But, Pieter reasoned, travelling from the future to the past is impossible.
In, Pieter reasoned, this reality it’s impossible. Not where he’s been. Not where he got the cap. Where he’s been, time must be different. Time must have no meaning.
At which point, Theo conjectured, a bright light would’ve lit up inside Pieter’s head, and he’d have reasoned something like this –
There is a multiverse where everything is possible.
In some place in that multiverse, what I’m trying to do is possible. Here, it’s not possible. There, it is. Now, if only I could go to there, what I’m trying to do would be possible. My problem is, not that I can’t get where I’m going, but I can’t get there from here.
But, Pieter reasoned, if only –
Theo snatched his hand away from the rim of the jar as if it was red hot. If everybody had an ocean. Well, yes; the ocean is a reasonably convenient metaphor. It’s an element that both separates and connects the land masses. Everybody, every reality, does indeed have an ocean, namely the barrier that keeps each different reality separate from the others. What everybody doesn’t have, what everybody needs –
(He closed his eyes.)
– is a boat.
Put it another way. What do you do if you know what you want the answer to be, but you can’t make the maths come out that way? You cheat.
And Pieter had cheated. But that sort of behaviour always comes with a price tag. The trick is, if you want to come out on top, to get someone else to pay.
Theo took the jar in his two equally visible hands.
Free access to the Clubhouse is available to all registered members. They can come, and they can go. They can also, if they feel so inclined, import pickled walnuts, to enjoy as a savoury snack between exits and entrances. What they do with the empty jar after they’ve finished with it is a matter between them and their ecological sensibilities. If they choose to leave their trash behind them, so be it.
Theo looked into the jar. He had an odd feeling that the jar was looking back at him, but that was probably just because he’d read Nietzsche and had a vivid imagination.
The operating system of YouSpace, he decided, is that it doesn’t have one. You just say what you want. Of course, if nobody bothers to tell you that, or if they leave you a set of completely false and misleading instructions, you can get yourself into all sorts of bother. But if you know the truth, it’s so very, very simple.
I want to go home.
But, to make it interesting, he went the long way round.
Also, he stopped at various points on the journey, to test his newly minted hypothesis and establish a few facts. He stopped, for example, at his parents’ house, approximately a week after he’d been born. He paid a flying visit to Pieter van Goyen’s rooms at the university, back when he’d been a student there. He dropped in on the Very Very Large Hadron Collider, half an hour before it blew up. Once he’d got the hang of it, it was a bit like being a bird flying over both time and space. Provided you kept your head, didn’t lose your way and stayed well clear of falcons and cats, it was a piece of cake. It was fun.
One last circuit – from the Beginning to the End, in a low, lazy, circling sweep – and then he banked into the flow to slow down, selected a point on which to land, swooped, deliberately stalled and dropped (just like a bird landing on a twig) into the time and place of his choosing. It was all right, he thought, just before he got there. It’s just like a faculty party. I don’t have to stay here if I don’t like it.
He knocked on the ancient oak door and waited. Pieter’s voice called, “Come in.”
Pieter, sitting in front of a roaring log fire with a glass of sherry in his hand, was much younger, of course. You don’t notice so much how people age if you see them regularly; and then you happen to find an old photograph, and suddenly it’s painfully obvious. In Pieter’s case, the change wasn’t so much downhill as sideways; the straggly hair over his ears was a sort of smoker’s fingers tawny yellow. Also, the wrinkles he had yet to acquire had suited him, made him a bit more