Spring Tide Read online

  So from then on each archangel carefully audited every one of the billions of planets within his area of control for the first signs of that strange new restless rust. And from time to time, only occasionally at first but gradually more frequently, one or other of them would suddenly reach into the Clock and blast clean the surface of some small stone that had showed signs of developing patterns on its surface that might possibly be able to replicate themselves.

  Each time, the invisible host would sigh.

  Like all the others, Eli watched his own little section of the Clock – his own galaxies, his own stars, his own planets – and for a long time, he did just as Gabriel had done and as the other archangels were now doing. Again and again, he reached in with his hand to wipe away imperfection with blasts of purifying energy.

  He had done this many thousands of times when he spotted yet another stone on which a film of organic matter was starting to grow. Following his now-familiar routine, he extended his hand into the Clock in a business-like fashion and was about to let loose the cleansing rays when, for some reason, he hesitated. All the other archangels round him were still blasting away – there was Raphael for instance, over to his left, shooting out deadly rays right at that very moment – but Eli found, to his own surprise, that this time he simply couldn’t bring himself to do it. In fact, far from reaching in to destroy this new collection of little self-replicating clocks, he found himself shielding them so they couldn’t be seen by anyone other than himself. And, having done that, he amazed himself further by abandoning his vigil over the millions of other planets in his sector and instead settling down to watch the tiny clocks he’d saved as they very slowly grew and changed.

  Time went by. That little stone wheeled around its star many hundreds of millions of times while Eli watched the little clocks on its surface. And he became so rapt, so enchanted, so focused on this one single stone, that he didn’t even notice the huge fiery eyes of the Clockmaker turning in his direction, homing in on him alone through all the spinning wheels of the Clock, and recognising at once what he was doing.

  ‘Eli, my son,’ the Clockmaker boomed. ‘You have disobeyed me.’

  Eli started, rigid with terror, while gasps of shock echoed and re-echoed through the vast auditorium around them.

  ‘I have disobeyed you, Father,’ Eli acknowledged. He fell to his knees as the Clockmaker came striding through his own creation to stand towering above his disobedient servant. ‘And now, I know, it’s for you to decide what you wish to do with me.’

  The Clockmaker shrugged. ‘Just wipe it clean, Eli,’ he said, with the merest of glances at the tiny world Eli had been watching for all those millions of years. ‘Wipe it clean, and, just this once, we’ll say no more about it.’

  It was not so much a sigh this time as a gasp that arose around them in the darkness. Eli had been extraordinarily lucky – archangels had been exiled or annihilated for much smaller acts of disobedience – but, instead of gratefully accepting the lifeline, he stubbornly stood his ground.

  ‘I won’t, Father,’ he said. ‘I want to leave it alone, and see how it develops.’

  Once again, like the sound of some great unseen ocean moving restlessly in its bowl, a sigh rippled back and up through the auditorium, to be followed by a deep expectant silence, as if the entire host was holding its breath.

  Surprised by his servant’s intransigence, the Clockmaker looked back with slightly more interest at the growth on the surface of the little planet. Why did this matter so much to Eli, he was asking himself? With his omniscience and foreknowledge, he could see not only how Eli’s little clocks were functioning in the present, but how they would develop between now and the end of time if allowed to continue on their present trajectory. And he quickly established that, in this particular case, the effect on the Great Clock would be negligible, for it so happened that this small planet, and its star, and even the galaxy of which they formed a part, were relatively peripheral parts of the grand design.

  ‘Master,’ Eli persisted, ‘those tiny beings there, those little clocks, have developed in a strange new way that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen before. They’ve become a different thing entirely from those spheres that Gabriel found. In fact, some of them have become almost as we are. For they see, Father, they know they exist, and they are aware of the Clock moving around them as something separate to themselves. They’ve even begun to wonder what the Great Clock is, and who made it, and what purpose it serves.’

  He didn’t really speak in words of course, and nor did the Clockmaker when he answered, for words would have been utterly inadequate to the speed and power of their thought. Rather, in each instant, the two of them laid out whole philosophies, entire sequences of thought, complete with every possible ramification, permutation and implication. It was as if, in each exchange, an entire new science was invented, developed and brought to completion. So it always was between the Clockmaker and his archangels.

  Again the Clockmaker shrugged as he half-watched the countless varieties of tiny clock on the surface of that little stone, his interest already fading.

  ‘They are like us in some respects,’ he conceded. ‘But look how they must suffer to be so.’

  Suffering was outside Eli’s experience, and the Clockmaker’s too, but the Clockmaker spoke of it by way of practical demonstration. He showed Eli pain, fear, grief and horror, first of all as they appeared from outside, and then as they were experienced from within, laying out millions of beautifully categorised examples. And he demonstrated with irrefutable logic that these various unpleasantnesses were the inevitable lot of these tiny beings.

  ‘These entities only exist at all because of suffering.’ That, very roughly speaking, was the gist of the Clockmaker’s argument. ‘They only continue to exist because their mechanisms drive them to constantly struggle against annihilation. They are fragile teetering towers. If they are not just to crumble and melt back into the world, everything that threatens their precarious balance must be the cause of fear and pain to them, while everything likely to maintain and perpetuate it must be the source of craving, the cause of constant striving and desperate struggle. There can never be rest for them, for as soon as they rest they will topple, and disintegrate, and cease to exist.’

  And Clockmaker laid out more examples. There was a man trapped inside a sinking ship, trying to suck air from the dwindling pocket that still remained, a woman surrounded by a forest fire, vainly trying to shield her children from the blaze with her own blistering flesh. All that was really going to happen to the woman and her children was that their bodies would oxidise, and then quickly return to the peaceful simplicity of the untarnished Clock. All that would happen to the drowning man was that his own personal clock would stop. Yet still they struggled desperately, even when all hope had gone of retaining their separateness.

  ‘Don’t you pity them, Eli?’ the Clockmaker asked. ‘Don’t you pity these strange accidental beings, which are neither one thing nor another? They are like us in a way – you’re quite right about that – they’re like angels, and that is indeed a strange thing. But can’t you see they’re angels made of mud, who must constantly worry about rain, and fret about heat, if they are to remain in existence at all? Surely it would be better to take away from them this cruel desperate battle that they are compelled to fight, and which in the end they’ll always lose? Surely it must be better to let them crumble quietly back down into the simple, untroubled matter from which they come?’

  ‘But these exist also!’ protested Eli, proceeding to lay out millions of examples, just as the Clockmaker had done, but this time of happiness, pleasure, love, beauty and delight, all of which, like suffering, had hitherto been quite unknown.

  If pain was real, then so were they: that was Eli’s argument. But the Clockmaker just laughed.

  ‘Alright, Eli, my stubborn son, I will give you a choice. You can destroy these little beings and come back to obedience, or you can let them survive. But if y
ou decide to let them carry on, you yourself will have to live out, one by one, every single life that has ever existed on this stone, and exists now, and will exist in the future. Do you understand me? You must sit behind every single pair of eyes from the moment those eyes open to the moment they finally close. And then straight onto the next pair, and the next, and the next, billions and billions of times over, from now until the moment that the last eyes close.’

  As the Clockmaker spoke, his own fiery eyes were drilling deep into Eli’s mind. ‘So come on now, Eli. Make your choice. Let’s see if you really mean what you say about their lives being worth living.’

  Eli looked up fearfully into the Clockmaker’s terrifying gaze and saw the pure and absolute justice of what he’d said. If it was indeed true, as Eli had claimed, that these beings’ existence was worth more than nothing, then how could he object to living behind their eyes?

  As he tried to decide whether or not he’d really meant what he said, he turned his attention back to that little stone of his and considered once more the tiny beings who lived there. There was no doubt about it: the Clockmaker was right about suffering. These odd, accidental little beings did indeed experience terrible suffering, and it was indeed integral to their nature, essential to their continued existence. Could he really bring himself to live through it, again and again and again, until the last spark of life had finally flickered out?

  Eli thought about it for a short while – the stone went round its star barely a hundred times – and then he made a decision.

  ‘I submit to your judgement, Clockmaker. I’ll let them live and I’ll pay the price for it.’

  The Clockmaker nodded, grudgingly impressed, and then, all at once, he dissolved Eli’s angelic body, plucked out the widthless point that contained his spirit, and readied himself to fling it down to the surface of that small and insignificant stone.

  ‘Very well then, Eli,’ he boomed. ‘You’ve made your choice. Come and look for me at the end of time.’

  So Eli lived, one after the other, the lives of every sentient being born on the planet Earth. He was every human being and every animal. He was every tyrant and every slave. He was all the women who died in childbirth, and all who lived and gave birth. He was every torturer and everyone who was ever tortured. He was every beggar and every passer-by, every cat and every mouse, every hawk and every sparrow. He looked out at the world through the multiple eyes of all the spiders that ever were, the compound eyes of every ant and fly, the lidless eyes of every fish. He experienced the abyssal depths through the senses of each blind creature that wriggled or crawled there. He was every single living thing, however humble, that had some sense of its own existence, however slight that might be. And everything that any one of them experienced, he experienced himself, from the sweetest pleasure to the most excruciating pain.

  After each life came to an end, he woke to himself again for a moment, saw the life he’d just lived laid out behind him, and saw the ways in which he might have lived it better. But then the moment of clarity was over, and he was back at the beginning of another life, his entire existence confined once more to a tiny memory-less bundle of flesh which must learn everything all over again. Occasionally, in certain human bodies, some vague sense of his situation would come to him, and he’d try to communicate it to his fellow beings. (And they, not remembering who they were, would almost always dismiss it, often angrily, and sometimes with murderous rage.) Most of the time, though, he had no inkling at all.

  And so he went on. Even when all the humans had died out, he wasn’t even halfway to the end of it. Millions of years passed by when he went through cockroaches, one after another, each in its dim and solitary world, with craving, pain and pleasure switching on and off in its brain like coloured lights, and no thoughts at all.

  At last, though, at the end of time, when the Clock finally stopped moving, and all its components had become cold and dark and inert, Eli returned to the place where the Clock was made. He was himself again, he was Eli the archangel, but he was immensely old. In fact, he was immeasurably older than the Clock itself, for he’d had to live out every second over and over again, through every being that had been present in it.

  As he came to the place where the arena had stood, he remembered the life he’d led before his fall to Earth. He remembered what it was to be an archangel. He remembered the great fiery eyes of the Clockmaker. He remembered the sense of expectation in the darkness beyond the arena, the sighing that rose upward and outwards through that cavernous space that contained the unseen host.

  But there was no sighing now, no expectation. No one spoke or moved. There wasn’t even a lonely wind such as might blow through a desolate place on Earth, making things rattle and clank.

  ‘Clockmaker!’ he called out. ‘It’s me, Eli. I did what you asked me to do, and I’ve returned!’

  But there was no one there. There was nothing in existence but Eli himself.

  Love

  ‘What do I love best in all the world?’ Mike Staines answers himself without the slightest hesitation. ‘This key fob! I’ve had it more than fifteen years! It’s solid steel. Go on. Hold it. It’s satisfying, isn’t it? You can really feel the weight of it in your hand.’

  There are three pint glasses on the table, each about two-thirds full.

  ‘Fifteen years I’ve had it,’ Mike says. ‘I got it in America. Everyone thinks I’ve had it engraved with my initials but actually it already had MS on it when I bought it. There was a company in Pittsburgh called Maximum Steel, apparently, and it used to give these things out as gifts to customers. I bought it in a little junk shop in Philadelphia, when I lived over there in the early nineties.’

  The key fob is like a slender matchbox in shape, but with rounded-off edges and corners. Set into one face of it is a tiny sphere which Mike rolls back and forth with his thumb, showing on one side a black MS enamelled on a white background, and on the other, a white MS on black.

  ‘Look at that woman over there with the purple scarf,’ says Dave Greaves. ‘Look at her with her nice new haircut trying to be someone. Here I am, she’s saying, I am Judy Fotherington – or Kath Hesselthwaite, or Trish Underwood or whatever her name might be – I am Judy Fotherington and this is what I stand for and this is what I am doing in the world, and this is how I choose to look.’

  Mike presses a catch on the side of his key fob.

  ‘There’s a complete set of little tools in here, look, miniature versions of the stuff that Maximum Steel used to sell. They fit so snugly inside that you wouldn’t know they were there. A little can opener and bottle opener. A screwdriver on the end. And scissors, look, and a metal toothpick, and here – look – a little blade. They’re real tools too, even though they’re so small. I’ve used all of them at one time or another. You know those moments when you need a bottle opener, or wish you had a knife? Well, here they are and they do the job perfectly. They just need a little drop of oil and a wipe down once in a while.’

  He snaps the catch closed and the little tools are gone.

  ‘But in every city in the land,’ says Dave, ‘there are thousands of women like Judy Fotherington, who stand for all the same kinds of things, are involved in all the same kinds of activities, wear the same kinds of clothes, go out with the same sort of nice but ultimately disappointing men as that bald bloke there she’s looking so delighted with.’

  Mike turns the keyfob in his hand, its cargo of keys jangling beneath it.

  ‘I really like looking after it,’ he says. ‘That’s the other thing about it. I polish it every week or two. That’s why it looks so shiny and new.’

  Apart from those pint glasses on the table, there are two packets of dry-roasted nuts and a silver tobacco tin with an ornate letter J embossed into its lid.

  ‘It probably sounds crazy,’ Mike goes on, ‘but with this in my pocket I feel stronger, as if this little toolkit equips me somehow. Do you know what I mean? The tools and the keys equip me for life. Not that I’m
superstitious, mind you. Not at all. Well, you know that, don’t you? You know I don’t believe in anything supernatural. Homeopathy, acupuncture, you name it: I can’t be doing with any of that stuff. But that’s the really great thing about my key fob. It doesn’t work by magic.’

  ‘People don’t understand numbers,’ Dave says. ‘That’s the thing. I mean, if I asked you how many people there were in this city you’d say – what? – getting on for half a million? You’d say that, and you’d think you’d answered my question, but do you really know what half a million means? I mean, just quickly, without stopping to work it out, do you think there’ll be half a million days in your life? No, nothing like. It won’t even be forty thousand. You could be introduced to ten new people every day of your life, from the day you were born to the day you die, and you still wouldn’t have met the number of people who live in this city.’

  ‘Psychology, yes,’ says Mike, ‘but not magic.’

  ‘And this is just one city,’ says Dave, ‘and not even a particularly big one. Yet there’s that woman in the purple scarf, and that bald chap with her, trying to be characters, trying to be individuals, trying to persuade themselves they signify something.’

  Jeffrey Timms laughs. ‘Well, perhaps they do, you miserable sod! What makes you so sure they don’t?’

  ‘There’s just one problem with this key fob,’ says Mike. ‘I’m frightened I’ll lose it. I know it sounds daft but I worry about it every single day. I mean I could drop it down a drain, couldn’t I? Or someone could steal it. Or I could leave it behind on a train, or a bus, or in a taxi. It’s nearly happened more than once, I can tell you. And the maddening thing is that there was another fob exactly the same as this one in the shop where I found it. I just wish I’d bought it while I had the chance and kept it as a spare. Believe it or not, sometimes I actually wake up in the middle of the night and lie there kicking myself that I missed the chance to have that other one sitting safely at the back of a drawer somewhere in case of need. But then I think: no, that would take away from this one. The whole charm of this is it’s the only one I’ll ever have. That’s the point of it really.’