Irregularity

by Nick Harkaway

  “How peculiar.”

  They tucked in her arms until only her head was visible above the covers.

  “Get some sleep,” Birgitte said. “And calm down. We can’t have you disturbing your mother like that.”

  In the emptiness beneath the bed, she felt the presence of the remaining spiders. There was no spinning. Only a thick, collective stillness.

  There were no more dreams. Eva did not expect it. She had betrayed them. She was not surprised when, over the next few weeks, the spiders began to disappear, leaving behind the dusty threads of their abandoned webs, sad grey constructions clinging on to the emptiness under the bed. One day the housemaid remembered to sweep there. And then the webs, too, were gone.

  Years later, Eva Gustafsson-Lindberg attended a lecture at the headquarters of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The speaker was Carl Alexander Clerck, and the subject was Svenska Spindlar. But when the esteemed arachnologist held up specimens of the sixty-seven different varieties of spider, Eva closed her ears, not wanting to hear. Instead, she spoke softly to herself, in her head.

  Spider one.

  Spider two.

  Spider three.

  I will not forget you.

  The Last Escapement

  James Smythe

  I want my money! I shout these words at the council who decided these things, because the money is rightfully mine, and there are not many ways that I can subsist in this world without it. Because, what else is the driver? What else moves the world in the way that we likely expect? A deal, as I seem to repeatedly have to inform gentlemen, is a deal; and these are not men of their words, despite their protestations of the opposite. They say that they need more tests before releasing anything, because the device that I have built is untested, unverified. Tests! Does Harrison need tests? A man who is proven perhaps circumvents these things. For me, lost as I am, crawling from beneath his shadow… I am tested. I am pushed to my break. I stand before them with my sea-clock, and they all hide their smirks. I can see their lack of faith in me, in mine. I ask for a funding, as I have heard that Harrison received such a release. They refuse me. Their laughter is less than hidden this time.

  Money is the perpetual hag that seems to outweigh all other of humanity’s concerns! Forfend that we should think about the betterment of ourselves. (And still, the deep irony of it: I am working on this clock for a reward, because living is not enough; and the clock itself will enable the crossing of the oceans with something resembling expedience, thus furthering the income and profit from trade and such. If I were to stop and examine the reality of this, perhaps it would all begin to collapse under the weight of such flawed logics.)

  I do not know how many times I am to try this: to create a time-keeping device that will hold its measure on a journey across the sea. Every day, the same thing: a task as simple as steadying a pendulum, the rock of left to right; of making it sturdy, able to take the yoke of a storm and hold it still. Time is regular, this is the crux of the problem, and when travelling the seas, time is lost. It evaporates, like salt-water from a deck — though time, of course, leaves no trace. It is such an intangible thing that we try to measure.

  Attempting to recreate the effects of the water in my own home has proven impossible, so I have taken to a smaller boat, cast out into the waters around the coast. Storm-rain beats on the hull, and the boat rocks, and so I time it as best I can; two devices on the same boat, one a control for the other. My eldest, Yohann, works with me, of course: aiding me where he can. His understanding is perhaps more simplistic in its way, less inherently attuned to the workings of the clock, but regardless! So his hands are steady, and so his eyes are sound. Mine falter. It is a failing of humanity that we are so flawed, so designed to collapse. Most mechanisms grow stronger with age. They are redrafted and remade, and subsequent images feature fewer of the foibles of their earlier kin. We are not so lucky. Our bodies degenerate just as our fathers’ did.

  On the boat, we monitor the clocks constantly, almost to the detriment of our lives. Surely there will come a point where the waves rock us so hard that we capsize; and still, should we, my concern would be with the escapements on my clocks, and wondering whether they maintain their sureness even as they are tipped underneath the water that we are so desperate to tame.

  I do not travel well, my gut-sickness attests to that. And would that we didn’t lose time as we do! My plans, all of them, rendered so slyly null. Time is lost — as vapour trails, smoke, the wisps of dehydrated water.

  There is nothing for it. I have come too far to be refused this now.

  The device is nothing but excrement. Too much time has been lost. Even Harrison’s earliest attempt at this held better. Still, I remind myself, he had practice, and funds. He was not working from the pittance that I am. I smash the clock onto the ground, and I watch the guts of it spill out, tumbling from the wooden skeleton that held them. I gather the wood: it can be used again, in part. When we first learned to harness the trees, we were masters of nature, I suspect. We bent and broke the world and we turned it into useable gain. We built ships, when we knew that wood would sustain such a thing; the float of them enabling the use of water in such a way that we were masters of another domain entirely. On and on, a cycle. Salt from the sea! That same salt that is left when the water is gone, and see how we use it! A preservative from nothing but dried-up spume.

  My drawing board is full of attempted failures, that by my own measure would perhaps be classed as successes. A man lives by how he gauges his own success; and there I can see that I have lived well. So my best escapement failed. It was not exacting enough. I have to design another.

  With clocks, there is an adherence to a rule of construction. That, as you force the casement to smaller and smaller sizes, so the internal organs — when time is so fluid, so full of life, how could one not think of it as something akin to a body, churning with blood and gusto? — must in turn become smaller. More compact, and therefore more delicate. My tools become subtler, forcing interactivity on a microscopic level. But, there’s less chance of failure. The delicate nature of the device means that everything is somehow more exact. So I force it smaller. Smaller means that there is less chance of chaos’s intervention.

  How small can this go?

  I commission new tools for this task. The sheer thought of it: that there are ever-decreasing sizes of devices for practitioners and designers to use to create objects of ever-decreasing size! So my tools are already small, practically minute; but they must be made smaller still. Does somebody build those tools for the tool-maker to build mine?

  News comes from Harrison, and I destroy my design. He has abandoned clocks in favour of — and I can scarcely believe it, even as I think these words — a pocket watch. Mudge and his lever escapement — a joke, I felt, always a quip that would never work — have bested Harrison’s attempts at the sea-clock. A pocket watch!

  I am nothing if not adaptable. A clock to be held in the hand of a seaman; so small that it can be monitored constantly, should it need to be; and that will not fall, or be swayed by the movement of the boat upon waves, simply because it is anchored to a man himself. I have not seen it, of course, because such a thing will not travel, will not risk being taken into the hands of our rivals. (Such is the constant, unerring threat of war: we are terrified that a mastery of time might somehow allow an advantage to our foes. I would destroy my devices a hundred times over — even with the pain that such destruction wreaks upon my soul — before allowing a Spaniard, say, to take control of it.) I have heard a report, though, of its general size. It seems impossible.

  It is obvious that my tools will not be up to this task, so I discard them. I commission more. This endeavour is too costly by far.

  I build an hourglass to distract myself — the most basic of clocks, being so easy to force a constancy of time through it. Measurements, nothing more. I use gunpowder. I am careful when grinding it, as the properties of such a thing are volatile; and I can only
make it so small, so fine. It’s incredible how little gunpowder is needed to flow for that single minute. Great dust that passes into nearly nothing.

  The committee force me to seethe with their almost unbearable arrogance, but I grit my teeth — I think of my father, of his words to maintain that I should stay steadfast and staunch, even in the face of adversity (and what adversity this is!) — and I thank them for their kindly offer. They give me funding. Yohann says that this is reason for celebration, but what does he know? He brings the naivety of his youth to all of his opinions. Would that he could see past these.

  But there is food, and tools, and materials. Gold is soft, and it’s apparent that such softness is something that I can use. To embed the escapement inside the gold itself, carving out a space for it where it will not be able to move, seems sensible. There is no room for error.

  The escapement will not fit; or, when I manage to make it fit, it does not work as I wanted. The device overspills with its insides, like the slopping of intestines from a slaughter; and when I attempt to wear it, to move around, it loses time even here. I stand in front of the clock that I have built for our home, and I wave my attempt at a pocket watch around, and I watch the seconds become lost.

  It does not work, and I cannot see how to make it work.

  Yohann tells me that we are nearly run out of money. I tell him to get out; that his inane bleating will not help me now. Harrison is there! He is at the forefront! He is breaking all that he knows in order to create — and, perhaps, that is what I have been missing. Innovation, rather than the invocation of the groundwork that others have laid. I am using their escapements, or variants of. I need my own. Something that I do not have, and I do not understand how to achieve. I feel pity for myself, and I hit my son, to force him to leave the house, and to leave me alone.

  I am asleep when inspiration strikes me. She comes to me as what might be a woman, but could easily be a man. A creature; a spectre. So vague in my mind’s eye that she is almost intangible, but then she strikes, and the knots and weeds in my thoughts are untangled. I am searching for something that is unfailingly reliant on that which we cannot change: gravity, the turn of the planet itself, regardless of where we stand upon it, reliant on a mechanism more complicated than my current devices, though yet also more simple.

  And then, I see it. We are attempting to tame water; so, perhaps, water itself is the key? As it moves on the outside of the ship, so rocking the boat whereupon the clock itself will be forced to be, perhaps water itself is the key to balancing it? The liquid inside the mechanism, acting as a stabiliser? I see cogs and gears, the teeth of the thing inside the liquid. A new escapement; true inspiration.

  When I wake, I am coated in sweat. A fever has set in, but I know that this fever is, itself, a gift. Inside my mind, the escapement begins to work.

  I work quickly. I carve the sections I will need, using the smallest tools that I have. It does not matter for this stage if they are perfect. I reuse materials, ideas. I have to do this quickly. God knows that Harrison will be working fast; and our other competitors (though I see them as nothing more than chaff, if I am honest with myself).

  I construct a box — airtight, I ensure — and then I flood the mechanism. The water engulfs the escapement, filling the holes between the teeth of the cogs. As it turns — as the mechanics work, the piston arm forcing the wheels to turn — it is sluggish. I adjust the measurements. Still, sluggish. Still, it’s not correct; but it feels like I am advancing.

  She is white and pale, my muse; like, I think, the froth on the surface of the waves.

  I am stricken. Yohann is strict with me, forcing me to take to my bed, telling me that nothing should rouse me. Under no conditions am I to work, these are his instructions. But, of course, how can I stop? Can an artist cease creating, even as his hands cannot hold the brush? As a writer cannot grasp the pen? Even in disability, their minds are as they were. Their minds work as a machine of their own, unbeholden to ailment and misery; and so, too, does mine. Tick, tick, tick, it goes; the ever whirring machine of a clock.

  I manage to wrench myself to the workshop, but I cannot focus. My eyes wander into a fog that I would swear did not exist outside of their periphery in the moment before it overtakes me, and I am forced to grip the table. I drop my tiny tools to the floor, and I scurry for them. They are too delicate to risk being trodden on. Should the plan for this new escapement work — and I am sure that it will, as my mind is full of waves, of the flow of the tides, of the rocking back and forth, the motion of the seas that it will one day service — I will need them. Expediency is of the utmost import from this stage. I say this to Yohann, and he urges me to my bed again. He cleans me before my night of fitful sleep: waking, sleeping, urinating. Never still for more than minutes at a time.

  As it comes light, I am overcome with a cough that is so strong that it feels as though I might lose my insides to it. I lurch to the edge of the bed, and I spit the waste to the bowl of my own piss, murky in the waters. It is only when I push back the curtain that I see the blood pooling inside there, swirling into and clouding the water; and how it settles, heavy at the base. These two fluids, so lost together.

  The feeling of being well again — of my health being fully returned, my vitality come back to me (even as I feared, though I would not admit it, that death was coming for me, finally; having outlived my purpose, failed in my task, my one role) — cannot be underestimated. Even as I run a fever — as Yohann insists on my perpetual sickness — I know that I am well. My body will not fail me. The fury with which I am able to resume my activities is astonishing, and I find myself in the workshop for a day and more in one solitary stretch, relying on my son to bring me food and drink. Without him, I suspect that I would barely have breathed!

  More word from London: that Harrison’s watch (to watch something suggests that it never boils, so cocksure in naming convention is the assumption!) is fiercely mechanical, unlike anything that I have created. Across the seas, they are all calling him a genius. He constructs his own tools, go the rumours; and he has built the device from nothingness, from the ether. Of course, it is hewn of metals; of course it has an origin, a place of birth.

  But as I work, something strikes me: that it is hard to compete. It is hard to imagine how I might, given the skills at his disposal. Harrison has money, and a reputation; I am alone. (Yohann reminds me that I am not; that I have his assistance. Of course, he is insane. What he offers is peripheral.) This is my task to bear, my shoulders heavy with their own skin and bone.

  I take a boat into the rivers. A small tug, destined for nothing more than trawling the river-beds, but still it manages what I want. There is a storm, perfect for my cause; and the waves caused from the tide’s swollen ache replicate what I need. I clutch my own watch to my chest to keep it as steady as possible, and I watch as this new escapement — the Drowned Escapement, I have termed it — attempts to maintain the time. Stable, stable, I try to hold it. My arms shake with the excitement, but they are nothing compared to the ebb of the boat herself.

  When we return, we have lost nine seconds. Over the time that we have travelled, this is unacceptable, wholly and totally unacceptable. Those are nine seconds that we will never get back, and I must. I must.

  The principle is fine. Yohann says that I am not thinking properly; that my ailments (the sickness that I suffered) has somehow cheated my mind from my usual ways of logic. I am, he tells me, in his sternest tone, not clear-headed.

  I have banned him from the workshop.

  Because the joy of a clock, really, is that nobody knows how it works. For the moments where it is keeping time, maintaining its steady beating rhythm, the means by which it achieves that rhythm are closer to magic. When it is shut — and I know, there is a fashion for the glass frontis piece, which I shall ignore duly — there is a mystery to what occurs inside. Nobody knows what makes the time be stuck to. Time, that constant that we have invented ourselves — broken down, to fractions and f
ragments — adhered to with some curious notion that we, humans, can decide how it works.

  The principle, as I say, is fine. But something is askew. Water has its own tide, but perhaps the tide inside the clock needs to be more than the tide outside. It needs to be heavier.

  Oil does not work As a fuel, it cannot be beaten, but it does not mix as well as I might want it to. Instead it settles quickly, and the mechanism is left in the water itself. The escapement, I nurture. I give it a coating, to ensure that it does not rust; and I smooth the edges, to expedite the ease with which the gears will shift when submerged. But still it does not perform as I would have it.

  At night, I stare into my bedpan; and then, from those bloody depths, inspiration arises.

  The butcher sells bags of the stuff at prices that seems almost scandalous for what would otherwise be waste. It is either bagged or tossed to the gutters! Still, this is what I must pay: for the blood of an ox (such as I am assured it was), there is a margin. Good blood, he tells me. His accent is not local; more, some lilting thing that rises and falls as he stumbles over the words. I would sooner not pay him, but I do not have it in me to kill an animal myself. (Yohann, when I tell him the plan, shouts. He tells me that I am gone insane; that I am no better than those scurvied wastrels eating the flesh of rats on the streets.)

  I mix the blood with the water and I pour it into the casing, and I wait. Everything turns. More tests need to be conducted, that much is apparent; but it needs to have more water. It must be thicker, I think, even if only slightly. I watch the gears move, and the blood disperses, the water a thin pink; and then, as the gears stop, when I let the mechanism cease movement, I watch it settle in a cloud at the bottom, pulsing almost; my life, as something akin to a jellyfish on the bottom of the ocean.