The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass Read online

  Liaei ate, then went to the back to use the tiny voidroom, lingered for a moment next to her spare luggage rack, wondering if she should open the gift box from Toliwe and Finnei. But no, she was not bored yet. And she was somehow unwilling to find out what it contained. And so she returned to the front seat.

  Ginadi ended the call and they were once again on their way.

  While the Day God continued its cycle in the sky, toward late afternoon, they had stopped twice more, and soon it would be dark. With the approach of twilight and falling away of bright light, the colors gold and orange rust began to fade, while the Basin walls darkened and deep browns and blues took the place of ambers. With the departure of focus, Liaei was nodding off, hypnotized by the relentless optical illusion of the falling road.

  They finally stopped for the night when the road was completely dark and only the twin rows of five headlights of the cruiser cut through the ebony thickness of night.

  “We could keep going, but it is no longer as safe,” said Ginadi, landing them smoothly. “And you are far too important to risk.”

  “What about you?” asked Liaei in a sleepy voice, unable to repress a smile.

  “Me? I’m terribly important, of course. But I am not going to be the Queen of the Hourglass like you, kid,” he said. “Now, off to the back, with you. Get some rest for tomorrow. Oh, and here’s an extra sandwich. Chew—helps to clear out the pressure in your ears.”

  “Can we please have some tea first?”

  He grumbled about demanding Queens and heating water at this hour, but then, grinning, rummaged in their supply bag, and plugged in the small water pot.

  Liaei got her hot soothing mug and took it with her to sip as she got comfortable in the strange narrow bunk bed.

  When she finally slept, she dreamt of an Oceanus full of aromatic tea, and on its surface were floating ancient temporal devices, clocks and hourglasses and bits of unknown machinery, half submerged in warm amber liquid that all started running down an endless downhill slope.

  In the morning, what woke Liaei was the sound of the wind. It was buffeting the parked cruiser on all sides, howling in gusts, whistling, and in the background stood a constant low hum. She never realized how different this humming silence was, a thousand meters above Basin City, how much movement and tonality it contained.

  Ginadi was napping in the front, his large uniformed frame stretched out along the two front seats. He grunted and got up as soon as Liaei moved into the front, and grumbled again, then opened the outside doors to her, saying “Careful, all right?”

  While Ginadi used the facilities in the back, Liaei stood just outside on the pavement, stomping her feet and stretching after a strange cramped night. She had gotten used to the extreme slope and was no longer as dizzy when looking at the grand vista below.

  The Day God had barely risen, and a large portion of the slope overhead was still in shadow, while off on the horizon opposite, the world was already in orange reflected flame.

  The air was a bit more chilly at this altitude and had not warmed up yet, so that Liaei, wearing no jacket and only a thin t-shirt and long pants, felt goosebumps along her arms. But it was a strange invigorating sensation, a wildness in her lungs, as she breathed the rarified air and spread her arms wide, and watched the precipice below the slope fill with rich creamy light.

  They got going once again, and this time Liaei looked at the roadway before them and noticed suddenly how much closer the line of fire was that indicated the end of the waterpipe and the beginning of The River That Flows Through The Air.

  “How long till we are up close to it?” she whispered in reverence.

  Officer Ginadi thought for a moment, checking their progress on his bulky chronometer. “I’d say middle of the afternoon. You really want to see it, don’t you?”

  “Oh, Day God, yes. I’ve been wanting to see it ever since I knew that it was there to be seen.”

  Looking ahead at the moving road, Ginadi smiled.

  Nothing could have prepared her.

  As they drew closer, the stripe of razor light grew closer, aligning itself with the end of the winding waterpipe, becoming a distant extension of it, becoming thicker, brighter.

  And yet, nothing the mind could visualize beforehand was even remotely close.

  By lunchtime, Liaei felt herself growing tense, as she retreated deeply into her seat, staring intently ahead, staring at it in the dwindling distance. Muscles of her neck and shoulders were tightening, clenched internally, expectation gnawing at her. She wasn’t even hungry and wanted to refuse the food offered her, but the officer insisted, and so she chewed something that was as exciting as dust to her single-minded focused senses. Chewed, as she watched it, always bright and coming more and more into focus, yet always just out of reach of comprehension.

  Finally, as the imaginary center point of the Day God stood nearly in perfect zenith overhead, covering the sky with golden orange radiance, they had climbed high enough so that Liaei could see the edge of the waterpipe as it ended about two hundred meters above them up the slope. . . .

  “We’ll stop now so that you can see,” said Ginadi, aware of her intensity.

  Liaei did not answer immediately, she was so clenched. Then she nodded.

  The cruiser decelerated and Liaei watched the last dozen support rings flash past them along the gray concrete of the water pipe surface.

  As they slowed and lost hover altitude, there was an approaching roar up ahead. They could hear it through the closed windows of the cruiser, a sound rising above the constant wind hum.

  The cruiser doors shot open, and Liaei stepped outside, followed by Ginadi, with his usual, “Be careful now, okay? Watch your step.”

  Liaei stared, her eyes drying from not blinking for so long.

  Just ahead, the angle of slope showed her the topside curvature of the concrete pipe as it ended, and beyond it she heard the waterfall roar of escaping water, but did not quite see it, not from this low angle, not just yet.

  “Watch your step, slowly now.” Ginadi, again.

  Liaei walked uphill, mesmerized, toward the curving concrete visible edge, toward the roar on the other side.

  And then suddenly, the angle of the slope and her proximity allowed her to see.

  A three-dimensional wall of water, transparent and clear, with only a shadow tint of reflected sky orange, as seen through it.

  A wall of water, even and smooth, bursting through, out of the shadowed darkness of the pipe, out of its long containment of concrete, and rushing up.

  Up along the slope, into the air.

  Day God shining through it, its glory scattering, diffracting, splintering, fragmenting into shards, as though seen through a wall of moving faceted crystal, a sheet of variegated living liquid glass.

  Liaei took another step or two, up the paved road, until she stood a meter away from the edge of the pipe, its gaping circumference balanced on the last support ring that just protruded about half a meter out of the ground. She looked down and saw that the rocks immediately below it were different from the ruddy barren stonescape all around. They were dark with moisture, dark with greenish discoloration of algae growth. Slippery, smooth-polished, they glistened, as they might have a million years ago when the Oceanus waters would have submerged them.

  Smooth, they were, polished by the million-year continued erosion caused by mere water spray. While all around, the dry rocks had undergone an opposite kind of erosion—once smooth beneath the water, they were now carved, grated, and sharpened by the abrasive sand particles and wind.

  And then Liaei realized she felt a difference against her face, the pores of her skin, a coolness in the air—the wet spray. It was as though she were standing with her face against a humidifier unit.

  Except this moisture was in the air itself, for many meters in the surrounding area.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Ginadi’s voice came from behind. “They still don’t know what mechanism makes the water flow up like tha
t, without mechanized pressurization. Just look at it, it is flowing smoothly, slowly even. Like a sheet of glass sliding up.”

  “Yes . . .” said Liaei. She never took her eyes off the flow. “Could it be a force opposite of the earth’s pull? Or maybe a displacement of tiny sub-particles to make the water molecules change physical state temporarily so that they become weightless and can be made to go up, or something?”

  “Or something,” said Ginadi. “No one knows. Not even the harmonium knowledge base. We just know it is an amazingly neat trick, and wish we could copy it.”

  “Could it be an illusion of the eye?” said Liaei.

  “Nope,” Ginadi said. “It’s real, kid. Real water flowing up. We draw the sludge out of the Oceanus, put the purified stuff into the pipe end down in Basin City refinery, and it just comes up here. And keeps on going. Been that way for as long as we can remember.”

  “Do you think maybe I can stick my hand in it to make sure?”

  He laughed. “I am sure it’s been done before. But probably you shouldn’t, since they’ll have my hide down in the City for putting you into any unnecessary risk situation, and this one’s a definite unknown. Why don’t you look instead at how the water continues moving up, there, just ahead? Let’s walk a bit farther along so that you can see.”

  They walked with slow very careful paces, and Liaei watched the bizarre sheet of water at least three meters thick (she guessed by its level of transparency) and who knew how wide climb alongside her up the slope. Then slowly it rose even higher in a gradually up-curving arc that was departing the angle of the Basin slope. As it finally leveled out, the moving wall of water lay at least thirty meters up in the air like a curtain of liquid molded light through which the Day God was distorted and pulled askew, bent into new directions. . . .

  It was akin to a transparent bridge standing overhead, Liaei realized suddenly, and she could probably walk right underneath it and stare at the Day God broken up as though in a kaleidoscope toy.

  And then, in the distance interval of several car lengths Liaei saw the first support pillar.

  “What is that?” she asked, but then realized that this was the same type of black metallic support ring as had held in place the water pipe earlier, and that it was somehow continuing to “hold” together the water of The River that Flows Through The Air. Except, this support ring seemed taller and it extended out farther from the sloping ground, with its circular band portion about twenty meters in the air.

  Water flowed through the center of the ring and onward to the next support ring in the same interval distance, and so on, until it again disappeared into a fiery thread up-slope.

  “Again, we don’t know,” said Ginadi. “It’s like it is guiding the water somehow, from ring to ring.”

  “What are those pillars made of?”

  “Some kind of metal alloy, I believe the harmonium analyzed it as such.”

  “Oh, Day God! How does it work?” Liaei exclaimed in a burst of frustration. She watched the bridge of water that was now high overhead, belted with the strange containment rings. Its roar was barely diminished but the microscopic spray stood in the air, softening the rocks directly below which seemed painted with a moist shadow.

  Without asking permission this time, Liaei approached the closest rock and placed a fingertip along its sleek surface. It came away slippery and likely coated with invisible life.

  “All right, I think we’ve seen enough, so let’s be on our way,” said Ginadi immediately, giving her a brief concerned glance.

  “I am sure it’s non-toxic.”

  “Right, well, still. You can watch the River as we drive right next to it all the way up.”

  The rest of the afternoon was monotonous and a kind of disoriented haze. Once the cruiser gained hover altitude, they were only about halfway up between the River and the paved roadway, and Liaei watched the water’s glittering mass and surface, at times appearing transparent, and at others, molten fire, depending on the angle of their parallel movement.

  Liaei stared at it constantly—through it, and at it, and around it—until the glittering line of reflected fire imprinted upon her retinas even when she looked away for brief moments. In her field of vision the River image was pasted like a white snake against the reddish rocks.

  Liaei remembered them taking another rest stop and chewing more prepackaged food for dinner at some point. And then, as darkness of evening slowly approached, the transparent water took on strange blue-greenish hues, and it left a deeper shadow upon the rocks below.

  With the coming of night, the River at last disappeared, blending into the darkness of sky. They parked the cruiser on a strip of pavement, and ate, then slept, and this time Liaei remembered having no dreams, only an image of a stripe of flowing white fire.

  The following day was to be the last of their journey. They were to reach the uppermost edge of the Basin slope and emerge onto the earth’s Plateau surface by the middle of the afternoon.

  Liaei spent the time not listening to music, not checking out her harmonium entertainment modules in the port in the back, but just looking outside the window in a self-induced stupor. Sometimes she counted the seconds that passed between the appearance of the support ring posts that flashed outside the window like dark upright shadows. At other times she tried to see an infinitesimal difference between the hue of the water as it entered each new stretch of segment between each ring. Sometimes it seemed to stand still, then flow wildly forward; sometimes it was all clear and transparent cream-orange, at other times there would be just a hint of green, then blue, then a bit of violet. She knew it had to be the prismatic effect of refracted light. But it was still fun to watch for different colors of the rainbow appear here and there, like wondrous surprises.

  About two more rest stops, and without realizing it—since she was so busy staring at the flowing water to the side of her—the horizon defined by the slope was coming down lower and lower ahead of them, closer and closer. It no longer seemed halfway up the sky, but was now just the height of a tall mountain.

  And in the course of mid-afternoon, the edge seemed to draw so close up ahead that Liaei could reach out and touch it.

  “Almost there,” said Ginadi. He glanced at her. “You excited?”

  Liaei nodded.

  He grinned. “If that’s your way of being excited. . . . Nah.”

  But then he pointed with his finger to the quickly approaching upper edge of the horizon. “See that bright dot of light, just to the right of where the River seems to disappear over the top? That is the border patrol tower of Edge City.”

  “I see it. Neat!”

  But Ginadi was already calling ahead, to discuss their approach.

  Liaei again looked at the wall of water at their side, ever rushing by, transparent yet filled with hidden or implied color.

  Then it happened.

  They were out of the Basin suddenly, for the horizon fell away completely at their feet, and suddenly the cruiser was straightening to match the curve-and-then-flattening of the roadway.

  They hung in the air at the edge of a grand flatland the size of the whole world. The earth was bathed in gold, all orange, amber, rust. It was pale and uniform.

  Everything impossible, flat.

  There, like a stalagmite growth from the cliffside stood the gray concrete tower, swept featureless by the daylight, almost the twin of the one down in Basin City.

  And then Liaei glanced to the right of her. She observed how The River That Flows Through The Air also curved along an imaginary line and straightened out, water running from ring to ring, and on into the endless distance.

  Beyond it, rising in many shapes of pale and dark concrete and metal, was Edge City.

  “I’m to take you directly to the Palace of the Clock King,” said Ginadi. He noticed Liaei’s dazed, frozen expression, as though she was still submerged in a multi-day dream state.

  “Okay,” Liaei said in a dull voice, as their cruiser started to move aw
ay from the edge of the Plateau surface. Onward it swept, reducing its hover altitude and speed for the city limits, past the guard tower into this alien city of pale brilliant surfaces that looked not all that different than the one she had called home for the last fifteen years.

  Except, there were more people on the streets here, moving energetically, their skin shades ranging from palest alabaster to deep bronze, smooth heads gleaming, dressed in brighter clothes, with more fashion variety than the jeans and fiber t-shirt that was the most commonly seen outfit in the Basin. Pedestrians walked along newer sidewalks of solid well-cared-for pavement which was not upraised from the ground itself but smoothed right on top of it.

  “The ground is firm here, unlike down where we came from,” Ginadi mentioned, seeing the direction of her stare. Remember that we’re on the normal surface level now, just like most of the earth—none of that sedimentary crumbling stuff. This is all mostly solid rock.”

  Liaei continued looking.

  “How are your ears?”

  “Fine. A little stuffed.”

  “It’ll clear up fast enough as your body gets used to the different pressure.” And then he added, “The name of the chief nurse is Vioma, by the way. She is the horticulturist medic who is waiting to see you. She just told me she is very happy to finally meet you.”

  “Yes,” Liaei said. “Chief nurse Riveli told me.”

  “Tired?”

  “Yes. But I am okay, really, thank you. This is very interesting, this city.”

  Ginadi smiled. “Don’t be too scared now. We’re going to the cultural center of this place, the so-called Palace of the Clock King. There’s all kinds of neat stuff there, museums, libraries, theaters, performance arenas. Even that River of yours, you know it flows right past the Palace courtyard? See, we’re still following it, even now.”

  And as Liaei turned to glance off to the side, about three street blocks away, she saw the gleaming fire of it, the living moving transparent entity. It appeared and disappeared beyond buildings and city structures, a glittering worm.