The Jovian Legacy

by Lilla Nicholas-Holt

  Of course! How can I be here when it was way before I was even born! he comprehends.

  He wanders back down to the kitchen again, where everyone is hungrily cleaning up their bowls. The father heats up the water in the kettle again, no doubt in readiness for the washing up.

  The children have creamy milk in their white enamel mugs with a blue trim, the milk giving them white moustaches.

  After breakfast the boys dress themselves in woollen shirts and pants held up with braces. The older three boys and their father don thick oilskin coats, and go out into the cold and crisp morning air.

  Jack watches them go through the house-gate and into a paddock to catch their horses, and the mother and young girl are left to clean up. The younger boy is instructed to fetch firewood.

  Everybody seems to have a job to do.

  These kids don’t have much fun, Jack thinks.

  He looks at the baby again. Cute little boy. Looks a bit like me when I was little. The boy looks up and grins at Jack.

  “What the?” he says aloud, taking a step back. That kid can see me!

  The boy has one little tooth and still grins at Jack while smacking his hand on the tray of his highchair. He had poured some milk out of his baby cup onto the tray. Milk splashes in every direction. His mother sighs. She doesn’t look well. In fact, she looks aged, Jack considers, too old to have such a young family. It looks as though having six children has taken its toll on the older woman who is pasty-faced with dark rings around her eyes. The girl seems to be doing most of the work for her.

  Jack watches the girl as she starts making bread the manual way.

  No Breville breadmaker in this kitchen.

  The mother takes the baby out of his high chair and outside to play in the morning sun. She sits on the grass to watch him while the girl continues making bread. Jack steals back down the hallway to have a squiz around, going into the lounge where another fireplace takes precedence over the room. It smells musty in there too and doesn’t appear like it is used much. The deep red drapes with gold brocade are still drawn, the floor bare apart from a large gold rug that offers the room a more cosy look, though the floorboards feel cold underfoot. A mushroom-coloured Chesterfield lounge suite is strategically placed around the rug. Gold cushions are neatly placed about and small gold protective covers lie over its backs and arms.

  A black and white framed photo sits atop the mantelpiece. Jack picks it up and takes it over to the light. It is the parents’ wedding photo. The husband wears a World War II Air Force uniform and the bride a gown with a V-necked and gathered bodice. From there her silky white gown falls in gentle folds to the floor with one of her white shoes peeping out from beneath her gown. Jack stares at the picture for a long time. He is sure he has seen it somewhere before. At that moment he hears someone coming up the hallway and quickly places the photo back up on the mantelpiece. He turns and sees the baby, who has crawled up the hallway and now sits in the doorway, staring and showing his toothy grin. Jack crouches down in front of him.

  “Can you see me, little man?”

  The little boy chuckles and grins. A dribble slides down his chin and drops on the floor. Jack puts his hand out. The baby babbles baby language and raises his arms. Jack doesn’t know what to do. He wants to hold the little boy but doesn’t know if he should, or even can. He gingerly places his hands under the baby’s armpits and lifts him. The baby smells lovely and baby fresh, and reminds him of Megan’s clones as babies. Baby Benjamin chuckles and snuggles into Jack, grabbing hold of his shirt. At that moment the girl appears at the doorway and freezes, her eyes like saucers and her mouth agape.

  Of course! She can’t see me. The baby will look like he’s suspended in mid air!

  Jack quickly places the boy down on the floor, who doesn’t think much of that idea and starts to cry. The girl stands stockstill. Jack steps back from the baby but Benjamin crawls quickly towards him, wanting to be picked up again. The mother appears, looking like thunder. She brushes past the girl and whisks up the little boy.

  “Why didn’t you pick Benjamin up, Marjorie?” she demands to know. Marjorie has turned white.

  “Oh for Heaven’s sake, go and start making the lunch,” her mother barks at her. “You have to take it down to your father and the boys; they’re in the hay paddock.”

  As she carries Benjamin out of the lounge the little boy puts his arm out towards Jack, tears flowing down his chubby pink cheeks. Marjorie, still in shock, says nothing, turns and follows her mother back into the kitchen.

  What a mean mother, Jack considers.

  Feeling unnerved by it all, Jack decides to go outside for some fresh air and finds a door off the lounge leading to the verandah. Once outside he inhales deeply. The fresh air is invigorating, the morning sun generating more warmth outside than inside the house. The photo he’d seen on the mantelpiece is still nagging at him. He feels sure he has seen it somewhere before.

  The farmhouse overlooks a gentle sloping valley, Jack noticing an old shearing shed in the distance with a young oak tree alongside it.

  Wait a minute! That looks like the old shearing shed on the farm where I grew up, only the tree is a lot smaller, he regards.

  He turns around and stands back, gazing at the house. It looks similar to the one he’d grown up in, but it too is a lot smaller. Jack then gets the shock of his life when he realises, and needs to sit down on the grass.

  “This is my old house!” he says aloud, remembering that more rooms had been built onto it by the time he’d come along. “Man, that means I’m back in our old farmhouse in 1949!”

  He also realises that the wedding photo is of his grandparents. He remembers that his father used to keep it in his dresser drawer, and that he used to pull it out and stare at it for ages. Reality dawns on him once again when he thinks of the baby he’s been holding.

  “The baby! His name is Benjamin. Bloody hell!” he exclaims, emphasising the words. “I was holding my own father! Oh Man, this is very, very weird.”

  He needs to collect his thoughts. He remembers his father telling him that he is the youngest of six children and his five siblings are actually his half brothers and sister. The half siblings’ father had been killed in World War II and the father’s best friend (Ben’s father Arthur) returned from war and married his friend’s widow. From their marriage came the birth of Benjamin, Jack’s father. The mother was well into her forties by that time, and as a result grew sick. Marjorie, the eldest and the only girl, had to essentially do everything her mother would have done had she not been sick. Jack remembers his father telling him that he was only nine when his mother died.

  He decides to go back in the house to see Benjamin again, the only one that can see and hear him. His father. As soon as Benjamin spots Jack again he clambers off his mother’s lap and hurriedly crawls over to Jack. Not wanting the same thing to happen again Jack quickly strides back outside into the garden and sits down in the middle of the lawn. He doesn’t notice an old dog saunter out of a washhouse that is separated from the house. The dog stops in its tracks, and with its head bowed starts to growl and show its teeth.

  Oh Shit! The bloody dog can sense me!

  Marjorie dashes out with a worried expression, looking in the same direction as the dog, but can’t see a thing. Benjamin emerges from the house and heads straight over to Jack, crawling with his knees off the ground.

  Smart kid, Jack thinks, regarding the child’s way of getting around.

  Benjamin sits down in front of Jack and grins at him again, chortling away in baby language, still dribbling.

  The dog stops its growling and retreats back into the washhouse with its tail between its legs. Jack feels a wave of relief and smiles back at his ‘baby father’, studying him in awe. Benjamin tries to climb up onto Jack’s lap, but Jack quickly moves away. The baby thinks it is a game and chuckles. He tries again to sit on Jack’s lap but Jack moves away again. He catches sight of Benjamin’s mother at the kitchen window with a murdero
us look on her face. She says something to Marjorie who had been watching her baby brother flailing his arms about and crawling around madly on the lawn like he was chasing something. She was obviously told to go and fetch him, but there is no way Benjamin’s fun is going to be interrupted this time. He screams and arches his back as Marjorie tries to pick him up. His face reddens with rage and he wriggles away from his sister, crawling flat tack in the direction of Jack again. This time Jack gets up and makes his way out through the house-gate and into the front paddock. He observes the look on poor Marjorie’s face yet again when she witnesses the gate unlatching, opening and shutting all by itself. Now she screams. The mother struts out in her pale grey house frock with a dirty apron and demands to know what all the commotion is about.

  Man! thinks Jack, she’s gone to the dogs since her wedding day, even with five kids from her first marriage.

  Jack decides to take a walk down to the old shearing shed, a favourite haunt when he was a boy. He stands in front of the much smaller oak tree. As a youngster he used to climb and swing on its low sweeping branches. The tree would have been around forty years older at the time.

  He scales the fence of the sheep yards and enters the old shed. It smells of sheep, precisely the same smell. For a few moments his mind harks back to when he helped his dad sort the sheep out for shearing. His dog Bud helped too. The young dog used to run across the sheep’s backs that were jam-packed in the yards ready for shearing. Jack would jump in the fadge holders - huge sacks full of wool, and jump up and down to pack the wool down. He loved shearing time as it was a time when the whole family and some friends worked together as a team, his mother turning up with flasks of tea and freshly made scones for smoko that were still steaming from the oven, with lashings of butter dripping through them.

  I wonder if Dad did all that too when he was a young boy. Too small to ask him about it yet, though I can’t imagine that old trout bothering to make scones for smoko - probably got Marjorie to do it. Probably would’ve karked it by then anyway, Jack thinks hard-heartedly.

  From the top of the sheep run he surveys his old familiar surroundings, taking in a deep breath. It is an extraordinary feeling to be viewing his old farm in such an unreal phase of reality. He looks up at the house to see Marjorie pass through the house-gate, holding a leather satchel that she proceeds to strap to a saddle.

  Must be the boys’ lunch. He watches as she mounts the horse as if she has done it a hundred times, and canters off. Jack wants to follow her and goes hunting for something.

  “Won’t find a quad around here,” he snickers to himself. He spots a couple of pushbikes that are leaning up against the side of the shearing shed, so grabs the least rusty one and rides off, keenly trying to catch up.

  Thank goodness she hasn’t looked behind her or she’ll see a bike ripping down the hill after her by itself. She’ll definitely freak out, and probably the horse too, Jack thinks amusingly as he pedals even harder. The old-fashioned bicycle has a horribly hard seat with straight up and down handlebars.

  Not exactly the most aerodynamically designed bike, the bloody thing even has a bell, he laughs, hitting a lumpy track where the cattle have been through on a rainy day, then the sun turning the muddy clay hard as concrete. He rides up the track after Marjorie’s horse that is fast disappearing from view, and his backside starts to ache. He pedals with all his might to keep up, the bike jiggling along the track. He comes across a brow of lush green grass and sees the old orchard, except that all the trees are still young. He wants to go through the orchard, but doesn’t have time. At last he catches sight of the boys and their stepfather working in the hay paddock with their pitchforks, making a huge rounded haystack in the middle of it.

  I guess that’s how it was done in those days, Jack deduces as he rubs his aching bottom.

  When the boys become aware of their sister’s arrival they drop their forks and gather around, taking out their flat tin bottles from leather cases that are attached to the saddles. Guzzling from their water bottles it takes a mere five minutes to scoff down all of their sandwiches.

  Jack hears the man (his grandfather) saying, “Thanks kiddo,” to Marjorie, who in turn briefly smiles at her stepfather and starts back up the hill on her horse again, her job done.

  So that was it. The men did all the farm work while the women kept house. His mind cast back to Megan telling him about her upbringing, when she used to help muster the sheep. Actually, she also helped her mother keep the men fed too, so she really had both jobs.

  We men get off easy these days, he thinks pensively. They expect their wives to help out on the farm as well as keep house, and have children, and stay looking good for their husbands. Whew, I’m glad I’m not a woman!

  He is shaken out of his daydreaming when he notices that Marjorie has disappeared, and the boys have also packed up and are riding up the track towards him. They see the pushbike laying on the track and wonder how it got there. One of them is told by Arthur to ride it back as he’d ridden with his brother on his brother’s horse when they first rode down to the paddock that morning.

  Jack is relieved as it is easy going downhill on a bike but hard yakka riding it back up again. He keeps his distance and follows them back on foot. He spots the orchard again and this time he ducks in. It is fenced off from the animals so Jack climbs between the number eight wire. The orchard is so different. It is, after all, 1949, and all the trees are still young, with only a few bearing fruit. His favourite, the Golden Queen peach tree, bears two good-sized ripe peaches, the limb nearly touching the ground under their weight. Jack picks one of them and sinks his teeth into it, finding it sweet and juicy.

  He wipes his chin. Delicious.

  In fact, it is similar to the peaches he’d eaten on Jovian. He realises then that the taste of everything has been perfected so Jovian people can enjoy fruit as he had done in the ‘good old days’, recalling that his father had once told him that fruit bought from supermarkets nowadays tasted like water.

  Nobody knows what they’re missing out on now, he considers.

  It takes Jack a while to walk back up the hill to the farmhouse gate. As he opens it something else dawns on him. His six hours must be up by now. He goes quickly into the kitchen to look at the clock. A quarter to three. He had arrived around six a.m. so it is without a doubt past his six hours.

  “Oh Shit!” Jack curses out loud.

  “Shit!” he repeats, fearing the worst. He recalls the time (when he initiated his birth into a black family) that he’d been warned he could alter the course of history if he messed around with the dates.

  “Bloody hell!” Jack exclaims, feeling a cold chill run up his spine, “I’m stuck! I’m bloody stuck! That’ll teach me.”

  He doesn’t know what to do, knowing that everyone must be getting anxious by now because he hasn’t come home from work. He feels the blood drain from his face.

  Megan stirred when she felt the sun on her face. She edged out of bed, took a shower and went downstairs to join Jack for breakfast. It seemed to be the only time of the day they had to themselves.

  She found the kitchen empty so decided to check his room. His bed was neatly made.

  Most likely from the house staff as Jack never made his bed, she thought wryly.

  Megan checked the kitchen again. Nothing. That’s strange. His keys weren’t on the hook so his AV wasn’t there either.

  Oh help, he’s had an accident! Megan immediately presumed, but then told herself it would be highly unlikely as Jovian vehicles had a magnetic field around them which prevented them from coming into contact with other vehicles. They would literally bounce off each other if they came too close for comfort. Megan knew her thinking was instinctive of being that of an ‘earthling’.

  Next thing she did was pick up the link phone and utter Jack’s name into it. It redirected to the Thebes Federation of Science network service.

  “Good morning Miss McGlew,” came a cheery voice in a sophisticated Egyptian
accent very similar to Sobek’s.

  “Good morning, Aya. Is Jack there?”

  “I am aware that he was in the research area yesterday afternoon as he had activated the redirection of his calls to me because he didn’t want to be disturbed. This was in effect last night, however, so I am wondering why they’re still being redirected.”

  “You think he’s still in the research room?” Megan anxiously asked her.

  “Yes, I believe so,” Aya answered. Her tone showed concern.

  “Thanks, Aya.” Megan replied, cutting her short. She hung up and went back to her room to get dressed.

  Maybe he fell asleep at work and is still sleeping, she thought optimistically.

  After breakfast she told Sobek she was going over to Jack’s work. Sobek had turned out to be worth her weight in gold, and Megan felt blessed to have her as her clones’ nanny (‘Metapelet’ the girls sometimes called her) although she regarded Sobek more as a sister.

  When she arrived at the Thebes Federation of Science she acknowledged Aya and quickened her step to the restricted area, where, it seemed, Jack had spent the entire night. She nimbly keyed in the code to enter the research laboratory and saw Jack at his desk, with a device still at the base of his neck. She knew exactly what it was. She gently placed her hand on his back to announce her presence. He didn’t flinch. In fact, his body temperature felt a little too cool. Megan felt his pulse. There was a pulse but it had slowed right down, as if he’d gone into hibernation. This scared her. She knew she couldn’t remove the device - that could prove disastrous. She told herself that he will be back soon and that she simply had to be patient. She searched for a blanket to wrap around him in an endeavour to bring his body temperature back up. She was given a blanket by the emergency treatment room and hurried back to Jack, wrapping the blanket around him, hugging him.

  She gazed deeply into his eyes. “Please come back soon Jackyboy, I miss you,” she softly said to him, wondering all the while where he must have gone to.