Merina looked at the receding sun, which struck her as unusual. It wasn't quite following the normal pattern, but was instead going more to the south, toward an ocean on the opposite plane and an expanse of land on this plane inhabited mostly by fungi for lack of light.
It was one of Merina's earliest memories. The sky was bright, much brighter than anything she would see for a long time after. She was walking up a hill with her mother, and when she was tired of walking, her mother carried her. Eventually a blinding light appeared over the top of the hill, and she squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. "Look," her mother said. "A sun. It has traveled far from its companions to bring us light and warmth. We should thank it, and give it respect."
The town clock in Bardonhill had been kept for the last thirty thousand hours in the attic of the courthouse, under a leak in the roof. At least that was how long ago it appeared to have stopped, it might have been there much longer. The gears were rusted, and the pendulum was stuck on its pin. Usually Merina only needed to correct a clock by a few hours, make adjustments if it ran too fast or slow, and even if it was broken, she carried some replacement parts and could improvise others. This one, though, was beyond repair, because some bureaucrat thought that it was less important than the yellowing records of disputes over goat sales a hundred thousand hours past that filled the rest of the room.
"Many suns to you." The clerk who had previously let her in had given her an informal version of a blessing that was common in the region, but to Merina it was no blessing. It was only another sign of the oppressive rule of inexact suns over the rationality of hours.
Merina walked down the main street of the town to the inn where she was staying, and picked up a letter at the front desk. A town this size might be expected to have a couple of rich families with private clocks to adjust, so Merina thought that this letter was from one of them, responding to a poster she had put up on an appropriate looking wall in the market square.
Instead it was from the local athletic association, and it confirmed her ideas about the town's backwardness. They wanted to use her clock to time a foot race. This implied that there were no suitable clocks for the purpose in the town. Merina was tempted to turn down the offer, but with no clocks to adjust it might be her only income there.
She met the director of the athletic association, who was kind, and gave her tea, and seemed genuinely enthusiastic about getting marks for his members that could be compared against races in larger towns. The time for the race was set for the zenith of the second following sun; the director wanted more time to prepare and advertise it, but Merina had no desire to stay in the town longer than necessary.
When the specified sun was only a few hours away, she walked over to the track, which was one of the few structures in the town more than a block off the main street. She was instructed to set her clock on a table next to the starting line, and she waited as the runners started to arrive. They chatted with each other, and with the director and his helpers. Merina sat at the table feeling too self-conscious to join in conversations between people who had played and run against each other for all of their lives. Eventually, when everyone who was going to come had, the crowd converged on the starting line, and the race began.
As the runners came in, Merina recorded their numbers and times, and the excitement of race was turned into a task of writing as quickly as possible at moments, at other moments waiting forever for the next runner to arrive. So it was a chore, but she could lose herself in it for the time being, knowing that when she finished she would be able to leave this town and go back to the closest thing she had to a home.
"Merina, go to Stera's house, give her mother these, and bring back a couple of pies. And take this candle to light your way."
Merina dutifully followed her mother's instructions, but when she was out of sight she blew out her candle, and walked the remainder of the distance by the lanterns in the windows of houses, and by the rippled reflections of distant suns on the sea above. She became intimately aware of the shape of the ground beneath her feet on the paths she traveled regularly, until she could traverse them with her eyes closed.
When she returned, she hid in the pantry, lit her candle, and read tales of adventure in sun-drenched lands.
"What? Oh, the times are being transcribed onto certificates by him over there." Merina pointed at a young helper whose name she couldn't remember.
"I mean the whole time. The time it is now."
"Oh, here, look." Merina turned the clock to face him.
The man paused. "What are the first three digits? I know that I should know them, but I am not certain. It starts with a three, yes?" The clock only marked hours up to the thousands; keeping track beyond that did not require a clock.
"That's all right, I don't think most people even know the number of digits. It's three-two-five. Why do you ask?"
"Just curious. I went to Tempus Hall, in Ellone, once, a couple of thousand suns ago. I thought it was fascinating, the way they stitched together the fabric of history by keeping time comparable everywhere."
They talked for a while. His name was Sioddeck; he was half Ellonian, and an outsider in the town as Merina was. He was going to cross a nearby column that connected different peaks of the same mountain as the column she was going to cross. Since they were going the same direction, Sioddeck suggested that they travel together for a while. Merina decided that she trusted him, and it would be a nice change to have someone to talk with for a little while.
They left a few hours later. The hike was not too strenuous, but Merina found herself missing the horse that had been her sole companion for most of her circuit. She had sold it a couple of towns before Bardonhill, because it would be hard for a stranger who must abandon a horse in order to cross a column to get a decent price too near to the mountains. Slowly, they made progress, until Merina thought that she felt a bit lighter then she was lower down. At one point a panoramic view opened up, and the town below looked tiny, inconsequential.
They stopped and ate at a tavern in an group of buildings too small to be properly called a village. The prices were inflated, but Merina was too hungry to worry about it.
"Where are you from?" Sioddeck asked between bites. "Somewhere on the other plane, surely."
"Actually, I was born on this plane, although on a part colonized through an island on the other side. It was about as far from civilization as you can imagine."
"How did you decide to become a clock-woman, then?"
Merina considered it for a moment, chewing her mutton. "Once, when I was a child . . . ."
Once, when Merina was a child, her town was visited by pirates. This was a cause for some celebration. They were not real pirates, but because the empire of which they were a colony had declared trade with its rivals illegal, the people of the town used the term ironically. Merina understood a little of this, now, but when she was younger she had thought of pirates as a sort of fairy that came at irregular intervals, and gave children candy.
She was at a party with her parents and some other families of the town, with some "pirates" there as well. They gave her and the other children exotic trinkets, but Merina was not interested in playing with the other children. Instead, she lurked at the periphery of the adult's table, and listened to their conversations.
One of the merchants from the ship was talking about the fact that people were still coming into the house where the party was taking place. "There is, surely, a better way," he said in a lilting, foreign accent. He went on to describe a mechanical device that could mark out equal portions of time and cause a bell to be rung.
"A clock," the man explained, "would allow meetings to occur at an exact, predetermined time. Think how much more efficient your mining operation would be if all of your workers could come at the same time."
"How much will it cost?" the father of one of Merina's friends asked.
"To be sure, it will take a good chunk of silver. It will pay for itself eventually. But I'm not doing this only for the money. If I wanted to make a profit, I'd stay at home and sell ornamental clocks to the bourgeoisie. I am a missionary of sorts, for memory and history. Without a good method for counting time, both are confused, and records of events cannot be untangled into a sequence. Where the suns travel, they count the number that have passed, and although this is not as precise as a clock, there is enough to piece together a common memory of the past. Here you lack even that. With a clock, the details of the rest of your lives, of the life of this little girl, can be remembered and recorded exactly."
"When my father was a young man, after the Ellonian Revolution, war broke out between Ellone and Feulien, and Stenaria sided with the Feulieners. Well, the mountains across from here have been part of Ellone for as long as anyone can remember, but really it is its own country, with its own dialect. The kings of Ellone, and even the revolutionary Council pretty much ignored it, and the local town councils repaid the favor. But with the war, they sent soldiers into the mountains, to stop anyone from crossing in either direction. That was when troubles began.
"People who live in the mountains often have connections on the other side; my father was no exception. He was working for his father, in a cross-plane trading firm, the same one that I work for now. In his travels across and back he had fallen in love with a girl from Stenaria, on the other side of the columns. She is my mother now, but that came later.
"When he could no longer see her, or even communicate with her, he became desperate and angry. He drank to drown the desperation, but it was never enough. Inevitably, he got in a couple of fights in bars with nervous soldiers who were as troubled as he was, troubled by being suddenly far from their homes, in a place where people resented their presence.
"Tensions in the area kept increasing, and eventually a soldier was killed in some dispute. Several men were hanged in retribution, including a pair who probably weren't directly involved. My father saw the gallows, and recognized the face of an acquaintance. He also saw where he could have been headed, and he decided that if something drastic would have to occur, he was going to be in control of it. So he waited for a dark moment between widely spaced suns, and snuck past the soldiers. They were set up to watch for intruders from the other direction, and he was far enough past them by the time they noticed that he was able to outclimb them on the column.
"They could have shot at him, but they didn't. There was one flaw in his plan, however. When he got close enough to the other side, he saw that there were Stenarian soldiers guarding it. He would have been jailed or worse had he gone either way, so he just stayed on the column. He found a little nook near the midpoint where she could sleep. A hundred suns later the war ended. I'm sorry if I can't tell you the number of hours, Merina, but he didn't have a clock, of course."
"The nook in the column he dynamited and chiseled out into a fair sized shelter. He lives there now, with my mother, now that his legs are bad, and he has trouble getting around in full gravity. My sisters and I visit them every chance we get. I don't know if that answers your question the way you wanted, but it's the answer I have" Neither one of them said anything after that, and they wordlessly put out the fire and got into their sleeping bags.
Merina glanced at Sioddeck when he wasn't looking. She liked him; he was as intelligent and interesting a man as any she had met on her circuit. However, she could not stop to discover what might happen between them with time. Still, Sioddeck's story made her remember that she was missing something. Love like Sioddeck's father had experienced was alien to her.
The town's new clock tower rang ten times, and she packed her books away and hurried out of the schoolroom. She had planned to meet Sansho, a boy that she liked and that she thought liked him. She was going to take him to a cave where she liked to go to think sometimes. If he could understand what it meant to her, the darkness, then she could let herself fall in love with him, and keep the darkness forever.
As they walked, Sansho jabbered about mining methods, and how he was going to make so much money once he started working, and Merina said "uh-huh," a few times, to make it sound like she was listening, when what she really wanted was to be silent with him.
When they got to the cave, Merina led him far enough in that the light from outside was no longer visible. She blew out her candle.
"It's like the inside of a mine. My father took me along with him to work once. It was kind of dark like this." There was an awkward pause. They were very close.
Then Sansho kissed her, her first kiss. She closed her eyes, and then almost laughed, because she realized it didn't really matter.
"This is it, then," Sioddeck said. "The column I'm going to is to the left, yours is straight ahead. You're welcome to come with me, if you want. It'll get you across just as fast, it just isn't as well traveled.
Merina shook her head.
"Farewell, then. If you're in the area, come and visit. My house is half a mile down the road I'm taking. Brown, blue trim. Although I'm never there."
"Farewell."
Merina walked alone for another mile after that. She should have gone with Sioddeck, she thought, but she couldn't bear to see his parents. They might have been stuck in a cramped stone room in the column, but she would trade her freedom to roam through the planes for a real home for being loved like that.
Ahead of her, the mountain and its counterpart on the opposite plane looked like a giant hourglass, one that did not require her tuning, but counted the time perfectly, eternally, for anyone to see who could just penetrate the rocks and vegetation that encrusted it.
Although it was only a little cooler than normal outside, Merina felt the cold air soak through her sweater and into her bones. Her teacher had spoken with her an hour before, and had told her confidentially that there was nothing more that she could learn from him, and that there were enough students in her position that he was going to organize a graduation ceremony.
What would happen after that, her teacher did not say. But Merina knew. She would marry Sansho, raise children, and grow old, never knowing the world outside the mining colony.
Merina walked, going nowhere in particular, not even to her old cave, its complete darkness too oppressive now, when she yearned for light. She did not love Sansho. Not long before, she had been at a party to see off the latest group of pirates to dock on the island across from their town. She had danced with a young sailor, and wanted to melt in his arms, and seeing Sansho jealous did not bother her at all.
She saw one of the natives who worked in the mines as she walked. His ghostly pale face was covered with soot. This was how the outside world saw her and everyone in her colony, she thought. It covered them in a layer of blackness, and forgot about them, except to take the silver they produced. She looked up and saw the column to the island on the other side. She had been walking toward it for some time. She had one chance to get out, she knew. She might make it to the ship on the other side of the column in time to stow away or ask for a position on board.
She walked for what seemed like an eternity, and when the mountain sloped into the column, she climbed. The icy steel climbing wires bit into her hands, and her stomach felt sick when there was no longer enough gravity to hold it down. Near the midpoint, vertigo struck her, and the world turned on its side. Then the face of the column was the entire habitable world to her, trapped between two sheer walls. An instant later she turned again, and the island was down.
When she finally arrived at the dock, the ship was still there, and she managed to convince a man loading the last of its cargo to let her on.
--It's 33.21.
--No, it's only 33.20.
--Yes it is.
--Alright, I give in; it's 33.21.
--Not any more, it isn't.
Merina laughed, and dusted the face of the minute-lagging clock as a playful admonishment.
"What are you laughing about?" It was Jonidh, standing in the doorway to the storage room and holding a newspaper.
"Just thinking. I've been thinking about my old home a lot lately."
"Some news came in that I thought you might be interested in. They've put up a wire between the capitol and Rocheport. It looks like they can send messages almost instantaneously. One of the first things they did was to synchronize the main clocks of the two cities. Hmm. If this goes too far you'll be out of a job." He laughed nervously. They both knew it might eventually be true. "There's also something in there about a riot in a textile factory. Seems the workers were protesting against the way clocks were used to control their lives, and they smashed a few up, in addition to any other machine they could get their hands on."
"I've been thinking that I'm bored here, and I want to leave."
"You want to go on another circuit already? Are you sure you've rested long enough?"
"I'm not going on another circuit. I'm going home. I'll stay there for a thousand hours maybe. I never said good-bye to anyone, and I should have. After that, who knows? I might keep going across the ocean, visit the Trapped Sun and argue with historians about the proper correlation between its revolutions and Eastern Hours. Settle down somewhere before too long."
"Good luck," Jonidh said. "I will miss you."
A phrase came to Merina's mind, without the bitterness that she had associated with it back on the other plane. "As the Stenarians say, 'May the light of many suns count your time and brighten your path.' "
"And yours. Many suns and many hours."