Alf

Putting a certain time travel dilemma to bed

(A version of this story appeared in Ban Fiction at Pornokitsch in 2017)

Time travel was invented twice. First, by the woman who burst into the lab of Rosa Maravu looking like her except older. She gave the young physicist a hand-drawn plan, sobbed, then disappeared. Rosa worked on this plan but also became convinced of something: her own indestructibility, at least till that point in her future when she’d travel back and hand the plan to herself. Quashing her nerves, she took to parasailing and was struck by lightning (tow cable sizzling to the boat deck in an exclamation mark). Time travel was invented by her lab partner, Maria Seini. It seemed the present was an ultimate point, forever unfurling. All that exists: the glacier of the past.

Travelling back the single hour she dared, Seini discovered that to reach the past you crossed what one of her would coin ‘timespace’, a sort of infinite gel. Though she’d taken a camera and held it tight, she arrived not only empty-handed but naked. And when she tried to travel back to the present, she got stuck in timespace, forever. Who knows how many millions of times a Seini drowned in gel till by some fluke of intuition one realised you couldn’t travel back, not even to the new future you’d made. The two remaining Seinis theorised that self-contained vessels might survive in timespace, and thus, set apart, conduct experiments on the past. It took a century for their theories to be put into practice — a century and a planet-wide gridlock of authority locking into place and tightening its final choke of the Earth.

At what point had this world been set on its path? A roundtable of three thousand thinkers boarded the Angelus Novus, which began its one-way voyage in the only direction possible. As the ship backtracked through timespace, they could see in its gelatinous wake the present bubbling into the future — see but not access. The moment someone disembarked at any point in the past, hence changed history, no point later than that moment could ever again be reached.

And history was the point. The ship’s motto: ‘What was the great mistake?’ Its mission: how to correct it.

Factions were split on the answer but united in their belief that most concepts were not eternal: humour, justice, even love — their occurrence depended on history. But other ideas did not need history to be achieved. Freedom, for one, was immanent; every member of the species knew, if not experienced it. The roundtable chose 1889 as the first point at which to try and crack this freedom out of the world.

The first team ended up in 1894, but near enough Passau to snatch a five-year-old in white ruff and socks from his screaming mother. The roundtable were responsible women and men; the infant was neither clubbed to death nor throttled in his crib but taken back to the ship and adopted. The embarrassed nickname his parents gave, ‘Alf’, was a makeshift contraction.

Alf heard stories throughout his childhood of what ‘he’ would’ve grown up to have done. But when he was twelve, his parents showed him recordings of what else they’d seen come to pass over the ship’s sides: the Mutter Deutschland movement, the implacable, alienatingly beautiful Frau Stroher, her cannier outfoxing of Stalin, and the world she made…

The abduction was the first thing Alf could remember; the rest the two decades on the ship, where mothers and fathers raised him turn by turn. The roundtable spent those decades choosing the disembark point of the next mission: a little before the previous time but at a different place. Alf, sceptical, nonetheless joined the team. As they crept the stony moors towards the Bosnian village his skin prickled at the thought that an infant of himself lay in a cot five hundred miles away, a shawled and crackling ball of potentials. Alf was the one to grab another baby and bundle it through the exit.

This abduction of a newborn was to be their last ever ‘kill’ mission. As Alf complained: “Why would taking one match away from dry forests baking for decades prevent a fire?” All they did was delay it — and worse. Equipped at its start with the technology of 1934, The Great War was truly the one to end all.

Unlike the rest of the crew, Alf was not dismayed. Seeing as the ship was near enough a closed system, babies were strongly discouraged, if not aborted. He now had a son.

Time-orphaned Gabriel he taught as well as he himself had been. But the crew’s good intentions aside, their time was taken by their experiments. Any children aboard were neglected — ordinary children but not above brandishing alternate-history books at the younger Gabe and calling him a “bomb-thrower”, “duke-killer.” Alf distracted his son with stories of real sunlight, open spaces. Finding them too abstract Gabriel restarted crying. So Alf explained, “Wielding power over others is childishness. It stunts you if you never grow out of it. They’re older than you but still children. What are you?”

This would be one Gabriel’s first best memories. Freedom and pity — the only eternal recurrences!

The roundtable circled a different faction to prominence, which argued that no removal of ‘great men’ could resist the mudslide of history. (“The bloodslide,” Alf joked.) Instead they sent a team of a dozen to 1648, a diplomatic mission from a fictitious principality, hoping to nudge the Peace of Westphalia away from nations and towards an older world, one without borders. Negotiations were still on their second day of introductory etiquette when the team’s exits to the ship stopped working.

At the loss of twelve crew-mates the roundtable had learnt the limit of how long anyone could stay in the past and hope to return aboard. Worse: nations and their armies still spread back through history in widening lanes from the sides of the ship. The roundtable had learnt as well how strangers could not initiate change, not in the brief time available, and especially not where the acceleration of history was too great. The Angelus Novus had to proceed to a time of less inertia.

The roundtable synthesised; they would no longer remove great men nor try to change ideas from the ground up; they’d influence the powerful to wield their power over others for better ends. When the next team disembarked in Clermont just before the 12th century, they used short-term predictions and non-too-witchy gadgets to pass as angels. They gained an audience with Pope Urban II. To him they pleaded that instead of the First Crusade he declare a Council of Accord, promise that eternal reward came not from slaying pagans but loving them, call for a Kingdom of Equals under heaven, and seal the commitment of the faithful by saying ‘God Wills It’. The Pope stroked his beard then threw the team into his dungeons. Alf, who knew the ship’s best look-out spots, saw the team burnt to ashes by the first inquisitors. ‘Equal ashes’, the Pope is said to have remarked.

The roundtable was running out of crew with which to correct the world; soon children were going on missions. They were running out of history, and in doing so, were running out of means to talk. Once the ship travelled 3000 years past Christ, the teams would be rendered effectively speechless. Unless they could figure out how to mime ‘free your people’ to Mesopotamian kings or hand-write cuneiform.

Marlon, the ship’s languages expert, asked the roundtable, “Why stop states being formed when we could halt — in exemplary fashion — the very notion of a nation?” It was Alf who made the clinching demurral: from the Pope disaster had they not learnt that persuasion was impossible? Any change in notions would have to come from a person themselves. Or seem to.

As the roundtable dispersed Marlon approached Alf. “If anyone can figure out how to achieve that it’d be you.”

Alf paid him little mind; Gabriel had taken to banging his head on the ceiling of their cabin when he was bored, to hardly sipping at his reconstituted food and drink. He no longer looked over the ship’s sides at the carnage but watched from forgotten portholes: a prone shepherd clutching his arm and chest to the dimming sound of bleats, in a clearing of his own flock; a baby boy crying in bilge as his parents swooned from hunger at the oars: the anonymous of history. It was in these watches Alf worked out how and why to help Marlon change the mind of King Alfred, and so avert the creation of England itself.

He could appreciate the shock of the Royal Hunt when their team disembarked. He’d read Maria Seini’s notes so often they’d become knitted into his own memory: how reality starts pinching backwards to a vanishing point; then dots appear on the point but don’t move; the dots become squat figures, jiggling up and down; draw closer, and with a violent yell your eyes and ears pop, and there’s the team in a naked pile on the floor.

They used up days making clothes from the forest then relocating the King. Alf had to guide Gabriel too, aged twelve but old enough to bulk out the team. Like his father, Gabe couldn’t remember anything beyond the Angelus Novus. The son threw himself into trees and brooks and would not stop smiling, Alf stumbling behind saying be careful please. It was he who found at the back of a mossy cave Good King Alfred cowering with a mud-flecked boy of his own, his son Edgar.

To them the team posed as druids, Alf speaking first in West Saxon as he flickered sunlight through a caterpillar-holed leaf. He reminded the blinking King of his past early days in villages with no Big Man where all goods were held in common; these in fact the roundtable’s soft-spoken stories of their former homes. Since these stories were memories, the betranced King imagined them so vividly he confused them with his own. Then he’d glance at Edgar - his past - and become confused.

Alf repeated the stories, changing a landmark here, a battle’s outcome there. The King’s correcting mind knitted these false memories with his real ones. But in doing so, it reminded him of his hard, bitter childhood.

The end of the week was nigh. Gabriel tried to tell his dad how unyellow the brook had been from where he’d fetched their water. Alf was stamping and thrashing from what to say next to persuade the King. Perhaps it was this hint of a life of fruitless work that made up Gabriel’s mind.

He went to tell his dad but Alf had finally found his means of persuasion. To the King and Prince he gave a long speech, fists clenched and pumping in unison like he was trying to secure a harness, voice cracking from love, a speech that contained his own past: childhood and fatherhood, the depth and variety of feeling he’d known and given aboard the ship, and how it’d taught him that the point of history was to end it.

Cautiously satisfied, the team were opening an exit when Gabriel made his announcement. Addressing his father he said he was going to stay behind.

Alf scoffed, uncleching a fist to take Gabriel’s hand. Gabriel reminded him he was officially no longer a child. Alf warned his Gabe that olde England wasn’t just forests and vales with squirrels leaping bough to bough from Penzance to John o’Groats. This speech, as cracked as Alf’s voice got, as hard as his fists milled, found no purchase, being based on history books and not on any living memory. Gabriel was unpersuaded.

As Alf was led away, backwards into the vanishing point, he cried, waving goodbye forever to his son. He hurried to look over the sides and in every porthole for him, for whatever ankle the boy would break which wouldn’t be mended right, for whatever septicaemia he might get from nicking a thumb. He saw the young man with moustaches like sycamore seeds, on his knees between a pair of druids, nose pinched to make him swallow black bumpy broth, before they gutted him and sorted through his fairy entrails for their own time travel.

Alf was little consoled when Freeman Alfred united this new England with his burhs, not fortresses but oases, placid and moderate havens called things like ‘middle burh’, ‘eden burh’, ‘scar burh’… Little consolation too when, sure enough, in a last frond of jelly foam, they saw those same burhs overrun by Frankish invaders.

Marlon said he’d learnt from his mistake. Alf listened bleakly to the man’s new theory of how to inspire in a new, that is older king a grail legend of a different sort: not a quest for Christ but peace, the true knight being the one who puts down arms and persuades others to do so, and so avoid that great mistake of war. Alf harangued the roundtable to instead send a team to the day before their King Alfred mission. They couldn’t form a consensus on the wisdom of intervening on their intervening; besides it’d only been a little mistake in the great scheme of things. They went with Marlon’s plan. That plan failed.

In those last, desperate times, the table turned to the fundamentalists. For them language itself was the mistake they had to undo, or tools, or fire, which had let humans cook meat and so travel less, settle more — let their fiery brains settle and go fat and wrong. One night Alf dreamed of that first ape who’d rubbed two sticks monomaniacally, till they began to smoke, only for one of their teams to come out of the underbrush with a bucket of water, douse the ape then jab a finger in its terrified face while saying, “No. No.”

Alf woke first by a long time. When the rest of the crew woke and looked over the ship’s side they didn’t see the disputed coronation of Charlemagne or the premature ascent of Baghdad; they saw unanimous wilderness, through which there half-loped the odd early hominid.

A note in Alf’s handwriting explained: he just wanted the bloodslide to end. “The roundtable will circle forever without ever admitting that the great mistake was ours.” The note continued: by the time they were reading it he’d have already disembarked then immediately exited back into the gel of timespace to forestall any further intervention. The note concluded with an offer:

“Before you move the ship farther again, remember: you could all disembark here, now. Start your own world, afresh, as you want it. Or don’t, and never get off, and let all of history roll out like it was always going to have done. I hope the memory of poor Gabriel will persuade you to the right choice.”

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