The Clocktower of Anachron

The dark hills east of the Diggings weren’t high, but they were steep and bare, and the road went up through them by a narrow pass. As Inquirer climbed he started to hear a sound, faint at first and then louder: ticking. Not one tick but thousands, all overlapping and out of step, some fast and some slow, like rain on a tin roof or a field full of insects in August. It came down the pass to meet him until the air was thick with it.

At the head of the pass the road went under an arch of black stone, and beyond it, in a high cup of the hills, stood the Clocktower.

It was enormous, all brass and dark iron, rising out of the rock like a finger pointing at the sky, and every face of it was covered in clocks. Big clocks and little ones, round and square, some with Roman numerals and some with figures he didn’t know, some with one hand and some with five, and every one showing a different time. Some ran forward and some ran backward. Some spun so fast the hands blurred. Some had stopped dead. The ticking came off all of them together and made the air shake.

The road ran straight to the foot of the tower and in at a great bronze door. There was no other way. Sheer black cliffs walled the pass on both sides.

On a brass plate over the door were the words: All Times Are Now. Enter.

The door opened before he could knock, and a man stood in the doorway smiling.

He was slim and handsome and of no particular age, in a beautifully cut coat of the very latest fashion. Or so it seemed at first. When Inquirer looked again the coat looked old-fashioned, and then ancient, and then oddly futuristic, and then the latest fashion again. His face was smooth and pleasant, and he wore a gold watch-chain across his waistcoat with several watches hanging off it, all ticking.

“Welcome, welcome! A pilgrim. How lovely. We get so few. They will insist on trying to go round by the pass, and of course there’s no going round. I’m Anachron. I keep this tower. Do come in; you must be worn out. You’ve come all the way from the past, haven’t you? From those dreary Diggings. All that dust. All those dead people.” He laughed and took Inquirer’s arm. “Come and see what I do with the Book. I think you’ll find it a great deal more alive.”

Inquirer hung back. He remembered Madam Setting’s warning. But the man was so charming, and the door was the only way through, and the ticking was so loud it was hard to think. He went in.

Inside, the tower was one huge hollow shaft with a spiral stair going up the inner wall, past galleries and landings, into ticking darkness. The first gallery opened off the stair a little way up, and Anachron took him into it.

It was a long room full of what Inquirer could only call living pictures. They were scenes from the Book, but the people in them moved and talked, and they were dressed the way people dressed in Mine-Own-Meaning.

In the first Paul was at a podium in a lecture hall, speaking to the Romans. “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation.” As he said power, the whole scene went up with a flash and a roar and a cloud of smoke, and when it cleared Paul was standing in the rubble, smiling.

“Dynamis!” cried Anachron, clapping. “That’s the Greek, you know. Power. And what do we get from dynamis? Dynamite! So the Gospel is the dynamite of God! Explosive! Shattering! Isn’t that thrilling? So much better than a dusty old word like power.”

Inquirer stared at the smoking rubble. Something was wrong with it, and for a moment he couldn’t think what.

“But Paul never saw dynamite,” he said slowly. “Nobody had made any. It was invented in… in my own grandfather’s time.”

“Details!” Anachron waved them away. “The word’s the same. Same root. Why shouldn’t Paul’s word carry everything ours carries? Come and look at the next one.”

The next scene was a congregation taking up a collection. A man was dropping coins in the plate and laughing so hard the tears ran down his face, slapping his knees and wheezing.

“God loveth a cheerful giver,” said Anachron. “And the Greek for cheerful is hilaros. And what do we get from hilaros? Hilarious! God loves a hilarious giver! He wants you laughing till you cry when you put your money in the plate!”

The third was a big stone building with a steeple standing in a town square, with Upon this rock I will build my church written underneath and workmen going up and down it with hods of bricks.

“The church,” said Anachron, very satisfied. “There it is. A building. Steeple, pews, organ, the lot. That’s what church means. Everyone knows that.”

Inquirer stood among the pictures with the ticking pounding in his ears, and found to his alarm that he was starting to like them. The dynamite was exciting. The hilarious giver was funny. The building was comfortably familiar. They made the Book feel close and bright and up to date, the way the polished pages at home had felt. His spectacles were growing warm on his face, and when he glanced down at his hands the faint gold of his lenses seemed to have deepened a shade, back toward amber.

He took Old Custom’s little clay lamp out and held it in his palm. It was cold and rough and very plain.

Not men like you, the old man had said. Not in your world. You’ve got to walk into theirs.

“No,” said Inquirer out loud. “Paul’s word didn’t mean dynamite, because there wasn’t any dynamite. A word can’t carry a meaning from two thousand years after it was said. That’s backwards. Our word dynamite was made out of his. His was never made out of ours.” He turned to the laughing giver. “And hilaros meant glad, willing, the sort of man who gives with a light heart instead of a grudging one. Paul says so in the same sentence: not grudgingly, or of necessity. It didn’t mean laughing till he cried. That’s our word, not his.” He turned to the building. “And the church in the Book isn’t a building. It’s people. Ekklesia, the assembly, the ones called out. There weren’t any church buildings for two hundred years after the Lord said that. They met in houses. I’ve seen one, in the Diggings.”

While he spoke, the pictures flickered and went grey. The dynamite smoke hung in the air without moving. The laughing giver froze with his mouth wide open.

Anachron’s smile didn’t change. But one of the watches on his chain stopped ticking.

“Very clever,” he said softly. “You’ve been to school, I see. Semantic anachronism, they call that one at the Schoolhouse. Reading a later meaning back into an earlier word. Very good. But there’s more than one way to tangle time, pilgrim. Come up.”

The second gallery was dim and dusty and full of old books in glass cases, each one open at a page with a card beside it in faded ink.

“Here,” said Anachron, “you’ll find the opposite trick. Since you’re so fond of the past, I’ll give you the past. Too much of it.”

In the first case lay an old Book in Inquirer’s own language, the kind his grandfather might have read, open at a verse of Paul’s. “I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto).”

“Let,” said Anachron. “You see? Paul was allowed to come. He was let. But he didn’t. Why not? Lazy, I expect. Or he just chose not to, though he had permission.”

Inquirer thought for a moment. “No. In my grandfather’s day let meant hindered. Held back. The word’s changed in my own language; it used to mean the opposite of what it means now. Paul was prevented from coming.”

“Ah, but you said so yourself, the old meaning’s the true one!” cried Anachron. “Always go back to the old meaning! Come and look at this.”

The second case held a Greek dictionary of tremendous age, older than the Book itself, open at the word hypēretēs. The card read: Originally, an under-rower. A slave who rowed on the lowest bench of a war galley.

“Now then,” said Anachron. “Where Paul says, Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, what’s the word for ministers? Hypēretēs! So Paul’s calling himself an under-rower. A galley slave chained to the bottom bench, sweating at the oar while Christ beats the drum! Isn’t that powerful? Preach that!”

Inquirer frowned. It was powerful. It was exactly the kind of thing that would have gone down beautifully in the parlous at home.

But he remembered Master Koine’s patient voice in the blue schoolroom: What’s the word doing here, in this sentence, in this man’s time?

“When was that dictionary written?”

Anachron hesitated. “Oh, a little before Paul.”

“How long before?”

“Some centuries,” Anachron said carelessly.

“And in Paul’s own day, did the word still mean an under-rower? Or had it come to mean something else?”

Anachron didn’t answer.

“I think by Paul’s time it meant any sort of servant or helper or officer. An attendant. The galleys had dropped out of it long before. Words lose their old meanings as well as picking up new ones. If I reach back past Paul’s day for a meaning that was already dead when he wrote, I’m just as wrong as if I reach forward to dynamite. I’ve only tangled time the other way round.”

The second gallery went grey round him like the first. The dust settled. Two more watches on Anachron’s chain stopped.

And for the first time, Anachron wasn’t smiling.

“You are tiresome,” said the Timekeeper, and his voice had changed. It was thinner, and somehow older. “Very well. Since you insist on keeping the past in its place, I’ll show you what happens when you do. Come up.”

The third gallery was bitterly cold. Inquirer’s breath smoked as he came in, and every clock on the walls had stopped, all at the same moment.

The room was full of people, standing in rows and perfectly still, like figures in a waxworks, in the robes and sandals of the Lord’s own day, the women veiled, the men long-bearded. When he got close he saw they weren’t wax. They were living people, pilgrims, frozen where they stood. Their eyes followed him. Nothing else moved.

“My faithful ones,” said Anachron. “They took your lesson to heart. The Book was written in another time, they said, so we must live in that time. Everything the Book records, they do to the letter. They greet one another with a holy kiss. They wear sandals because the apostles wore sandals. They talk in the cadences of an old translation because it sounds holier. They wash each other’s feet at every meal because the Lord did. They won’t use a lamp with a glass chimney, because there weren’t any in Galilee.” He gave a thin smile. “They’ve walked into the past so faithfully, pilgrim, that they can’t get out again. They can’t tell what was the Lord’s command from what was only the custom of the country He happened to speak in. So they keep the whole lot. And they can’t move.”

Inquirer went along the rows. In the face of one young woman, whose eyes were following him with something close to desperation, he saw a thing he recognized: the fear he had felt on Wooden-Literal’s barge, the fear of doing anything that might count as interpretation.

“How do I get them out?”

“You don’t. Not today. That’s a much later lesson on your road. It’s the bridge between then and now, and you’re nowhere near it. You can’t even tell the shell from the kernel yet.” He laughed. “You see? You can’t win. Pull their time into yours and you get dynamite and hilarity. Push yours into theirs and you get my frozen faithful. Either way the clocks are mine.”

He turned and went out of the cold gallery and up the spiral stair into the dark. Inquirer couldn’t think of anything to do but follow him.

At the very top of the tower was a round chamber full of machinery, wheels inside wheels, brass gears biting into steel ones, pendulums as long as trees swinging slowly through the gloom. In the middle stood a great glass dial lit from behind. It had no numbers, only two hands, one gold and one black, wound tightly round each other like a pair of snakes.

Anachron stood in front of the dial, and when he turned round Inquirer saw that he had two faces.

One was the smooth, smiling, fashionable face that had met him at the door. The other was on the back of his head, and it was very old, thin and grey and stern and deeply lined, with fixed, staring eyes like the eyes of the frozen pilgrims downstairs.

“Now,” said both faces at once, in two voices. “Let me show you my real work.”

He reached out and touched Inquirer’s spectacles.

The room spun. The floor went out from under him, though it wasn’t falling exactly so much as turning, and the ticking of ten thousand clocks rose to a single scream. When it stopped he was sitting on a stool in a small bare room with the Book open in front of him at the first chapter of Genesis.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

As he read, a voice in his ear whispered, Of course, the writer knew all about atoms and galaxies, just as we do, and was hinting at them. He believed it and read on, very pleased with himself. The room spun. He was on the same stool reading the same verse, and the voice whispered, Of course, the writer was a primitive who thought the sky was a tin dish, and the whole thing’s a myth. He believed that too, and read on with contempt. The room spun. Same verse. Of course, this was written for people exactly like you, about your own feelings, in your own day. He believed that as well. The room spun.

Over and over and over. The same verse every time, with a different time wound into it every time, and he believed each one for as long as the turn lasted. He couldn’t stop, and he couldn’t remember having read it before. He was caught in Anachron’s escapement, ticking back and forth between times that weren’t the writer’s, and all the while his lenses were going darker and darker.

I asked him on the wall how long he was in there. He didn’t know. A minute, he said, or a year. He said it was the worst place on the whole road, worse than the squall on the Babel, because there was no fear in it at all. He was perfectly content. Just the same verse over and over, through glass that got darker every time.

What brought him out was a hand on his shoulder and a voice saying, very plainly, “In the year that king Uzziah died.”

The room stopped spinning.

He looked up. Plain-Sense was standing over him, square and fair and steady, with his clear spectacles on his nose and a Book open in one hand. In the other, of all things, he had a surveyor’s chain, a long chain of brass links looped over his shoulder with a heavy plumb-bob on the end.

“In the year that king Uzziah died,” said Plain-Sense again, “I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up. You hear that? In the year that king Uzziah died. Not any old year. That one. The prophet tells you when. The Book’s always telling you when.”

Inquirer gaped at him. “How did you get in here?”

“I came through four days ago and got out. I’ve been waiting on the far side of the pass, and when you didn’t turn up I came back in.” He hauled Inquirer to his feet. “Come on. He’s in the next room winding, and he’ll notice.”

The bare room had melted away round them, and they were standing in the clock-room again among the big wheels. Anachron was at the dial with his back to them. His old face watched them over his shoulder with its fixed eyes, while the young one was bent over the works winding something very fast.

“He’s winding you,” said Plain-Sense. “Into his clock. Every reader he catches goes in there and keeps his time instead of the Book’s. We’ve got to stop the dial.”

“How?”

Plain-Sense lifted the surveyor’s chain. “With this. It’s the one thing he can’t bend. The links are the dates and places the Book gives. In the days of Herod the king. In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim. The Book doesn’t float, Inquirer. It’s chained to its own days. He can spin everything else in this tower, but he can’t spin that. When the Book tells you when, it’s telling you where to stand.”

Anachron had turned round, and both his faces were furious now, the young one red and snarling, the old one white and cold.

“You,” he said to Plain-Sense. “You again. I let you go once.”

“You didn’t let me.”

The Timekeeper threw up his hands, and every clock in the tower struck at once.

It sounded like the sky coming down. The great pendulums broke loose and came scything through the dark, the gears ground and shrieked, the floor tilted, and both pilgrims were thrown against the wall. Inquirer felt the time-sickness rising in him again. The room wanted to spin. His lenses darkened. Voices whispered dynamite and hilarious and under-rower and nothing they wrote has anything to do with you, all at the same time.

Plain-Sense was up. He swung the surveyor’s chain round his head and let it fly, and it went out link after glittering link and wrapped itself round both hands of the dial, gold and black, while the plumb-bob swung down and caught in the works underneath.

The hands strained against it. The dial groaned. Anachron shrieked and threw himself at it, clawing at the links with both hands.

“Inquirer!” Plain-Sense shouted. “Read! Read the Book’s own times! Out loud!”

Inquirer’s hands were shaking. He got the old black-boarded Book open in the lantern light, and the small white flame came up, and he read the first thing his eye fell on, which was the start of Luke.

“There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias!”

One link of the chain blazed, and the black hand jerked to a stop.

He turned pages. “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed!”

Another link blazed. The gold hand stopped.

He flipped on, wildly, into Acts and the Kings and the Prophets, reading out every time and place the Book gives for itself. When Gallio was the deputy of Achaia. In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month. In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar. With each one another link caught fire and another wheel in the great machine ground to a halt.

Anachron was screaming in both his voices. He tore at the chain, but every link he touched burned him. The two faces on his head began to blur and run into each other, the young fashionable face going old and the old one going young, until both were smooth and blank like a clock face with no numbers on it.

Then, without meaning to, Inquirer turned to the end of Luke and read what the risen Lord said of His own body: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.” And as he read it he understood why it mattered so much in that place. The Book wasn’t a dream or a myth, timeless and floating. The Word had been made flesh at a time and in a place, under a Roman governor whose name everybody knew. Suffered under Pontius Pilate. God Himself had come into history and nailed Himself to a date, and no Timekeeper alive could unwind that.

The great dial cracked from edge to edge.

After that everything happened very fast. The crack ran across the glass and down into the works, and the whole machine began to fly apart. Wheels jumped loose and went bounding across the floor, pendulums came down with a crash, and then the ticking of ten thousand clocks stopped all at once. The silence was so sudden and so deep that for a moment Inquirer thought he had gone deaf.

Anachron stood in the wreckage with his blank face. He was smaller than before, much smaller, and his fine coat hung off him like a sack.

“This isn’t the end of me,” he said, in a thin voice that was neither young nor old. “I’m in every age. Every reader brings his own clock to the Book. I’ll be in your next sermon, pilgrim. And in yours,” to Plain-Sense. “You’ll see.”

He went down through a trapdoor in the floor and was gone. Neither of them went after him.

“He’s right, you know,” said Plain-Sense, coiling up the surveyor’s chain, which had come loose from the broken dial. “He’ll be in every sermon either of us ever preaches, if we let him. He just won’t be in charge.”

They went down the spiral stair together. The pictures in the first gallery had gone dark, and the glass cases in the second had cracked. When they got to the third, the cold one, the frozen pilgrims were moving. Not much, a hand coming up, a head turning, a foot shifting in its sandal. The stopped clocks on the walls had started, very slowly, to tick together.

“They’ll thaw,” said Plain-Sense. “Slowly. Some of them, anyway. They’ll have to come down the road to the bridge like us, and learn the shell from the kernel. But at least they’ll be able to walk.”

The young woman whose eyes had followed Inquirer was blinking now. As they went past she whispered, “Which way?”

“East,” said Inquirer. “Through the pass. Stay on the road.”

They came out of the bronze door into the evening. Inquirer looked back and saw that every clock on the outside of the tower had stopped, and not at random. Each had stopped at its own proper hour. A good many of them were cracked.

The brass plate over the door had changed as well. Where it had said All Times Are Now, it now said, in plain letters, as if someone had scratched it in with the point of a knife: In The Fulness Of The Time.

“Did you do that?”

“No,” said Plain-Sense. “I think the tower did. Come on. It’s getting dark, and the road east is broken in places. They call the next stretch the Shattered Mosaic.”

In the last of the light Inquirer checked his spectacles. They had gone back to their palest gold, the color the Illuminator had ground them to at the spring. He touched the pebble in his pocket.

“Will you walk with me?”

Plain-Sense smiled. “I came back into that tower for you. I’d have thought that answered it.”

So the two of them went on together out of the Clocktower hills. Behind them the great dead tower stood up black against the stars with every one of its clocks stopped at its own true hour. And somewhere far beneath it, in a cellar under the rock, something small and blank-faced had started, very quietly, to tick.