a representative of her company, and a representative who hoped to move out of senior engineering into senior management. She had decided to be a gwishin. It was Korean, and started with a white hanbok, the usual dress for funerals in southern Korea, and her long black hair let down for the occasion was also the norm for gwishin. But for the facelessness of this ghost caught among the living she decided to show off a bit of Kenstel’s technical achievements. She wore a facial erasure mask, part of Kenstel’s range of invisibility garments. Although completely transparent from inside, the side towards viewers did more than just absorb light. It appeared as a shapeless void. It would have been fun, she thought, to go in a full cloak with only her hair showing, but it might also lead to collisions with other partiers. Now, until she turned to face someone, she appeared as she was in everyday life: a rather formal  korean woman who moved with unusual grace.

It was only as she left the lift and walked across the lobby of the Gresham did she realize the short-coming of her costume. It left no way to drink or eat. Before the night was over, she would be happy to be clear-headed. Now, she just felt a little silly.

Rafael Acosta, her ‘date’ for the evening, was waiting for her, dressed as a helmed angel, complete with the yellow and red plumes of the Acosta crest. Like Min-seo Lee, he was rather formal, and very aware of his ancestry. He claimed descent from Enrique de Acosta, who in the sixteenth century had been governor of Yucatan and Cozumel. His father, like their ancestor, was adventurous enough to go where the new action is, and had moved the family to  Brazil to enjoy that country’s tech boom. Rafael was the head of European customer relations for Panjiva, one of Kenstel’s major suppliers. His formality, his air of aloofness, was quite an asset. He felt no need to assert himself, but he was a very good listener. The two formal young and ambitious minions in world connectivity had hit it off because they were both formally shy, and didn’t quite fit the casual style of much of the tech industry. They were both beginning this evening with the subtext of trying to spy a bit on what each other’s employers had in the works. But for now, they just turned into O’Connell street towards the Liffey’s docks and revelry.



2

Kenneth Owens also dressed carefully that Samhain eve. He had laid out everything in advance, preparing for a journey. It was a rather warm night in Pilton, but his clothes for the night were suitable for the Peak District or the Highlands of Scotland or Snowdon. He had not eaten since this morning, not knowing how his stomach would react to his trip. He expected, hopefully, that it would feel just like  sleeping. As he dressed, he did not put his i.d. or money cards in his pocket. They would almost certainly be of no use for him when he arrived, but if they were taken from him in some way, he would not have them if he returned. ‘When I return,’ he thought. He put his phone, a Razer Tegenaria in a carefully buttoned pocket. He was not likely to receive any calls while he was gone, but he wanted to be able to record and perhaps process a lot of data quickly while he was away from his car. He was wearing his Google Galileos, but redundancy is good. He was even taking an old Microsoft Surface, with a 10 terabyte ssd drive. It was loaded with a ridiculous amount of data and calculating software, because he didn’t expect to arrive anyplace with good wifi connectivity. And, of course, he took his Swiss Army knife, useful anywhere. It was only 20:30 GMT, and the trip to Glastonbury Tor would take only ten minutes, but he wanted to make sure he was on time. Full moon would be at 22:38 GMT, or just about 22:27 locally. He hoped there would not be too many new agers there to observe the full moon, or his journey. His food and water were already in the car, along with a relic from an earlier time.

‘Nest, I’ll be out for a while.’ Ken spoke, surveying his little nest once more before snuggling down into Attila. The Hyundai was almost dull grey, except it had a subtle iridescence. He had almost bought a red one, which he had thought he would call the Red Dragon, since he hoped that a red dragon might be at his destination. But he had decided on the unpainted model as better for his purposes, and then he couldn’t resist a pun. It might be a while before he saw his nest again. He might never see it again. He had told no one of his planned trip, not even his mother, whom he usually talked with each week, who would be horrified to know what he was doing. If all went well, there would be much to explain and share. If all went badly, there would be nothing anyone could do to help. If all went well, no one might notice  his absence. If not, well, he didn’t know what if not well would look like.

Actually, Ken didn’t know what if all went well would look like either.

Einstein’s Apple Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. T. S. Eliot Burnt Norton The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Albert Einstein Letter to the family of Michele Besso I 1 Min had considered her costume carefully. Halloween had never been a big deal in Korea, although she had taken a zombie walk in Hongdae a few times. She felt double dislocated. Here she was, a Korean working for an Indian company known for its nationalism, which had built its singular role in the antenna business by playing on nostalgia for ancient Indian advances in astronomy, in Dublin. Although the Connectivity Conference was over, and she was officially on her own time, she still felt a representative of her company, and a representative who hoped to move out of senior engineering into senior management. She had decided to be a gwishin. It was Korean, and started with a white hanbok, the usual dress for funerals in southern Korea, and her long black hair let down for the occasion was also the norm for gwishin. But for the facelessness of this ghost caught among the living she decided to show off a bit of Kenstel’s technical achievements. She wore a facial erasure mask, part of Kenstel’s range of invisibility garments. Although completely transparent from inside, the side towards viewers did more than just absorb light. It appeared as a shapeless void. It would have been fun, she thought, to go in a full cloak with only her hair showing, but it might also lead to collisions with other partiers. Now, until she turned to face someone, she appeared as she was in everyday life: a rather formal korean woman who moved with unusual grace. It was only as she left the lift and walked across the lobby of the Gresham did she realize the short-coming of her costume. It left no way to drink or eat. Before the night was over, she would be happy to be clear-headed. Now, she just felt a little silly. Rafael Acosta, her ‘date’ for the evening, was waiting for her, dressed as a helmed angel, complete with the yellow and red plumes of the Acosta crest. Like Min-seo Lee, he was rather formal, and very aware of his ancestry. He claimed descent from Enrique de Acosta, who in the sixteenth century had been governor of Yucatan and Cozumel. His father, like their ancestor, was adventurous enough to go where the new action is, and had moved the family to Brazil to enjoy that country’s tech boom. Rafael was the head of European customer relations for Panjiva, one of Kenstel’s major suppliers. His formality, his air of aloofness, was quite an asset. He felt no need to assert himself, but he was a very good listener. The two formal young and ambitious minions in world connectivity had hit it off because they were both formally shy, and didn’t quite fit the casual style of much of the tech industry. They were both beginning this evening with the subtext of trying to spy a bit on what each other’s employers had in the works. But for now, they just turned into O’Connell street towards the Liffey’s docks and revelry. 2 Kenneth Owens also dressed carefully that Samhain eve. He had laid out everything in advance, preparing for a journey. It was a rather warm night in Pilton, but his clothes for the night were suitable for the Peak District or the Highlands of Scotland or Snowdon. He had not eaten since this morning, not knowing how his stomach would react to his trip. He expected, hopefully, that it would feel just like sleeping. As he dressed, he did not put his i.d. or money cards in his pocket. They would almost certainly be of no use for him when he arrived, but if they were taken from him in some way, he would not have them if he returned. ‘When I return,’ he thought. He put his phone, a Razer Tegenaria in a carefully buttoned pocket. He was not likely to receive any calls while he was gone, but he wanted to be able to record and perhaps process a lot of data quickly while he was away from his car. He was wearing his Google Galileos, but redundancy is good. He was even taking an old Microsoft Surface, with a 10 terabyte ssd drive. It was loaded with a ridiculous amount of data and calculating software, because he didn’t expect to arrive anyplace with good wifi connectivity. And, of course, he took his Swiss Army knife, useful anywhere. It was only 20:30 GMT, and the trip to Glastonbury Tor would take only ten minutes, but he wanted to make sure he was on time. Full moon would be at 22:38 GMT, or just about 22:27 locally. He hoped there would not be too many new agers there to observe the full moon, or his journey. His food and water were already in the car, along with a relic from an earlier time. ‘Nest, I’ll be out for a while.’ Ken spoke, surveying his little nest once more before snuggling down into Attila. The Hyundai was almost dull grey, except it had a subtle iridescence. He had almost bought a red one, which he had thought he would call the Red Dragon, since he hoped that a red dragon might be at his destination. But he had decided on the unpainted model as better for his purposes, and then he couldn’t resist a pun. It might be a while before he saw his nest again. He might never see it again. He had told no one of his planned trip, not even his mother, whom he usually talked with each week, who would be horrified to know what he was doing. If all went well, there would be much to explain and share. If all went badly, there would be nothing anyone could do to help. If all went well, no one might notice his absence. If not, well, he didn’t know what if not well would look like. Actually, Ken didn’t know what if all went well would look like either.

Bride Price

Because my feelies trump your politics, and your politics trump facts, I am always reticent to comment on what Mrs. Kiltz, one of my seventh-grade teachers, called 'current events'. But current events occur in what Yural Noah Harari has called 'the miracle', and we for the most part are blythely unaware or dismissive of living in a miracle, and far too careless about protecting it. Miracles tend to be fragile states that easily collapse into chaos.

The miracle emerged in modern European culture and has continued to nourish not only the lives of those countries but also those that have emerged from European colonialism. The miracle was made possible by scientific progress, but that alone did not guarantee it. (Marshall McLuhan would consider moveable type to be an almost-necessary-and-sufficient factor; oddly Harari mentiins neither Gutenberg nor McLuhan. Perhaps he's another fish who never notices the water in which he swims.) The miracle that is modern European culture invented concepts we take for granted but which are very rare in human history, which are revolutionary.

Take, for example, the extremely counter-intuitive notion for which there is no evidence, but that Jefferson claimed as self-evident: 'all men are . . .  equal.' Today we have knotted knickers and start screaming 'but not women, not black men', all the while losing sight of the fact that without Jefferson's radical water in which we fish swim, there would be no reason to grant equal rights to anyone. Hammurabi, Moses, Henry VIII, Mao Tse Tung, these were the guys with the rights. I'm just a poor boy from a poor family, kept alive to work at the Ruler's pleasure and to die in the Ruler's wars.

A friend posted an anectdote about having been molested when she was seventeen, and ,'somewhere she shouldn't have been', but she told no one because she was 'just a fucked up kid'. (She was a fucked up kid because she was a lesbian in a southern-fucking-baptist family trying to live in the 20th century money-making economy while following the moral code of a tenth-century b.c. desert tribe.) Some one commented that her saying she was 'somewhere she shouldn't have been' illustrated that we live in a rape culture. How did can we get? For the first 1000,000 years of human civilization we have lived, like all other plants and animals, in a rape culture. Bees don't ask flowers if they consent to the rape of their pollen. Be fruitful and multiply is a law nearly as easy to follow as gravity.

But in the miracle that is (has been?) modern European culture, we have a notion of individual freedom and sovereignty. It is because we have agreed to that notion, that shared fiction, that element of the story we tell ourselves, that we can object to violations of the story without people just looking at us like 'what planet do you come from? The world that disagrees with our story -- think Uganda or the Roman Catholic Church--have 100,000 years of human history on their side.

So, I worry when people look at lapses in the culture as representative of the culture. Call someone the enemy long enough and you make it so.

I run the risk of having written far too much to expect anyone to read. But if you are interested, I suggest Harari's Sapiens or McLuhan's The Global Village.

So, I want to end with suggesting that modern European culture with it's capitalism and whiteness and whatever else annoys you, is a bridge under construction. I t leads from the savagery of a real raid-and-rape culture that has prevailed for 100,000 years and the dream in which anyone may safely go anywhere. Below the bridge lies the rocks of another stone age. I hope we don't tear down the bridge because it hasn't reached the destination yet.