On the myclasses portal where this learning episode was found there were links for two episodes from different SF series, Doctor Who and Sliders, as well as a short story, 'Gregory Mobile'. The following text with links was offered to the students, excluding images from the two episodes, due to copyright reasons. The David Rade story 'Gregory Mobile' is included here and offered under Creative Commons license. Citations for the texts are available in the Readings and Further Links and Resource List.
Students attending a face-to-face class for this study watched the DVD versions of the two episodes using the class computer and overhead projector, while students studying as flexible learning were offered a copy of the film on CD-ROM, copied under the special provisions of local Copyright laws.
The points at the start of these notes are to be discussed in the Forum area. You are asked to jump to the Forum area, using the link here and making a comment in the appropriate Forum thread. Please remember, your participation in discussions is expected in this study, as part of your overall participation.
Forum topics for discussion: |
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| How is time travel presented in the Doctor Who episode 'Father's Day'? Does the narrative argue against or for the use of time travel to resolve personal situations? | |
| How does the Sliders episode 'In Dino Veritas' avoid the problem of causality in its exploration of sensational effect in the Age of the Dinosaurs? | |
| How does David Rade's story 'Gregory Mobile' accomplish some of the effects of time travel and what are the effects of this process on Gregory's personality? |
How could any discussion of time travel in Science Fiction avoid the most popular and long lasting series of narratives about a Time Lord who travels through time and space to fight against a variety of terrible creatures? There are links at the bottom of this page to information about the famous television series Doctor Who and to the derivation of the good Doctor, a Time Lord from a distant part of the universe whose role it is (was, and will be) to maintain the time lines and to battle the most terrible creatures of the Universe: the Daleks, the CyberMen and many others who threaten Humanity.
In the episode 'Father's Day' (Ahearn, 2005), the Doctor comes back to assist his female friend, who wants to see her father, who was killed in a car accident before she was born. Against his better nature, the Doctor lets his assistant see the death but she can not speak to her father.
Again taking pity, the Doctor allows his assistant to return to the scene of the accident under strict instructions that she not interfere with the events that will unfold, especially because when they return, for the second time, their earlier selves will already be there. In this way the Doctor is taking the chance on disrupting the timeline and causing major problems for the space-time continuum.
Of course, the worst happens and the accident that kills the father is avoided. The father lives and there are major disruptions to the timeline. Because the Time Lords have been destroyed by the Daleks, with Doctor Who the remaining sole survivor, there are no Time Lords to fix the major paradoxes that arise and instead the Reapers appear, creatures from another dimension who harvest any life form that was involved in the creation of the time paradox.
A series of time paradoxes such as seen in the Grandfather Paradox visited in learning episode five occur even to the point where a person meets herself as a baby. In the end, the situation is averted by the death of one man, the father, who sacrifices himself for the sake of the whole of Humanity.
This episode has a well-known writer who draws on several other well-known SF texts for his material. This makes the episode 'inter-textual' as described in earlier Learning Episodes. More details on this can be found in the links section, below.
'Father's Day' is an unusual episode because it marks the first time any viewer has seen a Reaper (a strange creature that maintains the space/time continuum) in the Doctor Who series. The Reapers arrival in this episode is due to a rift in the space/time continuum and the creation of a series of time paradoxes or time loops. However, such problems are very normal in the series but elsewhere do not lead to the arrival of the Reapers.
The episode has strong religious overtones, as seen by the Repers invading a church and then one man going out to die to save many others. Here the Christian themes are very clear.
Less clear are the time paradoxes that have lead to the arrival of the Reapers. While the Doctor allows the situation to develop, the major time paradox is based around a change in the destiny of one man, the assistant's father.
The 'Father's Day' episode shows one human trying to change the past, trying to reach back to make contact between a daughter and father. Just as in Timescape in learning episode six, the attempt to change an individual destiny leads to a major change for the community. The personal Fate of one man becomes the endangering of the whole of Humankind.
The Doctor Who episode 'Father's Day' is offered here in learning episode seven to show a further use of time travel as a novum in the narrative. In this case it is clear that attempting to change destiny is unwise and even dangerous. Making contact between daughter and a dead father can even lead to the extinction of the entire species. 'Father's Day' is a cautionary narrative, warning that history should be left untouched, accepting Fate rather than battling against destiny.
In the television series Sliders, that ran from 1995 to 2000 and still has a large and loyal fan base, time travel is not used to move between settings for the continuing narratives. In fact the episode 'In Dino Veritas' takes great care to show that the 'sliding' is not time travelling but is instead moving 'sideways' between parallel worlds. This series makes use of the idea of the Multiverse to create many different worlds, all slightly different from the original world, called in the series Earth Prime. Sliders can carry with them a small controller for holding open the wormhole across parallel worlds.
The wormhole is created and the controller creates a vortex and through this the Sliders move from one parallel world to another. The vortex and wormhole make use of the "Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge", a theory established in science for this travel.
The popularity of time travel over the years was often found in the travellers ability to move back in time to eras that captured the imagination, such as to the era of the rise of Nazi Germany to assassinate Hitler, to the time of Christ, or even to the time of the dinosaurs.
The great popularity of the Age of the Dinosaurs in time travel narratives is seen clearly in the short stories studied in the first few Learning Episodes.
The Sliders episode offered here in learning episode seven shows that there is more than one way to bring dinosaurs into an SF narrative. Of course, the use of dinosaurs in a narrative can be done through genetic engineering, as seen clearly in the Jurassic Park films and novels, and here the use of recovered DNA to recreate dinosaurs is the novum of these narratives.
It is strange to think that the Sliders series can use parallel worlds to visit dinosaurs again in narratives, but on the Earth visited in 'In Dino Veritas' dinosaurs remain on the Earth and survive in closely monitored reserves, patrolled by holographic and actual park rangers.
This episode of Sliders is offered for learning episode seven to show the enduring popularity of the use of dinosaurs (as evidenced further by the recent TV series Prehistoric Park) and that the novum of a time machine is not necessarily required to revisit this ancient cliché of SF again. A wormhole vortex can also allow for visits to the Age of the Dinosaurs. Instead of considering the problems of time loops and impacts of visiting the ancient past on the present, the travellers can move rapidly and without impact in time from one world to another. However, new problems arrive for the viewer who might ask with some validity how a species from sixty million years ago on Earth would find the ecosystem capable of sustaining their life form in the contemporary world.
The use of wormholes in space/time is also revisited later in studies in this fate and predestination theme area when we consider some of the scientific writings on relativistic time travel, first described by Einstein.
The short story 'Gregory Mobile' solves the problem of the technology of time travel by making only digital files travel through time, through a tachyon transceiver that was suggested by Gregory Benford in an earlier novel.
However, even though a species called the Zuffitos can communicate across time and space, the technology poses some problems for those who use it. In this case, the thoughts and feelings, the very core of the Zuffitos, is challenged by the use of the time device.
One Zuffito, Gregory, is stranded in Colinton as part of a punishment and he is faced with a dilemma that can only be solved by using the tachyon transmitter, but at what cost to his sanity, and his self?
You are asked to read the short story 'Gregory Mobile' by David Rade as it will be used for the in-class test due in learning episode eight.
'Gregory Mobile' by David Rade
SnowFM played requests on work day afternoons. The old Sanyo radio was in the middle of a slow, bluesy song. Gregory was not listening even though there was not much else to hear. To Gregory the music was a sort of background noise, like the creaks in an old house as it cooled down at night.
It was still hot. No-one had stopped at his service station for over an hour and there was a blinking blue light in the back room where there should have been no blinking light. Gregory tried again to understand how his life running a petrol station in Colinton could possibly be compared to the lives of all those generations that came before him. If he never heard from his family again with their contempt and criticism, he would die happy. But that was hardly likely.
The Range Rover was traveling fast from the east, from Peakview. It took the last corner before the descent to the straight bitumen into the town too fast, but it was a well-designed vehicle and it hugged the road. It looked like it was going to run straight through Colinton when it swerved off the paved strip and hit the pale dust of the side road up to the old school. Gregory could see a large figure at the wheel and beside him a woman. Gregory glanced at the flashing light and then recognized the tune on the radio, Neil Young and ‘Helpless’. The Range Rover came at his pump across a driveway and it was traveling too fast. Still, he had seen lots of other fools from the cities drive like this. Maybe they wanted to show off to the locals, show who was boss?
When the brakes kicked in the nose of the truck nodded down and then settled back. A thin cloud of dust rose towards the doorway and then died in the heat. Gregory came out of the shadow from his office and picked up an oily rag on his way. He was about to speak when the large man swung out of his driver’s seat and the bonnet of the Range Rover popped.
“You a mechanic?”
Gregory shrugged. This would be unpleasant, he knew. “What’s the problem?” He knew nothing about the newer trucks and the Range Rover was brand new and very expensive. The man started at him with eyes too blue and wide. There were large sweat stains on his pale blue Rodd and Gunn shirt. He turned from Gregory and flicked open the bonnet. A spring sent it gliding up and the big man peered in, craning his head this way and that. His hair was a thick and curly gray and his neck was beaded with perspiration.
“Air conditioning?” Gregory asked.
“Do you know how much this heap cost me? And all I get are complaints. Just how am I expected to cover three hundred kilometers in three hours on these roads? And who made the stupid dinner booking? Do I look like I want to go out for dinner with one of her stupid friends?”
He was jabbing his thumb towards himself and demanding an answer from Gregory. No, he did not look like a man who ever wanted to eat dinner slowly whilst chatting. He looked like the sort of man who would inhale dinner and wash it down with more than a bottle.
It was clear that Gregory’s life would be better if the Range Rover resumed its travel. He considered the options that would lead to the car not achieving an optimal speed. It would have to be a control problem, not a power problem.
“Is it the governor?” Gregory asked. “Is the vehicle’s computer over-riding your directions?”
The big man took two shuffling steps towards Gregory. “What the Hell are you talking about,” the big man asked. He was too close and Gregory could feel spittle touch his face. “Are you a mechanic or an idiot?”
Gregory hesitated too long for his answer.
The big man slammed down the bonnet against the servo-mechanism, a considerable feat of strength and passion. With the bonnet down Gregory could see the woman. She was a little pale, an elegant face framed by close-cropped hazel hair. She looked younger than the big man, who turned back to his wife, pointing at her and waving a hand about, commanding attention.
Over the top of the back seat a dog’s head arose, cocked to one side, one ear forward, listening for the master’s voice. Its face was brown and white. Even though the windows were up and Gregory could hear faint music coming from inside, the dog was hearing the tone of command.
“I’m not going any further,” he called to his wife. “You can drive yourself. I’ve had it. Nothing works. We try to do something together and its even worse than staying at home.”
Gregory glanced over his shoulder into his back office. The blinking blue light was still blinking. He wished he had done something about it.
The big man turned back to Gregory. “Where are we, anyway? Where the Hell am I getting off?”
“This is Colinton,” Gregory answered.
“Then this is where I’m getting off, in Colinton,” the big man said, nodding to himself. He turned back to the Range Rover and swore at his wife. “Get yourself back!” he yelled. “I’m not traveling another … open the boot, go on, open the damn boot, I’m getting my gear and staying here.” He turned back to Gregory.
“There’s the Country Club Motel back there,” Gregory said, pointing back down the road with his oily cloth, “or the Snow Goose Hotel just up there.”
“I’m staying at the Snow Goose,” the big man called to the woman. “That’s all there is to it. Open the boot, do it now!”
The dog in the back had its paws on the seat. The dog wanted to do something, anything the big man said. Gregory saw complete obedience in the face of the dog. He looked into the face of the wife. She looked worried. She took off her seat belt and called for the dog to stay.
“You’ve got the keys,” she called to the big man.
The big man swore again and patted his shirt pocket, then his pants. He found the keys, attached to a thin, black plastic remote. He pointed the device at the car and pressed a button. The bonnet popped open. The big man swore and punched down the bonnet. The wife was opening her door.
“Stay!” he commanded her. The dog in the back became still. The wife closed her eyes and collapsed back onto her seat. She had been commanded too many times. Her lips were tight. She brought her hands up to cover her face, to cover her expression from Gregory. The big man clicked another button. The fuel flap popped open on Gregory’s side of the car. He clicked another button as if breaking the neck of the device. “Stupid car!” he yelled.
“Take it easy,” Gregory said. The big man did not hear him. The door to the boot swung open spilling bright afternoon light onto the Springer Spaniel in the back. The big man swung around to Gregory, holding out the electronic key like a little plastic dagger.
“You see, that’s what I mean,” he sputtered. “I go out with my friends, out shooting, once every two months with the club. No, she can’t stay at home and do her stupid stuff with her stupid friends, she has to come along because we have to do everything together. Now,” he said, jabbing at the air with the key, “the dog does just what’s he’s told, even if there are no rabbits anyway and it’s all a waste of time, but my stupid wife …”
The dog was not behaving as commanded. She heard her master’s voice more clearly through the open boot and saw him move as if to blow his whistle. She leapt over the few bags in the boot and trotted around to the big man’s left side, sitting obediently in the dust.
“Oh God,” the big man yelled, “what are you doing?”
He kicked the dog in the ribs. She sprawled on her side with a whimper then righted herself and returned to his side, leaning away and watching his feet carefully. The big man swore again as if sneezing and hurled the car keys as far as he could. They landed on the bitumen of the main road, skidding a little. The dog stayed still, trembling for release. She knew this routine.
“Fetch!” he told the dog, who streaked away from the Range Rover for the road. Gregory could see there were no cars coming. The big man walked to the back of the vehicle and tossed a small bag onto the driveway. The bag opened, spilling a white shirt into the dust. The big man swore and propped himself against the car, head down. He leant forward for something. Gregory looked at the wife and she met his gaze. Gregory wondered if he needed to drive her away, or call someone for her, or – then he heard the sound of oiled metal pieces fitting together.
The big man had a double-barreled shotgun. Its breach was open. He had a fancy leather belt with shells in it and as he cradled the shotgun he pulled out two shells and loaded the shotgun expertly, then clicked the breach closed and pivoted.
Gregory swore and dropped down onto all fours.
There was a shot and Gregory heard the dog scream and then stop screaming.
Gregory lay on the ground. He fidgeted his feet about in the dust of his own driveway but found he could do no more. Looking between the tyres Gregory could see the big man’s boots on the other side of the Range Rover. The big man crunched over to the passenger’s side door and heard the woman scream, not at all like a television scream and the door was swung open and a much loader shot rang out and glass like thick chunks of ice fell about him, some dripping.
Gregory sobbed and choked on the dust and coughed and wished he could move.
The big man’s boots moved around to the back again and Gregory knew he was taking out more shells.
“I have to get up and run,” Gregory told himself, but he could not. “No, you can’t,” another voice in his mind said, in the clipped inflexions of his father. Gregory held his breath. He heard calls from down near the shops.
“I told you!” the big man shouted.
There was another shot and the shotgun dropped to the ground, pointing out towards the road, then the body of the big man crumpled backwards, falling gently in a mist of red spray. Gregory closed his eyes and tasted the sand he had breathed.
He could move now, as long as he did not open his eyes. He squirmed backwards until his shoes hit the wall of his office then he twisted around and opened his eyes, looking into the darkness of his office. He pushed himself to his knees after taking a knob of glass from one palm and crawled around the counter and into the back room. The radio was still playing. Gregory crawled right to the back and then tried to stand. He swayed for a moment and could not focus then the world stilled itself. The blue light was blinking on the transceiver and Gregory’s ears still rang with the shots. His hands shook but he managed to set the controls. He pulled on the headset and visor and sat on the floor, panting. He knew the little satellite dish on the roof would be turning to the deep space repeater but he supposed no-one would notice it when there was the Range Rover and the bodies and all that blood in front of his garage.
A tone sounded faintly in his earphones and Gregory settled himself. All he needed to do was remember. Remember what happened when the Range Rover pulled up in the dust and the big man climbed out. Then what happened. Then exactly what happened. He just had to have it straight to send it back, to send it now, to receive it then.
Gregory’s people, known to the Council of Elders in Colinton as the Ziffitos, were an oddity. As an early species they were expected to flourish and should have, except for a nagging tendency to fall away at crucial times. In their Quadrant other advanced species made treaties with the Ziffitos to advance territory and trade but agreements that seemed clear one year were disputed the next, then abandoned with more bewilderment than anger.
While other species advanced through technology, conquest or cooperation, the advance of the Ziffitos was harder to chart. Their highly unusual abilities to interface mind with storage and communications devices meant learning and communicating was much more rapid than for other species, but there was little evidence these abilities had positive outcomes for their species, spread across the galaxy thinly in small family groups, with little interaction with other families or other species.
The Ziffitos were the only species able to interface with a tachyon particle generator. When accelerated ions collided with a compressed gas of indium antimonide in magnetic suspension the resulting burst of tachyon particles was unable to be predicted by any species’ technology. The process was only accessible by the Ziffitos with their massively parallel cognitive processes linked directly to wide input and output gates that coded the tachyon emissions as binary data. The data was broadcast in all directions from the one signal but was unable to be channeled either in direction or time.
The tachyon signals were not attached to space time. A file header was sent simultaneously with the message fragments. A file footer checked that the fragments that were trawled and arranged according to the header address file were ordered correctly. The data file once sent was always available in the past, up to the space/time the message was sent. Data could not be sent to the future as there was no future available, but the space/time could be set for the future, with an open address. The transceiver that sent the file would checksum the space/time date and load it for use when the dates matched. A file sent from Colinton, Earth in 2009, was always available to a transceiver from the date the first transceiver was created, operational and accessed by a trained Ziffito.
Gregory’s memories were not as sequential as a human’s, due to complexity of his neural pathways and their pattern matching. While he tried to keep the events since the Range Rover came into Colinton orderly – a series of images, sounds and understandings – he knew that the message itself would contain much more.
Gregory could hear a truck starting at the shops. They would be coming up to see what was wrong at his garage. He could almost hear voices. He adjusted the headset and asked the hair-thin cables find their corresponding data ports at the base of his hair line on the back of his neck. The smart fibres organized themselves and plunged into the chipset below the skin where they glowed pale blue and started to send billions of packets of digital data as light stutters first to Gregory’s cerebral cortices then with the header to the transceiver.
The transceiver headset assisted Gregory to focus by dampening other stimuli, lowering ambient light and sound received and minimising nervous sensation through the skin. Suddenly, essential functions of breathing and heart-rate became louder, central to Gregory’s mind. This would be the background to the transmission and could not be edited out. A flare of doubt came to Gregory – what exactly would he record? He stifled images that rose unbidden to mind and imposed a vast black wall to block his fears.
There was no point remembering the blinking light before the Range Rover came into Colinton as that was the message he was now recording. He did not receive the message just minutes before but … Gregory slid away from that scenario as it was profitless. He had received messages before. He hated every one of them, but he had received them and acted on them. Perhaps that was why he was now living in Colinton, alone, he reflected.
He focused on the task at hand and stated his code word to begin the recording ‘Burrow’. He imagined the word in red letters on a black background, glowing and brilliant. Above him on the shelf the transceiver’s single diode glowed a pale green and the recording began.
He sat again on the wooden chair with the tattered red cushion by the counter, looking out through the dusty window at the main road into Collinton. Something was on the radio. He tried to remember the song but it was lost and instead he found fragments of hundreds of other songs, with memories about them, flashes of images associated with hearing them, the taste of the food he was eating when the song came on. Even songs he never heard himself - other songs from ancestors, songs to dance to, songs to sleep, songs to make love … He blanked out the radio and began again, looking out the dusty window at the road and here came the Range Rover.
Gregory was tempted to open his eyes and check the colour and the license of the Range Rover but he did not. It did not matter, that sort of detail. Then he remembered trying to authenticate other details, from other messages. But it was not Gregory, it was his grandfather, sending a message to his father before raising a weapon to his face and letting the power source heat up … Gregory blocked that memory and focused on the Range Rover, running too fast round the corner … and he remembered riding on a GravLev train with his father on another planet, the tilt and lean and the smell of hot, synthetic air.
Reeling, Gregory sucked back the memory and focused on only the visual memory of the Range Rover, skidding to a halt before the garage and the big man climbing down out of his seat. What he did, what he said, the way he slammed down the bonnet and then his wife spoke. No, and then Gregory remembered the dog’s ears above the back of the front seat … and he remembered his own dog and the way it died from a paralysis tick … and Gregory had never even taken him to the veterinarian in Peakview … and he pulled himself back to the big man at the back of the Range Rover, pulling out the rifle from the pack, no, the shotgun, and loading it and shooting the dog and then watching his legs from the ground as the big man walked around to shoot his wife. Gregory was almost positive that this was a true, accurate and whole memory. Then the big man was back at the boot of the Range Rover and reloading the shotgun and then the last shot and the gun hitting the dust and then the trunk of the man collapsing beside it and the red mist over the broken glass.
Gregory said, “Okay, okay!” aloud and focused in his mind’s eye on his code word, red lettering on black background. This was the file footer to mark the end of the transmission. The optic fibres faded down to transparent and writhed themselves out of the back of Gregory’s scalp. Gregory heard a large diesel engine drawing closer and he smelt the blood that he noticed had stained his right sleeve. Other sensations came back as he sat on the floor of his office. Gregory pulled off the headset and grabbed the edge of the counter to haul himself up to the shelf, his knees creaking and his back sore. He had only been recording for half a minute and there was a Toyota Land Cruiser utility driving up the dirt, residential road from the shops to his garage, coming to check what was happening. There were three men in the front of the Land Cruiser and only one of them was a Exile. The others were human.
Gregory set the transmission status to twenty minutes earlier and pressed the inlaid button. The display diode changed from a pale purple to a dull brown. Twenty minutes ago, it started to blink an insistent pale blue.
Gregory sat near the rack of fishing maps and guides to the lake country. There was a cup of tea to his right that was undisturbed since breakfast. He looked down across the garage driveway to the main road into Colinton and up from there to the Country Club Motel along the long row of pine trees to the left. The old Sanyo radio was playing a naggingly familiar song with the top notes making the plastic packets of fuel caps buzz just a little. There was a blowfly walking back and forward on the window sill, battering its big head here and there against the glass stenciled with spare parts brands. Gregory thought about throwing out the tea and making another cup but it was very hard to move. With the fan running around with a low murmur above and the main road to watch, there was very little Gregory needed to do and that suited him just fine. The best times were when all the voices were still and no-one came for petrol, which was much cheaper down the road and past the town, anyway. That was what Gregory liked about SnowFM, in summer they just didn’t care and put on all the same songs that the tired, old DJs liked. SnowFM played requests on work day afternoons. Gregory had never phoned in a request, although he thought about it sometimes. He would ask for the most popular song so when it was his choice, he would not even know.
Zuffitos did not brand their technology even though it was made by competing companies. The transceiver on the shelf in the back room had no name, just a number, in binary. Even if it broke down there would be no one to call to fix it. Gregory hoped it would break down but the terms of his sentence in Colinton meant he had to leave it running.
The transceiver was tuned to local conditions in Colinton and some of the Council’s support staff placed the dish on the roof of the Mobil garage. Solar powered and super-conductive, all files were available from the day Gregory was installed in his garage so twenty minutes before it was sent the transceiver rechecked the header file and timer and then displayed a blinking blue light on the front panel. From the corner of his eye Gregory saw the steady blue blinking and shifted his chair around slightly to avoid it. Even though it was bright daylight outside, the window glass gave him the ghost of the pale light and Gregory tuned his eyes through to the Motel, the gentle slope of the hill beyond and the highway from Peakview.
“What rough beast wants me for dinner?” Gregory said and lifted the cold tea to his lips, seeing a drowned insect floating in brown liquid. He put back the cup and trained his sight on a horse grazing on the hill beyond the Country Club. Sometimes Gregory talked to himself. He was brought up in a large family, trained as a ceramic engineer during military service and immediately raised a family when married. He was used to voices – there were no end of voices for Zuffitos – so he responded to worry with talk. Sometimes that kept the other voices away.
“You see, if you want dinner in Colinton I’d recommend the RSL just over there,” he said and nodded to the long, white building over the road. “That’s where I eat, mostly. They’ll leave you alone at the RSL. That’s what I want, to be left alone.” The blue light blinked and Gregory went on.
“So, here are some choices: that’s a message I don’t need to receive; or it’s a message I need to receive and I ignore it; or I take the damn message. But if I do that then I’ll have to do something about it. And then it’s not just me, it’s the whole family, then they’re so charged up that they all offer advice, then they tell me how I should have done better and how disappointed they are, or were, or will be, or some other temporal manifestation of dissatisfaction.”
“Why, if that’s a message from … say, my grandson saying all is forgiven, then wouldn’t that me dandy? Well it might be dandy if it weren’t for all his memories and feelings and feeling him with his wife and his love for his grandmother so strong and so true because she’s such a wonderful Zuffito …”
“Or maybe its from grandmother herself. I’m forgiven and can come home. So, how far in the future would that come from? Another forty years, another hundred of these long, dry Earth years? You have to be kidding, as they say here.” He laughed and looked about the little office of the Colinton Mobil garage. “And just maybe I don’t want to be forgiven and come home to those ample breasts?” He chuckled. “Sure, as if I wouldn’t go home.”
He thought to himself: maybe I pick up the call and I listen and I act on it. Maybe it is to go home but when I get there I disgrace myself again, I walk out on my lovely bride Brod and they banish me again, then they put me out here again for another hundred and fifty Earth years but Brod takes pity again – she was always merciful – yes, sure! So they give me another chance and they call me again and this is the second call. Or maybe it’s the third time I have been forgiven, or maybe the hundred and twelfth. Can you imagine how many voices, how many stupid, pathetic, angry, loving, forgiving and furious voices will be in my head then? Or have they already had them? Is this number one hundred and thirteen? He thought to himself and then stopped himself thinking. The blue light blinked, palely, in the speckled glass of the service station window.
If anyone walked past they would see that blinking light in the back room and they might say to Gregory, ‘What’s that light back there?’ and Gregory would say, ‘Oh that thing, that’s just a whole heap of rubbish from other peoples’ heads in the future, calling in as usual to tell me how I have ruined the family but because they love me … I am forgiven. What do you think, should I answer?’
He stopped himself thinking again and then asked, ‘Who is thinking that?’ An incision of cold fear sunk into his bowels and twisted itself.
“How much of me is left to answer?” he asked the garage sales counter with its old fashioned cash register and its speckled Ford and Holden key rings and even the little snow dome replica of the Big Trout.
Gregory started to gag. There was something caught in his throat. Maybe he had swallowed that little fly from the tea cup?
“But what if it is Brod, and I can go home? What if she has forgiven me?”
SnowFM was playing a Neil Young song, or maybe it was Dylan, Gregory always mixed those up, and he placed the tea cup back in its yellowing saucer and stood. He took a pace to the back room and then swayed, his right shoulder turning of its own volition to the shop entrance.
A Zuffito in disgrace was expected to answer any and all calls in the hope that one may be redemption and a return to the home system. That was the idea, at any rate. In Gregory’s experience before his exile most of his species hated their transceivers and most deserted the home system for remote homes and lives. Why not walk out the front door, flicking the sign over to ‘Back in 10 Minutes’ on his way out? He could walk across the road to the RSL and buy a double rum and coke from Peta, sitting in front of the cable sports channel to pass away the afternoon? There would be no blinking blue light then. They would leave him be, until the meat tray raffles started in the early evening.
Then Gregory remembered sitting in the shielded cabin of a ship moving between moons. There was a vidscreen with colour shift adjusted images of an asteroid belt moving into a flame orange dust cloud hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, in the vast black of space. He remembered feeling the relief that he was alone, felt the numb cold of a dose of Memquel and a prayer repeated, ‘Just stay out, just stay out …’
It was not his memory. It was an ancestor. Gregory’s thought of the RSL and the drink brought back someone else’s memory of a drugged-up flight from the home system and just another Zuffito trying to stop the voices in his head.
“Was that you, grandfather?” Gregory asked. There was no reply and the vision faded. Gregory went to the door and flipped the sign. He grasped the door handle but did not leave. Instead, he dragged himself back into the cooler dark of the back office and sat in the plastic chair, settling the transceiver headset over the back of his head and sliding the visor down over his eyes. “Was that you, grandson?” Gregory asked himself.
A minute and a half later Gregory slid up the visor and commanded the smart fibres to uncouple from his ports. He understood why the message was sent. He could feel the pain from the glass in his hand, he could smell the shotgun smoke and the blood in the air. He could taste his own fear. His heart was only now rising to join the memory of his future, the pounding in his ears from the message, the panting and the rasp in the throat. All of that was immense, it was a solid block of pain and fear and urgency but it was like he had swallowed it, almost as if it were medicine, a giant pain to be taken to induce immediate fear and anguish. It worked.
Worse still were the other fragments. In a way, the urgent message was only a minor part of the file. The other shards of memory were not to be dealt with now, they were the side-effects of the pill. They were long lasting, they were life-long. They settled into main memory and took root, they became part of Gregory. They added to Gregory and they diminished him. Each new memory made less Gregory, less self and more Other.
“So, what if I had gone to the RSL for a drink? What if I hadn’t taken the damn call?”
If he had gone out and left the garage closed then the Range Rover would not stop there, it would careen around, probably down to the Shell garage on the other side of town. Would the big man shoot his wife and dog, then blow his own head apart at the Shell? This was known as wetastlosjemaner in Zuffito and was translated as UVS or Unending Valueless Speculation in English, well known to the only species able to use the tachyon transceiver. Gregory shook his head clear. He stood up and made his way to the door. His feet felt leaden. He noticed that he needed to breathe and coughed for air. His hand shook as he turned the notice on the door around to Open.
And then there it was. A big car rose above the horizon on the hillside but all Gregory felt was a dislocation as the memory slid over the actuality. It was not a neat fit as the memory did not quite match – like a superimposed, slightly blurred image or a double exposed image – the memory of the Range Rover a shiny blue while the actual Range Rover was a dusty white. But which was real?
The Range Rover was traveling fast from the east. It took the last corner too fast, then swerved off the paved strip and hit the pale dust of the side road up to the old school. Gregory could see a large figure at the wheel and beside him a woman. The radio was now playing Neil Young and ‘Helpless’. The Range Rover came at the garage and when the brakes kicked in the nose of the truck nodded down and then settled back. A thin cloud of dust rose towards the doorway and then died in the heat. Gregory looked down at his hands, still shaking. In his memory he did not look at his hands. He almost saw both actions and again he felt physically sick.
Then he felt his great-grandfather’s memory of staggering, heat-exhausted in a vast and alien jungle with two moons visible in a violet sky between the overarching boughs.
Grergory blinked away the memory and strode out to meet the big man. He forgot his oily rag, the stage prop for a country mechanic. The bonnet of the Range Rover popped.
“I should have given myself more time to get ready,” Gregory said. “Or I should have answered the call earlier.”
“What?” the big man asked.
“What?”
“You were talking to me?”
The big man stood with his hands on his hips only two paces from Gregory. He did not wait for an answer but turned to open the bonnet. “You’re the mechanic?” he asked over his shoulder.
Gregory did not know what to say. The memories were running around. His vision was jumping and the sunlight was burning into the side of his face.
“I said, are you the mechanic?” The big man’s voice was cold and hard. He wanted to hurt someone.
“Choose me,” Gregory said. The afternoon light was boring straight into his right eye. He had to raise a hand to shield his face. He squinted and felt a slow, warm trickle of blood start from his nose. The same thing had happened when he received his last message.
The big man wiped his hands on his pants even though they were not dirty. He turned to face Gregory. “Is there a mechanic here or am I just wasting my time, again?”
Gregory felt his father’s memories. The old man was old and frail when Gregory was exiled. He left his living will as a long and complicated testament to his life, a tradition for millennia amongst Zuffito males, received by tachyon transceiver in Gregory’s twelfth year in Colinton, his thirteenth year of an indefinite period of punishment. His father had passed on a good deal: his philosophy of life, his religious beliefs, his strategies for business success, his passion for aquatic lifeforms but above all, perhaps unintentionally, he passed on brief bursts of pure contempt for Gregory, the only one in his family’s long history to be exiled. If his father’s feelings could be distilled down to a command for Gregory it would be ‘Shrivel to nothing and disappear’. His father had temporary custody of Gregory’s mind and then was gone.
“For God’s sake,” the big man said. He slammed down the bonnet with one meaty hand and was turning to leave.
“Wait!” Gregory almost screamed. The big man turned, planting his feet with puffs of dust. Gregory stepped forward and held out his hand. “Gregory Benfill,” he said eagerly.
The big man was undecided then shook his hand reluctantly. “Andrew Rankin,” he said and looked past Gregory at the tired old garage office and the empty car bay and hoist. “So you’re the mechanic.”
“You don’t need a mechanic,” Gregory said.
“What do you mean?”
Gregory was floundering. He waved his arms about and when he spoke little droplets of saliva flew at the big man, who stood with his head to one side, frowning. “What I mean is … it’s the exhaust manifold.”
“What the hell is an exhaust manifold?”
“This model has a new type. I heard it as you drove in. You don’t need the bonnet. Can you open the boot, please?”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s an adjustment you can make, only takes a few seconds, there’s a control on the inside …” Gregory skirted around the big man and started for the back of the car. He could not help but look up into the cabin. Andrew’s wife was not looking at him. She was reaching into the glove box. Reaching for her mobile phone?Gregory swung his gaze to the back and saw the dog’s head appear above the window. “Could you pop open the luggage compartment, please? Only take a few seconds,” he apologized, “No charge.” He decided to try to grab the shotgun and then …do something, anything with it. Smash it?
“There are no controls for the exhaust in the back” the big man said, trailing after Gregory suspiciously. “I know this vehicle. There’s nothing there.”
“You’ve only had it for a short time, you missed it.”
“How did you know that?”
There was no handle on the outside to open the boot. “Would you mind opening it?”
Andrew looked undecided and then called to his wife, “Jane, open the boot will you. Just open the damn boot! This guy thinks it’s the exhaust.”
“You’ve got the keys,” Gregory said. “In your pants pocket.”
“You’ve got the keys,” Jane called from the front.
Andrew patted his pocket and pulled out the keys. The dog in the back seat was looking back at Gregory. She looked doubtful, waiting for command. The dog wanted to do something, anything. Andrew jabbed his thumb down on a button and the fuel flap opened. He swore and pressed another button and the bonnet popped. “That’d be right today,” Andrew said. “Every bloody thing going wrong.” Then the boot opened. The dog had both paws on the top of the seat. “Stay!” Andrew called to the dog.
Gregory heaved open the door and reached straight in. He grabbed a leather suitcase and pulled it out. He dropped it at his feet.
“Careful!” Andrew said.
“Bit late for you to talk about careful,” Gregory said. There was a LV case with a cream handle and below that a long, narrow leather case. Gregory yanked out the suitcase and threw it behind him. It spilt Jane’s clothes into the gravel.
“Get out of there!” Andrew yelled. He reached in and grabbed Gregory’s shoulder with one hand.
“You don’t understand,” Gregory said. He grasped the shotgun case and clutched it to his chest. “We have to change things. There’s no other choice.”
Andrew let go of Gregory and took a pace back. “Right,” he said. He called to his dog, “Freya, take him!” and he pointed at Gregory who stood with the oiled leather shotgun case clutched to himself.
The Springer was over the back seat and leapt from the Range Rover, aiming for Gregory’s arms in a trained maneuver. Gregory just had time to move and felt the dog’s teeth biting through his shirt into his upper arm. The dog held on and Gregory nearly dropped the case. He raised his knee but could not hit the dog. He jigged around in a lopsided dance and Andrew stood watching then said, “Freya, get him!” He was enjoying it.
Gregory felt the dog lose grip then reset her jaws in his flesh. For a fleeting moment he wondered if his treatments to look human covered tetanus. Then he remembered someone else’s pain, some sort of laser slicing through layers of skin in an ancient skirmish. Gregory was pulled off balance and held the shotgun case over his face to protect himself from the dog which darted around trying for his eyes and throat as he writhed on the ground. The woman, Jane, climbed down from the front and was calling Freya off but Freya could not hear. Andrew was laughing. This was exactly what he needed after all the crap of the day, of the whole stupid week, of the last year since he remarried.
The dog bit Gregory wherever it could, and he felt the teeth pierce his shoulder, rip at his knuckles, snap into the flesh over his chest and then release. It was drooling and there was blood on its muzzle. Its little tail wagged furiously. Jane was reaching down to grab the dog’s collar and Gregory watched her, so he missed Andrew walking up beside his head.
“Hey,” Andrew said in a low voice. Gregory just turned his head a little and saw the RM Williams boot swinging forward. It connected with his jawbone and he felt it dislocate. There was blood in his mouth.
Jane let the dog loose and called, “Andrew!” She could not stop either of them. The dog darted forward and seized onto Gregory’s leg and Andrew kicked again, striking the top of Gregory’s head as he flinched away.
“Let go of my shotgun,” the big man said.
Gregory tried to say ‘Never’ but his jaw would not work so he gurgled instead. There were calls from down the road, near the shops.
“Choose me, choose me,” Gregory thought. “Just stay out, stay out,” his grandson said. “Shrivel to nothing,” his father said.
Andrew’s left boot connected with Gregory’s mouth in a short jab. Teeth came loose. Jane was clawing at Andrew to take him away. The dog was deep in the flesh of his calf and growling. Curiously, the dog bite hurt much more than Andrew’s kicks with his pointed leather boots. Gregory could not see much through one swollen eye. The shapes were blurred and liquid. A car down the road was starting up. There were the calls of men, moving closer.
As he fell into unconsciousness Gregory commanded his arms to lock over the shotgun case. He was not sure if all humans had this ability but remembered one of the Council telling him it was possible to command human body parts. He thought he must have been kicked in the throat, or perhaps the dog had finally found the throat as he was having trouble swallowing his blood. No, the dog was still locked on his leg, he could feel its teeth grind.
As usual with an Exile, Gregory was not taken into Peakview and the hospital but instead was seen by the human doctor in the surgery on Stewart Street. The doctor discussed the case with a Councillor and then he went to his home for dinner. Help was called in and some new body parts moulded onto the smaller Zuffito form and then the senses connected. Gregory awakened with teeth in new positions and hands that did not quite match.
In the interests of all concerned Andrew, Jane and Freya were allowed to leave Colinton by the local police, one of whom was a Councilor. The shotgun was pried from Gregory’s rigid grip and destroyed immediately as no weapons were allowed in Colinton, for very good reasons.
As the Range Rover headed off to the west to a dinner appointment with friends on a fine beef property Andrew and Jane had little to say to each other. Jane was driving, feeling content and safe. Andrew was happy to be a passenger and he listened quietly to SnowFM playing requests. He felt happy to be married to Jane and noted how capably she handled the new car. He hoped she would drive more often. He reached over and placed a hand on her knee. She glanced across to him and smiled.
Freya, in the back, had not been modified in the police station, but she was also happy. Her master was pleased with her and the blood around her muzzle tasted like a sort of victory.
Gregory was dropped back to his living quarters behind the garage. It was dark and the night insects were running through their calls. He had neither the appetite nor inclination to walk over to the RSL and anyway, the decent thing was to stay indoors for a few days to let any human who had seen the beating think he was recovering. There was no formal interview with the Colinton Council. They knew enough to leave Zuffitos alone.
They left Gregory, or the reduced Gregory, or the enhanced Gregory to his quiet house, his television and his memories.
Ahearne, J. (Director). (2005).'Father's Day'. Doctor Who. Series 1, number 8. Written by Paul Cornell. BBC Video, DVD Version.
Costo, O. (Director). (1996). 'In Dino Veritas'. Sliders. Written by Steve Brown. SciFi-Channel. Aired 04/26/96. Episode 17. Season 2, number 8.
Stevens, A. & Moore, F. (n.d.) 'Doctor Who: Father's Day'. Magic Bullet Website. Originally published in Celestial Toyroom Issue 327. Retrieved 18 September, 2006 from http://www.kaldorcity.com/features/articles/father.html
Readings and links: |
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Notes from Wikipedia on Doctor Who and the origin of the Time Lords |
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Wikipedia notes on Doctor Who |
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Wikipedia notes on the Sliders series |
Further readings and links: |
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'Time's Arrow' by Arthur C Clarke |
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'A Sound of Thunder', by Ray Bradbury |
| Complete text of 'All you zombies' by Robert Heinlein | |
| Complete text of 'By his bootstraps', by Robert Heinlein | |
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ends
| enemy within | brave new world | fate and predestination | the shape of things to come | ghost in the shell |
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