Listing to Port

1. 5:55 each day, because you can put a snake next to your digital clock and pretend that the clock is a speech bubble.
2. That period of time between the opening and the closing of a good book that you are reading for the first time.
3. 1:01 each day, because this is the only time that the clock will laugh at your jokes.
4. 88:88, because it means that you have travelled in time and space to the dimension of broken clocks.
5. That period of time made up by stitching together every time in your life that you have said the word ‘interesting’.
6. The time between the birth of twins.
7. 6:06 each day, if your name is Bob and you like to believe that your clock is thinking of you. Do check: it is possible that your secret name in Clockland is Bob. Clocks are thoughtful like that.

0331 Minutes
 -0331.1 Those before the next one
    –0331.11 Those that additionally come after the previous one
    –0331.12 Minutes partly out of sequence or of unusual shapes
       —0331.121 Those coming back around again to the next one once more
    –0331.13 Those threaded through time, coming back as themselves again and again
 -0331.2 Those underlined in some way by historians
    –0331.21 Minutes of the death of kings
       —0331.211 Those in shadowed sickrooms
       —0331.212 Those on the battlefield
          —-0331.2121 Those unattended by a horse
    –0331.22 Those minutes surrounding the birth of twins or the fulfillment of prophecies
    –0331.23 Those containing the first tiny sign of some disaster
    –0331.24 Those during which the ink dries on the signatures of peace treaties
 -0331.3 Those pertaining to music or literature
    –0331.31 Of songs
       –0331.311 Those minutes that are the best minutes of their respective songs
       –0331.312 Those minutes that are only minutes of said songs
    –0331.32 Of art or sundry things
       –0331.321 Those minutes when you see something that you cannot later unsee
    –0331.32 Of literature or film
       –0331.321 Those minutes when sense swims up out of the dense morass and breathes and sinks back down once more
       –0331.322 Those in which everything changes
       –0331.323 Ends
 -0331.4 Minutes of unusual length
    –0331.41 Those emboldened by the addition of a leap second or two
       —0331.411 Minutes stuffed full of leap seconds as a gift for lovers of time to open on New Years’ morning
    –0331.42 Minutes that have been time-dilated into flabby lumps of spaceship time
    –0331.43 Those spent falling off a cliff, receiving terrible news, in unusual ecstasy or being a bit bored
    –0331.44 Those minutes inhabited by malfunctioning time machines
 -0331.5 Minutes that have been forgotten
    –0331.51 Those in which nothing happened
    –0331.52 Those in which things happened that no-one saw
    –0331.53 Those attended by too few elephants
    –0331.54 Those in which things happened and people saw them and which subsequently those people successfully joined the foreign legion to forget
    –0331.55 Quotidian minutes in the lives of the long dead
    –0331.56 This minute, many years from now

1. There was a switch on a metro train, and somehow something hit it.
2. It was a warm Sunday in July, and there were major delays. In the third carriage, a builder and a singer got to talking over the next hour, and later on they went out of their way to share part of the journey home.
3. Ten years later, they had a baby daughter, who was brown and perfect and who liked to play among the lavender bushes.
4. The daughter had a daughter who had a daughter, and so on for a few hundred more generations. Eventually nearly everyone on the planet was descended from her; and her lavender-loving genes spread out into space.
5. There were seven more races that could perhaps be called human before the race between disasters and ingenuity took a sinister turn. But by then, the seventh humans had made something rather like robots in their own image, and the robots survived. They spent some millions of years being confused between a number of simulation cultures, but eventually they decided that they probably had the right reality and commenced to live in it.
6. The robot societies spread out over the Galaxy, though they did it the slow way. Fortunately, they could afford to wait; though, by the time they had reached some of the more distant stars, they were much-changed.
7. Eventually, one by one, the robot stars winked out, leaving an occasional lost city hurtling through the void on planets that had come loose from their systems. And there were three or four other civilisations that came from different places, and one or two of them knew of the lost cities and told stories about what they thought might have happened there. Though they were never quite right, it must be said.
8. The Universe gently skated over the crest of its near-infinite expansion and began to draw back in. By this time life had more or less worn itself out, though it had a few brief and bright late flowerings in the heat and chaos near the end of time. It seemed there was a chain connecting their feverish stories to the old ones, though there is not enough space in anyone’s mind to enumerate the links of it.
9. Time ended and it all began again.

1. There were two detectives who went to a small village on the edge of a marsh. The earth was black in that place and the cold waters black too. There were no paths through the marsh, which was a maze of blasted thickets and dry, crackling reed-beds where strange birds lived. No water could be said to flow into or out of it. There were rumours that time went in different directions in different parts of the marsh and that its waters flowed from now to then rather than from here to there. Nevertheless, a reed-cutter had ventured into its nearer parts to gather eggs, and she had found a body on a mudbank, so the police were called.

2. They had a bit of a thing for each other, these detectives, but nothing would ever come of it because one was married and the other had too much of his identity tied up in being straight. Neither of them was particularly near retirement, but one was older than the other. Their companionship was based around their taciturn refusal to talk about their pasts, which one must assume were both murky and mysterious. In the village they found no-one missing and no-one suspicious. Though there were those who said that human finger-bones and the like had a habit of washing up in the marsh and it would be well to look out for a serial killer. There was a fortune-teller who gathered up the bones, because she was on the look out for her long-lost son who had slipped off playing into the marsh some years ago. But they were not the bones of a child, and she had taken to casting futures with them instead. This near the marsh, the bones would only fall in spirals, revealing nothing of themselves to anyone.

3. The detectives placed the remains, which were mainly skeletal, in a body bag in a refrigerated trailer. The next day most of the locals gathered in the village hall. There was an old man who said he was sure the murderer would be there but everyone, it seemed, had stayed out of the marsh for months. Someone said to see the fortune teller in her mouldy house by the willows, and since there was no other option, they went.

4. The fortune-teller was pleased to see them, for she was often lonely. She did not think she knew the body, she said, but she did know the marsh. She showed them a great black crystal with a spiderweb of incarnadine flaws at its heart, opaline and shimmering. It is a paradox, she said. Paradoxes grow around here like mushrooms. What with time in the marsh the way it is. I can show you the trunk of a hollow tree that is entirely crusted with them, down by the pool where I found the finger bones. Growing off all those petty little frog intrigues dragged back and forth through the years. But I have never found one so large and so strange. I truly think it could be worth something. I was hoping to pass it on to my son. The younger detective looked into the crystal and thought he saw his future written there, and he needed to know more like he had never needed anything. But the fortune teller shut the box. It is for my son, she said. I can show you the pool where the finger bones wash up, and maybe you can find the key to both losses for me, and I will bury it with him. I have never dared to dig there.

5. She gave them a map and a spade and sundry documents of her son’s that could be used to identify him. The detectives thanked her and, having little else to go on, packed sandwiches for a trip into the marsh. As they walked the sun ticked back and forwards across the noonday mark in the sky like the second-hand of an ailing watch. When they reached the pool, the younger detective started digging. The older leaned on the willow tree (they had not thus far checked its bleak crack for more glittering paradoxes). He opened the packet of documents and began to read. The first one was facts and strands of hair and identifying marks. The missing boy, it seemed, had had a wine-stain mark on his left shoulder.

6. The older detective had just such a mark on his shoulder, and he knew that as a child he had been found wandering (though he did not like to discuss it). He realised that he could be the fortune-teller’s long-lost son. He told the younger detective of his suspicions. But the younger detective, in sudden fright of losing the crystal’s speaking flaws to him (or of losing him to the crystal’s speaking flaws) jerked back the spade and swung at him with it. It hit the older detective in the neck and he bled out on the wet mud.

7. The younger detective threw the older detective’s body into the crack of the rotted-out willow tree by the black pool, where it hung for several days before slipping down into the water. It drifted into the currents of the marsh and washed back and forth through time, shedding small bones and shreds of skin along the way.  Eventually the body fetched up on the reedcutter’s mudbank, three weeks before it had been laid to unquiet rest. The reedcutter found it, and called the police.

8. Some two days into the future, the sun ticked back and forth across the noonday mark like the second-hand of an ailing watch. The younger detective walked out of the marsh and into another story, which we are not concerned with here. He no longer needed the crystal. Before he left, fearful of evidence, he tipped the bag containing the skeletal body into a cracking reed bed. The body slipped into a deeper current where time turned itself inside out. It took the bones and reclothed them in their raiments of past years.  

9. Twelve years before, a thrashing bag bobbed up from the current onto a sandy bank, and tore itself open under the moon. The older detective crawled out, young and gasping, with his memories scrambled. He stumbled South, out of the marsh, back to the city. It seemed he had been somewhat changed. He no longer bore the fortune-teller’s mark, he could not remember who he was, he bore no documents. In time he married a nurse, and the itch of the memory of the younger detective faded from his brain. But he knew that he himself had had a flair for detective work. So, after some years of rehabilitation and retraining, that is the field he went back to. Eventually, he was paired up with an older partner who was as taciturn as he about his past.

10. Some time later, they got a call about a body in a marsh…