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I WOKE up the next morning with many questions about Enta—Valcas’ governess. Her evasiveness finally made sense to me. She had been protecting Valcas, but I didn’t know whether she did so out of love or loyalty. I looked forward to viewing more of the recordings inside the zobascope. Until then, I had more questions for Valcas about his governess.
I bathed and dressed for the day before leaving my suite. Valcas found me in the white hallway looking for him near additional doors leading inside the main house. He greeted me with a hug and asked whether I’d like to go for a walk with him along his favorite hiking trail. I agreed. Hand in hand, we walked toward the front entrance of the white tower.
The eighteenth door to our left from the front entrance led into a very clean wooded path. The trees along the path were made of a sterile material that was nothing like actual leaves and bark, although they were shaped correctly down to every detailed stem and leaf. The path itself was tiled with vinyl, in a faux stone pattern, with tufts of soft green carpeting on both sides. All of the colors were very natural, but there was no dirt or debris.
“Is this really a hiking trail?”
“Yes. It’s an indoor hiking trail with fabricated scenery. Take a look at the objects off in the distance. They’re very lifelike projections. And, it’s allergen free.”
“A hypoallergenic hiking trail—interesting.” I shrugged.
Valcas snickered. “What are you really interested in asking me about, Calla?”
I cast him a sideways glance. “How did you know?”
“Well for one, this hiking trail is not all that impressive. It’s just an excuse to get some exercise and spend time with you away from everyone else. You’re also terrible at making small talk, especially when you have a question on your mind.”
Unable to think of any reason to stall, I jumped right in and asked my most burning question. “What was your governess like?”
Valcas looked at me with surprise, clearly not expecting my question to be about Enta. “Nurse Vittor,” he replied. “Enta was her first name, but I never addressed her that way. She was a well-renowned nurse who had the aptitude to become a great scientist if she’d had the fortune of more advantageous connections. My parents welcomed Nurse Vittor into our home to take care of me as a nursemaid or nanny. Having displayed a sharp intellect and broad knowledge of subject matter, it was later agreed that she would stay on as my governess. She taught me well, but we never developed the usual student-teacher relationship. I was so used to calling her Nurse by then that it kind of stuck. She was very good with children. If she had children of her own, I never knew about them. Nurse Vittor had a knack for being secretive.”
Um, yeah, she’d certainly kept a lot to herself the entire time she’d known me. “Where is she now?” I asked, wondering why Enta wouldn’t have stayed at the white tower.
“I really don’t know. Nurse Vittor resigned from her position here at the tower after I started taking more advanced lessons from other instructors. We parted on good terms, but we lost touch and I haven’t seen her since. Some of the more gossipy servants relayed a story about how she’d fallen in love with an inventor she’d admired for a long time who was already married. She cared for him enough to not interfere with his marriage, but later learned that he’d isolated himself from his family. The inventor’s wife quietly divorced him and, since he’d been unresponsive to her requests made through her attorneys, he lost everything—his home, his land, his family. If all this was in fact true, then I wouldn’t be surprised that Nurse Vittor left here to try to find him. She and the inventor never ended up together, though. Word is that by the time she found him, he already had a new bride—his work.”
I gasped. The story and the people in it were too familiar to me. I wondered whether Edgar ever knew that Enta felt that way about him. They hadn’t reunited until just before he died, when she cared for him during the last days of his life. He died in her house and was buried in her yard. I shuddered. No wonder Enta needed time away from the homestead. She’d just lost the unrequited love of her life.
Valcas squeezed my hand. “I’m sure she’s doing just fine now, though. With her talents, in both science and discretion, I wouldn’t be surprised if she spent some time working for the TSTA.”
I frowned. Valcas hadn’t made the connection between Enta and his uncle Edgar. His past version had no idea what had just happened back at Enta’s homestead. Even if things had worked out between Enta and Edgar, I still didn’t understand the timeline. I frowned again as I tried to figure out Enta’s age. If Edgar was in his hundred and twenties when he died, then what did that make Enta? If Valcas was a teenager in the 1930s and was still a teenager in the twenty-first-century, and Enta looked to be in her mid-forties when she was tutoring Valcas... It didn’t make sense.
“Calla?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t tell what expression you’re making. You look thoughtful, but pained. I hope my story is not upsetting you in some way.”
“It’s a really sad story,” I said. “I’m also trying to work out some numbers in my head.”
“All right, I’m intrigued.” Valcas stopped walking and let go of my hand. He placed both of his hands on the sides of my head, his thumbs grazing my temples. “Where is your lovely mind going with this?”
“I just don’t understand how the aging process works and how it differs between this world and mine on Earth. I’m starting to lose track of time without knowing exactly what it is I’m supposed to be tracking. Does that even make sense?”
“It’s complicated, but one gets used to it. You, Nurse Vittor and I are all from worlds with different time schemes. Nurse Vittor and I were both born in different, much more futuristic worlds than Earth, and as a result, our lives and how we age are subject to how time is measured there instead of how it works on Earth.”
“You and Enta aren’t from the same world?”
“No, we’re not. She’s part of a much more distant future, so she ages even more slowly than I do. Calla? You look pale—well, paler, actually. Are you feeling sick?”
“A little,” I admitted as I caught onto Valcas’ arm and shoulder. “I feel dizzy.”
“Let’s find a place to rest.”
Valcas seated himself on a patch of plush green carpeting under a tree on the side of the trail. He opened a drawer that had been built into the tree. After pulling out a couple of throw pillows, he placed one on his lap so that I could recline while looking up at him. I didn’t know what made me feel more ill, the idea of other worlds with different time schemes or the fact that Valcas just pulled pillows out of a tree.
“Other worlds,” I murmured. I’d known that the white tower was a made-up place, but it hadn’t actually sunk in that this place and Enta’s homestead were so different, so far away.
Valcas placed his hand on my forehead and looked at me, half concerned, half confused. “Does this feel like Earth?”
I considered his question as I ran my hand along the velvety trunk of a nearby tree and looked up at its leaves of thick felt. “No, but a lot of it reminds me of Earth.”
I looked at Valcas. His father, Jim, was from Earth, but Sable was not. Did that make Valcas half alien? For how many Earth years would he continue to be a teenager? “How does it work here for a person’s age?” I asked. “There must be some kind of formula for conversion—you know, like people’s ages in dog years and vice versa.”
Valcas chuckled. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but I guess that makes sense. It has to do with how long the years are in each world, how many minutes are in a day, et cetera. But, Calla, the calculations are painfully boring. Let’s touch upon a lighter subject. Then maybe you’ll feel up to continuing our walk.”
“Okay, no formula explanations then. But, could you quickly calculate a few numbers for me? Please?”
Valcas traced my left cheekbone with his fingers, grazing along my jawline to my chin. “How can I refuse when you look up at me that way?”
I smiled, feeling the blood return to my cheeks. “Say, for example, it’s in the 1930s in England where your Uncle Edgar lives—you’re how old?”
“Seventeen.”
“Okay, so then what year was it on Earth when you were six or seven years old?”
Valcas thought for a brief moment, “It would have been in roughly the year 1030, something in the realm of 900 Earth years earlier.”
I gulped. One of Valcas’ birthdays converted to an entire lifetime of someone born on Earth. No wonder he looked the same age as me when I met him at the dock. He would be seventeen years old until sometime in the 2020s, when he would turn eighteen.
“But, how is that possible? You would have been born here before your father was born on Earth.”
Valcas nodded. “That’s because this is a future world, Calla. My father met my mother in another future world and traveled with her here. The timeline here at the white tower reset when I was born, having never followed the timeline on Earth and making it possible for my father to have already been born in his own world.”
He shook his head. “The part that my parents either failed to consider or chose to ignore is just how long my mother will outlive my father. In Earth time, he will be an old man in the late 1900s and early 2000s, whereas my mother will not be an old woman until the mid to late 6000s.”
“So, then it all depends on where you are born?”
“Yes. Where is much more important than when.”
I frowned. My blossoming fake relationship with Valcas felt that much more impossible. Even if he and I could be together, we’d be in the same situation as Sable and Jim. He would outlive me for thousands of years because my timeline was so much shorter.
“How old was Enta when she became your governess?” I asked, trying to move on to something less depressing.
“I remember her forty-second birthday from when I was a child. But remember, that would be in years according to her birth-world, which is about seventeen times farther into the future than my world is to Earth.”
“But, then—”
I felt a rising panic, a sudden pressure in my chest and in my head. I had no idea how old Enta was in the present, but I had a better idea of why Enta didn’t look anywhere near as old as Edgar. I hadn’t considered that part of my travels had been to the future. I’d always thought I was going to a different place in another’s past or present, not realizing that even though right now I was in Valcas’ past, I was actually far beyond my Earthly future.
Valcas smoothed out a couple of curls near my forehead. “I really didn’t think you’d be quite so squeamish about this subject. Maybe we should head back to the hallway and find some refreshments.”
“Okay. But, Valcas, how do you keep track? How does any regular traveler keep track of the years?”
Valcas frowned. “Unfortunately, many get lost.”