Stone Clock

by Andrew Bannister

  ‘In the end, I am nothing … but yes, I invested and I built. I hoped without belief that I would prove myself wrong. Instead, I proved myself right. I proved all my models right.’ He shrugged. ‘The Spin, the Clock, is running down.’

  ‘That sounds ominous.’

  ‘Yes. You see, I can take the state of the physical model at any particular moment and use the virtual models to predict future states. They all predict the same thing. My models are basically perpetual. They use the original physics of the Clock. But the Clock itself does not. Is not. It will destroy itself within a thousand years.’ He felt himself colouring, and added, ‘Plus or minus fifty.’

  There was a long silence. Then Hemfrets shook its head. ‘You know what you have just announced? The death of almost ninety planets? You must be wrong.’

  ‘I am not.’ Skarbo walked over to the bench, and sat down next to Hemfrets. ‘You mistake scale for likelihood. I can’t predict the next state of a single quantum wave, but I can be sure about this.’

  ‘And you have had hundreds of years to be sure. I do not want to believe you … but somehow I do. How will it happen?’

  ‘Collisions. Orbits in the Clock are already almost a whole percentage point away from their correct path. This is a colossal error, and it is growing rapidly. The margins for error in the Clock are very small; there will be at least one catastrophic collision within a thousand years, and the first will lead to a second, and a third, and very soon a cloud of destruction.’

  ‘I see.’ And, as if in denial of what it had just said, Hemfrets screwed its eyes shut for a moment. Then it opened them very wide. ‘And what is your view of this?’

  ‘My view?’ Skarbo waved a hand. ‘Irrelevant. The models can run backwards as well as forwards. They imply that this began at least a hundred thousand years ago. The end of it is a thousand years away. The probable death of this planet is less than a hundred years in the future – and I will be dead long before then.’

  ‘You have no regrets? You do not wish to visit this thing before it dies?’

  ‘My wishes don’t matter. There is no affordable way of getting me to the Clock before I die, and besides it is outside the Bubble. Who would want to take me? Why worry?’

  ‘Affordable …’ Hemfrets looked down for a while. Then, without raising its head, it added, ‘I’m sorry for the intrusion, but exactly when will you die?’

  ‘Eighty-eight days from now.’ Skarbo thought for moment, then let himself smile. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘And afterwards? Your kind believe …?’

  At first Skarbo didn’t understand. Then he laughed. ‘Simple. I expect you know this is not my original form?’

  Hemfrets nodded. ‘I wondered why you chose it.’

  ‘Several reasons. One of which was scarcity. I wanted to preserve something – these creatures were extinct in the Bubble. They, we, live long and breed little. That is a poor adaptation strategy for worlds that may change.’

  ‘But a good strategy for,’ Hemfrets nodded at the room, ‘this.’

  ‘Yes. Well, then. My original kind had hundreds of religions and philosophies. I was brought up with them, but I shared none of them. I believe there are no gods, no afterwards, but then I have already had nine chances at life – eight versions of afterwards, if you will. Besides, I am the last of my kind as far as I know. I think I have the right to make my own rules.’

  ‘So you have.’ Hemfrets stood up and stretched. ‘The last of your kind? You are a creature of excess, Skarbo. Nine lifetimes? The last? Hundreds of years of craft? All to study a doomed collection of planets from a planet doomed itself? Forgive me; I need rest, and time to process what you have told me. But if you agree, I would like to talk more about this when we wake.’

  Skarbo inclined his head. ‘Sleep well, for as long as you need. For myself, I don’t sleep, but I’ll be occupied.’

  ‘You don’t sleep …’ Hemfrets shook its head. ‘Another wonder. Well, I hope you occupy well. I will be with you again in about five hours, standard.’

  It walked slowly out of the room. A second later a disturbance at the edge of his field of view told Skarbo that the Companion had followed.

  The Companion, he reflected, was probably the reason he had just lied.

  It wasn’t that much of a lie. He could sleep, if he chose, or rather he could enter a torpid state which was as close to sleep as his modifications allowed. But, even these days when energy seemed to be elusive, he didn’t have to. He did so very rarely, usually after some major effort, and he hadn’t the slightest intention of doing so now. Not with those two anywhere near.

  So instead of sleeping the not-sleep he was frankly afraid to enter, he walked back through the Machine Room, barely aware of the soft, off-beat tattoo of his five functioning legs. He had started out with eight. One had been lost in an accident – his fault – one had failed to regrow at the beginning of his current life, and one had simply atrophied and dropped off, quite painlessly, a few hundred days ago. That was age for you.

  At the far end of the Machine Room, the walls came together at a steep angle that looked like a sharp dead end, or an inverted blade. Skarbo stopped just before the walls narrowed too much for his size, and stood still for a second, remembering.

  Like this, and then that …

  His remaining legs tapped what he hoped were still the right places on the floor. It had been a long time, and it was harder with only five.

  It seemed to take longer than he remembered. Then the walls in front of him split neatly along the corner, and he was looking into a grey space with a flight of stairs at the far end of it.

  He hadn’t done this for two lifetimes. He had been meaning to do so before he finally died, but it hadn’t been a priority. Now it was. He had seen the light in Hemfrets’s eyes; he had seen the slight hesitation of the Companion. Something was coming. He doubted very much if he could do anything about it, whatever it was, but at least he wanted to have seen it.

  The stairs led up to a landing, and narrowed into a ladder. He had always struggled with the ladder. By the time he was at the top his breath was wheezing.

  But then he was there, and the sight he had not seen for two hundred years was still as he remembered. He let muscle memory guide him back into the couch he had made for himself when he had first come here.

  It angled back so he was looking up through the vast transparent dome.

  He assumed that the place had been given a name by earlier people but he didn’t know it. When he had arrived the planet had already been an abandoned husk.

  His own name for it was God’s Eye.

  As an ex-mammal in an insect form he had a complicated relationship with eyes, and he had told the truth when he said he didn’t believe in gods – but he still couldn’t think of a better name.

  Tonight, the dust layer was at its lightest. If he pushed himself up and forward a little out of the couch he could lower his gaze far enough to see the horizon, and the view was clear almost all the way across the diseased-looking surface. Only a blurred, dull pink sliver clinging to the edge of the distant curve of landscape betrayed the fact that the atmosphere was full of powdered planet.

  Skarbo sighed and let himself fall back into the couch. The view to the horizon was interesting but familiar – even comforting, in a way. Whereas the view straight up was striking and not comforting at all, even if it, too, was familiar. From a long time ago.

  The ship was close, far too close for any pretence that it was in orbit. It was poised a few hundred metres up, well inside Experiment’s degrading atmosphere, and presumably sitting on one local gee of thrust, which struck Skarbo as a very wasteful way of going nowhere.

  It was close enough for him to see plenty of detail. At this distance the curved grey belly was just high enough to catch the last of the low-angle sunlight glancing past the planet. It was covered with bulges and pods, each one throwing a stretched-out shadow across the hull.

  There were many,
many shadows. Skarbo knew about such things in theory, if not much in practice, and he suspected that if even a quarter of the bulges were weapons, Hemfrets’s ship was by far the deadliest thing he had seen in seven lifetimes.

  Not eight, because he had seen something like this before. Just once.

  He had forgotten many things on purpose and many more by accident, but not this. He closed his eyes.

  He had been flat on his back then, too, he remembered. But absolutely everything else had been different.

  Greater Bowl, Gannff Planet, Mandate (Original), Bubble

  ‘DO YOU REALIZE, we haven’t been outside this year?’

  Skarbo nodded, which made the coarse moss on the bank tug his scalp up and down. It tickled. ‘I know. Work, though.’

  ‘In your case, maybe. Some of us were looking for a chance. Man, don’t you ever look up?’

  ‘I’m looking up now.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Sheesh, you’ve already got twice the credits of anyone else. You’re going to pass, like, years early.’

  Skarbo shook his head. ‘A year. That’s all.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t be out here now if I hadn’t hauled you. The first time it’s been safe for months.’

  ‘I work, Fostees. That’s what we’re supposed to do.’

  Fostees shook his head vigorously, making locks of curly greenish hair flick round his forehead. ‘Not so, my serious friend. Work is one of the things we’re supposed to do. We are also supposed to attend cultural events, keep abreast of current affairs and take advantage of the extracurricular experiences offered by our time on this first-rank planet close to the seat of the sector government.’

  Skarbo closed his eyes. ‘Yes. I read that pamphlet too.’

  ‘See? Not just my opinion, although it seems to have omitted sex … and, come on, admit it – it’s a great view.’

  Skarbo had to admit that it was.

  They were lying just below the top lip of the Greater Bowl, about a kilometre above the disc of cloud that presently filled the lower third of it. It was late evening, almost fully dark, and behind and below them the lights of the city were splashed across the valley like a broken chain between the two gaunt Watch Towers that marked, and had once defended, its eastern and western boundaries.

  In front of them, the cloud was still luminescing softly with the last of the solar energy it had stored during the day. Skarbo had read that it was closer to photochemical smog than cloud, but that didn’t stop it looking beautiful.

  The upper edge of the cloud was licking at one of the ring lakes that broke the smooth downward sweep of the grass surface. The Greater Bowl hadn’t always been ornamental. It had originally been a three-kilometre radio telescope, and as if that wasn’t big enough it had been meant to be part of an array of hundreds of identical telescopes, a thousand kilometres on a side. The construction would, people had believed, boost the economy of a planet that was flagging at the time, and the revenue stream from hiring out the enormous instrument to wealthy academic institutions from all over the system would pay back the equally enormous loans needed to build the thing.

  This would have worked beautifully but for the small detail of the election of a reactionary anti-science government just as the first bowl was completed. They declared that it was ridiculous to bankrupt the planet in the cause of the wasted science of astronomy, and repurposed the bowl as a waste disposal site.

  Five years later they had bankrupted the planet in the more respectable cause of making war on the neighbours.

  The Greater Bowl remained the only bowl. Ten generations later, in a more environmentally conscious age, it had been excavated. Once its scarred and contaminated surface had been seeded with a coarse grass that didn’t mind chemicals, a series of annular lakes dug to control surface-water run-off, and an ornamental lake created in the bottom of the bowl, it became an unofficial monument to the damage that can be done by really stupid people.

  The cloud was intermittent. The bowl was big enough to have its own rather simple weather system, producing slithering acrid mists, occasional rain, and the cloud. Once or twice a year the whole surface froze, becoming a lethal but popular sledding venue. The lake was full of pollution-tolerant insects, and even the locals didn’t swim in it.

  Fostees was still talking. Skarbo tuned him out. He was good at that.

  The cloud-light wavered and died, and his heart jumped. He had promised himself something, and now was the time. He closed his eyes and counted slowly to a hundred under his breath to give his eyes time to resensitize. Then he opened them and let himself stare straight up at the stars.

  He had never done this before. His family would not have encouraged it; did not encourage what they called ‘playful things’. There was duty, and responsibility, and virtue, and work, and more work, and if the work was finished then other work could be found. And so Skarbo was still working. It had taken Fostees, who described himself as ‘fun-loving’ – and Skarbo automatically inserted the word trivial – several weeks of nagging to get Skarbo even to have basic eyelid displays fitted. He was glad he had them now.

  They were useful for work.

  The view is of an oblique cross-section of the Greater Spiral Arm, providing one of the most densely populated starscapes visible from anywhere within the Bubble of the Mandate …

  That had been in the pamphlet too, he recalled. But the words were inadequate. The shocking blaze of stars was indescribable. No wonder they had wanted to build telescopes here.

  It was too much for him, first time. After ten seconds or so he shut his eyes again, but his retinas were still glowing with after-images. He watched them, and found himself focusing on one area in particular – a group of stars that were definitely either brighter or closer than the others, and which seemed very close together. Still keeping his eyes closed, he reached out a hand and prodded Fostees.

  ‘The group of stars that make a rough circle,’ he said. ‘Close to the horizon. What are they?’

  ‘Where? Oh. That’s the Spin, of course.’

  ‘What’s the Spin?’

  ‘Good grief. Where have you been?’

  Skarbo sighed. ‘Remember about the work?’

  ‘Even so. The Spin’s a thing that shouldn’t exist, is what it is.’

  Skarbo opened his eyes again to let the real starlight erase the fading blur behind his eyelids. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s impossible, or something. The orbits are wrong; the planets ought to smash into each other.’

  ‘Why don’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know! No one knows, I expect. It’s pretty, right?’

  Skarbo nodded, and closed his eyes again. One day, he thought, he might be able to gaze at the Spin without stopping. One day. He wanted to blink a search, but smearing the inside of his eyelids with glyphs would have destroyed the beauty, so he would make do with the little Fostees could add, letting his mind process and paraphrase.

  There were eighty-eight planets and twenty-one suns in the cluster that shouldn’t exist. Some were inhabited – perhaps most, but there was no contact with them. There had been, in the half-forgotten past, but the walls were going up all over the sector. People kept to themselves, including the people in the Spin.

  He opened his eyes again and looked for the group of stars. There; or, now he looked again, not there. At first he thought it had changed shape, had become somehow flatter? But that was nonsense.

  Then he realized some of the stars were missing. He could remember the image, and, compared with the memory, three bright points of light at the top of the group had gone.

  So had some of the stars near them. And as he watched, a couple more winked out. He reached out and nudged Fostees. ‘I think it’s getting cloudy.’

  ‘Can’t be.’ Fostees sat up and peered. ‘There wouldn’t be clouds at this season. It must be something else … Oh …’

  There was a buzzing rustle from below them in the bowl. Skarbo glanced down towards the cloud, which looked unchang
ed, and then at Fostees.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  Then he frowned. He couldn’t see the man’s face but Fostees was sitting bolt upright, his palms pressing into the ground by his hips, and he looked as if he was staring down at the slope of the bowl.

  ‘Fostees?’

  The name seemed to penetrate. Fostees turned towards him, and there was enough starlight to see that his eyes were wide. ‘Lie down!’

  ‘What?’ Skarbo shook his head. ‘Why?’

  ‘That way they’ll pass over. If you’re standing they’ll build up against you and take you down with them.’

  Skarbo looked at him. ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘Just do it! Face down!’

  It was an urgent hiss, and as he spoke Fostees was already turning over and flattening himself against the grass. He had his hands covering the back of his head.

  For a moment Skarbo stared at him blankly. Then he looked downhill.

  The rustling was louder. As he watched, the edges of the cloud rippled and a blackly iridescent tide flowed up the slope towards him. It wasn’t water; it was things.

  He threw himself to the ground, buried his face in the grass and covered his head.

  For a moment there was only the growing buzz and the scratch of the sour-smelling grass against his face. Then he was covered, by something that scratched and pattered and skittered in waves of hardly detectable weight; something that creaked and clicked and gave off a sweetly acrid smell that made him want to retch, and he knew without being able to see anything that this was insects – millions, billions of insects.

  The inhabitants of the bowl had abandoned their home.

  He lay, trying not to move, not even to breathe, while the countless pin-pricks danced up his body and his reflexes howled at him to jump up and run.

  Then it thinned out and stopped.

  His back felt wet. He unclasped his hands, raised his head and took a shuddering breath.

  An irregular black circle was flowing up the bowl. As he watched, it crossed the highest of the ring lakes without even slowing.