ReVISIONS (24 page)

I didn't question it, though. My attention was caught by the room in which I had appeared. Very large with white walls. Not a single straight line, nor a roof.

With the question, the answer again. It was the strangest sensation, as if I only had to become aware to have always known. At the time, it was one more insane thing that distanced me from the reality of it all.

Chimes hung above the wall and sang a soft but complex harmony along three octaves. The sound made a field of some kind, on which rain played, changing the sound into a very different kind of melody that pulled the threads of the field tighter.

There was an equation for it, of alien beauty. Mathematics made tangible through sound and giving rise to an EM field. This was possible because of . . .

A man sighed. I turned.

He was seated at a desk, poring over some papers.

A name came with the sight. Anis Korbous. No older than me, he was already a physicist of renown.

His brows furrowed in concentration. He spoke softly as he worked. A flute hung from his chest, and, from time to time, he took it to his lips and played a series of notes. A recorder, not unlike those I had repaired except for a dishlike antenna, responded to it by stopping, rewinding, and replaying his last arrangement.

Listening, I learned why my question had brought me here.

One look at the artifact he was working on confirmed it.

My
octofuss
. Its condition was as pristine as the first time I had seen it. Somehow I knew it had been dubbed “the Saturnine Enigma,” because its use hadn't been identified yet.

Korbous was convinced that sound could be transformed into a form that could exist forever, and the octofuss was the key to proving that.

His only problem was what sounds he had to play to activate it.

 

Research is fascinating. But done by someone else, it's also a very tedious process. My attention wandered the room, its materials, alien no more than a second.

Only the lone
cube
, at the center of the room, rising from the floor, with incense burning on its surface, refused to yield its secret immediately.

The mere thought brought me in. There was no light, and yet I could sense the presence of walls, set at wild angles. They didn't reflect in any way the outer shape of this place.

But I didn't have to wonder about its function. A single tone played, its echo growing into a continuous, complex chord. And from that, pressure waves of sound converted to electromagnetic energy, accessed as needed by the different devices of the house.

 

I watched Korbous for hours, trying to unravel a mystery that would explain my own, fascinated by the way knowledge kept popping into my head about this different time period. This new path of time.

 

“Your wife and I missed you at lunch. I guess you missed lunch altogether, didn't you?”

We both jumped, one of us real, the other an immaterial presence still learning to control its bodiless movements.

The voice emanated from the walls. Anis turned slightly toward a curve in the wall. Sound came from there, and a face was appearing, fuzzy, and slightly out of synch with the voice. I stepped
inside
. And saw that the inside of the wall was hollow, but with wood and more complex material built into a complex maze that led to different, smaller chimes. The walls, powered by a central polyhedron.

Wavecatchers.

Sound programmed, or filtered, I'm not sure, what came in and out. Machinery changed the nature of the waves. Sound waves were turned into electromagnetic waves and traveled through a relay as light, carrying the two
phones'
signatures.

Where does the light go . . . ?

 

 

“Nisea asked me to check on you. She had to go back to the Academia, but as soon as she dispatches her students, she'll come and feed you.” The voice wasn't out of synch anymore; a dimple added humor to its warmth. “I thought I should warn you!”

This time, my questing thoughts had tethered me to a woman named Myrib. Myrib Zrirey, her full name was.

I walked away from her, curious again.

Her room, unlike the scientist's, was full of colors and clutter. Only the same bare polyhedron at the center reminded me of Anis'.

Differences and underlying similarities caught my attention.

Here, there was a roof, but small colonnades held it at least ten centimeters above the end of the walls. It was larger than the room itself; the corners caved in, slightly. Floating closer, I saw smaller water balls used as chimes.

The work itself was beautiful to behold.

This was, I discovered, an artist's home. There was peace and quiet.
It was easy to forget what I was and wasn't.

All afternoon, she worked on a new kind of wave field, designed to generate a lighter gravity for small objects.

Wave fields were created by combining compatible waves, each building upon the other in a feedbacklike reaction. They didn't travel, but kept interlacing until they became impermeable to a third kind of wave that sometimes created a specific state around them.

Myrib didn't understand the reactions, nor did she care. She understood, barely, the complex harmonies that made it possible, and while she played them in the background, she gave the result a superb, aesthetic form.

She believed that the world never had enough beauty and that by revealing some, she helped people see it everywhere.

She didn't only paint wave field equations or symphonies, I discovered. She sculpted
wavecatcher ghosts
, as she called them.

Electronic relays were scattered between houses, catching electromagnetic signals translating them into electrical impulses and storing their representations in chips not unlike those I repaired as a kid, then sending them back to wavecatchers.

Except that, from time to time, unsent waves were caught, and got past the signal recognition filters. It had happened once during Myrib's chat with Anis.

Most people erased those, or recalibrated or sent for a tech. Myrib unplugged a small red memory cube, no larger than a single die, from under the belly of her phone, and replaced it with a clean white one. She had asked Anis to make them specifically to catch ghosts.

She played it afterward on a sensitive plate where sound became image. On the other side of the plate, using touch and sound, she enhanced and transformed the image.

She never recognized the slightly slanted eyes in the dark thin face, made somber by its mien and framed by unruly dark hair.

I did. I had seen the face for years, in the mirror.

 

 

The thought brought me back to Korbous' side, but years later, as he gave a lecture in an amphitheater.

So I traveled through the ages, following my octofuss, until its mystery unraveled.

As fate, or whatever, would have it, it happened on May 4, 2103. Because of me.

By that time, EM waveforms had been mastered, mathematical music was taught in school, called mathic, and inspired no wonder anymore. Because humankind had set foot in space, with veils that caught no wind, but waves of a special kind.

But I didn't care about the recently discovered aquantic waves, didn't marvel at those particles that weren't packed together, but truer to older calculations, could emit infinite warmth, on a line so thin it was almost nonexistent—the ultimate power source if created inside a wave field that could contain it, or harvested in its natural environment of interstellar space.

 

 

Then, nothing mattered to me. At least to my disembodied self who watched, with a sinking feeling of doom, his own doppelganger.

He was an antiquarian, too. The similarity ended there. Even his voice, quieter, more sure than mine. His brown hair hadn't grown dark, nor had it faded with maturity. Maybe he dyed it. He didn't seem to need glasses or contact lenses, never stumbled, never seemed to say anything inappropriate. He understood science.

And he wasn't working alone.

 

 

“Today,” my doppelganger claimed in his adult, alien voice. “We will prove our theory.”

Around him, people applauded.

In the center of the room, my octofuss lay.

“The Saturnine Enigma has been lent to us for one day. One hour will suffice to prove, as Anis Korbous theoretically proved more than a century ago, that sound waves can be transformed into electromagnetic waves in such a way that this hyperoctahedron, if activated with adequate mathic input, can reproduce it as easily as my cat does a ball of fur.”

This elicited laughter all around. The sound of it was muffled, though.

I glanced around. The room, I discovered, was wave field-proofed. Soundproofed, light-proofed walls. Knowledge came to me again, unbidden and welcome: more and more people chose to do this, for privacy. “And, using Anis Korbous' algorithm,” my doppelganger concluded, “let us hear his first lecture on the subject, the one he wrote, but refused to record in any other way, so that one day, that is today, Humankind might learn, literally, from the past!”

He put a complex instrument before the cube, programmed with mathic equations derived from the Korbous Formula.

Its circuitry looked familiar, but only to me since this time line never created its close cousin: the mobile phone.

Beside it, my octofuss started to vibrate in a sickening, unforgettable way.

As I heard, for the second time, the long tedious lecture, the thought turned round and round in my head. This is real.

 

When everyone had left the room, I tried an experiment of my own.

I had, by now, enough practice with my new self to sense the object's edges with insubstantial fingers that trace their way to each meeting point.

Softly, I asked, “Octofuss, Octofuss, tell me who isn't real anymore. . . .”

And it answered, “Crotona!”

I froze. The cube, shrouded in its mysterious vibrations, went on, “Who are you?”

 

I stood there for a long time, until the voice died out and my chance to change it all back had passed.

I had no regret; I had made my choice. Who knew what other terrible consequences my trying to change time would create?

This time it wouldn't be by accident, I knew what I was doing. This
time
, I would have been responsible.

But more than that. I had already become what I now was. Undoing it would be trying to move backward.

Moving forward is the only way in which life makes any sense.

Life, or whatever state of existence passes for it.