Time Stand Still
THE INVENTOR’S TALE
It may surprise you, my sparkling daughter, that I always wanted to be a Regulator.
As a boy in Crown City, I would watch the Watchmaker’s uniformed guards moving about with perfect precision: specially chosen, specially trained troops, all so punctual…just like human machines.
I would see the Blue Watch patrolling the streets on a schedule that did not deviate by so much as a minute per day. Or the Red Watch, who stood like vigilant statues outside Chronos Square, the Watchtower, or anyplace else that was important enough to be guarded by the best. Or the Black Watch, elite Regulators who observed the people of Crown City and even conducted secret missions to enforce the peaceful Stability across Albion.
They seemed as perfect to me as the Clockwork Angels themselves—but the Regulators, at least, were human, and they were something I could aspire to.
Only the best were chosen to be become Regulators, though, whether Red, Blue, or Black. Even as I played in the streets with my three boyhood friends—Zivo, Woody, and Lee—we would dream of joining the Regulator corps when we grew up. What could be a more marvelous goal?
Alas, I had a fundamental flaw that made me unfit to be a Regulator. I was never on time.
My friends and I devoted ourselves to turning our dreams into reality. As boys, we trained and practiced and drilled together—it was just a childhood game, but we wanted to be ready for when we were old enough to submit our applications to the recruitment offices. We found empty alleys and marched up and down, marking off precise steps. We timed one another with a metronome that Woody had borrowed from a music teacher who insisted on exact rhythm from his students.
While my friends all moved with clockwork precision, I would often stumble or miss a step. I was the dissonant note, as the music teacher would say. Lee, Zivo, and Woody made it seem so easy, as if the gears turned smoothly in their minds and bodies, while mine were jammed up with grains of sand. No matter how earnest I was, I could not keep time to the exacting standards of a Regulator. Even so, I did not give up on impossible dreams.
You probably have many questions, my sparkling daughter. Since this is the very first tale you will collect in your book—the first of many enjoyable and enthralling stories, I expect—let me explain how the special alchemy on these pages works, and also how the magic of storytelling works…a magic that you should be familiar with, but I suspect that you paid little attention when I compelled you to read all those books aloud to me.
Chronicling a person’s life does not entail including every tedious moment of it. By design, the alchemy left many gaps in this tale. How was I born? What about my years as an infant, as a toddler? Where did we live? What did my parents do? How did I meet these three friends, and what made us so close? What happened to them after they played their role in my story?
The fact is, dear Marinda, those parts aren’t relevant to this particular tale. The magic of a story is to take the totality of a life and winnow it down to the important events, strip out the dull everyday existence, assess the side notes and determine whether they are vital to the core of the tale or merely interesting tangents. My memory has a second sight. The alchemy in this volume has a very selective reactive mechanism, a filtration effect that hones the story down to a fine gem. And through special alchemy, I have fine-tuned this particular tale to my genetics.
One would never want a life story to be boring.
And this is not my entire life story, daughter—not by any means. It is just the story you don’t already know.
When we reached the proper age and all the forms had been filed, my friends and I were assigned to Regulator training. I know now that some of the qualification fields in the submission documents may have been exaggerated slightly in my case, but after I’d been approved, no one would question my legitimacy, because errors simply did not happen in the Watchmaker’s Stability. Who would even consider that some Crown City bureaucrat could have improperly assigned me?
Zivo, Woody, and Lee supported me throughout our basic training. They helped me and—more often than I like to admit—covered for my mistakes. We moved into the Regulator recruit barracks, received Gray Watch uniforms to show we were trainees, and settled into our proper subdivision in the ranks. We began our new lives.
And I failed miserably.
Even the bonds of friendship could not overcome imperfect punctuality where the Regulators were concerned. When I marched with the trainee ranks, I was out of step. When we practiced complex formations on the parade ground, I stumbled and thereby entangled the performers.
Before long, I was deemed unacceptable for Blue Watch patrols, and with some consternation our training captain transferred me to the Red Watch recruits. If I could not keep time or march with perfect rhythm, I should at least be able to stand motionless and alert, on guard like a human statue.
But I was too fidgety for that, and my mind wandered. Rather than staring fixedly ahead, I would daydream, look at passersby, or even just gaze into the sky as ideas struck me. After only a month, the trainee captain removed me from Red Watch duty before anyone could notice my failings or his embarrassment.
Discharging me from the training corps, however, would also be unacceptable, because all the properly approved forms showed that I was supposed to be in the Regulator barracks, and mistakes were simply not made. Therefore, I needed to make myself useful in some way. I had to demonstrate proficiency in some necessary career, and then all would be for the best.
My three friends were sad for me. Their training was going well, and they had a bright future in the Regulators. While they sailed ahead down the main current of their careers, I got caught in a side eddy and drifted in a backwater.
Angry at my failings, I became obsessed with the machinery of time. What did I lack? The internal perfection of fitting my life’s gears with all those others! The fact that I couldn’t keep time made me even more intrigued by it. And when I noticed that three of the twelve clocks inside the trainee barracks were off by as much as two minutes from the city’s primary Watchtower clock, I determined to fix them.
I discovered I had quite an aptitude for the delicate mechanisms, the wheels within wheels, the hair-fine springs. I adjusted those barracks clocks and made them perfect. Better still, I impressed the Regulator captain with my work. At last, I had something useful to do! The captain dispatched me to assess, calibrate, and maintain the various clocks in the other barracks.
Guarding the accuracy of time was a heady responsibility, touching on the same ethereal territory the Watchmaker had claimed for his own.
Each day, while the Regulator trainees practiced, I would busy myself in a makeshift workshop, dismantling decommissioned clocks, studying how they worked and—dare I even suggest it?—discovering ways to improve them.
Tick-tock.
Zivo, Woody, and Lee finished their basic training, perfectly synchronized, as expected. All three of my friends received Blue Watch uniforms so they could patrol the streets of Crown City and protect the schedules of all good citizens, while I kept my gray uniform as a trainee—a perpetual trainee, apparently. Since I had been removed from the regular routine, I had no hope of graduation. I simply fixed the Regulators’ clocks.
As my reputation grew, others brought me problematic timepieces, and I worked miracles to align them with time again. Some were unsalvageable, so I kept the spare parts, the gears, springs, bushings, and crystals. Since the Clockwork Angels admonished those who waste, whether it be time or resources, I kept those pieces, hoping they would someday prove useful.
On the night that we celebrated the graduation of my friends and their class (which would have been my class), we heard a commotion outside the barracks, and we emerged to see a wandering pedlar standing in the darkness. The trainees who had just become Red Guards stood at attention and pretended not to notice anything out of the ordinary. The full members of the Blue Watch on duty did not deviate from their routines. But because I had no set schedule, and because Zivo, Woody, and Lee were still celebrating their promotion, we all went outside to stare.
The pedlar had an overburdened cart, a steam boiler that glowed blue with coldfire, pistons that huffed inside brass-encased cylinders. Everything was adorned with gold, which was very common in the Watchmaker’s land. His cart was loaded with interesting paraphernalia, secret packages, decorative glass spheres, vials of alchemical substances, trinkets, lamps, pots, coldfire batteries, even a selection of ornate music boxes.
The objects were less interesting than the pedlar, though. He was an old man with tangled locks of gray hair beneath a black top hat. He wore an overcoat, a beard, and an eyepatch that made him all the more mysterious. He paced alongside his self-motivated cart that chugged along at a slow pace so as to display his wares for potential customers.
Even more interesting, he was accompanied by a black-and-white spotted Dalmatian. Since dogs did not adhere to plans or schedules, they were a rarity in Crown City, but the pedlar’s dog moved as if it were part of a clockwork caravan, keeping pace with the chugging cart and the plodding pedlar. The Dalmatian had a strange cockeyed gait, as if it had injured its foreleg, but it soldiered on, wobbling but never pausing. It seemed very old, but I couldn’t guess its age, because the clocks of Crown City are not calibrated in dog years.
The pedlar called out as he passed. “What do you lack?” Since the Regulator training barracks were on the outskirts of Crown City, there was little casual pedestrian traffic, so the arrival of the pedlar was a matter of some note. With his one eye, he looked at Zivo, Woody, and Lee, then his gaze finally settled on me. “What do you lack?”
“We are all trained Regulators, sir,” said Zivo. “The loving Watchmaker has provided for everything.”
Woody added, “We have our barracks, we have our uniforms, we have our duty.”
Since I had found my purpose, even I didn’t lack anything. The old man’s gaze lingered on me, but I was more interested in the limping but persistent dog.
I bent close to the serene, focused animal to study its obvious limp. I was astonished to discover that the Dalmatian was an enhanced dog. Beneath the smooth skin, I could see delicate machinery, pistons and tubes covered by spotted fur. I found a hairline crack and realized that a portion of the fur on the dog’s back was hinged…an access plate.
“This is no ordinary dog,” I said.
The pedlar looked at me. “Indeed not. Martin is quite an extraordinary dog.”
Thinking of the mechanisms, the delicate timepieces, the precision gadgets that I had disassembled, reassembled, and (sometimes) improved, I touched the now-stationary dog, ran my fingertips over the pelt, and assessed the clockwork mechanism beneath the skin. “He could use some adjustment,” I said.
“Martin has been my companion for some time, and he suffers from the perennial flaw in biological machinery. We tick away, and alas, some of his mechanisms have worn down.”
Zivo, Woody, and Lee watched me, curious, but they had always been good enough friends to tolerate my unorthodox behavior. I touched the interconnected framework while the dog endured my probing ministrations. I could feel the fine-gauge gears, the pulleys, the thin pistons, and uncovered a lump—a set of interconnected gears slightly out of alignment.
Recalling my workshop inside the barracks, I said, “I’ve found what seems to be wrong, sir. If I understand how your extraordinary pet is put together, it’s a simple enough fix, given the proper parts—and I believe I have the proper parts.”
He raised his eyebrows. “How is that so? Martin is one of a kind. I would not expect a Regulator trainee to have components even remotely resembling what a clockwork dog would require.”
With some embarrassment, I was forced to admit that I was an inadequate Regulator trainee but quite skilled in repairing and adjusting timekeeping mechanisms. I explained my tinkering, my innovations, and my instinctive understanding of precision machinery.
The pedlar was intrigued. “I will allow that. In fact, I would appreciate it very much—and so would Martin.”
While the newly graduated members of the Blue Watch and Red Watch observed me, I returned from the barracks with a basket of assorted spare pieces as well as delicate instruments, calipers, repair tools. I set to work under the pale blue illumination of the coldfire streetlamps, fixing and lubricating the unique machinery that animated the clockwork dog.
When I closed up the hinged access plate again, the dog paced back and forth smoothly, rejuvenated. His tail wagged in a way that reminded me of the metronome we four had used to practice our marching when we were just boys.
The old pedlar patted his dog, then he looked at me with genuine gratitude. “Thank you, young man. You may choose any item from my cart. It is the only reward I can offer.”
Many of the odds and ends looked intriguing to me, but they had no real place in my work at the barracks. “As I said before, sir, I lack for nothing. I am happy to help. Truly, I need no reward.”
“We get what we deserve,” the pedlar said. “Are you certain you won’t take anything?”
Again, I shook my head. “Happy to be of service.” I patted the dog’s head, and the pedlar moved on into the city with his chugging cart and his pet Dalmatian, who now trotted along smoothly and happily.
Two days later, unexpectedly, I received a transfer and promotion from the Regulator barracks. I was given the unprecedented assignment of monitoring, regulating, and maintaining all of the primary clocks in Crown City.
Since the order came from the Watchtower itself, my Regulator captain accepted the transfer with good grace and without questions.
For my own part, I had plenty of questions but no regrets. This seemed the perfect career for me. I could impose the blessing, or tyranny, of time throughout Crown City. I could study, repair—and, yes, improve—the giant clocks in the tall towers throughout the city. I understood how each pendulum swung, how each gear moved, like a slave master whipping one second after another into line. I gloried in the tops of the towers, standing on the back side of the clock face, as if I stood behind time itself. As the giant gears turned, I felt like I was part of the machine.
Each clocktower had its official resident clockkeeper, a mostly ceremonial position, a man or woman who lived at the base of the tower and performed basic regular maintenance, but I was the Official Regulator of Clocks. I performed the delicate adjustments. I had Time on my hands.
Over the next year, I got to know all the clockkeepers and all the clocks, every gear and pendulum. And though I was not punctual enough to qualify as a Regulator, I kept the main clocks in Crown City accurate to within a few seconds—good enough even for the Watchmaker himself.
Two years into my duties, as I emerged from the Neptune Tower—an ethereal tower named after a distant planet that no one but astronomers had seen—a Regulator intercepted me, a member of the Blue Watch. With brisk angular movements, he handed me a sealed card embossed with the Watchmaker’s honeybee symbol.
A young man with as little punctuality and habits as eccentric as myself was startled to receive a direct communication from the loving Watchmaker. I was so taken aback that I didn’t at first realize the Regulator was my old friend Woody! He looked prim, professional, and identical to all the other members of the Blue Watch patrolling the streets.
I met his eyes, and he did his best to become a human statue as Regulators were taught to be, but I saw the glint in his eyes, the quirk of a smile. I took the document from him. “Woody? What is this about?”
“The Watchmaker has summoned you.” He nodded toward the sealed letter. “That card contains all the information you require.”
I broke the wax seal and opened the folded message. Apparently, the Watchmaker had taken note of my skills, and he had a special task for me, an important assignment regarding some confidential maintenance within the Watchtower itself. My heart beat a wildly asynchronous rhythm. Did he want me to calibrate and adjust the primary clock in all of Crown City, the most important timepiece in the land of Albion?
“Follow me, please.” Woody turned on his heel as briskly and precisely as if he were a clockwork construction, just like Martin the Dalmatian dog—or the awe-inspiring Clockwork Angels themselves.
Because I’d grown up in Crown City, I had been to Chronos Square many times. I had attended solstice festivals. I had watched the Regulators perform in their precision parades, I had seen the traveling carnival extravaganza with all of its wonders.
And of course I had observed the Clockwork Angels many times. Every citizen of Crown City received tickets to watch the wondrous statuesque creatures ratchet forth from their alcoves high in the Watchtower and issue their words of wisdom to adoring crowds.
But I had never been inside the Watchtower, the home of the Watchmaker himself! When Woody delivered me to the tower’s closed door, he turned about and marched away without bidding me farewell, though he did cast a curious glance in my direction.
I stood holding the Watchmaker’s invitation, and before I could ask what to do, the door opened to reveal a member of the ominous Black Watch. “Arlen Peake,” he announced, as if I had forgotten my own name. “You are expected. Climb the steps, and you will find the Watchmaker.”
I climbed a staircase like a wound-up watchspring, and at the top I found another black-uniformed Regulator waiting to receive me. He opened the door and allowed me into an expansive laboratory that also served as an office. There were easels, blueprints, engineering plans, and a desk covered with stacked papers. Lamps glowing with blue coldfire levitated near the ceiling.
The Watchmaker stepped forward, moving stiffly, no doubt because he was so old. So old!
I knew, of course, that the Watchmaker had imposed his Stability more than a century and a half earlier, so he had to be an unnaturally ancient man. And as I looked at him now, I felt all those years. The Watchmaker had sallow cheeks, papery skin, and wispy gray hair plastered across his skull. He wore a formal jacket, trousers, a vest. His sleeves were pulled down all the way to his hands, held in place by golden cufflinks.
“Welcome, Arlen Peake,” he said in a portentous voice. “Unsuccessful Regulator, yet highly skilled perfector of clocks.”
Something about him looked familiar, but I stood in such awe of being in the Watchmaker’s presence that I couldn’t place it. Then I noticed, hanging on a peg on the wall, an old black top hat, an overcoat, a wig of tangled gray hair. And an eye patch.
“I remember…” I began.
A spotted dog emerged from a side room with fluid steps, a clockwork dog that hadn’t changed at all since I had repaired it beside the pedlar’s cart outside the Regulator training barracks.
“You helped Martin when he needed it years ago,” the Watchmaker said, “and I watch how well you take care of my clocks. Now I need your help again. This time I hope you will accept a reward for your services.”
I stammered an answer that was embarrassing in its imprecision. Even so, the Watchmaker took it as a Yes.
“Come with me.” He led me through another door in the back of his laboratory—a door that led to another set of steep stairs. “I have prepared everything for you. I have all the tools and spare parts you will require.”
Dumbly, I followed him, and the clockwork dog trotted after us. My repairs must have done the trick, for the dog still moved as smoothly as if he were a clockwork puppy.
I was awestruck in the presence of the Watchmaker, but when we stood inside the top-floor mechanical room of the primary clock, I felt even more overwhelmed: the gigantic toothed gears seemed as large as planetary orbits. The pendulum ratcheted back and forth, extending down through many floors of the tower, each arc advancing time forward by one increment. I was a keeper of clocks, the master of the mechanism, and this was the most magnificent clock in all the world.
“You—you want me to make adjustments here, sir?” The Watchtower could not be out of alignment! This clock defined time itself, as far as Albion was concerned.
The ancient Watchmaker looked at the ratcheting gears, as if distracted. “No, not that.”
He went to tall closed doors at the outer wall and rolled them aside to reveal four beautiful Titans, stone female figures whose beauty was legendary, whose wisdom was indescribable. Every inch of their bodies was made of a pure white substance halfway between flesh and stone. And their wings! Arched wings curved against their perfect backs, layered with feathers, each one as long as a sword. The Clockwork Angels were motionless statues, not alive…and yet they were.
“These are what I need you to fix,” said the Watchmaker. “I created them long ago to replace something I lacked. They are far better crafted than Martin.” He absently patted the clockwork Dalmatian. “Far better than…other experiments of mine. The Clockwork Angels are the pinnacle of my achievement. They are perfection itself.”
“Every person in Albion knows that, sir,” I said.
“Indeed, but it seems that even perfection has a time limit. I have endowed the four of them with quintessence. I have given them all the care that it is possible for one man—even me—to give.”
He handed me a wrapped leather case, which I opened to find a full set of delicate and intricate timepiece repair tools. “Something is wrong with their hearts. See if you can fix them…” The Watchmaker’s voice hitched. “See if you can make them remember how to love me again.”
The Watchmaker left me in the high Watchtower room with my tools and with the Clockwork Angels. He locked the door, and a member of the Black Watch stood outside to prevent me from leaving.
I worked in the locked room.
As I touched the Clockwork Angels and accessed their internal workings, finding the spark of quintessence and the complex machinery of their delicate yet eternal—and artificial—hearts, I was afraid: I knew that I was seeing things, learning things that no human was meant to know. The Clockwork Angels were sacred, symbolic foundations of the Stability. All of Albion worshipped them, gathering in Chronos Square to see the figures emerge from the tower. They would chant and swoon and raise their arms. The Clockwork Angels…no one could know that there might be a flaw, that anything could possibly be wrong with such perfection.
I swallowed hard and focused on my work.
I used all my skills, studying each component under magnification. The Black Watch delivered meals for me, but I was not allowed to leave.
I tinkered and adjusted for days, but before long, I came to realize that the fundamental flaw was nothing I could ever fix. And with great sorrow, knowing that I had failed our loving Watchmaker, I summoned him and hung my head as I gave my report. “I strived to the best of my ability, sir. But try as I might, I cannot make the Angels love you. It is not something I can adjust.”
The ancient man looked at me with intense sorrow that seemed more despair than disappointment. I had not failed him—I had destroyed his last vestige of hope.
I feared he would react with anger, that he would throw open the alcove doors in the high Watchtower and hurl me out for a final flight down to the flagstones of Chronos Square far below. Instead, he did something different. The ancient Watchmaker used stiff fingers to remove his gold cufflinks and unfastened his shirtsleeve, which he rolled up to expose a thin, withered forearm.
But it was not just an old man’s arm. I saw the pale blue of coldfire, thin tubes, and well-lubricated hydraulic pistons implanted beneath parchment-like skin.
Martin the clockwork dog stood next to him, as the Watchmaker extended his not-quite-human hand and flexed his fist so that I could see the coldfire hydraulics and the enhancements had made to his own ancient, near-immortal body.
“Then,” he said, “you must do what you can to fix me.”
Two days later, I had done what I could for him. I knew more about the secrets of the Clockwork Angels and the Watchmaker himself than any man could ever be allowed to know and live, and I guessed the Watchmaker might execute me. When I saw his face darken, I knew what he was thinking: a man so ancient, with so many lives in his grasp, might have only a measured amount of compassion and a limited time for mercy.
But he patted his clockwork Dalmatian with great fondness, and a flicker of gratitude crossed his expression. He called for the Regulators, and when they arrived and stood before him in silence, the Watchmaker said, “We get what we deserve. I offered you a reward before. Take it now.”
He seemed frightening and angry, but I also realized that he was embarrassed by the terrible things I knew.
“I’ll give you a great wealth of gold, which any man would consider a tremendous treasure…though gold means little to me, since I can always make more. It is everything you will need—but you have to go. Leave Crown City. Travel far away…and tell no one of this for as long as you live.”
And so, my sparkling daughter, that is why I left and traveled to the far end of Albion, where I found a small, quiet village called Lugtown. Still a young man, I found a wife, settled down, and was left to invent things and dabble with my knowledge. Although my marriage did not follow the plan I had envisioned, you were the greatest part of the rest of my days. I had a great treasure and an even greater secret. I kept this secret to the end of my days, as I promised, but it is yours now to do with as you will.
My life story does not end there, as you know, but this story does, and now the rest is up to you. I ache for the radiance I saw in you as a little girl, such hopes and dreams I had for how your life might be. To see that light betrayed, first by your mother—how terribly abandoned you felt—then to watch helplessly as your horizons narrowed to the dutiful care of a failing old man. It is unbearably sad. I can never repay you, never atone, but I can try to give you one last gift. For it is no simple thing to say that the true gift of life—is living.
At first you will hate me for this. Then you will love me for it.
I hope you find many more tales to fill your book of Clockwork Lives, and I hope you come to understand what I have done for you.