The Internal Clock – free PDF version fromhttp://anadder.com/clock Creative Commons license – seehttp://anadder.com/copyright
3
"I bet I could, but I'm no performing primate. Besides since when is it your plan?..Clever thingyou did with the supply guy though, mentioning the idea of smuggling and then turning thesuspicion of blasphemy on him.""Thank you! he's from the fifth floor though, they all have the yearning for the Art. Supply peopleand the rest of the business occupations - they've never quite accepted the Chestnut. Non-allegiance is in their bone marrow even if none of them have been aware of it for centuries. Infact-""In fact you should shut up and concentrate on surviving the evening. Or do you have someulterior profit motive for smuggling me in?" The last sentence was a crescendoing accusation."I admit, profit has something to do with it-. Feisty are we? The Council will love you - the last of the Masters left, and she's a woman with the tongue the likes of which none of them haveencountered in their usual lives!""Well I'm sorry, somehow I missed the Tower School for Ladies in my formative years-- quiet,they're coming""Certainly, my gracious eminence."S smiled as she pictured T doing the mock salute she's seen so much of ever since the great Planto save the tower was formed.
Exactly
half an hour later, her box was carried by four men through the streets of the eighth floor. S hated being every second in every public thoroughfare or open space. It was being trapped in an all-pervasive ball of oppression made worse by the fact that she was one of the few that actually felt it. That and the unnatural smell of the social atmosphere that mosf nostrils missed. Even with her vision obscured by the fact of her being in a wooden box meant for chickens (complete with straw), it was still bad enough. She looked through the hole.Pockets of people lined the streets, walking, speaking, doing their crafts outside their habitations;eating, giving, receiving, roasting and consuming Chestnuts; raising children, getting married,divorced, hired, dismissed; handling small animals, building, disassembling. Hah! What people?This wasn't even organized or purposeful enough to be called a rabble. A bee hive, ant colony or termite hill had more humanity through the trait of organization. These people had noorganization at all, and little humanity expressed through individuality. S guessed that most of thefigures she saw through the peephole haven't had a clear head for over ten generations. A masswithout a purpose. There was no life-span. They may say hell lasts an eternity but this existenceturned out to be as close to the scenario as possible. All were like fabled moths that live for but aday. Except unlike moths that day was excruciatingly long and more pointless. They were born atthe proverbial 9 am (as most lived till 60 so there is a fairly neat scaling factor), taught till 2 pm(meaning it took eight years until something basic like a craft sunk in), married at 3 pm (meaningtheir initials were selected by the matchmaker randomly -- what point was there in matching people by character if there was little opportunity to develop some kind of human character?!),kids at 3:30 (a pregnancy being the greatest moment of clarity in a woman's life in the Tower -how unlucky the men were!), retirement at 7 and at last, midnight signaling both the end of theDay Most Pointless and a fading into the second oblivion. S saw everyone on this level of theTower, at all stages in their day - all the times and rhythms of the world mixed into a stew of nothingness.She saw a smithie bent over his anvil right on the street, churning out some clamp-like things.There were over a hundred scattered around him. About half were good, the rest were unfinishedwho-knows-whats; knotted bits of wire and intermeshed slabs of sheet metal. 'Twas almost as if he didn't know what he was making while in the midst of making it.
Leave a Comment