An essay by Specialist Estaugh Johnten, as provided
by Mickey Hunt
A frozen image of the park’s playfield looks
somewhat like an ordinary playfield on Earth. Families are sitting on blankets
with their picnics, a canine is poised in the air as he clamps his teeth on a
flying disk, a woman is jogging down the path between a row of shade trees. Children
dash through a play castle with its hanging bridges and polymer towers. All
this would look ordinary, except the colors in the image are antipodal like in
an old-fashion film negative. What might be shadow emanates light, and it all
incandesces with a lustrous glow.
An expectant crowd has
gathered at the edge of a field, and upon closer inspection, you’d see that the
postures and faces droop with sadness. They are faces possessing delicate
contours no race of Earth ever had.
Even stranger would be
watching the film in forward motion, because everything actually moves opposite
to what you expect: the people, the leaves on the trees, even the sounds of
voices.
I myself am walking
backwards, with my arm around the waist of a wife I’ve never met, and a
charming child of mine with her arm wrapped around my neck. My wife is carrying
my field notebook. I’m elated, and of course completely bewildered. As we walk
in reverse toward the waiting crowd, I nearly stumble, because I can’t see
where we’re going.
Children are playing a game
nearby. One girl runs backwards and stoops to leave a small white ball on the
ground. As we pass, the ball springs up of its own accord and smacks me in the
nose. It hurts…
Welcome to the planet Lumen.
The above scenario describes
my personal first minutes after I stepped to the ground of a planet circling
the first dark star[1] we’ve ever discovered and located
within a vast region of dark matter. It’s a planet, indeed a whole region of
space, where physics on its most rudimentary level, and, perhaps even time
itself, moves opposite to ours.
Earth Command had engaged me
on this exploratory mission for the remote possibility of encountering sentient
beings on other worlds. While I have studied astrophysics as a hobby, my true
expertise was in anthropology. My job was to catalog and analyze sentient alien
cultural practices. Little did anyone guess that I would arrive on this new
planet already “knowing” a great deal about life there. It was a knowledge that
sprang into existence as events occurred. Of all our team members on the
mission, I was the only one who could fully wrap his brain around how things
worked. My Earth-based supervisors believe it was my Asperger’s Syndrome that
enabled me to adapt to the confusing environment. What had isolated me from
other people in normal time allowed me to better fit in on Lumen. Plus, I had
already developed attitudes and techniques to help me compensate for my
misperceptions.
~
When our research ship Radiant first approached Lumen, we entered
a high slow orbit above the nightside. The view from my port window showed the
surface to be dark, that is, with no lights to indicate any sort of advanced
civilization. I wrote in my field notebook, “Another lonely silent sphere, like
me.” Only when the ship orbited to the dayside of the planet did our scouting
telescopes show living beings with a technology similar to 20th century Earth;
that is, they had self-propelled transport craft, including flying vessels. As
I gazed from the window, a weird cluster of rocks about a kilometer or so from
us flew away from the planet. I didn’t learn until later that they were meteors
falling toward the planet.
During Landing Orientation,
I arrived late and took the remaining empty seat in the front row. Captain
Therreal[2] remarked that it was strange the
inhabitants hadn’t responded to our attempts to contact them by radio.
At that time, Communications
Officer Esang interrupted to shrilly announce that Lumen was being bombarded by
messages from space, including one from a woman who cried in inverted English, “Please
come back, we need you!” This was all a mystery that we resolved only later.
As we landed the transport
shuttle on the surface for the first time ever, Assistant Safety Officer
Sanderson was in charge of making one last check to the atmosphere’s
compatibility with human physiology. The composition of Lumen’s air was roughly
identical to Earth’s, except in the motion of the elements’ atoms. Sanderson
reported the air was “okay,” and as we waited for the transport’s integument
door to open, she noticed that I was clutching my notebook to my chest.
“Eager today, Professor?”
she asked.
Suddenly self-aware and
chagrined about looking like a schoolgirl, I nonchalantly lowered the notebook
to my side. No matter how many times I corrected her, she always called me
professor.
“I’m just messing with you,”
she said.
Oh. I realized then she was
only teasing, but her use of “mess” reminded me of an archaic meaning of the
term, that of a sailing ship’s dining hall. This seemed like a natural segue,
so I asked her if she would join me for dinner sometime.
She only grimaced and shook
her head.
I suppose the universe
wreaked its revenge when the door opened and flooded the compartment with the
native air. Sanderson hyperventilated and passed out cold. The door buzzed and
slammed shut, and medics evacuated her to a berth in the shuttle where she soon
recovered. As it turned out, Sanderson never could process Lumen’s air, and
further research showed that approximately 5.5% of the Radiant’s crew couldn’t. For them, the oxygen was totally inert and
unreactive, and they were compelled to wear breathing apparatus and tanks
whenever they spent time on the planet, a situation which was a burden. Also,
as it turned out, Sanderson grew to respect me, and we became friends. She was
a medical doctor, and I invited her to attend the birth of my daughter, a story
I will return to later.
When the landing team
shuffled down the ramp, I among them, the scene before us appeared as a blazing
impressionistic painting of a New England
landscape. Figures approached from the crowd. They appeared blurry until they
drew near, and I realized with a shock that they were walking in reverse. A
person turned to me, and now I saw it was a young woman. She held a baby on her
hip, a little girl almost a year old grasping her mother’s blouse. The young
mother’s luminescent skin, garments, and facial features gave her a certain
beauty I never imagined possible.
Her baby. She reminded me of
photographs of my own mother when she was a child.
The woman stepped toward me
and kissed me lingeringly on the mouth—her lips cool to the touch—and when she
stepped back she held a garland of flowers in her free hand. A memory burst
into existence, a memory telling me the sweet smelling lei had hung around my
neck only seconds before. How was this happening? She spoke to me in a
familiar, bizarre, inverted language.
As other crewmembers were
greeted with similar, albeit less intimate farewells from the indigenous
people, I felt myself swept up in astonished awareness that we and they existed
within the same reality and were passing in converse directions–my future being
the young woman’s past, and my past being her future.
So that’s when I realized
the mysterious radio message had been for me, and the immense throng of people
at the landing site had gathered to say goodbye.
My first impulse was to
sprint back to the transport and hide in a locker, but for once in my awkward
life, when everything was infinitely awkward, I knew what to do. I held my
ground and began writing on my field notebook. The young woman lifted the
garland to her nose and breathed in. She smiled like gentle sunlight, wiped her
eyes, sniffed twice, and nodded with comprehension as droplets leapt from the
ground, rolled up her cheeks, and squeezed into her tear ducts.
I finished writing and held
up the notebook so she could read my words, I love you and our baby very,
very much. I promise, we will be together again.
I swapped my notebook for
our child who snuggled her face against my chest. And I had no idea how it all
would work, but clearly, we had already solved certain future problems of
cross-cultural interaction—I had a family!
~
Is time real, or was it
simply that the physics of Lumen moved backward, even at the quantum level? Is
it that subatomic particles like electrons were just spinning in reverse to
ours?
Up until we encountered
Lumen, what we found there and in the planet’s spatial neighborhood would have
been described as being composed of Diroc’s Antimatter.[3] However, the only antimatter we’ve
known before has been in laboratories. We’ve never experienced antienergy
before, not what was recognized as such. In artificial, simplistic experiments,
whenever matter and antimatter touched each another, they annihilated. But the
stable presence within our galaxy of antispace and all it contains, and our
safe interaction with Lumen, proves that matter and natural antimatter coexist,
which brought up the possibility that our previous theories have been all
wrong.
Dr. Pachero-Nanez, the first
scientist to clarify and popularize the idea that time was not real, claimed
that time is only a human construct that measures relative rates of change.
Pachero-Nanez helped us understand that Einstein’s theory of relativity wasn’t
as profound as once thought, because it only meant that time seems to flow
differently because of an observer’s relative position to the light by which we perceive events. That is true,
but our experience on Lumen proved Pachero-Nanez wrong about the existence of
time itself.[4]
Why? Because my life with
Ahtebazille existed before it had even happened from my perspective,
we learned that time itself was a singular entity of its own.
Time is real. And yet what happened was completely dependent on our
decisions in that moving present that we shared together, a present something
like the juncture of two streams when they form a river. The streams merge,
mixing and churning, and continue on with both changed.
Events occurring in that
present changed my past and created their own memories. As I already wrote,
when Ahtebazille greeted me, she hung a lei around my neck as a parting gift.
Until she took that action, it never happened for me, but when it happened,
that lei continued to be around my neck in her future and in my past, and that’s
why I remembered it.
My two and a half years on
Lumen was full of such experiences, but the confusion and the continuous
reshaping of my memory were only part of the difficulty.
~
Most people of Lumen were
sad when we arrived, and sadness often pervaded my mood as well, because I knew
I had such a brief period ahead to be a father and a husband. Our daughter Atte’eerneh
was growing younger each day, and in a few months her contraction of size and
abilities alarmed and grieved me. I knew what the inevitable would be. It was
exactly like having a child with a terminal illness, but there was no
treatment, cure, or hope of recovery. Her birth then was like a death, or at
least a vanishing. I saw her slip into her mother’s body, and then observed as
Ahtebazille’s belly shrank month by month, and I couldn’t forget our daughter
as she had been: happy, scampering around our house (backwards of course),
playing with dolls and singing nonsense songs. I was so sorrowful in thinking
that I couldn’t know her at a period later in her life. Adding to the sorrow,
when I arrived on Lumen, Ahtebazille was pregnant with our second child, a boy.
I had to force myself to not
think about this.
~
For an example of a milder
difficulty, as it turned out, arriving late to social events was essential on
Lumen. In fact, to be early you had to arrive after an occasion was completely
over, or you would be too late. By the time of Ahtebazille’s and my wedding I
had it figured out. Because, of course, from my point of view, the wedding
ceremony began at the end and worked backwards to the beginning. In fact, our
last ever “connubial celebration” took place on the night before the wedding.
Whenever I speak at
holo-seminars and conferences, the questions most frequently asked are about
sex. Everyone wants to know how to “make a baby” on Lumen. I’ve written about
it in impersonal clinical detail in my paper “From Coitus to Foreplay: Sexual
Relations Between Intraspecies Partners of Reverse Time Ecosystems,”[5] but it’s enough to say in this present
article that the process is far easier than one might imagine. As I have
understood from the wide study of cultures, intimate relations between the
opposite sexes are fraught with awkwardness, blunders, embarrassment,
misunderstandings, and even humor, obstacles often easily overcome in a loving
relationship. When the respective time streams of the partners are opposed,
those factors are compounded. But as with everything on Lumen, I was always surprised
how well it worked out when we just relaxed and let what might happen, happen.
~
The same as with our
daughter undeveloping until the point of when her life began at fertilization,
so my relationship with my wife Ahtebazille diminished over time. I knew her
better, but she knew me less. She seemed to have forgotten my favorite foods.
Her cooking deteriorated. After the year and more of enjoying our marriage bed,
the strictly enforced chastity was a sore trial for me. Her parents stopped
liking me, saying that a close relationship between their daughter and me was impossible.
She comprehended what I said less.[6] Beyond when we first met (from her point
of view) one evening at a square dance, I was a stranger to her, but I knew her
better than ever, the situation being a mirror to when I arrived and first saw
her. So, as we knew it would, my wife didn’t know me anymore. Think of it like
severe Alzheimer’s, except she was young and healthy in every way, making the “memory
loss” all the more painful.
~
Though we had been among the
Lumens for a long while, they acted cold, cautious, and afraid, as if we had
just arrived. When we actually had arrived, we were clumsy. Now they were, and
you had to be on a continuous lookout for unexpected hazards, like being run
over while crossing the street.[7] I myself was nearly killed by an ice
cream truck roaring around a corner.
So, there was no longer any
joy in staying, and after 30 full months of living on the planet, deeply
involved in the affairs of its people, we lifted off for the last time, with me
feeling even more alone than I have in my whole life.
~
That was eight months ago,
and soon after my arrival on Earth, I ran into my old friend Mickey Hunt[8] at my favorite tea cafe. Mickey had been
an obscure social reformer back in the 21st century and took up writing faux
science fiction and fantasy in his retirement. I say faux, because the science
and fantasy were really real. Captain Therreal had run across an actual copy of
Mickey’s early novel in a museum and went back to meet him. Therreal ended up
inviting him on a time transcendence journey, but now after extensively roaming
across Earth’s eras, Mickey planned to return home to his own time. When he
heard about my family on Lumen, and my heartbreak over how empty my current
life was, he asked me to join him aboard the UNSS Chariot for the acceleration to light speed, a voyage that would
last a whole year. He said he’d make room for me in his quarters.
“Really, you’d take me
along?” I said. “Only a select few go on these expeditions.”
“You’ll be my guest,” he
said. “Here’s what you do: when we break the light barrier, we leave the
material-energy-chronos universe and enter what’s called eternity. You know, ‘God
is light.’ It’s like dying, except you’re not dead. It’s being totally awake.
In the dream world, your powers of thought and action are limited. Your mind
floats along, flitting here and there, and you have negligible control over
imaginary actions within the dream. Your body is all but immobile and paralyzed
in bed. Consider that the supernatural world is to the natural world what the
waking world is to the dream world. In the supernatural, you have incomparably
more freedom and control over your mind and body than you do in your ordinary
existence. You can go anywhere and anywhen you like.” He paused to let this
sink in, and then repeated, “Anywhere and when. It’s the only way to travel
anymore. Time and space transcendence.”
A warm flush suffused my
whole being, and the gloomy cloud that enveloped my head vanished entirely. I
pulled out my field notebook and began scribbling my packing list.
Mickey said, “Why don’t you
tell me what you’re thinking?”
I told him what, and that’s
my plan for the future.
Calculating my life
expectancy, I intend to arrive back on Lumen so that I might possibly live
until a few months before I arrived
the first time. That will give me another 40-50 years with Ahtebazille and my
children.
“Don’t forget the grandchildren,
great-grandchildren, and so on,” Mickey said. “You may be surprised at the
multitude of descendants you have. I was when I peeked ahead, and knowing about
them is why I never feel lonesome.”
My enthusiasm suddenly fell
away, and I closed my notebook. “I just thought of it. When I rejoin my wife,
for her it will be parting all over again. She’ll be old, maybe even dead.”
“Can’t be helped,” Mickey
said. “You’ve got to go.”
He’s right. And I will go.
END NOTES:
[1] A dark star is a black hole in particular effects, but much lower in
mass.
[2] This is the same Therreal who commanded the starship Chariot in the first intentional
time-transcendence excursions based on the theories of Nobel Prize-winning
propulsionist, Dr. Pachero-Nanez, who discovered that as a vessel neared the
speed of light, its mass decreased, enabling it to break the light barrier and
escape the limitations of the material-energy-chronos universe.
[3] Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, 8 August 1902–20 October 1984.
[4] Pachero-Nanez was wrong in other things as well, namely his National
Socialist politics.
[5] Originally published in the Journal
of Chaotic Terrain, Vol. 3849, Issue 3, Year Indeterminate.
[6] I had taught her English and I, in turn, had to learn to speak and understand
it backwards.
[7] I never quite learned to safely drive on Lumen.
[8] Not his real name.
END
Estaugh A. Johnten grew up
on a farm in Pennsylvania and earned a B.A. in
Social/Cultural Anthropology at Templetown
University Tübingen , Germany Hahvad University
Mickey Hunt explores the
universe from his base in Asheville ,
North Carolina Dark Mountain
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