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| Years went by. Everyone was ready for the
aliens to land. The antenna’s were cocked like pig’s ears
waiting for the sound of food in a dish. The landing pads were paved
and brightly dotted with arrows, the satelites were poised, positioned
in neat sequences between the Sun and Saturn. Everyone was ready. Yet the skies were silent, softley quiet and gently twinkling as the far off bands of microwave and radio waves crashed upon the wide open metal ears of the kingdom with nothing to say. Years went by. Soon people began to speculate. Conspiracies were strung together like beads. ‘The nobility, the rich governor’s, the nuns, the newsboys - they were all connected, they were all in on it”, the Common Folk muttered late into the night, blowing the foam from their pricy mugs of froth. They rumored that at this very minute the castlefolk were deciphering messages from the aliens and not sharing the wisdom discovered, or they were currrently examining the bodies of the aliens and not sharing their miraculous cures. Likewise the Nobility began murmuring that rebellion factions had taken root in the kingdom, developing technology funded privately that far exceeded the Kingdom’s means. Spy agencies were set up and everyone listened carefully. Meanwhile King Ed blissfuly sunk into an inconspicuous position, everyone being so busy with waiting for aliens and spying on each other. He lolled about the castle, let him hair grow long, made friends with the birds and generally had the best time of his life since becoming King. Ten years went by and then another ten and everyone was ready and waiting. Different ridiculous factions welled up, grew stong, fought against each other and won or joined together. Factions who felt the aliens had to be green, knowing what they knew from their blurry satellite photos fought visciously against those who felt certain the aliens would glow and be translucent and would not have any colour. Otheres were convinced the lower bandwidths of the microwaves contained secrets in that low binary hum and that one wasn’t listening hard enough if they couldn’t hear that distant hello contained therin. They were met by ferocious opposition by those who felt it was the middle bandwidth that contained the pertinent messages. Still others argued, “In my lifetime the aliens will explain gravity in a different way”, or “In my lifetime the aliens will land and they’ll be flea sized and polite”, or “in my lifetime the aliens will decipher the languages that sound like a mouthful of rocks across the border and they will make it beautiful and we’ll alll understand one another” or ‘In my lifetime the aliens will land and they will be green and have big eyes, or they will be tall and thin the colour of honey, or they will points of light that speak through your mind, or they will be insect-like with scales on their tails, or they will not be friendly, or they will start wars between us and burn our villages and steal our children, or they will teach us how to live in peace, teach us how to achieve our position in the universe”. The aliens landed eventually. It was King Ed’s seventy second birthday. Turns out they were there all along, much to King Ed’s surprise, just waiting to determine whether or not to get involved. Like newcomers to well going party, where everyone is drunk and picking fights and kissing each other, the newcomer hugs the wall looking for a familiar face before stepping in. And when the aliens landed, many, many people lost their minds because they thought they knew what to expect, they had bickered about it for so long. They were so sure of their imaginings. But their imaginings, like anything created within the kingdom, were steeped in everything they experienced in their little lifetimes. The aliens were from an entirely different kingdom, far away from anything anyone had ever seen or heard or felt and therefore turned out to be something noone thought of. Something so unlike anything anyone could possibly imagine. Completly undescribeable and unknown. Within no time the entire Kingdom went mad. They went so stark raving mad that even King Ed couldn’t understand their blubbering and hollering. King Ed setting a festive straw hat upon his head and picking a bouquet of the finest wild flowers he could find set out to meet the aliens. His heart leaped at the prospect of getting some exotic soap. He found they were quite freindly and more than polite. He couldn’t, even using the wildest words he had at his disposal, ever describe to anyone what the aliens looked like. The closest he could come to is that they looked something like a poem. A lovely dinner was spread out and eaten whole heartedly by all and together King Ed and the aliens agreed upon a course of action to right the kingdom back into it’s self-assured ridiculousness. The aliens gave him a time machine to go back to the point in time where he gave his speech concerning spaceships and aliens, the speech that originally got everyone so rialed up and hopeful. So there King Ed stood on the balcony, looking down at the blur of faces below and announced his discovery of a time machine. There was no way he could not discuss the Time machine as he was standing in it, having arrived that way on the balcony. Within no time the Nobility and the Common Folk were completly fired up about time travel and it gave everyone a renewed sense of hope and faith in the world. Again King Ed shook his head in disbelif. Was there nothing he could do that would disuade the masses from having him lead them into a bright future. Aliens, time machines, no matter what craziness he touted as real, the people continued to beleive in him. All he wanted was quiet afternoons in the flowerbed but instead was continually called upon to preceed over a number of legal battles concerning time travel in the castle’s court. Time travel was legalized before the first rabbit sent through the machine ever returned. This allayed the conservative nobels who argued that if time travel were not legalized time would become a black market commodity. Scenarios such as $10,000 for one minute of real time travel, or time runners controlling the market by bidding high on products meant to sell low and vica versa, or spies infiltrating during old and prominent wars, divulging secrets learned far into the future and irrevecably changing the winning sides philosophies - these were just a few of the concerns lobbied in the King’s parlour. Nonetheless time travel was legalized and the fumbled and the botched lined up with knarled fists of money, cheese, real time watches - anything sellable in the King’s market. One by one they bought their tickets and one by one they stepped through the time machine to return to key points in their personal histories in hopes to change the course of their future. Not one of them returned. This was partly due to their not being a return mechanism built into the time machine, at least not one that anyone could figure out. The rational held sway that these people had to find their own way home and perhaps solve the problem for the castle’s Cheif Thinkers. A larger problem was overlooked and discovered by those that tavelled through time. Many people had to estimate the point in time they wished to return to. Although many knew the key event they were trying to get to, few could remeber the exact time and date of the event. So many of these sorry travelleres returned far too early and had to spend months waiting for the event, trying not to run into themselves as this proved to be endlessly confusing and required a long convaluted conversation in which both past and present selves stormed away from one another. Many more travellers overestimated and returned to a point in time beyond the key event they were trying to arrive at and were stuck trying to talk themselves out of it. Those lucky travellers that estimated correctly and arrived in the knick of time found they couldn’t quite remember the sequence of events leading up to the key point and spent hours running about, trying to track down the right people before the event. In these instances they unavoidably ran into themselves and botched up with a gross amount of confusion and chaos, turning the event into an even greater disaster. In all cases the events that these people tried to prevent through time travel happened anyway and happened with even more dire reprecussions. This turned the future, that King Ed was in some way responsible for, into a mad unhappy time. The people were so fed up with time travel and the concept of time in general that a rebellion against time ensued. There were clock burning sessions, calendars were used as toilet paper, the course of the stars were spat upon, sun dials were outlawed, egg timers were pulverized, stopwatches were scrambled and the time machine was blown to pieces with three well placed sticks of dynamite. All in all it was complete chaos and to ask someone for the time was similar to insulting their mother - it just wasn’t done. For forty years almost, a whole generation of Common Folk and Nobility grew up in the time of no time. King Ed, nearing his seventy second birthday, stroked the flowers in his beard and picked at the loose threads in his trousers as he sat inside a small room just off the balcony. “What a miserable mess”, he thought. Although he was the only one who knew the whole story. With everyone having gone mostly insane throughout his reign, what with aliens, the time machine and the time rebellion, he was the only soul to have survied unscathed, as he was quite mad to begin with anyway. There finally came a general consenses that time was needed, or at least some kind of clocking mechanism set up as everyone was working long days and eating at all hours. Calendars were studied, wisemen went blind tracking the path of the sun through magnifying glasses, sticks were stuck in the sand at random intervals, their shadows studied with scrutiny, yet noone could figure out what time it was. They tracked the stars, they mapped the planets, they counted stones at low tide but without the comparison to previous knowledge they were unable to assume time. Only one man knew. And he was dead, a chain of daisy’s around his neck, marigolds poking from him beard and a peaceful smile on his lips. And as far as anyone knew, he wasn’t telling anyone. |
At the foot of the Camel's Back Range in the BC interior, you might catch a glimpse of Nikki capturing relics & vistas in paintings, in words or through the camera lens. Her anthropological heart strings pull her along mountain passes, as she sleuths out histories on people/places to weave their stories. As well as working on "Sage Brush Country", a painted series in oil, she is the curator at a local museum. www.pembertonmuseum.org |
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