Parallel Time

     Superb ! This new motorbike is so much better than the old one, more power and more responsive, and today is ideal for a bike ride, cloudy but dry. See how easy it is to overtake this lorry, and get back into my lane well before the top of the hill. 

"Oh, no !" I shout, braking hard, "Get out of the way !"

    Blackness. Silence.

    Now I’m back on the road, on a different motorbike, and this road is different, in a different countryside, and now the weather is sunny. No other traffic either. I come to a town and see a man waiting by the road. I stop. 

    "Where am I," I ask.

    "This is Bugle Four," he replies and then asks, "What time do you have ?" I look at the watch on my wrist, "Ten past three." 

    He doesn’t seem interested in my reply and I notice that his own watch shows a very different time. I wonder what sort of place would have a town called Bugle Four. He looks towards the distant mountains and says, "There’s a bad storm up there now."

    "Really, the weather up there looks the same as here."

    "Not a weather storm," he says, "a time storm."

    He pauses and suggests, "If you are thirsty there is a restaurant on the other side of the road."

    I enter the restaurant. I feel some coins in my pocket and join the short queue. The man in front gets a drink. "Same again," I order, for fear of not knowing what the drink might be called. 

    "That’ll be fourteen (somethings), sir," says the waiter.

    I don’t catch the word so I take all the coins from my pocket and hold them out in my hand. "I hope this is enough."

    The lady in the queue behind me smiles and asks, "Can I help ?" I look at her imploringly and she takes three of the coins and hands them to the waiter saying, "Me too," and then to me, "would you like to join me ?"

    We sit at a table. She says, "I have been away from Bugle Four for a while and just got back today. I’m waiting for my friend. You seem to be a stranger here. Where are you staying ?"

    "I don’t have anywhere arranged yet."

    "Then stay with me. I live on my own and I’m sure you have some interesting tales you can tell me."

    "But, I don’t know you, and you’re a woman and I’m a man."

    "Don’t worry," she says, laughing, "I see from your watch that we’re not at all compatible, so the chances of anything happening are very remote."

    Someone turns up the sound of the television in the corner of the room. "Here is the time forecast." Everyone is silent and turns towards the screen. "The general situation. The low over the mountains will gradually fill and move away to the North East. This will leave an area of relative calm and steady time except that locally around Bugle Four there may be some isolated time storms." Time storms ? What can they be ?  

    My new friend pulls a calculator from her handbag and furiously does some calculations. "Oh, no. That means that my tax form for next year was due last week !" She explains, "This is what happens when you travel as much as I do. Look, I’m awfully sorry, but I really must go and get this thing done. Ah, here comes my friend, Lumaga, perhaps you can stay with her."

    Lumaga takes her place. There is an embarrassing silence. I lamely say, "The weather is very nice here today."

    "The weather ? Oh yes, it's nice, well, it’s always nice of course. If it rains it’s nice, if there is a breeze it’s nice. What time do you have ?" 

    "It must be four o’clock by now," I say. She seems excited by this and then asks, "Did you see that programme on television about parallel universes ?" I shake my head. 

    "It was so interesting. A lady scientist said that there could be other universes parallel to ours where things could be slightly different, and other universes which could be so different that we would not recognise anything. She said there might be a universe like ours but where time is the same everywhere and progresses at a steady rate, and it is the weather which is so variable, and needs forecasting." 

Well, she got that right - that’s my universe, with weather forecasts and steady time, and clearly not what they have here, where I am now. 

    As Lumaga and I go to her place I notice she keeps trying to read my watch. When we get there she grabs my wrist and carefully compares my watch with hers. "So close," she says. "Actually you are the person with the closest time I have ever met, except for someone I met once with exactly the same time as me, but she was a Christian lady from the first century and had moved twenty centuries forward. Can you imagine, twenty whole centuries ? That’s very rare of course and she was gone in a moment." 

    She looks again, "Even the dates are the same." 

    "You look confused," she continues, "Time varies from place to place. Once I was in the next town and I telephoned my mother, and she was angry at me for waking her. It was two o’clock in the morning for her. I must have made a wrong calculation. Also time varies generally, that’s why the time forecasts are so important. In a town like Bugle Four the time will be more or less the same everywhere within it, but there will be local variations in people’s homes, although it will be fairly constant among the family members if they always live there, and of course everyone has their own individual time which their watch shows, and I’m so excited that ours are so similar."

    "Is there a danger of, um, you-know-what ?"

    "Falling in love ?" she laughs, "Oh, yes. We seem to like each other, because our times are so nearly coincident and I have been noticing that your time seems to be keeping pace with mine. This means we could be coincident for a long time."

    "So if our times are the same and they stay in step we could be good friends for ever," I suggest, "like two hearts beating together."

    "Yes, but we will have to wait until the morning," Lumaga continues, "to see how close our time rates are and then I can calculate how long our friendship will last. The calculator will show how long it will be before we get so out of step that we lose interest in each other."

    Like getting bio-rhythms in step. Perhaps this explains how people fall in and out of love - very interesting. 

    "I think you had better sleep in the spare room," she laughs, "just in case our times really are in step."

    After breakfast next morning she compares our times, which by now are slightly different. "I calculate that we will be close friends for the next five years," she says, "that’s very good."

    "What happens after that ?"

    "After a further five years we are merely acquaintances, and after a further twelve years we will be completely out of step and have nothing in common at all – strangers." 

    Like marriage and then divorce in my universe ? I change the subject. "You mentioned someone from the first century. Is that like time travel ?"

    "In a way, but that lady did not travel through time from the first to the twenty first century, but it was rather that time and everything around her was changing, and at different rates. Also it was not her choice, it just happened to her."

    Lumaga looks out of the window. "It’s a lovely day, of course," she says, "although perhaps a bit warmer than yesterday. Can we use your motorbike to go into the country for a picnic ?"

    She tells me the way, and we leave the motorbike and walk through some fields. Eventually we sit down under a tree. After we eat she seems very excited and says, "There is no-one else here and I want to do something for you, but you must promise you will stay sitting down and not get up or try to touch me." 

    "Okay," I agree, wondering what she has planned.

    She fiddles around with the cassette recorder which she has brought and explains, "I have been practising this for some time, waiting for someone who’s time is the same as mine. I want to do a strip tease for you."

    "Oh, yes !" I exclaim, and then ask, "but what music will you use ?"

    "I’ve got Beethoven’s third symphony."

    "A symphony, Beethoven’s Eroica, for a strip tease ? All of it ?" I ask incredulously.

    "No, just the second movement, the first part of it - you’ll see when I’ve finished," she laughs, "but you must remember your promise."

    She puts the cassette recorder down on the grass, away from me and starts the music. Then she moves some way farther and starts to dance. She dances gracefully, perfectly in time with the music. She flings off her scarf and starts to unbutton her blouse. I notice that she is dancing faster, faster than the music. Now she is dancing so quickly that she cannot undo the next button, and she cries, "A time storm !" 

    Lumaga falls to the ground. Now the music speeds up. There is a pause. The second movement has finished and the third starts, playing even faster.

    Now the time storm must be at the cassette recorder. Perhaps it’s like a very small black hole, distorting time locally, but without gravity having any other effect. Perhaps all the matter here has negative mass. No, that can’t be right, otherwise the black hole would repel it. Maybe the matter here has zero mass and so it is not attracted to the black hole. I think that the time storm is moving towards me. I notice that the leaves on the tree are turning orange, then brown, then they start to fall off. I see that Lumaga is moving very slowly now and hear that the music is also playing very slowly. The time storm must be on me now, speeding me up and making everything around me appear so slow. The time around me seems to be getting faster and faster. 

    Blackness. Silence.

    "Where am I now ?"

    "Now, indeed ?" says a young woman with a lilting Irish accent. "And where else would you be but in hospital, in ward C4 to be precise."

    I open my eyes and see a nurse. She says, "I’m glad you’re awake now. You had an accident on your motor cycle and you have been unconscious for nearly three hours. We were quite worried about you at first, but then the instruments told us you would eventually be okay." 

    I love the accent. "I had a wonderful dream, so real."

    "Huh, was it dreaming you were ?"

    Lumaga, Lumaga.