The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [488]
There was one piece of furniture that remained unchanged whilst all about raced, moved and blurred in a never-ending jumble. It was a small table with an old candlestick telephone upon it. I stepped into the room and lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” said a prerecorded voice. “You’re through to the Swindon ChronoGuard. To assist with your inquiry, we have a number of choices. If you have been the victim of temporal flexation, dial one. If you wish to report a temporal anomaly, dial two. If you feel you might have been involved in a timecrime . . .”
It gave me several more choices, but nothing that told me how to contact my father. Finally, at the end of the long list, it gave me the option for meeting an operative, so I chose that. In an instant the blurred movement in the room stopped and everything fell into place—but with furniture and fittings more suited to the sixties. There was an agent sitting at the desk. A tall and undeniably handsome man in the blue uniform of the ChronoGuard, emblazoned at the shoulder with the pips of a captain. As he himself had predicted, it was my father, three hours later and three hours younger. At first he didn’t recognize me.
“Hello,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“It’s me, Thursday.”
“Thursday?” he echoed, eyes wide open as he stood up. “My daughter Thursday?”
I nodded, and he moved closer.
“My goodness!” he exclaimed, scrutinizing me with great interest. “How wonderful to see you again! How long’s it been? Six centuries?”
“Two years,” I told him, not wanting to confuse a confusing matter even further by mentioning our conversation this morning, “but why are you working for the ChronoGuard again? I thought you went rogue?”
“Ah!” he said, beckoning me closer and lowering his voice. “There was a change of administration, and they said they would look very closely at my grievances if I’d come and work for them at the Historical Preservation Corps. I had to take a demotion, and I won’t be reactualized until the paperwork is done, but it’s working out quite well otherwise. Is your husband still eradicated?”
“I’m afraid so. Any chance . . . ?”
He winced. “I’d love to, Sweetpea, but I’ve really got to watch my p’s and q’s for a few decades. Do you like the office?”
I looked at the sixties decor in the tiny room. “Bit small, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.” My father grinned, clearly in an ebullient mood. “And over seven hundred of us work here. Since we could not all be here at one time, we simply stretch the usage out across the timestream, like a long piece of elastic.”
He stretched his arms wide as if to demonstrate.
“We call it a timeshare.”
He rubbed his chin and looked around. “What’s the time out there?”
“It’s July fourteenth, 1988.”
“That’s a stroke of good fortune,” he said, lowering his voice still further. “It’s a good job you’ve turned up. They’ve blamed me for the 1864 war between Germany and Denmark.”
“Was it your fault?”
“No—it was that clot Bismarck. But it doesn’t matter. They’ve transferred me to another division inside the Historical Preservation Corps for a second chance. My first assignment occurs in July 1988, so local knowledge right now is a godsend. Have you heard of anyone named Yorrick Kaine?”
“He’s Chancellor of England.”
“That figures. Did St. Zvlkx return tomorrow?”
“He might.”
“Okay. Who won the SuperHoop?”
“That’s Saturday week,” I explained. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
“Not strictly true, Sweetpea. Everything that we do actually happened a long, long time ago—even this conversation.