J. Pekka Mäkelä:
3 9 1
An excerpt from the chapter V: MCMLXXXIX
Translated by the author. Copyright © 2004, 2005 J. Pekka Mäkelä. All rights reserved.
Introduction • Chapter II • Chapter V • Chapter XVII
You wait by the door and then you walk a couple of steps ahead of me towards the darkened and quiet dining room and the nurses' office. I'm not sure if you're doing it on purpose, but I can't help noticing how you swing your hips when your walk. On a second thought, I think it's unintentional, considering how relaxed is your step and your posture. I you just knew how I look at you, your back, your buttocks, your legs, you'd probably walk in a very different manner.You take a seat by the office desk, browse through a few patient files, then glance your watch. Close to three thirty AM. A few hours to kill before it's time to go through the wardrooms and change patients' diapers. After that, reporting for the morning shift people. Then homeward to catch some sleep.
There you're sitting, stretching like a cat, I just try to look like I wasn't looking; I don't know what I should think about you. This is one of those moments I feel so clumsy around women, not knowing if I can read any signs right or wrong, or if there are any signs to read. Please, if you'd like things to go somewhere, please make it clear. Anyway, we're at work, so just to not make things awkward I try not to read too much at things. There's so much strange intimacy between people during these night shifts even without any erotic tensions going on. Like there's between us, at least from my side, and has been even before tonight. You keep on stretching, glance at me with half closed eyes, ask to see the scroll again. I fetch it from my bag for you. You open the scroll, study the old Greek lettering, the tough papyrus sheet. You tell about your friend who brought paintings from Egypt, as souvenirs, and how the paper was like this. Yes, but this is much thicker, has more layers, better quality. Much less brittle. More professionally made. Did you know, a king Ptolemy of Egypt was so jealous of his library he prohibited the export of papyrus? He wanted to make sure no other king has such a library like his in Alexandria. His worst rival was at Pergamon, on the modern Turkish coast. Without papyrus, the pergamonians make do with very thin slices of leather. They invented parchment.
You throw a smile at me, politely.
But that was long before we came there, I tell you. Last ruler from the house of Ptolemy had died more than four hundred years before. She was called Cleopatra VII, the Cleopatra. She was the last ruler of independent Egypt for a long time. And she wasn't even Egyptian but Macedonian, a descendant of a general of Alexander the Great. And, as the family had adopted the Egyptian custom of incestuous marriages, she probably had hardly any Egyptian blood in her veins. The last Egyptian pharaoh had died some five hundred years before Cleopatra, who had at least had decency to learn some Egyptian unlike her predecessors, who just used their Macedonian dialect. Even all the Roman officials and clergy - keeping Egypt under control by the time we were there - spoke only Greek. Egypt wasn't ruled by Egyptians again until the 20th century.
So much about my awkward lecturing about history; you don't seem to have much interest in these things. Who would, at this time at night? You look at the open scroll; I look at you.
After a while, you raise your face, look at me with your half closed eyes. I can't tell if you're amused, dreamy or aroused. Probably mostly amused. You start to roll your tongue around the words, with languor, with a draw: A time machine. T-t-time machine. Ti. Me. Machine.
How does a time machine work, you ask.
I don't know, really. Kaarina and Joel tried to find out by eavesdropping Tuileq and Ansuyl. But they didn't learn much. Of course they didn't even intend that some ancient barbarians - that's us - might learn about something that was something new and secret even at their own time. This whole thing seemed to be some kind of private project for Ansuyl. The other three were just paid workers. Anyway, their talk became usually incomprehensible if it was something out of the ordinary routines. You see, they were using these automatic translation devices in their left ears. The device seemed to listen to the thoughts of speaking and then whisper to the ear how to pronounce it in the foreign language. I think. It sure looked like that. They gave us simpler devices that only translated other people's speech to an earpiece. But neither model worked very well. I'm not sure which was more difficult, learning their language or learning to understand what the device thought was English. In any case, Kaarina and Joel tried to catch something, from the asides and things like that, about how the time jumps were accomplished.
On the hills to the north from the oasis, there were three discrete devices forming an equilateral triangle. Kaarina called them abyss generators. At the camp there was a larger device Kaarina called a control unit. For a time jump, a kind of oscillating time-space abyss was generated in the midst of the three generators. On the other end of the abyss, there was the time and the place you wanted to jump into.
Have you ever played guitar? Then you know that a vibrating string has many other frequencies than the basic note. You can hear these harmonics better by playing flageolets, where there's no basic frequency. Anyway, with this basic frequency, all of the string vibrates, and it's strongest at the middle. With the first harmonic, the vibration is the strongest at the quarter length from both ends. There's a non-vibrating node at the center. With the second harmonic, there are two nodes at equal distances. If Joel and Kaarina understood it right, this time abyss is somewhat similar, with a basic frequency and harmonics. What's important for us is, that there's a node exactly at the halfway in the abyss. Halfway in time between the beginning and the end. Apparently, the time abyss has an opening to the outside world at this node. Are you following this any better than I was?
You have that mischievous smile again. You say: Don't know, but go on.
Okay. Apparently, there's an opening at the halfway point of this time abyss - an opening for something to fall into the abyss and end up to the same point in time and space as the real time travelers. And it seems that this middle opening is big enough for an...
... an airplane, you say.
Right. The four of them had apparently known about this opening and made calculations to ensure it didn't happen, say, inside Earth. They didn't want to get rock or molten magma into the abyss. They had the opening a few thousands of feet over the surface of the earth, where there's still enough oxygen. But they didn't consider airplanes. And it seems they had a very bad luck, as with two out of three time jumps an airplane just happened to fall into the abyss.
You look absently through the office windows.
I have to admit, this is all I know or understand about the matter.
