The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [487]
Bowden broke the silence. He produced a piece of stained paper wrapped in a cellophane evidence bag and passed it across to me. “What do you make of this?”
I read it, not recognizing the words but recognizing the style. It was a sonnet by Shakespeare—and a pretty good one, too.
“Shakespeare, but it’s not Elizabethan—the mention of Howdy Doody would seem to indicate that—but it feels like his. What did the Verse Meter Analyzer say about it?”
“Ninety-one percent probability of Will as the author,” replied Victor.
“Where did you get it?”
“Off the body of a down-and-out by the name of Shaxtper killed on Tuesday evening. We think someone has been cloning Shakespeares.”
“Cloning Shakespeares? Are you sure? Couldn’t it just be a ChronoGuard ‘temporal kidnap’ sort of thing?”
“No. Blood analysis tells us they were all vaccinated at birth against rubella, mumps and so forth.”
“Wait—you’ve got more than one?”
“Three,” said Bowden. “There’s been something of a spate recently.”
“When can you come back to work, Thursday?” asked Victor solemnly. “As you can see, we need you.”
I paused for a moment. “I’m going to need a week to get my life into gear first, sir. There are a few pressing matters that I have to attend to.”
“What, may I ask,” said Victor, “is more important than Montague and Capulet street gangs, cloned Shakespeares, smuggling Kierkegaard out of the country and authors using banned substances?”
“Finding reliable child care.”
“Goodness!” said Victor. “Congratulations! You must bring the little squawker in sometime. Mustn’t she, Bowden?”
“Absolutely.”
“Bit of a problem, that,” murmured Victor. “Can’t have you dashing around the place only to have to get home at five to make junior’s tea. Perhaps we’d better handle all this on our own.”
“No,” I said with an assertiveness that made them both jump. “No, I’m coming back to work. I just need to sort a few things out. Does SpecOps have a nursery?”
“No.”
“Ah. Well, I suspect I shall think of something. If I get my husband back, there won’t be a problem. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
There was a pause.
“Well, we have to respect that, I suppose,” said Victor solemnly. “We’re just glad that you’re back. Aren’t we, Bowden?”
“Yes,” replied my ex-partner, “very glad indeed.”
8.
Time Waits for No Man
SpecOps-12 is the ChronoGuard, the governmental department dealing with temporal stability. It is their job to maintain the integrity of the Standard History Eventline (SHE) and police the timestream against any unauthorized changes or usage. Their most brilliant work is never noticed, as changes in the past always seem to have been that way. It is not unusual in any one ChronoGuard work shift for history to flex dramatically before settling back down to the SHE. Planet-destroying cataclysms generally happen twice a week but are carefully rerouted by skilled ChronoGuard operatives. The citizenry never notices a thing—which is just as well, really.
Colonel Next, QT CG (nonexst.),
Upstream/Downstream (unpublished)
I wasn’t done with SpecOps yet. I still needed to figure out what my father had told me on our first meeting. Finding a time traveler can be fraught with difficulties, but since I passed the ChronoGuard office at almost exactly three hours from our last meeting, it seemed the obvious place to look.
I knocked at their door and, hearing no answer, walked in. When I was last working at SpecOps, we rarely heard anything from the mildly eccentric members of the time-traveling elite, but when you work in the time business, you don’t waste it by nattering—it’s much too precious. My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offense—which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straightaway.
The room was empty and from appearances had been so for a number of years. Although, that’s what it looked like when I first peered in—a second later some painters