Sentence The Fivehundredandninetyeighth

 

Not that Tavish was any the wiser; oh, it's true that he had discovered what he thought of less as a Worm Hole and more of a Moth Hole in the fabric of Space/Time and that at intervals he was able to draw from the hole in his doublet little rolled-up scraps of paper, bearing messages from the Future – what should have been his Present – 2016, and this was how he had been given the suggestion of an en-cyphered journal, how he knew that Sam and Jasmine were working on the case, but he had as yet no way of sending his own messages forward; he had tried, had put a question on his own slip of paper and inserted it through the moth-hole but there it had remained and no reply to the question: 'who are you?' ever came back; now, Tavish admitted to himself that he was a tad rusty on Quantum Theory, had no idea if time moved forward steadily, or had differential gears, as for the wheels on a car, enabling it to make rapid changes of direction; he knew about wrinkles and about theories of multi-universes, but could not for the life of him understand why any of this was happening to him and his friends – beyond the fact that he had a Mission: to wipe out The Ring of Gold so far as he was able; and there were days he felt quite spavined, suffering from the discomfort of sleeping under

hedgerows - "this," he said to himself. "is a young man's game, the sort of infiltration I did when I was twenty, and now I'm 73 it’s no picnic, laving in cold water, with no soap, Christ, I feel like a middelmannetjie – the man in the middle – stuck her 750 years away from my own time, responsible for these women and a boy, but with no resources other than my own imagination, and that feels like it's been keelhauled, scraped raw and barely functioning; Sister Evadne and Griselda rarely speak to the rest of us, with their own sociolect setting up a class barrier against poor Wullie; Tammy and Bernie are impetuous and want to press on towards Embra and eradicate the remaining members of The Ring, and seem to think everything will be hotsy-totsy after that, not really grasping that we have no way out of our present situation: imprisoned in History! which was when he felt an icy finger stroke down his spine – this happened every time a message was to be found in the Moth Hole, a kind of psychic You've Got Mail alert!