Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“Alternative,” Orlando said promptly. “What he took doesn't have any value at all except to him. It wasn't even with the stuff they put out. That's why he had them put the important stuff out, so they'd look there instead of anywhere else. Like Sonia said, a card trick. It's something so unimportant that it won't be missed, but it's important to him.”

“I may have a girl for you after all,” Eleanor said.

“That's the direction I've been leaning toward,” I said to Sonia. “Something that seems to be worthless.”

“Nothing is worthless to my mother,” Eleanor said, and then stopped. “Oh, good lord,” she said. She wrapped her right hand into a fist and pretended to try to force it into her mouth.

“Just some relative, huh?” Hammond said accusingly.

“Case closed, Al. All over, and at no cost to the taxpayers.”

“A kid was transported across state lines?” Sonia demanded.

“What do you think about Emily Liang?” Eleanor asked me.

“Nice little girl. Plays the piano, doesn't she? Wears a lot of pink?”

“I mean, for Orlando.”

Orlando pulled the center out of a piece of bread and rolled it up between his palms, the picture of adolescent nonchalance.

“Nah,” I said, “she's too nice for Orlando.” He gave me a startled glance.

“What do you mean, it's over?” Hammond's shoulders loomed toward me.

“The kids are home. Nothing valuable is missing. It was all a. . a-”

“A family misunderstanding,” Eleanor finished for me.

A big pill made out of bread hit me on the ear. “How could she be too nice for me?” Orlando said.

“What a question,” his sister scoffed. “Have you got a brother, uh, Eleanor?”

“Do I ever,” Eleanor said.

“And you seem so calm,” Sonia said.

“How many conversations we got here?” Hammond asked. “I feel like I've got jet lag.”

It reminded me of Uncle Lo, and it seemed like safe territory. “Just what exactly is jet lag?”

“It's a displacement of the circadian rhythms,” Orlando said, getting it out of the way so he could return to his main theme. “How could she be too-”

“Circadian,” I said. “Pretty word. Sounds like Shakespeare, the seacoast of Circadia.”

“What I really don't like,” Orlando announced to the world at large, “is when someone asks a question and doesn't listen to the answer.”

“Circadian,” Eleanor interposed, “circa dies, literally 'about a day.' A rhythm that repeats approximately every twenty-four hours.”

“An internal rhythm,” Orlando said sulkily.

“Like sleeping?” Hammond asked.

“You have hundreds of them,” Eleanor said. “Your digestive system, your basal metabolism, body temperature, endocrine glands, brain waves. All cyclic, all set to a period of about twenty-four hours. When you change time zones-” she glanced at me, realizing what I was thinking-"you, um, you have to readjust all those little clocks to local time."

“What do you think?” I asked her. We'd already more or less settled it, but nothing seemed to be settled about Lo.

She shook her head. “I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now. He was tired, that's for sure.”

“I'm tired, too.” I yawned again. “That doesn't mean I just flew in from Hong Kong.”

“Who just flew in from Hong Kong?” Hammond asked.

“Circadian rhythms persist for a long time, even where there's no sunlight,” Orlando contributed, more to thwart Hammond, I thought, than for any other reason. “People living in deep caves for months still function in twenty-four hour cycles. Astronauts in space, same thing.”

“Orlando is interested in time,” Sonia said, a bit wearily.

“Who isn't?” Orlando demanded.

“Can we have a show of hands?” Hammond asked.

“Time is everything,” Orlando said, warming to his subject, “and we don't know doodly about it. We haven't got words for it, even; we recycle the words we use about space. 'The near future' and 'the distant past.' Like I just said, 'a long time.' Time isn't like space in any way, but we use the same words. Space goes on in all directions. If time moves at all, it moves in only one direction.”

“Time moves in only one direction?” Orlando had jogged Eleanor's metaphysical funnybone.

“Maybe it doesn't move at all,” he said, looking mysterious. “But if it does, it moves in only one direction.”

“Says who?” Eleanor asked.

“Says atomic decay, for one thing.” Orlando sounded positive.

“I thought time was cyclic,” I said.

“You would,” Orlando said coolly. “Stone age.”

“Most of the people in the world believe in cyclic time,” Eleanor volunteered.

“Most of the world,” Orlando said dismissively, “believes in reincarnation, too. That doesn't make it anything except a remnant of a primitive worldview.”

“Yow,” Hammond said. “Listen to the boy. Am I the only one who's hungry?”

“You don't believe in reincarnation?” Eleanor was on the fence about it.

“I'd say the mix is a bit rich in former Egyptian princesses,” Orlando said. “There couldn't have been that many Egyptian princesses. How come nobody was a dung-beetle farmer, that's what I'd like to know.”

“Dung sounds great,” Hammond announced, “but I'm having steak.”

“You had steak yesterday, Al.” I thought for a moment. “Was it yesterday?”

“Time is a cycle. What about you, Sonia?”

“Surf and turf,” Sonia said. “And something white and dry.”

“I want to eat something with a head,” Eleanor said. “I'm feeling fifties. Maybe a steak, like Al's. How can you be so sure about reincarnation?”

“Because it's cyclic. Cyclic time doesn't happen in nature.” Orlando closed his menu. “I'd like pork chops.”

“It doesn't happen in nature, huh? Tell me about the year,” Sonia said.

“A perfect example.”

“For whose side?” Eleanor put an oar in.

“Prime rib,” I said. I hadn't even realized a waiter was present until I felt him behind me. He was as tall and thin and melancholy as Ichabod Crane, and he had a small hole in the elbow of his red jacket.

“Anything for starters?” he asked mournfully.

“Salad all around,” Hammond said, assuming command. “Bring all the dressings you got.”

“For my side, of course,” Orlando said. “Every year is absolutely different.”

“And wine?” the waiter asked.

“A jug of each color,” Hammond said impatiently. “Can't you see we're debating the nature of the universe?”

“Let me know if you figure it out,” the waiter said, turning away.

“Spring, summer, fall, winter,” Sonia said, counting each off on a finger. “You remember a year when they came in a different order?”

“And garlic bread,” Hammond called after the waiter.

“Oh, sure,” Orlando said. “And day and night, high tide-slash-low tide, waking-slash-sleeping, the phases of the moon, the apparent motions of the planets and stars, the solstices, circadian rhythms-I mean, give me a break. Local phenomena, card tricks. So the planet circles a star. So it rotates. Mercury doesn't. On Mercury, it's the same day all year. A Mercurian's circadian rhythms would last forever. So what? We have a day every twenty-four hours, but it's never the same day.”

“I told you he was bright.” Sonia didn't sound entirely happy about it.

“And why do you care about this so much?” I asked.

“It just pisses me off. Our brains are the most complicated things in the universe, and we don't use them. We understand time intuitively in ways we don't even consider.” He picked up the salt shaker and threw it at me.

It was a pretty quick snap. I caught the shaker left-handed, and salt poured over my forearm. “Great,” I said. “And I've been trying to cut down.”