Chapter 19

Resonance

“No.” I was baffled and crestfallen. “It can’t be.”

Wilbur, beside me, had no hint of expression.

Tim, eyes back on the computer screen, was about to continue when he squinted, jolted and did a classic double take. “Sorry,” he said, with embarrassment. “These are your follow-up results. Let me see...” He tapped and swiped his screen, stared at it, then with an expressionless face that contradicted his words, said, “This is baffling.” Turning from the computer to face me, he continued. “According to today's tests, you do not have a heart condition. Nor any trace of the medication you were given.”

“My heart is okay?” I said, unsure—as ever—what to believe.

“Uncommonly healthy. Comparable to a thirty-year-old’s.”

“Then why the chest pains?”

“Muscular cramps,” he said distractedly, returning his gaze to the computer and swiping. “Avoidable by more regular exercise and improved fitness.”

A moment’s sudden relief beyond measure.

“But this is impossible,” said Tim, before flinging his gaze back at me. “Your DNA doesn’t match your birth records. Is this a practical joke?”

With a quiet almost embarrassed voice, Wilbur said, “Did you compare the DNA against the record I suggested?”

Tim kept staring at me until, as if shaken from a daydream, he turned to Wilbur. “What? O?!” He swiped his screen again, several times, before he found something he apparently couldn’t take his eyes from.

“Well?” I said, impatience rising.

Several tense moments passed before Tim looked directly at me and said, “According to this, you have the same DNA as Steven Stone, a seventy-nine-year-old from Wunsa Pond.”

At last! I was vindicated. The proof: I was not Ernest. I was myself.

And I had spoken briefly with an older version of me.

“This makes no sense,” said Tim, eyes still on his screen.

A smile spreading across my face, I looked at Wilbur. He turned his gaze—almost unwillingly it seemed—from the floor to me, but said nothing. For once, his expression said it all: he was in shock.

The boot was now firmly on the other foot. I had been right all along.

I was me. I M E.

 

Wilbur recovered soon enough to promise Tim he would explain everything in the near future but for the moment we had to attend to other matters. We stopped by reception on the way out, and a wave of Ernest’s Babel settled all ‘bills’ (although health care was free, the resources expended in providing it were carefully monitored, which was the argument Wilbur had used earlier to eventually convince me to bring the Babel along).

He said almost nothing on the way home, other than to answer my question as to whether he still believed I was Ernest.

“Apparently not,” he said, and left it at that. Other than staring through the window and looking worried, he did nothing until the train ride was nearly over.

I didn’t mind. The thrill of being proved right was coursing through me. My celebratory mood prompted plans to open a bottle of wine from Ernest’s collection and toast myself! Wilbur’s state of mind was not a concern.

But while still immersed in the silent train ride home, post-vindication depression set in. So I had proved I was me. I was still stuck in this dream. Still away from my wife and kids, from my own time. Still lost, waiting for the dream to end, unable to think of anything that would hasten its conclusion. Still forced to deal with each moment as it came.

Before I knew it, I was staring despondently through the train window just like Wilbur.

Near the end of the trip, I stopped staring long enough to glance at him. Still gazing out the window, his face had changed: he wore not the features I knew, nor even his natural Orlani shape, but rather resembled a short-haired version of Einstein. Before I could even express my surprise, Einstein abruptly turned into an Orlani with a face narrower, darker and more careworn than Wilbur’s own. I watched fascinated as his appearance changed further, sometimes gradually, sometimes more abruptly, into various Orlani and human faces. Apart from Einstein, the only one I recognised was the ancient actor Rod Taylor, but without any hair.

“Are you rehearsing impersonations for a talent show or something?” I finally said. He can look exactly like anyone he chooses, I thought, yet two days ago he did the worst Groucho Marx impersonation I’ve ever seen.

Wilbur, looking like a bald human female, turned to me, but his expression lacked understanding. I pointed at my face, then at his. He reacted as if startled, looked at his reflection in the window, then immediately re-formed his usual human face.

“Sorry,” he said. “My mind was on other things.”

“Then how could you focus on shape-shifting?”

Wilbur looked even more uncomfortable—embarrassed, I thought. “If Orlanis turn inwards enough, our thoughts sometimes unconsciously manifest in our shapes. It’s sort of like our version of fidgeting.”

“You were thinking about Einstein?”

“Among others. Relativity actually—time dilation.”

This is really bothering him, I thought. “And Rod Taylor?”

He spent a moment thinking before answering. “An old film I saw.” He held my gaze for a few moments, then returned his attention to the window view.

We said nothing else for the rest of the trip.

It was not until we were walking to his car after exiting the train that Wilbur finally broke our silence. “I think it’d be instructive if you came to my house,” he said, poker-faced. “There’s something I should show you.”

As soon as we arrived, after again parking his car in front of his house—not under the carport—he led me to a closed door of a room I hadn’t been in before. He unlocked the door, and ushered me in.

Inside, on a desk, was a strange device about the size of a large old-fashioned TV set. It had a prominent display screen, was made of a mixture of what looked and felt like dark metal and glass, and had a very irregular shape full of geometric protuberances, deep insets, and wide grooves. The front panel below the screen was flat, its top half full of meters, soft-touch buttons, and displays full of icons, none of which I recognised. Its lower half was even more unrecognisable; it included what I took to be an alien alphabet on what appeared to be the equivalent of a keyboard, albeit a vertical one!

“One of the reasons I’m in Jibilee,” said Wilbur, as I studied the machine, “apart from observing humanity, is to assist a local historian—one Ernest d’Alembert. He’s been researching the transition from capitalism to enufism, and I’ve been assisting him using this.” He pointed at the device.

“Which is?”

“A time viewer.”

I stared at him without expression, not at all sure what he was getting at.

“That’s the simplest way to describe it,” he added. “It can view the past, but it can’t interact with it. At least that’s what we always thought, what we’ve always experienced during its decades of use on Orlanos. Yet when Ernest and I last used it to study the year 2030, he literally disappeared before my eyes. I thought I’d found him again when I met you by the roadside. Even after you claimed otherwise, I still thought you were Ernest. You were simply disoriented. Or perhaps affected by the viewer’s malfunction, or the bump on your head. Or all of the above.”

“But if you thought I was Ernest,” I said, “why didn’t you show me this room? To remind me how I disappeared.”

“The same reason I didn’t mention I was from Orlanos. The same reason I made up the story about you being dumped on my doorstep. To spare you further disorientation.” He sat on one of the two chairs in the room. “The point is, Steven, it would appear Ernest wasn’t merely transported across some physical distance, as I first thought. Somehow the time viewer has caused the two of you to move across time, to swap over. Even though that should be impossible.”

I took Wilbur’s lead and sat in the other chair. But not because of shock. Perhaps surprisingly, I took his words in my stride. They had a certain plausibility given the circumstances of this rambling dream. And having read so much sci-fi, it was just the sort of explanation my subconscious would dredge up. No, I was not shocked—I was offended. “You mean,” I said, gesturing at the viewer, “even though you’d been mucking around with this thing, you still never believed me? Even though you’d been watching my time, you still thought I was Ernest?!”

“Until the evidence began to accrue, yes. As I said, use of a viewer has never before resulted in time travel—all it’s ever been able to do is provide a window into the past, one we could look through but not move through. So, just as you couldn’t believe you’d travelled in time, neither could I. I did have a slight and rather worrying doubt that you might be telling the truth, but it was too extreme a possibility, or so I thought, to attach much credence to it. Amnesia and false memories seemed more credible.”

“You could have mentioned your doubts.”

“I thought it best to keep them to myself. You had enough to deal with. Whether you were Ernest or Steven, there was little to gain from adding to your confusion by informing you of uncertain possibilities. I certainly didn’t want to colour your views—that would have just made it more difficult for me to find out what had truly happened.”

“And when did you start believing I was telling the truth?”

“Not until Toby’s tests. And later, when you demonstrated your intimate knowledge of the Stone family, and proved not to have Ernest’s fingerprints. The DNA test today removed my last lingering doubts. Or perhaps it was a test of my own, which I completed this morning. That’s why I was a little late arriving at your house—at Ernest’s house. I took a sample of the singed grass outline, where you said you arrived. My test found residual traces of a synthetic fibre that hasn’t been manufactured for over twenty years but which was commonly used in your time to make bed sheets.”

“You mean I was transported here complete with bed fluff?!”

Wilbur nodded grimly.

“So now, finally, you believe I’m not Ernest.”

“Yes. You really have travelled into your future.”

“You mean I’m dreaming I’ve travelled into the future.”

Wilbur laughed briefly—or at least it sounded vaguely like laughter, of a sort that might be expected from someone without a sense of humour, similar to what I heard from a Prime Minister at a press conference responding to a lame joke by a visiting foreign dignitary—shrill, staccato, overly enunciated and emphatic as if almost rehearsed. “You’re even more difficult to convince than I am,” said Wilbur, his amusement gone. “This is real, Steven. You really have travelled in time.”

“How? You said the time viewer shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“It shouldn’t, and never has previously, but there’s a first time for everything, it seems. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but probably the similarity between you and Ernest is at the base of it all. Along with some rather striking coincidences. I didn’t realise it at the time, but when Ernest and I last used the viewer, when he disappeared, we were watching an area which included a point exactly midway between your house and here. I was indulging his curiosity, viewing the house he was born in, at the time he was born: shortly after ten p.m. the day you disappeared.”

“That’s about the time I last remember being at home,” I said, trying to recall events.

“Just as I thought. Well, at that time, here, when Ernest saw himself take his first breath, he touched the viewer’s screen—I think he was about to point something out to me. Immediately, there was a blinding flash of light—perhaps the same blinding light you described seeing just before you arrived. When I could see again, the viewer was inoperative—and Ernest was gone.”

I said nothing, too focussed on trying to assimilate the new information.

“Since then,” continued Wilbur, “I’ve checked the records, and found that your age at the moment we were viewing was exactly the same as Ernest’s when he disappeared—to the minute. It’s unlikely that’s just a coincidence.”

“But why would it be important? How could it have made any difference?”

“I can only speculate, but the viewer may have acted as a link across time between the two of you. Due to freak circumstances—namely, your identical appearances, and the symmetry of your ages and locations relative to what was on the viewer—there may have been, for want of a better term, a temporal resonance between you and Ernest. Consequently, when he touched the viewer’s screen, he unwittingly initiated your mutual transfer across time.”

As absorbed by Wilbur’s words as I was, still I could not help being briefly distracted by a stray thought: Temporal resonance!? Weren’t they an ambient band from the 90s?

Oblivious, Wilbur ploughed on. “Certainly, whatever truly happened, it was too much for the viewer: the energy involved blew its fuses, which in retrospect is no surprise at all. It must have been enormous, far more energy than the viewer uses. Presumably it’s also what singed the grass where you arrived. I have no idea where it came from. The continuum itself, perhaps—zero-point vacuum energy.”

It was some time before I could respond. I was not sure how much I understood. “Are you saying that because of some coincidences mostly, some similarities between Ernest and me, we were both transported across time? That I came here to his time, and he to mine?”

“Yes, that’s more or less what I think happened. For the first time in the viewer’s history, extremely unlikely parameters created a resonance sufficient to sponsor a transfer across time.” At this point, he seemed to forget I was there, and looked elsewhere. “Perhaps it could be utilised. Perhaps some form of time travel will eventually become commonplace.”

“Well,” I said, with some bite, “it’s been a one-way trip so far. Enough, I think, to put off most would-be time travellers.”

Wilbur snapped back to the real world, stared at me.

My mind, however, was focussed on a fine point he hadn’t considered. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

“For which you can hardly be blamed. Being ripped from your own time—”

“Not that,” I interrupted. I stood and paced back and forth across the room. “I mean Ernest being transported back to my time. To my bed. With my wife.” Memories of the feverish moments before transportation flooded back to me. The possibility that I’d been replaced in an instant with Ernest was unsettling to say the least. Would he suddenly appear as I was at the time—naked and on my back? Inside Yvette?! Or would he retain the clothes and posture he had at the moment of transfer? How would Yvette react? Would she know he was not me? Or would she make the same delusive attempts that Wilbur had made to pacify and convince me that I was someone else?

I stopped in my tracks and stared at Wilbur, hoping he would infer details I preferred not to spell out. “It was not exactly an opportune moment,” I said.

“Ernest would not have been transported to your bed,” he said, finally, as deadpan as ever. “Just as you awoke not here where Ernest was, but where your house was decades ago, Ernest presumably arrived in your time at this spot, here, whatever may have occupied it then.”

Though relieved, I could not help thinking of Yvette. “Then my wife just suddenly sees me not there?”

“Probably. I don’t know for sure. This has never happened before.”

I sat down and looked him in the eye. “How do we fix this? How do I get home? I don’t suppose it’s as simple as just waving a metal thingamie-wingamie around?”

“If only. The truth is, I’m not sure. It may not even be possible. This is virgin territory, Steven. Nevertheless, perhaps we can arrange another resonant swap.” His expression became grave. “We certainly must attempt it. History may be in the process of being changed—Ernest’s presence in the past may be altering subsequent events that have already transpired.”

My concerns were more immediate and selfish. Not with history or the future but with me. “So what’s stopping you?”

Wilbur blinked. “Well, I’ve only been convinced of all this since your DNA test, even if I have been dwelling on its possibility since yesterday. And, of course, I needed to explain it all to you before roping you in on an experiment of this type.”

“Which you’ve done. You have my permission. Press the buttons, pull the switches, make it so. Just do whatever it is you need to do. Please! Let’s get started.”

He studied me carefully, and said, “You seem to have a strong sense of urgency for someone convinced this is all a dream.”

I shook my head. “I know it’s a dream. But maybe the best way to end it is for me to dream of returning to my own time.”

“You once told me you were sure this is a dream because you can’t remember anything of Ernest’s life, but everything of your own. Well, now that we know why, you can no longer use it as a reason for arguing you’re dreaming.”

“It’s not the only reason,” I said, then hesitated. He was watching me carefully, his expression clearly telling me to continue. “There’s no way this could be the future,” I finally said. “The way things were going in my day, they couldn’t possibly have led to this.”

“Forty years can be a long time. Plenty enough for change.”

“Change, yes, but total transformation? Everything I’m familiar with has been turned upside down.”

“It took much less time for Lenin’s revolution. And Gorbachev’s. And—”

“And didn’t they have happy outcomes?!” I snarled, immediately regretting it. I sighed before continuing in a less aggravated fashion. “Change for the worse I might have believed. But such radical change for the better? How could it be anything but a dream? It’s too optimistic, too much of an improvement. My god, the worst thing going for it, as far as I can tell, is its suburban provincial feel—its capacity to be dull.”

“You have only been exposed to one small part of the world, Steven. Enufism thrives on diversity and there are many other cities I’m sure you’d find more exciting.”

“Maybe so, but is provincialism the worst you can do? What about Soylent Green cannibalism? Logan’s Run euthanasia? Even a conspiracy to turn everyone into Mormons? Although you might be halfway there with that one. If I could just glimpse some horrible countervailing truth lurking at the back of this world, then I might believe it, then it would seem more real, more normal.”

“You’ve seen too many dystopian films,” said Wilbur, frowning. “They’ve coloured your perception of what is possible.”

“Well, I know one thing that’s possible.” I paused for effect, then slowly enunciated my words. “That I am dreaming.”

“From what I understand,” said Wilbur, almost without pause, “humans dream much as Orlanis do. I’ve never had a dream in which even one day moved in a normal fashion, with each detail complete and sequential. My dreams are usually haphazard, disjointed, often with no apparent logic, like most of your planet’s election speeches that I’ve sampled. My dreams also tend to be full of strange beings, impossible events and bizarre situations.”

“You mean like time travel and shape-shifting aliens?”

He did not stay on the back foot long. “I take your point, but tell me Steven, since you arrived in this time, have events ever shifted from one location to another without intervening movements? Have you walked so fast you found yourself flying? Has your face sprouted grass? Or your arms dropped off? Have you met unicorns or long dead persons? Have you in fact experienced anything at all resembling what you normally dream about?”

“No,” I admitted reluctantly, but with anger. Then, more subdued, “None of the above. This is the most realistic dream I’ve ever had. And far longer and more detailed than any I can remember. But that doesn’t prove anything. I don’t remember many dreams, so for all I know, the ones I’ve forgotten are just like this. When I do wake up, I’ll probably forget this one too.”

“And if you don’t forget, perhaps then you’ll be convinced this isn’t a dream.”

“It’s beside the point,” I said, after an uncertain pregnant silence. “Dream or not, I want to go home.”

Wilbur sighed. “Pragmatic and reasonable.” He turned to the time viewer, pressed a button. Its screen lit up, dark blue. “Fortunately, I’ve given the matter some thought. I think I know how to set up another temporal transfer.”

“How?”

Wilbur pressed something on the front panel, and the ‘vertical’ keyboard tilted downwards to the horizontal. “Remember,” he said, as he rapidly tapped keys, “we know when and where Ernest arrived. Or where he should have, at least. Once I set up the viewer to show his arrival, I’ll simply follow his movements for as long as it’s been since you arrived. Then, you’ll both be the same age again. If his location is suitably static I’ll shift the view to a spot midway between here and where Ernest is located—which should then re-create the conditions of the original resonant swap. Hopefully, all you’ll need to do then is touch the screen.”

“And away I’ll go?” I only pretended I’d followed him.

The time viewer’s screen filled with odd characters as Wilbur continued typing. Silence settled over the room. I tried to use the quiet time to clarify his explanation in my own mind, to understand what he was trying to do. It didn’t come to me. “Sorry, I forgot what you just explained. What are you looking for?”

He continued typing as he replied. “For now, the moment of Ernest’s arrival. Later, ultimately, so as to arrange another temporal transfer, the point as far past Ernest’s arrival as you are from yours.”

He stopped typing, and the viewer’s screen faded to a mixture of grey and black hues that I could not decipher into anything recognisable. They vanished with a flash, replaced by a sudden view of an open paddock, at night, with rain falling, and a bull standing under a large solitary tree, munching grass. Almost at once, the grey and black hues returned. Another flash erupted, this time its cause visible as a convoluted lightning bolt. I did not recognise the scene specifically, but it was similar to several areas not far from home, the vicinity of which is strewn with paddocks and small farms.

“Ernest should appear any moment,” said Wilbur, adjusting the screen’s brightness to suit the night-time scene. Whatever he did also managed to compensate for the excessive brightness of the lightning. “If my theory is correct.”

Long moments passed, punctuated by lightning bolts but no sign of Ernest. I began to fret.

Another bolt struck, and there in the midst of the paddock, about twenty metres from the bull, out of nowhere, Ernest suddenly appeared. He was standing with his arm stretched forward, pointing at something. I say Ernest, but for all I knew, it could have been me. We were identical, apart from his outlandish clothes—a bright pink pseudo-kaftan and floral pants for god’s sake!

Immediately, gingerly, Ernest rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. Then, he blinked and looked about as if trying to focus. Concern changed gradually to confusion. He turned a full circle, panic rising, but became motionless when another lightning flash revealed the bull, who had stopped chewing and fixed his gaze on Ernest.

“Uh-oh,” unisoned Ernest and I.

He took one step backward but almost slipped on a large, apparently fresh cowpat.

“Well,” said Wilbur, without expression, his eyes glued to the screen, “he often said that back then you couldn’t avoid bullshit.”

I barely heard him, my attention fixed on Ernest onscreen as he recovered his footing. When he saw the bull scraping a hoof, readying to charge, he frantically turned from side to side, sizing up escape routes. A moment later, he bolted for the nearest fence, perhaps fifty metres away. The bull immediately charged after him.

Ernest kept running, occasionally slipping panicky glances behind.

The chase seemed in slow motion. It flooded me with concern, not just the obvious type for Ernest, but also for myself—if Ernest was killed back in my time, would a resonant swap be possible between me and his corpse? Would I be stranded in the future all because of a bull!?

By the time Wilbur was halfway to the fence, the bull had covered more than half of the ground between them. It looked hopeless. Closer and closer it came. With the fence still ten metres away, the bull literally breathed down Ernest’s neck.

I despaired. The bull was going to trample Ernest. I was going to be trapped in the future.