Ripped Apart: Quantum Twins – Adventures On Two Worlds (23 page)

Later in the afternoon Seija returned from her visit with Taimi Keskinen. She felt a lot more comfortable in her own mind after talking over the whole situation with another woman and mother.

She had had enough hot drinks with her friend, so she poured herself a glass of beer, took it through into the living room, sat down in an armchair and put the glass on the table with a bit of a clunk. The two men stopped talking and looked at her. Assured of their attention, she said: ‘We are not going to tell the police, the army, or any other people like that about Qwelby. He is a lovely boy. He is lost and I don’t care where he comes from. He needs our help and he desperately wants to find his sister. We are going to help him.’

She could not tell them how she felt about Qwelby. It had been difficult enough explaining to Taimi, another mother. There was an energy from him that seemed to be asking her to be ‘mother,’ not his mother, just ‘mother.’ And it felt good to respond.

For a while nobody said anything. Paavo, who had sat forward in his chair when his wife spoke, slowly sank back into his chair. ‘Right,’ he said at last.

Viljo nodded.

They remained sitting there in quiet contemplation, staring into the flames. The living room door opened and Hannu put his head around the corner. ‘Mum, is it alright if we come in?’

She nodded, and Anita and Qwelby followed him. Paavo commented that he felt hungry. Everyone looked at their watches and realised just how much time had gone by. Seija headed out of the room, grabbing her husband and pulling him into the kitchen, leaving the others to sort out the furniture. Then she telephoned Taimi to come over.

The children chose the larger sofa so all three could sit together with Qwelby in the middle.

As her father sat down in the armchair next to Anita, she leant over and asked: ‘You will help Qwelby, won’t you?’

‘We need to know more about him,’ her father temporised.

‘Please, Daddy, he’s just got to find his sister.’

‘Well…’ he started.

Anita moved across to her father sat on his lap, hugged him and put her head on his shoulder. ‘Please Daddy. He’s so lonely. He’s lost on a strange world and he must find his twin. We’ve got to help. Please promise you’ll not tell anyone he’s here?’

Ever since she could talk, Anita had been able to twist her father round her little finger. What his daughter was asking was difficult for a man in his position. But, whoever the boy was, he was in the Rahkamos’ house. Those big blue eyes staring up at him, appealing.

‘I promise. But remember this, Anita. He is a stranger. A very obvious stranger. Other people will see him, hear about him and his real story will come out eventually. You do understand that don’t you?’

Anita kissed her father’s cheek and returned to sit on the sofa as the Rahkamos and Taimi Keskinen came into the room, laden with trays. As soon as everyone was settled with food and drink, Anita and Hannu explained a lot of the things Qwelby had told them about his world.

Dr Keskinen was thinking it was all very interesting. A world of fantasy taken from a variety of science-fiction films by a very clever and manipulative boy. Well, Qwelby was in the Rahkamos’ home. It would be a betrayal of friendship for him to interfere.

The two story-tellers paused.

‘Qwelby, will you explain to me exactly how you came here,’ Viljo asked as he leant forward.

‘From finding what you call the comets,’ Anita suggested.

With his compiler working well, Qwelby told the whole story right through to his rescue by Hannu. Once again the musical tones of his rich baritone enfolded his listeners and took then into his adventure. There was silence when he finished. Everyone was waiting for Dr Keskinen to comment.

Viljo dragged his mind back from wherever it had been. He had to admit that the boy was a born story-teller and had done his research. It was easy to understand why the children believed him. He would let them down gently.

‘The facts are good,’ he said. ‘The Large Hadron Collider is a circle twenty six kilometres around. The buzzes are explained by the magnets placed at regular intervals all around it which hold the two streams of protons in opposite directions. They travel about ten thousand times around before crashing. Lots of different particles are given off when that happens. Qwelby is saying that they, along with all sub-atomic particles, are actually composed of these kuznii that have no mass. Then, like photons, they can travel at the speed of light. And we know that photons can slip through other dimensions where they can travel faster than the speed of light on this world.’

He could not help but smile. There was something fascinating about what the boy had said. Not the story itself. Even though he had not fully broken away from being enwrapped by Qwelby’s voice, he knew that was obviously a load of bunkum. But the concept had appeal. ‘Of course, there is the La Palma and subsequent series of experiments,’ he added.

‘What’s that?’ asked Paavo.

‘Teleportation!’ exclaimed Anita and Hannu together.

‘Quantum entanglement,’ the scientist corrected. ‘But not for anything living,’ he protested.

‘It would explain how Qwelby got here, though, wouldn’t it Dad?’

‘Humans cannot be carried on photons.’

‘Qwelby isn’t human, Dad.’

An uncomfortable silence filled the room.

‘Explain, please,’ Qwelby asked. ‘I do not understand.’

‘We’re humans and you’re… an alien, from another race,’ Anita said, feeling uncomfortable.

‘Erm, well, perhaps not,’ he responded. He took a deep breath. ‘We’re taught that we’re really the same.’

A stunned silence ensued.

He cleared his throat. ‘Aeons ago we, um, Auriganii as we then were, had all our DNA active. About one hundred and fifteen thousand turns ago, that’s what you would call a year, we left our homeworld as the sun was going to become a white dwarf. It took about forty thousand turns to find this planet. It looked so beautiful from space that we named it Azura Yezi, the Blue Planet.’ He paused. This was basic history to him, but to these Azurii?

‘But you live on Vertazia?’ Hannu queried.

‘At first we settled here on the Blue Planet, living in many places including islands, mountain tops, and around an enormous lake in a fertile valley that split one of the continents in two. They were sort of bases, like the ends of a bridge between Earth and where we mainly lived in the higher dimensions. On Earth at that time there were several races of hominids. Some of us mixed with one particular group.’

Qwelby’s voice had faded away and the ovals of his eyes had become completely pale violet.

Anita shivered as a cold draught swept across her. ‘You’re talking as though you were there,’ she said in almost a whisper.

Qwelby’s eyes returned to their normal large purple centres in pale blue ovals, and Anita felt the room grow warmer. ‘I was,’ he replied. ‘Err, well, sort of,’ he added, shaking his head to clear the dizzy feeling and wondering how that consciousness shift had been so easy when he was in the solid third dimension.

Then it struck him just what had happened. He appeared to have accessed a memory that was millennia prior to any such memories that were encoded in his genes. The room slipped out of focus as a tendril of thought arose from deep inside his mind, but slipped away as he tried to grasp it. The room came back into focus and he saw people were staring at him. He sensed a mixture of concern and some fear.
‘Need friends,’
his Intuition said.

Doctor Keskinen nodded. Given that Qwelby was not talking in Earth years, what he was saying fitted in with more than one extreme theory of how human beings had developed.
The boy had certainly has done his research well for his preposterous story.

Qwelby took a deep breath and calmed himself. ‘We are taught that there was a terrible war amongst the humans that caused the Earth’s crust to shift, an ice age to end and the seas to rise. Many of our bases were destroyed, and over a long time we lost the ability to move between what had become two, parallel worlds. That part of the Archives is so strongly warded that we, that’s me, Tullia and our special friends all working together cannot access it.’ He grinned. ‘There are lots of areas that are heavily restricted to much older people which we do, er, access. But not this. We are told the event was so terrible that the record has been sealed forever.’ He and Tullia had not been part of the SubNet culture for long enough to even think of asking if it might be possible to access that information.

‘Whatever happened, the result was that we have three DNA segments active and you, two. The big difference between us is that we live at a much faster rate of vibration than you.’ He turned to Dr Keskinen. ‘And that makes us closer to the energies of the quantum world.’

‘La Palma, Gran Sasso, then MonKiw. It was all over the internet. Quantum entanglement. And now across dimensions!’ exclaimed Anita, looking at her father as if to say ‘sorted!’

Her father opened his mouth. Where to start with demolishing her suggestion? CERN had been one end of both the ultimately successful Gran Sasso series and then the subsequent MonKiw trials. But not for anything requiring so much energy to transport, and definitely not for anything living.

‘If at some distant time in the future we are ever to recover our original Aurigan nature with all twelve DNA segments,’ Qwelby continued. ‘We, that is you Azurii and us Tazii, have to join together. We need your energy and you need our third segment. And.’ Was he telling them too much? There were mixed feelings flowing all around the room with strong encouragement coming from Hannu and Anita sitting either side of him on the settee. ‘So, you see, we want, we need, to be friends with you.’

It had been exciting and a validation of their powers when he and Tullia had wormed their way into the ShadowMarket. There had been no way that they could back out when faced with demands for energy exchanges that tied them in to the SubNet. At times what they had discovered about the Azurii had been disturbing, but they had been able to isolate that discomfort as it clearly was all part of the lives of the Azurii. Now, he felt he was bearing a heavy burden as he had to make it clear the Tazii were totally unlike how the Azurii imagined all aliens to be.

There was silence as the adults tried to absorb the ideas. Taimi Keskinen was delighted. A Yoga teacher, she firmly believed in the world of energy and what could be achieved by working at what people called subtle levels. Could Qwelby see auras, she wondered. She would love to discuss that with him. Could he help her to increase her skills with energy healing?

Qwelby smiled at Taimi as he realised that she was accepting what he had said and was interested.

‘A wormhole,’ Viljo announced. Six heads swivelled, different expressions on their faces. With a smile he held up a hand to still their questions. ‘Its existence is explained by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In fact I consider it is more likely to operate between dimensions than in the ordinary space-time of our universe…’

‘We could use that to get him back home?’ Hannu interrupted excitedly.

‘No.’ Dr Keskinen shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I got carried away thinking of one of Anita’s favourite TV series: “Deep Space Nine”. So far only small wormholes have been created under laboratory conditions and are unstable. It’s just a theoretical explanation of how Qwelby could have got here across dimensions.’ Keskinen gave Hannu an apologetic smile for having demolished the boy’s suggestion.

‘Consciousness,’ added his wife. ‘We explore that in my yoga group. It’s pure energy. That also must be present in all dimensions.’

‘Yes,’ Qwelby nodded. ‘So. Not carried on photons. Err…’ Qwelby leant forward, his purple orbs disappeared and his ovals became completely violet. ‘When an object reaches the speed of light, all the constituent subatomic particles expand to fill the whole of the universe. That is they all achieve coherence at exactly the same moment. Space, time and consciousness are one. When the consciousness element also achieves coherence, that determines the location of the object in space-time,’ he said in a monotone as though repeating a lecture he had been given. Opening his eyes he continued in his normal voice. ‘My consciousness must have been focussed on Hannu and Anita and the hillside outside your house. The multiple wave forms that all my particles had become collapsed back into particles, and I arrived.’

Qwelby sighed and slumped back. He knew how travel was said to have been achieved by those Auriganii who inhabited the ultra-fast vibrations of the ninth dimension. The thought that was how he and Tullia had travelled was mind-blowing, but still did not explain how he had slowed his vibrations so as to be on Earth in the solid, third dimension.

‘Superpositioning, Dad! Everything all at one.’ Anita was jiggling with excitement. ‘It’s how the Infinite Improbability Drive worked in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Universe.’

Dr Keskinen was feeling bemused. Of course his daughter understood quantum mechanics. Until meeting Hannu and then his group of friends, her principal interest had been in dividing her time between himself and his wife, exploring their differing interests. But this boy. His family had to be scientists.

Qwelby said in a faint voice. ‘Tired. Heavy. Energy loss.’

After the events on the day of the first snowfall, Hannu and Anita had quickly become good friends. Her few friends when living in Helsinki had all been girls. None of them very close as she had not shared their interest in clothes and dating, and was uncomfortable with the personal things they talked about: although she wondered how much of what they said was true. She had much more interesting things to explore: science and the world of the psyche. Time for the other stuff later.

With someone of her own age she could really talk with, Anita had came to the conclusion that either there was not a lot of truth in what the Helsinki girls had said, or they didn’t have interesting boyfriends. But. Although they spent a lot of time in each other’s company, she and Hannu never really were alone. They were either with their group of friends, her father in his laboratory, or working on a school project with parents around whichever house they were in.