Sand City Murders (23 page)

“Well, perhaps this sort of thing happens to people all the time. Perhaps it’s commonplace.”

“I don’t think so.”

“And why not? Consider: A woman jumps off a steep curb to avoid a puddle, and in that tiny moment, she is in free fall… And then, a few minutes later she makes the most momentous decision of her life and she is forever changed by it. Did she travel in time, or perhaps slip into another reality? It is certainly possible.”

“No, it’s impossible.”

“I think not. It is all a question of awareness and memory. I slipped back and forth for many years before I even had an inkling as to what was happening to me. I thought my experience was the same as everyone else’s. It took decades before I learned this was not the case… that people live only in a linear fashion.”

“What about that thing, the searing pain you mentioned? If I jumped around in time, wouldn’t I notice that?”

“Most certainly. I am meaning the first mode of travel, soft jumps, the kind of travel where only your consciousness shifts from place to place. This is quite different, and I’ve come to believe, quite commonplace.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“I believe everyone has this ability to travel through time, but few of us have any consciousness of it. Most of us are stuck in our time simply because we do not have the awareness that we can be unglued.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, you know, when you wake up in the morning, you remember what happened yesterday… more or less.”

“Yes, persistence of memory. This is a powerful thing.” Fynn paused to face me. “Yet, I think you are missing the point entirely.”

“How so?”

“Say you accidentally slipped back in time… What would you recall? The place where you came from, or the place where you find yourself? To have a memory of the future would be quite unusual, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

“Though not impossible.” Fynn gave me another big smile, a devilish smile. “As you say, you might well remember what you did yesterday… you wake up and expect about the same to happen today. But, if you have no awareness of traveling, then what you do today should coincide with what you did yesterday. Your own mind would make it so.”

“So your memory is reset?”

“Not at all. You just don’t recall traveling to the past. Your memory simply picks up where it left off. You might wake up tomorrow morning and find yourself shoveling lion dung in the bowels of the Coliseum; or dragging the corpses of dead gladiators from the arena… 
Ah, just another day at work
... If you cannot remember jumping from somewhere else, a future time, then this would seem perfectly normal to you.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Perhaps… but this is easy for you to say because you do possess such an awareness. You do remember things— things you’d rather forget, as you’ve said.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Fynn laughed.

“So it’s all about awareness?”

“Yes, memory and awareness… something you seem to have an aptitude for.”

“Me?”

“Of course. You are the exception. But all this is a different kettle of fish. Today our lesson is about
free fall
.”

“Alright then, explain this
libra lapsus
thing.”

“I will warn you in advance, it can get fantastically complicated.”

“How so?” I was dubious.

“How are you at astronomy?”

“Astronomy?” I paused to consider. “Not so bad.”

“I’m afraid I will lose you here, it’s all frightfully involved…” Fynn paused. “Do you have a head for figures?”

“You mean math?”

“Yes.”

“Not really.”

“I could give you velocities in miles per hour, if you’d like, but I’m not sure that would aid your understanding.”

“Probably not.”

“Well then, I will keep this as simple as possible.” Fynn walked to the blackboard and erased his formulas. “I would begin by saying that everything in this universe is in motion. It sounds straightforward enough, yet when you begin to think about it, things start moving very quickly.”

“Wait, are we talking past or future here?”

“Ah, indeed, the two modes of travel...  Well, they both rely on
libra lapsus
.”

“Like past or future?”

“Yes, but this is something of an oversimplification. Only the present matters. It might be easier to say I am a
place traveler
. I simply go from place to place.”

“Don’t we all?”

“This is most fundamental. As soon as I leave a place, I am not there.”

“That’s just common sense.”

“For you perhaps, for me, not so much. If you leave this place, this classroom, you will likely persist elsewhere, maybe in the principal’s office, or in the corridor…” Fynn gave me a smile. “I may cease to exist in the present altogether. This is a bit different, eh?”

“I’ll say, but I don’t get any of this.”

“It is simplicity itself.” Fynn drew on the board. He made three giant circles almost touching each other. The first he labeled
past
, the next,
present,
and the final one,
future
. He drew a long arching arrow. “When I travel to the past, everything must change.” He erased the circle containing the future. “Everything is reset.” He redrew the circle and wrote
future
again. “Though this particular future is probably just a temporary place, a phantom place...”

“How is this simple?”

“In one case, when I go to the past, only my awareness travels, a soft jump. When I go to the future, my entire self travels, a hard jump.”

“So, more like mind travel and body travel?”

“Again, that is rather facile. If I go to a new place, both my mind and body come with me.” He smiled briefly. “If I go to an old place, my mind re-enters a body it is largely familiar with.”

“Is this like astral projection?”

“Not at all.”

“Okay, sorry for the questions. Please go on...”

Fynn paced a few steps in front of the board. “The first thing you must understand is that to travel through time, one must also travel through space.”

“I’m not following already.”

“Ah, but this is fairly simple. Everything is in motion, yes? If I go from summer to winter, I must be in a different place, if only because the Earth orbits the sun. At any point in time, the Earth is in a very specific location. It travels through space and so must I... Motion… this is all that
time
can measure.”

“Still not getting this…”

Inspector Fynn erased the entire board again and drew a large chalky dot, and then a line with an arrow to another dot. “To travel from here to there, from point A to point B, I must travel in space. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“And so it is when I travel in time. Surely, no one can go from one place to another without using up some time? It goes to follow, time is simply a measure of motion.”

“Okay… but what does this mean?”

“I must travel through space and time together, not just time.”

“Can you give me an example?”

Fynn kept his patience but paused for a moment. “Say I want to leap ahead by a half a year, yes?”

I nodded.

“I must travel through time of course, but I must also travel in space. I must physically go to where the Earth will be in six months: the other side of the sun as it were. And that is quite far in terms of miles. It’s the same if I slip to the past. I must return to where the Earth
was...
as it moved through space.”

“That sort of makes sense.”

“Motion, direction and momentum are critical to how
libra lapsus
operates.”

“Can you explain that in simple terms?”

“No, it’s altogether inexplicable.” Fynn flashed a smile and raised an eyebrow. He took a deep breath. “You are traveling on a train or in an automobile… at say, one hundred kilometers an hour.” Fynn glanced at me. “Everything in your car is traveling at the same speed… your passengers, your baggage, a cup of coffee, yourself. All is well… but then suddenly, your coffee cup enters the state of
free fall
. Suddenly, it is plucked from time. It is no longer moving at the same speed. The result? It goes crashing into the back window to spill everywhere.”

“Can’t say that’s ever happened to me. But I think I’m getting it.”

Fynn put his hands behind his back and resumed his pacing in front of the blackboard. “We rarely consider how much we are moving at present; that we are perched atop this giant churning orb, thundering along, careening through the cosmos at a fantastic speed. Exactly now, sitting on that desk, you are traveling at about one thousand miles an hour.”

“I am?”

“Yes, that is the approximate speed that the Earth spins on its axis. Just as if you were riding in an automobile.”

“Okay, with you so far.”

Fynn erased the board again and picked up a stick of chalk. He drew the arc of a circle in the top corner and wrote the word: sun. “And further consider, that the Earth is orbiting around the sun at a tremendous speed, many thousands of miles per hour... much faster than your Saab.” Fynn drew a rough circle, presumably the Earth. He added some arrows of different sizes. Small curved ones showed the rotation of our planet, a larger one showed its orbital path. “And so we are all moving many hundreds of miles in just a single moment.”

I started to laugh a little. I had never really considered this.

“The sun, and hence us, are also spinning around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at breakneck speeds.” He drew a much wider arrow near the sun. “So you see we are already moving quite quickly. Moreover, our galaxy is in motion as well… in various ways, but ultimately we are being pulled in the direction of the constellation Hydra, at many millions of miles per hour.”

I was beginning to get this. “But all this movement, it must be in a mix of different directions: spinning, orbiting, revolving, speeding through space.”

“Yes, you’ve put your finger on the complicated bit. All these vectors, all these different speeds and relative positions. They all must be considered.”

“What does all this have to do with free fall?”

“Everything. In the very instant of free fall, all momentum, inertia, time and space— they cease to exist. This has large implications on how I travel.”

“I’m totally lost.”

“It all hinges on what direction I am facing.” Fynn drew a stick figure on the Earth. “Here... this is me, the jumper. But first, where is the Earth relative to the sun? Recall your astronomy?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Not at all. If it is night, then I am on this side of the Earth.” He erased the figure and drew another. “If it is daytime, I am here, and so on…” He kept drawing little men at different positions on his chalk Earth. “So… when I jump, the time of day so to speak, or what direction I am facing, has a strong bearing on where I might end up.”

“So you can only jump at dusk or at dawn?”

“This is an oversimplification, in practice it is nothing like that.”

“But you’re this cup of coffee...”

“I am that.”

“Have you smashed against the window and spilled, or the equivalent?”

“I would say yes, quite a number of times.”

“Okay, if I understand at all, then you’re not really in control here… I mean the way you travel.”

“With any great precision, yes. Remember please, for centuries I was led to believe the Earth was the center of the universe… Only Copernicus changed this view… It was much, much later, in the nineteen twenties when Edwin Hubble saw that the galaxies were racing away from each other… And only recently, in the late nineteen eighties did scientists observe that we were speeding towards the Great Attractor.”

“The Great Attractor?”

“An unknown gravitational field that draws in all nearby galaxies, and at tremendous speeds. This has an effect on
libra
lapsus
, and understanding it more thoroughly has allowed me to travel more efficiently.”

“And before these discoveries?”

“I will admit, my ability to travel with any precision was rather limited… I would say, I traveled completely at random.”

“This is really complicated.”

“I agree. It’s taken me centuries to work this all out. And I fear, I’ve only scratched the surface. I could go on for hours on the intricacies of free fall…. I will not even mention how the Earth’s obliquity has caused me no end of discomfort. Suffice to say, traveling to the future is not so exact. I can rarely go to a precise time and place. More often than not I am miles away from where I start.”

“Miles away?”

“Remember, I must travel through time and space together. So, the longer the free fall, the further I travel, both in time and space. In that moment of free fall, all momentum, inertia, if you will, is nullified.”

“This is hard to wrap my head around.”

“Let’s just say, I’ve ridden many a bus to make my way home, or far worse.”

“What’s worse than riding the bus?”

Fynn said nothing but gave me a pained smile.

“What about when you just jump back into an old consciousness, you know, like stepping into a pair of cozy slippers.”

“Yes, a soft jump... this is quite different and much easier, more predictable. While the journey is initiated by
libra lapsus
, the destination is more or less fixed, not at all dependent on geography.”

“Why is that?”

“Who can say? But back-jumps seem to be nothing more than a byproduct.”

“A byproduct? That’s a funny word to use.”

“A symptom then? A result? What I mean is, slipping back to a previous self happens only because I was able to travel there in the first place. I cannot simultaneously occupy the same space and time. There cannot be two
me’s
existing together.”

“So when you free fall, you’re not exactly sure where you might end up.”

“This is true to a large extent, though it is now a matter of sheer will and concentration. It’s taken years and years to master. Still, I am not the perfect traveler.”

“And your compass thing?”

“It aids in navigation. When it’s with me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When I travel backwards to a previous self, I can carry nothing with me but my consciousness. So this object gets lost from time to time…”