Chapter 4: Explanations of Sorts

Realisation was a long time coming: this was a much younger version of myself. And then: it had to be Alfred. But why would he be a doppelganger of myself? And should he not have waited for me to come round?

Thinking over the events of the day made it clear, however, that on him the strain must have been colossal too. Guiding and monitoring me all the time, with catastrophic failure staring him in the face more than once, would have taken an extremely heavy toll. He deserved to sleep and I dare not disturb him. We could get acquainted over breakfast and after.

After a few moments of deliberation I decided to make myself comfortable outside. I drew one more fur over the still form on the bed and thought that the temperature should be higher by a few notches. I could not be sure but it did feel a bit warmer after a while. Yes, I took the remainder of jungle juice with me and even put on Alfred's joke of a jersey. Fashion be damned, it was night after all. I found out that Alfred had indeed dumped my fags but there, on the table, was something that looked suspiciously like decent grass, ready rolled. This was good; I needed something to prop me up while I pondered developments.

A single cushion was sufficient to seat me comfortably atop the cave. There, under the cloudless nightly dome, I considered my weird situation. The weed tasted better than any smoke ever and, together with the tiny sips of cognac I took, went straight to my head, achieving this delicate balance just beyond sobriety where cognitive ability is at its best without diminishing the power of logical thought. I sincerely hoped that I would enjoy this lucidity of mind long enough to find sufficient explanations to put my soul at rest.

The double me I pushed aside for the time being. There must exist a connection between the two of us, that much was clear. Alfred had to have selected me on purpose somehow. But how he could look inside me, scan my body, my mind, what exactly he meant by bio-feedback, how he could see me but yet be invisible to me, were questions I could not answer even in my heightened state of awareness. The physics had me beat. But I also realised what enormous efforts Alfred must have applied to his task. He did mention the awful amount of deliberation it took to set up the island. But the moving about in time and space was the most impressive achievement, compared to that everything, even the healing, magnificent though it was, took second place. Again no answers were forthcoming and long after I lost the fragile equilibrium of mind and body and was quite intoxicated with booze and smoke I resigned myself to the fact that Alfred indeed must be an incomparable genius, and quite the humanist to boot, although I had a sneaking suspicion that he might have been prompted by motives beyond mere altruism. This resignation and my acceptance of having to trust Alfred to come up with answers let me find some semblance of peace, no matter how fleeting this might turn out to be. In the end I must have dozed off into a weightless, dreamless void – death itself could not be more agreeable than this.

Waking up by the earliest of light I felt rather than heard some stirrings down below. Before I could walk down, Alfred emerged from the cave, huddled in a fur, taking shuffling steps and looking about him with the greatest hesitation imaginable.

"Alfred, up here," I called out softly.

He turned around ever so slowly, lifted his face up to me and after a very long moment the tiniest, weariest smile appeared as he made a simple gesture with his hand – stay there, I will come up. Slowly, carefully, much like a man wearing borrowed bifocals, he trundled up towards my sentinel.

Have you ever seen this disgustingly filthy picture of Brezhnev smooching with Honecker, the erstwhile East-German leader? Did it make you want to puke up more than you could eat? If you are like myself, a man not much given to showing off emotions, it would. But now, all of this, realities, time shifts, healings and the like became meaningless as I stepped towards Alfred. Here was a man! I reached out, pulled him to my chest and hugged him fiercely, fur and all, choked up, not able to speak a single word. Alfred hugged me back, no sound from him either, but I could feel tremors running through his slender body.

After a lifetime I released him gently and looked into his face, my face.

I did not want to make a show of it, yet spoke hoarsely. "Alfred, I don't know where to begin, we have lots to talk about. But first, I will make breakfast for us. Why don't you take a dip in the meantime?"

"Yes, yes – I will do that."

We went down together, I ducked into the cave and got busy in the kitchenette. From the soft splashes after a while I knew that Alfred did his thing too. A handful of eggs was soon scrambled, bacon fried, coffee blubbering away in the kettle, there was some nice multi-vitamin juice left, milk too, apples, pears, grapes, bread rolls: he must have provided everything fresh before donning his aesculapian cloak and making me over.

Just when I wanted to call Come and get it!, a freshly laundered Alfred shuffled into the cave.

"–"

"Just sit down anywhere, Alfred. Do as if you were at home. Everything is ready."

"Yes, yes – sure, yes."

We didn't speak much apart from all the polite little things about passing the butter and having some more juice or coffee – we both felt the enormous tension building up between us, fraught with questions and emotions.

When we both had eaten our fill we took a last cup of coffee outside and sat down under the trees.

"Alfred, allow me to start getting acquainted with you. It sure was a long time in coming. But before I ask any questions, know that regardless of what evolves here, I am very grateful indeed for all you did for me. I cannot thank you enough, ever. Nobody could have done more. Perhaps for us both? No matter. My very first question is now the most important in my mind and will, I think, go a long way towards enlightening me. After that we can talk about what happened yesterday if you wish. – Am I your, are you my doppelganger? You must have specifically selected me for your programme, this cannot be coincidence, is it?"

"Very well. You are right, this is the most important aspect of my experiment. But there is more than one dimension to this. I do understand you have suspected that my motives were not altogether as pure as might appear at first glance. And yet your selection was, as unbelievable as this may seem, coincidental rather than specific.

"MasterBuilder, my programme, has been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times. Nobody knew this, of course, but without paying the ridiculously low fee, parallel reality, this singularly outstanding feature, is not available, making the programme just one, the best mind you, of many 3D-design programmes.

"I am very ill. I had to find somebody amongst the paid-up users who was as similar to myself as possible to work out ways of healing. You did latch on to that and asked about being a guinea pig. Yes, in the wider sense of the word you were. This similarity had to include gender, the entire blood group, enzyme compositions, skeletal compatibility and a further multitude of things, like matching up people for an organ transplant. But outward appearance was not important at all. This is indeed a fluke. I wanted to, would have to eventually experiment on myself, but from what happened in the course of your healing, you can imagine that I would never have been able to control the process. I would certainly have killed myself. It is here where you come into the picture. But I did not choose you. Rather, I had to make do with you, because out of the more than one hundred thousand users you were the only one who ever did pay!

"Yet, despite this haphazard selection, you are very closely matched to me, even though there is quite a difference in age and background and I was very glad indeed when I found you. A rapidly diminishing emotion, I assure you, when I realised the terrible state of your health, not to mention your frustratingly casual approach to the matter. I doubted whether I would be able to heal you at all. The reason for all this healing, beyond my personal gain of course, is simple: portation between realities can be very stressful at times. The more often one travels, the heavier the strain becomes – unless one is entirely healthy, that is. There are factors coming into play that defy all my efforts at isolating and rectifying. So, healing for you and me was a must, and here we are. I had to heal you first before I could try and heal myself with your assistance."

All this was stammered haltingly, with great pauses between sentences.

"Alfred, surely you know my name, at least from when I registered. Why don't you ever use it? I tell you, you should, but if you ever call me Bertie, I will crash this programme," I said with a smile.

"Well, yes, Berthold. I didn't want things to become too familiar. We did not get along all that well, did we? Do you actually know what happened yesterday? After I dunked you under? – I thought not. It was very, very foolish of me to do that and your account of what happened at the other pond should have warned me. But I was so happy that we succeeded beyond measure that my playful side got the upper hand. Under you went and by all standards you were near brain dead immediately. Of course I would never have done that, had I known that there were some very dodgy parts of you not healed yet. But overcome by sheer joy, I omitted to check! My almost fatal mistake. I am very, very sorry. When you floated away suddenly, I was left with no choice. I had to jump in to save you. The various stages of pain you went through merged into one grand assault upon me. You see, I am as ill as you were. Had I foundered, we would both have died there and then. I do not know where I got the resources from, but some maniacal desperation gripped me and I just managed to hold onto consciousness and to flip you over so that your face rose above water level. And that was it. The programme took over just in time, separating the two conflicting input streams, healing you first. Sorry, but I had to thump you quite hard to get you going again. I pulled you onto the steps, dragged you half out of the water, unable to do more. Then I collapsed. For how long had we been out? Maybe a few minutes, maybe half of an hour, half a day. But you were getting stronger and I was weakened beyond endurance. When I saw that you were safe, I crawled onto the bed. I am sorry, Berthold, sorry I wasn't there for you in the end. I do apologise."

His voice broke once again.

So I had been right after all, I was dying. Fancy that. But no harps, no cymbals, just this bloody magnum orchestra. No checkpoint into paradise, no virgins waiting either. This also explained the remains of a huge yellowish-purple bruise over my breastbone. Suddenly I was filled with exhilaration, enough to make me want to sing at the top of my voice and dance and hop around. Maybe it was just the fact that Alfred was alive and quite human after all, but certainly our survival of an ordeal of this magnitude, even worse for Alfred, must be one of the most astounding feats of humankind, recorded or otherwise.

"Well, Alfred, I for one am certainly grateful that I survived and that you helped me through it. However, the pains you have endured must have been enormous, if I am to understand that you are also afflicted with cancers just as I was. And you pulling me out and forcing me to live on top of everything is more than can be expected from anyone. Do not put yourself down. A brother couldn't have done more for me. By the way, I do not know how we must continue. You did interrupt your processing. I could only preserve and save your status as it was when ... You will have to come up with a solution here. And shame on you, your hair isn't white!

"But my mind still boggles over the odds of you finding a match for yourself through this programme of yours. Even if all users had paid the fee, they would still have been astronomical. I know for a fact that my blood is made up of quite a few rare components, rare enough to make it much in demand when I was a donor at the Red Cross in my youth. And I also know that this type of blood is to be found almost exclusively amongst the former German population in what is now the province of Moravia, part of the Czech republic, after the Reich's unplanned termination. You do live in the States, but where does your family hail from, if you needed this match?"

Alfred did not answer immediately. He seemed to be deep in thought for a long time, before a huge grin appeared on is face.

"You are right, it is very, very good to be alive and to know that my programme worked as well as it did. But from my experiments with animals I could never have guessed that the healing would be as complicated and as painful as we both experienced it. Perhaps that was a mistake, the animals must have been rather healthy by comparison. I think I should be able, with your help, to finish healing myself. If it doesn't work, I am still miles ahead. Besides, despite the programme telling you that your processing was finished, I still have to set back your biological clock to where you want it, but this we will discuss when we both feel up to more experiments.

"As to the odds of finding you I can but agree. This should also explain my continued insistence on speedy co-operation. I did not, could not explain everything to you, since some of the most important aspects of the programme, why the two of us had to match as closely as possible, for instance, are rather obscure to me as well. The programme's logic seems to have taken on a life of its own here. But my experiments with the rabbits showed me that I couldn't heal a male rabbit with the help of a female template. Even the male templates had to be generated from the same population. And what hope did I have of finding somebody else? I had no choice but to push and cajole you into going along. I know all the names and adjectives you dropped onto me in your mind, apart from the ones you called me openly that is, and what you termed rudeness and nagging was actually brought forth by my awareness of my limited life expectancy. I do understand you being upset most of the time. But understanding of how you felt was one thing, knowing that our time was running extremely short the other. If you must know everything, we can go over the healing logs together. I assure you it will make most interesting, if depressing reading.

"Yes, I am living in New York. I have settled there after wasting endless years in and around San Francisco. A totally degenerate freaked-out lot. My ancestors must have come from eastern Europe too, but not much is known, since my parents got rid of me when I was still small, less than a year old I think, and shunted me off to an endless succession of foster homes. I never saw nor heard from them again and I haven't tried to find them after they abandoned me. Stuff the coldhearted egoists. The blood group match came up as the first thing when I explored you. After that I felt like winning the f$%king, sorry, the bloody lottery: even the bad news were good, since our afflictions and ailments matched surprisingly well. Apart from the age difference we could almost be identical twins. I know that you are a religious person, despite your terrible swearing, and so am I. We both have little esteem for the established churches, whether they thump a book or not, and even less for the lunatic fringes of all of them, and yet ... I do feel, just as you do, an enormous reverence for the part of creation we live in and even my twisted variety is just that, a part, and I can only enlarge on some laws of physics because I know them extremely well. And, no matter what the evolutionists tell us, without some kind of creation preceding, evolution – and there has been a lot of it, to be sure – would have been impossible. When there is absolutely nothing at all to start with, there cannot even be a vacuum, never mind a big bang! This much at least should be obvious to even the most primitive of dimwits nowadays futzing about in the so-called ivory towers of science.

"But come, Berthold, now is not the time to dabble in philosophy. We will leave this for the evenings. My final healing can wait, I feel fine now, and I think the programme will cut me some slack here. I will check everything tonight. Let's go exploring together, try the bio-gym, swim in the bay, walk the island, do some fishing later, get to know each other on the go, shall we?"

We picked up a rug apiece, some fruit, I grabbed a six-pack of Pilsner and down we went. At the grove, Alfred explained to me how he set it all up. Do bench presses for as long as I can, go over to the springy upright trees, push them, pull them, put my back against them with as much strength as I could muster for as long as I could hold out, pull myself up on the higher branches, swing over the lower ones, much as I had tried it out before. But he was quite the taskmaster, showing me when I did something wrong, needling me when I wanted to drop out from sheer fatigue. In the end, we went for a brotherly swim in the bay. He looked over the waters and mumbled something about the absence of decent surf.

I didn't think that he could do anything about it, but not much later there was a shift in wind direction and some fair-sized breakers were rolling in, just strong enough to make swimming an enjoyable challenge. Afterwards we went for a leisurely stroll, with Alfred showing me more interesting features along the way. Like the little knoll we could hide behind to watch the antelope and 'roos feeding and gambolling about. He took me to one of the smaller hills and showed me a sheer cliff side where some eagles and other raptors were nesting.

"I know you enjoyed creating the island and I was right there with you. And yes, much like Genesis it was. You were quite carefree in selecting this, that and the other, but when you went off in a huff I had to fill in the gaps. Food chains had to be established, various insects found to ensure pollination of flowers, shrubs and trees. Of course, with you wanting neither mosquitoes nor snakes, monkeys or large predators, it wasn't all that easy to accomplish. But I think the island will be stable in the long run. We will have to watch for signs of degeneration, though.

"Look over there, Berthold, two tortoises. They seem to be quite happy here, even though they travelled a few thousand miles with my help. By the way, I didn't lose a single animal during portation, but some of them were very pissed-off acting at first till I found out that everything went a lot easier if I moved couples of everything at least, or, later, whole groups. Also, I had to ensure that their feed plants or prey were established before I dropped them here. I know now what Noah is supposed to have accomplished in his time, believe me, even though I agree with you: he shouldn't have bothered with stingers or baboons."

Chatting with Alfred was extremely pleasant. He was smaller than I by a full head, his slim body looking almost undernourished, yet I could see stringy muscles working under his almost girlishly smooth hide. Apart from that, describing Alfred is like providing you with a picture of myself. Narrow face, strong nose and chin, a high forehead, deep-set eyes, his blond hair a shade lighter than mine had been. And whereas I have a tic of spicing my speeches with illustrating sounds he did it with gestures. His hands were never still, his face and blue-grey eyes actually living his words. He didn't wear glasses but told me that he should and that he hated the damn things since he broke or lost them all the time.

On we went right around the island. From one of the hills we looked out over the ocean and saw a school of what must have been dolphins playing and feeding at the same time.

"Alfred, explain to me, please, how you managed to set up the cave. The library is a work of art, absolute tops, but how did you accomplish it? It does take a lot of time to bind the books as well as that, not to mention the fantastic cost. And the bookplates..."

"Berthold, it surprises me that you keep wondering most over rather trivial aspects of this set-up. It should be obvious that I can shift time phases in more than one direction. While you were grumbling about my tax forms I had more than enough time, my time of course, to see towards the things which would be needed once you got really moving. And there was this nice bookbinder chap from Austria who was rather fed up with re-binding the same old bibles and Talmuds again and again. The library and the bookplates are in lieu of penance for my nagging."