"Welcome to my home," said Nick, gesturing toward a neat cottage with a thatched roof and bright red shutters over the windows. It was one of twelve in a straight line, on the same side of a dirt street. All were neat, colorful, and tidy. Everything was out of a picture-book about gnomes, hobbits, and dwarves.
"Everything looks familiar," she said. "I've seen these houses, and you, in books."
"You're not the first from your world to visit Sandorra," he responded. "The Bridge between our worlds is travelled by certain kinds of people. People with the ability to see beyond the every-day surface of things. People who have the ability to bring my world into your art and literature. Much of the best in your world is made of memories of mine. A few people arrive accidentally, the rest are called. Like you."
"Why am I here? I'm just a kid; I haven't done anything yet."
"We knew you'd be coming", he replied. It was my good fortune to be chosen to greet you."
"This is very strange. Are you sure you have the right person?" she asked.
"Yes, there can be no doubt. But time is short. We are to bring you to the Seer as soon as you arrive."
Based on this new information, she added three new possibilities to consider: when she bumped her head, she died and went somewhere truly weird; when she bumped her head, she became delirious, and hadn't yet recovered; or she was dreaming. She preferred the last explanation. In any case, she had already decided to go along with events, and see what might happen next. Nick seemed to be a pleasant-enough fellow. The village had a story-book charm. And there was nothing else she had planned for the afternoon anyway. So, it's 'off to see the Seer,' she thought, humming to herself.
"I'm ready," she said. "Shall we start our journey?"
"Actually, it's not much of a journey. It's that house over there," he said, pointing to the third house down the row.
"Someone named 'the Seer' should be living in a damp, spooky cave with spider webs and stalactites hanging down," she said. (Or is it 'stalagmites', she asked herself).
"I'll suggest that to her," Nick replied, "though I don't think it would be too good for her arthritis."
So they journeyed across three lawns, three walkways, detoured around a pink-flowering bush Alex couldn't identify, up two steps, and at last arrived, tired and hungry after their long journey, at their destination. This house looked the same as the others, with colorful window shutters, thatched roof, and heavy green front door. It fairly shouted with quaintness.
Nick used the lion-faced knocker on the door to rap sharply, three times. The door opened slowly, and Alex could barely make out the old woman within. "Come in, come in," she said, with a great deal of enthusiasm. "I've been expecting you."
"So I've been told," Alex replied. "I hope you're not only 'the Seer,' but also 'the Answerer,' because I know less and less as time goes by."
"Why not just call me Martha," the old woman replied. "My actual name has eleven syllables ..."
"'Martha' will be fine," Alex and Nick said at the same time, and laughed together.
They walked down a short dark hallway to a small living room, and sat on comfortably padded chairs. The living room was dominated by a large stone fireplace, carpeted with cold ashes. The walls were nearly covered with pictures, fine drawings of people and places Alex hadn't seen before. The windows were covered with heavy curtains, which kept the room dark. It was difficult to see into the corners. Books lined several shelves, and were strewn everywhere else. There were also several very odd items, including a crystal ball, and other things Alex couldn't identify.
Now that Alex could see Martha better (somewhat), she saw a very old woman, stooped a bit with her great age. She was dressed in a voluminous floor-length gown, of a color that melted into the darkness. Her hair was wrapped in a kerchief of the same color, and a few dry wisps of gray hair straggled out over her forehead and around her ears.
"Let me try to guess something about you," Martha said to Alex, in a voice which was not nearly as ancient as its owner. "You are in the midst of a strange experience. You're not sure how you got here, how to get back, or exactly what is happening. Yet you don't feel afraid, and are accepting events as they happen. Is that right?"
"Yes, but ..."
"And a little about yourself, before coming here. You love reading, especially fantasy. You can lose yourself in a good story. You often enjoy being alone, and never feel lonely if there is a good book or story or song in the air. You tend to daydream, and have probably tried writing stories or poems. Am I right so far?"
"On the nose. Actually, sometimes it's a problem. It's a lot more fun reading than doing homework."
"In your world," Martha went on, "there is a strange race of people called 'psychologists' who might try to cure you of such anti-social tendencies. None of those people would ever make it across the Bridge. They're too firmly rooted."
"But why am I here?" Alex interrupted. "And why are you called 'the Seer'?"
Martha replied quietly now, "I have visions, sometimes they're dreams, sometimes while I'm awake. While I see many possibilities, I know when I'm seeing the truth of a matter. And I saw a great truth concerning you, my dear." Martha paused, and her silence continued for an uncomfortably long time. At last she continued, "There is a great threat to the Land. I can't see it's nature, but I know it is real. And I know that we need you to fight against it."
"Now I know you have the wrong person. A fighter is one thing I'm not."
"But there are many ways to fight. This isn't some swords and dungeons story we are talking about. This is a real world, with real people, even though our definition of 'people' is wider than yours. Our laws of physics are different," said Martha.
Nick said, "To give you the most important example of how our laws are different, let's talk about 'time.' If I can use an old cliche, if time is like a river, then in your world people can stand on the bank and watch the river go past, never changing speed or direction. In our world, we can stand still or float downriver, into the past. None of us has learned to travel upriver into the future, though people like Martha can sometimes glimpse events up around the next bend."
"If you float downriver, how do you get back?" Alex asked.
"Everyone has his or her or its own home port, from which a downriver trip is launched. By the physical law that our scientists call "The Law of Conservation of Time Stasis", our Fifth Law of Thermodynamics, everyone has a natural tendency to stay in one's own time. The law says that time energy and mental energy are interchanged, but not created or destroyed. Understand?"
"Not really", Alex answered. "We didn't cover Thermodynamics in eighth grade. Maybe next year."
Nick smiled. "It means that, to travel to the past requires a lot of concentration, and when you stop concentrating, you snap back to your own present."
"Why can't people in my world do that?"
"The laws are different there. Even so, there have been a number of books written about people who've managed to do just that. One was about a man who saw a picture of a woman who lived many years before him, fell in love, and loved her so deeply that he managed to transport himself back into her time", Nick said.
"I saw that movie," Alex said. "It was called 'Somewhere In Time", but wasn't it just a story?"
"If you remember how he travelled back, he concentrated on the past, dressed in old-time clothes, and removed everything from sight that could remind him of the present," Nick replied. "After very intense concentration, he travelled to the past, found the woman, and they fell in love. He stayed in the past until he accidentally found a coin in his pocket that reminded him of his natural time. Immediately, he snapped back and was trapped in his own time. The story agreed very closely with the rules of time travel that we know. We're not sure if it really happened."
"There was another story," Nick went on, "about a man who travelled back to the New York of 1882. In that book, the descriptions of the place and time were so real, that some of our explorers who made the same trip are convinced the trip in the story was real. Once again, the trip and the return matched our own laws exactly."
"After I saw the movie," Alex said, "I remember trying to do the same thing. I wanted to go to a place I read about called Green Town, Illinois, in 1928. I remember concentrating very hard, but mostly I remember being afraid it might actually happen, so I never let go."
"We've never understood why the Laws of Time are different in your world," said Nick. "We don't really know if you can't time-travel because the laws are different, or the laws are different because your own minds don't allow you to time-travel," Nick said.
"There's something else to think about that's important," Martha said. "The laws of both time and space are different here. In your world, the only way to travel from one point to another is to start at one of them, then travel a path to the other. You must actually be at each of the points in between, one point at a time. Sandorra has 'holes' in it that you can't actually see. But if your path goes through one of the holes, it comes out at another, without ever going through the points in between."
"Then there must be one of those 'holes in space' right at the end of my uncle's garden, and that must be how I got here," Alex said.
"No," Nick said. "There are actually two different ways of travelling. The 'holes' are for travelling from place to place in Sandorra. The pathways between our two worlds are called 'Bridges', and there are different rules for travelling in each of them."
"Are there a lot of Bridges?" Alex asked. "Are they all over the place, or just in special places?"
"We know of several hundred around the world," Nick replied. "Some are useless. They might be too small to use, or not accessible from one of the two worlds. Sometimes Bridges disappear, or new ones appear. We can't always predict when that will happen. We were very fortunate that there was one so convenient to a place where you visited."
Alex's head was beginning to reel with all she was learning. She looked away from Martha and Nick into the dark corners of the room to give herself time to think. In the darkest corner, perched on a blanket with garish sun- and moon-faces, perched a stuffed iguana. She hoped it was stuffed.
After a few moments, she asked "But why didn't other people, like my uncle, also come through the Bridge? He's always doing garden chores right in the same area."
"Because there are two requirements for someone to cross over. First, your whole body must fit through the Bridge. Second, you must have the right kind of mind-set," Nick said.
"You must be rich in imagination, and able to submerge yourself in flights of fantasy," Martha said. "What does your uncle do for a living?"
"He's a computer programmer."
"Ah," said both Nick and Martha, in unison, as though that explained everything.
"I'm sure he's very imaginative," Alex said indignantly. "He's sort of 'big-boned', though, so maybe he didn't fit through."
CHAPTER 5
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME
After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Alex said, "Can you explain to me why you folks know so much about what you call 'my world' if it really is so different from here? You seem to know about our books, movies, and even individual people. Why?"