Mainspring

by Jay Lake

He studied his beloved.

  She sprawled broken-backed upon the striated lines of the Mainspring. There was no stirring of life. Blood stained the metal around her.

  The lines he had seen proved indeed to be the edges of bands of steel set end-on. They could be a hundred miles deep for all he could tell. This close, he could see the metal flexing and loosening. The bands moved farther apart at a speed visible even to his eye.

  Soon they would part like the thin lips of an angry master and her body would plunge again to be lost within the coils of the Mainspring.

  “I am coming,” he said, grasping the railing to step over it and drop the twenty feet or so to rest beside her.

  “No.”

  Hethor looked up at the sound of William of Ghent’s voice.

  A shambling horror stood on the catwalk a few yards from him. Bare bones glistened; metal cables showed along its joints. Skin and cloth were slashed together as blood, oil, and shavings dribbled onto the catwalk’s metal grid.

  It was William of Ghent, recognizable only by the voice and the surviving blue eye that gleamed like madness in the spring.

  “Let the world be,” the William-thing said. “The Mainspring will fail as it should to call them back.”

  This was indeed a thing, sprung from darkest magics. No human, no creature of God, could have survived that fall to the center of the Earth to rise again.

  “I no longer seek to repair the world,” said Hethor mildly. He looked down at Arellya again.

  The William-thing didn’t seem to hear Hethor’s words. “I am the guardian of the winding shaft. The Clockmakers will return.” Ruined hands reached forward, sparks crackling on the fingertips as it shuffled forward.

  “As man lives, so lives God,” Hethor told the William-thing. “I will not fight you. I follow my heart.”

  Hethor flipped himself over the rail, hung, then dropped to the surface of the spring. The impact nearly broke his ankles. His feet stung like they were on fire. The spring edges flexed beneath him, making a perilous ground. The same depths that threatened to swallow Arellya threatened to take him as well, even before Hethor could reach her.

  Balancing on the narrow edges, Hethor leapt from coil edge to coil edge. Above him the William-thing pleaded with him to come away.

  As the spring creaked beneath him, Hethor reached his beloved and took her tiny body up into his arms. She was still warm somehow, not the cold lump he had expected. He ruffled her hair, feeling its familiar silkiness. All the nights they had spent together came rushing back to him. Her guidance on his journey. Her leadership of the war band of correct people even as the group eroded around him. Her simple patience and uncompromising sense of purpose.

  “I hope your soul finds peace in this place,” he whispered. “Surely no correct person ever journeyed so far to find life’s end.”

  The spring yawned wider. He could have simply tipped forward and plunged into the metal crevasse and died with Arellya.

  Something held him back.

  There had to be more purpose to all of this. Gabriel had not visited Hethor in New Haven simply to send him out to die. He had survived ocean and air and frozen night and screaming fate. He had found unlikely friends and unexpected enemies and still completed his journey to this place.

  If Hethor had wanted to lie down and die, he could have done so on the ice, in the poppies, back on the stairs. Even in the gutter in New Haven.

  Why had he not?

  Gabriel had said he could wind the Mainspring of the world. Hethor had the power. Whatever that power was.

  He also had the choice.

  Bracing Arellya on his left arm, he opened his right hand to look again at the key-shaped scar that had reasserted itself. He had never found the Key Perilous, not with the Jade Abbot, not in the jungles of the Southern Earth. The Brass Christ or the wise men who came after Him had hidden it too well.

  Had it ever been there to find?

  Above him, the William-thing continued to shout, about choice and freedom and betrayal.

  Hethor had always possessed the Key Perilous, he realized. His journey wasn’t to find the Key. It was to understand how to use it. Everything else—Gabriel’s mission, the messages on the golden tablets, all his tribulations—were his schooling. With a far harder hand than Headmaster Brownlee would have dared extend even to him.

  Well, perhaps he had learned something.

  “The heart of God is the heart of the world,” Hethor said quietly to his beloved. “As man lives, so lives God. As God lives, so lives the world. I choose to live the way I will.”

  He closed his eyes, summoned his holy sight to see the clockwork and gear trains of Creation. The room around him did not change much. The great spring on which he crouched was real here, too, though Arellya was merely a jumble of broken, inert mechanisms.

  Hethor reached into the orderly workings of his own heart, trying to capture the rhythm and the strength of it that he might give that to Arellya. His body twisted with the springs, as though the leverage that drove the world were being focused through his joints and sinews. Fire ran across him.

  He ignored the pain and continued to set his beloved’s body to rights. It was the hardest work Hethor had ever done, a strain deeper than any study or argument. A journey longer and more dangerous than his descent into the Earth, for all that this lasted only seconds. His own heart slipped, skipping beats, as he tried to bring Arellya’s back.

  All the gears of Creation rattled. Hethor’s head filled with light, a bloom of peaceful energy that drowned out the pain, his own attempts at holy magic, everything. He was for a moment the sole focus of God’s kind regard. He was wrought of silver and gold, with crystal for his soul.

  He reached out and made the greatest offering he could, passing that precious gift of God’s attention to Arellya and to William as well.

  Arellya coughed her way to life then as the Mainspring snapped shut. The motion caused Hethor to slip, tumbling into the closing crevasse so both his legs were trapped tight to crushing, just above the knees.

  Even the pain was welcome.

  His beloved was whole.

  She opened her eyes and said, “Hethor?” just as the William-thing burst into light on the catwalk above. Not merely light, but the brilliance of chaos. All the randomness of fire mixed with odd shoots of Creation, flowers folding to buds, rivers running backward, islands sinking beneath the sea. The world itself stuttered in reverse among the glow.

  Still touched with the holy sight, Hethor smiled upward. With the breath of God still upon him, he opened up his heart, plunged his hand into his chest, and withdrew a small crystal key.

  It fit the scar on his palm perfectly.

  “The Key Perilous,” he said. “Love is the heart of God.” He gave himself to the world.

  The agony and bleeding from his crushed legs threatened to overwhelm Hethor then. He let Arellya gather him into her arms as she whispered questions he had trouble understanding. Above him, William’s chaotic fires of life subsided to something cool and beautiful and quite surprised, while Arellya sobbed out her heart’s pain to send Hethor to his rest.

  HETHOR WAS amazed to find himself awake once more. He’d imagined death to be more like sleep.

  He was in a curious place, too.

  Something blue and brown hung in the sky above him. It was covered with white swirls. An orbital track stretched in both directions away from it, left and right, while a smaller brass ring circled it, rising like horns from the limited horizon of his view.

  He looked at the Earth, safe among her gearing, high above in the noontime.

  Which meant he was where … ?

  The lamps of the stars were clearly visible beyond the Earth. He was surrounded close at hand by a few silver lights. Glistening forests of bamboo stood nearby, edging lakes of quicksilver that shivered slightly as if the land itself breathed. Pale deer darted through the brush while a flight of albino swans winged overhead. A white toucan watched him from atop a rock.<
br />
  It had to be the moon. Was this where Heaven lay?

  Hethor looked down. Though he thought he could feel his feet itching, he seemed to have no legs below his thighs. The bite of the Mainspring had been real enough, then. The sight should have gripped him with a hysterical panic, but Hethor was far too tired to scream now.

  He sat propped against a boulder covered with silver lichen. A ewer of water stood near him, and a loaf of pale bread. On the boulder next to him, surely there the whole time though Hethor just saw him now for the first time, sat the archangel Gabriel.

  Had he been a bird the moment before?

  The real Gabriel, Hethor knew, was no more like the winged savage Hethor had defeated on the stairs than the monkeys of the Guyanan jungles were like him. The archangel sat with an air of simple confidence. It possessed an authority that no ordinary man or beast could attain.

  “I have a question for you,” said Gabriel in response to Hethor’s attention. “One very few born of woman ever get to answer.”

  Hethor thought he already knew, but he asked anyway. “What is it?”

  “Are you ready to go to God?”

  Hethor took the question as seriously as life itself. Which it was. He had felt, for a moment, the soul-warming touch of God down in the heart of the world. But that was a reward, a finality. It promised an eternal haze of paradise, a summer day that never met its sunset.

  Life was more than paradise.

  Arellya.

  Even if she was climbing up those endless stairs, doomed to die of starvation and thirst deep within the heart of the world, he wanted to be with her.

  “I have a love, back on Earth,” Hethor said slowly. “I want to live out my life with her.”

  “If I send you back, you will be a powerless cripple. At the mercy of every brigand or animal that might chance upon you.”

  “Then I shall have to trust in God as He trusted in me.” Hethor smiled. “Send me back to Arellya.”

  The jungle spread around Hethor where he sat on the warm ground. Huts nested in and among the trees as hairy children threw fruit and played tag in the shadows of a hothouse sun. Kalker stood before him stirring a great clay pot. The old correct person glanced up.

  “You have come back,” he said.

  “I am back,” Hethor agreed.

  “Would you like me to tell Arellya?”

  Hethor smiled until his cheeks ached.

  THEY FEASTED; then they promised themselves to one another in the manner of Hethor’s people; then they went to live in a little hut overlooking the river. Legless, he could not use a wheeled chair as he might have back in New Haven. Instead Hethor fitted wooden pegs to the stumps of his legs so that he could walk with the aid of canes. At times of need he allowed himself to be carried. It was not such a trial, as much of his life there took place in the trees or on the water.

  After he’d fashioned tools for himself with metal the correct people had traded for from distant tribes, Hethor carved a wheel-and-gear of the horofixion from jungle heartwood. He omitted the usual Christ figure. “Enough people have died for enough sins,” he told Arellya. “It is time to get on with … well … time.”

  William of Ghent came after a while, clothed in light. Somehow he looked much as Gabriel had on the moon. The sorcerer and Hethor just stared at one another a while without speaking. William finally nodded, saying, “Perhaps ‘Clockmaker’ was just another word for ‘God.’”

  “Perhaps we were both mistaken,” said Hethor kindly, though he was certain he’d understood all too well at the end. Not that he remembered those moments with much clarity now.

  “The Earth still turns.” William nodded to Arellya. “I must go to London. There is work to do in the world. I will see that you are remembered there.”

  Hethor reached upward to touch William’s sleeve. Their hands met. “Do not tell them I yet live.”

  William shrugged. “You gave up your life for God upon the brass, and gave me back mine in the bargain. Who am I to say if you live? It is enough for me that you are here, and we have met this one last time.”

  He was gone, stepping away into more light.

  After a few seasons Hethor took his wife as an apprentice in clockmaking, for all that he lived among a people who told time by watching the gears in the sky. It was enough to know that the Mainspring at the heart of the world ticked on.

  Still, Hethor sometimes wished he could yet hear the clattering clockwork of Creation.

  Praise for Jay Lake’s Mainspring

  “Mainspring is a nonstop adventure yarn that’s the equal of anything from Fritz Leiber or Robert E. Howard, with a premise that’s so mind-bendingly weird that it’ll have you giggling in public. The idea is that the universe is a giant, magnificent clockwork, the planets themselves on gears whose teeth are visible in the night sky. A humble apprentice is catapulted into adventure when an angel charges him with a quest to save the world from ruin when its mainspring winds down. There’s zeppelin battles, demented theology, and lots and lots of clocky, mechanical goodness here. This is blasphemy at its finest.”

  —BoingBoing.com

  “The world is a giant clockwork mechanism powered by hidden gears and moving along a track through the sky. When the Archangel Gabriel visits apprentice clockmaker Hethor, instructing him to take the Key Perilous and use it to rewind the Mainspring of Earth lest the world come to an end, Hethor embarks on a journey that takes him to unexplored lands and sets him against many in high places who believe him to be deluded or heretical. Lake’s first trade hardcover novel presents an original and intriguing vision of an alternate Earth during its period of Enlightenment. As Hethor and his companions find their faith in the Divine Clockmaker both challenged and justified, so, too, do they discover the humanity that both blesses and curses them in a mechanistic world. All but the smallest libraries should consider this for their SF or speculative fiction collections. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Could Mainspring be the opening canto of a metaphysical magnum opus in the vein of Wolfe? Yes, very plausibly. The language is lyrical and perfectly calibrated; the symbolism is profound; the intelligent mystification is just at the appropriate level. With this novel, Jay Lake has ascended from journeyman to master; let the masterwork now unfold.”

  —Locus

  “Lake envisions the universe as an enormous clockwork, put in motion by God, complete with gears and a mainspring hidden at Earth’s center, in his intriguing first trade hardcover novel, a fantasy set in the magic-tinged late nineteenth century … . Lake demonstrates his enormously fertile imagination in this unusual book.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mainspring is a grand and glorious adventure, an epic journey of imagination the likes of which I haven’t often seen … . A breathlessly exciting tale that takes the best old-school storytelling and the most vivid contemporary world-building sensibilities and spot-welds them together. Think Edgar Rice Burroughs or Philip José Farmer meets China Mieville or Ian R. MacLeod by way of religious allegory. Mainspring is always gripping and often dazzling in its vision.”

  —SFReviews.net

  “Theological steampunk set in a mechanical universe—the debut novel from a noted short-story writer … Good elements-intriguing alternate history, solid characters, briskly moving plot.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A fascinating take on the God-as-clockmaker theory, this is a compellingly readable coming-of-age story … . Superb world-building and an original take on an old idea.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “From the sweeping mechanisms of his clockwork world, down to the subtle movements of his characters, all drawn with a clockmaker’s eye, Lake gives us a story both grand and intimate, smart and savvy … and a whole lot of fun to boot.”

  —Hal Duncan, author of Vellum

  “As if Edgar Rice Burroughs had collaborated with Adam Roberts, or as if Robert Louis Stevenson had partnered with Gene Wolf
e, Jay Lake, in his new novel Mainspring, delivers a mad, brave, compellingly readable tale of an alternate universe where the gear-stuffed Earth literally rolls through the Heavens on a brass track, and one commonplace but bold and noble-hearted young man—apprentice horologist Hethor Jacques—finds himself nominated by an angel to set right the faltering orrery.

  “Tendentious politicians compare our Creation to a watch found in the jungle, implying a Maker. Lake, with the artist’s instincts for narrative and character over dogma, takes this conceit and runs with it in postmodern fashion toward a conclusion both shattering and redemptive. Lucent, tactile, deeply inhabited, the world of Hethor Jacques is a marvelous subcreation stuffed full of miracles, both cosmic and domestic. In Hethor’s world, one can hear the midnight meshing of mystical gears. I imagine they sound somewhat like the subliminal hum of this book.”

  —Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy

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  ESCAPEMENT

  JAY LAKE

  Available now

  A TOR PAPERBACK ISBN 978-0-7653-5637-6

  Copyright © 2008 by Jay Lake

  ONE

  Paolina

  THE BOATS had been drawn up in the harbor at Praia Nova when the great waves came two years past. The men of the village generally thought this a blessing, for that circumstance had spared their lives. The women generally thought this a curse for much the same reason. A Muralha remained silent and unforgiving as ever, a massive rampart of stone, soil, and strangeness soaring 150 miles high to separate Northern Earth from Southern Earth. In the shadow of the Wall, there was less food than ever until boats could be rebuilt and nets rewoven, but no self-respecting man would go without dinner. So the women quietly starved themselves and their babies to keep the drunken beatings away.