“No, Sue. I don’t seem to have time anymore.”
Now, what made me say that? I must get hold of myself. I must. There is so much to do... And again, he wondered: do what precisely?
“Time for what...?” she asked.
“After all the soul searching, the repeated attempts to dismiss the evidence before me as imaginary or superstitious, or whatever... Once again, I must follow Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s admonition: If all probable explanations fail, then we must accept that which seems impossible. Or something like that.” He reached out for Suzy’s hand. “The game’s afoot, Mrs. Holmes. The game’s afoot.” And with that he drew her onto his insensate lap and kissed her long and passionately.
“Why, Mr. Holmes, I never...”
“Oh, yes, you did. And you did very well, I might add.”
And before they ventured into truly dangerous territory, she pushed his wheelchair back to rejoin the rest of Desmond’s guests. The Normans and Alicia were still gathered around the TV set, where the newscaster was busy telling everyone whose fault it was that the riots had occurred. The Professor was missing.
“Earlier this year, in my broadcast on March the 23rd...”
Much earlier, Alec thought. What had I been doing on March 23rd? Probably getting more and more nervous about becoming a father. It’s a wonder that people have children. They are nothing but worry, they scream and demand as though only their needs and desires were of paramount consequence. They are tiny worlds of absolute egocentricity. And, to top it all, the world is vastly overpopulated. And yet...
And yet he wouldn’t give up Sacha for all the tea in China...
“...and whatever else you do, do not leave the security of your home. Bar the windows, if you have bars, close the shutters. I’ll keep you informed. Trust me.”
The undying trust was interrupted by a cacophony of a dozen police cars racing from three different directions towards a single car stalled on some undefined ramp, leading to or from an expressway. The sirens were wailing, the tires emitting bluish smoke. On the nondescript ramp, a man was standing in front of his stalled car, his hands high above his head. The police cruisers came to a screeching halt some twenty yards from the unarmed man. The fugitive was black, of course. Assuming he was a fugitive. At least twenty officers of the LAPD, guns drawn, approached the man in semi-crouched positions. Had the man been white, probably only ten of the LAPD finest would have drawn their firearms. The whole picture made Alec vaguely sick. He shrugged and wheeled himself back to the terrace.
Sitting at the other end, lost in something he was reading, was Desmond. Alec approached him slowly, as not to disturb his old friend. Strange that, he’d known this Professor for such a short time, yet besides his immediate family, no man was closer to him than the ‘r’ rolling, Scot expatriate.
“Ahh, therre y’arre.” Without looking up, the Professor waved Alec to wheel himself closer. “I’ve been reading your latest open dissertation.”
An open dissertation was a lecture open to the general public. In such speeches, or lectures, Alec tried to avoid specialized scientific terms, equations, or other references, which only made sense to physicists deeply involved in that specialized field. The Professor was almost through. Alec peeked over his shoulder.
“...while photons can be regarded as either waves or quanta, in general the electromagnetic, gravitational, and now the information-field are not quantifiable in the same manner as matter is. Nevertheless, while the quanta of energy consist of particles of essentially identical characteristics, the underlying constituents of the Information Theory do not conform to this pattern. Although the wave characteristic remains, its components do not appear quantifiable.”
“You sure about that?” The Professor ran his finger along the last sentence. Alec smiled and said nothing. He wasn’t sure. He just found that the equation only worked when he made this assumption.
“...of matter which is subject to quantum theory. The Information Field is a field where all knowledge appears suspended, available to be drawn upon, explored, used, applied and when no longer required, ignored. When no longer required, it reverts to its original form, or lack of it, even as the gravitational field in essence does not exhibit any form though it does follow certain patterns. But there is no essential difference between the heretofore known fields and the field that I am proposing. The known fields are generated and/or are interchangeable with matter. Hence, E=MC2. The same is true of the Information Field. The only difference is that it precedes both matter and energy. You might think of it as a matrix, which defines what characteristics matter and energy will assume, if and when it becomes manifest, or emerges, from the virtual reality. The Information flow seems to supply the impetus to organize matter from the available quanta.
And thus, to repeat, while other fields vary in intensity in relation to matter, the Information Field appears to be uniformly distributed throughout spacetime, as though a part of a virtual universe from which physical universes are born. It also appears, that the efficacy of the IF is somehow related to the recipient or the object drawing on the field, almost, as our covert organizations would say, on a need-to-know basis.”
“Pretty good stuff that, lad. But what really got me, was what you wrote before about the Information Field preexisting the big bang. That should upset a goodly bunch of the old fusspots who think that their theories are the only theories.”
Desmond had forgotten to roll his rr’s. Alec was too old to blush, but the Professor’s approval gave him a pleasant glow.
“But, after you get through all this theorizing, don’t forget to get back to basics, lad. Don’t ever forget that.”
“Which are?” Alec asked. The old man was always full of surprises.
“Don’t ever forget, lad, that the individual is the only reality.”
Had Alec been standing, he would have needed to sit down. All things were coming to some kind of a climax. He was under assault by his Suzy, possibly Sandra, his son and now apparently the Professor. A little too much of a coincidence, he thought.
“Yes, Sir. I won’t forget,” was all he could utter.
Maria laid out the goodies for lunch. Out here, by the ocean, Desmond referred to many things as goodies. Including food. John Norman switched off the offending TV to get further away from the LA upheavals. The newscaster was right, at least to a point, that the riots had been predictable for some time.
“When the disparity between the rich and the poor becomes too great, you cannot continue forever as a two-class society. In LA, the balancing factor, the middle class, has all but disappeared.”
The newscaster was uncharacteristically fuming, waving his arms. He might have been thinking of his own multi-million-dollar ‘class’.
The middle class used to be made up of professionals, the group performing the necessary services for which they have been inadequately rewarded. Now, this group could no longer be defined as the middle class. They remained in the lower fifth of the income brackets.
These days, the truly offending members of society were the CEOs, presidents, chairmen and other VPs of multinational companies; the upper echelons of Banks and Investment Houses, who not only drew exorbitant salaries, but influenced boards of directors to award them multi-million dollar bonuses, even in fiscal years during which their companies sustained financial losses. In the past, such excesses remained in camera, hidden within the corridors of power, sequestered by their grossly overpaid lawyers and accountants. Now, their disgusting abuse of public funds, not public in terms of tax money—some loot they’d left to the politicians—but still public, because the companies they exploited were publicly owned.
And then there was that ever-growing class of professional ‘sportsmen’. True, some of them did work hard to make their countless millions, but so does a neurosurgeon. Yet the salaries of professional baseballers, brawling hockey players, brutal football gladiators, golfers whose intelligence appeared sated by spending their whole lives, their total ene
rgies, in absolute commitment to rolling a little ball into a little hole, with a stick. Their get incomes, or even appearance fees, vastly exceeded those of cardiologists, oncologists, or even teachers responsible for the intellectual development of our children. Perhaps morons should get a greater share of the liquid wealth we call money. But during the last few decades the ratio has become vastly exaggerated.
Finally, one of the most offending groups were the seemingly innocuous youngsters, often no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, who were paid millions of dollars for a half-hour segment of third rate TV farce. They could neither act nor even enunciate their lines. Many never went to school to learn the rudiments of acting, not to mention basics of elocution. Like their equally retarded confreres, the rock ‘musicians’, they screamed and shouted or mumbled their lines without any regard for the wonderful heritage that the classical theatre offered. Most probably they’d never heard of Shakespeare or Mollière or even the modern playwrights of quality. The new scriptwriters of TV fares disqualified themselves by the mere fact that they passed the age of sixteen. Perhaps at that age they were in danger of thinking, and this fact alone, in the entertainment industry, was deemed a profound no-no. Nevertheless, those artless actors, once established, continued to gather millions, then buy themselves toy husbands, or toy wives, by the dozen, amass diamonds to flaunt them on Oscar nights, which had became no more than a vulgar display of a society of mutual adoration.
Hence, the riots.
“Can we go swimming after lunch?” Suzy asked, if for no other reason than to change the subject. She found discussing riots acutely depressing.
No one moved. “Why don’t you all go for a walk? I’ll look after Sacha,” Alicia offered.
Joan, John and Desmond opted for a quiet nap, instead. This left Suzy and Alec to accept Alicia’s offer. They did. After coffee, Suzy changed into shorts, while Matt took Alec outside, and led him to the footpath, winding its way along the shoreline. Then, as Suzy joined them, he withdrew. The sand at the side of the footpath was inviting. In segments, Suzy walked barefoot alongside Alec’s wheelchair. It felt good to be walking barefoot again. It’s been a while. You had to be a Canadian to really appreciate it. For his part, Alec enjoyed the exercise his arms got trying to keep up with her.
After a while, they stopped for a few minutes’ rest. Suzy sat down, smiling at the waves below. Alec parked his wheelchair next to her, at the very edge of the sand. As he leaned back, his eyes followed a lone airplane, which, at great altitude, appeared to be moving incredibly slowly. The silver fuselage, picking up the shimmering rays of the sun, seemed to crawl across the cloudless sky like a far-distant comet. In a way, it seemed outside the confines of time.
What if it weren’t there, Alec thought.
The silver dot lost its luster and melted into the blue background. “Like the Bermuda triangle,” thought Alec. “Only it will reappear in a minute.” But it didn’t. “Probably just a refraction of light,” Alec smiled, as he looked down at the water.
For him, the ocean possessed a magnetic property that had nothing to do with magnetism. It had the same hypnotic draw as an open fire.
“Will you accept a shell, instead?” Suzy asked.
“What for?”
“I don’t have a penny. For your thoughts, silly.”
What would I do without Sue, he wondered? Not once had she said anything contrary, let alone complained, about his legs. She must have evolved her own opinions. Perhaps she, too, like his sophomores, put his paralysis to hysteria. She’d never said a word. And even now, he mused, if it hadn’t been for her, I would be constantly lost in thoughts that would take me on a wild goose chase—more often than not.
“I’ve been thinking of the echo effect. Of synchronicity. Of reconciliation. Of many things. Even of the Bermuda Triangle,” he spoke slowly, haltingly.
She didn’t interrupt. She leaned back against the slope, until she was looking directly at the sky. The same sky that hung suspended over their home in LA, over their old apartment in Montreal, over her parents’ house in Kingston; the same sky over such different territories, different cultures. Different people. Different, yet in some ways almost identical.
“All things have already happened. Not to you, or me but they have happened. In their potential form. All matter and energy, in their endless varieties, combinations, complexities, permutations, in their infinite relationships… they already exists. All things already exist in the matrix of the universe. The physical or the virtual universe—but they already exist,” he took a deep breath.
“This is the assumption of your Information Theory, isn’t it?” She knew but sought confirmation. Alec’s Theory was not the easiest theory to fathom.
“Yes. That is the crux of it. If all things already exist, then the information that enabled them to exist must also be available. If only we could find the way to access it. The universe is like a giant computer with unlimited memory storage. Everything is there...”
“It sounds a bit like magic,” Suzy mused aloud.
“Ah, yes… the science of tomorrow.”
Alec’s eyes swept the distant horizon. Then he spoke again, weighing his words, as though finding his way through a complex labyrinth.
“And all those things must be arranged in order. If they happened all at once, we would have another big bang. Time puts them into a sequence. But the sequence is flexible. Different people learn different things at different times. The sequence can be changed, and it is, it must be, possible to oscillate between various points in the sequence. One of my post-doc friends has already shown that mathematically it makes perfect sense.”
Suzy’s thoughts took her on a different tangent. For now, she kept them to herself. She suspected that peek-a-boo was little more than Sandra using Alec’s body for reasons of her own. Or perhaps, she was just using the information that his body represented even as he continued to use hers... without ever acknowledging her presence or asking her permission. Peek-a-boo could be nothing more than tit-for-tat.
“…and if you can really visualize it…” Alec’s voice reached her from afar. A deep furrow divided his eyebrows.
People further down the beach began shouting and waving their arms. Alec and Suzy followed their hands pointing out to sea. A great surge was forming just this side of the horizon. The wave was some five kilometers away, but some people picked up their belongings and retreated to higher ground.
“What the hell is going on? Shouldn’t we be moving away from here?” Suzy was up and pulling Alec’s chair to join her.
“Relax,” he said quietly. “Just relax...”
He continues looking at the incipient tsunami. For a while it continued to advance toward the beach, then it appeared to change its course. Almost. Rather than continuing on its path, it began fumbling in place, fulminating in apparent confusion. After a short while, it retreated into the vastness of the ocean. Soon only a vague memory of it remained.
“All things, all conditions already exist,” Alec repeated. “In this or the virtual universe. The information is there.” And he released the breaks on his wheelchair. “Let’s go back,” he said.
There was so much confidence in his command that Suzy, who hated to be told what to do, followed him without a word.
“There is also polarization of light, which can give you invisibility,” he said, without breaking his pace. This time, his strong arms moved the chair faster than Suzy could walk. “And there is the weather, the climate, the movements of air...” He seemed to have changed the subject. Suddenly distant thunder reached them and an enormous bolt of lightening struck the place where the tsunami had been.”
“Of course, it could be dangerous. Very dangerous.”
And only then did he look as though he had just become aware of Suzy trotting at his side. He stopped and pulled her into his arms. Right there, in the middle of a public footpath. Not that such a display of ardour was unheard of in Lower California. Or on the beach. But it was ce
rtainly new to Suzy. She was a private lady.
“I’m sorry, darling. Forgive me?” And then looking even more guilty, he added quite unnecessarily, “I’ve been miles away. I’m really sorry.”
Miles or years, she had no idea. But she promised herself that someday, some fine day, soon, she would go there with him. Wherever it was. No matter what it took.
For a moment she felt annoyed at Sandra.
Even as Alec moved his chair along, he continued connecting with the Information Field. Only he didn’t quite realize it. Not as yet, but it would come.
With vengeance.
***
Time
If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible… I have no idea whether it's possible,
but it's certainly worth exploring.
Carl Edward Sagan
1934 – 1996
Astronomer
13
Atlantis
“There are three stages of existence, not two as is normally accepted. Being, becoming and stasis. The last corresponds to death. Real death. Not the cessation of biological functions. When in stasis, one is outside time. No wonder so many religions compare this condition to eternal damnation.”
They were all sitting on the terrace sipping the ever-present Sangria, looking out at the brooding ocean.
None of them had any desire to check on the events in Los Angeles. The broadcasts of the last two days had been so saturated with the riots, reasons for riots, proposed solutions, mayhem and murder, that any subject seemed better than more TV. Nevertheless, the subject under discussion was a direct result of the last session of the newscast, wherein the reporter and his guest––some local ecclesiastical authority, had discussed the morality of killing people who detract from the public good. They’d all had too much pseudo-philosophy.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 16