Chapter 25

No Place

After a small eternity of probably a few seconds, the white noise began to fade. I started to make out vague blurred shapes, but my other senses remained inoperative.

Gradually the blurred shapes grew more defined. Sudden hope. Was that my bedside table there? Or that other blur, the painting on our bedroom’s far wall?

… No.

I was not in our bedroom.

I was still outside.

But not outside where I had been, in 2070. Not even close.

One of the decreasingly blurred shapes finally revealed its full glory: the unmistakable form of a tyrannosaurus rex. The red flesh of its latest kill spilled from its jaws, blood caked its teeth and chin.

Overwhelmed by the sight, it took me some time to realise the dinosaur was not moving. Like every feature of the surrounding landscape, it was motionless.

Then I realised my own state in this mind-boggling scene was equally impossible. As before, my only functioning sense was vision. And yet, I could not see my body, however much I shifted my field of view.

I seemed to be a disembodied viewpoint, one that I could somehow shift seemingly at will, though this was small consolation for being trapped in a frozen prehistoric landscape, unable to even speak—or, more pertinently, scream.

Fearful beyond imagining, at my wit’s end, I watched in confused dismay as the scene suddenly blurred, and was rapidly replaced by another, even more baffling and unsettling: a landscape rich with vegetation, akin to jungle, but with hardly any plants or animals familiar; most were far more colourful, especially the many exotic vibrant flowers. More startling still: pale shapes, floating here and there, vaguely human, translucent, hairless, with huge craniums, naked but sexless. Again, no movement.

Persisting for less time than did the dinosaur, the scene blurred away and was replaced.

The blurring made me wonder if I was on Orlanos, surrounded by shapeshifters in their equivalent of a callisthenics class. Or perhaps the psychological experiment I had previously considered as explanation for events was continuing.

A new scene formed around me: proto-humans, half-man, half-ape, were clustered round a deer-like carcase, tearing at raw flesh with bare hands, blood dripping down chins. Yet again, a moment frozen in time, with no visible movement. It lasted for an even shorter duration.

More blurring to another bizarre landscape: night, pockets of lights glimmering in the distance, barely brighter than unrecognisable constellations. A foreground dominated by trees, possibly luminescent. In the midst: an object whose purpose I could not even guess. A construction? If so, then like none I’d ever seen: some parts open, full of frames and girders, like sculptures or mobiles—the rest closed, like distorted ornate medieval churches. Made of a single substance, perhaps, but not brick, wood, cement, steel or anything familiar. Inexplicably, I thought it might be organic. Like surrounding trees, it seemed to radiate its own pale light. But its position among the trees was hard to fathom, rendering its scale uncertain.

The image blurred again, more quickly than the previous time. I returned to the past. Another frozen moment: thousands of toiling sun-darkened men dragging slabs of rock up steep slopes to the top of an unfinished pyramid.

Before I knew it, the scene abruptly changed to something more familiar yet not: a small city seen from afar and above, separated from others by green belts, not unlike the town planning formats of 2070. But the buildings were not at all like those of Chord or surrounding cities, or anywhere else: they were full of odd angles, towers, spires, seemingly functionless protuberances, with colours in profusion and few regularities—a seemingly chaotic jumble.

A thought came from nowhere: it was many centuries at least beyond 2070—and the earlier baffling landscapes were further still into the future. I was being flung backwards and forwards, with increasing rapidity, between past and future, each instance—each instant—drawing closer to the present.

The next scene was consistent with my theory: a religious procession in the main street of what might have been an old European city—perhaps post-Renaissance, but then history was Ernest’s specialty not mine. Indeed, for all I knew, I was looking at a re-creation performed yesterday.

Wherever it was, though, I was clearly not constrained to the location I’d started from, in 2070.

Not only when but where would I finally end up? If anywhere?

The procession vanished, as I was flung to another tantalising glimpse of the future: a streetscape even more closely resembling those of 2070. Then, I was plucked back to the past.

Back and forth I went between past and future, ever faster, an unwilling witness to familiar episodes from history, baffling glimpses of uncertain future events, and mundane moments of domesticity…

A guillotine execution. A future Christmas pageant. An Edwardian gentleman, shaving. A flourishing national park with oddly dressed tourists. Congested city streets and Model T Fords. Futuristic cars and trains. Neon lights. A robot factory unlike any other. Vietnam War demonstrations. A cityscape transformed. Test cricket with Lillee squatting in mid-appeal. Swimmers with dolphins. Modern battleships, cannons blazing. A communal garden. Stock exchange chaos. A frantic restaurant kitchen. A dole queue. An election launch like any other, except for the unrecognisable faces.

Scenes became ever briefer, transitions more clear cut. Still I could neither hear nor smell nor taste anything. Gradually, however, tactile sensations were returning. I felt I was lying on my back, my arms outstretched behind my head.

The scenes changed more quickly—and my body faded into view.

Ever more quickly, soon too fast to follow, came the confusing kaleidoscope of historical moments. Amid the commotion, incongruously, without any apparent reason, I felt the stirrings of an unbidden erection. Not here, I thought, feeling a slave to mindless hormones.

But there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Constantly shifting images of past and future swapped, blurring together into an indecipherable jumble, mounting like my erection—until both reached their logical conclusion.

The jumble of images became a smear of white light, which brightened in no time to the point of blinding me. Then suddenly, everything changed: the bright light vanished, and my sight returned.

Yvette—my wife—was on top of me, riding frantically, midway through an obvious climax, as lightning lit up the room and a storm raged.

I was home! In our bedroom. In our bed. The moment I had left. As if I had never been gone. As if no time had passed.

Ecstatic, relieved beyond all possibility of doing adequate justice to my feelings with words, I waited until Yvette began to peter out and lower herself to the horizontal, then I tilted up to meet her halfway. I embraced her, kissed her.

No excessive tiredness from this particular trip through time! So great my joy and passion at again seeing Yvette, so vigorous my affection, by the time she caught her breath we had swapped positions and began what for her at least was a second helping.

Later, in afterglow, still wrapped in each other’s arms, she quickly drifted off to sleep, but I stayed alert for some time. In the security of my own bedroom, surrounded by the familiar, blissfully adrift in my wife’s embrace, the events of the preceding days seemed even more unreal than ever. Had I imagined them? Was everything I experienced in the future a figment of my imagination? It couldn’t have been a dream, as I’d maintained. Surely? Unless it was one that lasted for only a split second. Was that possible? Could it instead have been some sort of vision, or epiphany? A result of a blood vessel bursting in my brain? Was there a physiological explanation for it?

Eventually, drained and exhausted, but happy and utterly content, I fell asleep.

 

In the morning, wakened by the sound of my alarm clock, the future I had glimpsed or imagined seemed even less real.

Bright sun spilled through windows, as I heard the ensuite shower running, and the kids bickering in the next room about what TV show to watch.

I was really home.

Back to work, I realised.

I always woke as late as possible—still early, given the commuting ahead of me—but this made my morning routine a bit of a rush: out the door usually within half an hour, breakfast in the form of a snack bar on the train. Probably something I should change. One day.

I moved to the bathroom, smiled as I saw Yvette showering, asked how she’d slept (“very well”), responded in kind to her identical question, and started shaving.

It had to have been a dream—even though, unlike my usual dreams, I could remember its details in full. For now at least. They’d probably fade away soon. Perhaps they were already fading: in the clear light of morning, I decided I’d probably mis-remembered at least the timing of the dream—it must have happened after I fell asleep, not during sex.

Perhaps I had dreamed the sex too.

Probably not, I decided, when Yvette stepped from the shower, put a wet arm round my waist and kissed me on a shoulder.

“Hey!” she said, jovially, “All your energy last night must have shed a kilo.” She rubbed her hand across my stomach.

I turned, leant back to kiss her. “There’s a dieting regime I can handle.” I returned my attention to shaving.

“Looks like it made your hair grow too.”

In the mirror, I could see her surprised expression as she ran her fingers through my hair. “Huh?”

“Look for yourself.”

I checked in the mirror. “Doesn’t look any longer.”

She shook her head, and started towelling herself dry. “I’d have sworn it was a bit shorter last night.”

I checked again, but still could not see what she saw.

“When did you do that?” she said. Bent over to towel her lower legs, she was motionless, pointing at my left foot. The smaller toes and surrounds were livid with fading bruises. The smallest toe had a needle thin hole in the centre of its nail.

I was struck dumb.

I had no memory of the injury—not in the real world that is, only in the dream. The supposed dream. Yet I could not deny that my foot bore the residual damage of having been caught in the door of Wilbur’s car.

My knees suddenly weak, I stumbled momentarily, before leaning heavily on the bathroom bench.

It must have really happened.

“Are you all right?” said Yvette, full of concern.

“I… I think so.” I needed time to think.

“So? What happened?” said Yvette.

Could it have? Really? Or was there another explanation?

“Just a momentary dizziness,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure… Still, I think I might phone in sick today. Just to be on the safe side.”

She looked at me with confusion and suspicion, but said nothing. She knew I rarely took sick leave, not unless I was all but bedridden.

But at that moment, I needed time off work. To try to sort out just what had happened.

Had it actually been real? Or was it all in my mind?

I soon realised, however, that it didn’t matter. Whether it happened or not was ultimately not even relevant. It was of no importance whether the knowledge I’d gained and the ideas I’d been exposed to were really those in use forty years in the future, or whether they were figments of my imagination drifting up for god knows what reason from the deepest layers of my subconscious—what mattered was what I did with them.

The fear I felt when Ernest spoke of me, in effect, as being the architect of the future now seemed absurd. Perhaps my decisions and actions were bound to create the future, or change it—but then that is always the issue. For all of us.

“So,” said Yvette, “are you going to tell me what happened to your foot?”

I turned to her. “Yes.”