Embarassing myself
Feb. 25th, 2006 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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matociquala, via papersky and others:
Go ahead and post the awfullest, grottiest, ancientest piece of juvenilia you still have a word processor that will open. I'll wait.
Well, I didn't have a word processor of my own until 1989, by which time I wasn't really a juvenile. The first thing I did with it was to type in the half-finished novel I'd started when I was 19, and then I finished it. It got somewhat polished along the way, but the first chapter didn't change much. So this is something that started as handwriting in erasable ballpen in a notebook, got typed into an Amstrad in Locoscript, then converted (via flat ascii and a disk-transfer service) to Lotus Ami on a PC, and finally to RTF. This is about half of the first chapter. Oddly enough, given that I didn't even have the concept of viewpoint at the time, it's fairly consistently in one POV, which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the thing.
Under the awning, the air was stuffy with heat and the smells of new leather and cloth. The two strangers stood patiently, exotic in their plain dark garments, as the merchant turned away from them to rummage among the boxes at the back of the stall.
"Are you sure this is worth your while?" the younger of the two asked privately, wiping the sweat from his brow.
"Trust me, Tanil," the other replied, not taking his eyes from the merchant's stout back. "Some of the things here will sell very well in more civilised worlds." He fingered the pouch at his belt and smiled.
"This trade business would never suit me, Arrisin," Tanil said quietly, looking sideways at his friend's intent face, with its plump flesh falling into the creases of middle age. Around them, the soft murmur of the marketplace was punctuated by the slapping of bare feet in the dust and the rustle of robes.
"It is the only life I know," Arrisin said simply. "It serves a purpose: Odel could not well survive without trade."
"If Odel was not dying we would not need to trade with other worlds for a living," Tanil retorted, with a spark in his dark eyes. "Explorers are looking for the future." It was an old argument, which had kept them amused through a long trip through the less advanced habitable worlds of the Multiverse.
"Then go and look for it somewhere else," Arrisin returned without rancour. "I have some bargaining to do." He had seen that the merchant was about to turn to them again, and was already bracing himself for a contest of cupidity.
Tanil swung away, and began to wander among the stalls. The baking heat of this world oppressed him, and its square buildings and peeling plaster had no discernible beauty. Presently he found what he wanted - a shaded and deserted alleyway where he could vanish without attracting attention. Alone in the relatively cool dimness, he concentrated for a moment on a patch of air in front of him, feeling for the invisible boundaries of this reality, and then stepped into what lay beyond them - the multidimensional web of hyperspace, the reverse side of the fabric on which the worlds are embroidered. The colours of it, as always, astonished him with their iridescent loveliness and took away his irritation. He was a disembodied mind, a point of awareness with no senses but sight and touch, neither of which bore much resemblance to its normal-space equivalent. Contentedly, he began to drift among the tangle of glittering threads, searching for some more congenial world.
Tanil knew, before he had traversed very much of the shining expanse of hyperspace, that his new route had been badly chosen. The colours around him were dulled, the complex curves subtly distorted, and the freedom of his movement among the threads of the Multiverse was constrained in an unfamiliar and alarming way. Struggling to correct his course, he was being drawn inexorably away from his chosen destination, helpless as a swimmer in a coastal current. His bodiless exertions had little effect: slowly at first, then faster and faster, he was swept away from all that was familiar, deeper and deeper into a region where the whole fabric of Hyperspace seemed to be twisted out of its right configuration, strained in places almost to breaking point, the normal iridescent hues faded or exaggerated to garish ugliness. Tanil, divorced from bodily functions in this realm between worlds, could not scream aloud, but his mental processes became those of a man in desperate fear.
He emerged in normal space with a wrenching jolt, and fell forward on hands and knees, gasping for breath and trembling uncontrollably. Some moments passed before he was calm enough to realise that he had in fact arrived in a world with breathable air. The ground under his hands was rough and brittle, covered with ashes and fragments of calcined stone: the darkness of night was about him.
"What kind of place is this?" Tanil wondered, as he struggled to his feet and began to examine his surroundings. He seemed to be in the middle of a ruined town, with the shapes of buildings jagged against the faint luminosity of the night sky: the breeze which pulled at his garments carried a reek of old burning. Looking up at the patterns of the stars, he could see nothing even vaguely reminiscent of those he had memorized from the records of other Explorers. It was perhaps not surprising that none before him had visited a world so deep in a dangerous Anomalous Zone, or at least that none had returned to tell of it. The thought was not comforting. Cautiously, he began to walk towards the nearest building, crunching over debris.
"Who goes there?" The voice was harsh, and the language in which it spoke was unfamiliar to Tanil, though, after the fashion of his people, he understood it perfectly. A moment later, a dark figure emerged from a shadowed doorway and advanced towards Tanil, with uneven steps punctuated by the thumping of a staff.
"My name is Tanil," he called. "I am a stranger here, but I mean no harm."
"What does a stranger here?" the other growled, suspiciously.
"I lost my way," Tanil said placatingly.
"There are no ways here," the stranger retorted.
"I am here nevertheless," Tanil pointed out. "Who are you, and what are you doing here yourself?"
"My name is Pelsan." He was a bulky shape in the darkness, with a puzzling irregularity about the outlines. "Most people call me Sir, or even My Lord. As for what I am doing here - you had better come inside. It is not safe outdoors, by night."
Tanil followed Pelsan through the doorway, into a room full of smoke and flickering firelight. A middle-aged man was crouched by the fire, but at a gesture from Pelsan he rose and went out through an inner door.
"Now," said Pelsan. In the tawny light he was revealed as a youngish man, swarthy and dishevelled, dressed in a rough homespun tunic and hose and a cloak that had probably seen better days. However, it was neither his attire nor his haggard thinness that attracted Tanil's fascinated attention. Pelsan had wings - great black-feathered pinions folded across his back.
"This isn't Misenol," Tanil said foolishly, remembering traveller's tales.
"No. This is Miktol," Pelsan stated harshly. "Misenol perished a long time ago." The wings stirred with a dry rustle. Then he looked at Tanil sharply. "How did you know? Where did you come from?"
"I came from another world," Tanil told him, oversimplifying the truth.
Pelsan continued to regard him with suspicion. "If there was a Door to another world anywhere near here, I would have known - and probably used it months ago."
"There are other ways of travelling between worlds," Tanil pointed out.
Pelsan appeared to accept this, and waved Tanil to a crude bench-seat which seemed to have been made from pieces of a wooden door.
"Well, what are you doing here?" Tanil asked.
"Trying to live," Pelsan responded. He began to pace around the little room. He was very lame, relying on his staff and occasional flicks of his wings for balance: it was perhaps fortunate that there was not much furniture to avoid. Then, slowly, he began to talk, as though his mouth was full of ash. "This used to be a town in a prosperous country, I suppose - probably a dull little place, full of dull ordinary people leading peaceful little lives. Then one night the Fire-Birds came, and the place burned. The same thing was happening all over the plains, that year, until everything between the mountains was one great waste of ash and ruin. I know: I have travelled over quite a lot of it. It is still possible to grow a little food in some places - for a few years at a time. The people with me were villagers once, far away from here: I was with them when their homes were destroyed, and I have been with them ever since."
"Fire-Birds?" Tanil enquired, when the bitter voice trailed into silence.
"They come at night, probably from another world. Beautiful they are, in a way - all the colours of flame, and the shape of great long-necked birds - but everything they touch catches fire, and that fire is not easily quenched. I have seen people die like that - horribly."
Tanil stayed in that place all night. After half an hour or so a woman - not winged - brought in earthen bowls of vegetables and chunks of coarse bread: from time to time other people came and went, mostly men who had apparently been on watch outside. All were ragged, underfed and overworked and none too clean, their eyes grown dull from the long endurance of irremediable loss. Pelsan talked intermittently, painting a grim picture of poverty among the ruins of a prosperous civilisation and, perhaps unwittingly, an even worse one of his own predicament.
"I was an exile anyway," he said at one point, in defiant response to some sympathetic murmur from Tanil. "I left my father's people: they have not much room for flightless half-bloods, even the children of their Lord. In a few generations, maybe, when there are none of the pure-blooded winged folk left, we will have to learn to be more tolerant of each other - if there is anyone left at all."
Eventually, Tanil slept for a few uncomfortable hours on a pile of rags in a corner, never quite losing his awareness of the vast destruction all around him. In the morning, he took his leave, knowing there was little he could do to help Pelsan and his people.
In hyperspace once more, he struggled to escape from Miktol, but his efforts were fruitless. He emerged again, unexpectedly, in a night full of flames and smoke. His ears were filled with the roar and crackle of fire and desperate human cries: there were buildings all around him, burning fiercely and crashing into ruin, and dim figures running in panic. It seemed that he had moved a little in time but not very far in space: he fervently hoped that the displacement in time had been backwards rather than forwards. Overhead, bird-shapes of jewel-coloured flame soared and whirled, sometimes swooping so low that their fiery wings brushed some previously untouched roof and ignited it. The clouds of rising smoke were tinged with lurid colour, illuminated by unnumbered sparks.
A woman, in wild-eyed flight, collided with Tanil and clung to him, sobbing with terror. Awkwardly, he tried to calm her: when that failed, he turned to flee himself, dragging her with him through the roaring inferno of the stricken town, dodging falling beams and walls with the inspiration of panic. When they came to the inescapable place, ringed in and roofed by flame, he dragged her with him into hyperspace. He made only a short jump, which brought them out of the town and into a smoky grey morning. There were people gathered not far away, soot-grimed and weary, with blind frightened eyes. The woman broke from Tanil and ran towards them, to disappear in the embrace of one of the men. Tanil watched for a moment, noting with relief that she had suffered no serious ill-effects from being briefly outside her universe. Then he walked up to the group, realizing that they were not Pelsan's people.
"What will you do?" he asked of a stocky fellow who seemed to be leader among them.
The man looked at him blankly, and then said slowly, "We will make for the mountains - live in caves, maybe. Are you with us?"
"I think not," Tanil replied. "I would only be another mouth to feed, without the strength to be of any use." Sick at heart from the conviction of uselessness, he turned away, and went out of sight to make another attempt at escape from Miktol. This time, finding unexpected strength from the deep recesses of his being, he managed to make headway against the forces in the warped fabric of hyperspace, and at last left behind the distorted region. When he was sure that he was well away from Miktol, he selected a habitable world more or less at random, and emerged panting from the bright confusion of hyperspace. There was daylight - the sultry glare of a summer afternoon - and the grey-green shimmer of water among trees. He flung himself on the grass under a canopy of fluttered leaves, and relaxed, letting his mind lie open to the sounds of another new world: birds; a soft murmur of voices; the ripple and sigh of the lake-reeds; traffic on a road not far away. Safe in invisibility, he felt his breathing slow to a more comfortable rate. This place, wherever it was, was populous, safely civilized, and pleasantly dull.
The girl came slowly, with footsteps firm on the gravel path, her posture unbalanced by the heavy bag slung on her shoulder. She saw him. Unmistakeably, she saw him, and she smiled.
"Tanil!" she exclaimed. "What in nineteen dimensions are you doing here?"
He started. He had no memory of this place, or of this world. "I thought I was invisible," he protested.
"Not to me," she rejoined. "You taught me too well. Look!" She waved a hand, and her shadow winked out, though he could still see her standing against the sun.
"This must be my disreputable future catching up with me," thought Tanil.
"You look tired", the girl remarked. She came closer, and squatted on the grass beside him. "Do you realize I haven't seen you for three years? I was beginning to think you were a figment of my imagination."
Three years. How long was a year in this world? How old would the girl have been? Tanil gave up the struggle to understand. He was not sure that this future was so disreputable after all. The girl was oddly dressed, maybe, but there was something about her - some indefinable affinity that went deeper than her claimed acquaintance.
"I have had a rather alarming experience", he admitted. "I had to leave Miktol in haste."
"Was it the fire-birds?" she enquired in a matter-of fact tone.
"Yes." It was no use questioning her remarkable knowledge of his affairs. "I landed among them." He remembered black ash, burned stone and a reek of death, and the fantastic soaring shapes of gold and crimson flame.
"You aren't hurt?" There was alarm in her voice now. "Remember what happened to Dornian."
He did not, but that was beside the point. "No."
"You're sure?"
"Quite sure."
"You never did tell me the end of that story," she said thoughtfully. "I've always wondered what happened to them all. Lenya - and Orbert - and poor Dornian."
"When I find out, I will tell you," Tanil promised.
"Then it's still happening?" The girl sounded puzzled, and a little excited.
"I am not sure that it has started yet. Surely you remember that my time is different from yours?" It was a guess, but a fairly safe one.
matociquala, via papersky and others:Go ahead and post the awfullest, grottiest, ancientest piece of juvenilia you still have a word processor that will open. I'll wait.
Well, I didn't have a word processor of my own until 1989, by which time I wasn't really a juvenile. The first thing I did with it was to type in the half-finished novel I'd started when I was 19, and then I finished it. It got somewhat polished along the way, but the first chapter didn't change much. So this is something that started as handwriting in erasable ballpen in a notebook, got typed into an Amstrad in Locoscript, then converted (via flat ascii and a disk-transfer service) to Lotus Ami on a PC, and finally to RTF. This is about half of the first chapter. Oddly enough, given that I didn't even have the concept of viewpoint at the time, it's fairly consistently in one POV, which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the thing.
Under the awning, the air was stuffy with heat and the smells of new leather and cloth. The two strangers stood patiently, exotic in their plain dark garments, as the merchant turned away from them to rummage among the boxes at the back of the stall.
"Are you sure this is worth your while?" the younger of the two asked privately, wiping the sweat from his brow.
"Trust me, Tanil," the other replied, not taking his eyes from the merchant's stout back. "Some of the things here will sell very well in more civilised worlds." He fingered the pouch at his belt and smiled.
"This trade business would never suit me, Arrisin," Tanil said quietly, looking sideways at his friend's intent face, with its plump flesh falling into the creases of middle age. Around them, the soft murmur of the marketplace was punctuated by the slapping of bare feet in the dust and the rustle of robes.
"It is the only life I know," Arrisin said simply. "It serves a purpose: Odel could not well survive without trade."
"If Odel was not dying we would not need to trade with other worlds for a living," Tanil retorted, with a spark in his dark eyes. "Explorers are looking for the future." It was an old argument, which had kept them amused through a long trip through the less advanced habitable worlds of the Multiverse.
"Then go and look for it somewhere else," Arrisin returned without rancour. "I have some bargaining to do." He had seen that the merchant was about to turn to them again, and was already bracing himself for a contest of cupidity.
Tanil swung away, and began to wander among the stalls. The baking heat of this world oppressed him, and its square buildings and peeling plaster had no discernible beauty. Presently he found what he wanted - a shaded and deserted alleyway where he could vanish without attracting attention. Alone in the relatively cool dimness, he concentrated for a moment on a patch of air in front of him, feeling for the invisible boundaries of this reality, and then stepped into what lay beyond them - the multidimensional web of hyperspace, the reverse side of the fabric on which the worlds are embroidered. The colours of it, as always, astonished him with their iridescent loveliness and took away his irritation. He was a disembodied mind, a point of awareness with no senses but sight and touch, neither of which bore much resemblance to its normal-space equivalent. Contentedly, he began to drift among the tangle of glittering threads, searching for some more congenial world.
Tanil knew, before he had traversed very much of the shining expanse of hyperspace, that his new route had been badly chosen. The colours around him were dulled, the complex curves subtly distorted, and the freedom of his movement among the threads of the Multiverse was constrained in an unfamiliar and alarming way. Struggling to correct his course, he was being drawn inexorably away from his chosen destination, helpless as a swimmer in a coastal current. His bodiless exertions had little effect: slowly at first, then faster and faster, he was swept away from all that was familiar, deeper and deeper into a region where the whole fabric of Hyperspace seemed to be twisted out of its right configuration, strained in places almost to breaking point, the normal iridescent hues faded or exaggerated to garish ugliness. Tanil, divorced from bodily functions in this realm between worlds, could not scream aloud, but his mental processes became those of a man in desperate fear.
He emerged in normal space with a wrenching jolt, and fell forward on hands and knees, gasping for breath and trembling uncontrollably. Some moments passed before he was calm enough to realise that he had in fact arrived in a world with breathable air. The ground under his hands was rough and brittle, covered with ashes and fragments of calcined stone: the darkness of night was about him.
"What kind of place is this?" Tanil wondered, as he struggled to his feet and began to examine his surroundings. He seemed to be in the middle of a ruined town, with the shapes of buildings jagged against the faint luminosity of the night sky: the breeze which pulled at his garments carried a reek of old burning. Looking up at the patterns of the stars, he could see nothing even vaguely reminiscent of those he had memorized from the records of other Explorers. It was perhaps not surprising that none before him had visited a world so deep in a dangerous Anomalous Zone, or at least that none had returned to tell of it. The thought was not comforting. Cautiously, he began to walk towards the nearest building, crunching over debris.
"Who goes there?" The voice was harsh, and the language in which it spoke was unfamiliar to Tanil, though, after the fashion of his people, he understood it perfectly. A moment later, a dark figure emerged from a shadowed doorway and advanced towards Tanil, with uneven steps punctuated by the thumping of a staff.
"My name is Tanil," he called. "I am a stranger here, but I mean no harm."
"What does a stranger here?" the other growled, suspiciously.
"I lost my way," Tanil said placatingly.
"There are no ways here," the stranger retorted.
"I am here nevertheless," Tanil pointed out. "Who are you, and what are you doing here yourself?"
"My name is Pelsan." He was a bulky shape in the darkness, with a puzzling irregularity about the outlines. "Most people call me Sir, or even My Lord. As for what I am doing here - you had better come inside. It is not safe outdoors, by night."
Tanil followed Pelsan through the doorway, into a room full of smoke and flickering firelight. A middle-aged man was crouched by the fire, but at a gesture from Pelsan he rose and went out through an inner door.
"Now," said Pelsan. In the tawny light he was revealed as a youngish man, swarthy and dishevelled, dressed in a rough homespun tunic and hose and a cloak that had probably seen better days. However, it was neither his attire nor his haggard thinness that attracted Tanil's fascinated attention. Pelsan had wings - great black-feathered pinions folded across his back.
"This isn't Misenol," Tanil said foolishly, remembering traveller's tales.
"No. This is Miktol," Pelsan stated harshly. "Misenol perished a long time ago." The wings stirred with a dry rustle. Then he looked at Tanil sharply. "How did you know? Where did you come from?"
"I came from another world," Tanil told him, oversimplifying the truth.
Pelsan continued to regard him with suspicion. "If there was a Door to another world anywhere near here, I would have known - and probably used it months ago."
"There are other ways of travelling between worlds," Tanil pointed out.
Pelsan appeared to accept this, and waved Tanil to a crude bench-seat which seemed to have been made from pieces of a wooden door.
"Well, what are you doing here?" Tanil asked.
"Trying to live," Pelsan responded. He began to pace around the little room. He was very lame, relying on his staff and occasional flicks of his wings for balance: it was perhaps fortunate that there was not much furniture to avoid. Then, slowly, he began to talk, as though his mouth was full of ash. "This used to be a town in a prosperous country, I suppose - probably a dull little place, full of dull ordinary people leading peaceful little lives. Then one night the Fire-Birds came, and the place burned. The same thing was happening all over the plains, that year, until everything between the mountains was one great waste of ash and ruin. I know: I have travelled over quite a lot of it. It is still possible to grow a little food in some places - for a few years at a time. The people with me were villagers once, far away from here: I was with them when their homes were destroyed, and I have been with them ever since."
"Fire-Birds?" Tanil enquired, when the bitter voice trailed into silence.
"They come at night, probably from another world. Beautiful they are, in a way - all the colours of flame, and the shape of great long-necked birds - but everything they touch catches fire, and that fire is not easily quenched. I have seen people die like that - horribly."
Tanil stayed in that place all night. After half an hour or so a woman - not winged - brought in earthen bowls of vegetables and chunks of coarse bread: from time to time other people came and went, mostly men who had apparently been on watch outside. All were ragged, underfed and overworked and none too clean, their eyes grown dull from the long endurance of irremediable loss. Pelsan talked intermittently, painting a grim picture of poverty among the ruins of a prosperous civilisation and, perhaps unwittingly, an even worse one of his own predicament.
"I was an exile anyway," he said at one point, in defiant response to some sympathetic murmur from Tanil. "I left my father's people: they have not much room for flightless half-bloods, even the children of their Lord. In a few generations, maybe, when there are none of the pure-blooded winged folk left, we will have to learn to be more tolerant of each other - if there is anyone left at all."
Eventually, Tanil slept for a few uncomfortable hours on a pile of rags in a corner, never quite losing his awareness of the vast destruction all around him. In the morning, he took his leave, knowing there was little he could do to help Pelsan and his people.
In hyperspace once more, he struggled to escape from Miktol, but his efforts were fruitless. He emerged again, unexpectedly, in a night full of flames and smoke. His ears were filled with the roar and crackle of fire and desperate human cries: there were buildings all around him, burning fiercely and crashing into ruin, and dim figures running in panic. It seemed that he had moved a little in time but not very far in space: he fervently hoped that the displacement in time had been backwards rather than forwards. Overhead, bird-shapes of jewel-coloured flame soared and whirled, sometimes swooping so low that their fiery wings brushed some previously untouched roof and ignited it. The clouds of rising smoke were tinged with lurid colour, illuminated by unnumbered sparks.
A woman, in wild-eyed flight, collided with Tanil and clung to him, sobbing with terror. Awkwardly, he tried to calm her: when that failed, he turned to flee himself, dragging her with him through the roaring inferno of the stricken town, dodging falling beams and walls with the inspiration of panic. When they came to the inescapable place, ringed in and roofed by flame, he dragged her with him into hyperspace. He made only a short jump, which brought them out of the town and into a smoky grey morning. There were people gathered not far away, soot-grimed and weary, with blind frightened eyes. The woman broke from Tanil and ran towards them, to disappear in the embrace of one of the men. Tanil watched for a moment, noting with relief that she had suffered no serious ill-effects from being briefly outside her universe. Then he walked up to the group, realizing that they were not Pelsan's people.
"What will you do?" he asked of a stocky fellow who seemed to be leader among them.
The man looked at him blankly, and then said slowly, "We will make for the mountains - live in caves, maybe. Are you with us?"
"I think not," Tanil replied. "I would only be another mouth to feed, without the strength to be of any use." Sick at heart from the conviction of uselessness, he turned away, and went out of sight to make another attempt at escape from Miktol. This time, finding unexpected strength from the deep recesses of his being, he managed to make headway against the forces in the warped fabric of hyperspace, and at last left behind the distorted region. When he was sure that he was well away from Miktol, he selected a habitable world more or less at random, and emerged panting from the bright confusion of hyperspace. There was daylight - the sultry glare of a summer afternoon - and the grey-green shimmer of water among trees. He flung himself on the grass under a canopy of fluttered leaves, and relaxed, letting his mind lie open to the sounds of another new world: birds; a soft murmur of voices; the ripple and sigh of the lake-reeds; traffic on a road not far away. Safe in invisibility, he felt his breathing slow to a more comfortable rate. This place, wherever it was, was populous, safely civilized, and pleasantly dull.
The girl came slowly, with footsteps firm on the gravel path, her posture unbalanced by the heavy bag slung on her shoulder. She saw him. Unmistakeably, she saw him, and she smiled.
"Tanil!" she exclaimed. "What in nineteen dimensions are you doing here?"
He started. He had no memory of this place, or of this world. "I thought I was invisible," he protested.
"Not to me," she rejoined. "You taught me too well. Look!" She waved a hand, and her shadow winked out, though he could still see her standing against the sun.
"This must be my disreputable future catching up with me," thought Tanil.
"You look tired", the girl remarked. She came closer, and squatted on the grass beside him. "Do you realize I haven't seen you for three years? I was beginning to think you were a figment of my imagination."
Three years. How long was a year in this world? How old would the girl have been? Tanil gave up the struggle to understand. He was not sure that this future was so disreputable after all. The girl was oddly dressed, maybe, but there was something about her - some indefinable affinity that went deeper than her claimed acquaintance.
"I have had a rather alarming experience", he admitted. "I had to leave Miktol in haste."
"Was it the fire-birds?" she enquired in a matter-of fact tone.
"Yes." It was no use questioning her remarkable knowledge of his affairs. "I landed among them." He remembered black ash, burned stone and a reek of death, and the fantastic soaring shapes of gold and crimson flame.
"You aren't hurt?" There was alarm in her voice now. "Remember what happened to Dornian."
He did not, but that was beside the point. "No."
"You're sure?"
"Quite sure."
"You never did tell me the end of that story," she said thoughtfully. "I've always wondered what happened to them all. Lenya - and Orbert - and poor Dornian."
"When I find out, I will tell you," Tanil promised.
"Then it's still happening?" The girl sounded puzzled, and a little excited.
"I am not sure that it has started yet. Surely you remember that my time is different from yours?" It was a guess, but a fairly safe one.
