An Acceptable Time (6 page)

Mrs. Murry put another stack of pancakes on the bishop’s plate.

Mr. Murry said, “Tessering, moving through space without the restrictions of time, is, as you know, a mind thing. One can’t make a machine for it. That would be to distort it, disturb the space/time continuum, in a vain effort to relegate something full of blazing glory to the limits of technology. And of course that’s what’s happening, abortive attempts at spaceships designed to break the speed of light and warp time. It works well in the movies and on TV but not in the reality of the created universe.”

“What you ask is too difficult,” the bishop said. “How many people are willing to take lightning into their bodies?”

Mr. Murry smiled, and to Polly it was one of the saddest smiles she had ever seen. “You are,” her grandfather said.

The bishop said softly,
“It was as if lightning flashed into my spirit…and with the light such a profound peace and joy came into my heart. In one moment I felt as if wholly revitalized by some infinite power, so that my body would be shattered like an earthen vessel.”
He sighed. “That’s John Thomas, a Welshman in the mid-1700s. But it’s a good description, isn’t it?”

“Very good,” Mr. Murry agreed. “But it also shocks me.”

“Why?” the bishop asked.

“Because you know more than I do.”

“No—no—”

“But you don’t know enough, Nase. You’ve opened a time gate that Annie—Anaral, whatever her name is—seems to be able to walk through and which has drawn Polly through it, and I want it closed.”

Close it! How could it be closed!

The door had been opened, and the winds of time were blowing against it, keeping it from closing, almost taking it off the hinges.

“No!” Polly cried, stopping her grandfather in mid-sentence. “You can’t forbid me to go to the starwatching rock!”

Her grandfather sighed heavily. “What a lifetime of working with the nature of the space/time continuum has taught me is that we know very little about space, and even less about time. I don’t know whether you and Nase have actually gone back three thousand years, or whether those young snow-capped mountains are some kind of hallucination. But I do know that you’re in our care, and we are responsible for you.”

The bishop poured more syrup onto his pancakes. “Certainly some of the responsibility is mine.”

Polly looked into his eyes, a faded silver that still held light, but there was nothing of the fanatic, of the madman, in his steady gaze.

Mr. Murry said, “Nase, you’ve got to keep Polly out of this. You don’t know enough. We human creatures can make watches and clocks and sensitive timing devices, but we don’t understand what we’re timing. When something has happened—”

“It doesn’t vanish,” the bishop said. “It makes waves, as sound does. Or a pebble dropped into a pond.”

“Time waves?” Polly suggested. “Energy waves? Something to do with E = mc
²
?”

Nobody responded. Mr. Murry started clearing the table, moving creakily, as though his joints pained him more than usual. Mrs. Murry sat looking out the window at the distant hills, her face unreadable.

“I don’t know what to do about this.” Mr. Murry turned from the sink to look directly at Polly. “When we told your parents we’d love to have you come stay with us, it never occurred to your grandmother and me that you might get involved with Nase’s discoveries.”

“We didn’t take them seriously enough,” her grandmother said. “We didn’t want to.”

“Under the circumstances,” her grandfather said, “should we send Polly home?”

“Granddad!” Polly protested.

“We can’t keep you prisoner here,” her grandmother said.

“Listen.” Polly was fierce. “I don’t think you
can
send me away. Really. If I’m into this tesseract thing that Bishop Colubra has opened—because that’s what’s happened, isn’t it?—then if you try to take me out of it, wouldn’t that do something to—maybe rip—the space/ time continuum?”

Her grandfather walked to the windows, looked out across his garden, then turned. “It is a possibility.”

“If time and space are one—” the bishop suggested, then stopped.

“So it might,” Polly continued, “rip me, too?”

“I don’t know,” her grandfather said. “But it’s a risk I’d rather not take.”

“Look”—the bishop clapped his hands together softly—“Thursday is All Hallows’ Eve. Samhain, as Annie and Karralys might call it. The gates of time swing open most easily at this strange and holy time. If Polly will be willing to stay home just until after Thursday night—”

“Zachary’s coming Thursday afternoon,” Polly reminded them. “I can’t very well tell Zachary that I can’t go anywhere with him because Bishop Colubra’s opened a tesseract and somehow or other I’ve blundered into it.” She tried to laugh. “Is Zachary in it, too?”

The bishop shook his head slowly. “I think not. No. His seeing Karralys when he came to our time is one thing. Going through the time gate himself is quite another.”

“If Zachary hasn’t gone through the time gate, then he’s not in the tesseract?”

“I think not,” the bishop repeated. “Nor is Louise, even if—whether she believes it or not—she sawAnnie.”

“Polly,” Mr. Murry queried, “you’re
sure
Zachary saw this person?”

“Well, Granddad, yes.”

Her grandfather had the hot water running, and he held his hands under the tap, nodding slowly. “Going somewhere with Zachary should be all right. Away from here, but not too far away. Nowhere near the star-watching rock.”

“Just lie low till after Samhain,” the bishop urged. “And don’t go swimming unless one of your grandparents is with you.”

She nodded. “Okay. Samhain. What does that mean?”

“It’s the ancient Celtic New Year’s festival, when the animals were brought down from their grazing grounds for the winter. The crops were harvested, and there was a great feast. Places were set at the festival dinner for those who had died during the previous year, as a sign of honor and faith in the continuing of the spirits of the dead.”

“It sounds like a sort of combination of Halloween and Thanksgiving,” Polly said.

“And so it was. Pope Gregory III in the eighth century dedicated November 1 All Saints’ Day, and October 31 was All Hallows’ Eve.”

“So,” Mr. Murry said dryly, “the Christian Church, and not for the first time, took over and renamed a pagan holiday.”

The phone rang again, interrupting them. Mr. Murry went to it. “Yes, Louise, he’s here. It would seem that somehow or other Polly walked into three thousand years ago this morning, if such a thing is to be believed…No, I find it difficult, too…Yes, we’ll call.” He turned back to the table.

“My little sister is a doctor,” the bishop said.

“All right, Nason. We know your sister is a doctor.”

“I made the mistake—if it was a mistake—Annie cut her finger deeply, badly. It needed stitching, and Cub, the young healer, is not experienced enough, and Karralys was away, so I brought Annie home with me.”

“To now—to the present?” Incredulity, shock, and anger combined in Mr. Murry’s voice.

“Just long enough for Louise to fix her finger. I took her right back.”

“Oh, Nase.” Mr. Murry groaned. “You can’t play around with time that way.”

“I couldn’t play around with Annie’s finger, either.”

“Did Louise go along with you in this—this—”

“She wasn’t happy about it, but there we were in her office and—to tell you the truth—she had never seen Annie before, so it didn’t occur to her to think in terms of three thousand years ago. Her first reaction was that Annie needed help, and quickly, so she did what had to be done. When I told her who Annie was, she didn’t really believe me, and I didn’t press the point. She just told me to get Annie back to wherever or whenever it was she came from as quickly as possible.”

“Nason.” Mr. Murry stood up, sat down again. “This isn’t
Star Trek
and you can’t just beam people back and forth. How did you do it?”

“Well, now, I’m not exactly sure. That’s part of the problem. Don’t shout at me, Alex.”

“I’m beyond shouting.”

“Granddad.” Polly tried to calm things down. Now that her grandparents were taking charge, the adventure began to seem exciting rather than terrifying. “Your tesseract thing—what you’ve been working on—space travel—it’s to free us from the restrictions of time, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But purely for the purpose of extra-solar-system exploration. That’s all. We don’t know enough to play around with it, as I know from my own experience.”

The bishop spoke softly. “We climbed the Matterhorn because it was there. We went to the moon because it was there. We’re going to explore the farther planets in our own solar system and then in our own galaxy and look toward the galaxies beyond because they’re there. I didn’t come to live with Louise with any idea of finding Ogam stones, but when I found one—well, I was interested because they were there.”

“Here,” Mr. Murry corrected.

“Here. I may have been foolish. But neither did I expect what has happened to Polly. Child, can you lie low till the weekend? Yes, go off somewhere on Thursday with your young man. Not that I think there’s any real danger. But don’t go to the star-watching rock—can you wait until Sunday?”

“I don’t know.” Polly looked troubled. “I don’t know if that would do any good, because the first time I saw Anaral it was right here, last night while I was swimming.”

The bishop held up his long, thin hands in a gesture of disclaimer, shook his head. Sunlight flashed off the topaz in his ring. “I’m sorry.” Then he looked at Polly. “Or am I? We may be on to something—”

“Nason!” Mr. Murry warned.

Mrs. Murry hit the palm of her hand softly against the table. “This is Polly’s study time. I think a little return to normalcy would be a good thing. There are some books up in her room she needs to look at.”

“Good,” Mr. Murry said. “Perhaps this morning was just an aberration. By all means let’s try to return to normal.”

Polly rose, went to the bishop. “This Ogam writing. You said it’s an alphabet. Do you have it written down? I mean, so that I could make sense of it?”

“Yes. At home.”

“Could I see it, please?”

“Of course. I have what may be no more than my own version of Ogam in a notebook, but it’s helped me translate the Ogam stones. I’ll bring it over this afternoon.”

Mrs. Murry started to intervene, then closed her mouth.

“Thanks, Bishop,” Polly said, and turned to go upstairs.

Up in her room Polly simply sat for a few minutes in the rocking chair, not reaching for the books. What she would have liked to do was go out to the star-watching rock. She was no longer afraid of being trapped in past time. Somehow the threshold was open to her, as it was to Anaral. But her grandparents would be upset and angry. Would it truly help if she stayed around the house until after Thursday?

Polly turned toward her night table and reached for the books. Studying for her grandparents was a tangible reality, a relief after the almost dream world of the lake and village of three thousand years ago. Yes, she wanted to learn Ogam. If Anaral could learn English from the bishop, Polly could learn Ogam.

Meanwhile, she would study. The Murrys were more demanding than her teachers at Cowpertown High had been, and she was delighted at their challenge.

She turned to the first book in the pile. All the books had been marked with slips of paper. The first was by John Locke, a seventeenth-century philosopher—she knew that much, thanks to Max, who had frequently augmented whatever Polly was given at Cowpertown High. These were Locke’s impressions of America, idyllic and, she thought, a little naïve. But Locke was writing from the far past (though only centuries ago, not millennia) when the new continent was fresh and still uncorrupted by the accumulated evils of the Old World. The naked Amerindians seemed to Locke to live a life as innocent as Adam and Eve in the Garden. They lived without external laws, did not buy or sell or pile up wealth. They were, Locke implied, without shame, not burdened by the guilts of the past.

The book on her lap, Polly rocked, thought. There was no evidence that there had ever been Celts or druids on these shores when the early settlers landed. Had they been assimilated into the local tribes, as Karralys and Tav seemed to have been taken into Anaral’s people? Gone back to Britain? If there really were druids in New England three thousand years ago, what had happened to them?

She sighed, opened the second book to the page her grandmother had marked. It was by Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the troubled period of Andrew Jackson, when the Indians were treated with terrible unfairness, and yet Tocqueville wrote that the settlers in America “had arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution” and that they were “born free without having to become so.”

Still true? Polly thought of herself as having been born free, and yet in the short span of her life she had witnessed much abuse of freedom. Surely the lusts and guilts and greeds of the Old World had taken root in the New. And despite her affection for the natives of Gaea, for the Quiztano Indians in Venezuela, she was leery of the concept of the “noble savage.” People, in her experience, were people, some good, some bad, most a mixture.

Next in the pile was
Lectiones geometricae,
published by Isaac Barrow in 1670, and despite Polly’s proficiency with languages she could not concentrate on the Old Latin, so she put it aside for when she could focus better. She read a marked chapter in a history of the sixteenth century, learning that Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for heresy, including the proposal, horrifying to the Church establishment of those days, that there are as many times as there are planets.

—And even one planet, Polly thought,—has many time zones, and when we try to cross them too quickly we get jet lag. And even in one zone, time doesn’t move at a steady rate.

She remembered a day of lying in bed with flu and fever, every joint aching, and the day dragged on and on, far longer than an ordinary day. And then there was a New Year’s Eve party at Max’s beautiful plantation house, Beau Allaire, with Max sparkling as brightly as the crystal chandeliers, and there had been singing and charades and the evening passed in the twinkling of an eye. Poor Giordano Bruno. He was probably right about time. How many people have been burned at the stake for being right?