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(Author's note: This turned out a little more narrative heavy than I originally intended. It's a fairly conventional science fiction story; well, for certain values of 'conventional', anyway.) WINDOW ON THE PAST By BobH. (c) 2002 There are moments when you realize life is good. They can be moments that alter your life completely, but more usually they are otherwise unremarkable moments when it dawns on you how blessed you are. It was a Saturday early in September, Cambridge was experiencing an Indian summer, and for Paul Curtis, watching the bright sunlight streaming in through the window and illuminating his wife Liz as she dressed, this was one of those moments. Her short, spiky brown hair still wet from the shower, she was debating whether the red T-shirt or the blue went best with her baggy jeans. He smiled as she settled on the blue. They had both awoken before they needed to and, having an hour until they had to get up, had slipped easily and naturally into an enjoyable session of early morning lovemaking. Sitting up in bed now, luxuriating in that post-coital afterglow, Paul wondered if life could get any better and marvelled at just how good it had gotten in the past three years. Three years ago, that's when Elizabeth Anne Jones had agreed to become his wife and made Paul, in his view, the happiest man on Earth. The only moment of unhappiness in their relationship had come last year with the discovery that Liz was infertile. She had desperately wanted a baby of her own, and had been devastated by the news. Still, they had managed, eventually, to get through this and it had, if anything, even strengthened their love for each other. There were times Paul still couldn't believe they were together at all. It seemed so unlikely. Liz was popular, vivacious, and beautiful where he had been none of those things. There were those hailing Paul as the next Stephen Hawking or maybe Einstein it's true, and he was being courted by several major universities and multinationals, but he knew he was a difficult and prickly individual seriously lacking in social graces. Being raised by an endless string of foster parents after your mother was killed in a car crash when you were seven years old and your father left too traumatized to cope with his young son will do that to you. So will being vastly more intellectually gifted than your peers. Not surprisingly, Paul sought refuge in books, any books. His voracious reading eventually leading him to cosmology and to quantum mechanics, which made sense to Paul immediately and fired his imagination more than anything else he had ever encountered. His brilliance was spotted early and he was fast-tracked, securing a scholarship and a place at Cambridge University at the tender age of fifteen. Of course, being so much younger than his fellow students, and so much brighter than most of them, only increased his socialization problems. Fortunately, he found a friend and mentor in Professor Susan Archer, who taught the course in theoretical physics he was taking. She took him under her wing, firing him with the possibilities of science, and gently coaxing him out of the shell he had so successfully built around himself. A brilliant physicist in her own right, Susan was as devoutly Catholic as she was devoutly lesbian, two things Paul was never quite sure how she managed to reconcile. It was she who first brought the work of an Italian Benedictine monk, Father Pellegrino Ernetti, to his attention. "Hey, sweetie!" said Liz, breaking his reverie by throwing a pillow at him, "Are you getting up anytime soon?" "Hmm? Yeah, I suppose I'd better," he grumbled, swinging his legs out of bed and padding over to the window. It was a beautiful day, children already playing on the water meadow, which began a few yards away at the bottom of the hill, and sleek boats already knifing up and down the River Cam beyond as members of the various university rowing teams got in some early morning practice. "Oh, and by the way Paul, Happy Birthday!" said Liz. "That's right. In all the excitement I almost forgot. I suppose that makes this an even more auspicious day for our first test run." "I'll go see if Susan's up yet and put on some coffee while you shower," said Liz as she exited the bedroom. "OK," said Paul, mechanically, his mind on other things. Father Pellegrino Ernetti, Paul thought as he showered, that was where it all really began for him. At first he'd been puzzled by Susan pointing him in that direction, but in light of her interest in the history of the Catholic church's interaction with the world of science, from the trial of Gallileo onwards, he supposed it made sense. As a lifelong non-believer Paul didn't really understand religious faith on anything other than an intellectual level, but he was respectful of Susan's beliefs even though he didn't share them. "Father Ernetti was a man of outstanding intellect and learning," Susan had explained over coffee in the one of the city's many cafes on that long ago morning, "At Venice's Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, he occupied an endowed chair in pre-polyphonic music." "In what?!" Paul had asked, his musical knowledge sketchy at best. "Music composed between 2000 BC and 1200 AD," said Susan. "And his studies produced seventy books and hundreds of articles on the subject. He was a conductor and recorded over fifty albums of Gregorian Chant and related music. He was also the most sought after exorcist in Italy, even writing a textbook on the subject." "Why would I be interested in a musical exorcist?" asked Paul, in puzzlement. "Ah, but he was more than just a 'musical exorcist', as you so dismissively put it. What make's him of particular interest to us is that he held a degree in quantum and sub-atomic physics and did significant research in these areas, ultimately leading to his invention of the Chronovisor." "That anything like an interossitor?" "Don't be so dismissive. According to Father Ernetti, this device, which he invented in the mid 1950s as the result of research done, he claimed, with other scientists such as Enrico Fermi, enabled him to look into the past, to see and hear events happening in any time or place it was tuned to. He claimed to have used it to see and hear speeches by Mussolini, Napoleon, and Cicero, to explore a market in Ancient Rome around the time of the Emperor Trajan, and to watch part of a tragedy - Thyestes - by Quintus Ennius being performed in the year 169 BC. It was an astonishing claim, made all the more intriguing by his reluctance to talk about the Chronovisor in his later years. There were those who thought pressure had been brought to bear by the Vatican and that somewhere in the recesses of that institution the Chronovisor has been hidden away." Susan Archer was uncomfortable with the idea her Church would suppress something like this, Paul remembered, and thought it unlikely the device even existed, but she was intrigued by the fact that someone with Father Ernetti's background in quantum physics should think it a possibility. On investigating further they discovered that others had claimed to have constructed similar devices down the years. Baron Ernst von Lubek published an account of his attempts to build a 'time camera' in 1912, while in 1934 US radical William D Pelley claimed to have developed such an apparatus with Thomas Edison. The apparatus in question was allegedly confiscated by the FBI. Then there was the 'Radionic Camera' George DeLaWarr developed based on earlier experiments by Albert Abrams and Ruth Drown. This device was allegedly confiscated by the FDA. It would be worrying to think all these branches of the US government had access to this technology if Paul gave credence to these stories. He didn't. But there was still something about the Ernetti story that Paul and Susan felt was worth following up. Paul had gotten his degree in theoretical physics at 18, the age at which most students were just starting at university, and it was his post-graduate work which first suggested it might be possible to peer into the past. This was the point at which Susan first introduced him to the work of Father Ernetti...and to Liz. Elizabeth Jones was an electronics and computer wizard and in the first year of a degree course in computer science when Susan Archer first spotted her. "If she wasn't straight I'd definitely have been interested in her myself," Susan later told Paul. "I'm a sucker for that combination of brains and beauty. But unfortunately she is straight, and she seems interested in meeting you, for some unfathomable reason." "She..she is?" said Paul. "Yes. She's heard about our resident boy genius - who hasn't? - and wants to know more." "I don't know, Susan. It seems too risky. What if she rejects me? I've already had more rejection in my life than anyone should have to endure." Susan had put her arms on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. She was sympathetic but also firm. "Look, the work we do is important and it nourishes the intellect like nothing else I know, but the intellect isn't the only part of you that needs nourishing. Helping care for you these past three years has made me wonder if maybe I didn't take a wrong turn along the way, that in putting my work above all else I haven't missed out on something equally as important, and maybe even more so. The older I get the more I regret not having a family, Paul. Don't make the same mistake I did. Take a chance." He hadn't known what to say to that. Susan had occasional lovers, he knew, but he'd never before appreciated that she yearned for something more. It had taken a major effort on Susan's part to bring them together but eventually she managed it and, amazingly, they hit it off. Liz was able to see through Paul's prickliness and shyness, and Paul... well, Paul was just so stunned that someone like this should be interested in him that he was immediately smitten. Four years after this, when Liz graduated, they were married. And three years later here they were, at the age of 25, on the verge of making a scientific discovery that would make them rich and famous, and probably net them a Nobel prize, too. Towelling off, Paul rubbed his stubbly chin, and tried to make up his mind whether or not to shave. He studied his reflection for a minute before deciding it looked OK as it was. The face that greeted him in the mirror was not the sort of face anyone would have described as handsome, and the lank blond hair looming over it did it no favours either. Paul's measured view was that it was just over the line, on the ugly side of plain. It was an assessment most people would have agreed with, and why he thanked whatever gods there were that a pretty face wasn't something Liz absolutely required in a mate. By the time Paul made it to the breakfast table, Liz and Susan were already on their third cup of coffee and deep in conversation. Susan's bedroom was next to theirs and he hoped she hadn't heard them having sex, but the knowing smile she flashed him as he sat down dispelled that hope. He really had to look into getting more sound insulation into that wall. When he, Liz, and Susan had decided to set up a company and make a serious go of developing a time viewer, they knew this would be no nine-to-five project but something they would be working on all hours and would need to get at quickly whenever inspiration struck. This is why they were currently living 'over-the-shop', a converted barn with a living space consisting of a large bedroom, a small bedroom, a galley-type kitchen, a bathroom & shower room, and a spacious central lounge area, all on one floor, with the single large space at ground floor given over entirely to workspace. Raising the venture capital for the start-up costs had been easy and they had given themselves a year to develop a working prototype, a year being the length of the sabbatical Susan had negotiated with the university. He looked over at Susan as he poured what would be his first cup of coffee of the day but far from his last. She was 42 now, and her long dark hair was shot through with grey, her waist and hips beginning to show middle-aged spread, but she was still dark-eyed and striking, still the same feisty, intellectually fearless woman who had first taken a damaged 15 year old boy under her wing ten years earlier. After Liz, there was no one else in the world he cared for more. They were the only two people he was never abrupt with. "So what were you two chatting about when I came in?" he asked. "Nothing work-related," said Liz. "Susan was just telling me about her radical lesbian separatist phase down in London in the 1980s." "Really?" Paul said, suddenly interested. It wasn't a part of her life Susan talked about much, mostly because she now seemed embarrassed by some of the views she held back then. "Yes," said Susan, "I was just telling Liz how we were going to overthrow the Patriarchy, abolish heterosexism, and usher in a lesbian Eden. I'm still keen on the idea of a lesbian Eden, of course, but some of the things we did back then..." "Like what?" Paul prodded. "Well, as an example, there was this one woman in our group who got pregnant - sperm donor, naturally - and gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She gave up the boy for adoption because, of course, why would we devote any of our energies to raising one of our oppressors? It was a decision we all approved of; any one of us would have done the same. These days I wonder where that woman is, and if she regrets giving up her son." Given Paul's own largely parentless childhood, this story made him particularly uncomfortable. Then he found himself wondering if maybe it was her guilt over going along with this that had made Susan treat him the way she had. Possibly, he thought, but human motivations were seldom that simple or direct. "Oh, and Happy Birthday, Paul." said Susan. "I couldn't be prouder of the young man you've grown up to be." "What, no present?" said Paul. Susan laughed. "You know we agreed you don't get to see our presents until dinner tonight. Liz and I have laid on something very special. And, of course, we hope to also be celebrating a successful trial of the time viewer." "After all the time I've spent lashing it together, it had better bloody work," said Liz. "All the dry runs were successful, so there's no reason it shouldn't," said Paul. "Of course, I still think we're being a little timid with our first trip." "C'mon, Paul," said Susan, exasperated that he was bringing this up yet again, "you know we agreed that a trial trip back of just a couple of hours was the prudent way to go. We don't know for sure that a trip of even that short a duration is safe for a human being, let alone a longer immersion. Why try to run before we can walk?" "She's right," said Liz, "That's why I voted with her and against you on the shorter trip first. I know you're impatient and want to see what it's really capable of, but we'd never forgive ourselves if anything happened to you. For some reason, Susan and I are both rather fond of you and we like you just the way you are." "Well alright then," said Paul, draining his coffee mug and getting to his feet, "let's get this show on the road." The time viewer was not actually any one device in their workshop but the entirety of them working together. One day, if they succeeded it would be a tight, sleekly designed unit, but for now it consisted of the computers, transformers, biomedical monitors, and large numbers of other not-easily identified devices that took up most of the space. However, if any one of these could truly be said to lie at the heart of the time viewer it had to be the small cyclotron and the attached tachyon accumulator. The whole sprawling apparatus was built around an acceleration seat in which the person taking the trip would be wired up to just about every type of non-intrusive biomedical monitor, and several of the intrusive ones, too. Since the traveller didn't physically move during a trip an acceleration seat wasn't strictly necessary, but they had spotted it in a military surplus store and thought it looked cool. On entering the workshop, Paul idly checked his reflection in the full-length mirror just inside the door. The journey he was about to take might not involve physical movement in any meaningful sense, but it was just as much a giant leap for mankind as Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon had been all those years ago. How he looked now would be the image the history books would carry for evermore. This being so, he thought he looked OK. "Alright, positions everyone," said Susan. This was it. After weeks of dry runs, simulations, and systems checks they were as sure as they could be that everything was functioning properly. Now someone had to test the viewer for real, and only a human subject could know if it worked as it should. Lying back in the seat, Paul endured Liz attaching the various probes and monitor pads to his body as stoically as he could. "I know you hate this bit, sweetie," said Liz, smiling down at him, "Keep reminding yourself we need all the data we can gather and this is the only way we can get it." "I guess," said Paul, watching the bobbing of his wife's breasts and smiling at the memory of their lovemaking a few hours earlier. As always happened when Liz was fitting the telemetry, Paul slowly zoned out, his thoughts returning once again to Father Ernetti. Most of what was available about his Chronovisor was frustratingly vague, but over the course of several years he and Susan were able to piece together the direction his research had taken from several odd sources and published papers. Once they had established that direction, their own work took on a life of its own. Paul did most of the calculations, made most of the intuitive leaps, with Susan backstopping him. "Surpassing the master the student is," she had said at one point, in a spookily accurate impression of the voice of Yoda. "Ah, Yoda!" said Paul, smiling at the memory. "What?" said Liz, so non-plussed by this remark she momentarily paused in the task of attaching yet more monitor pads to increasingly improbable parts of his anatomy. "Nothing. Just daydreaming. Move along; nothing to see here." Shaking her head, Liz returned to her work, while Paul lifted his head and gazed at the large chalkboard on the wall behind Susan. It was still covered with chalked equations, the residue of that final, fevered burst of inspiration. That part of the work had gone quickly, and far sooner than either had thought they would, they figured out the scientific basis of a time viewer. They also figured out the secret of Father Ernetti's Chronovisor. Ernetti had been on to something back in the 1950s, and he knew it, but there's no way he could ever have produced a working time viewer. His claim to have done so must have been born of the frustration of knowing how close he came, and possibly been a way of staking an intellectual claim to the territory. He was, however, completely mistaken about what you could do with a time viewer, and for that Paul was oddly grateful. During the course of his research into Ernetti he had come across several works of fiction based on the idea of a time viewer. One of these, Isaac Asimov's 'The Dead Past', had pointed out how awful a device was that let you look at any point and place in the past. As Asimov had observed, the past starts a nanosecond ago and in the hands of government such devices could be used to spy on anyone, anywhere, at any time. They would spell the end of privacy. Fortunately, it turned out the viewer would only let you travel back along your own timeline and view your own past. And that's why Ernetti's accounts of his own Chronovisor had to be false. "OK Paul," said Susan, at the bank of monitors and consoles that was the control station for the time viewer, "As we agreed, we'll only be sending you back a couple of hours this time. If that proves successful, then we'll get more adventurous. Right, I'm turning on the cyclotron now, and as soon as we reach the desired level of tachyon flow you'll be on your way." As the hum of the cyclotron grew louder, Paul glanced over to where Liz was monitoring the cyclotron's functions and smiled. She had built a lot of the equipment in the workshop, cobbled it together from what often appeared little more than piles of random electronic scrap. Her electronics know-how had saved them many thousands of pounds and possibly several months of work. She might not be in the same league as Susan and him when it came to quantum mechanics, but she blew them both out of the water when it came to computers and electronics. Susan picked up a clipboard, pursed her lips as if debating something, then scrawled a word on it with a black marker pen. Paul couldn't see what she had written. Yet. "Commencing immersion," announced Susan, activating some unseen control. Things began to get blurry and Paul's vision started to lose its grip on the present, red shifting as it dopplered. Then everything bled together in one continuous streak of colour, as if rushing by at immense speed. Just as suddenly, it stopped. Paul was floating up against the ceiling of his bedroom with no sense of his body at all. He was watching himself watching Liz as she dressed. He was viewing events two hours in the past, but only viewing. He couldn't touch anything, or be seen or heard. He was as insubstantial as a ghost. But they had succeeded! The time viewer was a success! As he watched Liz mouth the words she had spoken to him earlier, no sound coming from her mouth, he once again regretted they had been unable to lick the audio problem. He doubted it could be licked, but what they had already done was a towering achievement. Their names were going to rank alongside the immortals of science. Paul experimented in venturing away from his earlier self but, as expected, he could go no further than about twenty feet or so. It was if he was tethered by an invisible cord. Pity. Being able to explore the world of the past in this form would would be amazing, but then he recalled the warning of 'The Dead Past' and remembered this limitation was no bad thing. Paul followed himself for the next two hours and even though he had already lived those two hours he found much of interest when viewing them again from a new perspective. He got to gaze at Liz right up close with her totally unaware she was being observed. He could watch her for hours. He was surprised, though, by the looks Susan sometimes gave Liz when the others weren't watching. They seemed... wistful? Most surprising of all, though, was when he reached the point where Susan wrote something on her clipboard. She was less than twenty feet from his body so he was able to float on over behind her to see what she had written. That's when something weird happened. As she was writing, Paul could see the ghosts of several other words clearly visible. Not until she finished did these disappear. When the cyclotron started up, Paul once again saw the blurring effect, experienced a moment of vertigo, and when he opened his eyes was greeted by the sight of Liz's shapely breasts, constrained by her red T-shirt and barely inches from his face. She was leaning over the acceleration sheet, removing the sensor pads from his temples. "Hi, lover," she said, smiling down at him. "How was the trip?" "Absolutely amazing. How long was I under?" "About a minute and a half actual time, though I'm betting the subjective time you experienced was much longer. Did you get the objective evidence we didn't just induce lucid dreaming?" Paul turned to look at Susan. She was still at the control station, watching him expectantly. "Sappho." he said. She gave a huge grin and held up the clipboard on which she had written a single word: Sappho. They held the trip post-mortem over glasses of champagne. All the biomedical readings showed the process had put no undue strain on Paul. Physically at least, it looked as if it was entirely safe. Turning on an audio recorder, they had him recount his experiences in minute detail. He was almost certainly the first person ever to make such a trip and this account would go down in history. When he told them about the ghost images he'd seen, Susan stopped the tape. "That's odd, " she said, "and it's not something we expected to happen. How do you account for it?" "I've been thinking about that, and what I've come up with is Schrodinger's cat." "Really? Interesting. Yes, I suppose it could be that." "Will someone please explain what you're talking about," said Liz. "What part does a cat play in any of this?" "Erwin Schrodinger was a famous physicist," said Paul, "won the Nobel prize for physics in 1933. In 1935, he published an essay describing a problem in quantum mechanics. He illustrated the problem by means of a thought experiment that has since become famous, the cat paradox." "Yes," said Susan, picking up the thread, "Schrodinger posited a situation in which cat is put in a closed steel box with a device, secured against direct interference by the cat, which if activated releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of cyanide. The device is activated by the slow decay of a radioactive substance. If one of it's atoms decays in the first hour the cat dies. If it doesn't the cat lives. There's an exactly fifty-fifty chance of this decay occurring in that time. So, at the end of that first hour, is the cat alive, dying or dead?" "You don't know until you open the box," said Liz. "In the larger, macroscopic world that's true," said Paul, "but if the problem was occurring at the sub- atomic quantum level the cat would be in all those stages at one, and every incremental stage in between." "It's what makes measurement and observation so difficult at the quantum level," said Susan. "If it was possible for you to open the box at that level then, by the very act observing, you would cause all those simultaneous states smeared across an infinity of parallel universes - a later development by Princeton physicist Hugh Everett - to collapse into a single state in this one, but you'd have no way of determining beforehand which state that would be, whether the cat would live or die. Observation is not a passive activity in quantum mechanics." When she said this, Paul experienced a brief pang of unease, as if there was something he had missed. "So the multiple image Paul saw represented a fog of possibilities of what I *could* have written before actually deciding what I would write," said Susan. "What's puzzling, though, is why he should see that multiple image. Yes, at the time I was deciding what to write there were several possibilities, but by the time he viewed it, it was history and the decision had long since been made." "True, but is it something we should worry about or just an unexpected but benign effect we can explore at our leisure at some future date?" said Paul. "Oh, definitely the latter, I should think. After all, you're just viewing the past, not interacting with it or otherwise affecting it in any way." Paul experienced another pang of unease at this, but he could not have said why. He quickly dismissed it as a spell of the jitters, something only to be expected when they were embarked on a project as momentous as this. "So do we have a go for a more ambitious trip?" he asked. The two women exchanged a look then turned back to Paul. They knew from long experience it was futile attempting to stop him when he was in the grip of an enthusiasm. "I suppose so," said Susan. "Do you have a destination in mind?" "The day after my fourteenth birthday." "I'm not sure that's such a good idea, honey," said Liz. "Please don't punish yourself like this, Paul." said Susan. She also knew the significance of that date. "I have to see him again. Just one last time. I...I can't recall his face properly anymore. Please give me this." Susan exchanged a glance with Liz. Both women reluctantly nodded. "OK. Then let's fire up the wayback machine," said Susan. The remark was flippant, but the humour was forced. It was late afternoon before they had everything reset and were ready to go again. Unaccountably, Paul was more nervous this time than he had been before the first trip. Yes, this was a longer trip, a deeper immersion, but that made it no more dangerous than the first one. "Remember, Paul," said Susan as the cyclotron once more hummed into life, "while you rode along with the full two hours subjective time of your first trip, you need to fast forward yourself on this trip when you've seen what you're going back to witness. You really don't want to live through the full eleven years of subjective time to get back here." Paul had the fast-forward control held firmly in his right hand. He wouldn't actually be able to feel anything while he was immersed but the mind could still send messages to the hand and the scene dopplering around him would be confirmation that he had activated the fast- forwarder. "Commencing immersion," intoned Susan, and the world blurred into motion. The Farmer family had been among the more tolerable of the many he was fostered out to, Paul recalled as he floated above his 14 year-old self, sitting there in the living room of their semi-detached house. Mr and Mrs Farmer were also present, making small talk, trying their best to draw out the surly and uncommunicative teen they had let into their home. Mr Farmer turned, hearing something Paul couldn't, and went to the front door. He returned with another man, a man with a haunted look in his eyes and hands that trembled; Paul's father. This was the first time Paul had seen him since the accident, seven years earlier. It would also be the last time. The meeting had been a disaster. Trevor Curtis was on a day-release from the sanatorium where he'd been since the breakdown he suffered when his wife died. He was nervous, still emotionally fragile, and wracked with guilt over his inability to take care of his son. The young Paul saw none of this. All he knew was his father had abandoned him and he was filled with resentment. Watching from the vantage point of both the ceiling and his greater years, Paul wished he could intervene, could stop his younger self saying all those hurtful, unfair things, but he couldn't. This was a tragedy already more than a decade in the past. Seeing his father's face through the eyes of an adult rather than those of a hurt and angry teenager, Paul could see the pain there. As a 14 year-old, all he allowed himself to see was betrayal. Trevor Curtis stayed only twenty minutes before returning to the sanatorium. Four days later he took his own life. When his father left, Paul watched his younger self quivering with rage and confusion, eyes brimming with tears, and the futile attempts by Mrs Farmer to comfort him. It was time to return. There was nothing else to see here. He activated the fast-forwarder, letting it bring him all the way back to the present. Despite being a deeper immersion, this had been a much shorter trip in terms of subjective time elapsed, but Paul had seen all he wanted to and had proved a deep immersion presented no more problems than a shallow one. With his arrival in the present and the return of bodily sensation, Paul knew that something was amiss. Not only was he alone in the workshop but his body felt all wrong, and not just because it was mysteriously free of biomedical sensors. Looking down at his body he instantly realized why. He was clad in a short denim skirt and coloured hose, the pink tube top above his exposed midriff holding back small but very definite breasts. He lifted a slender hand to the mass of long, dark hair he could feel falling about his shoulders and held it before his eyes in wonderment. "I'm a girl!" he said, his voice high and sweet. Numbly, he climbed out of the acceleration seat, momentarily unsteady on the chunky two inch heels on his shoes, and made his way over to a full length mirror near the door. He was short, maybe five-one, thin bordering on skinny, and looked to be about 13 years old. His face was cute, and lightly freckled, and there were small, gold earrings in his pierced ears. He was wearing pink nail polish and matching lipstick but no other make-up. "Not that a kid this age needs make-up at all," he murmured idly, still trying to take in the enormity of what had happened to him. The door beside him opened, and there was Liz, but she looked different. Her short, spiky hair was now long and full and her standard jeans and T-shirt ensemble had been replaced with a stylish dress and hosiery. She smiled at him. "There you are, Carrie. Come on back upstairs. Your mother's already got dinner ready." she said, taking his hand. Carrie? Mother? Paul let himself be led upstairs, his mind and his heart racing. What was going on? The flat over the workshop looked subtly different due, Paul, realized, to the absence of any male influence. Liz went over to the cooker where Susan was stirring something in a pot. They exchanged a brief kiss on the lips and Susan gave the younger woman's backside a quick, affectionate squeeze. Paul felt queasy. "You need to both sit down now," said Susan, carrying the pot over to the dining table. She had cooked her special chicken chilli and it was good as ever. Over dinner Paul watched the two women carefully, mostly only speaking when spoken to. If he hadn't already guessed it, it was obvious from the way they were together, the looks they exchanged and the brief touches they gave each other as they talked that they were more than just friends. Paul was now Susan's daughter and Liz was her lover, and it was plain neither of them would know Paul Curtis had ever existed. Susan looked happier than he had ever seen her before. After dinner, Paul excused himself, saying he needed to go to his room and study and that he'd be turning in for the night afterwards. "Ok, baby," said Susan. "Does your Mum get a goodnight kiss, or are you getting too old for that now you'll be fourteen tomorrow?" He kissed her and she pulled him to her, giving him a big, motherly hug, resting his head on her chest and stroking his long, dark hair. It felt good, surprisingly good, just like Paul remembered his mother - his real mother - doing when he was a young child. Feeling tears welling up, he pulled away, mumbling that he needed to get to his room. Fortunately, he still had the presence of mind to realize that his would now be the smaller of the two bedrooms. As he closed the door behind him he let out a long sigh of relief. He had come close to losing it then and this was a welcome sanctuary. More than anything, he needed time to think. Paul's first look at the bedroom came as a shock. He had not given any thought to the fact that, of course, it would be the bedroom of a 13 year old girl. Now he was confronted with that reality. The first thing he noticed was how pink everything was. Pink carpet, pink wallpaper, pink bed covers. The pink wallpaper was printed with images of Barbie, and there were a number of shelves on one wall lined with several dozen versions of the famous doll. Clearly, this girl had once had a serious Barbie fetish. Paul suspected it had since been replaced by an intense interest in boy bands, however, since much of that wallpaper had now vanished beneath posters and magazine images of the fresh-faced scions of several young manufactured pop groups. There were numerous stuffed toys lined up neatly along the bed's headboard, and a school uniform tossed casually onto the bedcovers, the only sign of untidiness in an otherwise surprisingly neat room. Besides the bed, the room's other items of furniture were a chest of drawers, a large wardrobe stuffed with the sorts of clothes 13 year old girls wore these days, a desk on which was a laptop computer and a pile of school books with several rows of bookshelves on the wall above, and a dressing table. On the dressing table was a variety of jewellery, two lipsticks, four small bottles of nail polish, and a diary. Hanging from the mirror were several necklaces, a crucifix and rosary beads. Sitting at the dressing table, Paul turned his head this way and that, made various faces, and flicked his hair back and forth like the models in the hair care product ads. The girl in the mirror followed his every move. Sighing, he pulled his top down and examined his breasts. They were real. He hadn't seriously expected them not to be, but he still needed to check. So far, this had all had something of the quality of a dream about it, but now Paul was feeling just how real it was to his very bones. He pulled his top back up and went over to the desk. He couldn't quite bring himself to examine what now lay between his legs, not just yet. According to what was scrawled inside the front covers of his school textbooks, he was now Caroline Mary Archer and a pupil at Our Lady of the Assumption Roman Catholic Girls School. Well, he could worry about that come Monday. Right now he needed to give some serious thought to just what had happened. He was now 13 years-old and would be 14 tomorrow, according to Susan, but it was Paul Curtis' birthday today. His birthday had shifted by a day. That had to be significant. Then it hit him. He had used the time viewer to witness the events of one day less than eleven years ago. If today was his twenty-fifth birthday but tomorrow was Carrie's fourteenth, that meant she was one day less than eleven years younger than him. That was it! Fantastic as it seemed, using the time viewer to see a given period of time into the past would wind back your age by that same amount of time. At the moment, Paul could not see how it could do this, but he was the living proof that it did. Logically, the same thing had happened to him on his first trip but becoming two hours younger wasn't enough for anyone to notice the difference. But why had everything else changed, too? Clearly, his age regression wasn't specific to him alone but represented a change in reality itself. If he was now a 13 year-old then reality would rearrange itself to accommodate that change. And those changes maintained the domestic situation of the three of them living together as they had. Oddly, having him become Susan's child and Liz become her lover was probably the least disruptive rearrangement that kept everything else unchanged. Yes, he could see that, but why had he changed sex? Then it dawned on him. Susan would have gotten pregnant back when she was still with that radical lesbian separatist group. Had tests shown her fetus was male Susan wouldn't have had an abortion - she had always been too seriously Catholic for that - but a male baby would have been given up for adoption and he wouldn't be here now. It all fit. And none of it helped. With reality having rearranged itself to accommodate this younger version of himself, the starting point was now Carrie Archer and not Paul Curtis. The only trip he could make was into her past. Paul Curtis was gone, probably forever. He was fairly certain he had the why of it, but not the how. Then he recalled something Susan had said to Liz: "In the realm of quantum mechanics, observing is not a passive act." In the act of observing something at the quantum level, you change it, and that was certainly what had happened here. In observing his own past, he changed it, but even though quantum mechanics lay at the heart of the time viewer's operation he hadn't been observing events at the quantum level, so how...? This was making his head hurt. It was clear there was too much here they didn't understand. All he could do was accept what had happened and worry about how later. His mind returned to the first trip he had made. If the act of observing the past could change it, had there been something he missed, however small? "The T-shirt!" he shouted, leaping to his feet. "Liz had on the blue T-shirt when I left and the red one when I returned!" Such an easy thing to overlook, particularly for a man. If he hadn't missed it he might still be one, he realized, because at the slightest indication what they were doing could alter the past, they would have shut the whole project down. Lost in his thoughts, it was some time later before Paul noticed the sounds coming from the adjacent bedroom. It was the muffled laughter he heard first, followed by several squeals he recognized as Liz's, and then the rhythmic sounds coming from the bed. Susan and Liz were having sex. They had obviously decided to take advantage of him retiring early. Listening to them, Paul found his mind awash with conflicting emotions. He realized now what that wistful look he'd seen Susan give Liz during his first trip meant. She was in love with Susan, may even have been in love with her since before she introduced them. No wonder she had had so few lovers in recent years and why none had lasted very long. Now, thanks to him, she had Liz. On the one hand, he should feel angry - that was his wife having sex with someone else in the next room, godammit! - but on the other, if she had to be with anyone else he was glad she was with Susan. They were his family before and they were his family now, the two people he loved most in all the world. But that didn't mean it wasn't going to be hard, very hard, seeing Liz with Susan instead of with him. He knew he was going to have to make a decision about whether or not to tell one or both of them what had happened, but that could wait until tomorrow. Lying on his bed, listening to their lovemaking, he found his hand sliding under his skirt and into his panties, fingers seeking out the moist slit that now resided there. How strange, he thought, as he slowly kneaded his clitoris, that this most female part of the anatomy, so familiar from pleasuring Liz, should now be a part of him. He masturbated to the sounds of Liz making love with Susan, but it was the memory of Liz making love with him that brought Paul to orgasm. Afterwards, having made a trip to the bathroom to wash and to brush his teeth, Paul lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He was wearing one of several nightdresses he had found in one of the drawers. He was a girl now, whether he liked it or not, and no one remembered him being any other way, so it seemed pointless not to. He could make a big deal about not wearing feminine things, but to what end? Everyone else would just think he was behaving strangely. He doubted he would get much sleep that night, but he fell asleep just as easily as he always had. Paul was awoken the next morning by someone gently shaking him and saying: "Time to rise and shine, sleepyhead." He opened his eyes blearily, and Liz's face came into focus. She was smiling down at him. Sitting up in the bed, he smiled back at his wife. Then it registered that her hair was long and full rather than short and spiky, and the memory of what had happened came flooding back. This wasn't a dream. He really was a teenage girl. "Happy birthday, honey!" came a voice from the doorway as Susan came into his bedroom, carrying several gift-wrapped packages. She sat on the bed, and passed them over to him. As the two woman watched him expectantly, smiles on their faces, Paul picked up the top package and slowly unwrapped it, mind racing. It would be a good idea to show enthusiasm for whatever was in them since they undoubtedly contained things the now 14 year-old girl he was supposed to be would be delighted by. The first package contained thin gold earrings and a matching necklace, where the second contained a party dress. "Oh, thank you, Mum, they're lovely!" he gushed, convincingly feigning enthusiasm and giving his 'mother' a hug. The next two packages were from Liz. The first contained a set of make-up. "You young girls today start wearing make-up far too young, if you ask me," said Susan, in a faintly disapproving voice, "but between your pleading and Liz berating me for being old-fashioned, I relented." "I'll give you a make-over later," smiled Liz. "It'll be fun!" Enthusiasm was a bit harder to feign this time, but Paul just about managed it. The final package contained a pair of high heels whose upper parts consisted of nothing more than a few thin straps. "Bet you never thought I'd go back and buy you these when we were trying on shoes during our shopping trip last week." said Liz. "No, I certainly didn't," said Paul, holding the shoes uncertainly. "Aren't you going to try them on?" asked Susan. Reluctantly, Paul slid them over his feet then, at the encouragement of the two women, walked up and down the room a couple of times. He was slightly unsteady on his feet, but not as much as he might have expected. There were other shoes in his room with similar heels and, apparently, his new body remembered how to walk in them. "They look good on you, Carrie," said Susan. "Now hurry up and shower. I'll make us a quick breakfast and then we have to get to church." Church? Paul had been so caught up in the fact of his transformation and trying to figure it out last night that the significance of his school and those rosary beads hadn't really registered. It was one thing respecting other's right to hold such beliefs, but it was another thing entirely to be expected to go along with them. Oh well, one more thing to have to fake. Church was an uncomfortable experience. Paul had always thought religious belief was superstitious nonsense, and having to sit through the service was almost more than he could bear. Add to this how uncomfortable the stiffly formal dress he was wearing was, and Paul was having a hard time. "Stop fidgeting!" Susan angrily whispered at one point. "What is wrong with you?" Paul was able to follow Susan's lead through the service, making the appropriate noises at the appropriate times, and to bite his tongue during Father Watson's sermon, but it was impossible to hide his discomfit and unhappiness. When they got back, after a journey spent in frosty silence, Liz was out shopping for groceries, so Paul decided to seize the moment. After debating the matter in his mind for so long, he finally made the decision he had to tell Susan what had happened. "Mum?" he said, as they got out of the car, "There's something I need to show you." He led her into the workshop and over to the blackboard, which was festooned with equations, all of them in Susan's writing. Paul had realized that with him out of the picture as a scientist, the only way Susan and Liz could have developed the time viewer was if Susan had done all the theoretical work herself, meaning the realignment of reality had left her with the same genius level intellect as him. "There's a problem with this set of variables here," he said, erasing them and chalking in a new line of equations. Susan looked at him, then the equations, then back at him, a look of total shock on her face. "How did you do that?!" she whispered. "It's a problem I noticed a few weeks back, " he said, "the final piece of the puzzle that let us get the time viewer up and running and make the first successful trip." "The first...," she said, "But we haven't made a trip yet." "Well, you'll be able to now, but there are some very good reasons you might not want to." He then proceeded to tell her everything. When he finished she just stared as him, totally stunned. "Susan?" he said. "This can't be, Carrie. Please tell me you're making it up." "I'm sorry," he said, gently, " but I'm not. This time yesterday things were totally different between the three of us. The life you remember living for the past fifteen years or so didn't exist before then. And if it wasn't true, how could I have added that equation? There are only four or five people in the world who understand the physics enough to have done that, and you're one of them." It was the one irrefutable argument. Susan lowered herself unsteadily into a chair. "I remember my pregnancy, giving birth to you, and watching you grow up - you were such a beautiful baby. Are you saying none of those things happened, that all my memories are false?" "I don't know." he admitted. "Reality was altered so that, yes, you actually experienced all those things. But I didn't. So what exactly does that mean in terms of what's real and what isn't? That's a conundrum for the philosophers, I think. We're here now, we are who we are, and that's all that matters." "Yes," said Susan, unhappily, "but who are you? You're not the daughter I knew and loved up until yesterday. Paul Curtis is not Carrie Archer." "I may not have been before, but I am now," he replied. "You believe in the existence of the soul. If there is such a thing then, yes, I'm the same person because we're the same soul. Our formative childhood years were very different, but I am her. And I have no choice but to remain her." Susan stared at him for a moment then sighed deeply. She appeared to have reached a decision. "I suppose you're right," she said. Then she gave a little smile. "It's going to be strange having to teach you all those things a mother teaches her daughter all over again. What do you think we should tell Liz? The idea of her having ever been straight is as weird as anything else you've told me." "I don't think we should tell her," said Paul. "I told you because I just had to share it with someone, and you're the only person I could prove it to." "Will you help me with the time viewer?" said Susan. "What? How can you still want to use it after what I told you?" "Because I'm a scientist and that's what we do. We seek after knowledge. With your invaluable experience we may be able to figure out what the variables are and how to control the effects." "OK, I suppose." said Paul, not entirely convinced. "Right, now that's settled let's get you upstairs. You have friends coming here to celebrate your birthday, and Liz still wants to give you that makeover." Paul almost sighed with relief. Susan had clearly decided that he was still her daughter and to continue treating him that way. If she hadn't, if she had rejected him, Paul knew he would have been in trouble. He was sharp enough to appreciate that the only role open to him was that of her daughter, however much he might wish it were otherwise. Paul had convinced himself he was adapting to the situation he found himself in better than most men would have. That conviction started to slip a little when he found himself sitting at his dressing table while Liz worked on his make-up. "At your age you don't actually need much make up," said Liz, as she applied a light blusher to his cheeks, "but then why does need have to come into it. Make-up is fun!" Paul didn't share her enthusiasm, and felt distinctly strange having his wife fixing his face. "Can I ask you a personal question?" he asked. "That depends on how personal it is. What did you want to know?" "Have you always known you were gay, or did it take you a long time to find out?" "Oh, I've known since before I was your age. I never ever had the slightest interest in boys. Why did you want to know?" "It's just you and Mum seem so happy together, I was curious if you'd ever, y'know, wondered what it was like being straight." "Well, academically, perhaps, but I was never curious enough to want to experiment with a man," she said, giving a little shudder. "And, yes, I'm very happy with Susan, though I know she worries about our age difference. I'm not planning on leaving her for someone younger, but I know she's insecure about that." "Well, I hope you never do. You two are my family." "Yes, we are, aren't we? And I love you as if you were my own daughter, too, although it's a shame you were already a 7 year-old when Susan and I met" said Liz, "I'd have loved to have known you as a baby and a toddler. OK, enough of this sloppy stuff; it's time you got into your party dress." Alone in his room, Paul checked through the diary for any references to the three girls who were coming over soon - Kylie, Melanie, and Jessica. Everyone in the diary was referred to by their initial rather than a full name, and when the four did stuff together as a group the others appeared as KMJ, so it was easy picking them out. While Paul was hoping for some insights from the diary, the whole thing was an endless account of shopping trips, speculations about various boys, and similar trivia. There was nothing in there he could use at all. Fortunately. there was a photo of him with the others tucked into a corner of his dressing table mirror. The names scrawled on the rear enabled him to at least learn how to identify them individually by sight. And then they were there. They arrived together, a giggling, excitable mass of teenage femininity. They squealed in delight at Paul's new shoes, dress and make-up, and made him twirl around for them while they oohed and ahhed. Liz and Susan looked on, smiling indulgently, while Paul forced a grin and felt mortified. Liz and Susan had made food and, after eating, the girls all retired to Paul's room. And that's where it all started to go wrong. The girls talked about boys, make-up, boys, clothes, and boys. Try as he might, Paul just couldn't keep up. He didn't know much about any of these subjects and it was impossible to fake. He had made a reasonable job of fooling Susan and Liz but he just didn't speak 'teenage girl' so there was no way he could fool KMJ. At first, he tried to get by just joining in with any giggling and doing a lot of listening, but that only worked for a short while. When the others tried to draw him into conversation his inability to speak the language led to gaffe after gaffe. KMJ left much earlier than they otherwise would have. They were very subdued. Puzzled and concerned by this, Susan decided to have a heart- to-heart with Paul while Liz cleared up. "What happened?" she asked, as she sat down next to him on the bed. Paul sniffled dejectedly. "I'm trying to fit in, honestly I am, but I don't know how. I didn't fit in as a boy and now I don't fit in as a girl." His eyes were brimming with tears and Susan, her heart going out to him as only a mother's could, hugged him to her and comforted him, burying his sobs in her warm embrace. "Hey, now," she said, lifting his chin with one hand and wiping his tears away with the other, "we can't have you upsetting yourself like this. Let's talk it through. It breaks my heart seeing you this upset." "OK," said Paul, stifling a sob. Playing idly with the hem of his dress, he began: "I was always the square peg in a round hole at school, the one who never fit in. It was like everyone else was speaking another language, one no one had ever thought to teach me. I was a prickly loner who simultaneously sent out 'stay away from me' vibes while at the same time desperately wanting to be part of the group. I was so much brighter even than my teachers, and was so bored most of the time, that I fell back on sarcasm and became a disruptive influence in classes. If my brilliance hadn't been spotted, if I hadn't been taken out of there and put on the fast track to Cambridge University, I would've been expelled. And now it's happening again. I've ended up as a popular girl with friends, but I don't know how to keep them. I've already alienated them, and it will only get worse. It's a repeating pattern. When I go to school tomorrow, the whole tragedy will play out all over again. I'll lose patience with the nuns teaching me stuff I know in far greater depth than they ever will, whatever bonds of friendship the others still feel towards me will stretch and break, and by the end of the week I'll probably be even worse off than I ever was at any point as a boy. It's all hopeless!" Paul had been looking at his lap as he said this. Now he looked up, directly into Susan's face. She was staring at him her expression unfathomable. "I think," she said, at length, "you'd better stay home from school tomorrow while I try to figure out what needs to be done. Whatever I decide, it will be what's best for you." She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. "Now try and get some sleep, and I'll see you in the morning." Paul's sleep was fitful and uncomfortable, punctuated by strange dreams filled with nameless dread, but he slept through 'til morning. "Wow, you like something the cat dragged in," said Liz, when he emerged from his room to face the new day. "Gee, thanks," said Paul, though he was sure it was an accurate description. "Where's Mum?" "She's down in the workshop. Worked through the night, in fact. She said to send you down there as soon as you woke up." Paul gave Liz a good morning hug and a kiss on the cheek, while wistfully recalling the far more passionate way their day had started on Saturday, before heading down to the workshop. "Morning, Carrie," said Susan as he entered. She looked tired. "There's a glass of orange juice for you on the bench." Sitting on the bench and swinging his legs back and forth, Paul sipped his orange juice as he watched Susan write a speculative equation on the chalkboard. "I've been thinking about your account of your first trip," said Susan, "and about how Liz's T-shirt was the only physical change that occurred." "Yes, that's right," said Paul, slinging back the rest of his juice. It gave him a surprisingly warm, fuzzy feeling. "Hmmm. Well, I think you're wrong there. There's no way of proving it, of course, but I think you may also have altered what I - the other version of me - wrote on the clipboard." "How do you mean?" said Paul. Fuzzy, yes; he was definitely feeling fuzzier. "You collapsed the probabilities by the simple process of watching me write. Whatever you caused the word to be would be the word I remembered writing, regardless of whether or not it was the word I had originally written." "Wow. So the viewer is even more dangerous than we thought?" "No, not really. All those changes were minor effects, each a mere eddy caused by your passage through time. Modify the motion of that passage, smooth it out, and you eliminate any such eddy effects. That's what I've been wrestling with all night, and I've finally figured out how to modify it correctly. See here," she said, pointing to a line of symbols, "this is the breakthrough that enabled me to work out a new, more refined and accurate set of settings for the controls. The de-aging and consequent rearrangement of reality to accommodate your younger self is still an effect of an immersion, of course, but now it's safe, predictable and free of those random side effects." "I see." said Paul, though he didn't really. He should have but something wasn't quite right. "Come with me," said Susan, a strange look of pity and compassion in her eyes. He took her hand and let her lead him over to the control station. She flicked a few switches, and the cyclotron slowly whirred into life. Then she led him over to the acceleration seat. Settling into it, she pulled him, unresisting, onto her lap. His head buried in her shoulder as she stroked his long hair, Paul knew what was about to happen but he was powerless to stop it. The ability to resist had entirely deserted him. "You put something in my drink!" he whispered, appalled yet still unable to rouse himself to any sort of action. "Rohypnol," she said, still stroking his hair. "It wasn't going to work," she said, a great sadness in her voice. "I want my daughter back, the girl I knew and loved for fourteen years. I knew what needed to be done yesterday, soon after you told me you'd taken her place, but I thought maybe I should hold off, see if you'd make a go of it, that somehow you could be her, but it's now plain that, however hard you try, you never can be. It's not your fault, but you're not her." She raised her right hand, and Paul saw it held something he had not seen before. The fast-forwarder had been modified to include a remote activation switch for the viewer. "Please don't do this," he pleaded, a tear running down his cheek. "Don't worry," she cooed, soothingly "it'll all soon be over." With that, she activated the viewer, and the world became a dopplered blur. They were floating above a room Paul didn't recognise and though he could neither see nor hear Susan he knew that she was there with him. Since they had travelled back together, they had obviously arrived at a shared point on their individual timelines. Looking down, he could see a much younger Susan and a woman he didn't recognise - her girlfriend of the time, perhaps? - smiling down at a tiny figure lying in a bassinet. Then everything blurred into motion again and he knew that Susan had activated the fast-forwarder. Since it was the depth of the immersion and not its duration that caused de-aging, there was no need for them to stay any longer. Susan had done exactly what she came to do. Paul tried to hold on to his thoughts, but as they returned to the present he could feel them slipping away... --- When the tiny baby in her arms began to cry, Susan Archer knew exactly what it meant. "There, there," she cooed as she pulled her T-shirt up, exposing her right breast, "Mummy's right here." She manoeuvred her nipple into the mouth of the bawling infant, who immediately began to suckle contentedly. Susan felt a great contentment, too. She had loved her time breast-feeding Carrie first time around, feeling a bond of love and protection for her baby daughter that seemed to her deep and almost mystical. Rising carefully from the acceleration seat so as not to separate baby and breast, she walked over to the wall mirror, giving a huge smile when she saw her reflection. The trip had been an exactly thirteen year immersion, keeping their birthdays the same dates, but leaving Carrie as a 1 year-old and herself a 29 year-old. Her hair was long and raven black with no trace of grey, her body lean and trim - leaner and tauter than it had ever been, in fact. It seemed she now exercised more than she originally had when she was 29 first time around. She looked down at her beautiful baby then and smiled. Carrie's loving upbringing had made her a well-balanced, popular child, where Paul's had left him damaged. Now Carrie could have that loving upbringing again, and once again be the popular, well-balanced and loving girl she had been. It was for the best, thought Susan, the way it had to be, though whether what she had just done was an exorcism or a reboot she couldn't decide. For now, she was just glad to have her daughter back. This time, however, she would have Father Watson christen her Caroline Paula Archer, in memory of the person she would have been in another life. Had he still been alive, she would have done all she could to have the christening performed by Father Ernetti. After all he was, in many ways, godfather to their new life. When Carrie stopped feeding and fell asleep, Susan took her upstairs to her room. There she laid the sleeping infant in her crib, carefully tucking her in. There was a mobile directly above the crib, soft toys strewn around the room, and idealized cartoon images of all manner of woodland creature on the wallpaper. Susan stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame, and smiling down at her sleeping child. There are moments when you realize life is good. They can be moments that alter your life completely, but more usually they are otherwise unremarkable moments when it dawns on you how blessed you are. This was one of those moments. A slender arm slid around Susan's now-trim waist and she turned to look into the face of Liz, who pulled Susan to her. It was several minutes before they broke off from their kiss. When they did, Liz reached behind Susan and turned on the baby monitor in Carrie's room. Giggli