THE CLOCK KING AND THE QUEEN OF THE HOURGLASS
Vera Nazarian
Published by Norilana Books at Smashwords
Copyright © 2005 by Vera Nazarian
Cover Art:
“Clock and Hourglass,” Copyright © 2011 by Vera Nazarian
Image Elements: “Open Star Cluster and Nebula NGC 3603 by Hubble Space Telescope (ACS)” by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, December 29, 2005; “May Sartoris” by Lord Frederick Leighton, circa 1860; “Clock with Heads of Prophets” fresco detail by Paolo Uccello (1443).
Cover Design Copyright © 2011 by Vera Nazarian
Ebook Edition (Reprint Edition)
Epub format ISBN:
ISBN-13: 978-1-60762-093-8
ISBN-10: 1-60762-093-6
July 14, 2011
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.
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A Publication of
Norilana Books
P. O. Box 209
Highgate Center, VT 05459-0209
www.norilana.com
Published in the United States of America
Other Books by Vera Nazarian
Dreams of the Compass Rose
Lords of Rainbow
Mayhem at Grant-Williams High (YA)
The Duke in His Castle
Salt of the Air
After the Sundial
Mansfield Park and Mummies
Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons
(Forthcoming in 2011)
Pride and Platypus: Mr. Darcy’s Dreadful Secret
THE CLOCK KING AND THE QUEEN OF THE HOURGLASS
— 1 —
The Hourglass
Her reason for existence was to become the Queen of the Hourglass.
Liaei was formed from the purest ancient genetic material preserved by the horticulturists, from the largest most succulent ovum of a batch of millions, and from one of the liveliest vector-driven spermatozoa of trillion. Following countless failures, both gametes were filtered and isolated in a superselection process, guaranteeing down to a near-infinite degree of certainty the viability of the combined DNA.
After the egg and sperm were joined in a drop of liquid, the bundle of quickly multiplying cells that was to be Liaei was incubated for the traditional six months under warm golden lights in the nursery, submerged in amber life fluid. The embryo became a delicate pastel bundle of flesh, and then a perfectly formed infant. Microscopic tubes supplied liquid and serum-based nutrients, feeding her while the heart and lungs developed, blood vessels branched out and other organs grew and took on the final female configuration.
On the last day before birth, Liaei floated in the life fluid and was observed with wonder by a room full of darkly golden skinned human and dull metallic machine horticulturists through the glass of her three-tier womb. Amhama, the nurse whose charge Liaei would be, gazed at the perfect child. There were no words. She wiped tears from her dark cheeks with the back of her thin hand and tried to imagine that the fluttering in her lower stomach was merely nerves and not the most sacred and most ancient of human emotions called love.
And yet, it was motherly love that Amhama felt, a strange abstraction, and knowing it she prayed in silence, sending up great soul cries to the bright Day God in gratitude for the honor that had fallen to her.
The voice harmonic echoed meaningless numerics from the natal system. “Thirteen baktun, zero katun, zero tun, zero uinal, zero kin. Time to give birth.”
“Go on,” said the chief nurse Riveli to Amhama. “Do the honors, Amhama.”
Riveli stood back, motioning to the others also, and they crowded away in respect, the combined sheen of their surfaces—golden human skin, pastel organic cloth, and grey machine metal alloy—blending in a soft curvilinear mosaic. Outside the large transparent windows the Day God filled the sky with orange light, and it was the apex of noon. Serendipity or eon-shaped intent, it signified an event of singular importance.
Amhama alone remained standing before the glass womb. She was a frail, gently fading woman with smooth gold skin wrinkling into delicate time-etchings around her egg-shaped face. The sterile natural fiber nursery robe of brilliant white fell in soft listlessness to cover her shallow spots of breasts and torso, wrapping around her thin hips and ending in weightless folds about her bony golden knees.
All smooth, aging, hairless, sterile.
A true mother, she stood.
Amhama lifted her hands to the womb’s rotund cover, pressed the release of the first tier, then the second and third, like a falling away of taut onion skins, and finally lifted the inner cover glass for the first time since the incubation six months ago. Slightly arid, sterile nursery air rushed in to disturb the perfect balance of humidity inside the womb, while the infant floating upon the amber liquid sensed the difference and began to stir. Amhama reached inside and started to remove the delicate cobweb of tubing, and with each tug the child squirmed, not so much in pain or discomfort but in surprise.
The final surprise of parting came when the largest central tube was retracted and its thickest portion detached from the navel—a mechanical umbilical cord.
Liaei was now completely separated from the womb, and in the world. Air came into her stimulated lungs and filled her, and pain entered through her navel, and she cried, high pitched agonized, overwhelmed innocent.
She was born.
Amhama gently supported her head and lifted Liaei from the liquefied amber. It ran in rivulets down the newborn’s pale delicate surfaces, dripping back into the womb basin, and splattered on Amhama’s clothing.
Liaei screamed as she was wrapped in brilliant white sterile fiber.
Parted from the birth ocean, she was completely alone.
At the bottom of the Pacific Basin, a mere rock’s toss from the dark lapping waters of the great shallow lake that was all that was left of the Oceanus, huddled the Basin City. It was like a film of mineral deposit at the Oceanus’s edges, rimming it, a growth of crystalline structures that in places emerged out of the thick waters like stalagmites, and in others were formed from the clays and rock of the ancient marine sediment that lined the surface of the Basin.
Colors were all tertiary—mauve, teal, dull ocher brown, rich sienna, pale cream, honey amber, salmon clay. Interspersed were patches of gray and ebony rock formations, and chalk-dusted earth. The Basin City structures stood out like islands of chromatic uniformity, impositions of strange, unnatural sterile order. Buildings were placed in rows to approximate city blocks, and streets were upraised platforms of artificial alloy, separated from the unreliable floor sediment that underwent liquefaction so frequently that it was impossible to build upon. Closer to the water’s edge, and in some places j
utting brazenly into the Oceanus, were grim water refinery plants, domes of concrete and steel surrounded with bands of metal scaffolding and pipes that siphoned off the super-saturated salt sludge-water into appropriate reservoirs for processing. Here the toxic blood of the Oceanus was vaporized, then returned back to liquid state, and captured in post-processing reservoirs that delivered distilled water to the whole of Basin City and beyond. Pipes and tubes ran off in all directions below and above the sediment ground. Some of the water was redirected into local aqueducts that rested on thick columns fifty meters in height and covered with transparent plasti-glass on the topside to prevent evaporation into the thin arid atmosphere.
Finally, the largest thickest post-processing waterpipe, with the diameter of a small canal, fed directly from the tallest processing dome and ran through the heart of Basin City and out and up the Basin slope.
It was said that it had been originally built thousands of years ago with enough clay and concrete and metal alloy to reach the halfway point of the slope walls of the Pacific Basin, and then for some reason the project was abandoned. Looking back, some thought the building materials had run out. Others supposed it was lack of interest or funding. Whatever the reason, the high-tech civilization of the time did not complete the building of the waterline pipe all the way up the Pacific Basin walls. But instead of abandoning the water delivery project completely, a marvelous impossible technology was used to continue to channel the water up the Basin slope without the pipe.
The water was made to run uphill, never touching the ground, suspended through the air.
Amhama liked to smile and talk to the child Liaei. As the girl grew human and the woman grew older, the bond between them was formed with words.
“Liii-aaah-eeeh-iiih,” Amhama sang in a breathy voice, leaning over the crib. The light came amber-sweet from the window, coloring Amhama’s smooth forehead and hairless scalp, coloring the infant’s face, overflowing into the room, and the distant heavy indigo shape of the Oceanus defined the horizon. Above and beyond stretched the great slope of the Basin—no sky was visible from the vantage point of the window, only remote Basin walls that loomed like golden shadows of slate, and desiccated dust sweeping bedrock in the haze-filled background. The Basin gathered the intense light from the sky and kept it, pooling inward where it reflected off the walls and colored the air golden. The surface of the Oceanus shimmered, the film over its thick waters iridescent like benzene, undulating with temporary rainbows and then again dark.
Amhama moved her gaze farther outward, narrowed her eyes to better focus, and saw the pale white speck of a ship sailing out into the heart of the waters. “Look,” she whispered, knowing that Liaei was too young to respond or be aware, but wanting to speak nevertheless. “There goes a white ship! A great voyager, a brave explorer! Imagine how fearless, how insolent, to skim along the treacherous surface of the Oceanus.”
Liaei stared back, great jewel eyes glistening with moisture and of indeterminate hue.
“That’s right, the fearless ship sails!” said Amhama again. “It will never come back, probably. Fearless white ship! Silly, silly ship that will sink in toxic salt.”
And then she laughed and drew her fingers along the child’s soft cheek and the amazing growth of pale white-gold hair that started from above her forehead. “You are safe here, my sweet-eyes. Unlike the ship, you are here with me, and you are safe.”
Liaei looked back with wide eyes at her nurse and voluntary mother. And she looked through her, maybe. Because her infant eyes did not focus or see—not yet.
When Liaei was five, she jumped and danced like a creature of fluid and no bones or flesh—flexible and malleable like a jellyfish, resilient and light like the bouncing ball she played with. “Ama! Ama!” she sang as she moved seemingly nonstop around the rooms, galloping barefoot through their apartment. And Amhama answered fondly with “Liii-aaah-eeeh-iiih!” as she went about her own chores.
Each night Amhama left the child sleeping as she rose and got dressed in the deepest period of darkness and left their apartment to work her shift at the medicineal. She walked along the winding upraised streets illuminated softly with transparent lanterns, with absolute darkness pressing in from above, the sky and Basin a kettle of ink. There was no need to take a transport, since the walk was less than ten blocks along the largest street of Basin City. The lantern light dispelled the night and made it safe. And the patrolling police cars swept along frequently, hovering without a sound, their vaguely oval shapes skimming the air at street level. One of the cars had its security plasti-glass top down and an officer—familiar to Amhama because they nearly always seemed to share this shift—waved to her and then was on his way.
Amhama smiled and waved back, then drew her street jacket closer against the night’s dry chill breeze, and hurried, so as not to be late. The medicineal building was one of the tallest structures in Basin City, a tower of several hundred floors, and it loomed before her. Once inside, she entered the first sterilization floor, was cleansed and then proceeded in a lift to the two hundredth floor in the horticulturist section, where she worked with other growers of mammal embryos to produce human gametes. Amhama was one of the specialists with the highest experience in genetics and was thus often assigned to special case homo sapiens. Elsewhere in the building, the horticulturists developed other very occasional animal species and mostly plantlife DNA and created hybrids that were brought to hothouse maturation. Here, in the Special Projects section, were the unusual select projects, such as Liaei. Indeed, it was so easy to forget that Liaei was Amhama’s project, a unique responsibility, and not merely a beloved child.
“How is she?” Chief nurse Riveli asked Amhama every time as Amhama came to the section desk to begin her shift. There was never a need to clarify whom Riveli meant.
“Sleeping well tonight,” Amhama replied with an involuntary smile. “I gave her a kiss and she did not even stir as she usually does. I fed her the thick protein and melatonin-enriched cocktail before bedtime, and it seems to be calming her down enough to allow her to sleep within the hour of lying down. Otherwise she is still unstoppable.”
“You are rather unstoppable yourself,” replied Riveli, smiling widely, without looking up from the work display on her desk. “No one else in our section would have dared to do this thing, you know. To singlehandedly raise the Queen of the Hourglass.”
“Ah, she is just my Liaei,” said Amhama. “Not a Queen of anything yet.”
Riveli looked up, and for a moment there was a pitying expression in her steady eyes. “She is what she is, Amhama. Since the moment of fertilization. You know it since you put her cells together. She may seem an ordinary child, even though hyperactive, but soon enough the differences will become prominent. Her energy levels alone are but precursors.”
“Oh, I know,” said Amhama, and as though remembering, ran her hands down her own slender undifferentiated body, the line of her waist and hips completely lacking concavity. “It is just a nice way of talking about her now, while I still may.”
“Forgive me for being blunt as always,” said Riveli. “I just don’t want you to get hurt from yearning.”
But Amhama unfolded her sterile white robe and was putting it on, and had turned her back to Riveli.
The following year, Liaei had reached formal learning age, and she now accompanied Amhama to the medicineal every morning. To accommodate Liaei’s fragile sleeping schedule, Amhama had taken a later shift, and now worked starting an hour after dawn. They walked together in the dawning hours, the child Liaei harnessed to Amhama with a short safety leash just in case, even though they held hands. The air was cool and crisp with dryness, with occasional slightly noxious and humid gusts from the Oceanus reaching them here many meters away. The moisture was ephemeral however, for it immediately dispersed upon the wind and more often it was an arid breeze that swept along the surface of the skin. They watched the sky that started high above at the distant lofty edges of the Basin walls take o
n color. First, it paled from darkness into silver, then, as the Day God rose and engulfed all overhead, it became sudden flaming amber and the Basin was filled with light.
Dawns came sudden in the Basin.
“Look!” Amhama would say, pointing to a sudden flaring speck of brightness, a hair-line ribbon of light that began halfway up the Basin slope and culminated at the high edges.
“The River!” Liaei said, bounding along at her side, clutching Amhama’s larger dry hand in her soft moist own.
“The River That Flows Through The Air!” said Amhama. “Isn’t it wonderful and bright? We can see it all the way from here, when it is so far away. Kilometers upon kilometers.”
“Why is it so bright, Ama?” Liaei asked, while the dawn wind stirred her hair into brightness also. “Is it made from light?”
“No, it’s water, silly. When the Day God shines upon clean transparent water, its light reflects back into your eyes and mine. The Oceanus would be shiny too, but it is so thick with salt and chemicals that the light does not reflect the same way.”
“Is that why the Oceanus is so dark always? I hate it, it is creepy,” said Liaei.
“The Oceanus is nasty, but at the same time it is wonderful, because that’s where the last of our water comes from. Nowhere on our Earth is there any more water left, only here. That’s why we live here.”