The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass Read online

  “They are failing. The air transports.”

  “What?”

  Riveli started to pace. Amhama and Liaei stared at her with curious attention.

  “It’s not been generally announced so as not to generate public worry, but there have been some foodstuff delivery issues, and some water refinery shipment problems. The Basin City water purification plant had a transport crash halfway up the slope. When they examined what was left of it, the harmonium field was gone, completely lifeless. And there’s nothing they can do but trash the equipment when that happens. And so,” continued Riveli, “they’ve had to trash fifteen transports since this winter. That’s an unheard of failure rate, not with harmonium-powered equipment.”

  “Oh, my . . .” said Amhama.

  Liaei snorted. “We’re all falling apart, aren’t we?” she said.

  “So then how do we get Liaei up there safely?”

  Riveli thought for a moment. “She’ll take a police patrol car. Yes, I know it is not ideally equipped to hover at such a steep angle as the Basin slope, but if going slowly, and well-fortified with emergency supplies and plenty of water, she’ll be fine. In fact, the safest course is to follow the waterpipe canal and then the River all the way up the slope.”

  “Goodness, that might take days,” Amhama said.

  But Liaei spoke up. “I’d like that,” she said. “I will finally get to see The River That Flows Through The Air.”

  “I am all packed,” Liaei announced to the harmonium. “Not that many personal items in my box, mostly datapad and audio library components and extra power packs. A couple of pretty self-decorative presents from the horticulturists and Amhama, for my fifteenth birthday. My cool weather jacket, even though it is hot here now. Extra underwear and . . . pads.”

  “Sounds like you are prepared,” replied the harmonium.

  Liaei shrugged. “Prepared for not sure what. But yes, I am.”

  “Then the last lesson from this node in Basin City will be about intimacy, and about fear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is a natural thing to be afraid of the unknown,” said the harmonium. “And another entity, a person you have never met, is an unknown. When you come together, unless you trust that no harm will befall you, you will not be receptive. We will practice an exercise that focuses your thoughts on the calm and acceptance that might be needed at that point. First, imagine a bowl of water, smooth and placid and perfectly clear. . . .”

  The next morning, in the bright amber sky glow, many of them came to see her off.

  “Take good care of her, Ginadi,” said Amhama, releasing Liaei from a long close embrace during which she stroked the back of Liaei’s head and whispered something, while moisture ran down her face. She was speaking to the patrolman who would drive Liaei up the Basin slope. It was the same police officer who had watched the streets of the night City, stopping to wave occasionally to Amhama when she worked the various night shifts over the years. She had requested him specifically for this task, because she felt she could trust him. He was a stranger, yet familiarity was a thing of degrees. And over the many nights she had seen his calm reliable solid face from the other side of the car’s security glass, Amhama sensed that she need have no fear.

  Ginadi was a tall, large-built man, approximately Amhama’s age, with muscled arms that showed through the fabric of his gray uniform. But ages were hard to tell, Liaei knew. They all looked gently alike, these people of a human species separate from herself.

  “Don’t worry,” he replied, squinting in the bright morning glare of the Day God, watching Amhama with dark warm eyes. “She will be fine, I promise. The back cargo space has been converted into a rest bunk and the closet’s a voidroom, and there is plenty of food and water. She can use the rear harmonium port to pass the time. Or she can watch the scenery. We’ll make as many stops as necessary.”

  “Thank you,” said Amhama. “I wish I could be there with you, but I will slow you down.”

  Ginadi nodded.

  Liaei knew it was true because the police cruiser could not support more than two people and be remotely efficient—not with all the habitat modifications in the rear cargo area. And not when it will be climbing up a 25 degree and higher slope for most of the journey and would have to keep its tail end from bumping the uneven and sharp rock formations of the ground.

  The horticulturists from the medicineal—the closest she had to a real family, Liaei realized—stood just behind Amhama. Chwanta was still wearing her sterile lab coat, since she had come directly from a night shift to see Liaei. Chwanta patted and then tousled Liaei’s already longer than shoulder-length hair, and said, “You are beautiful, Queen. Remember that.”

  Finnei and Toliwe were next. Liaei understood that they must have discussed the significance of this gesture beforehand, because Toliwe said, “We have something for you,” while at the same time Finnei proffered a small metallic gift box decorated in a bright harmonium field pattern that danced in illusory motion around the center and rotated along the box’s perimeter.

  “Open it later,” Finnei said. “Open it when you get bored with the scenery.”

  I will never get bored with the scenery, Liaei wanted to retort.

  But at that point Mara, the machine tech, pulled up from the back of their group and smoothly extended a limb from her chassis. It was holding a new datapad attachment. “This is an expanded memory music player, the latest model,” said Mara’s lively pseudo-living voice. “So that you can always dance, Liaei. It’s been a pleasure!”

  Liaei bit her lip, holding back something that was breaking inside of her. That except for her dear Amhama, Mara would act the most human of them all. . . .

  Ginadi cleared his throat and then checked his right armband. He set a custom chronometer to start measuring at that point, which would divide their multi-day journey into appropriate rest periods. “We should be on our way.”

  Whoever said the Pacific Basin was only a toxic wasteland, had not been faced with the grandeur of the near upright walls of this deepest and likely most ancient of earth’s planetary craters.

  One had to imagine the greatest mountain range, its invisible peaks lost in a horizon line that was so far overhead that it amounted to heaven. Beyond that dissipated edge, the remaining portion of sky was all solar orange radiance, a burning atmospheric mass of deflected radiation and particles of airborne matter, a soup of pale amber cream that somehow blinded the eye.

  As the police cruiser left the outskirts of Basin City, Liaei, sitting in the front passenger seat next to Officer Ginadi, stared at the receding familiar landmarks. There went the concrete water refinery domes, the tall city center with the medicineal building towering above many others, the crisscrossing network of suspended streets, suspended aqueducts, various residential and shopping complexes, everything dotted by blazing panels of light that were solar energy collectors plugged into the harmonium systems all around the city.

  There, if she blinked, she could see the glare of light reflecting in the windows of the multi-floor complex where she and Amhama had lived for the past fifteen years.

  And beyond everything in the receding distance of the horizon was the oil slick stripe of the Oceanus. A black metallic snake, it rested, mirroring the Day God.

  Road traffic was light as usual, consisting of occasional city buses, freight transports, and personal units. They had taken the wide main street that ran alongside the grayish concrete and metal waterline, as wide in circumference as the street itself.

  “See that?” said Ginadi, as they swept onward, hovering about half a meter above street level, at a precise speed and height limit for this particular city area. “Can you guess how many cubic tons of purified water it carries?”

  “Hmm, I used to know this,” Liaei replied. “I believe it varies seasonally, doesn’t it?”

  Ginadi shook his head in reproach, eyes steady on the road as he steered the two pilot rods in manual mode. “What, they don’t teac
h you the basics in school any more? It’s thirty cubic tons per hour on the average, which is pretty low volume for this pipe diameter. And yes, it varies from the low of about twenty cubic tons in the summer to a high of about forty during the highest precipitate winters.”

  “Sorry that I don’t know this off the top of my head. And I was taught in a special school,” Liaei retorted. She stared at him with a beginning frown, but then noticed lines of humor at his lips. Officer Ginadi was teasing her.

  The main street and the waterline meandered past natural land structures around which they had been built, with fewer and fewer human-made structures on both sides, while the angle of the slope incline started to increase, until they left the city limits, marked by nothing other than a sign and a small border station.

  As they approached the border station, Ginadi talked to them on the voice comm, and without even slowing down they were cleared to proceed. Liaei saw two officers wave at them from the rounded transparent windows in a small three story concrete tower.

  Since hardly anyone ever left Basin City, they were now the only ones on the road.

  On both sides of them, reddish sedimentary rock, striated layers, rust, amber, rose, teal, sienna. No earth, no soil, thought Liaei. Such was only to be found in enclosed city parks and in the greenhouses where under pristine climate-controlled conditions the horticulturists grew plantlife for food and other organic consumption.

  Except for microbes in the atmospheric cocktail distributed by the winds and the almost non-existent rainfall, there was no life.

  The cruiser top and windows were closed for comfort, and the air conditioning and oxygenator and humidifier were on, the comfortable mixture coming like a breath of life through the vents. Otherwise, Liaei knew, they would be bathed by very dry rarified air at this point, the kind that normally made her lightheaded and gave her a sinus headache. But at least at this distance the stink of Oceanus would be almost gone. She was not sure if that was such a good thing since in many ways the Oceanus was home. She had lived along its mineral-encrusted shoreline all her life and it was a familiar bloated monster of inky-black poison and life, a paradox.

  So long, Oceanus, she thought. Then she turned around and kept her eyes on the rising way before them.

  The road that had been a city street was now a faded and unmarked strip of dust-blown ashen pavement, cracked in many places, as it crawled upward only a couple of meters on the left side of the waterline.

  The great water pipe itself, a monstrous concrete worm burrowing above ground, rested within circular support rings of black metal alloy. The supports were placed at regular intervals along the pipeline. They were anchored in place on the nether side by subterranean posts in the sloping ground like giant nails driven deep into the rock flesh of the Basin.

  If one looked far enough overhead, the worm narrowed as it receded in the distance, slivering upward, curving occasionally, meandering along natural formations. And the support rings running along its surface appeared to be the annelid segments of the creature.

  And then, at some point up the slope, the worm ended, and a line of reflected fire began.

  They were about a day’s travel distance from it.

  Liaei watched the monotony of the sienna and rust rock coloration bathed in bright Day God glare as the world on both sides of them had become a single massive slope. As they ascended higher and higher there was a new sensation, a frequent popping pressure in her ears.

  She glanced occasionally and shyly at the rather quiet Officer Ginadi next to her, who engaged the autopilot function, and now occupied himself by watching data on the harmonium display field. He looked up only to make sure they were indeed on course and hovering above the smoother safety of the ancient road and not the sharp boulders just meters away. Were the cruiser to scrape its bottom due to a miscalculation in hover altitude and angle, at least they would not attain as much damage on pavement as they would on irregular rock.

  The road was ancient indeed. At one point historically, Liaei knew, people had traveled up and down it by foot, or by manually held sedan chair. No wheeled or other road-contacting vehicles were allowed, because if such a vehicle’s braking mechanism failed, it would roll down out of control due to the high incline, and would cause an unpredictable amount of damage to others on the road below it. Thus, all traffic had been pedestrian.

  Or maybe not, she remembered her lessons suddenly. Around the time the road was being built in various stages there had still been some domestic non-human species of animals, mostly quadruped, and they had been used as pack-animals and cargo carriers—a form of intra-species slavery.

  No wonder they were now extinct. As technology developed and the world went on, nearsighted homo sapiens did not find enough value in other species and thus did not provide for them. Since, in that dawn of sentience, the health hazards of eating meat increased and compassion slowly flowered and overtook cruelty, the designation of animals as food became irrelevant. And companion animals, the few fortunate non-food species that had served the dubious purpose of pets, were also eventually left to dissipate as an unnecessary luxury in a world of dwindling resources.

  They had been marvelous terrestrial aliens, Liaei thought.

  We ate them, we tortured and abused them as consumable things, and we abandoned them in the end. And in all our wisdom and profundity of logic and thought we never did learn to properly value those beings, thought Liaei, those wondrous true aliens on our own planet, for their own sake—for the sake of the miracle of life that they stood for, just as much as we did. Sentience had not been enough to guide us. It had been the people of my own genetic makeup, responsible for the loss. And now, for these modern homo sapiens, who do know better than to use and enslave others, it is too late. These human beings live in a world where they are the only animals left. And I too, I live along with them.

  And as the pavement flew by, eternally falling in an optical illusion before her eyes, Liaei imagined ghosts out of the depths of millennia, millions walking up and down that road, biped and quadruped, burdened and not, of their free will and—on behalf of someone else—without. They trudged, clad in pale cotton that covered flesh of all hues, while the Day God rose and set above them millions of times, and at the same time gradually swelled to fill most of the sky until the sky held no more ancient blue, only gold.

  And the Oceanus, it had stood closer to the top edge and higher then, probably almost at this same exact point which they passed now along the slope. And there was no Basin City. . . .

  “Hungry?” said Ginadi, interrupting her reverie. “Almost midday meal time.”

  Liaei glanced his way, nodding, then added, “Sure.”

  “Then let’s stop for a stretch and lunch.”

  The cruiser had to be decelerated very carefully. And then—since in motion it had been positioned at a slight opposite angle to the slope, to correct the extreme leaning-back effect they would have had to experience otherwise—it had to be made parallel to the slope, and then the hover altitude was diminished as it gently plastered itself closer and closer against the road.

  Liaei and Ginadi were nearly lying back in their chairs when the cruiser finally slipped to a stop and its parking grip-supports were extended to attach to the pavement.

  The air systems turned off and the doors came open with a slight hiss, then warm and thin air came to engulf them. It beat at Liaei’s face with shocking impact, tangling her hair.

  “We’re sitting in the middle of the road,” she said.

  “Right,” said the officer in his usual calm voice, with a touch of humor. “You think anyone would mind that we’re blocking their way?”

  Liaei laughed.

  But then he added, “Careful, by the way, if you’re afraid of heights. As you stand up and get out of the car, move slowly, and don’t look back immediately. Get a feel for the ground first.”

  He wasn’t kidding. As Liaei got out of the cruiser, she was buffeted by the dry wind and an immediate overp
owering vertigo. She remembered the gym back at Basin City, how the aerial exercises made her weak and faint in the pit of her stomach at first, and how she breathed to control the terror.

  Breathing deeply in a similar fashion, she stood up, the non-slip soles of her shoes gripping the road. And then slowly she turned around, extending her arms at both sides a little way, for natural balance.

  An impossible vista was before her.

  The world was falling away into a rust-orange haze, dissolving in the distance.

  Down, down, down.

  All perspective lines receded. Rocks that were huge boulders and cliffsides, when they passed by, appeared tiny handfuls of pebbles far below. The paved road behind the cruiser was a stripe that slipped away along the pipe waterline, curved occasionally, and disappeared in the incalculable distance, narrowing to a point.

  They were now too far to see Basin City or even the Oceanus, in the atmospheric haze.

  Liaei had grown so light and weightless and bereft of anchor that she knew that if she were to take another step down the road, she would fall, then roll down the slope forever. . . .

  With a force of will Liaei swallowed to loosen the constriction in her throat, then turned her back on the road. As a result of her movement she heard tiny pebbles crunch under her feet, then heard them clatter and roll away, down, down, down. . . .

  Inside the cruiser, Ginadi was making a call to the City, to report on their progress. He was talking with his mouth full, holding a half-eaten pre-packaged vegetable roll sandwich in one hand, and gesticulating with the other as he attempted to describe something about hover propulsion to the party on the other end of the harmonium link. He stopped only to offer Liaei another sandwich, a small jar of creamy white dipping sauce, and a chilled drink container.