"My mistake was that I thought my energy explosion would be at B,
throwing Summer back into a normal time direction. Instead, it was at
A, reversing the time direction of Mark's existence: and the reversed
Mark was Summer."
"But Mark was Summer's son." I exclaimed.
"Curious, isn't it?" he agreed, smiling strangely. "She gave birth to
herself, like the phoenix. Nor is that all. She conceived herself!"
With a firm hand, he wrote "Wyn" above the bottom arm of the Z!
The diagram looked like this:
MARK
--------
/EXPLOSION
/
/
/SUMMER
/
/
/ WYN
STORM ------------
"The re-reversal!" His blue eyes were a little self conscious as they
looked at me now. "Don, I was born Mark Storm. This explosion today
reversed my time direction and I became Summer Storm, to give birth
to myself nine years ago. And in a terrific burst of natural energy
that you yourself saw, a crucible so fiery that it could wrench the
very inner fabric and physical form of the body, the time flow for me
was twisted back to its proper direction that night in the park and I
became myself--to father myself six years later!
"I was my mother. I am my own father and my own son!"
* * * * *
There it is. Wyn believes he sprang from nothingness, from himself.
Amid the wreckage of the laws of cause and effect that this whole thing
involves, it's possible, I suppose. But a couple of details still
bother me, details I haven't mentioned to Wyn.
Oh, it isn't the coincidences. If the future is fixed as is the past,
they wouldn't necessarily be coincidences: things like Summer--in the
reversed time in which she lived--stripping off her clothes, donning
Gus Adams' raincoat over her nakedness and going with us out to the
park, to that rendezvous with the lightning and Wyn.
One of the details I can't take is that it's hard to believe that,
even in such strange twistings and turnings of time, any creature
can initiate itself and, in effect, spring from nothing--though Wyn
says it's done at the sub-atomic level in simple terms of conversion
of energy to matter. But how about the fact that such a complicated
creature as man is built by the action of the genes and chromosomes?
The other is that year that I was Summer's lover. If she was living
backward biologically, wouldn't that apply, too, to the growth of an
unborn child while it was still part of her. And Wyn left Allertown
right after Mark's birth.
I've heard of virgin mothers. I'd rather believe in a "virgin father"
than human creation from nothingness.
I once had hair, and it was blond. My eyes are blue. I look in the
mirror, and then I look at Wyn lounging at ease behind his newspaper.
My son? My motherless son?