Another Space in Time, Returns. (5% of the book)

Ch. a:  BACKSTORY

_______________________

This book is the continuing story from ‘Another Space in Time’. As with that previous work I dictated all my detailed memories, which were recorded, sorted, and then transcribed by Richard Bunning. Both books are accurate in every detail.

My name is Arthur Fieldman, farmer of the parish of Foxton, Lincolnshire, England, Planet Earth. Could I have written these two books for myself? Probably, given time and a fair wind, but as a still working, elderly farmer, I would have always struggled to find the time. This is especially true as the routine demands of the land seem in my old age to take ever longer. My health received a boost when I received my replacement heart, but one can’t for long turn back time. My failing eyesight is now also an increasing impediment. The young ones are no longer prepared to struggle with the demands and isolation of farming, mine included, and who can blame them? If I were still young I believe that even I would head for a potentially easier life in the city.

My strange ‘inheritance’ needed to be properly recorded sooner rather than later. I really feel that the completion of this, the second half of my story, might just help a few sinners and non-religious individuals gain some sense of direction and purpose on their journeys into distant futures. Once Richard and I started this project I almost immediately felt an urgency to complete, so as to minimise the chance that this strange inheritance would ever be lost. The inevitable approach of my own death gave poignancy to my efforts, not through regret but sadness. The sorrow is driven by the realisation that however well Richard writes, many will treat this as just another work of science fiction. Note well that the melancholy is not to any degree based in my personal demise. I am an old man with aching bones for whom death is provided with unexpected promise by my, what must be God given knowledge.

I had no hesitation in using Richard’s help again, so benefiting from his long history of ghost writing for ‘wish-to-be-authors’ who lack fair ability. Some of his works would be a surprise to regular readers who rest unaware of the shenanigans of the publishing industry.

It’s truly amazing that it isn’t my lived history that is recorded in these pages, but the memories of another man I know as well as I know myself, even though we never met. One can say that I acquired a synaptic memory of every detail resting in Rodwell Richards’ mind, at the point of his death. Nowadays I carry not just the record of my own life, but also that of this other man who last lived on Earth in a modern family home on Goil Stripe Lane, in Foxton. This is a small town in the English county of Lincolnshire. He worked as a middle-ranking officer of the European Department of Border Security who, having come to know too much for the powerful to risk, was one night ‘dispatched’ by a bullet to the head. His body, when police eventually gave up on his case, ended up to be long forgotten in cryogenic suspension. This potentially beneficial store of replacement parts, as chance had it, was to be used years later to save my modest life.

Amazingly, it seems that though Rodwell was truly dead, as we understand the concept, he somehow then spent a very active period in another space and time, in another world. I have no doubt at all that this other place really exists. During this strange life, and, as I understand it, for some time after, his clinically dead body was kept going on a hospital ventilator. A medical scientist reviewing this case might argue that he was merely experiencing vivid dreams in a comatose near-death state. I who have his memories beg to differ. This other life that I truly believe was enjoyed in a parallel dimension, on a planet named Axa-Goranas, just had to be recorded for posterity. It would have been a sin for me to have died without ever giving readers a little glimpse into the possibility of some sort of continuing future. The truly religious reader may gain no personal reassurance from Rodwell’s gifted history, but others will. Of that I am sure.