Temperance’s Temporal Detective Agency, Finding Time

Synopsis

Finding time. This continuation of the historical narrative from Temperance’s Temporal Detective Agency begins with the end and ends with the beginning. And yes, these are stories captured by and archived at the Black Hart Library. Everyone has their own personal sanctuary. For some it’s being immersed in sports, for others it is canoeing along a river, still others find it in mathematics. For Professor Bajusz, it is a quiet sunny day, sitting on a park bench, smoking his pipe, glaring at squirrels through his wire-rimmed spectacles and patiently observing the world. Bran is doing time at the Black Hart village jail, but then he really needs a restful vacation with healthy exercise after being stranded on a previous investigation. The food’s not bad and he has visiting hours at the library each day. A good deal, no not a good deal, a great deal! In the end, this story is not about either of them, yes they play some role, especially in providing the narrative, but this continues the story of Temperance and her temporal detective agency.

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Very sincerely yours,
Professor Stanwell Peterson Briar (AKA Bajusz)

Chapter 1 Doing Time

“He said that we’d find you here,” she says with a thin-lipped smile as she stares through the village jail’s cell bars at me. She has her favorite Peterson System pipe clenched between her teeth and apparently, she is trying one of the Balkan pipe tobacco blends today, based on the spiciness that I’m smelling. The jail cell bars are freshly painted a nice matte black. My neighbor in the cell next door, MacTavish and I painted them just last week to freshen them up a bit. One never knows when visitors might drop by for a cup of tea. A fresh dash of paint always makes a place seem happy, even if it is a jail cell.

As the old saying goes, “If looks could kill, I’d be walking with a serious limp right about now.” Temperance definitely has that look. She grabs the sturdy iron cell door bars and rattles the door with vigor. I’ve seen her grab the spindles on the headboard to our bed and rattle it against the wainscoted wall with that level of enthusiasm, but usually with a different expression on her face. One should never discount the security and safety of a well-designed jail cell.

“A vacation from your worst tendencies and your recent career flying the black flag as a Dirigible Pirate, Professor Bajusz said to me. You know what? He was laughing so hard at the time that he could barely get the words out. His bushy grey mustache even looked gleeful, right up to that point where he knocked his favorite Savinelli pipe on the floor. Ashes flew everywhere across the tile floor and his secretary was glaring daggers at us both. Curious relationship there, it’s clear that she hates him, and he is not too fond of her, considering the fact that she gambled away his retirement savings.” Temperance has a way with words. She has that tight-lipped smile that I have come to interpret as an indication of her displeasure.

“The others are here too?” I ask, a bit embarrassed by my current mild case of incarceration. I’m lounging on the fragrant mattress, it’s basically just a big canvas sack stuffed with hay. My old Medico briar pipe is full and it’s the end of a long day. I get to select my own hay each day since I’m working on the jail’s hobby farm. Each morning, I cut some of the hay field with a scythe and lay it out on the ground for curing. You might wonder what system of incarceration would allow the prisoners to wield dangerously large and potentially lethal scythes. It’s just different here, and I hardly present any risk other than the likelihood of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. And they have already addressed that foible. Be that as it may, for some reason, I find the aroma of hay baking in the warm summer sun quite soothingly relaxing.

“Yes Bran,” she replies with some exasperation, “Brix and Kenzie are busily bribing the guard at the front gate. I’m sure they’ll be passing through the iron gate shortly. Apparently, bribery is a very casual thing here in the village of Black Hart. Why didn’t you just bribe the guard and walk away? He said that he would have let you go for less than it costs to feed you.”

“I don’t eat that much!” I quickly reply, trying to keep up the playful banter.

She pointedly, and without comment, stares at me with her fists balled into her hips. I can see her white teeth clenching tightly on the stem of her pipe.

“Temperance, I get free access to the Black Hart Library for two hours each day as a part of the effort to rehabilitate my criminal tendencies. Amazing, right? Otherwise, I’d have to buy a library membership. The library is run like a private club you see, and it’s possible that I may have a genetic aversion to spending money on memberships of any kind. Plus, I was kind of broke when I got here.”

“You do realize how crazy that sounds,” Temperance replies.

“Crazy you say? Too much time spent amongst the Livonians, no doubt. Black Hart has a really solid library considering the size of the village, and the librarians are quite enjoyable company as well. Considering how out of the way this place is spatially and temporally, the library is especially well provisioned with obscure texts in the Physix and Temporal Mechanix,” I reply as I hear the “clumping” sound of Brixtoni’s combat boots stomping up the stone passageway from the Harrogate Street entrance. I’ve probably mentioned it before, Brixtoni’s father was secretly a fan of The Clash in his youth, hence her name. As far as I can figure, that’s the gate that the local farmers use to move their harrows from their homes in the village to the surrounding fields. I haven’t had an opportunity to check whether they actually store their harrows in their living rooms or in some out-building. Unlike the Livonians though, I’m sure they don’t shelter their goats in their living rooms. Oh and don’t ask me if there’s a plow gate, I haven’t seen much of the village yet, given my confinement. “On top of that, as punishment for the prisoners here at the jail, why, they have been feeding us Hungarian food. As punishment! Punish me more! Arpád, who owns the street café located on the front steps of the library provides the food here in the jail. I’ve had Gulyás for lunch for the past five days and I’ve gained ten pounds. Not sure what that is in kilograms, but it’s a lot. In the Livonian measuring system, that would be one big stone, one medium stone and two or three little stones depending on the specific village. And some sand. Apparently, the local sheriff, who is of French extraction, hates the local Hungarian bistro owner and considers being forced to eat the food as a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Thankfully they only make us eat French food on Wednesday and then it is some sort of cold watery soup with the consistency of cold pee. Pee, that is, if one has a urinary tract infection, which, fortunately, I don’t.” Yet. But I’m working on it at the library. I passed a kidney stone when I was with the Dirigible Pirates, but I’ve had no need for screaming since.

“Hey, how do we get in on that kind of deal?” Brixi asks as she grabs the bars on the cell door and rattles it on its hinges. Everyone seems to do that, yes first thing, they walk up to the bars and rattle them, just to verify that they are sturdy iron bars and not rubber or something silly like that. She smiles at Temperance as if they have been having private discussions while I have been away on my dirigible sabbatical. She is wearing a grey fedora with black ribbon, combat boots and not much else, but it’s a warm summer’s day here in Black Hart and clothing really isn’t all that necessary. Her brown breasts glow with what I assume to be tanning oil, although I do get a whiff of coconut.

“Not difficult, you just steal a sheep or two like my neighbor MacTavish who’s over there in the neighboring cell,” I reply, pointing at the kilted and heavily bearded fellow in the neighboring jail cell who casually waves his massive hand in response from his bed, “or disparage the locally brewed beer, which is apparently what I did. Inadvertently.”

“Beer?”

“Yeah, their locally micro-brewed beer has a kind of spoiled potato front pallet, and a disgustingly vile dead possum after-taste. Ok, and to be fair, I did disparage their political and legal system as well, once I was done critiquing their beer.” If I recall clearly, which I don’t, I could barely stay on my feet at the point and I kept sliding off the barstool. The seat on the stool was either quite slippery or else I was in the process of transforming from a solid to a liquid. I was trying to diagram the hierarchy of local courts on a bar napkin and correlate that stem and leaf structure to Babbage base sixty code architecture when the bartender whacked me on the head with his truncheon. Now that I think about it, perhaps I should have been thinking in terms of Markov chains or something.

Little did I know that the bartender is also the local magistrate for one of their courts. The court that I offended is the one located near the village militia’s trebuchet, way over on the east side of the village green. Yes, everyone in the village and surroundings serves in the self-defense militia and they have a massive trebuchet which is their pride and joy. This would constitute a well-armed but not terribly mobile militia. The village of Black Hart court system is widely noted, and exhaustively studied for their dual path legal system. Basically, whatever is illegal at one court is usually legal at the other, and vice versa. Yes, so basically, no matter what you do, you are breaking the law with one court or the other any time that you are in the village. Turns out, anyone with any sort of opinion at all lives just outside the village limits. This simplifies things for everyone. Consequently, everyone is well-versed in paying gratuities, well in point of fact, paying outright bribes as a part of everyday life. Bribery is even more common than tipping here in the village, if one is the sort to seek out these analogous comparisons. Amusingly enough, public nudity during sunny days is prohibited by one court while public nudity is encouraged on those days and prohibited on rainy or partly cloudy days by the other court. There is no mention of whether Brixi’s fedora qualifies as an item of clothing or whether this constitutes partial clothing and would fall, as it were, midway between the two court’s jurisdictions. This type of discussion has been thoroughly debated in the two courts with the current focus being on the original intent of the village council at the time that the law was passed several hundred years ago. Of course, with the collapse of linear time, several hundred years ago seems like it was just yesterday and in fact it was for some folks, but unfortunately everyone who debated the proposed ordinance and then voted it into law was falling-down drunk from the local swill / beer festival at the time.

Brixi and Kenzie are both grinning madly at me. Brixi, in between laughs, says, “The guard told us about the village library and the librarians, surprised that we were not proceeding directly there instead of visiting this forlorn jail. We told him that we were here to provide physical and emotional comfort for an old friend. There was a leered suggestion that we might be wasting our time with you. He mentioned something about them, the librarians that is, being constantly excited by reading all of that physix literature which results in their relentless need for sexual gratification and that you had been more than casually engaged with improving their understanding of classical mechanics.”

I smile in reply, there is nothing to be gained by either disclosure or confession.

Yes, the librarians are widely known for their endless hours of unspeakable debauchery of which we shall speak extensively at a later point - with considerable delight. Perhaps this is a universal tendency amongst that profession, possibly I should consider expanding my global sampling strategy to increase the robustness of my analysis and summarization. Despite being unspeakable, a bit of gossip always sweetens the pot of tea. Long story short, what is now the Black Hart Library was originally a gentlemen’s “dinner” club that evolved into a non-gender specific entertainment club. This was very progressive thinking given the era and remoteness of this time branch. Black Hart village is as far from anywhere you can get by most stochastic measures. Detailed statistical studies have established, with a 95% confidence interval, that approximately half of the patrons were women and most of them were reasonably human, other than the retired members of the alien Intergalactic Observer Corps (GOC of IOC) residing in the community who are definitely not human despite their appearances and far too enthusiastic about their former butt-probing proclivities. Back in the day, the women and men who were and are today, employees of the club, all having university degrees in the physix, maths, literature, the arts or history, were inclined to take anything as payment during a particularly extensive period of economic duress and were often enough paid in books. Or eggs. Sometimes during the warmer months, payment was in locally grown produce, as well. Cucumbers come to mind. But mostly payment was in books and coal during the winter. Hence, each room tended to accumulate books of a particular genre, based on the education and tastes of the resident club employee (aka librarian). As the book piles accumulated, it was just easier to refer to the employees as librarians. As time passed, a printing press was added in the basement for the printing of the local newspaper and various obscure books on the physix. As one might expect, Friday night at the Black Hart Library is particularly popular with the single crowd, while Saturday is popular with married couples who tend to share the interests of a favored librarian.

With a laugh, I mention that it has been my experience that the librarians at the Black Hart Library are a notoriously randy lot given to no end of excess. Exponential probability curve? Yes, that’s them. I also suggest that it has been a statistically quasi-random sampling process and not entirely exhaustive. They both nod, grin, giggle and offer to help with a methodological study. Or they may have started with giggling. Perhaps the exact sequence is of little importance. I immediately recognize the benefits of making this statistical sampling process a team effort. Obviously, we aren’t shy around each other. I’m not certain, I think I am distracted by their breasts, although Kinzie’s curly black Mohawk haircut merits equal attention. Since I last saw her months ago local standard time, she’s buzzed the hair on the sides and back of her head quite short and has dyed the blonde curls on top a dark auburn, almost black color.

A tussled-haired blond dressed in a starched white nurse’s uniform pokes her head around the corner and waves at me with one hand, she has a lattice crust topped pie in the other hand.

“Say, that looks like cherry pie! Nurse Caiti, you’ve baked me a pie!”

“Bran, its not just pie, this is a cherry pie with a saw blade baked into it so you can escape.”

“I thought that the tradition is that the file or saw blade is baked into a cake?” I have to ask of course.

Caiti has that pouty look as she replies, “I don’t bake cakes, Bran, I bake pies. You always told me that you loved my pies.” She looks closely at the door to my cell, “Say this cell door isn’t even locked.”

“That all makes perfect sense, of course I love your pies,” I reply considering how to continue, “Yes, the door isn’t actually in point of fact, as we might say, locked. The guards don’t like to be bothered in the middle of the night when we need to go to the water closet, so they just leave it unlocked. And we consider it locked on a hypothetical basis unless we need to go wee.”

Temperance shakes her head, apparently not at all surprised at my current state of incarceration, the pie or the employees of the village library, “Bran you’re an idiot. But you’re our idiot. We’ve got a big case, and we’ll need your help. And we talked about it last night, everyone agrees that you look really great in disguise, not at all like yourself.”

I regard this last comment with some consternation. Yeah, I look damn good in disguise. But unremarkable otherwise?

“There is this WTF needs to be delt with.” She pronounces it “double-ya, Tay, aff” as folks do from her former hometown. That’s a “Wandering Temporal Fragment” in more specific and euphemistic scientific terms. Depending on one’s perspective, that special event, that moment in time when the acronym originated can either be viewed as a comedy or a reflection of the decline in the state of higher education back home in Canada. Mostly, it has been the statement, asserted with great authority and pomposity by more than one grey-haired elderly codger, professors of one social science or another, that this behavior all originated with the adoption of indoor plumbing, socialism and excessive sodomy – they, being widely recognized experts on the topic of excessive sodomy. And really, what would constitute an excessive level, I ask you? As everyone knows, plumbing is inherently the work of the devil and not at all favored by the followers of John Calvin in the Presbyterian faith. Good, old-fashioned outhouse sited over a hole in the ground for those folks is close enough to god. Be that as it may, you may recall from your history lessons that as far as can be determined, time travel was probably invented by Tesseract Bee as a means to avoid exceedingly boring lectures from Professor Bajusz. She and her friend would just pop out of class when the Professor began the day’s scribbling of various differential equations in chalk on the blackboards. Eventually she matriculated, went on to study advanced studies in temporal mechanix where she was awarded her doctoral degree. It would be fair to say that no one on her dissertation committee understood a word that she said during her dissertation defense, but the fact that she phased in and out of the room multiple times proved sufficiently convincing. This all occurred during the early years at Kincardine Agricultural and Technical University (KAT) and since then she has come to head the Advanced Temporal Mechanix (ATM) department. And so it was, after a day spent with her graduate students, scribbling like mad on the blackboards, chalk dust filling the air and coating everything in a thin layer of grit, that Doctor Tesseract and her students, graduate students no less, found themselves at the local pub hammering down pints of moderately cold beer. Yes, no warm beer for them, they were all true Canadians.

Approximately three or four beers in, one young lad, Rodney if the story is to be believed, said to the barmaid, “Did you know that time can be segmented using scission and then these bits of time wander casually, nay, quasi-randomly about?”

The barmaid it is said, wrinkled her nose, brushed back her bangs from her eyes, and replied, “Scissors? Aye lad, and it’s no o’ tha’ language that’ll get yur pasty white arse in me bed tonight.” She then gathered the empty bottles and steins of beer from the table and stomped off behind the bar, waving one finger in the air at him.

“It was like a ‘What the Fuck’ moment, when the math coalesced, wasn’t it. Time can fragment? Time can be purposely fragmented? Couldn’t we just call it, ‘WTF’, like a wandering temporal fragment?” This from the auburn-haired young lady who is all in for maths and chemistry and always sits at the front of the lecture hall, but hardly ever speaks during the average day.

Doctor Tesseract stares at them, “Brilliant. What do the temporal fragments do? They wander! Think about it, “Wandering Temporal Fragments” is what we tell everyone. That way we can all get some sort of prestigious international science prize. We call it anything else and we will be a footnote on some boring paper.” Her eyes are twinkling like they always do when she is excited “Only we will really know what it means.”

Chapter 2

Coming soon

• Temperance’s Temporal Detective Agency, Finding Time