First Contact and Time Travel by Zoran Živković

Author:Zoran Živković
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319905518
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Zoran ŽivkovićFirst Contact and Time TravelScience and Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90551-8_8

8. Time Gifts

Zoran Živković1

(1)Belgrade, Serbia

Zoran Živković

“Time Gifts.” Written in 1997. Originally published in Serbian in 1997 as Vremenski darovi, Polaris, Belgrade, Serbia.

The Astronomer

I

He had to escape from the monastery.

He should not have been there at all; he had never wanted to become a monk. He’d said so to his father, but his father had been unrelenting, as usual, and his mother did not have the audacity to oppose him, even though she knew that her son’s inclinations and talents lay elsewhere. The monks had treated him badly from the beginning. They had abused and humiliated him, forced him to do the dirtiest jobs, and when their nocturnal visits commenced he could stand it no longer.

He set off in flight, and a whole throng of pudgy, unruly brothers started after him, screaming hideously, torches and mantles raised, certain he could not get away. His legs became heavier and heavier as he attempted to reach the monastery gate, but it seemed to be deliberately withdrawing, becoming more distant at every step.

And then, when they had just about reached him, the monks suddenly stopped in their tracks. Their obscene shouts all at once turned into frightened screams of distress. They began to cross themselves feverishly, pointing to something in front of him, but all he could see there was the wide open gate and the clear night sky stretching beyond it. The gate no longer retreated before him, and once again he felt light and fast.

He was filled with tremendous relief when he reached the arched vault of the great gate. He knew they could no longer reach him, that he had gotten away. He stepped outside to meet the stars, but his foot did not alight on solid ground as it should have done. It landed on something soft and spongy, and he started to sink as though he’d stepped in quicksand. He flailed his arms but could find no support.

He realized what he had fallen into by the terrible stench. It was the deep pit at the bottom of the monastery walls; the cooks threw the unusable entrails of slaughtered animals into it every day through a small, decayed wooden door. The cruel priests often threatened the terrified boy that he, too, would end up there if he did not satisfy their aberrant desires. The pit certainly should not have been located at the entrance to the holy edifice, but this utmost sacrilege for some reason seemed neither strange nor unfitting.

He began to sink rapidly into the thick tangle of bloated intestines, and when they almost reached his shoulders he became terror-stricken. Just a few more moments and he would founder completely in this slimy morass. Unable to do anything else, he raised his desperate eyes, and there, illuminated by the reflection of the distant torches, he saw the silhouette of a naked, bony creature squatting on the edge of the pit, looking at him maliciously and snickering.

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