Chapter 8

The TV was out in the front room, a room specially put aside for TV watching since they'd splashed out earlier in the year and bought a big flat screen TV and a high definition receiver for the commonwealth games. The room was just big enough for the screen and a seat for each of them.

After dinner, Eddie led them out to the TV room, and casually turned the television on without mentioning anything to Sarah. Like all televisions, it took a while to warm up, and then it suddenly burst into life, sound and vision coming on at the same time. It was a travel show, and it showed one the reporters, a beautiful woman, in a bikini and sarong standing on a beach talking about how great this particular place was to visit. Given the quality of the high definition broadcast, the size of the television and the way that the volume was set, the woman was pretty much life size, she sounded so real, and it really looked like the TV was just a window out to the beach.

Sarah whipped around to look at the screen in amazement. She watched for a little while, and then turned her head to look at Eddie with this intrigued look on her face.

"All right Eddie, what's this new magic?"

Eddie just looked at her and smiled.

Sarah looked at him thoughtfully for a minute, and then she heard his voice in her mind from earlier in the day. "Nothing we have is magic. There's always a way things work, though you mightn't ever understand it. You just think its magic, because you don't know how it works."

Her brow crinkled in concentration, and she slowly approached the television with her hand held out in front of her. Her fingers gently touched the screen, and she felt it's firmness, rather than passing through to the beach like she'd half expected. While she was touching the screen, the picture changed to a blazing camp fire, and she yanked her fingers back in surprise. When she realised that there was no heat from the fire, she backed away from the TV and turned back to Eddie.

"This is a test isn't it?"

Eddie nodded. It was a test in at least two different ways, but she probably hadn't caught on the Chelle side of the test.

"Well, there was nothing there, and suddenly I could see and hear a woman on a beach, and then suddenly there's a man by a fire. But when I get up close I can see that's just a lot of dots that change their color."

The picture changed to an ad that showed two little boys taking crockery plates out of a box and putting them onto a normal gym-type treadmill, which would fire them at high speed into a wall, whereupon bits would go in all directions. The two little boys looked around at the camera with an evil, self-satisfied smile on their face. It was an ad for a health insurance company. It didn't make a lot of sense but the visual gag had made it one of the most popular ads in history.

Sarah burst into laughter.

"Eddie..."

Eddie could see that she couldn't even figure out what to say, what to ask. Jill burst into a peal of laughter. "Sarah, Eddie's being mean. I'll tell you about it. This thing is called television. I don't have a clue how it works, but it can show you things that happened in other places and other times."

"What, any place and time?" Sarah jumped on that — could this thing show her how her family was?

Eddie made the connection too. He knew how strongly she was connected to her family, and he still felt bad for not taking her on that walk her had promised and then chosen not to after what Chelle had said about keeping a close eye on her. "Oh no, you can't go back to any time, sorry. Someone has to be at the other end with a whole lot of machines to make it work."

"Oh."

Eddie glanced at Chelle. Yes, she'd got it too. It was there when they'd met that first day, and they should've picked it straight away: the only possible explanation for Sarah was that she really was from the eighteenth century. And yet it was just so impossible, so he understood the look in Chelle's face as they watched Jill trying to explain the mechanics of television to Sarah.

Eddie guessed that it had been easy for him, for his family to this point. They just had to decide whether they believed Sarah. But Chelle had to deal with paperwork, and it was something that would have to done at some stage. Sarah just didn't have any existence in this time. No birth record, no immunization records, no school records, nothing. There was no way that Sarah could exist in this world without proper documents, a proper identity, and it was going to be Chelle's problem to deal with it. What could she do that wouldn't lose her job for her?

"Chelle, it's a problem isn't it?"

Chelle shook her head. "Oh, you have no idea. I don't have any idea what to do about this."

Eddie discussed it with her for a little while. After a while they realised that Jill had turned the TV down, and Sarah was trying to both watch the TV, largely in incredulous disbelief, and listen to Eddie and Chelle discussing her future. Eventually they decided that they didn't need to tell the whole truth. They'd base their strategy on the idea that Sarah was a lost child, and if anyone ever came forward to claim her, that would clear up the mystery of her identity. In the meantime, Chelle would start working to create a paperwork trail that would justify the creation of a temporary identity. She didn't need to lie at all, just not tell all the truth, at least, not the unbelievable bits.

Sarah was happy with that. Fine, in fact, since she didn't really understand the problem. Why should she need an identity? She knew who she was. But she had this crawling suspicion that this was just another thing that she didn't understand about this new world she was stuck in. The problem here was this TV thing. It was just a continuous stream of things she didn't understand at all. Mostly she simply couldn't make any sense of the words or pictures, but when she did, that just raised questions faster than she could think them. At least she understood that some of what she was seeing was pretend. She could only hope that most of it was. Even if it all was, what a strange place the world had turned out to be!

Her attention was grabbed by the words "Paris Hilton" from the TV. That was followed by a series of pictures of a pretty fair haired girl in impossibly weird clothing doing impossibly stupid and disgusting things, and with an invitation to watch later that night to see even more. What, more? How could there be more!? Well, the whole Paris Hilton thing was definitely pretend, but she could see why Jill, with her sneaky sense of humour, would name the sheep after this Paris Hilton.