The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass

by Vera Nazarian

  But Liaei continued to stare at the thin distant ribbon of light on the Basin slope. “I want to see the River,” she said softly.

  Amhama sighed. “You will, child, soon enough. There’s another city up there, on the very top. Just beyond where the River flows into the horizon and disappears. One day you will go there.”

  “I want to see the River now.” There was a whiny tone to Liaei’s normally musical voice. “Please!”

  “Well, we can’t. I need to work and you have class. And the way there is just too long and difficult and uncomfortable, and besides we can’t afford it.”

  Liaei tugged at Amhama’s hand, and then frowned so that her whole little face contorted like a soft malleable thing. Her dark gold eyebrows shaped evenly with follicles of natural hair swept upward at the inner edges, then down, lending expressiveness to her face that was already so much more defined than Amhama’s own. Compared to her, Amhama was a smooth egg-headed doll with generic even features and only warm eyes that added individuality. But unlike Liaei, Amhama’s eyes were infinitely tired, it seemed, tired in essence, in their origin.

  The girl did not seem to notice it or understand the nature of this tiredness, and continued to pull at the woman’s hand periodically, all the while repeating, “Ama, I want to see the River, please, oh please, can we go see the River, Ama, oh please!” She whined and stomped her feet with forcefulness so that her light sandals made a clatter against the dull alloy surface of the street. She jumped up and down and then leaned down in a crouch and tried to drag Amhama’s hand to her level.

  “No!” said Amhama finally, tightening her hold on the small moist living hand, and pulled her along, almost with regret, as they turned the final block to the medicineal building. “Not now, Liaei, not now. Stop that, girl! I have to work. Understand? And you have to study.”

  Liaei began to wail, her six-year old lungs grasping the arid air, and then suddenly stopped. She saw a multicar passing by, the standard Basin City school transport. Amhama watched Liaei as she stared at the many smooth hairless heads of the other children visible through the plasti-glass, their faces even-featured and similar to each other, their skins of all golden shades from light to dark. Liaei was mesmerized.

  It was a wrenching feeling Amhama got every time she saw Liaei like that. Liaei wanted to be there in that multicar with the other children, wanted to attend the ordinary public school. And although it had been explained to her by both Amhama and Riveli with careful gentle tact, Amhama knew that Liaei stifled inside of her a rebellious intensity and did not believe their reasons for keeping her separate were good enough.

  The school transport moved past them and down the street. Its hover path was swept clean of dust, leaving the surface of the road dark in the place where it had been. Liaei stood staring in its wake, watching it disappear beyond the curve of the street. She had grown silent, forgetting that only a moment ago she had been struggling and almost crying. The grip of her fingers had loosened in Amhama’s own. She walked in numb obedience at Amhama’s side and did not speak another word as they entered the medicineal building.

  “You have old DNA,” Amhama had explained to Liaei that day as they sat in a sterile metallic office on the 204th floor together with Riveli. Riveli’s smooth even-featured face was almost like Amhama’s and her skin was only a few shades of darker gold. The difference was, Riveli watched the child seated on a chair before them with her expression blank, and her smile seemed pasted on for lack of true involvement. She watched Liaei as though she were a clinical specimen—which she was—watched her initial fidgeting and mobility, observed it change into malleable silence and seriousness, the whole transition mercurial and impossibly alive.

  “Old DNA means that your genetic makeup is almost original to the ancient homo sapiens species, and not a tapering off post-hybrid like most of the rest of us,” said Amhama kindly. “It means that you are special and your life force and will and developmental potential is very very strong.”

  “Do you understand what that means, Liaei?” asked Riveli.

  Amhama, uncomfortable with the girl’s continued silence, went on. “You know how I always get tired, Liaei? And how you almost never seem to be tired, and want to move around so much so that I scold you constantly? Well, to be honest, sweetheart, I have no right to tell you to stop moving so much, since this is part of what makes you so very special. I am the one who is dull and slow, compared to you.”

  “You are not dull, Ama,” blurted Liaei suddenly. “And I don’t want to be special. I want to be like you.”

  Riveli sighed.

  Amhama moved her lips, tightened them.

  “I don’t want old DNA,” continued Liaei. “Why must I have it? Can you take it away?”

  Amhama opened her mouth to speak, but Riveli raised her hand to stop her, and then said, “What you have, child, is what everyone in the world right now would give everything to have. You were made with the best of what we have left. The strongest, cleanest of defect, most likely to survive. We made you that way so that you would do great wonderful things for the remainder of the human species.”

  “Why?” said Liaei, staring somewhere between Riveli’s chin and her thin neck.

  “Don’t you want to help all of us?” persisted Riveli, and her pasted on smile did not waver. Amhama wanted to wipe that smile off her face with a swipe of her fingers.

  “I want to be just like everyone else . . .” replied Liaei. She was beginning to frown, and a stormy expression was gathering which Amhama knew so well. And so, to distract the oncoming tempest, she brought up that thing for the first time, the thing which sat like a rock in her innards.

  “Why would you want to be like everyone else, boring and ordinary, when you are going to be the Queen of the Hourglass?”

  “Amhama!” said Riveli, her gaze coming into focus with alarm. “No, she is too young.”

  “Not too young to start learning,” retorted Amhama. “At least some of it.”

  Liaei’s frown relaxed and she was immediately mesmerized. “What is the Queen of the Hourglass, Ama?” she said in a completely different tone, forgetting her complaints.

  Amhama smiled, then laughed. “The Queen of the Hourglass!” she said in her familiar sing-song tone. “The Queen of the Hourglass is a most wonderful thing to be! That’s you, Liaei! But first you must go to your class, and behave, and after that I promise I will tell you more.”

  When Liaei had her mind set on something, she became focused and intensely driven. That day Liaei paid precise, almost unhealthy attention to her lessons from the edu-system voice harmonic—as Amhama discovered when she ran the child’s regular progress report—and when they returned home after eating dinner at the medicineal building cafeteria, Amhama saw how Liaei was unusually subdued, biting her lips and looking at a point before her, paying no attention to anything around them. She wanted so badly to ask her, Amhama knew, and yet, something held her back.

  It was as though the child was afraid of hearing the answer. Twilight gathered over Basin City in ephemeral rolling mists that would fade even before full night came, dissipating into arid darkness, when Liaei finally came up to Amhama who sat, fingers moving lightly, reading the dots from her armchair display. She tapped her arm and said, “Ama.”

  Amhama looked up to see the earnest eyes, the dark golden brows and curls forming over a smoothly curving oval face, frozen in intensity like a doll, a peculiar mechanical creature. Liaei was so living that she seemed unreal. Her facial muscles were microscopic and perfect in their organization.

  “The Queen of the Hourglass,” she said. “Tell me.”

  Amhama bit her own lip. And then, thinking in a tumult, she said, “Let me show you.” Amhama turned the reading display so that both of them could see the rows of raised reading dots impressed in the slowly turning drum. Then she thought for a moment, put her fingers on the switch to stop the drum rotation and called up a search on the harmonium pad. “Search Hourglass,” she told the mach
ine.

  And instants later the search came tumbling back at them. “The Hourglass,” said the harmonium at the same time as the drum turned, “is an ancient device to measure the passing of an abstract construct called time. It postdates the sundial, predates the clock and the computer and the harmonium.”

  Amhama watched Liaei’s face.

  “I don’t understand,” said the girl, why would anyone measure the passing of time? I thought time just is? And what are all those things it mentioned?”

  “Ancient machines,” replied Amhama. “The closest predecessors of the harmonium systems were these things called computers that relied on the fluctuation of an energy called electricity that had something to do with the magnetic poles of the earth, I think. Or maybe it’s a type of solar radiation? A bit of it’s what’s in those weak static fields that sometimes can be detected by the harmonium. Though, I am not sure, since much of this information has been lost with the same civilization that had built the River That Flows Through The Air.”

  For a moment Liaei’s expression lightened, as Amhama imagined she was distracted by the pleasant memory of Day God’s dayfire reflected upon a thread of white flame along the Basin slope. Liaei really loved the River, loved hearing about it, seeing it every day as they walked outside. Someday they must visit, but now, there was this to deal with.

  “So anyway, there was this energy source that ran all that technology that no longer functions. All those weird machine relic carcasses that people sometimes find buried along the Basin walls or even up there on the Plateau beyond. They say there are ancient cities there, covering the surface of the earth with their sad rubble, all useless parts and objects that once meant a great deal but now there isn’t even a memory of their function. They just lie there, overgrown with drybrush cacti and half-covered with sand.”

  “The Hourglass . . .” whispered Liaei, interrupting Amhama gently.

  “Oh yes. Sorry, let’s ask it some more, let’s see what it says about that.”

  They asked what the hourglass looked like and how it worked. “A sealed glass container of specific cubic volume separated into two equal parts by a slim tube neck with an opening of a certain width and one part filled with just enough granules of sand or other powdered material to mark the passage of a specific period of time,” the harmonic voice told them. “It is turned repeatedly so that the powder runs from one side to the other through the narrow opening.”

  “How weird and useless!” said Liaei.

  “But it was not useless, back in those ancient times, sweet,” said Amhama. “People used it to keep track of their daily activity, their lives. They didn’t know about the clockwork mechanism just yet, did not know about interlocking gears and counterweights and pulleys, so they had to use this simple device.”

  “What about the Queen?” said Liaei.

  “That’s another story for another day.”

  Amhama had the rare ability to stall—not just for days and weeks but for months and years. Amhama dropped tiny snippets of new information about the Queen, and Liaei continued to ask relentlessly, so that in a sense they tortured each other constantly without getting anywhere.

  Liaei grew very quickly, grew tall and filled out with softness, and was now fourteen years old. There was a bountiful layer of pale golden hair growing from Liaei’s scalp, and it now reached below her waist. Amhama, her own scalp bare as everyone else’s, helped Liaei cut it many times, touching the soft strands in wonder, amazed at the profusion of this energy. She traced the brow hair at the ridge above Liaei’s golden-green eyes, and marveled at the spikes of lashes fringing the eyes—for Amhama had none of her own.

  Liaei’s slender long-limbed body had also taken on strange prominent curves, hips expanding and waist tightening, and the breasts budding at first with sharp tips and then swelling with roundness that was so alien compared to Amhama’s own flat chest.

  “What is happening to me?” asked Liaei often. She also asked the harmonium so many variations of questions about the Queen of the Hourglass that she knew now for a fact that the Queen was a creature made to perform a single very important function, and that had something to do with the Clock King—another creature similar to herself yet specialized in a different way.

  “You are growing,” replied Amhama, smiling gently. Liaei was used to the ambiguity of that smile, unsure whether it contained sorrow or pleasure or a mixture of both and something else altogether.

  “So I am to be the mate of this Clock King,” said Liaei, a statement of fact, for she no longer asked Amhama things as much as she restated what she learned on her own. Even her voice was deep and mellifluous now, unlike Amhama’s somewhat childish androgynous timbre.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why my body is so animalistic?”

  Amhama sighed. “Must you call it so? It is simply the body of a younger human race with a different level of hormonal development.”

  It was fascinating how fluid was the movement of Liaei’s face, the dance of her brows that reflected every emotion. Compared to her, Amhama was a mechanized puppet with a limited set of facial movements. Even now, Liaei’s facial muscles fluttered, expressing anger, a suppressed violent mystery of some emotion alien to Amhama. And her eyes—the intensity was painful to observe.

  “Yes, animalistic,” said Liaei. “What else would you call this? I am fertile and disgusting, and soon—any day now—will bleed on a regular basis. Yes, the harmonium told me thoroughly what you and the medicineal have been trying to keep from me so carefully. All the while as you watch me, and record every tiny new thing. Apparently I am almost ready to begin the full Queen training. It has to do with my interaction with the Clock King.”

  Liaei got up from the seat before Amhama. She moved about the room with a grace and speed, so that the finely woven fiber material of her clothing seemed to lag behind her in delayed motion, sweeping around her curves as though driven by an invisible wind. Liaei came to the window of their apartment, the same window from which she had stared for the past fourteen years, and the Day God shone brightly outside, reflecting against the inky darkness of the Oceanus in the distance. It, the great lake, had receded inward even more within those fourteen years, so that the black water that had lapped at the edges of the shore at the refineries when Liaei was born, was now about a meter away, revealing more crystalline rock and sediment at the rim.

  Amhama watched Liaei’s form as she stood illuminated by the brilliant dayfire, watched her curving profile, the parabolic lines. “Ama,” said Liaei, not turning her head. “How long do I have, before I am Queen?”

  Amhama was still, even her breath falling off.

  “Ama!” said Liaei, turning suddenly to face her almost-mother. “Please tell me! I’d rather hear it from you than the harmonium.”

  “Two more years.”

  The words came reluctant, slow. For in that moment Amhama did not want to speak at all, wanted to postpone, to delay, to put off forever. Words always seemed to speed up the course of events. Words made them concrete and inevitable.

  Liaei took several steps and then came down in a crouch before the seated woman and put her hand on Amhama’s golden skin, her forearm. Her palms were moist and warm. She looked into Amhama’s motionless tired eyes.

  “And when will I begin the training?”

  There was a breeze that blew in the open window, and it carried a moist and queasy scent of Oceanus. Liaei’s face wrinkled in involuntary revulsion from the toxicity, and in that moment it occurred to Amhama how sensitive, how fragile she was, this growing child. Her child and yet not hers. How ephemeral.

  “I’ll talk to Riveli,” said Amhama. “Tomorrow.”

  Neither Riveli nor Amhama had changed much over the fourteen years. Liaei saw Riveli on a regular basis, every several months, for various interviews, physical and psychological tests, and at every sign of developmental change. Riveli always remained neutral, showing as little emotion as possible, even less so than was normal. Amhama
told Liaei that it was her way of maintaining professional distance, but Liaei had the distinct impression Riveli did not like her, even resented her progress over the years. But Riveli and Amhama were two main individuals of the few people Liaei interacted with, since she was never enrolled in a regular school. Other children Liaei’s age grew into poised androgynous teens and she saw them in passing on the streets, in the apartment complex where they lived, in the transport vehicles along roadways, at the food centers and general stores. They were young smooth aliens.

  But Riveli was a comfort in her predictability, and Liaei knew what to expect.

  “We’ll start the training this week,” said Riveli, watching her desk display as she nearly always did, not looking at Liaei directly. “Most of the training will involve reading material, and the harmonium will provide it. Some of it will be physical exercises—since you will have to maintain absolute muscle tone and precision in addition to proper hormone levels. A horticulturist tech pair will work with you.”

  “And all of my progress will be measured and recorded.”

  Riveli glanced briefly in the girl’s direction. “That is correct.”

  Liaei nodded. She then wrinkled her nose.

  “A Queen rules at the side of the King, as his consort,” said the harmonium. “In a matriarchal society the Queen has the primary power, while in a patriarchal society, it is the King.”

  “What about our society?” asked Liaei. She was seated before her display in the classroom cubicle of the medicineal, a tiny room beneath a directed skylight that had been set up specifically for her, and the harmonium adjusted to interact with her voice at all levels of knowledge. The display consisted of the slowly turning plasti-alloy drum frame covered like a sieve with dotholes at specific intervals. As the drum turned with inner mechanical clockwork, rounded pins entered and receded from the dot holes in various combinations of semantic code, and Liaei observed them and derived meaning. Once she had had to keep her fingertips upon the dots but now it had become second nature, so all she needed was to look. The drum simply turned at individual rates, as needed, and Liaei’s drum moved faster than anyone’s, because she was a natural speed reader.