The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass

by Vera Nazarian

  Liaei snorted. “You really expect me to do something like that belly dance?”

  “Try it when you get home,” the harmonium said.

  “Liaei, girl, aren’t you going to have something to eat? I made us a spicy amaranth and corn medley, with leeks and freshly ground pepper, homelab made. I cultivated the pepper DNA myself just last week, and it worked out wonderfully, cayenne—”

  Amhama’s voice came from the other side of the locked door to Liaei’s room. Liaei had locked it from the inside, and now stood before the tall mirror. She replied, “I’m not hungry yet, thanks! A little later, Ama!”

  “All right, but don’t wait too long because it tastes better freshly warm, not reheated. The full strength of the pungent spice has been released and the leftovers will be of weaker potency—”

  The window to her bedroom was open, and the Day God-gilded Basin walls were shining bright, and reflecting upon the narrow visible strip of Oceanus. Arid wind moved the pale fabric curtains, and the light and movement reflected in the mirror, in which Liaei’s backlit form was a dark silhouette.

  “Music, 3/4 measure, balanced percussion beat, rate very slow to medium fast to slow fadeout, wind and strings, no voices.”

  Sound filled the room, swelling out of the air itself, it seemed.

  Liaei watched her own silhouette moving with grace to the beginning notes. She removed her clothes, swaying with the sound, gently, trying to keep her body fluid and confident. When she was completely nude, she looked at her own dark silhouette and its natural curves. Without the usual curtain of hair over her head, for the first time she saw the true balance of her body. The proportions were mathematically pleasing, with shoulders and hips being almost parallel, and the narrow inward-curving line of waist was cinched parallel to her slender line of neck. Narrow and wide, in aesthetic balance. Her legs, when drawn together, tapered into equally narrow feet, which echoed the neck and head dimensions.

  Liaei squinted her eyes, relaxing her imagination, and a visual gestalt formed, of two masses, vaguely triangular or even circular, one on top of the other. It was the prehistoric mathematical symbol of infinity flipped on its side.

  And if she squinted and blinked, it approximated the same general proportions of the ancient device called the hourglass.

  Toliwe seemed more remote than usual to Liaei. If it were possible, he was avoiding her, and yet she knew it was not the case, not with someone like Toliwe. He was forthright and stubborn and wise, and he never shirked facing his duty and responsibility—such as herself.

  At their regular checkup appointments, Toliwe was reserved and polite, when needed, gentle, and he seemed capable of facing her calmly. And yet there was something very subtle, a new barrier between them. Sometimes it was a mere difference of seconds—moments fewer spent in her company than possible.

  Yes, they would still meet at the gym, sometimes with a group of other techs, sometimes just the two of them, but Liaei noticed now that Toliwe had learned to be impeccable in never crossing the line between a professional relationship and friendship.

  Liaei’s hair was coming back. She now had a soft fuzzy centimeter-high buzz growth on her head, pale flax. Her lashes and brows too were regrowing, coming in a bit bristly and not as soft as they had originally been.

  “You’re like a brush, you realize?” Amhama said often, patting her on the hair. “I still don’t understand why you cut it off in the first place, but I suppose it is a good thing you did it once, so now you know how it is.”

  “No problem,” said Liaei in a flippant banter. “My next thing is to get my earlobes pierced, like Finnei.”

  Amhama smiled, shaking her head.

  Thus Liaei had learned to placate Amhama with the semblance of youthful rebellion. It was easier to act out than what was really inside.

  It was early spring of the year of the Day God 51,003 Post Harmonium, about 4 months after Liaei had cut off her hair for no clear reason, that the psychological truce between Liaei and Toliwe reached a crisis.

  They were walking along the crystallized and calcified shoreline of the Oceanus, salt encrusted between the water and the land like pale exquisite lace. All around the Basin walls towered, filling the vista, and directly in zenith stood the golden swollen light of the Day God, poured into all of sky. The Oceanus wind reeked of toxic matter as it wafted inland.

  Toliwe was several steps ahead of her, and Liaei walked with her gaze down, watching the sharp rocks and the occasional partially buried remains of old water pipes under her sport shoes—rocks and boulders striated orange, rose, cream. The wind was warm, and it swept them in irregular gusts, taking Liaei’s breath away momentarily. On one of the slopes a jagged, razor-thin meandering line of white fire marked The River That Flows Through The Air.

  The pier that was the spot of their usual exercise was only a few meters away.

  It was at that point that Toliwe, glancing sideways to his right, and somewhat stiffer than usual in his movements, suddenly tripped and lost his footing. He didn’t make a sound, only slid down the gravel incline, stopping only several steps away from the thick inky water, right in the middle of the pale crystalline salt growth on the edges that separated the water from the land.

  “Toliwe!” exclaimed Liaei. She scrambled after him down the slope.

  Toliwe was already up on his feet, hands covered with pale salt, and was shaking off the seat of his jeans, and limping. His bronze scalp glistened with sudden moisture. When he turned his face toward her, Liaei saw him wince with pain.

  “Damn . . .” he said. “Liaei, I am sorry, looks like I am not going to be able to do the stretching balance routine with you today.”

  “Are you okay?” she said, knowing he was not okay but needing to say it out loud. She leaned toward him and then crouched to observe his right foot, already swollen at the ankle and the torn leg of his jeans.

  “I don’t think anything’s broken,” he replied. “Probably just a bad sprain. Hurts to step on it, so you’ll need to help me walk up the slope.”

  “Of course . . .” She locked his right arm with hers, stiff in all of her body at the contact, and afraid to press, afraid to feel what she was holding, and yet his arm was firm and warm. They walked slowly with measured steps up the incline, while small rocks came clattering from under their feet. Once on the pier, Liaei helped him sit down on the warmed ground, with his right foot stretched out in front of him, elevated slightly.

  She stood away, releasing his arm, releasing the strange warm solid bond, and just stood there, watching him as he pressed the voice comm on his datapad and requested medical assistance from the medicineal. He spoke in a controlled level voice, not giving any indication of his true discomfort, and only his facial expression seemed more grim than usual, facial muscles nearly frozen, the black pupils of his eyes dilated in pain.

  When he was done, Toliwe looked up at her and made the effort of a grin. “They’ll be here soon,” he said. “Meanwhile, why don’t you go ahead and do the routine as usual? Pretend I am doing it too. Here, let me first set the recorder to take your heart rate measurements—”

  Liaei stared at him, watching him struggle to seem normal. “Oh, come on,” she said, frowning. “I can’t do it now, now seeing you hurt!”

  He winced again, his eyes narrowing, and then lifted a hand to shield his vision from the blazing orange light from overhead.

  “Why not?” he said. “We are kind of stuck here, wasting time, and you might as well use it to your advantage.”

  Liaei felt her head spin with a sudden wildness. She crouched again, just centimeters away from him, so that they were seeing eye to eye and he did not have to make the extra effort to look up into the brightness of the Day God. For several long moments they stared.

  Toliwe’s expression was unreadable, but if she could smell fear, she was smelling it now.

  “Do you know,” she said, “that it would be a little crazy of me to be doing Fua motions with you like this? Do you reall
y think I am such a quaint specimen of old DNA, so different from you, that even though we cannot technically mate you can discount me as a person? Liaei, jump, breathe, walk, dance! Liaei, do the Fua routine like a good little primitive bitch!”

  “What do you mean . . .”

  But she continued, coming down on her knees in front of him, then slumping and sitting down with her legs folded. “Don’t you think of me in any other way than something weird that you grew in your lab?”

  The stench of his fear was rising in her mind. She was not sure if it was his or her own, but she could not stop.

  “Liaei,” he tried, “I never imagined this—”

  “That’s because you only imagined the datapad readout, excellent progress, eh, Toliwe? I am doing so well, and you are so proud of me!”

  “Of course I am proud of you!” For the first time his voice lost its calm and he made a movement with his body toward her, forgetting his injury, then winced in pain. His eyes had an expression of shock.

  Liaei sat before him, her palms gripping the warm ground, while tears started blinding her, started to run in torrents down her face, and the wind swept dust into her eyes.

  “You are proud of Liaei, the survivor, the viable Queen of the Hourglass, who will be fertile when the time comes and who will bear a child and enrich the gene pool, and—”

  “Oh, no, Liaei!” he was speaking fast now, his hands—strong and firm and warm—pressing down her shoulders, pressing hard. “Listen to me, you are really upset because I think there’s a misunderstanding between us, right? Liaei? What is it that you think that I think about you—or not think—I mean, I am not making any sense. You have strong feelings, you are young and intense and your hormonal levels are—”

  “Oh yes, that’s right!” she interrupted. “I knew you were going to mention hormones at one point or another! Well guess what? I am not just the sum of interacting chemicals and genetic soup, but a sentient being! And yes, I feel! There’s joy and sorrow, and there’s this other—this utter crap. Unlike you who are like this rock on which you are sitting, so stable, so intellectually and physically advanced, so wise and confident and beyond me. Hell, you have a million or so years of evolution on me!”

  He was shaking his head, frown lines and pain lines mixed up in his face. “Oh Liaei, I am so sorry—”

  She was floating away from him, cold and remote, looking through a curtain of tears. “Are we so different?” she said as she sobbed. “Are we like two different species? Show me your body, please, Toliwe, please . . . Let me see what you are, a man? I am a woman, and you are a man, how can we be so different and remote? How can you not feel? Why aren’t you drawn to me, not even with the tiniest bit of something, some stupid chemical in your bloodstream—”

  Speaking thus, she reached out with her hands, putting them to his chest, then drew the shaking palm of her right hand to stroke him, feeling the curve of body, the warmth.

  But he took her hand in his, firmly and gently, and she realized that the fear she was smelling in him was pity.

  Toliwe was looking at her, his eyes like dark jewels, moist, she realized, also like her own, his beautiful face tragic.

  “You do know that what you are asking and insisting is a form of interpersonal harassment, Liaei? It would be a form of pressure, illegal and wrong, to force yourself on another individual, and if you were anyone else, it would be so. But—”

  He paused, and then his grip tightened around her fingers, and then just as suddenly he was gentle, and he put his hands on the clasp of his jeans.

  Liaei stared, terrified, as Toliwe undid the front of his clothing, then undid the pale layer of underclothing, exposing himself to her. She looked and saw what she knew to find there. A small blunt protuberance of flesh, skin almost colorless, washed out by the strong daylight, the organ flaccid and rudimentary. Not a trace of pubic hair. Not a trace of movement or life.

  “Is this what you wanted to see?” he whispered, then slowly covered himself up again, and closed up the opening in his jeans. “I am sorry with all my heart, with all my ability to feel as a human being. I cannot feel what you want me to feel, for you or anyone. No means to respond, no way to give you what you want, what you have every right to have. I belong to a dying race, Liaei. The physical excitement is so faint, that it’s like an echo. Yes, I feel something. But not enough to even name it. A shadow of desire.”

  “A shadow of desire . . .” she echoed him, and laughed and wept at the same time, using the back of her hand to wipe the running mess of her face.

  And then he took her by the shoulders and drew her close, and he ran his hand through her short pale gold hair, that was now just covering her ears.

  “I can feel intellectual affection, I can fall in love, but it is a thing of the mind,” he whispered near her ear. “It is like a complex mathematical construct, wherein the physical contact of flesh is a tiny single-digit variable, and all the rest—affinity, thoughts, life experience, personality gestalt, even gestures and motion and appearance and tone of voice—all of it matter to create the desire to Bond. It is a desire of experience, not of a physical sensation. Does that make sense? A desire for shared time.”

  “Shared time . . . Common time, yes. I should understand this, being the Queen of the Hourglass, should I not?” she whispered suddenly, pausing in comprehension. Her voice was thick with misery, tears. It cracked, and then she coughed, sputtering against Toliwe’s plain fiber shirt.

  “Soon . . .” he said in his softest and most gentle tone. It was cryptic, yet not quite.

  “You mean, soon the Clock King will be the one for me, to make the savage Bond and share Common Time with?” said Liaei. “While you and Finnei make your serene Bond with only a shadow of desire . . .”

  “In a way . . .” he replied, watching her with kindness, and she was not sure whether he answered her first or second question.

  It did not particularly matter. At that point an ambulance car approached, hovering a couple of meters over the crumbling sand and salt dust of the pier and leaving a smooth swept trail, and Liaei sat back, to give Toliwe space, and to allow the techs to assist him.

  But the tension wall between them was now broken, and in the breaching of it, Liaei found a peculiar combination of newfound distance and proximity. The distance would be eternal, a dividing line of lack of common will. While the proximity was also permanent now, an understanding of sorts.

  It was an understanding across genetic time.

  Liaei menstruated for the first time just a month before her fifteenth birthday. She had been trained in what to expect and still it was traumatic. She woke up and used the voidroom, and there was blood.

  “Ama!” she cried, holding the voidroom door partway closed for privacy, and looking out into the corridor through a narrow crack. “It’s happened, Ama! Red discharge! What do I do? Where are the pads? Oh, Ama!”

  Amhama felt a moment of panic herself. Putting her night robe on, she hurried to the hallway and rummaged through their closet for the specially made soaking pads, formulated just for Liaei’s needs. Holding a couple, Amhama thrust them around the door and through the opening. Liaei’s hand snaked forward, grabbing them.

  “Are you sure it’s blood?” said Amhama. “And are you sure it’s coming from your vaginal area and not from an injury somewhere else? It’s okay, sweet, just trying to be very certain here. It is wonderful if it’s so! Congratulations! Oh, what a wonder this is!”

  Fumbling and rustling sounds came from the other side of the door. Then, “Yes, I am sure . . . what else would it be? Red fruit juice?”

  On the other side of the door Amhama laughed, trembling, rubbing one thin arm with the other, in a peculiar gesture of self-consolation. There was joy and amazement and fulfillment of many years of work and not daring to hope, and then expectation. Amhama felt as proud as if she had been the girl’s mother in the ancient genetic and gestational sense.

  But, standing in the half-light of the hallway, thin
and pale gold, Amhama looked just as she did fourteen years ago. Those times of intimate motherhood were long past. Such physical experience was alien to Amhama. Her glacial rate of aging was a reminder of the difference between her and her heart’s child who will live and die in such an ephemeral span.

  Now, it was almost time to let go.

  “I’ve made arrangements, and you will be assuming your role of the Queen of the Hourglass next week,” said Riveli in a far more gentle tone than she’d used for years.

  Liaei and Amhama were seated in stiff silence in the chief nurse’s office.

  “How do you feel, Liaei?” Riveli continued. She was seated at her desk and as always observing her harmonium display as she talked. Liaei wondered if this was merely a safety barrier in her communication style or whether Riveli was indeed so infernally busy that she could never take a moment away from her minutiae of work and make consistent eye contact like a normal person.

  “Fine,” Liaei said.

  “Good. Do you feel you are ready?”

  Liaei’s eyes focused somewhere just ahead of her, staring at a spot on the wall, while her lips moved into a smile. She took a deep breath, exhaled loudly, then said, “Yes.”

  “Excellent. I’ve contacted the Committee up at Edge City, and we think it is the right time to proceed with the project. My colleague up there, horticulturist medic Vioma, will take over my supervisory duties and you will be well cared in her charge. Once you get there, they will train you briefly in the Protocol and then you will become the Queen of the Hourglass.”

  For the first time Amhama spoke up. “How will Liaei travel to Edge City?”

  Riveli stood up and faced them.

  “You know about the risks of inter-city travel. It’s a sterile wasteland out there, filled with bio-hazard. We cannot exactly risk putting her in an air transport, not all the way up the Basin slope.”

  Amhama frowned. “Why not?” she said. “What’s wrong with the air transports? I know we use them mostly for lugging cargo up and down the Basin, but you’d think in this important case they could equip one with a temporary habitat and facilities?”