Michael Sullivan - Hollow World

Chapter Five

Times They are a Changin’

Ellis woke up sporting a hangover without the benefit of a binge. He’d been awake for some time but resisted the temptation to get out of bed. He had no real idea what had happened or where he was but appreciated the time alone after having ridden the tornado to Oz. How long had he been asleep? How long had it been since he’d left the doctor’s office? Only a matter of hours in one sense but more than two thousand years in another.

Two thousand! How is that possible? Hoffmann was off by a factor of ten! Had he dropped a zero somewhere? The whole thing was hard to believe despite having achieved his intent. This must be the feeling that gave expressions of wonderment to Olympic athletes when they took the gold, the look of shock on Academy Award winners even as they took out the speech they had carefully prepared. Some part of them never really believed it was possible until after it happened, and even then such miracles were hard to accept. He’d done it; he’d traveled through time—but Hoffmann was way off on the number of years.

Ellis had expected to jump forward about the same distance as the founding of the United States was back. Life would be very different, but not too alien, and he expected the world would still be fundamentally the same. Instead, he had jumped the same span of years dividing the time of Christ from the age of the Internet. He was the equivalent of a Roman citizen used to slaves, the luxury of horses, and the labor of carrying water—plopped down in the age of computers and fructose corn syrup. Faced with such a shift, Ellis was grateful for the chance to wade in slowly.

Lying in a very comfortable bed, he could tell it didn’t have springs, like one of those space-age sponge beds he used to see advertised. He had pillows and sheets, not cotton though; these were softer. He spent little time pondering the bed covering given his surroundings. He’d seen 2001, Blade Runner , Logan’s Run, and Star Trek . He knew the future was supposed to be stark, cold, and clean—or grease-stained and grit-covered. Maybe it was, but this room wasn’t.

He lay in a massive canopy bed nestled in a cathedral of carved wood and luscious drapes. The décor of the room was castle-Gothic, with walls half clad in dark, eight-panel oak and uppers decorated in vibrant murals of medieval ladies and men on horseback. Lions, swans, crowns, and lilies abounded—carved in wood or sculpted in plaster. Above loomed a ceiling painted to look like the sky, with puffy clouds and hilltops around the edges. Light streamed in through a series of peaked, two-story windows with crisscrossed latticework, which cast spears of radiance across the foot of the bed. A breeze fluttered the edges of curtains, and Ellis could hear birds and a distant trickle of water. He smelled flowers as well as something exotic, like cinnamon or nutmeg. Besides the distant birdsong and splashing of water, he occasionally caught a distant voice calling out or laughter rising from far off.

When he finally touched the floor, he found wide-plank hardwood with thick Persian-style rugs welcoming his bare feet. Naked, he kept the sheet around his waist. His pack was on the floor beside the bed, and his clothes were folded and resting on a soft chair. His knife, as well as the still-holstered pistol, remained on his belt.

“Oh, good morning, Ellis Rogers! I thought you’d sleep the day away. Are you feeling better?”

Ellis jumped. He didn’t see anyone but pulled the sheet tighter.

“Who’s there?” he asked, peering out toward the open archway that led to another room.

“ I am Sexton Alva. Pax’s vox. They told me you might be disoriented and thoroughly grassed, so I needed to go easy on you. But honestly I find the whole matter utterly amazing! ”

This voice was different from all the others: decidedly female, but he couldn’t tell where she was and kept the sheet tight.

“Where are you?”

“ What’s that, dear? ”

“Where are you? I can’t see—”

“ Oh, Pax wasn’t kidding. You are completely sonic. Fantastic! Of course you can’t see me. I told you. I’m Pax’s vox. ”

“What’s a vox?”

“ Ha! Utterly magnetic. Really it is—you have no idea. And the way you talk! You really are grassed—real grassed like with spears and bows and arrows and such. I don’t think I can explain what a vox is to you—no point of reference, really. You probably think I’m some sort of spirit. You worship rivers and rocks, right? Have a god for everything? You can just consider me the spirit of this house. But don’t worry. I’m a good spirit. Just call me Alva, honey. ”

Ellis continued to turn his head, trying to locate the source of the voice without luck. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. “I’m not from that far in the past.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not from that long ago. We didn’t have spears and bows. We had cars and planes and computers and—”

“ Computers! Yes—that’s me. ”

“You’re a computer?”

“ No, but it is certainly better than a spirit, isn’t it? I’m about as much like a computer as an abacus is. I’m Pax’s caretaker. I keep the place running, keep everyone happy and safe. Tell them what to eat in the mornings, relay messages, arrange parties, water plants, entertain everyone, teach them, advise them, watch out for them—more Pax than Vin, of course. Pax is always eager to learn; Vin apparently knows everything already. ” This last comment came with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “ I’ve looked after Pax for centuries. Wonderful, wonderful person, and not at all crazy, you understand. You’ll do well to remember that if you stay here—or you’ll find too much pepper in your meals, and your bath will always be a tad too cold or too hot. I’m sorry. I don’t like making such vile threats, but when it comes to protecting Pax, I’m an animal. ”

“ Where are you, exactly?”

“ Oh, my physical installation is built into the foundations of the complex, on the sublevel. ”

“So—you’re like a furnace or a water heater?”

“ Ha! You’re wonderful. In seven hundred and eighteen years no one has ever called me a furnace or water heater. That’s very clever. You don’t know how hard it is to be original these days. But you’re original, aren’t you? I mean, truly original. No others like you at all—ever. That’s just amazing. You’re like a tree, but you can talk!”

“Speaking of that. Alva, I have a question.”

“ Wonderful! I’m great at trivia. ”

“I was wondering why we understand each other. After two thousand years I would have thought language would have changed more than it seems to have. And why English?”

“Oh, you can thank the British Empire for that. Imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries established the English language as the dominate common tongue the same way that the Roman Empire had established Latin as the previous international language. The dominance of the global economy by such English-speaking countries as the United States further required all the world’s nations to view English as the necessary international language of commerce, which—”

“Okay—okay, so that explains why English survived, but why is it still so—I mean, people in the Middle Ages didn’t talk the way I do, even though they spoke English.”

“That’s because the Middle Ages didn’t coexist with a post-globalization environment. Most linguistic changes are the result of assimilating other languages or because isolation causes the independent evolution of a dialect. By 2090, the impact of variations had been reduced to negligible levels as non-English languages were abandoned—wiped out by lack of use. If you wanted to compete economically, you adjusted to the language of commerce. Sure, there are fads and fancies, but the sheer size of the consistent user base and the tendency of humans to prefer familiarity led to a relatively stable form of communication. The longer life spans of humans also reduced trends of change. ”