Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

by Peter Dickinson

  “That’s absolutely fascinating,” she said. “I must tell Michael.”

  I felt my heart turn to ice.

  “Who’s Michael?” I said.

  “He’s my boyfriend,” she said.

  “Well, I’d much rather …” I began.

  “Oh, but I must,” she said. “It’s just what he’s been looking for. He’s a research psychologist, you see, teaching rats to run through mazes and finding how quick they learn, but all that’s been done before and it’ll never make him famous. What he needs is something new. Like telepathic intelligent mice. I bet no-one’s worked on anything like that before.”

  She rattled on about Michael’s career, and how important it was for him to get a good start and publish scientific papers which would make people notice him, while I tried to think. I was sober for a few minutes. I’d always read shock could do that to you, but I’d never believed it. It’s true.

  My first thought was to tell her I’d been having her on, but I didn’t think she’d believe me. Then I thought of refusing to let Michael into the tower, but that wasn’t much good. It wasn’t my tower, for a start, and Lilith was the Town Clerk’s daughter, and we’d got all the TV and newspapers in En­gland right there in Branton hunting for stories. There aren’t any stories in Branton, except when the clock stops.

  Then I had a much better idea.

  “Look,” I said, “you’d best not tell anyone except Michael. I don’t want a lot of people poking around after mice in the clock, upsetting its balance. And you don’t want anyone nipping in ahead of him and pinching his research project. Right?”

  “Oh, of course not,” she said. “When can he come?”

  I’d need a couple of nights, I thought. Better get it over before the story comes out. We fixed for the day after next.

  FOURTH ESSAY ON MICE

  Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,

  O what a panic’s in thy breastie …

  That’s Robert Burns, and it’s poppycock!

  We’re always doing this sort of thing about animals, calling wolves cruel and foxes sly and so on, as if we people were so much kinder and honester ourselves. Your average wolf is as good a parent as a human, more co-operative with the rest of its pack than we are, and so on. All right, they hunt and kill other animals for food. We send other animals to the slaughterhouse for food. I’ve never heard of wolves killing other animals for fun, but I’ve met humans who do.

  And mice? Of course, they’re pretty skilled at keeping out of sight, dodging attacks, scuttling for safety. Wouldn’t you be, in a world full of cats and hawks thirty times your size looking for supper?

  To my mind it doesn’t make sense talking of ordinary mice being brave or timid. They do what they have to do. If they have to fight, they’ll fight regardless. It’s mainly instinct.

  But Clock Mice, who can consider the dangers they’re in and their chances one way or other …

  I tell you, from personal experience, that Clock Mice can be as brave as any human I’ve ever heard of. Look how Tracy’s mum stayed with her litter the first time I opened Lady Summer’s back. Look how they risked their lives, trying to give Jeremy a chance when Juno got him. Look what they did when they understood about my plan.

  It wasn’t as if they had to. I think it would have worked. But they decided it was wrong.

  Wicked? I don’t like the word, but well, yes, this time.

  Wicked.

  I hadn’t thought of it like that, of course, not being a mouse. To me it was just a way out of the mess I’d landed us in.

  I didn’t drink any more champagne, and as soon as the speeches were over (some very nice things they said about me—and Granddad too, apart from forgetting to mention they still hadn’t paid for the clock) I slipped away to Ma Palozzi’s tea-parlor. The band was still playing, and hundreds of people were dancing, stopping to watch and cheer when the quarters chimed, and to shout the count of hours when the green man banged his drum, and I sat in the window watching them with my heart in my boots, swigging strong Darjeeling and trying to sober up.

  The honest truth is, I was ashamed to face the mice.

  It was funny. If you’d asked me how I was going to tell them, I wouldn’t have known. I hadn’t even thought about it. All I knew was I’d got to do it.

  So at last, with getting on a gallon of tea sloshing round inside me and my ears ringing with the tannin, but still pretty woozy from the champagne, I picked my way through between the dancers and let myself into the tower. It was getting towards evening now, and the mice were beginning to stir for their night-time doings. None of them took much notice of me.

  How do you say, “Hey, folks listen! I’ve got news for you!” to a bunch of telepathic mice?

  I actually said it aloud a few times to passing mice, but they didn’t take a blind bit of notice.

  Then I got my wits together and started trying to think at them.

  How do you think “listen,” without thinking the word itself?

  It’s a bit like one of those party games where you try to get your team to guess some phrase you’ve been given (“Look before you leap”, “Please do not adjust your set”—things like that) without saying anything. You draw it, or you act it, depending on the game. You try to make the others see it. You make pictures.

  “Listen?”

  No, of course not.

  It’s not as easy as you’d think, controlling mind-pictures. You begin to form them and they sort of slither into other things, or just melt, and you find you’re thinking in words. I did my best, but not a mouse looked up from its errand to wonder what I was up to, crouching over them, grimacing like a maniac.

  I couldn’t even get their attention! I thought of opening up one of the nests. Polly Dickory had a new litter and she’d stay while I tried with her, though the other mice seemed to regard her as a bit of a scatterbrain. I was getting a screwdriver out to prize her door open when Tracy came scampering across the floor to see what I was up to.

  That’s more like it, I thought. If I can’t get through to Tracy I can’t to any of them, so I picked her up and put her on my palm—she’d let me do that—and held her about fifteen centimeters from my nose.

  I thought sad:

  I thought difficult:

  I thought danger:

  She sat there looking at me. Her eyes were as clever as Lilith’s in their own mouse way, but I could see I hadn’t got through to her.

  I thought sorry:

  I couldn’t keep the pictures clear. I was too sick at myself for being such a fool, just because of a pretty young woman sitting beside me for an hour or two, and me supposed to be seventy-plus sensible.

  Tracy put her head on one side, still puzzled, but with a different sort of puzzlement, more like when she’d been watching me at work and trying to fathom out what the bits were for. Then she seemed to make up her mind.

  She nipped up my arm and down my suit to the floor. She started across, and turned. Her look said, “Come along,” as plain as speaking.

  She nipped up on to the carousel and started off round the rim. It was about ten minutes to six and I’d been sitting beside Lady Autumn, who’d just come in from her dance with her harvesters and rabbits at the three-quarters strike. Tracy went on past her own home in Lady Summer, past Lady Spring and the Hickory clan, and all the way round to Lady Winter, who was waiting there in the shadows, ready to go out on the hour.

  There she stopped. I could feel she was nervous, unsure. Some of the other mice had noticed something was up and had come along to watch.

  Tracy seemed to take a breath, as if she’d made up her mind to go through with whatever it was. She went quietly forward to Lady Winter’s feet, where she paused for a moment, looking up, then started to climb. The carved leaves of Lady Winter’s dress gave her easy footholds the whole way up. She settled on th
e shoulder, beside the white wooden neck, and looked at me.

  “Well?” her look said.

  I came closer. I didn’t need to say “Listen” any more, so I started with something I knew I could make a picture of in my mind:

  She’d have seen that down in the market, raiding the pet-stalls at night. The mice fancied pet-food more than human food for ordinary eating. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

  Tracy stared at me, still puzzled. She knew I was trying to tell her something, but I wasn’t getting through. Perhaps mouse brains are the wrong shape for human thoughts.

  She cocked her head to Lady Winter, for all the world as if she was saying, “Can you make anything of this, ma’am?”

  I shrugged to myself. Well, why not? If I was crazy enough to try and send mind-pictures to a mouse, it wasn’t that much crazier sending them to a block of carved wood. Lady Winter had been sideways to me so far, standing ready to go out and do her dance. I moved round so that I could look straight at the pale, calm, sorrowful face. In the fall of the shadows I couldn’t see that her eyeballs were nothing but painted wood.

  The pictures seemed to come a bit more orderly into my mind, and didn’t slip around. I kept it simple as I could:

  That’s only a very rough idea of what I thought, and it’s taken Emma hours to draw. I made the pictures in my mind, clearer, more detailed, in just a few seconds. And I didn’t think jagged edges and things like that. I just thought Warning—Danger, without any words.

  Anyway, I was fairly sure I’d made it clear what I was going to do, supposing Tracy was somehow picking it up, using Lady Winter as a sort of interpreter. Over the next two nights I’d catch some ordinary mice in the market, and when Michael came I’d let him think I’d caught them in the tower. He’d do his experiments and not find anything special, and he’d decide I was just a silly old man who’d been trying to impress his Lilith.

  Tracy asked me a question. It flicked into my mind, mouse-speed, and out again. It came through Lady Winter. It was as clear as a rap on my own front door. That’s how I know about the wavy look they make for questions:

  No, I told her:

  Then the carillon began. I must have been concentrating so hard on getting my pictures sent that I’d never noticed the warning. I jumped back—I’d been standing just where the door was due to open. The mice—dozens of them by now—scuttered off the carousel.

  But Tracy—maybe she’d been as absorbed as I was—stayed put on Lady Winter’s shoulder.

  “Hold tight,” I shouted, forgetting it wouldn’t mean anything to her.

  The lugs that held the carousel still between strikes clicked down and the carousel moved smoothly round, taking the foxes and woodmen, Lady Winter with Tracy on her shoulder and the green man out into the open.

  I could feel Tracy’s fright as she was carried out over the twinkling square, with all the cheering people waiting for the strike. It wasn’t them she was frightened of, though. Now that the clock was going again they must all have begun to get used to being carried out over the square once an hour. I think it was something to do with being out there with Lady Winter when the green man beat the drum.

  While the quarters were sounding I went back to the far door, to wait for Lady Winter to carry Tracy back in. Lucky for me I did. I’d forgotten about old Joe. I might have been standing right beside him while he was striking.

  I’d never been in the going chamber for that. You remember about the Town Clerk not wanting anyone to know we’d got the clock mended till he was good and ready? So until that day there’d been just that one muffled strike, early in the morning. I wasn’t prepared.

  Nine miles off you can hear old Joe, given a good wind. So think what it might be like to be standing not five meters from him, inside the same four echoing walls. My hands flew to cover my ears without me telling them, but still the sound shuddered through me. My long bones quivered, my dentures danced on my gums and my skull rang like an answering bell.

  Six strokes I endured. If it had been twelve I think I might have been deaf for life, like St Joseph’s priest (and no-one was going to make me Archbishop of York.) As it was, the ringing didn’t go out of my ears till I burnt my tongue on my breakfast sausages two days later. By the time I stopped swearing the ringing was gone. Don’t ask me why.

  Where was I?

  Oh, yes, waiting for Lady Winter to bring Tracy back in. It was all right. She was still there, perched on the carved shoulder. She looked different, dazed—no, dazed isn’t right, amazed is more like it, as if she’d been shown things beyond seeing, told things beyond knowing, been away outside mouse-time and people-time and clock-time and now as the hour-strike ended had been born all over again back into her everyday mouse world.

  Or it might have been just the effect of being out there, high up over the square in the sweet spring dusk, with the glitter of lights below and half Branton singing and cheering and counting the strokes. That would have been quite something.

  Anyway, in a couple of seconds she shook her fur and became young Tracy again. She glanced at me (“Oh yes, of course, that’s what we were on about,”) and ran down Lady Winter’s dress, flowing over the green leaves like a big drop of tea dribbling down. She settled herself on the white carved toes and all the mice, barring the babies, gathered round in a circle and looked at her. Nothing happened, except maybe in their minds.

  I stood and watched with the whine of the after-strike throbbing in my ears. It struck me that maybe the mice were deaf, what with Old Joe bellowing at them a hundred and fifty-six times a day, day in, day out. That might explain a lot. Deaf mice wouldn’t survive a week, you’d think. It’s not just the sounds of danger they’d miss, the snuffle of a dog nosing along a pile of cartons, the grate of a footstep. Ordinary mice chatter the whole time, greetings, quarrels, warnings—if we could hear all the way up their voice-range we’d be maddened by their continual squeaking.

  Soon as the tower was built there’d have been ordinary mice moving in, what with the market so handy. The babies would have been deaf before they left the nests, so they wouldn’t have lived long. But suppose one litter had a parent with an extra gene for mind-casting, and they inherit it, and that does them instead of squeaking and listening, so they get by, and pass the gene on, and that’s where Clock Mice come from in the first place …

  That’s how a scientist might look at it. It’s one way of slicing the Swiss roll.

  I was wondering about this when I noticed the mice stirring. Not much, just their heads moving this way and that, the way you’d see in a group of people if they were arguing something over and all turning together to look at whoever was speaking. The discussion didn’t take long, happening in mouse-time, and then they turned back to Tracy. She thought at them for a few seconds more and then flowed back up to Lady Winter’s shoulder and looked at me.

  I came closer and gazed into the blind wooden eyes, which I’d got Hiram Kapo to paint a nice dark grey only the week before.

  She told me NO.

  It wasn’t a word. It wasn’t a picture either. It was a sharp thought in my mind, coming from outside. I knew that without thinking about it, the way you know when you hear your name called from outside the room you’re in.

  I felt Oh? But why …?, and maybe she picked that up because she tried to explain:

  I didn’t get it.

  She tried again:

  I realized the mice didn’t think only in pictures. We don’t talk only about things we can see, do we? We wouldn’t have much worth saying without words like happy and stupid and right and cheating and kind and so on. I could feel Tracy gearing down, the way you would if you were trying to explain something to a small child. This time she tried pictures:

  I got it. She was telling me what my plan was like.

  It was as if, when Juno had caught Jeremy, instead of trying to trick her away from him themselves, the
y’d brought their children as bait.

  I wanted to argue. It wasn’t like that. Some of those children were going to grow into Clock Mice, weren’t they? Ordinary mice were different. They didn’t matter.

  I didn’t put it in pictures but she must have got my drift. NO, she told me again, and then:

  She let me feel the love that a mother has for all her children. What right, she was saying, have we got to let ordinary mice bear our dangers?

  I could have gone on. They’re just animals, I could have told her. You’ve got as much right to use them any way you want as people have to use animals the way we do …

  But I guessed I wasn’t going to get the Clock Mice to follow that line of argument. (I’m not sure I follow it myself, sometimes.)

  Look, I told her, he’s coming. He’s dangerous. What are you going to do? She told me.

  SECOND ESSAY ON SCIENCE

  Science means knowing. Scio = I know. Latin.

  How do I know that?

  How do I know there was ever a language called Latin, and somebody called Julius Caesar running around in a white sheet and conquering Gaul and getting stabbed by his pals on the Ides of March, whatever they are? How do I know I didn’t dream the whole thing up, all the books in the libraries, all the long words in our language. Hadrian’s Wall.

  Well, I’ve walked along Hadrian’s Wall, haven’t I?

  Unless I dreamed it.

  How do I know I’m not crazy about Romans the same way Cousin Angel is crazy about cats? I say Romans ruled the world once, she says cats. What’s the difference? How do I know?

  I don’t.

  There is no such thing as knowing, absolutely bang-certain­ knowing, not even an atom of doubt about it, not even a quark. Look, I’ve got this goose egg in my hand you’ve given me, and I’m holding it out of the window and I’m going to let it go, and there’s Mrs. Curry below cycling off to give her chat to the Over-60s Club about crocheting cuddly toys. How do I know it’s really going to fall towards the centre of the earth and not stop until it reaches Mrs. Curry’s bike-basket and goes splat among a lot of fluffy pink rabbits?