The Four Horsemen XII

Backwards Time

Despite the long centuries of folklore and popular imagination by the followers of the book, angels are not superhuman beings who live in abodes above the clouds warmed by eternal sunshine. But we always grasp the point that they tended to be quite unattainable and, in most cases, rather strange people.

We also guess that they live in a far-off place. In fact, the other side of the universe does not quite do justice to its farness. That's because if you placed the universe's timeline upon a time-space graph (a world line), it would form a circle: a closed temporal loop of everything. Thinkers in India tend to a cyclical worldview, which is correct, except that in this model, time only goes in one direction.

Visualise the universe's world line as a circle on a cartesian plane. Let the bottommost point be the moment of its birth, and the topmost point be the big crunch. Are you comfortable now? Now if we move upwards from the big bang moment, the universe would branch off both ways, and our known universe is the line on the right.

It would be a different matter if we consider things locally. Causality patterns in the circle travels around it, that is to say that each event can only be caused by another event which precedes itself on the circular path, which is to say that half of space-time will have an opposite causality orientation to the other half.

And the other half is where the Angelic race resides, where things in the future cause things in the past.

The cause for their weirdness is now easily understandable, given the way that they think. Because of the reversed cause-effect relationship between all things, their minds are invariably geared towards remembering what will happen in the future and and speculating about what has happened in the past. In short, extraordinary precognition and dismal memory.

One angel may open the cookie jar and ask another:
"Why will you steal all the cookies from the cookie jar?"
And the other would reply:
"I'm sorry, but I will be starving."

Walk around this oddly familiar otherworld and you would find science fiction novels about the past, fantasy novels about the future, hot debates on whether Eschatology should be taught in schools, and coins and documents whereon dates like 284 BC are proudly emblazoned.

And they tend to see humans in similar terms as we see them, because it would take no less than a miracle for a human to transgress such impassable temporal boundaries and for an angel to do the same (and at the same time, being conditioned to follow weird paths of logic); like angels, humans who land on the opposite world-line are as good as having grown seven pairs of wings, and had their appearances dutifully predicted and, in rare cases that demanded public attention, documented.