Section 4: The Bones of Time’s Philosophers

 

And what heroic nature of what text

shall be the celebration in the words

of that ovation, the happiest sense in which

 

A world agrees, thought’s compromise, resolved

at last, the centre of resemblance, found

under the bone’s of time’s philosophers.

—Stevens, “Of Ideal Time and Choice”

 

            She slept long—she felt it in her bones—and when she woke it took her a while to move across the halflands between sleep and waking. When she arrived, she found the world a cold place, and hard.

            She dressed, and made breakfast for herself and her houseguests. She allowed herself the luxury of grinding some of her closely guarded coffee beans, grown in the carefully tended greenhouses built around Noon, imported, or, more often, smuggled across the Barricades at considerable expense.

            As she drank the black brew, its heat and bitterness flooding her mouth, its rich earthy smell deep in her sinuses, she opened Aquitaines book and began again to read, now in more earnest.

            It took her awhile to get used to the pace of his rantings. The Philosopher wrote a difficult mixture of autobiography, technical manual, philosophy, and mad raving. But it was possible for her to make out something of the events that had driven Aquitaine across the Barricades and into debt to the likes of Murray the Buzzard. As she’d figured, he’d been engaged to Sophia when the girl had died unexpectedly, in an accident—a fall of some kind. His grief had distanced him from his friends  and family; it was here that his madness, she thought, began.

            In any case, he was far enough into his own patterns to act secretly, decisively, and illegally within the first twenty-four hours. That’s the time in which the body would have been sequestered, sealed, and transported across the barricades for release in the wild, or burned, or treated chemically. During that time, he’d stolen it, arranged for some highly illegal storage and transport that an upstanding young member of a wealthy family should scarcely have been able to imagine, let alone arrange.

            But he had, and then he’d run, taking her with him, not to mention a fair chunk of the family fortune. He’d spent that getting the laboratory set up and Sophie in her cage. That was when he’d started spending himself into the red—he was too immersed in his project to keep himself in food and his bride in flesh. He’d gone to the Buzzard, shown him some shiny objects and some pretty rhetoric, and he was in business, sort of.

            The research he performed was an extension of certain of his studies at the University of Noon, the only real center of learning on Clock, located in and around the great cathedral. These were studies that were not exactly sanctioned by the Powers at the University—the episcopate and its network of underlings. These areas were not forbidden, because they were in fact offshoots of the hallowed central function of the Cathedral itself. But these inquiries were at the same time somehow—it was unclear—counter or at least foreign to this function, to its purpose.

            The animosity was far from clear to Gerturde, because, probably, it was all too clear to Aquitaine, and he’d had no motive for laboring to explain it. In any case, his research was in the area of Chronothanatology, the interrelationship of death and time, an investigationship into the peculiar situation of the dead on Clock, where neither time nor death functions properly—where they have been pulled “sideways,” beat back, retarded.

            More specifically, the Philosopher wanted to know how to mitigate the effects of his lover’s death. His desires seemed to vary from moment to moment—now he wanted to give her speech, now he wanted to give her breath and pulse, now he wanted to restore her mental function, now he wanted to see her pallor lessened. These were not many facets of one vision, but a henotheistic wavering procession of mixed memory and desire. He was trapped in a vicious spiral, his sanity disintegrating as his knowledge firmed. His work became increasingly a holy quest for him.

            It took Gerturde a while to get to what she regarded as the point—the function and use of the device.

            It proceeded, apparently, from a generally known generalization—the rule that the dead go nightward. But this was, apparently, imprecise. The proceeded not merely nightward—toward the dark, but east in the old parlance, or late in the new. They did not go away from Dusk into Night because it was closer, or because the Barrier barred their way, but because, with the passage of enough of what Aquitaine called pseudo-time, real time exerted some faint pressure, and the dead became subjected to this, as apparently would the living if they persisted long enough while alive.

            However, the effect was not uniform. There were variations that could be calculated, variations that occurred at certain Cardinal Points. Noon was unique, and Aquitiane could not discern the precise nature of its strangeness. But all of dayside would be somehow different nightside.

            To find out precisely how would require direct experiment, and this was difficult since the dead were forbidden to tread dayside by the laws and customs of social hygiene. The last time he had been dayside with Sophia had been when they crossed the barricades by way of the sewers beneath them. The result of that crossing had been a sudden diminishment of function and liveliness. It would be likely, Aquitaine theorized, that the dead, or rather most of the dead, would lose more and more of their vitality as they passed Midnight, and would wane entirely (not to mention being lost in the warrens of the Swarming City), long before they could ever reach dawn, and ascertain the result of bringing the dead full circle, which Aquitaine was certain would be of fantastic importance. Alternatiely, Aquitaine theorized, it was also possible that the transformation would be unique at each of the cardinal points. There was no way to be sure but to try.

            In some of his most bizarre ramblings, Aquitaine had named dusk the youth, midnight the kingdom, and dawn the senescence, of death.

            But the journey, which in fact many explorers had contemplated, would be rife with an number of problems, most geographical. Distance was the most obvious, but more important, the valley was cut off at around the region of 2:30 by an incursion of mountains that, like the mountains and plateaus which surrounded the valley on either side, stretched up beyond the breathable atmosphere.

            These mountains were riddled, as was much of clock, with subterranean tunnels—the tunnels of the swarming city, where all the dead eventually drifted and subsided, lost in the endless, winding catacombs, unable to find their way free, towards morning.

            These would be truly impassable to all comers without a navigational tool of some kind. Old-fashioned compasses were of no use, because the caverns where riddled with magnetic elements. And, unlike in the rest of clock, the sky and valley were out of sight and no aid to navigation.

            The primary function of the device was that it told the hour—that is to say, it told the user precisely where on the circumference of Clock she stood. As such, it could be used to distinguish latitudinal and longitudinal motion, and to measure the ----------. Given enough time, one could uuse it to find a path to the other side, if such were possible.

            Sighing, she closed the book, and could not say, even to herself, what use she might make of its knowledge.

            She knew only that the age in her bones spurred to choose, and choose quickly. And for quickness, too, spoke her mortal fear, because her escape from the Buzzard would not lest forever, and she would have to find some more permanent shelter than the walls of this lovely home.

            What she needed, she knew, was someone with whom to talk things over, to whom to make her shadowy logics clear by the telling. Unfortunately, she didn’t have many friends left, just employers and victims and obstacles. She could not, quite, bring herself to confide in Sophie or Pearl. Not yet. She was still too much alive, if not by much.

            So she went back to the philosopher’s lab, to see the Sheriff of Dusk, to whom she had now and again been all things, and who had now and again been all things to her.