The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  Helen poked her head out of the tomb at the commotion. I heard her emit a gasp as Abigail let the camera fall to the ground and tore out of the tomb, jolting to a stop in front of the cart. Both donkeys brayed in protest, bells jingling furiously. Abigail dodged the donkeys and ran into the professor’s arms for a bear hug.

  Helen stared at her ex-husband, framed in the tomb archway like an angry goddess.

  “Xavier,” she said with a touch more timbre to her voice than usual. “Not dead, then?”

  “As you see, Helen.” He added, looking down, “Let me breathe, child.”

  Abigail released the professor, but did not move away, as if she were afraid he might disappear again. “I was hoping for something like this when the same thing happened to us.”

  “Not quite the same thing. The professor came here of his own free will,” Nate said, making it sound as if we were having a normal conversation.

  “We thought you had been scattered across time, Xavier.” This from Helen. “Couldn’t you have left a note? It would have saved everyone a great deal of trouble. We had a memorial for you.”

  “You did? Did you go, Helen?”

  “Xavier, you made a fool of all of us.” Helen turned on her heels and stalked back into the tomb. If there had been a door to slam, she would have slammed it.

  Xavier rubbed the spotted donkey’s mane without seeming the least bit apologetic. “Really, I thought I was being perfectly clear. I left Scarlett unlocked in the bike bay for whoever wished to take her. I put all my affairs in order. My will has long been on file—I left everything to St. Sunniva. And I graded the final projects for my classes and left them on my desk. Julia, did you find them?”

  I was sweating, in desperate need of a shower, and my boots were hurting my feet. I tugged at the shirt that was sticking to my back under the itchy cloak. “We found the graded projects, Xavier. A note clipped to them saying that you had decided to relocate into the past would certainly have been helpful.”

  He led the donkeys into the shade of the Nigidii tomb, tied the reins to a tree, and accompanied us inside. “I didn’t want anyone stopping me or coming after me, pestering and badgering me to come back. I programmed the computer to erase my destination from memory by having it randomly move the mirrors after I left so that no one could trace me. How did you manage to find me?” He caught Helen’s eye and went on. “The night I left, I folded my biking clothes on a lab chair—again, I thought I was being perfectly clear—changed into a tunic I had made, and left my watch, cell phone, and other small items in the locker.”

  “But Xavier,” I had to ask, “Why on earth did you come here just as Vesuvius was about to erupt?”

  He hesitated for the first time since we’d run into him.

  “It’s a bit of a long story. We can talk about it later.”

  “And why are you so tan?” I added.

  “I’ve been here for six months.”

  “I thought you looked even older, Xavier,” said Helen in a ringing voice from deep within the tomb.

  “Time is relative,” the lean, tanned professor said to a confused-looking security chief and me, his gray hair loose around his shoulders. Apparently, even though only eight days had passed back home, six months had passed for the professor. If I had been the type to clutch my brow, I would have. I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Dr. Mooney was alive.

  “What is the date, Xavier?” Helen asked in a tone that reverberated around the tomb and could only be described as glacial.

  “August twenty-fifth. The eruption would be in full force by now if the Pliny camp was correct. I had a hunch that they weren’t, but still,” he chuckled, “I spent a nervous afternoon and night peeking out of my room at any unusual sounds. A party of some kind was taking place in the tavern across the street and between the noise of the musicians and the intoxicated sailors, I think I must have opened the door of my rental room a dozen times during the night to look outside—”

  “Your rental room?” the chief interrupted. I glanced down at the faint impressions our bodies had left on the dirt floor of the Nigidii tomb.

  “I’ve been living the life of a trader. I made my way down from Britannia via Singidunum by foot and boat—or, at least, that’s the story I’ve been telling. What I really did was step out of STEWie’s basket just outside one of the town gates, with silks and spices to trade and a handful of coins. You have no idea how much planning it took to sneak everything past Oscar. I had to bring in the supplies bit by bit for several weeks and store them under my desk and behind the larger of the musical instruments.”

  “That explains the cinnamony smell in your office. Wait, is that why you took that sewing course? To make a tunic for yourself and sacks for the spices?” I asked. “I thought it was because you were trying to expand your social horizon.”

  Somewhere in the dark part of the tomb, Helen snorted.

  “I knew that spices—saffron threads, cinnamon sticks, peppercorns—would fetch a good price on the market here. Silk, too. I ordered traditionally made silks and had them shipped to my house. There was quite a pile of stuff. If I could have figured out a way to pull it off, I’d have snuck a horse and cart into the TTE lab. I wrapped up my affairs, got everything ready, and stepped into STEWie’s basket. Once I got here, I hid everything behind a tomb until I sold off a bit of the saffron and some silks and obtained rental quarters and the use of a cart.”

  “But why come here?”

  Xavier sent a concerned look in the direction of Abigail, who was sitting on the wooden chest, arms wrapped around her knees. Then he caught Helen’s eye as she came back into the sunlit part of the tomb.

  “Well, Xavier?” she said sharply. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been diagnosed with an immune system disorder. Crohn’s. The details don’t matter. I knew what it meant.”

  “No more time traveling? If so, that would have been the right decision,” Helen said. “Because if there was a heightened risk that you could bring something back, even with the nasal and hand sanitizer and other precautions—”

  “—like the plague, you mean? Modern antibiotics deal with the plague very effectively. Still, I didn’t want to take the chance. I decided to find another way to be useful. The pursuit of knowledge would be better served not by sitting at my desk, I reasoned, but by relocating to the past and making a cache of photos and detailed notes for historians and archaeologists to find. I had so many destinations to choose from—I had been planning to look for al-Khwarizmi’s The Book of Sundials before I was diagnosed, but in the end I chose Pompeii. I reasoned that I’d have significant physical and social freedom here—that the coming eruption would mean that I’d be able to move around freely and talk to people.”

  “That makes sense,” said Kamal. “The freedom of movement part, I mean. Has it worked, professor?”

  “Mostly, though perhaps not quite as well as I expected. How’s your research going?”

  Kamal’s thesis topic was Safe Landing Zones in Neanderthal Eurasia.

  “It’s only been a week, professor, plus we’ve been doing test runs with a cranky tilapia because we thought something was wrong with the equipment.”

  “Right, right. Sorry about that. I had hoped that Dr. Little would take over as your advisor.” Kamal looked aghast at the prospect. It seemed like Xavier was just beginning to realize how much his departure had affected everyone at St. Sunniva.

  “Were you planning on leaving for Rome as the eruption day neared, then? To document their contribution to science or something of the sort?” I asked.

  “The Romans?” He snorted. “Don’t get me started. They wouldn’t recognize a mathematical proof if it tapped them on the shoulder. No, my intent was to, uh, make my way from here to Alexandria, then perhaps the Levant, Greece, China…”

  Kamal started at the mention of Alexandria, as Egypt (albeit an Egypt that was two thousand years in the future) was home to him. “You’ll get to see the lighthouse,”
he said with wonder.

  “We might get to see it, too, right?” Abigail said.

  Xavier turned to Nate.

  “Chief—Kirkland, is it? I’m glad to see you here.”

  “Well, thank you, but—”

  Xavier raised a hand. “I don’t know how you found me. It doesn’t matter. We’re in sore need of an investigator. A crime has just been committed.”

  18

  He meant a local crime, not the one that had landed us in the past. A burglary.

  “My friend Secundus runs a garum shop. That’s his cart outside.”

  “A what?” Nate asked.

  “A specialty shop of sorts. Secundus is a freedman—he and his family used to be slaves. When their master, the owner of a laundry in Nola, died, the family was granted freedom. Secundus’s older brother went to Rome to look for a trade and a wife and Secundus came here to Pompeii to open a shop with his mother and daughter.”

  “We’ve seen the cart before,” I said. “Parked in front of a villa outside town.”

  “Faustilla—Secundus’s mother—uses it when she needs to deliver an ointment to a wealthy client, for curing gout and warts and such. Secundus and I met when I sold him spices for an herbed sauce he manufactures on-site. He offered me a room for rental above the shop. The shop also sells pickled vegetables.”

  “So, specifically—”

  “Beets and such.”

  “No, I mean what got stolen?” Nate clarified.

  “Money from his cash box. They destroyed what they couldn’t take. Jars of pickled vegetables upended onto the floor into a soggy mess. Garum containers smashed. You wouldn’t believe the smell garum generates when it’s mixed with pickled beets—”

  “Garum?”

  “A local delicacy. It’s the sauce Secundus manufactures in the garden behind the shop. You don’t want to know what’s in it.”

  “I do,” said the chief, reminding me of his statement that an investigator needed to know everything about a crime, no matter how trivial.

  “It’s a fish sauce used for flavoring dishes, made from discarded mackerel bits steeped in salt and left to ferment in the ground for up to three months.”

  “Ugh,” I said, remembering the pile of fish guts and bones in the bonfire by the roadside. Nate, for his part, looked a bit regretful that he had asked.

  “Romans love the stuff. A pint of it will set you back twenty denarii. You can buy a tunic for about four, a cup of quality wine for a quarter of a denarius.” He added, “I need you to give Secundus a professional opinion as to who might have done this, Chief Kirkland.” The chief opened his mouth to say something, but before he could (I assume) protest that he knew nothing about the criminal underworld of ancient Pompeii, Xavier added with a frown, “Hold on. If everyone thought I was dead and you weren’t looking for me, then why are you here? And why, for heaven’s sake, are you dressed like that? Helen, why didn’t you have the team dress in Roman-wear?”

  “We were aiming for JFK airport of February 1964,” Helen snapped across the tomb.

  His frown deepened. “That’s quite a slipup.”

  “Someone sabotaged us, Dr. Mooney,” Abigail explained quietly.

  “We were trying to figure out who murdered you, Professor, by scattering you across time—but since you’re alive and well—” I stopped awkwardly. Sick or not, his cheeks had a healthy glow under his tan and his frame was lean and muscular, like he had been getting a lot of exercise. Scarlett had always kept him in good shape, acting as a counterbalance to his sweet tooth, but this was a step beyond. I went on. “Anyway, once we realized we’d arrived in Pompeii, well—we thought Dr. Rojas did it at first.”

  “You thought Rojas murdered me? By scattering me across time?”

  “There was a rumor going around that the two of you had garnered a significant number of nominations for next year’s Nobel Prize,” I mumbled.

  “You thought Rojas murdered me so he wouldn’t have to share the Nobel?”

  Hearing him say it like that did make the idea sound ridiculous.

  “So no one attempted to murder you, Professor,” Nate said slowly.

  “No.”

  “And no one knew your destination.”

  “No.”

  “And yet someone sent us here, to the same spot at very nearly the same time.”

  “That is odd, yes.”

  Xavier glanced in the direction of the mountain as if its conical shape was visible through the thick walls of the tomb. “August twenty-fourth has passed. Preparing for the trip, I remember being surprised that Gaius Pliny hadn’t mentioned that the eruption happened the day after the festival of Vulcanalia. It seemed likely that he would have made some comment about the festival’s failure to appease the god of fire.” He added, “Still, I didn’t want to be foolhardy about it, so a few days ago I trekked up the mountain to see if there were signs of an imminent eruption.”

  “And there weren’t?” I asked.

  “Well, there were actually. Once you get to the summit, above the tree line, you come to a flat, barren place devoid of vegetation. It looks like a giant campfire burned itself out eons ago and left behind blackened rock and scorched earth. I saw a couple of vents and cracks with sulfurous steam seeping out. There was also a recent landslide. I wasn’t familiar enough with the terrain to be able to tell if any bulging of the mountain was going on. Just in case, I got all of my belongings ready yesterday morning. The eruption, according to Pliny, started in the afternoon—”

  “Ah, that’s right,” said Helen.

  “—but when the day and night passed without anything happening, I decided it was safe to make a round of the town to sell more of my wares and some of Secundus’s remaining garum. Which is where you ran into me.”

  “What are the other dates in the medieval copies of Pliny’s account?” Nate asked.

  “Frankly, they are a bit of a mess. I looked into it before I left. The most famous of the manuscripts, where the traditional date for the eruption comes from, is the ninth-century Codex Laurentianus Mediceus—”

  “In the Florence library,” Helen added.

  “The codex tells us the date is nine days before the Kalends of September—August twenty-fourth—but we know that’s wrong. To answer your question, Chief Kirkland, other sources give the month as October or November, or don’t give the date at all. I was planning on being the one to settle the debate once and for all.” Xavier glanced at Helen’s orange pumps and said, “You’ll need to get out of those clothes and into something more appropriate for this time period,” just as Helen said, “Clothing is our first priority.”

  Helen put her hands on her hips. “Xavier, I’m the team leader here. Finding you changes nothing.”

  “I’m the more senior research member.”

  “Only by age. Your specialty is time travel engineering, not history.”

  “Yours isn’t history either.”

  “No, but historical linguistics is closer. And I teach Latin—”

  “And during the past six months I’ve drastically improved upon my working knowledge of Latin. And I’m the one with the money bag—”

  Nate raised a hand to stop them. “Hold on. I’m head of campus security and this is still an investigation.”

  “Given our predicament, maybe a democracy is in order?” Kamal suggested.

  “Yeah,” Abigail said, in what was for her a rather sharp tone. Watching her turn away, back held stiff, my suspicions were confirmed. It had just sunk in that Xavier Mooney had purposely cut himself off from everyone at home. I had seen it before. Students sometimes had trouble coping with the fact that their advisors had lives of their own, which occasionally took precedence over the students’ needs. (And sometimes it went the other way around, too—St. Sunniva’s student union had recently won a legal battle against a chemistry professor who’d felt that a seven-day maternity leave and a zero-day paternity leave were more than adequate for his graduate students who were facing impending parent
hood. The postdocs and senior grad students in his lab had staged a quiet rebellion and the policy had been amended to something more reasonable.)

  I almost pointed out that Dean Sunder had put me in charge and that everyone’s paychecks—except for Chief Kirkland’s and Helen’s—made their way across my desk before being sent out, but decided it would be best not to prolong the who’s-the-boss conversation.

  “I think the suggestion of getting us some clothes is excellent,” I said, settling the matter.

  “We all solve puzzles of one kind or another,” Nate said. He and I were accompanying Xavier back into town, having left the others behind in the Nigidii tomb. Helen was still livid, Abigail was sulking, and Kamal was more than willing to let us do the walking in the midmorning heat while he took snapshots. We had left the donkeys in the shade of the tomb, the chestnut-colored one chewing on thin grass and the spotted one staring at us with sad eyes.

  “Puzzles,” the chief went on as we walked through the town gate. “Small ones, large ones. Julia, you solve office and personnel problems on a daily basis. In police work, it can take anywhere from a few months to a year or more. And in scientific research—”

  “In science, solving a problem in a single year would be considered extraordinary,” Xavier said. “You might get lucky, of course, but more often than not you have to count in decades, if not lifetimes. Even if a solution strikes suddenly—Eureka!, like with Archimedes—it’s preceded by years of study and rumination. Take Fermat’s Last Theorem. In 1637, Pierre de Fermat wrote in the margin of a copy of Arithmetica that he had a proof of the theorem but it was too long to fit in the margin. It wasn’t until almost four hundred years later that the theorem finally found a proof at the hands of mathematician Andrew Wiles of Princeton and Oxford. He was knighted for his accomplishment.”

  “How long was it then?” Nate asked as we turned a corner into an alleyway.

  “Hmm, Chief Kirkland?”

  “Wiles’s proof, would it have fit in the margin?”