Sand City Murders (48 page)

“You mean like the road signs… the ones you can’t read?”

“Exactly this.” Fynn laughed. “I may jump ahead to find things have changed quite drastically... or with a bit of luck, not at all.”

“What is it like slipping back to someone you’ve been before?”

“You mean physically?”

“Yeah.”

“Rather like waking from a dream. It begins and ends with deja vu, though more sustained and intense. ‘Ah, I have the strangest feeling I’ve been here before…’” Fynn laughed again. “And it is quite true. A curious phenomenon, yet I’ve grown accustomed to it. I find one self merging with another, though the most present self is dominant by far. These memories are the freshest in some way. Gradually I adjust to my previous life. I recall the routines, the situations, the people, the surroundings. It all seems quite normal after a few days.”

“A few days?”

“Sometimes less, sometimes more… I suppose it depends on how far I’ve traveled. Some things I recall better than others. Sometimes I am rudely reminded.”

“Can you do this consciously?”

“I have developed some skill in this regard. In the early days, I will say, things were very different.”

“How so?”

“Every jump was random and every jump was a hard one.”

“A hard one?”

“Always a new me. No soft back-jumps as it were.”

“Why not?”

“Ah, there was simply nowhere to go. No previous lives to revisit.”

“So, just to the future?”

“No, entirely random as I’ve said.” Fynn stretched his arms. “Every jump took me by complete surprise. I would have to scratch my head and ask myself: ‘Have I been here before? I don’t remember that…’”

“It must be confusing.”

“As I’ve said, in the early days I was like a skipping stone.”

“A what, a skipping stone?”

“Yes. Just as you throw a stone across the pond. It skims the water and hops, sometimes many times.”

“Oh sure…”

“Completely unpredictable— a terrible period in my life. I would never know where I’d end up. Half way across the world, in a foreign place or time, to a wholly unfamiliar culture, a place where I did not know the language or the local customs. Quite upsetting.” Fynn paused, his face had a pained expression.

“A different language? Is that a timeline thing?”

“No, it’s a geography thing.” Fynn smiled. “I will say I have developed a facility for language though, I learn very quickly. Out of necessity more than anything.”

“How many languages do you speak?”

“Dozens.”

“Like?”

“English,” he said, “most every other language on the continent, from Dutch to Greek.”

“That’s it?”

“My Russian is passable, Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin… others too… But I know them less well.”

“And you don’t forget them? Like if you travel back or forward?”

“Not at all.”

“Wow.”

“When I first learned that I could back-jump, that I could return to a place where I had been before, well, this changed everything. This was momentous.”

“How did that happen?”

“Sheer luck, I suppose. I just happened to be facing in the right direction when I fell and went to the past, to a previous self: my first soft jump, my first return. And from that moment, I knew I was on to something. No longer did I just skip about randomly. I had some tiny measure of control and some measure of awareness. It was then I discovered there are two modes of travel.” Fynn chuckled to himself. “What I didn’t understand at the time was how even back-jumps were fraught with danger…”

“What kind of danger?”

“Such a question… I will say, my very first jump was different from all the rest, and that I was extremely fortunate.”

“Getting caught by Roman soldiers and sold into slavery?”

“Things could have gone far worse...”

“You’re an optimist. How could things be worse?”

“I may have jumped and landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That would be far worse.”

“Has that kind of thing ever happened?”

“Of course. This is why I am rather cautious nowadays.”

“Well, what was so lucky about that first jump?’

“That I survived the moment of searing pain is a miracle unto itself…”

“Right.”

“And consider how everything could have ended very badly in the following situation: I am eight, I jump to a new future. It is quite a shock, I can tell you… My only desire is to return home. So… let’s say I attempt to back-jump as soon as I’m able. However, I do not make it all the way back. Instead, I land in a previous self who has, well, let’s say, a somewhat limited awareness of the situation. It would be entirely possible that I would wake up one morning and find myself in the body of an old man, in a previous self, and yet, I would now have the memories and mentality of an eight year old boy.” Fynn sat upright. “Surely this could lead to madness. It would be very upsetting to say the least... I consider myself very lucky that this did not happen to me.”

“What did happen?”

“Eh?”

“Do you remember your second jump?”

“I do.”

“And?”

“It was completely by accident that I was pushed overboard from a ship…” Fynn paused again. “Ah, but something you must realize, in the early days, my understanding was extremely limited. I had no inkling as to what was happening to me. An impossible situation really.”

“This I’m not getting.” I gave off a frustrated face.

“My awareness is subtractive yet my experience is cumulative. When I leave a place, that life, that self, is gone. But the time I lived through, is a place to which I can always return.”

“That’s a little clearer.”

“There is also a ripple effect… and this can be fantastically complicated.”

“How so?”

“It mainly has to do with the gaps in my concurrency.”

“Can you explain?”

“Of course... Take my very first jump from classical age Hellas to the Roman Empire, some three hundred years, yes?”

I nodded.

“I lived in either one of those times, but in the time in between, I am not there... So, that leaves a yawning gap.”

“And?”

“And it was quite possible to hard jump into this gap … to shake Socrates hand, or ride along side Alexander the Great.”

“But that might change the…”

“Yes, such an action might cause a ripple. I might try to revisit myself in the ancient copper mine and find myself gone…” Fynn paused. “Or not… it could be that I am still slaving away in the bowels of the earth.”

“I’m definitely not getting this.”

“As I said, fantastically complicated.”

I expected Fynn to say more but he fell silent. “And the ripple?”

“There have been times when I thought to return somewhere familiar, only to find that life obliterated. And on other occasions, the opposite.”

“But you said, the past always changes the future.”

“Indeed, the real question is, how much?”

“The quantum of change thing?”

“Yes. Remember of course, I can usually return to a life and finish it off, or correct it, if it is lacking.”

“Fix things? Like you did here?”

“Yes, exactly so.”

“Is that something you do a lot?”

“Yes, very much like a rehearsal for a stage show, I might say.”

“A kind of
do-over
thing?”

“I have found it far easier to remedy my mistakes afterwards, not as a
do-over
. Time travel never has to enter into it.” Fynn gave me a smile. “Though, I have used this technique to stabilize my life as it were.”

“What technique?”

“Revisiting a single life several times. Yet this approach is also fraught with danger.”

“Why? It sounds like a dream come true.”

“I suppose… but it could just as easily go wrong. You might spend your entire existence ping ponging back in forth until you got everything perfect. Yet, is there such a thing? A perfect life? You would have wasted this gift.”

“I think it’s a dream come true for most people.”

“Why is that?”

“Just what you described. Say, I could go back to being fourteen, but with all the experiences and wisdom of my thirty year old self. Being so young while knowing what I know now.”

“And what is so good about that?”

“I could fix a lot of things. Make better decisions. Date this girl or not, take this job or not. Pursue another path. Find my lost keys... I’m guessing that I’d be brimming with self confidence.”

“Your thinking is very small,” Fynn admonished. “Though I do see your point, and... well, I was not immune to these kinds of thoughts. But tell me, do you have so many regrets? So many things to fix in your past? You are far too young for such ideas.”

“I guess...”

“Most of all though, you are failing to see the dark side of this.”

“What dark side?”

“Might it not be a burden for a young boy to know what a thirty year old does? Surely, something is lost, an innocence… And what replaces it? A deep abiding cynicism? Not healthy for a fourteen year old.” Fynn paused. “There was a time when I thought I could arrange any life to my liking. Yes, by slipping back with knowledge, with advance warning, with knowing the future for certain… I believed I could potentially make my life very sweet. Yet it was not the case.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t wish to speak of it. Only to say, I have learned that the future is never assured. Not a dream come true, certainly.”

“Okay, so what is the downside to all of this?”

“By this, you mean a price to pay?”

“Yeah.”

“I have what you might term a
nexus life
, the one from which all jumping springs… And I will say, it is a terrible life for him, this self who is also me. I will admit, it is a wretched existence. So, this is my dark secret.”

“Who is he?”

“He is me, a version of me who dwells in the past.” Fynn held out his compass. “He spends his life making these… He lives in an asylum on Lake Geneva, in the mid-eighteen hundreds.”

“An asylum?”

“A sanatorium, yes. He’s well-looked after, I assure you. This nexus self has a small workshop. He toils there every day making compasses. I visit him quite often.”

“Why?”

“He’s very young… about twenty-two. I back-jump into this life with great frequency. I retrieve a finished compass and I jump out again to a new place.”

I had to think about this and remained quiet for some moments. “You almost talk about him like he’s someone else, not you.”

“A convenience of words, I think. He is me… though he does live in a rather confused state of mind. I am constantly jumping there from somewhere else, and I usually only stay as long as it takes to construct another compass.”

“Why him?”

“It is a well worn path that I often use… Long lives make big targets, they are easy to slip back to.”

“How do you keep that with you?”

“I can duplicate objects by bringing them to the future and leaving them there to find. It doesn’t always work… perhaps about half the time, depending on how much the future has been altered.”

“What happens when you change the future. Does that affect the past?”

“A reverse causality?” Fynn raised an eyebrow. “I have not experienced such, at least not in the true sense of the word. Events in the future do not cause events in the past. Time would have to flow in reverse, and it does not.”

“But every time you travel to the past, you change it. Whatever you bring back, ideas, memories or plans, even objects from the future, they affect the past. Isn’t that reverse causality?”

“There is a question of semantics here. I will say this: you shot me in the head and it caused me to die. For reverse causality it would be: my death caused you to shoot me in the head. Such rarely happens if ever, though I take your point. There is an indirect and a subtle interference going on here. What I bring from the future does indeed affect the past.”

“So I’m not so far off then?”

“What I bring to the past may very well alter it from that moment on. But time still flows forward. In some sense, I am the cause... and the effect.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Well… I travel to the past and stop Mr and Mrs Columbus from meeting each other, falling in love and marrying. No little Christopher is born. The world is a different place. A particular timeline you are familiar with no longer exists. The future from that point on is altered. So I have changed the cause and the effect. I suppose in some sense, causality itself is a measure of the distances between timelines. We would certainly not be here having this conversation.”

“Who are these other travelers you keep mentioning?”

“Do I keep mentioning them?” Fynn asked.

“You do. Who are they?”

“Well, some of the travelers I’ve encountered align themselves with the Keepers… a nickname I presume. They are a loose-knit group of like-minded travelers, a cabal of sorts.”

“What do they do?”

“I cannot say exactly. I have had no dealings with them for the most part.”

“What about Mortimer? Is he a Keeper?”

“That’s rather doubtful.” Fynn gave a grimace. “I suppose there are two types of travelers. Those with awareness, and those without.”

“That sounds simple.”

Fynn turned and faced me with a smile. “It is... for those with no awareness. They seem quite happy and heedless.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“I run into them all the time, the same people popping up wherever I go through history… and yet they are oblivious to their condition.”

“You’ve met these people?”

“I have, and I’ve talked to some of them at length. I’ve concluded that they have no awareness at all, no consciousness that they slip through time. To them, everything seems perfectly normal.”

“You’re certain of this?”

“Of course. There is this one fellow… he keeps appearing in the oddest of places. I’ve seen him in Bombay in the nineteen fifties, in Cairo in the nineteen twenties, Chicago during your civil war, in Bagdad in the fifteen hundreds… and so on.”

“Do you know this guy?”

“Not at all.”

“And he has absolutely no idea what’s going on?”

“I think not… but who can say that someday he will not gain a measure of awareness. Such is entirely possible.”