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WHITE LIGHT faded, revealing a grove of trees similar to those I’d seen when Calla traveled with us to Edgar’s Nowhere.
“Excellent,” I muttered to myself as I inspected the grounds. Pine trees, the silver brook, Edgar’s bizarre vegetation—seemingly well-tended—and a small workshop. All were there.
Remembering that there would be no impact from my arrival at Edgar’s workshop, I didn’t bother grounding. Instead, I removed my glasses from my face, made haste toward the workshop door and knocked. Through it rang an exclamation, the scrape of what sounded like a chair brushing along floor tiles, and then the shuffling of feet.
When the door opened, Edgar looked up at me over round spectacles and blinked. “Why, Valcas,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t expecting you. Do come in.”
The laboratory bled bottles and vials, heating devices, tables and chairs, everything an inventor needed to run his experiments.
“Please sit down,” he said, brushing tubing off a chair and onto a pile of rumpled lab coats. “To what do I owe this honor, Valcas?”
“I’m searching for someone. I need your help.”
Edgar stopped wringing his hands long enough to sit down beside me. “What about your parents? Are they not able to provide assistance in this matter?”
I swiped my forehead and swallowed, struggling to find the words. “My mother’s not fond of my current mission. And my father is dead.”
Edgar’s eyes grew glassy. “J—Jim, er, James...he’s gone?”
I nodded, placing my hand on his shoulder. “The good news is that his death has not yet happened in your time. I traveled back to your past just now, from the future.”
“The good news?” Edgar’s momentary gloom brightened. “The future! So, then, James currently lives?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank goodness, for I still have to thank him for my new surroundings. I must send a letter to him at once.” He gathered papers and writing tools that had been scattered across the table—loose pages of parchment, browned at the edges, some already rolled into tubes and tied with twine.
I winced as I watched him sort the materials into piles. Was Edgar already on his way to becoming lost? I knew nothing of my father helping out with Edgar’s workshop in the woods. Yet, it was not impossible. “Did my father build this place for you?”
Edgar looked out a window above his lab table. “The divorce is final.” He hung his head. “I avoided the paperwork because I wanted Elizabeth to take everything, so that Shirlyn will have something—when she’s free. I needed a place to work on my experiments in the meantime.”
“This is not an un-place?”
Edgar blinked. “An un-place? No, no. I live in a real place.” He looked around the room. “At least I think it is...right now.” He stepped to the kitchenette near the lab table and brought back a steaming pot and a mug.
I stared at Edgar, convinced that the Workshop in the Woods was a Nowhere, with the brook’s still silver waters. From what Calla had told me, vehicles of travel also didn’t change here—yet another sign of a Nowhere. There were Nowheres all over the worlds. Sometimes people stumbled upon them by accident. This happened in times of desperation or fear—when search terms became muddled. More advanced travelers, such as Ivory, could pull in physical elements from different places and times to create a Nowhere as a place of escape. Other times, un-places transitioned into Nowheres after the person or persons living there became lost. From there, the lost seemed to disappear, leaving their Nowheres behind. Where they went from there was anybody’s guess.
The transition from un-place to Nowhere was what Calla, Enta and I believed had happened to Edgar, here in this place that he was now telling me his brother, my father, had built for him.
I knew from experience that World Builders could create new, real places that expanded the Everywhere and Everywhen. Was it possible that World Builders could build Nowheres and un-places too? I hadn’t considered that an option. The thought was maddening, not to mention brilliant. My appreciation for my father grew stronger.
But that wasn’t why I’d traveled to the Workshop in the Woods.
Edgar poured a dark broth into the mug and nudged it toward me. I sniffed the liquid, and then sipped. It was terrible.
“The flavor comes from a particular variety of leaf I’ve cultivated over the years,” Edgar said. He frowned. “Many years...”
“Refreshing, thank you.” I covered my mouth and resisted the urge to push the mug to the side. “Edgar, I realize that you and I haven’t been close even though we are family. But I’ve always admired your work.”
Edgar paled. His lips trembled before pulling into a smile. “My work?”
“Yes, in the area of time travel. You’ve invented valuable technology—”
He beamed. “In the future?”
“Yes, the future.” I proceeded carefully, not wanting to reveal the invention of the travel glasses, surprised he hadn’t asked how I’d arrived. Perhaps mentioning my father’s death had distracted him more than I’d intended. “I’m unsure whether you had TSTA rules in mind during development, but you must have studied more about time travel theory than I have.”
“It is one of my favorite pastimes. What is it that you’d like to know?”
“What do you know about Daily Reminders left in the past?”
He sulked. “The past cannot and must not be changed, Valcas.” He stood up and squeezed his head with his hands. “A Daily Reminder led to my daughter’s imprisonment.”
I cringed, feeling foolish. Sometimes my insensitivity knew no bounds. I should have found a better way to bring up a topic that I knew involved Shirlyn.
“Had I done a better job of warning her,” he continued, “her present situation could have been avoided. It’s all my fault!”
“I apologize. I wasn’t trying to bring up painful memories. The reason I need your help also involves a Daily Reminder. Two of them, in fact.”
Edgar, visibly shaken, sat back down. “Have you been charged? There will be a hearing—”
“No. I had nothing to do with it, at least not my present-self. The hearing has already taken place. One of the two Daily Reminders no longer exists—I destroyed it myself.”
My uncle stared at me, speechless. “How do you expect me to help?”
“I need to learn more about the nature of Daily Reminders—the written accounts that implant memories in the minds of silhouettes, memories that never should have existed because they were untrue—nonexistent—in the silhouettes’ lifetimes.”
I motioned to sip the tea in front of me, then remembering how awful it was, abandoned that idea and looked up. “One of the Daily Reminders was left in my past, an item kept by my silhouette. I feel I know something of its existence. I remember having destroyed it at a TSTA hearing; but I can’t remember what it looked like or what it said.” I clenched my jaw, ready to admit something I’d never revealed to anyone. “I feel that even though the reminder has been destroyed, it has forever changed me—that the memory had meaning. It lives in me, despite the fact that I can’t remember it.”
Edgar covered his lips with both hands. “And it always will. You are changed. As I’ve said all along, the past cannot and must not be changed. Once the change has been made, it has always been. Even where and when the Daily Reminder has been destroyed, some remnant of its memory lives on. A silhouette of that memory remains in your heart.”
“Then the TSTA’s rule against the creation of Daily Reminders is a sound one. The TSTA knows that the reminder—the memory, change, whatever you want to call it—is never fully destroyed.”
“The question is whether it can be completely overwritten,” said Edgar as he sunk more deeply into his chair. “Even if a Daily Reminder were truly destroyed or overwritten, is what happened ever completely eliminated?”
“Where else would they be—the events that happened but are not remembered without a Daily Reminder?”
Edgar shook his head. “I assume the events become part of the Everywhen.”
Perhaps. I’d assumed only World Builders could expand the Everywhere and Everywhen, but at some level, everything one does and says, every moment that transpires, becomes part of place and time. I could accept that.
Still, I must have looked puzzled, because Edgar said to me, “Destroying a Daily Reminder doesn’t destroy the third memory, the one that’s most true.”
“Most true?”
“Think about it this way, Valcas.” He sipped a similar tea-like substance from a mug that had been set on the other end of the table. I tried not to imagine how bad the tea would taste at room temperature. “How many versions are there of any particular story?”
Always the teacher. I grinned. “It depends on how many observers there are and, also, the particular bent and prejudices of the storyteller.”
Edgar shot me a sly grin. “If only you and I tell a story, how many versions are there?”
“Two.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Three, Valcas. Yours, mine and the truth. Sure, yours and mine will have similar aspects if the topic is particularly mundane. But, if we were at odds in recounting the story, then you would have your version. I would have mine. And then the third version would be—”
“The unbiased truth.”
“And which version is correct, or—should we say—the most true?”
“Well if there were a recording, I suppose it would show the events exactly as they happened. This would likely be true even with technologies such as the zobascope,” I mused aloud, noting that captured feelings might color the perspective of the recorder, but probably wouldn’t change the scene. The recorder’s feelings would perhaps be more telling of the recorder rather than a concealer of truth. I narrowed my eyes, confident that I understood where Edgar was going with this. “So, yes, then, I would agree with you that the most factually correct version would be the truth.”
“And so it is with Daily Reminders. Even those that have been deleted have made an impression in the worlds, no matter how much the TSTA would like everyone to believe otherwise.”
“In other words, the TSTA’s version of the truth.”
I grimaced as Edgar took another sip and shrugged. “The truth is captured in time for all to see. You just have to find the correct slice.”