The Dark Arrow of Time

by Massimo Villata

  Time passed, and Kathia still hadn’t come back. It was taking her longer than he had expected. Helias left the room to look for her. He passed a door that had been left ajar and heard her voice. She was talking on the cell, in an undertone. He couldn’t make out what she was saying. Helias knocked.

  “Come in…. I’ll be right there.” she said to Helias. Then she said something in another language, incomprehensible, but which probably meant “Wait a second.” addressing whoever she was talking to on the cell, but still looking at Helias.

  “Here’s the key. If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll come with you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just give me a call. Is your code still the same?”

  “Yes. Here, catch.”

  “Talk to you in a bit. In the meantime, check the hiding place….”

  “Helias…. Where is the hiding place?”

  “What? You don’t know?…”

  “Well, no. I know about it, but not where it is, exactly.”

  “Sure…. I’ll explain later. Call me when you’ve finished.”

  “Okay. Go to the left. At the end of the hall, turn right. You’ll end up in the inner courtyard. After that you know the way.”

  “Okay. Talk to you later.”

  Helias went out, again leaving the door slightly ajar, and headed off to the left. Then he turned on his heel and went in the opposite direction, making no noise. He passed a corridor branching off, and then another. He took a left and was about to go out into the courtyard. But stopped in his tracks.

  He had recognized an unmistakable figure in the half-light of a nearby foyer. It was Geremy Stuerz. Who was talking on his cell.

  Helias went back the way he had come and followed Kathia’s instructions. Passing the unclosed door, he heard her voice again.

  Back in his room, he turned out the contents of a drawer and found the ‘bandaid’ cell.

  “Saileh…. Professor, can you hear me?”

  No answer. And the other cell rang.

  “Here I am. Sorry about the delay.”

  “Shall I give you directions to the hiding place?”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to go together? Or for you to go yourself?”

  “Together we’d attract too much notice. Don’t forget that they might be staking us out. In fact, I’d say it would be better if this conversation lasted as little as possible. So I’ll tell you only what’s strictly necessary. At intervals. It’s better for me not to go. You’re more likely to notice if somebody’s watching you or following you.”

  “Okay. Tell me.”

  Helias fell silent for a few moments.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, I’m here. This is the starting point, then I’ll give you further directions. ‘Where what sees is transformed you will find it.’”

  Silence. For a few seconds.

  “Right…. But a lot of time has gone by, for me. I don’t remember too well. Be more specific, please.”

  “Leave the building, toward the lake. Go right and follow the shore as far as the bridge. Then call me again.”

  “Right. Over and out.”

  She hadn’t objected!… Nor, over the cell, could she realize that Helias was deceiving her. That’s exactly why he had chosen to communicate that way.

  Helias watched from the window. He still couldn’t believe it…. Kathia really was walking along the lakeshore toward the bridge, in the direction opposite to ‘their’ rock. Unhesitatingly.

  “Saileh…. Professor, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, I hear you. Welcome back, young man! The ‘bandaid’ automatically sent a message to my cell, and here I am. How are you doing? I heard you had a pretty close call and were injured.”

  “Nothing serious. I need to talk to you urgently.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “What do you think about Kathia? I mean, doesn’t she seem strange to you, changed?”

  “Yes. She’s changed a lot since leaving prison. Which can be fairly normal. The strange thing is that she changed suddenly. When she got out, not while she was a prisoner, when I went to visit her occasionally.”

  “Could they have brainwashed her, or something of the sort?”

  “Honestly, I wouldn’t know. Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing I can pinpoint. But everything in general. She’s like someone trying very hard to be herself, or rather, to interpret an image of herself. But without really being able to.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time that that girl has surprised us….”

  “Now it’s different. She’s missing something. She also seems to have lapses of memory, pretty big ones.”

  “Perhaps we’d better talk about this in person.”

  “Yes. And I also have to ask you about Mattheus.”

  “Is he ‘strange’ too?”

  “Maybe worse.”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t seen him yet.”

  “Neither have I, but there are….”

  Helias’s cell had rung.

  “I’ve got to answer the cell now. It must be Kathia. We should call or meet later.”

  “Fine. I’m back in my office. I’m here. Over and out.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  It was Kathia, but her voice was strange.

  “Helias…. You lied to me. You owe me an explanation….”

  “I’d say I do.”

  Helias was pleased. Kathia appeared to have recovered, at least partially, her memory of those days. Maybe he had been too suspicious. And it wouldn’t have been the first time he had suspected her wrongly. They just had to talk about why she had been acting so strangely. Maybe there was a simple explanation….

  “Right. Let’s talk about it now.”

  “Yes. I’ll come to your room in a minute.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you. Over and out.”

  Minutes ticked by. More than enough time to return from the bridge. Helias went back to the window. No sign of Kathia on the lakeshore. Perhaps she was arriving. He went to the door. There was no one in the hall.

  Other, endless, minutes passed. Then someone knocked. He looked through the peephole. It was Kathia. He opened the door.

  “Hello, Helias.”

  Kathia had a strange look on her face. And there was someone at her left. Mattheus. Then his sight fogged over.

  And the last thing he saw, a hand’s breadth from his nose, was Geremy Stuerz’s idiotic grin.

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Massimo VillataThe Dark Arrow of TimeScience and Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67486-5_12

  12. Helias Was Stretched Out on the Floor of His Room

  Massimo Villata1

  (1)Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, INAF, Pino Torinese (TO), Italy

  Massimo Villata

  Email: villata@oato.inaf.it

  Helias was stretched out on the floor of his room. Half conscious. As if he were sleeping, but he could hear the voices and the questions. And his mind answered automatically, he couldn’t help it.

  “He really doesn’t know anything about the other two diskettes.” said Kathia. “But we have to get them back too. Those are our orders.”

  “Why isn’t the other one enough?” asked Mattheus.

  “Because the idea is to keep anyone else from using them.”

  “But this fellow doesn’t know anything….”

  “So we have to look elsewhere, and….”

  A thundering at the door, and a voice resounded from the corridor.

  “Open immediately, or we’ll break the door down!”

  “How many are there, do you think?” asked Geremy Stuerz.

  “I feel four, I believe.” answered Kathia.

  “Maybe five.” said Mattheus.

  “What are their intentions?”

  “Bellicose.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Answer them.” said Kathia. “What do you want?”

  “We’re the ones who a
re asking the questions here. Open immediately.”

  “Easy, easy. We’re coming.”

  Kathia opened the door, which burst open.

  “Freeze, all of you! Or you’ll regret it.”

  Four armed men strode in, followed by the professor.

  “That’s enough now. Wake the boy.” ordered the latter.

  Kathia motioned to Mattheus, who sprayed something under Helias’s nose. Which woke him almost instantly.

  “What’s going on? Kathia! Mattheus! Why?… What are you doing with this guy?”

  “Arrest them.” said the professor. “We’ll interrogate them later.”

  And he bent over Helias.

  “Everything all right, young man?”

  “Y…yes, I’m fine. More or less. But what’s going on?…” stammered Helias bewilderedly, eyes darting between the three figures standing around him and peering searchingly at Kathia, who shied from his gaze.

  “I’ll explain. Come with me.” And, to the guards, “Take them away. Without attracting attention. Go through the cellars.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing all this time, these three years, young man?” asked the professor from the comfort of his office armchair.

  “I’ve looked into things, studied the situation. I had three years to the good, before taking up from where I left off. Might as well use them to try to understand what was going on, I thought.”

  “Fine. But first explain Kathia’s and Mattheus’s behavior to me, please.”

  “Don’t rush ahead. We’re getting there. But you’ll understand better if we start from the beginning….”

  Helias shook his head.

  “You can’t wait, can you? You’re in a hurry to know? Well, I see your point.”

  The professor remained in silence for a while, stroking his wattles.

  “In a certain sense, I’m about to give you good news. But only to some extent. I’m not sure they’d approve. Are you certain you want to know?”

  “Absolutely. Whatever it is.”

  “Right. The ones you saw before, and since you got back here, are not….”

  “They’re not the same! Of course they’re not themselves! What an idiot!… But then….”

  “Yes, my boy. They’re clones.”

  “Clones of who? They’re practically the same age….”

  “Clones of themselves….” murmured the professor, studying Helias from behind his lashes.

  “They’re copies…. Cookie-cutter twins…. They’re experiments…. That’s putting it brutally, but that’s the way it is….”

  “Even the ones I knew myself? Kathia and Mattheus too?”

  “Yes.”

  “But who allowed a thing like that?”

  “Thaýma. Many years ago.”

  “Okay. Tell me from the beginning now, please.”

  “A sensational discovery was announced. An individual, who wished to remain anonymous, carried a genetic mutation that enabled him, sporadically and under certain conditions, to ‘guess’ what other people were thinking. The scientist to whom the individual had voluntarily submitted his case immediately asked to be able to conduct studies in order to isolate and reproduce this genetic mutation. The request was highly controversial, and nothing more was heard about it for some time, at least publicly. It was thought that it had come to nothing, as indeed was to be expected. A few years later, however, it was back in the spotlight, but as a done deed, essentially, a study at the advanced stage that was already giving its first fruits. But I’ve not been able to find out anything about the developments that led up to this stage.”

  “You mean to say that it’s not known how or when the project came to be authorized and funded?”

  “Exactly. It’s strange, but there’s a yawning gap in the paper trail. Anyway, to make a long story short, thus were born the first ‘Mattheuses’ and the first ‘Kathias’, born from who knows what kind of experiments in genetic engineering, that went well beyond the simple reproduction of certain gene sequences.”

  “How long did these experiments last?”

  “Don’t be fooled by the apparent difference in age between Kathia and Mattheus. In reality, they were ‘born’ only a few years apart. It’s just that the Mattheuses were affected by a slight form of premature aging. So the Kathias were ‘produced’, correcting the earlier error and resulting in exceptionally slow aging….”

  “In other words?! How old is Kathia, then?”

  “Almost forty, I believe, or slightly less.”

  Helias gaped at him in surprise.

  “Amazing, isn’t it? In fact, the one you met would be three years older by now. We’re talking about Thaymite years, but the difference with either the Earth or Alkenia is minimal….”

  “Would be? Why did you say ‘would’? What’s happened to Kathia?”

  “If I knew I would have told you right away. As I said earlier, I’d also noticed the ‘change’ in her, though it was only a vague suspicion that was only confirmed today, by you and by what’s happened. But I had already tried to investigate whether she might have disappeared and been replaced. I haven’t found out anything yet, but others are working on it, with redoubled diligence, given our recent discovery.”

  “Be honest with me, could she…? Could they have…, have harmed her?”

  Helias was feeling terrible, visibly so. He felt as if he had had to swallow, in one horrible gulp, all of the awful surprises, sorrows and griefs of an entire lifetime.

  “Can I get you something? Shall we continue later?”

  “I’d just like to disappear, for an instant. Or sleep and not have to think of anything for a year on end. But I’ll settle for a visit to the lavatory. And a glass of water, if you don’t mind.”

  The professor poured the water and waited for a few minutes, doodling on a sheet of paper.

  “When are you going to interrogate the impostors?”

  “Shortly. Do you want to be present?”

  “Yes. What’s become of Mattheus?”

  “We’ll have them tell us that too.”

  “In the meantime, shall we continue?”

  “Yes. Where were we? Ah, yes. Kathia’s age. Don’t be too upset by that. In fact, biologically she’s actually twenty-five or thereabouts. Just that she has more experience of life, greater maturity. Not bad, no? Both for her, and for, uhm… you…. Because you’ll see her again, I can feel it. She’s got nine lives, that girl. And nobody can gain from doing her any real harm.”

  “Are there other ‘cases’, apart from the Kathias and the Mattheuses?”

  “Yes, so it appears. But personally I don’t know much about it. For example, that Stuerz, you knew him already?”

  “Yes. From college, on Earth. A slimy sort…. And incredibly obnoxious….”

  “Who knows, maybe they had already put him on your tail back then. Like Kathia, I mean. But by the ‘others’.”

  “But who are these ‘others’?”

  “No idea, still completely in the dark there. In that respect, my three years haven’t gotten me much of anywhere.”

  “How did you deal with finding yourself in a past, part of whose future you already knew?”

  “As best I could…. It’s not a trivial problem…. Knowing, for example, that an hour and a half down the road there’s another me, living in blissful ignorance of all this. You get these urges to go shake things up for him a bit. But you already know that you didn’t do it. And you certainly don’t want to discover that you didn’t do it because you had an accident along the road. So you cut yourself off. A sort of voluntary house arrest. Far from anybody who might recognize you and ask you embarrassing questions. Just think that before coming to Alkenia, the first time, I mean, or in other words before our time trip, a student of mine told me that he had seen me in a place where I had never in fact been. At the time, I thought it must have been someone who resembled me. Later I understood.”

  “So, going back to our bioengineer and his team, they….”r />
  “No, wait. I said nothing about a team. Because there was no team, as far as I know. He, a certain Professor Winkler, appears to have worked alone. Which, at the very least, is odd….”

  “Without assistants?… And so without any direct control? And no one gaining the experience to be able to continue with the experiments later?”

  “So it would seem. Nobody except for a very few non-scientific auxiliaries. Strange, to say the least, isn’t it?”

  “Where is this fellow now?”

  “Dead and buried. For more than fifteen years.”

  “And the research?”

  “Finished along with him. Or rather, even before his death. There was a crackdown and the experiments were no longer authorized, for obvious ethical reasons.”

  “But in the meantime, a certain number of individuals, children of that lab and all to some extent strange, strolled the streets of Thaýma as free citizens. Is that right?”

  “More or less. Free, yes, but treated with wariness. Even if they are quite useful for certain kinds of work, as you can imagine.”

  “How many of them do you suppose there are?”

  “I don’t know. A few dozen, maybe a hundred or so. The documentation about it isn’t accessible, as far as I know. Not accessible to me, anyway. But I’ve already briefed the counselor, who’ll find out. I’ve already told him everything yesterday evening. And a short time ago I filled him in on the latest developments. He’s doing what he can for Kathia too. Meanwhile, since yesterday evening we’ve been organizing a group of people who will enable us to defend ourselves from these offensives, which are something new, starting with the pilot and Spitzer, down to the false Mattheus and Kathia, with that other one, who were arrested thanks to the guards in this group.”

  The professor looked at the time.

  “It’s nearly time for the questioning. Shall we go?”

  “One last question. So, contrary to what I thought at the beginning, the ‘normal’ Thaymite population is just like Earth’s, with no strange powers. Only a tiny percentage, lab children, have the strange things like Kathia’s eyes and all the rest….”

  “No, the eyes are another story. They’re the common heritage of all Thaymites. Though Kathia’s, and those of her ‘brethren’, have a further peculiarity….”