Spring Tide

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Oh.’ He stood with his mouth open for a while, staring at my face. My lie had completely floored him. ‘It’s just that your car was still parked on the street, and I could see your bike round the side.’

  As Dave knew, my mother couldn’t drive, and she lived in a village twenty-five miles away that was ten miles from the nearest station. In fact, he’d once very obligingly given me a lift there, when my car was temporarily off the road. But I reminded myself that there wasn’t a law that obliged us to explain our travel arrangements to our next door neighbours.

  ‘I said to Betty perhaps I should break down the door,’ Dave went on after a difficult three-second pause which my explanation was supposed to have filled. ‘Or call the police. I was really worried about you, mate. Specially when it got dark and your curtains were still wide open. I wondered whether you’d had a fall or something. I was pretty relieved when Betty got up this morning and saw your curtains drawn. “Well, they couldn’t have drawn themselves, could they?” Betty said. “So someone’s alive in there, for sure.”’

  ‘I appreciate your concern, Dave, but I’m absolutely fine.’

  Fine wasn’t a very accurate description of how I felt, though. I was terribly tired, and desperately agitated. What was more, though Dave had always got on my nerves, I was experiencing for the first time a whole new level of irritation that was still novel to me but was soon to become the norm in all my dealings with the outside world. As long as I was with him, I was acutely aware that every single minute the conversation lasted was a minute lost forever when I could have been under the ground, exploring the pristine spaces beneath my house.

  When I’d finally managed to wrap things up with Dave, I shut the door so quickly after him that it was really more of a slam, hurried back to my living room, and was already descending the stairs when I suddenly remembered that I had friends coming for lunch.

  Cursing, I climbed back out again, found my phone and called to tell them I wasn’t well.

  ‘Oh, poor Jeremy,’ exclaimed my friend Liz. ‘Hope you feel better soon. Anything we can do for you? Shopping or anything?’

  Again, I felt that irritation. Why was she wasting my time with these trivia, when the cellar was down there waiting?

  ‘I’ll be fine, thanks,’ I said and hung up, so keen to finish the call that I didn’t even take the time to say goodbye.

  I was hurrying back towards the cellar, when it occurred to me that I couldn’t just leave things like this in my living room. Anyone who came to the house would immediately see the piled furniture, the rolled carpet, the big hole in the floor, and the descending stairs.

  Seething with resentment at the wasted time, I drove to a builder’s merchant at a dangerous and illegal speed, bought wood, hinges and a new rug, and hurtled back again, shooting two red lights, and getting honked at angrily by other motorists. Flinging my purchases down in my hallway, I returned to the living room and moved the furniture again so I could roll up the fitted carpet and remove it altogether. My impatience seemed to give me superhuman strength and I not only shifted the dresser on my own this time, but managed to lift it right over the rolled carpet.

  That done, I set to work fashioning a hinged door in the middle of my floor, which I could conceal under the new rug in case of visitors, but uncover quickly when I was alone, so as to cut delay to an absolute minimum. Through all of this I kept the curtains drawn, in spite of the sunshine outside, and in spite of the curiosity which this would inevitably arouse in Dave. God damn it, it was none of his business! I’d always hated the benign, cow-like curiosity of Dave and my other neighbours up and down the street, beaming over their garden fences as they waited to be told the identity of a weekend visitor, the reason for an unusually early departure for work or the contents of a package they’d kindly taken in for me, but up to now I’d always felt obliged to indulge it. Not any longer, I decided. There was no time.

  I’m no carpenter, and I’d forbidden myself peeks until the job was properly finished, so it was after 5 p.m. when I finally descended again into my cellar. I had an aching back and several small cuts and bruises from my furious hammering and sawing, but none of that mattered. As I put my foot on the stairs, I was in a kind of trance of anticipation at the prospect of all that space, trembling, dazed and almost floating, like an adolescent boy on the way to his very first sexual experience.

  I’ve moved a few things down there over the months since then, and made a few changes. One of the rooms on the top level is now a store. I’ve left a few strategic buckets here and there: the last thing I want when I’m ten storeys or more below the world is to have to come up to the surface to take a leak. And, in a room on the twelfth level, near to the stairs, I’ve also established a kind of base camp, with a comfortable chair, a couch, bottled water and canned food. I can sit down there for hours quite happily, doing nothing at all other than savouring the empty, private space that I know is all around me, and listening to the extraordinary silence.

  But I continue to explore as well. Lately, I’ve taken to sticking a blank post-it note on every door I enter, so that I’ll know for certain when I’ve seen them all. I’ve never yet found a room that was different in any way from any of the others – there’s never been the slightest trace of any previous occupant, or even the smallest clue as to the purpose for which all this was hollowed out – but it didn’t take me very long before I found the edges. Not counting those initial flights of stairs, the twenty-second floor down is the bottom, and, on every level, each of the four radial corridors ends in a T-junction after thirty-five rooms. So each floor, in other words, is a grid that is seventy rooms deep and seventy rooms wide, and, since there are twenty-two floors, that means that my house has in excess of a hundred thousand rooms: six of them above ground and the rest below. I’d once gloated over the idea that I had as many rooms as all the rest of the street put together, but that turned out to be a ridiculous underestimate. A few corridors on a single level could equal my street. In the cellar as a whole there were as many rooms as there were people in the entire city above me. Who could blame me for not wanting to go out any more, when I have so much space of my own at my disposal?

  And yet I have to admit that lately I’ve started to feel that it isn’t quite enough. I still love my cellar, and I still appreciate its extent. But the limits are chafing a little. Without my having made a clear decision to do so, I’ve found myself beginning to tap on the outer walls of the perimeter corridors, listening out for the hollow sound of yet more rooms beyond the ones I’ve come to know. And then, of course, there’s the possibility to consider of even more space below. Well, why not? If this is possible, then so is that.

  Outside in the world under the sky, my old friends laugh and quarrel, meet and part, have babies, go to work, take their dogs for walks in the park, watch TV and go to the pub. Deep down below them, I am pulling up the lino on the bottom floor, searching for hatches that might take me through to new and untouched spaces.

  The End of Time

  Eli waited. Behind and above him was complete darkness. In front of him was an empty arena. His fellow archangels around its perimeter were shadowy forms in the dimness, waiting silently, just as he was doing himself, for the performance to begin.

  A single tall figure stepped forward into the middle. From the pitch darkness beyond the arena, a great sigh arose from countless unseen watchers, spreading outwards and upwards like a tide. For this new presence was no mere archangel, this was the Clockmaker himself. He stood out there for a moment, while silence fell once more, and then he raised his hand. Pouf! – a brilliant point of light appeared, suspended above them all.

  Again that great sigh came from the darkness on every side and, in the intense brightness of that tiny light, Eli glimpsed for a moment the cherubim and seraphim out there, the dominions and thrones. Tier after tier, this whole vast angelic host had been waiting for all eternity to admire the Clockmaker’s work.

  The point of light expanded rapidl
y, diminishing in brightness as it did so, until almost the whole arena was filled by a huge dim sphere, leaving just sufficient space round the edge for the archangels to keep their vigil. It was time for Eli and his companions to get to work, and they set to it at once, each one leaning forward to peer intently into the depths of the sphere.

  Straight away, Eli saw lights in there. He saw great skeins of light, strewn through the void, each one made up of millions of little disc-shaped clumps of glowing matter that span around like wheels. And when Eli examined the wheels closely, he found that they too were made of smaller parts. They were tenuous structures of the most extraordinary delicacy, consisting almost entirely of empty space. These wheel-shapes were not solid clumps as they had at first appeared, but were so full of emptiness as to be almost imaginary: wheels sketched out in the darkness by billions of separate specks of light, each one following its own allotted path. And Eli saw that, as these little specks travelled round and round the centre of each wheel, waves of pressure passed through them, so that the specks clumped closer together when the wave reached them, and moved apart again as it passed by, creating graceful spiral bands of brightness that themselves moved round the wheel. Each tiny wheel was really two wheels revolving at different speeds: a wheel of specks, and a wheel of waves that moved through the specks!

  Laughing with delight, Eli turned from the spectacle to point it out to the hidden watchers who were seated, row after row, on the dark tiers behind him. ‘Observe!’ he cried. ‘The same matter forms two separate wheels simultaneously!’

  A sigh of appreciation rose up among the cherubim and seraphim, the thrones and dominions. But, even before the sigh had faded, another archangel on the far side of the arena was calling out just as excitedly as Eli had done: ‘Look! Even the smallest of these lights has tiny spheres revolving round it!’

  Again the sigh in the darkness.

  ‘Notice how they also spin on their own axes!’ called a third archangel.

  Another sigh.

  ‘And see how the whole spreads outwards!’ called a fourth. ‘This whole area is constantly expanding, just so as to be able to contain it.’

  The Clockmaker had created Time, no less, and here in front of them, wheel within wheel, was the Great Clock that gave it form.

  Sigh after sigh rolled outwards and upwards in the darkness.

  Gradually the initial excitement subsided. The archangels called out only rarely now, and those awed sighs, rising in one part or another of the vast and unseen auditorium, happened less and less frequently. So rare had they become, in fact, that many aeons had passed in complete silence when the archangel Gabriel suddenly spoke.

  He had been giving his attention to the smallest elements of the Clock, and had focused his vision to such an extent that he could see not only the tiny motes of stone that revolved round each star, but the surfaces of those stones, and the tiny objects that lay on those surfaces, and even the minuscule particles, wheels themselves, of which those tiny objects were made. And, on the surface of one of these stones, he had made an strange discovery.

  ‘Observe, Clockmaker!’ he said with a bow. ‘A new clock has appeared within your own!’

  The Clockmaker had been busy elsewhere, but, hearing this news, he looked across at once, his huge blazing eyes piercing through all the intervening nebulae and galactic clusters, to home in on the stone which Gabriel was pointing to. Eli looked too, of course. The stone was a rocky shell, still molten on the inside, of a kind so common throughout the Clock that they could be found spinning around almost every star. Minor irregularities pocked its surface. There were little bumps and hollows, and, as sometimes occurred on these half-cooled stones, liquid water had gathered in the hollows. But Gabriel was looking into that liquid, pointing at objects so minute that they were as small in relation to the half-cooled stone as the stone itself was small in relation to the galaxy that contained it. These new, tiny objects took the form of little spheres, moving this way and that through the water.

  Now of course stars, stones, water and specks of dust were all parts of the Great Clock, and, a clock being an assemblage of moving parts, they were meant to move in relation to one another. But the Clockmaker could see at once that what Gabriel had found was a new kind of movement, and so could Eli, and the other archangels, and the hidden host. These microscopic spheres weren’t simply being pushed and pulled by the forces around them. They weren’t just being tugged downwards by gravity, or lifted by buoyancy, or tossed about by the convection currents that kept the water constantly turning over.

  No, the motion of these little spheres was something else entirely, for it was driven from within themselves. Chemical processes unfolding inside them provided energy to thousands of tiny fibres on their outer surfaces, and these fibres were beating together in rhythmic waves that sent the little spheres rolling and tumbling through the water in directions that couldn’t be explained by gravity, buoyancy or currents.

  Along with all the other archangels, Eli could see at once that Gabriel had spoken the truth: each of these little spheres was indeed another clock in its own right. But what particularly fascinated Eli was the way they perpetuated themselves. They weren’t bodies of matter in the way that a star or a planet or a stone was a body of matter. Rather they were patterns that passed through matter, just as those spiral pressure waves he himself had spotted had passed through drifts of stars, or ripples passed through water, or sounds passed through the air. In every single moment, each of those minuscule spheres was simultaneously taking in new matter from its surroundings, and expelling matter from within itself. In a very short time, each one had completely replaced the building blocks of which it was made. And yet, like a spiral arm, it still retained the same essential form.

  And what a form! There was silence in the arena and in the darkness beyond, and the archangels glanced uneasily at one another. They all knew that the Clockmaker hadn’t built these tiny structures, that they had arisen on their own, and were a purely accidental by-product of the forces that the Clockmaker had set in motion, much as the complicated eddies and cross-currents of a mountain stream are a by-product of its headlong rush downhill. And yet, accidental or not, there was an obvious fact in front of them which they could all see but none of them dared name out loud: every one of these little rolling spheres was at least as complex and as perfect as the Great Clock in its entirety. What would their master think about that?

  The Clockmaker frowned. He was omniscient, of course, so he was far ahead of all the rest of them, and he’d seen at first glance what his angels and archangels had only gradually grasped. Each of those little rolling spheres, he could see, wasn’t simply as intricate as his own Clock, but far far more so. Indeed, considered in terms of complexity, his Clock was as tiny in relation to these little spheres, as they were to it in terms of size. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Clockmaker had noticed something else as well that none of the archangels had yet spotted: these things were changing over time. At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of them were splitting themselves in two, and the smaller spheres resulting from the division would then immediately begin to take in matter from the rich solution around them, growing quickly to full size again, and then themselves dividing. Naturally, small errors occurred at each new division. These were usually negligible in their effects, but occasionally they resulted in clocks that were too badly flawed to be able to maintain their separateness from the surrounding matter, so that they simply broke down and disappeared. What the Clockmaker had noticed, though, was that, in an absolutely infinitesimal proportion of cases, the new clocks actually proved to be superior to their precursors, in the sense that they were even more finely attuned to the task of maintaining their own integrity against the forces of entropy all around them. And therefore, because the types of clock that were most successful at retaining their separateness were the ones that increased in numbers, the design of these little clocks in general (if the word ‘design’ could be used in s
uch a context) was constantly increasing in sophistication.

  With his divine foresight, which was really a capacity to see not just in three dimensions but in four, five and even six, the Clockmaker looked ahead through time with his great fiery eyes. He observed the trajectory of development of these tiny intricate clocks, and saw them diversifying and spreading, like a kind of restless rust that would gradually form itself again and again from the simple minerals of which a planet was made, until that planet’s entire surface was covered with a multiplicity of wriggling, bulging, blooming forms, climbing over one another, consuming one another, driving one another to yet higher levels of adaptation and complexity. Ultimately, he saw, this would affect the mechanism of the Great Clock itself in small but subtle ways. It would change the albedo of planetary surfaces, for instance, and in so doing, minutely alter the workings of the entire design.

  ‘Wipe it clean!’ he commanded.

  Gabriel, that great archangel, bowed his head in submission, and reached with his hand deep into the Clock until his fingers were almost touching that little, spinning, half-cooled rock. He frowned with concentration for a moment as cleansing rays came pouring out from his fingertips, scorching the surface of the little stone, annihilating the tiny spheres and all their kin, and breaking down all but the most rudimentary of chemical bonds, so that the stone was returned in a matter of moments to its previous state as a simple mechanical component of the Clock.

  A sigh rose and spread, outwards and upwards, through the multitude in the darkness beyond the arena. And Eli watched in silence from his own quiet corner.

  ‘Listen! All of you!’ the Clockmaker boomed out to his archangels. ‘Note carefully what Gabriel has just done and do exactly the same! That is a command, to be followed without exception. You must watch your sectors constantly for any unscheduled developments of that kind, and, as soon as you find them, they must be wiped away at once. Nothing must be allowed to tarnish my Clock’s perfection, or to disturb the smooth, clean flow of Time.’