Spring Tide E-Book

Chris Beckett

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 348

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A thought-provoking collection of contemporary short stories from the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award 2013. Chris Beckett's thought-provoking and wide-ranging collection of contemporary short stories is a joy to read, rich in detail and texture. From stories about first love, to a man who discovers a labyrinth beneath his house, to an angel left alone at the end of the universe, Beckett displays both incredible range and extraordinary subtlety as a writer. Every story is a world unto itself - each one beautifully realized and brilliantly imagined.

Leseprobe

Spring Tide

Chris Beckett is a former university lecturer and social worker living in Cambridge. He is the winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award, 2009, for The Turing Test, the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2013, for Dark Eden and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Novel of the Year Award for Mother of Eden in 2015 and for Daughter of Eden in 2016.

Also by Chris Beckett

The Holy Machine

Marcher

Dark Eden

Mother of Eden

Daughter of Eden

The Turing Test

The Peacock Cloak

Spring Tide

Chris Beckett

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 byCorvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Chris Beckett, 2017

The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78 649 0506

E-book ISBN: 9781786490506

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Maggie

Contents

  1  Cellar

  2  The End of Time

  3  Love

  4  The Lake

  5  Creation

  6  Transients

  7  The Kite

  8  The Steps

  9  Frozen Flame

10  Still Life

11  Dear

12  Rage

13  Roundabout

14  Ooze

15  Newmarket

16  The Great Sphere

17  The Man Who Swallowed Himself

18  The Gates of Eden

19  Aphrodite

20  Spring Tide

21  Sky

Cellar

I’ve never told anyone about my cellar because I know that, as soon as I speak of it, it will cease to be truly mine. Even if issues of legal ownership were not to arise – and I’m fairly certain they would – people would want to see it, look into its origins, make it into news. I mean, good God, a thing like this could go viral, all round the world. And, even supposing that sort of media attention could in some way be avoided, my friends would certainly expect to share my find. I can imagine them now, whooping with excitement as they run up and down the stairs and along the corridors. I can almost hear them planning the parties we would have.

But that of course would be the end of everything that I most value about my cellar. If I were ever to share its secret, it would just be another bunch of rooms from that day on, however unique its construction, however mysterious its origins, however stupendous its scale. And, like so many millions of other rooms in every city and town, and in every single country all around the world, it would be given functions – storage, office space, accommodation – and be cluttered up, as other rooms are, with chairs and pictures and computers and desks and cupboards and beds and people and chitchat and TV and all the other props and rituals of that dreary and repetitive little dance that people call life. If I keep the secret, on the other hand, my cellar is something else entirely, barely of this world at all.

So I speak to no one about it, and have permanently abandoned any thought of moving anywhere else, or of embarking on any relationship which might, at some point, raise an expectation of staying over or – heaven forbid! – moving in. Not that I’ve had any interest in such relationships lately. At the beginning, before I’d completely absorbed the full implications of my discovery, I did still go out and meet with other people. I occasionally even invited friends back, getting a bit of a thrill, if I’m honest, from watching them in my little home, chatting and laughing about nothing as people do, without the slightest inkling of the vast and mysterious spaces beneath them. In fact, I used to give them tours of the house, the way you do, showing what I’d done with the various rooms – the knocked-through wall here, the clever little storage units there – just so I could listen to them coo about how spacious it was, how clever I was at making space. I had a job not to laugh out loud.

But as time went on, I became less interested in human interaction. Increasingly, when social opportunities were offered me, I turned them down and chose the cellar instead, until eventually the invitations all but died away. At one point I contemplated putting it about that I’d joined one of those secretive cults whose rules forbid fraternising with non-believers, and whose beliefs are sufficiently obnoxious to prevent anyone wanting to fraternise anyway. I thought it might be a way of putting an end to the last annoying trickle of invitations, as well as potentially embarrassing spur-of-the-moment visits. But these problems seem pretty much to have solved themselves now, leaving only the occasional irritant of telephone enquiries about my well-being from my more persistent friends.

When I bought the house, there had been no cellar mentioned in the details I received from the estate agent, and I’m quite sure the previous owner had no inkling of its existence. I myself found it purely by accident one day when I was investigating some loose boards in the middle of my living room floor.

Ever since I’d moved in, I’d been irritated by a patch of carpet there that subsided slightly when I stepped on it. However, when it actually came to doing something about it, the annoyance those boards caused me had always seemed pretty trivial in comparison to the time and trouble that would be involved in moving the furniture and rolling back the fitted carpet. In particular, I was put off by the prospect of shifting a largish dresser which I hadn’t bothered to move even when I redecorated the room. But that particular Saturday I noticed that the wobbly board or boards had now actually stretched the carpet to the point that it never quite lay flat. Since I happened to have nothing else in particular to do that day, I decided I’d try and fix the problem right there and then.

I piled all the furniture, other than the dresser, at one end of the room. I took the drawers out of the dresser and stacked them in the hallway, and then I went next door to ask my neighbour Dave if he would help me shift the dresser itself. I had to offer Dave a cup of tea after that, of course, which was tiresome, and listen to him discuss the merits of the five interestingly different combinations of motorways and A-roads that he’d used over the years when visiting his in-laws in Doncaster. But when he’d finally gone – it was about 11 in the morning by then – I rolled back the carpet, identified the loose boards, and pulled them up to see what was going on. It turned out that one of the joists beneath them had at some point split, with the result that it was sagging slightly in the middle, and was only held together by a couple of fibres.

All that was really needed was a little extra support at the weak point, and, since the joist was only half a metre above the concrete base of the house, that was a simple matter: it could simply be propped up with bricks. To make things even easier, I happened to have some bricks in my back garden, left over from building a wall, which would be more than enough for the job. I was about to go and fetch some of them when I noticed – and I could so easily have missed it! – what looked like the corner of a metal hatch in the concrete. That was unexpected. A hatch to gain access to where? I pulled up more boards to allow me to get down next to it and pull it open. Inside I found a set of descending stairs, disappearing into darkness.

I felt rather excited. It seemed I had a cellar down there which had somehow been forgotten about along the way as the house passed from owner to owner. I realised that it would almost certainly be too damp to be of use – otherwise why would the stairs have been boarded over in the first place? – and, since I had the whole house to myself, I had no real need for extra room in any case. But there was something profoundly satisfying all the same about the idea of having more space at my disposal than I’d known about. I’d always hated clutter – that was the simple explanation for the spaciousness which my friends had always admired – and I’d always considered myself to be the polar opposite of a hoarder. The house was sparsely furnished, I didn’t collect ornaments or keep books that I’d already read, and anything I didn’t actually use any more was promptly dispatched to the dump or a charity shop. But space I liked – you could never have enough of that – and my favourite dreams were about discovering new and unexpected rooms.

Intrigued and excited as I was, though, I did hesitate before going down the stairs. I can even remember wondering whether to go round and fetch Dave again so as to have someone with me. How I’ve changed! It seems extraordinary to me now that I could have contemplated such a thing even for a moment! But I saw things differently then and, apart from anything else, there was a vague apprehension in the back of my mind that there might be some criminal explanation for the hidden cellar. What if there were bodies down there, for instance?

After a few seconds thought, however, I decided that Dave was unnecessary and I fetched a torch and began to descend the stairs on my own. Dead bodies would certainly not be pleasant, but they did seem rather far-fetched. And if there were new rooms for me at the bottom of those stairs, I wanted a chance to savour them without dreary old Dave beside me to spoil the moment by prattling on about the various cellars he’d encountered over the years, or the relative merits of plastic membranes and waterproof rendering as a means of keeping out the damp. How different everything would have turned out if I hadn’t made that choice !

When I reached what I’d assumed to be the bottom of the stairs, I discovered to my surprise that I was still surrounded by concrete walls. It was simply a landing, and the stairs just turned and continued downwards. Even more strangely, the same thing happened another storey down: I reached a second landing, and there was still nowhere else to go but either down or back up again. Clearly this was no ordinary cellar. I must admit I began to feel rather scared, although it would have been difficult to say exactly why.

Three storeys down, further below the ground than the roof of my house was above it, things changed. I could hear the absence around me straight away and, when I pointed my torch outwards, a whole corridor revealed itself in front of me, with doors down either side. How long the corridor was I couldn’t tell at that point, but it clearly extended beyond the boundary of my house, and was too long for the beam of my small torch to reach the end of it. Sweeping the beam around me, I soon discovered that it wasn’t the only one. There were actually four corridors radiating out from the stairway at right angles to one another. I noticed a light switch in the corridor in front of me, and, not really expecting it to work, I flipped it on. To a distance of some fifty metres, the corridor was suddenly as bright as any normal well-lit room. There were blue doors down each side of it, five metres apart, and after every second door there was an opening into a side corridor. Beyond fifty metres, the lights hadn’t come on, so the corridor disappeared into darkness. I soon established that the other corridors were just the same, and flipped on lights in all of them. But there was more. The staircase continued downwards, and when I shone my torch down the narrow well, I found that, as with the corridor, it continued beyond the distance that my beam could reach.

I felt really afraid then, a strange, pure terror, as if I was in one of those nightmares where nothing actually happens except for fear. Certainly my alarm didn’t come from a sense of physical danger: there was no threat to myself that I could see. Nor did it come from a feeling that I was doing something that might get me into some kind of trouble. Why shouldn’t I descend a staircase beneath my own house? No, as I say, it was a pure terror, a distillation of terror, that arose from my complete inability to make any sense at all of what I was looking at. What possible purpose might this place have? Who could have made it? How could it possibly have remained undetected up to now, and why was it underneath my house? It wasn’t just having no answers to these questions that was frightening, it was the fact that I had no sense at all of where an answer might be found.

But it was too late to turn back. Even if I’d climbed straight back up those stairs at that point, rejoined the world above and nailed the floorboards firmly down, my house would have become an entirely different place. Until today it had been a straightforward little semi in an ordinary street, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room, but it could never go back to being that, any more than a piggybank-full of one-pound coins could ever again mean the same to a National Lottery winner. My house was a mere pimple now, a tiny outcrop, a shoebox made of bricks, perched above an enormous hidden space which – such was my modest estimate at the time – quite probably had more rooms in it than my entire street.

I was terrified and disorientated, but, even then, I sensed the possibilities. Even at that early stage, scared as I was, I had an inkling that what I was now experiencing as fear might quite readily and easily be repackaged as an intense, almost sexual, excitement.

I went to the first door on the right and, feeling rather foolish, knocked on it. There was of course no answer, but I found this in itself unnerving – it’s interesting, when you think about it, how ready we are to reinterpret simple absence as sinister brooding presence – and I stood in front of it for a full minute before I’d gathered the courage to turn the handle. The room was completely empty. I flicked on the light switch inside the door and found the walls pristine and white, the floor covered in a plain grey lino that looked as if no one had ever stepped on it. There was no furniture, no trace of human occupation, but this one room was bigger than the living room in the little house three storeys above me that I supposed was still up there, although it already seemed almost irrelevant to my life.

I stayed down there for seventeen hours in the end, without food or drink, wandering from corridor to corridor, room to room, and descending at least eight storeys below the ground without any sense that I was getting near the bottom. I became utterly enchanted, so immersed in the experience that I simply couldn’t bear to interrupt or dilute it by returning even for a short while to the ordinary little world outside. When I could no longer ignore my aching bladder, I simply pissed in the corners of rooms, making a mental note to bring down a bucket and mop.

The rooms were arranged in blocks of four surrounded by corridors, and each room was exactly the same, with white walls and grey floors. Each time I opened a door I felt a frisson of anticipation and fear, wondering whether this time there’d be something there to see. Even a piece of furniture would have been a shock, or a different colour paint, let alone a human being, another mind, sitting there quietly, waiting. But I found nothing to disturb the pristine uniformity.

I think in fact that the very absence of anything new was the thing that kept me going so long, flicking on light after light after light, opening door after door. It was maddening to think there might possibly be a room I’d not yet seen that was different from the others, but at the same time, it was actually very soothing to be finding nothing at all, to be encountering, over and over again, the same calm vacancy, the same pure space, like unused graph paper uncluttered by pencilled lines or curves. The rhythm of that, the monotony of it, even almost its tediousness, was strangely compelling, like popping bubblewrap, or playing a fruit machine, or reading a newspaper you’ve already read many times from one end to the other. And I think it made manageable what would otherwise have been simply too much for me to contain.

It wasn’t until 4 in the morning that I finally emerged, exhausted, dizzy with hunger, and parched with thirst. How poky my little living room seemed, with the furniture piled up at one end of it, and my own ghostly reflection looking back at me from the window whose curtains were still drawn back from the morning. How dreary and ordinary that streetlamp looked across the road, those parked cars, that hedge, that brass letterbox glinting meaninglessly in the electric light. I quickly snatched the curtains closed, then gobbled some tuna straight from the tin, with three ungarnished pieces of white bread and a warm bottle of beer.

I lay down on my bed after that, but I was far too agitated to be able to settle properly into sleep and, even in the short periods when I briefly nodded off, my dreams were simply a continuation of my waking experience. I was still opening doors, one after another, I was still looking into rooms. And then I’d wake and realise that it really was down there, the cellar, the corridors, the empty rooms. Several times I was on the point of abandoning the idea of rest and heading back underground, but I held myself back and, about the time that daylight first began to seep in round my curtains, I finally succumbed to exhausted sleep.

I was woken at 9.30 by my neighbour Dave pounding on my front door.

‘Are you alright there, mate?’

I blinked at him. He didn’t seem to notice he’d woken me. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘Only you went all quiet yesterday. I could see the hole in the floor through your window, but you didn’t seem to be there.’

‘I popped out to see my mum.’

‘Oh.’ He stood with his mouth open for a while, staring at my face. My lie had completely floored him. ‘It’s just that your car was still parked on the street, and I could see your bike round the side.’

As Dave knew, my mother couldn’t drive, and she lived in a village twenty-five miles away that was ten miles from the nearest station. In fact, he’d once very obligingly given me a lift there, when my car was temporarily off the road. But I reminded myself that there wasn’t a law that obliged us to explain our travel arrangements to our next door neighbours.

‘I said to Betty perhaps I should break down the door,’ Dave went on after a difficult three-second pause which my explanation was supposed to have filled. ‘Or call the police. I was really worried about you, mate. Specially when it got dark and your curtains were still wide open. I wondered whether you’d had a fall or something. I was pretty relieved when Betty got up this morning and saw your curtains drawn. “Well, they couldn’t have drawn themselves, could they?” Betty said. “So someone’s alive in there, for sure.”’

‘I appreciate your concern, Dave, but I’m absolutely fine.’

Fine wasn’t a very accurate description of how I felt, though. I was terribly tired, and desperately agitated. What was more, though Dave had always got on my nerves, I was experiencing for the first time a whole new level of irritation that was still novel to me but was soon to become the norm in all my dealings with the outside world. As long as I was with him, I was acutely aware that every single minute the conversation lasted was a minute lost forever when I could have been under the ground, exploring the pristine spaces beneath my house.

When I’d finally managed to wrap things up with Dave, I shut the door so quickly after him that it was really more of a slam, hurried back to my living room, and was already descending the stairs when I suddenly remembered that I had friends coming for lunch.

Cursing, I climbed back out again, found my phone and called to tell them I wasn’t well.

‘Oh, poor Jeremy,’ exclaimed my friend Liz. ‘Hope you feel better soon. Anything we can do for you? Shopping or anything?’

Again, I felt that irritation. Why was she wasting my time with these trivia, when the cellar was down there waiting?

‘I’ll be fine, thanks,’ I said and hung up, so keen to finish the call that I didn’t even take the time to say goodbye.

I was hurrying back towards the cellar, when it occurred to me that I couldn’t just leave things like this in my living room. Anyone who came to the house would immediately see the piled furniture, the rolled carpet, the big hole in the floor, and the descending stairs.

Seething with resentment at the wasted time, I drove to a builder’s merchant at a dangerous and illegal speed, bought wood, hinges and a new rug, and hurtled back again, shooting two red lights, and getting honked at angrily by other motorists. Flinging my purchases down in my hallway, I returned to the living room and moved the furniture again so I could roll up the fitted carpet and remove it altogether. My impatience seemed to give me superhuman strength and I not only shifted the dresser on my own this time, but managed to lift it right over the rolled carpet.

That done, I set to work fashioning a hinged door in the middle of my floor, which I could conceal under the new rug in case of visitors, but uncover quickly when I was alone, so as to cut delay to an absolute minimum. Through all of this I kept the curtains drawn, in spite of the sunshine outside, and in spite of the curiosity which this would inevitably arouse in Dave. God damn it, it was none of his business! I’d always hated the benign, cow-like curiosity of Dave and my other neighbours up and down the street, beaming over their garden fences as they waited to be told the identity of a weekend visitor, the reason for an unusually early departure for work or the contents of a package they’d kindly taken in for me, but up to now I’d always felt obliged to indulge it. Not any longer, I decided. There was no time.

I’m no carpenter, and I’d forbidden myself peeks until the job was properly finished, so it was after 5 p.m. when I finally descended again into my cellar. I had an aching back and several small cuts and bruises from my furious hammering and sawing, but none of that mattered. As I put my foot on the stairs, I was in a kind of trance of anticipation at the prospect of all that space, trembling, dazed and almost floating, like an adolescent boy on the way to his very first sexual experience.

I’ve moved a few things down there over the months since then, and made a few changes. One of the rooms on the top level is now a store. I’ve left a few strategic buckets here and there: the last thing I want when I’m ten storeys or more below the world is to have to come up to the surface to take a leak. And, in a room on the twelfth level, near to the stairs, I’ve also established a kind of base camp, with a comfortable chair, a couch, bottled water and canned food. I can sit down there for hours quite happily, doing nothing at all other than savouring the empty, private space that I know is all around me, and listening to the extraordinary silence.

But I continue to explore as well. Lately, I’ve taken to sticking a blank post-it note on every door I enter, so that I’ll know for certain when I’ve seen them all. I’ve never yet found a room that was different in any way from any of the others – there’s never been the slightest trace of any previous occupant, or even the smallest clue as to the purpose for which all this was hollowed out – but it didn’t take me very long before I found the edges. Not counting those initial flights of stairs, the twenty-second floor down is the bottom, and, on every level, each of the four radial corridors ends in a T-junction after thirty-five rooms. So each floor, in other words, is a grid that is seventy rooms deep and seventy rooms wide, and, since there are twenty-two floors, that means that my house has in excess of a hundred thousand rooms: six of them above ground and the rest below. I’d once gloated over the idea that I had as many rooms as all the rest of the street put together, but that turned out to be a ridiculous underestimate. A few corridors on a single level could equal my street. In the cellar as a whole there were as many rooms as there were people in the entire city above me. Who could blame me for not wanting to go out any more, when I have so much space of my own at my disposal?

And yet I have to admit that lately I’ve started to feel that it isn’t quite enough. I still love my cellar, and I still appreciate its extent. But the limits are chafing a little. Without my having made a clear decision to do so, I’ve found myself beginning to tap on the outer walls of the perimeter corridors, listening out for the hollow sound of yet more rooms beyond the ones I’ve come to know. And then, of course, there’s the possibility to consider of even more space below. Well, why not? If this is possible, then so is that.

Outside in the world under the sky, my old friends laugh and quarrel, meet and part, have babies, go to work, take their dogs for walks in the park, watch TV and go to the pub. Deep down below them, I am pulling up the lino on the bottom floor, searching for hatches that might take me through to new and untouched spaces.

The End of Time

Eli waited. Behind and above him was complete darkness. In front of him was an empty arena. His fellow archangels around its perimeter were shadowy forms in the dimness, waiting silently, just as he was doing himself, for the performance to begin.

A single tall figure stepped forward into the middle. From the pitch darkness beyond the arena, a great sigh arose from countless unseen watchers, spreading outwards and upwards like a tide. For this new presence was no mere archangel, this was the Clockmaker himself. He stood out there for a moment, while silence fell once more, and then he raised his hand. Pouf! – a brilliant point of light appeared, suspended above them all.

Again that great sigh came from the darkness on every side and, in the intense brightness of that tiny light, Eli glimpsed for a moment the cherubim and seraphim out there, the dominions and thrones. Tier after tier, this whole vast angelic host had been waiting for all eternity to admire the Clockmaker’s work.

The point of light expanded rapidly, diminishing in brightness as it did so, until almost the whole arena was filled by a huge dim sphere, leaving just sufficient space round the edge for the archangels to keep their vigil. It was time for Eli and his companions to get to work, and they set to it at once, each one leaning forward to peer intently into the depths of the sphere.

Straight away, Eli saw lights in there. He saw great skeins of light, strewn through the void, each one made up of millions of little disc-shaped clumps of glowing matter that span around like wheels. And when Eli examined the wheels closely, he found that they too were made of smaller parts. They were tenuous structures of the most extraordinary delicacy, consisting almost entirely of empty space. These wheel-shapes were not solid clumps as they had at first appeared, but were so full of emptiness as to be almost imaginary: wheels sketched out in the darkness by billions of separate specks of light, each one following its own allotted path. And Eli saw that, as these little specks travelled round and round the centre of each wheel, waves of pressure passed through them, so that the specks clumped closer together when the wave reached them, and moved apart again as it passed by, creating graceful spiral bands of brightness that themselves moved round the wheel. Each tiny wheel was really two wheels revolving at different speeds: a wheel of specks, and a wheel of waves that moved through the specks!

Laughing with delight, Eli turned from the spectacle to point it out to the hidden watchers who were seated, row after row, on the dark tiers behind him. ‘Observe!’ he cried. ‘The same matter forms two separate wheels simultaneously!’

A sigh of appreciation rose up among the cherubim and seraphim, the thrones and dominions. But, even before the sigh had faded, another archangel on the far side of the arena was calling out just as excitedly as Eli had done: ‘Look! Even the smallest of these lights has tiny spheres revolving round it!’

Again the sigh in the darkness.

‘Notice how they also spin on their own axes!’ called a third archangel.

Another sigh.

‘And see how the whole spreads outwards!’ called a fourth. ‘This whole area is constantly expanding, just so as to be able to contain it.’

The Clockmaker had created Time, no less, and here in front of them, wheel within wheel, was the Great Clock that gave it form.

Sigh after sigh rolled outwards and upwards in the darkness.

Gradually the initial excitement subsided. The archangels called out only rarely now, and those awed sighs, rising in one part or another of the vast and unseen auditorium, happened less and less frequently. So rare had they become, in fact, that many aeons had passed in complete silence when the archangel Gabriel suddenly spoke.

He had been giving his attention to the smallest elements of the Clock, and had focused his vision to such an extent that he could see not only the tiny motes of stone that revolved round each star, but the surfaces of those stones, and the tiny objects that lay on those surfaces, and even the minuscule particles, wheels themselves, of which those tiny objects were made. And, on the surface of one of these stones, he had made an strange discovery.

‘Observe, Clockmaker!’ he said with a bow. ‘A new clock has appeared within your own!’

The Clockmaker had been busy elsewhere, but, hearing this news, he looked across at once, his huge blazing eyes piercing through all the intervening nebulae and galactic clusters, to home in on the stone which Gabriel was pointing to. Eli looked too, of course. The stone was a rocky shell, still molten on the inside, of a kind so common throughout the Clock that they could be found spinning around almost every star. Minor irregularities pocked its surface. There were little bumps and hollows, and, as sometimes occurred on these half-cooled stones, liquid water had gathered in the hollows. But Gabriel was looking into that liquid, pointing at objects so minute that they were as small in relation to the half-cooled stone as the stone itself was small in relation to the galaxy that contained it. These new, tiny objects took the form of little spheres, moving this way and that through the water.

Now of course stars, stones, water and specks of dust were all parts of the Great Clock, and, a clock being an assemblage of moving parts, they were meant to move in relation to one another. But the Clockmaker could see at once that what Gabriel had found was a new kind of movement, and so could Eli, and the other archangels, and the hidden host. These microscopic spheres weren’t simply being pushed and pulled by the forces around them. They weren’t just being tugged downwards by gravity, or lifted by buoyancy, or tossed about by the convection currents that kept the water constantly turning over.

No, the motion of these little spheres was something else entirely, for it was driven from within themselves. Chemical processes unfolding inside them provided energy to thousands of tiny fibres on their outer surfaces, and these fibres were beating together in rhythmic waves that sent the little spheres rolling and tumbling through the water in directions that couldn’t be explained by gravity, buoyancy or currents.

Along with all the other archangels, Eli could see at once that Gabriel had spoken the truth: each of these little spheres was indeed another clock in its own right. But what particularly fascinated Eli was the way they perpetuated themselves. They weren’t bodies of matter in the way that a star or a planet or a stone was a body of matter. Rather they were patterns that passed through matter, just as those spiral pressure waves he himself had spotted had passed through drifts of stars, or ripples passed through water, or sounds passed through the air. In every single moment, each of those minuscule spheres was simultaneously taking in new matter from its surroundings, and expelling matter from within itself. In a very short time, each one had completely replaced the building blocks of which it was made. And yet, like a spiral arm, it still retained the same essential form.

And what a form! There was silence in the arena and in the darkness beyond, and the archangels glanced uneasily at one another. They all knew that the Clockmaker hadn’t built these tiny structures, that they had arisen on their own, and were a purely accidental by-product of the forces that the Clockmaker had set in motion, much as the complicated eddies and cross-currents of a mountain stream are a by-product of its headlong rush downhill. And yet, accidental or not, there was an obvious fact in front of them which they could all see but none of them dared name out loud: every one of these little rolling spheres was at least as complex and as perfect as the Great Clock in its entirety. What would their master think about that?

The Clockmaker frowned. He was omniscient, of course, so he was far ahead of all the rest of them, and he’d seen at first glance what his angels and archangels had only gradually grasped. Each of those little rolling spheres, he could see, wasn’t simply as intricate as his own Clock, but far far more so. Indeed, considered in terms of complexity, his Clock was as tiny in relation to these little spheres, as they were to it in terms of size. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Clockmaker had noticed something else as well that none of the archangels had yet spotted: these things were changing over time. At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of them were splitting themselves in two, and the smaller spheres resulting from the division would then immediately begin to take in matter from the rich solution around them, growing quickly to full size again, and then themselves dividing. Naturally, small errors occurred at each new division. These were usually negligible in their effects, but occasionally they resulted in clocks that were too badly flawed to be able to maintain their separateness from the surrounding matter, so that they simply broke down and disappeared. What the Clockmaker had noticed, though, was that, in an absolutely infinitesimal proportion of cases, the new clocks actually proved to be superior to their precursors, in the sense that they were even more finely attuned to the task of maintaining their own integrity against the forces of entropy all around them. And therefore, because the types of clock that were most successful at retaining their separateness were the ones that increased in numbers, the design of these little clocks in general (if the word ‘design’ could be used in such a context) was constantly increasing in sophistication.

With his divine foresight, which was really a capacity to see not just in three dimensions but in four, five and even six, the Clockmaker looked ahead through time with his great fiery eyes. He observed the trajectory of development of these tiny intricate clocks, and saw them diversifying and spreading, like a kind of restless rust that would gradually form itself again and again from the simple minerals of which a planet was made, until that planet’s entire surface was covered with a multiplicity of wriggling, bulging, blooming forms, climbing over one another, consuming one another, driving one another to yet higher levels of adaptation and complexity. Ultimately, he saw, this would affect the mechanism of the Great Clock itself in small but subtle ways. It would change the albedo of planetary surfaces, for instance, and in so doing, minutely alter the workings of the entire design.

‘Wipe it clean!’ he commanded.

Gabriel, that great archangel, bowed his head in submission, and reached with his hand deep into the Clock until his fingers were almost touching that little, spinning, half-cooled rock. He frowned with concentration for a moment as cleansing rays came pouring out from his fingertips, scorching the surface of the little stone, annihilating the tiny spheres and all their kin, and breaking down all but the most rudimentary of chemical bonds, so that the stone was returned in a matter of moments to its previous state as a simple mechanical component of the Clock.

A sigh rose and spread, outwards and upwards, through the multitude in the darkness beyond the arena. And Eli watched in silence from his own quiet corner.

‘Listen! All of you!’ the Clockmaker boomed out to his archangels. ‘Note carefully what Gabriel has just done and do exactly the same! That is a command, to be followed without exception. You must watch your sectors constantly for any unscheduled developments of that kind, and, as soon as you find them, they must be wiped away at once. Nothing must be allowed to tarnish my Clock’s perfection, or to disturb the smooth, clean flow of Time.’

So from then on each archangel carefully audited every one of the billions of planets within his area of control for the first signs of that strange new restless rust. And from time to time, only occasionally at first but gradually more frequently, one or other of them would suddenly reach into the Clock and blast clean the surface of some small stone that had showed signs of developing patterns on its surface that might possibly be able to replicate themselves.

Each time, the invisible host would sigh.

Like all the others, Eli watched his own little section of the Clock – his own galaxies, his own stars, his own planets – and for a long time, he did just as Gabriel had done and as the other archangels were now doing. Again and again, he reached in with his hand to wipe away imperfection with blasts of purifying energy.