Withered stumps of time

Phlebitis, doomed sailor, sat in the waiting room and felt impatient.  Somewhere beyond the reception desk, through at least three doors and down corridors that were carpeted in beige and painted in blue and left the traveller with the feeling that they were the only thing left on earth, was Justice Aburton.  Who was keeping him waiting, in the appropriately named room, for reasons that Phlebitis suspected were entirely selfish.

On the wall, a clock made of toast ticked quietly, measuring out the seconds, minutes and hours with three hands, each looking as though it were ashamed of its companions and was reluctant to spend time in their company.  The hands tried to stay maximally separated, meaning that the clock currently claimed that the time was 30 seconds past ten past two, and had been just five minutes earlier twenty-five seconds past five past nine.  Phlebitis could understand the use of toast as the outer body of the clock as it was disposable, replaceable, and edible if the mood took you.  He spent months at a time on board his ship, hauling boiled frogs, or willow-drug statues, or little jade figurines that were probably cursed, and appreciated things that had a use but could also be eaten when the only alternative was boiled frog or the cabin boy.

The receptionist lifted her head from the magazine she was reading and smiled vacantly at Phlebitis.  Her pupils were dilated, and the whites of her eyes were mostly yellow.

“He will see you now,” she said, her voice dreamy and quiet.  “He says he will apologise for keeping you waiting if you can only show him how late he is.”  Phlebitis snorted at that; Justice Aburton was famous for making seemingly penitent offers if the injured party could only do three impossible things before breakfast.

“The usual way?” he asked, gesturing towards the door behind reception.

“Yes,” replied the receptionist, her focus sliding back towards her magazine.  “Please don’t kick the echidna on your way.”

I don’t even know what one of thsoe is, thought Phlebitis, but he nodded and smiled, and made his way to the door.

Beyond was the beige, earth-like carpet of the corridors, and the walls and ceiling were painted sky-blue, and Phlebitis remembered walking on a honey-coloured beach one morning just after sunrise, wondering how he was going to escape from the wretched desert island.  He shivered; he’d learned a lot about what he was capable of in those three weeks.

The corridors seemed to run on interminably, and there too few doors into rooms for the length of the corridors.  For them to be sensibly sized the rooms that were there would have to be the size of football pitches at least.  He walked down them, knowing the route by heart and turning at all the right places without having to count doors or paces, arriving at the door with the little brass nameplate on it: Justice Aburton.  He knocked.

“Come in,” came a heavy-sounding, tired voice.  “Come in, come in.  I haven’t got all day to wait while you figure out a door-handle.  Ah Phlebitis,” as Phlebitis opened the door, “come in.  I’ve been told I should be expecting you.”

“I made an appointment, yes,” said Phlebitis, closing the door behind him.  “I wasn’t expecting you to honour it though.”

“You killed two of my insurance inspectors last time you were here.”

“I left the Unreal City without anyone telling me that you had men hidden in my frog-boiling barrels.”

Neither man sounded angry, they were just stating facts.  For a moment there was silence between them, and then the Justice, a brown-haired man with a face as wrinkled as an old potato (and with little green patches), tapped a finger on some documents on his desk.

“It says here,” he said, tapping again for emphasis, “that you wish to leave harbour with some withered stumps of time.”

“I am trading in clocks and watches this time round,” said Phlebitis.  “The frog-farmers have finally developed astronomy and want access to timepieces to improve their harvest.”

“Of frogs?”

“So they tell me.”  Phlebitis had his own doubts that frogs and watches worked well together, but he couldn’t see how a clock would build a weapon, so he wasn’t worried about this new trade demand.

“It seems unlikely,” muttered the Justice.  He turned pages of a document, the papers held together by a clip in the corner, while Phlebitis looked at the three frames hanging on the wall behind him.  Two contained certificates, of Law and Philosophy, and the third contained a picture of a young man, who might just have been the Justice, proudly holding up a fish as long as his body.  Phlebitis, who knew how heavy fish were, thought the picture had been faked.

“But you have withered stumps of time,” said the Justice, pointing at a page.  Phlebitis leaned in a little to see it and realised that it was a copy of his manifest.  He read the line that the Justice was stabbing a finger at, and frowned.

“Those are integral sticks,” he said.  “I got them from Madame Genevieve, who’s government-sponsored and possibly has links to the City Directors–“  Justice Aburton glared at him so hard when he said that that he had to stop and swallow before continuing, ”– and she said nothing about there being export problems.”

“The integral sticks form a clock of sort,” said the Justice.  “There aren’t normally issues with them, but you’re taking them to a new destination, and we don’t really know what they want them for.”

“You just said yourself that clocks aren’t an issue going to frog-farmers!”  Phlebitis felt like he was being jerked around like a marionette by some petty mandarin.

“Most clocks don’t contain reservoirs of time!”

Justice Aburton was white faced save for two burning red spots in his cheeks, and he was half out of his seat, leaning forward on his knuckles on his desk.  His breath was short, panting.

“What?” Phlebitis felt a sudden chill run down his spine, and he struggled not to shiver.

“They are withered stumps of time,” said the Justice.  “As they grow they contain time within their cells, and then when they sporulate they die.  Their time is released into their spores, which grow rapidly into young plants, getting past the most dangerous part of their lives in the blink of an eye as far as the rest of the world is concerned.  But if the plants don’t sporulate for some reason, possibly because humans have intervened and prevented it, the time is never released and is held still in the dead and withered stumps when the plant dies from other means.  You can then crush the plant to release that time into one burst.”

“That sounds dangerous,” said Phlebitis.  “To everyone.”

“It is,” said the Justice.  “So I must abjure you from taking them as cargo.”

“Yes, of course,” said Phlebitis, suddenly placid and eager to help.  Although the Justice eyed him a little suspiciously, they finished the documentation in just fifteen minutes, and then Phlebitis was free to leave again.  He walked back through the corridors deep in thought, wondering how he could hide the fact that he’d already shipped four cargoes of the withered stumps of time to the frog-farmers.

Dental Palmistry

Phlebitis paused at Madame Sosotris's door and re-read the sign on it.  At first glance he'd thought it said Oriental Palmistry but now that he was closer he could see that it in fact read Dental Palmistry.  He hesitated, his calloused fist a couple of centimetres from the door's surface, wondering what it could mean.  Indecision wracked him for several seconds; his visits to Madame Sosotris were not made for pleasure but out of painful necessity and the opportunity to not visit was tempting.
The door opened just as he was deciding that madness was as good a reason as any to not knock and not find out his future from her.  A small woman who barely came up to Phlebitis's waist walked into him and said, "Ow."
Phlebitis lowered his fist, seeing Madame Sosotris emerging from the gloom inside her house.  Her eyes seemed dilated and unfocused, and there was a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth.
"I said, 'Ow'," said the small woman, looking up at Phlebitis.  He pulled his gaze from the slightly vampiric-appearing Madame Sosotris and looked down.
"Watch where you're going," he said.  "If you were a sailor you'd be over the side in no time, making friends with the sharks."
"Are you saying I'm clumsy?"  The small woman squeaked when she was excited or angry.
"No, I'm saying that the other guys would think it funny to trip you over and watch you fall over the side.  Don't worry.  You look like you'd float for quite a while."
There was a noise like a boiling kettle whistling, which Phlebitis slowly realised was the small woman.  She was so angry that her face had turned a deep purple and she was standing on the very tips of her toes.
"Are you going to move?" he said.  "Only I'm here to visit Madame Sosotris and you're rather in the way.  You seem to be blocking the entire doorway."
The small woman was actually vibrating with anger now and was having trouble staying on her toes as she did so.  Seeing an opportunity, Phlebitis stepped to the side and tugged gently on her shoulder as he did so.  A spasm of panic passed over her face as she lost her balance completely, her hands reflexively pushing forwards to break her fall and pushing her center of gravity further out of alignment, speeding her fall.  Phlebitis stepped over her and pushed the door shut behind him.
"I'b god a midderable code," said Madame Sosotris.
"You always do when I visit," said Phlebitis.  "It's almost like it's been written about somewhere and we just have to play our parts out over and over again."
Madame Sosotris gave him a penetrating look and produced a lace handkerchief from one of her sleeves.  As she lead the way into her drawing room, where she performed séances, table-turnings, read cards and ate dinner, she blew her nose.  It was a long, drawn-out, mournful honking process, at the end of which she dropped the sodden handkerchief into a bucket
"What's dental Palmistry then?" asked Phlebitis sitting down in the high-backed chair that didn't wobble.  Madame Sosotris glared at him but sat on the other one without saying anything.  She rocked slightly as she tried to make it balance.
"A mistake by the sign-writer," said Madame Sosotris.  Phlebitis could see that her eyes were red as though she'd been crying, and her wrinkles seemed to get deeper and dirtier everytime he came.  "Although, a couple of nights ago I did get a visit from a man who had mouths in his palms.  His future was very hard to read, but eventually I figured out that he'd misunderstood the sign and was hoping for Palmal Dentistry."
"Is there such a thing?"
"Ye–e–es," said Madame Sosotris trying not to look at the builder's wrap of hammers and chisels on the sideboard.  "How have you been though?  Surely another eight months alone at sea must give a man certain... urges?"  She winked.
Phlebitis tried to ignore his stomach doing somersaults and forced a smile.  "I'm not alone," he said.  "I'll just have the usual please.  The future for the next six months in strange images and dire pronouncements.
Madame Sosotris sighed softly, suspecting that Phlebitis was somehow mocking her, and leaned back in her chair.  For many clients she would draw out cards or a crystal ball and use them to distract the customer while she engaged the trance, but she'd been trying and failing to seduce Phlebitis for years now.  He could see it all done the real way, warts and everything.  Her eyes rolled up back in her head, revealing jaundiced whites, and her fingers tensed until her hands looked like claws.
"I see a marriage," she said, and Phlebitis snorted.
"You tried this two times ago," he said.  "You do not see me marrying you, you just wish you could."
"No," said Madame Sosotris, her voice now oddly thick.  "I see you marrying a shape, an intelligence that is not moulded by earth into a human form.  The ceremony is under a moon, and there are people and ... and un-people watching.  There are boiled frogs for the wedding feast.  There are... wait, the image is changing.  There is a chair, a golden chair with eyes in the back.  They are watching you, they are looking for you.  Then they cannot find you and the chair warps and twists.  It is angry.  There are more chairs, and they gather around a table to discuss you."
She sat forward, her wispy grey hair spilling over her eyes and gasped for breath.
"Great," said Phlebitis standing up.  "Married to something not human and it looks like one of the wedding gifts is going to be a carnivorous dining suite.  You've outdone yourself this time, Madame."
His money tinkled on the table.  "I should have asked for the Dental Palmistry," he said.  "That might have made more sense."
As the door closed behind him Madame Sosotris finally got air back into her tired, ancient lungs, and called out.  But Phlebitis was already gone.

Consider Phlebitis

Boiled frogs. More bloody boiled frogs.
Phlebitis hated boiled frogs more than he hated his name, and more than he hated the mother who had given him his name. Yet the boiled frogs were considered a delicacy in the Meliphasic isles and they traveled well, so every summer Phlebitis spent four months sailing back and forth across the stretch of water that was called the Meliphasic Sea on one side and Big-Wet-Salty on the other. He had to boil the frogs himself, en route, because the frog farmers believed that their frogs were sacred. He'd tried asking them to boil the frogs and they'd almost refused to trade with him any more. He'd not wanted to risk boiling the frogs on the beach in front of them after that.
So, he constructed large iron barrels that were raised slightly off the deck and the frogs were put into spring water in the barrels so that the frog farmers were happy they were being cared for and respected. If they'd got their language far enough to describe love they'd probably have insisted that Phlebitis love the frogs too. Once they'd set off, Phlebitis would clip his nose shut and light the fires beneath the barrels, and the frogs would boil from noon until sunset.
The Meliphasts would trade trinkets for the boiled frogs; trinkets that they either carved from local jade or amber, or sculpted from a kind of white rock they made beneath the banks of willow trees. The amber and jade fetched prices that would astonish (and enrage) the Meliphasts, especially considering they got barely a bucket of boiled frogs for each little objet d'art, but the sculpted white rock was in even higher demand. It dissolved easily in water and could be administered to cure fevers, mental weakness and a host of other things besides. And of course, the Meliphasts considered the white rock sacred, so they wouldn't increase production of it, explain how they produced it, or sell it in anything other than elaborate carvings that took months to create.
"Can't you carve me little discs, perhaps with a symbol engraved in it?" Phlebitis had asked. "The letter E, for example?"
The Meliphasts were slightly less angry than the frog farmers had been but Phlebitis had still twisted both his ankles trying to get away from them and back to the relative safety of his ship.
And so, he had a sea-voyage back to sensible, enlightened lands where he was trying to keep precious white-rock statues from dissolving in the wet atmosphere, waves and rain so that his profits didn't run into the sea and cure headaches in all the fish.
For now though, he was on his way to the Meliphasic isles and the stench of boiled frogs seemed to both pre- and suc-ceed his ship so that he was forever moving in a miasma of amphibian stink. The cook, a short ugly man whose mother had apparently called him Adonis in a show of irony so large that the Gods were still discussing who had priority for striking her down, had just told Phlebitis that they were out of meat, unless he counted the boiled frogs. Phlebitis, his head in his hands, had sent him to do just that while he tried to find out if they'd ever stocked a net or fishing lines on the boat. It was, he felt, an omen, a sign that this voyage was not going to be one of the wildly successful ones like the one where a giant squid had attacked them just hours out of harbour, and they'd pretty much just dragged it ashore losing only four men and a mast in the process.
Boiled frogs. He hated boiled frogs.