Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (21 page)

“
Come in,” said the history fellow. “Oh, it’s you—Figwort, isn’t it? Go away.”

“
But you asked me here.”

“
I was drunk; and besides, that was weeks ago, before you came out with all that molecular sexuality nonsense.”

“
Before
and
after, actually. You weren’t just seeing double.”

“
Hmmm. Can you prove that? Tell me what I had for breakfast this morning.”

Figwort went
toowit-toowoo
and returned with a verdict of Eggs Benedict, his molecular indiscretions quickly forgotten. History bowed to the brilliant young Professor. Even the lovely Miss Bonsoir was relegated to a glossy insert in his biography, captioned:

Figwort’s Helen of Troy—the face that launched a thousand trips through time
.

In truth, Prunella Bonsoir was the prettier of the two—Figwort could attest to that; but still he chose to move on, leaving Prunella behind in that timeless moment where molecular sexuality blossomed and Figwort’s own future was spawned.

Professor Phileas Figwort thus entered history as the pioneer and undisputed master of time travel. Having done so, he proceeded to make the first of his three great discoveries.

The idea itself took hold in ancient Rome, unfurling its roots within the bloody confines of the Flavian Amphitheatre; but the seed had been planted much earlier, when Professor Figwort first tried to explain how he went about travelling through time.

“
There is no device, as such,” he said. “The apparatus is mental; intangible;
conceptual
. You just flip the switch and off you go. Once you understand how time works—how the timescape of the mind moves through absolute time cocooned in a bubble of linear time—it’s really quite simple: just recalibrate your mind, reorientate yourself and go.”

In those early days, before the advent of Professor Figwort’s second great obsession, history unrolled like a red carpet before him. Famous people. Great mysteries. World-shaping events. Time travel opened up all sorts of possibilities and Figwort explored them all, jumping wheresoever his curiosity led. What a hoot!

But then came the incident at the Flavian Amphitheatre, one dusty red day in the reign of the Emperor Nero. An angry sun cast shadows upon the arena. Figwort wore a toga and spoke Latin as if it were his mother tongue.

“
Habet, hoc habet
!” somebody cried when a left-handed
secutor
turned his ankle on a half-buried panther rib, thereby succumbing to the net of his
retiarius
opponent. The fallen gladiator raised a finger in surrender. Chins bulging beneath puffy eyes, Nero broke from his post-lunch doze and turned to Figwort, who frantically gave the thumbs-up. Unfortunately for the
secutor
, this didn’t have the effect that Figwort had intended. Nero mirrored the signal. The
retiarius
drove his trident into the net. Blood flowed.

Figwort hurled himself blinking back into the future, vomiting as he went, staining the passage of time as the boos and jeers of the crowd jabbed accusingly at his ears.
What had just happened
?
Why had the
secutor
been killed
? It took him several hours of soul-searching research to uncover the truth: in ancient times, the question being asked of the Emperor was not, ‘
Shall I spare him?
’ It was, ‘
Shall I kill him?
’ A leftover rib had brought the gladiator undone. Figwort had condemned him to death.

It was a misunderstanding, nothing more; a well-intentioned ‘yes’ delivered in the wrong cultural framework. Figwort clawed at the toga and ran trembling fingers through his wild hair. Could life really hang by so slender a thread?

It was then that the realisation hit him. It spun him around and laid him out flat.
Communication
, Figwort thought, the sands of time forever bloodied.
Communication is the source of all mankind’s problems
.

This, then, was the first of the Professor’s great discoveries—a sobering notion. So simple. So poignant. And, just like Miss Bonsoir, it led Figwort a merry dance straight down the path of obsession. Fifty years later the professor found himself talking earnestly to an orangutan named Oswald.

This time there was no going back.

Oswald, despite the name, was a female orangutan with muppet arms and beautiful black eyes. Her orange-brown hair was frizzy and reminiscent of Figwort’s. She loved to eat pears.

Oswald had been a regular visitor over the last decade, brachiating across from the neighbouring sanctuary where orangutans roamed free and cared not at all about the temporal thunderstorms that occasionally lit up Fort Figwort. She would come in through the window and steal Figwort’s slippers. She frequently turned her stooped appraisal upon the open refrigerator. She pulled her cheeks back and grunted merrily whenever Figwort dropped something on his foot.

They were practically married.

But all of this was quite some way in Figwort’s future—speaking, of course, in terms of personal, linear time. For many years, he carried alone the burden of that first great discovery. Figwort became more and more reclusive. An oddball, people said. A fruitcake soaked to next Christmas. But how could they know? What could they hope to understand? Communication—that was the problem.

Figwort spent the first decade verifying his insight. He travelled back in time and studied the calamities of the past. From pointed fingers to pointless wars, from misguided politics to guided missiles. Good intentions, bad inventions. A paradise lost in patter, bereft of all meaning. Even where two parties shared a cultural framework, still the potential was great for obfuscation. Communication was so imprecise.

Figwort continued to investigate, delving further back into history and humouring both evolutionists and creationists; but he found the humour to be equally dark—a cosmic joke. Whether it be cavemen fighting over animal skins or God’s children coveting the forbidden fruit, everywhere it was the same.

Everywhere and
everywhen
—misunderstanding.

People said that language was alive; but it was more than that. It was, in fact, the very breath of life. And with life came death,
ipso facto
, shrouded in nuance and forever converging like the incisions of a forked tongue. Overtones. Undertones. The one thing you could bank on was less than total comprehension. Now, Professor Figwort lived each day with the death of the
secutor
he unwittingly had condemned to a garbled foreclosure; but increasingly he felt that he carried as well the responsibility to make good on mankind’s overdrawn destiny. If only he could help people to understand.

For several years, he thought the answer might lie with telepathy; but in the end that was just specious thinking. Telepathy was still founded in language. It relied on an exchange of concepts and thus was vulnerable to
mis
conception. Telepathy would not have stopped Hitler or averted the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was too much a product of the conscious mind, open to interpretation; to perversion. What was needed, Professor Figwort concluded after a disheartening conversation with Joan of Arc, was something that stripped the brain of its prevaricating layers. Something that probed beyond the cerebral cortex and isolated the intent upon which words and concepts were founded. Something that tapped into the very essence of meaning.

Something that, had he possessed it in his university days, would have allowed young Phileas to connect with Miss Prunella Bonsoir—to speak his mind, as it were—and thereby avert the disastrous course of events that had since overtaken him.

Ah, to live an ordinary life; the humdrum, no conundrum. But Figwort was caught in a halfway state—impotent, verging on omniscient. If only he could solve the puzzle. If only he could spare others the torment of communication gone wrong.

For decades Professor Figwort sought a deliverance, chasing after the dream with all the manic-depressive zest of a cerebral alchemist. He muttered. He scribbled. He purchased an island in the Malay Archipelago and locked himself away, the model exemplar for crazed scientific endeavour.

The answer was there, somewhere inside his mind, and Figwort tore out most of his hair looking for a way in. He burnt the candle at both ends; became waxy in complexion. Even when he heard that Miss Bonsoir had passed away—the virgin queen of molecular sexuality, as serene in eternal sleep as she had been in her college days—still, Figwort merely pursed his lips and stared out at the rainforest beyond. Such was the way of things. Life. Death. Words without meaning, feeding off each other; malleable; ever-shifting, like the slippery vowels of ‘Ouroboros’.

Professor Figwort haunted himself in solitude, pacing the corridors of a troubled mind and occasionally popping back through history to see what Aquila had eaten for lunch that day. Outside, the sky grumbled and rain fell steadily. The orangutans held leafy branches over their heads—all except Oswald, who long since had purloined Figwort’s umbrella. Time moved on. Before he knew it, Phileas Figwort had spent half a lifetime consumed by his second great obsession.

Then came the breakthrough.

Twilight had fallen and Professor Figwort was contemplating a lone sprig of broccoli. He stared at it with the dull gaze of a man serving penance. He regarded it with solemn distaste.
Observe
, he told himself.
A vegetable suspended in time and impaled here upon my fork. Its colour is ambiguous, just shades of green, but its taste is unmistakable
. He closed his mouth around the broccoli and chewed with sour appreciation.
A mistake to taste, perhaps, but unmistakable in taste. Yes
.

Suddenly, Figwort’s eyes bulged and he spat the offending mouthful onto his plate. “Of course!”—he thumped the table— “It’s all about taste.” Then, eyeing the half-chewed broccoli: “Or lack of taste. Whatever. Thoughts are like food; food for thought, ha-ha! You can only tell so much from their look, shape, colour…Yes, yes…But if I can link the formation and vocalisation of an idea to its
taste
—to the essence of its meaning. Yes, it should be possible. All I need is to pin down the brain somehow. To isolate and impale each thought at the point of conception. After that, it’s just a matter of psycho-gustation.”

Thus was revealed the second of Professor Figwort’s great discoveries: that communication, through taste, may be filtered to the point of absolute purity.

Imagination having taken hold, Figwort worked like a
Once-ler
. In no time at all he had constructed three prototype devices—each capable of making thoughts tasty and then of tasting them. Tomorrow, he would test these taste helmets, and soon he would make his third great discovery, thereby ending the tragic tale of Phileas Figwort.

Merci, Miss Bonsoir
. Figwort opened the window and went to bed.
Thank you and goodnight
.

The conclusion would be swift.

A new day dawned over Fort Figwort, as was common practice, the dawn rays travelling some 150 million kilometres from a fixed point before breaking with uncanny precision through the uppermost leaves of the glistening rainforest. The orangutans stirred in their treetop nests. Time passed slowly and, heard only by those who cared to listen, the universe spoke.

“
Early one morning,” sang Professor Figwort—who was one of the many people
not
listening— “…just as the sun was dawning, I heard a maiden think in the valley below: ‘I can’t deceive thee. You must believe me. Phileas Figwort has caught my thoughts so.’”

Oswald had by this time snuck into the bathroom and was grooming herself with the professor’s hairdryer. Figwort lured her away with a bowl of cornflakes.

“
Here we go,” he said, pulling the skullcap over her sparse pate. “
Bon appétit
.”

Oswald stopped chewing and rolled her eyes up, her expression one of refined deliberation. She scratched her head through one of the holes in the skullcap and then turned her attention back to the cornflakes. Professor Figwort chuckled and donned his own skullcap. He looked as if he were about to take a shower.

“
It works like this,” Figwort explained, plucking an orange from atop a cannonball mound of oranges on the table. “Now, let’s pretend that you’ve just asked me for a mandarin. In the regular course of events, I would either have to assume that by ‘mandarin’ you really meant ‘orange’—in which case I’d pass you one—or that you actually thought there were mandarins among the oranges and that you specifically wanted one of those—in which case I’d have to say no. But you see, there is ambiguity. I would need to ask for clarification…”—Figwort regarded the orange, lips puckered as if he’d just cleaned out the horn of plenty— “…but not with the thought helmets. Right now, our every utterance is being pinned down at the point of conception, so that what we hear is not just the word itself but the very essence of what lies beneath it. Do you see?” Figwort frowned, a quicksilver shadow of doubt flickering at the periphery of his great vision. “Oswald, can you understand me? This is of the utmost scientific significance. Pay attention, now. I want you to reach out and shake my hand.”

Oswald regarded the professor’s outstretched palm, her jaws spread but her lips pursed. She looked to the left, then the right, and then passed him the salt.