by Anthology
Bridgemaker waved his arm in an angry gesture that included the whole room, “But you’ve already brought me hundreds of its products!” he shouted. “What I want is the machine itself so I can make my own products!”
“I’m afraid, Honorable Bridgemaker, that the machine never existed. Our field men have explored the Pre-Technological Age, the First Technological Age, and the early years of our own age; but even though they witnessed some of the ancient technicians at work, they never caught a glimpse of the machine.”
‘But if the ancient technicians could create something without a machine, I could too,” Bridgemaker said. “And since I can’t, the machine had to exist. Go back at once!”
“Yes, Honorable Bridgemaker,” The man bowed and withdrew.
Bridgemaker tore open the package. He glanced at the product, then set the controls on his Language Adjustor, Duplicator and Alterator machine.
While he waited, he brooded on the irony of his life. Ever since he was a small boy he had hungered hopelessly for one vocation. Now that success in a totally different vocation had made him financially independent, he had focused all his energies into the attainment of his first love. But all he’d got for his trouble was a roomful of ancient products, and even though he’d increased his financial independence by duplicating and distributing those products, the basic frustration still remained: he was a secondhand artist and he wanted desperately to be a firsthand artist.
He went over to one of the shelves that wainscoted the room and glanced at some of his vicarious creations: A Farewell to Arms, by Chamfer Bridgemaker . . . Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, by Chamfer Bridgemaker . . . The Odyssey, by Chamfer Bridgemaker . . . Ivanhoe, by Chamfer Bridgemaker—
There was a loud plop! as the first copy Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone came out of the Language Adjustor, Duplicator and Alterator machine.
Bridgemaker sat down to read his latest masterpiece.
PROFESSOR FIGWORT COMES TO AN UNDERSTANDING
Jacob Edwards
Professor Figwort made the last of his great discoveries at gunpoint.
By life’s clock he was now a reclusive but sprightly octogenarian. Fort Figwort echoed with the sounds of grey matter as he hopped from peak to peak. Leaps of genius, made with abandon. Nothing could disturb the good Professor here atop his mountain retreat.
Or so he thought.
Then one night, during a temporal thunderstorm that would have had even Doctor Frankenstein raising an eyebrow or two, the air around him warbled and a shadowy figure appeared. Figwort regarded it with myopic interest.
“Figwort,” a voice whispered, its timbre as of a fluttering kite. “Professor Phileas Figwort. I come to you on your night of triumph. I come from the stagnant waters of the future. Everything changes after tonight. Here, now, the hour of deliverance. So understand this, Professor: I cannot let you live.”
Figwort pulled in his chin and blinked several times, slowly. Wild tufts of hair poked out through the holes in his skullcap, lit green by the phosphorescent discharges outside. He looked like a tortoise.
“I recognise your intellect,” the shadowy figure continued. “I acknowledge your good intentions. But you walk the road to ruin.” The voice flapped and swooped. Figwort ducked. “In the future there will be no more food for thought. The brains of humanity will feed off each other like piranha fish in an ever-shrinking ecosystem. So understand this, Professor Figwort: your great work must be undone.”
Phileas Figwort cocked his head to one side, carapace gleaming, his brain on a wispy hair-trigger. Outside, the storm raged with thumping vehemence. A bolt struck down from on high.
“Here, now.” the voice sparked. “Understand this.”
Life flashed.
In the course of a career that planted him firmly amongst the Giant Sequoias of science, Phileas Figwort made three great discoveries, all of which went unrecorded.
Bearing in mind its ending, Figwort’s is thus a cautionary tale. Hope need not beget the child of expectation. Time contraceives and, in this case, the good Professor performed his magnum opus as a soliloquised swan song—three fading notes in the unwritten annals of history.
It all began at university when a titivated young Figwort inferred the existence of molecular sexuality. His inspiration at the time was Miss Prunella Bonsoir, a human movements student with whom he was enamoured. He wrote a rather soppy paper on the subject and slipped it under her door.
Not being of mind to tiptoe through the black tulips of scientific speculation, Miss Prunella perhaps did not appreciate the finer points of Figwort’s treatise. She leafed through it with brow daintily furrowed, her wide, discerning eyes picking out only two words. “Phileas Figwort?” she murmured, passing the foolscap to her best friend. “Does that have something to do with athlete’s foot?”
“It’s a love letter!” her friend shrieked. (She must have noticed that the flow of the handwriting perfectly mirrored the EKG of a pounding heart.) “To you, from Figgy Figwort!”
Mirth spread through the dormitory as if on the back of a collapsing domino chain. The letter was passed around and was even published in the student newspaper. Everyone who read it fell over laughing, except for Prunella Bonsoir and, of course, a mortified young Figwort, who vowed his revenge.
The resulting demonstration of molecular sexuality kept the newsmen titillated for several days.
UNDERGRADUATE MOLECULES AGITATED
IN DORMITORY DELIGHT!
“BONSOIR, MISS BONSOIR!” COLLEGE QUEEN REVEALS ALL!
Amidst the scandal and the official investigations, people largely overlooked the genius that underlay Figwort’s discovery. In fact, young Figgy was driven so far as to point the cold metal finger at himself; but, having inexplicably misplaced his gun, found no outlet for this resolve and so turned pell-mell to a hot and hastily infused cup of something not entirely unlike tea.
It was then that he divined a solution to his new-found problems: he would travel back in time and stop himself from disturbing Miss Bonsoir in the first place—on any level, molecular or otherwise. Yes, that ought to do it. While he was there, he might even return those now-overdue library books.
Time travel itself posed no difficulties for a brain lashed by tannins. Figwort sat back, lips puckering. The idea popped out in a styrofoam cup. “All I have to do is break my temporal anchor,” he murmured. “Yes, and link my physical body to the intangible essence of memory.” He ruminated for a moment. “Of course. The limits are conceptual, not physical; and as the fourth dimension runs wild within the confines of my three, the whole process should be self-powered. Yes, just flip the switch.”
So saying, he made a face like a constipated owl and hopped back in time. “Oh, Prunella,” he exclaimed, ambushing his earlier self outside Miss Bonsoir’s dormitory and landing a featherweight punch on his own nose. “It was for thee.” He then grabbed the billet doux on molecular sexuality and made a run for it, grimacing as a new memory brought his former self’s pain flooding back.
With a reproving glare at his own retreating shoulder blades, pre-Prunella Figwort dabbed a handkerchief at his bloodied nose and muttered something uncomplimentary.
Suddenly remembering precisely what that something was, post-Prunella Figwort turned his head to make a riposte, but tripped, flapped his scrawny arms and with a startled hoot vanished back into the future.
Where and when he found that Phileas Figwort remained an anathema and molecular sexuality was still very much in the public domain.
Nothing had changed.
So what had become of his attempted hack job on history? Why had his life, having turned turtle, somehow managed not to right itself again? Figwort puzzled over this for a few seconds and then, like a burst of water from a re-pressurised tap, his brain was doused with newly created memories that had been carried forward in time from pre-Prunella Figwort. Suddenly, he recalled seeing his latter self trip and disappear; watching the now unattached sheaves of paper f
lutter poetically to the ground; reclaiming them and hotfooting it back to Prunella’s dormitory, thence nervously to flatten out his beating heart and disclose his feelings for the lovely Miss Bonsoir.
From his newfound vantage point in the present, Figwort massaged a bruise on his head and gnashed his teeth around a handful of aspirin. Unbelievable. Causality had humbugged him.
And this turned out to be a recurring sore point, for—try as he might—Figwort just could not deter his pre-Prunella self or change the disastrous outcome of his unrequited love for Miss Bonsoir. (Who, incidentally, remained bat-eyed oblivious to the temporal battle being waged for her by Figworts past, present and future.) Something always went wrong and, despite many valiant attempts, Figwort never managed to triumph in his tussle with history. He could save neither himself from Miss Prunella nor Miss Prunella from himself. Bonsoir sera sera, he eventually concluded. He couldn’t even take his library books back.
But in the end that didn’t matter. Time travel was quite notable in its own right, and as the world turned one way, opinions turned the other. Soon, most people were willing to gloss over young Figgy’s undergraduate faux pas. All that was necessary, in fact, was for Phileas to overcome that first great obsession—which he did, thanks to an accidental encounter between him, his earlier self and a discerning if slightly tipsy fellow from the history department. “One of you is from the future,” the man observed after watching the bickering Figworts for a few minutes. “Do come and see me later on.”
In terms of linear time, the lure of Prunella Bonsoir at first distracted Figwort and delayed his acceptance of this invitation; but the post-Prunella Figwort showed no such hesitation. He slipped back to the future and immediately knocked on the man’s door.
“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 misconception. 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’.