The Clocks

After her mother had left, Sara realized that there was one other piece of good news that she'd forgotten to tell her. Yesterday she'd been promoted to Librarian In Charge of both the Little Cathedral and the Cathedral of Whispers. She now had an excellent excuse to dive into the archives herself. Besides, there were still areas that weren't properly indexed, and she could oversee that while she was searching for something to help her sisters.

She had to laugh. Given that Paolo had only just become a full priest, her new position meant that she was now his superior. In fact she outranked anyone lower than a bishop. If and when Paolo rose to that lofty level, he would, at least technically, be her equal. The reality of the situation, well, that would remain to be seen.

When Archbishop Comfort had told Sara that she had won the position she'd remarked, "That'll show those hidebound, rigid 'traditionalists'. You can bet that I'm going to take a great deal of pleasure in rubbing their noses in the reality of a 20 year old 'girl' not only scoring 94% on the Library Skills examination, but also that none of their male candidates scored higher than 72%. I'm especially going to point out that they ranged from 28 to 35 years old. They're going to be livid, but maybe that'll get some blood flowing in their clogged brains.

"Oh, and don't worry Sara. They'll never be anything but cordial toward you. Don't expect any dirty tricks either. Their prejudices may be stuck in the last century, but not one of them has failed to approach me over the past months to compliment me on what a fine job you've been doing as an Assistant Librarian.

"If they give me any trouble at all, I'm going to remind them of their own words. Frequently. I expect that within six months, a year at most, they'll have forgotten your gender entirely. What they'll remember is how you've made their work easier, and that's far more important to them."

Sara was suddenly, inexplicably tired. She wrote it off as due to the stress of the morning. Regardless of the cause, she had no duties until that afternoon, so a nap was definitely in order. As she drifted off, her excitement almost kept her awake. Librarian In Charge and pregnant.

FANTASTIC!

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Sara arrived half an hour early at her new office behind the Little Cathedral. She wanted to catch Paolo before he got tied up with another task. After talking to him, if she delegated any non-critical tasks to her staff, she'd also be able to focus on searching for what the twins needed. She shook her head at the incongruity of it all. Here she was preparing to do something for the express purpose of selfishly helping her family. However, in the process, she'd be indexing long-neglected records that nobody else had wanted to touch. In the end, she'd probably receive a commendation for taking on the job.

She felt rather guilty about it, but she had no intention of not doing it either. The part of her that was completely logical pointed out that demonstrating that she was willing to work hard, in spite of her new position, would help to quell any criticism directed at appointing a "mere female" to such a highly desirable, and influential, post.

Seeing Paolo with his arms full of books, she flagged him down. He deposited his load on a nearby table then gave her a brief, chaste, but heartfelt hug. After that Sara picked up a book from the pile at random, opened it, and pretended to be discussing something about it with Paolo. Once she'd finished explaining what was going on, she noticed Paolo's hands were clenching the back of a nearby chair and his knuckles were white.

"I do not EVER want to see ANYONE, twin or not, burdened with such a horrible thing ever again. It goes without saying that we must protect children from being abused by those seeking to manipulate them by forcing them into early or political marriages, but when something like this happens.... We MUST find or create and formalize some sort of procedure that will also protect them from those who 'for their own good' would cause them pain. There needs to be a middle ground that, even if everyone doesn't entirely agree with it, everyone can acknowledge is at least sensible and fair."

Sara noticed that, as he spoke, his hands relaxed and blood began to flow into his fingers again. "Well my love, those seem like very reasonable ideas. Now why don't we dig into the archives and see if some right-thinking churchmen of the past have already addressed the problem. If they have, but the situation didn't come up all that often, it wouldn't be surprising if the procedure was gradually forgotten."

Then she whispered, "I'm going to give you an official assignment in a moment. After I do, I want you to look put-upon, but you will agree to perform your assigned task, just as any good, but lowly, newly-ordained priest would." She snuck a smile at him then drew herself up and spoke loudly enough that a few of the others nearby could hear her, "Your assignment is to complete what you began two months ago. You will devote yourself, when you are not instructed otherwise by the bishop or are in class, to further improving the organization of the archives. Do you understand?"

Paolo bowed his head, so nobody could see his grin. She was a great actress. "Yes Librarian. I understand. I shall begin as soon as I complete my current task."

Sara winked at him and replied, "Very well. I shall be working at the Cathedral of Whispers for the next week. I want regular reports on what I expect will be expeditious progress."

With that she turned, exited the building, and headed for her office. She needed to organize her desk and get her staff working on reasonable tasks that would take each of them at least a week. Then she'd head over to Whispers and start digging.

Paolo's special ability was of great use for the next few minutes as he heard various hushed voices while he was replacing the books he'd just carried in. "Already henpecked he is." "Women are like that. They love being able to give men orders and get away with it." "But she's an awfully pretty thing. It's probably worth it." "Well, that may all be true, but we DO need those files properly organized, and I sure as heck don't want to have to do it." "Amen to that brother. And speaking of which, we'd best get back to work ourselves."

Brimming with mirth, Paolo stored every single comment in his memory. Sara would enjoy hearing them after they got home that evening. For now though, once he'd finished his shelving, he'd dive into the archives and see what could be found to help his sisters-in-law.

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Early the next morning, Sara and Paolo headed back to the cathedrals. Working on Saturday morning wasn't precisely required any more now that he was ordained, but when he first began his training, it was "suggested" that he put in some time on Saturdays to help get things ready for the Sunday services. He'd developed the habit of doing it every week and continued after his novitiate was complete. After that was finished, he dove into the archives.

Over the next few weeks, like Sara, his "diligence" was noted and recorded. As May marched on, the oldest records in both cathedrals saw significantly more traffic than they had in the previous four or five decades. Not only churchmen, but scholars from Ingvold and other schools were scheduling time for their research projects, not only because of the increased funding flowing from the Duchess, but also because searches had become easier due to the improved indices.

Akane was one of those most often frequenting the very oldest records. Like Sara she would have been spending some time there anyway. When she found out from Blair about the twins' problem, and the substantial risk to their health, she'd allocated at least two hours every day.

Blair, on the other hand, had almost no time at all to search the records. Her spy network had to come first, no matter what. At this point, what she could say about her children was that they might die. If she were to slack off on her work, some of her people would die. Even so she dithered and worried until Sara pulled her aside and informed her, in no uncertain terms, that her presence would be more hindrance than help since she had no training in research methods. For her to be effective, someone who did know how to use the archives would have to take time away from their search to teach Blair.

One thing a good spy understands, with great clarity, is a lose-lose situation. It was cold comfort, but she was able to sleep a bit better.

It's been said that the threat of death does wonders for helping one focus one's concentration. It didn't completely apply to Blair, but she did find herself able to deal with her daily situations with increased speed and accuracy. Because of that, she had more time to provide the twins with what they needed most now that they were avoiding being with Jason, companionship. It's not that they didn't want to be with Jason, but their level of stress rose significantly whenever they were near each other.

When they had to be together, they confined themselves to very tightly constrained conversations in "twin" where they made extraordinary efforts to block their emotions. Fortunately school had just closed for Spring Break, and physical contact could be severely limited. For his part Jason worked harder than he ever had before to control and channel his excess energy by pouring himself into his mathematics.

As a result he was constantly tired, which tended to mute his behaviors as well as his emotions. As for the girls, I'd like to say that their stress level was also improving, but it was getting worse. It wasn't as bad as if they'd been with Jason all day at school, but it was climbing steadily.

Miranda had taken another tack. She'd had her network seek out physicians who might have expertise in treating twins with severe separation problems. She'd not expected to find one, but she was pleasantly surprised when, within a week, her agents had found nine.

Once she had their names, Blair arranged to dispatch Eugenia to interview each of them in turn, under the guise of a student doing legwork for a professor who was preparing a scholarly paper discussing stress related problems in twins.

Eugenia amassed much more information than she'd ever expected, and was astonished to find that about 60% of it varied little from one physician to another. Doctors, like most specialists in any field, tend to have highly individual opinions about many things and frequently disagree. Finding 60% concordance was remarkable and almost unprecedented.

(When the crisis ended, one of the professors at Ingvold did prepare a lengthy and comprehensive paper discussing the problems of stress in twins. It was extremely well received, especially by the military who wanted their pairs to be as effective as possible at all times. Genie, in addition to being mentioned as a co-author on that paper, also had her first ever solo paper published, based on the same research, although hers discussed the possible reasons why experts disagree when given the same facts to work with. It also reviewed the likely reasons behind why the areas that they did agree on tended to be the foundations from which their other opinions diverged.)

Once she'd finished with her interviews, Genie, Miranda, and -- surprisingly -- Mimi sorted the notes into piles. They had "High probability of accuracy," "Moderate probability," "Might be correct -- needs correlation," and "Where did they come up with this garbage?" As always, the final category was Mimi's suggestion.

Genie and Miranda were carefully reading each page before choosing a pile. Mimi though would glance at a page for a few seconds at most and then toss it onto the correct stack. Miranda and Eugenia soon quit what they were doing and just watched Mimi. It was not so much because of her speed, but because every single page she tossed toward a pile from up to a meter and a half away landed neatly on top of the previous ones.

They exchanged glances then, as one, stacked their remaining sheets on top of Mimi's. Mimi never looked up, but kept sorting until she was finished. When she was, the others noticed that a fifth pile had somehow appeared. The label on it said, "Whoever came up with these ideas ought to have their license revoked. Then shoot them. These so-called treatments are extremely dangerous."

Genie had recorded the name of whichever physician she'd interviewed on each page. Miranda found that every sheet in the new pile had the names of the same two physicians on them.

She walked to her desk, took out a piece of paper, lifted her pen, and began writing. What she wrote was: "Investigate the qualifications of Drs. Ulysses Braun and Fiorina Ramanujan." After sanding the note she picked up and rang a small bell on her desk. She handed the note to the man who appeared and said only, "Immediately."

He bowed and faded out of the room.

Two days later Genie saw a crowd gathered around the "Official Notices" message boards outside The Residence. When she was able work her way close enough to see, there was one new notice which read, "Ulysses Braun and Fiorina Ramanujan have been arrested. Charges include, but are not limited to, practicing medicine without proper licensure and proof of ability, and recklessly inflicting harm on citizens of The City. All parties who have suffered injury of any kind as a result of the actions of said persons are to report to Guard Corporal Levi and present their cases."

It was the first time she'd seen results from what her mother did. It's not that nothing ever happened, but rather that Genie had not previously been privy to the confidential activities behind the actions.

As she turned to head home she realized that she was lucky that they were in Spring Break. She'd been having a difficult time getting herself up and moving for almost 10 days, and it was getting worse. She had also recently developed a dull, throbbing headache that was beginning to plague her even in her sleep.

She shouldn't have put off doing something about it for so long, but, with everyone devoting their free time to researching how to help the twins, she'd felt that her problem was a lesser priority. Even so her mother was probably going to yell at her. She'd been taught from the beginning that an agent needs to notify her superior when she wasn't at 100%. In the field, not being at peak efficiency could either require changing a mission plan or scrubbing it altogether.

As she walked home, the sunlight reflecting off the windows along the way made her headache much worse. When she opened the door, Mimi caught her as she tripped on the threshold. The next thing she knew, she was in bed with an ice pack on her forehead and her mother sitting beside her holding her hand. "Details Genie. Speed doesn't matter. Be as complete as you can."

Eugenia heard herself reporting the progression of her symptoms over the past 10 days. It seemed to be fairly accurate. When she'd finished, Miranda was at a loss. Genie didn't have a fever. Her pulses and breathing were normal, and her abdomen was soft and not distended or tender. Obviously something was wrong, but what?

She settled herself in a meditative posture and let her thoughts run free. She'd learned years before that the technique would often result in her mind coming to a correct conclusion without her being consciously aware of how it had been derived.

Several minutes later she raised her head and said, "Twins. Hibiki and Yoko. As soon as possible if they are mobile. Bring their nightgowns."

Mimi replied, "Yes Madame," and vanished out the door.

---------------

The twins arrived, with Blair following along. None of them looked all that good. The twins were almost haggard. They were wearing very light coats that hung to their ankles, obviously tossed over their nightgowns. They must have been in bed too.

Blair was succinct, "Your plan?"

Miranda answered as she led the others upstairs, "You know of our recent research. I think I know what will improve their symptoms, at least temporarily." Upon entering Genie's bedroom, she pulled back the covers of Genie's bed. "Coats off the girls then get one on each side of her."

Blair forebore from saying anything. She and Mimi removed the twins' coats and maneuvered the girls into position. They seemed only partially aware of where they were, and Genie was by now not much better.

But, immediately upon touching Genie, the twins rolled toward her until their chests were partially on top of hers and their heads on her shoulders. Next, each threw an arm across Genie and laid it on her twin's back. Genie, whose arms had extended themselves as the twins curled up against her, now brought them down and wrapped them around the twins. Before anyone could count to five, all three were asleep.

Mimi suggested, "Madames, we should probably leave them uncovered lest they become overheated."

Miranda nodded. "Agreed. Let us do exactly that. Please have tea brought to my study." She turned toward Blair. "Mrs. Macklin and I need to talk."

"Yes Madame."

Miranda glanced over her shoulder at the children. When she turned back, Mimi was gone. "One of these days, I really do need to figure out how she does that."

Blair responded, "Interesting. Ailin does exactly the same thing. But, as you say, we have other, more pressing needs at the moment."

About half an hour later, Mimi escorted an anxious Akane into the study. "I'm sorry for visiting without notifying you first, but something has happened. I'm not sure yet whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. I need your input."

Miranda poured tea into a third cup that had appeared. "Please Akane, sit down. Then tell us what's happened."

Akane sat, took a sip of tea, then put her cup down and turned toward Blair. "You know that Jason hasn't been doing very well lately, though perhaps not as poorly as the girls?"

"From what you've told me, you're probably right Akane, though it's hard to say not having seen them together. As of this morning they were practically bedridden."

"Well then, yes, Jason has been doing better than that, though he's been getting confused at times. Anyway, just before I came over he suddenly stood up from doing his mathematics, said 'I'm sleepy," and headed off to bed. It's still morning. He never takes naps this time of day.

"By the time I caught up with him, he was already asleep. I tried, but I couldn't wake him. I checked him for a fever, but he doesn't have one. His breathing was normal too. Do you have any idea what might be going on?"

Blair and Miranda exchanged glances. Interesting. Miranda stood. "I think perhaps I do. Will you come with us please?"

Blair and Akane rose and followed Miranda to Genie's bedroom. Upon seeing the girls Akane asked, "How long?"

Blair answered, "Since about 40 minutes ago."

"Curiouser and curiouser. I think that, once this is all sorted out, we need to do some more experiments, sooner rather than later, don't you think Miranda?"

"Indeed I do. For now I have what I suppose we can call a 'working hypothesis'. You know about Mario Brown's effect on Genie with regard to Separation Sickness. Yes?"

Akane and Blair nodded for her to continue.

"I think that, just maybe, right now Genie is anchoring the others just like Mario does for her. She appeared to be quite ill an hour ago, but look at her now. She looks completely normal, and so do your girls Blair. When they arrived they looked like they'd been made up as ghouls for All Hallows Eve."

"I'm not sure why, but I have this, I guess you'd call it 'an intuition', that they're going to sleep for the next 24 hours or so. It also feels like after that they'll need to do this about every third night."

Miranda shook her head in frustration. "I hate it when things like this happen. It doesn't make sense. There's no logic in it, but even so I believe it as much as I do that the tax collector will show up three times a year."

Blair smiled fondly at her girls, finally relaxing herself now that they looked so much better. "It's hard to argue considering what's here before our eyes. Right Akane?"

"I have to agree. I've read a great number of histories where fantastical things are recorded as having happened. A very few, not many, but some, have later been proven to have really occurred. I suspect that this is one of those times." She lifted her chin, having made a decision. "I'd best get home and see if I can arrange for someone to check in on Jason now and then, and what to expect. After that I must go to a pre-new-term meeting at school. I'm loath to leave Jason, but there's not much I can do except sit there and watch him sleep."

She chuckled. "If he found out that I'd done it, he'd never let me hear the end of it. He'd be nagging me about 'wasting valuable time' for weeks."

She turned to leave but was intercepted by Mimi. "Please don't bother yourself Madame Fukui. I've informed Ailin of Jason's needs.

She will watch over young Jason until you arrive home, so you needn't hurry. You should stay here with Madame Donetti and Madame Macklin and finish your tea. Since you haven't had breakfast, I've left a substantial snack for you. You'll need your energy when you joust with the 'old fogies' that so annoy you."

Mimi escorted them out of Genie's bedroom and carefully closed the door. "I shall watch them and will inform you should there be a need."

All three of them watched as Mimi flowed across the landing and then down the stairs. Finally Miranda said, "I believe that we should follow her instructions. My desire to sort her out is becoming a bit more acute, but it still is less urgent than our other problems. Let's adjourn back to my study. That way, should we faint from shock, we'll at least be sitting down."

The others nodded their agreement. None of them fainted, but, truth be told, they all felt rather light-headed and just a bit numb. What in the world was going on?