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Крис Бекетт: Spring Tide

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Крис Бекетт Spring Tide

Spring Tide: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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A thought-provoking collection of contemporary short stories from the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award 2013. Chris Beckett’s thought-provoking and wide-ranging collection of contemporary short stories is a joy to read, rich in detail and texture. From stories about first love, to a man who discovers a labyrinth beneath his house, to an angel left alone at the end of the universe, Beckett displays both incredible range and extraordinary subtlety as a writer. Every story is a world unto itself – each one beautifully realized and brilliantly imagined.

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Outside in the world under the sky, my old friends laugh and quarrel, meet and part, have babies, go to work, take their dogs for walks in the park, watch TV and go to the pub. Deep down below them, I am pulling up the lino on the bottom floor, searching for hatches that might take me through to new and untouched spaces.

2

The End of Time

Eli waited. Behind and above him was complete darkness. In front of him was an empty arena. His fellow archangels around its perimeter were shadowy forms in the dimness, waiting silently, just as he was doing himself, for the performance to begin.

A single tall figure stepped forward into the middle. From the pitch darkness beyond the arena, a great sigh arose from countless unseen watchers, spreading outwards and upwards like a tide. For this new presence was no mere archangel, this was the Clockmaker himself. He stood out there for a moment, while silence fell once more, and then he raised his hand. Pouf! – a brilliant point of light appeared, suspended above them all.

Again that great sigh came from the darkness on every side and, in the intense brightness of that tiny light, Eli glimpsed for a moment the cherubim and seraphim out there, the dominions and thrones. Tier after tier, this whole vast angelic host had been waiting for all eternity to admire the Clockmaker’s work.

The point of light expanded rapidly, diminishing in brightness as it did so, until almost the whole arena was filled by a huge dim sphere, leaving just sufficient space round the edge for the archangels to keep their vigil. It was time for Eli and his companions to get to work, and they set to it at once, each one leaning forward to peer intently into the depths of the sphere.

Straight away, Eli saw lights in there. He saw great skeins of light, strewn through the void, each one made up of millions of little disc-shaped clumps of glowing matter that span around like wheels. And when Eli examined the wheels closely, he found that they too were made of smaller parts. They were tenuous structures of the most extraordinary delicacy, consisting almost entirely of empty space. These wheel-shapes were not solid clumps as they had at first appeared, but were so full of emptiness as to be almost imaginary: wheels sketched out in the darkness by billions of separate specks of light, each one following its own allotted path. And Eli saw that, as these little specks travelled round and round the centre of each wheel, waves of pressure passed through them, so that the specks clumped closer together when the wave reached them, and moved apart again as it passed by, creating graceful spiral bands of brightness that themselves moved round the wheel. Each tiny wheel was really two wheels revolving at different speeds: a wheel of specks, and a wheel of waves that moved through the specks!

Laughing with delight, Eli turned from the spectacle to point it out to the hidden watchers who were seated, row after row, on the dark tiers behind him. ‘Observe!’ he cried. ‘The same matter forms two separate wheels simultaneously!’

A sigh of appreciation rose up among the cherubim and seraphim, the thrones and dominions. But, even before the sigh had faded, another archangel on the far side of the arena was calling out just as excitedly as Eli had done: ‘Look! Even the smallest of these lights has tiny spheres revolving round it!’

Again the sigh in the darkness.

‘Notice how they also spin on their own axes!’ called a third archangel.

Another sigh.

‘And see how the whole spreads outwards!’ called a fourth. ‘This whole area is constantly expanding, just so as to be able to contain it.’

The Clockmaker had created Time, no less, and here in front of them, wheel within wheel, was the Great Clock that gave it form.

Sigh after sigh rolled outwards and upwards in the darkness.


Gradually the initial excitement subsided. The archangels called out only rarely now, and those awed sighs, rising in one part or another of the vast and unseen auditorium, happened less and less frequently. So rare had they become, in fact, that many aeons had passed in complete silence when the archangel Gabriel suddenly spoke.

He had been giving his attention to the smallest elements of the Clock, and had focused his vision to such an extent that he could see not only the tiny motes of stone that revolved round each star, but the surfaces of those stones, and the tiny objects that lay on those surfaces, and even the minuscule particles, wheels themselves, of which those tiny objects were made. And, on the surface of one of these stones, he had made an strange discovery.

‘Observe, Clockmaker!’ he said with a bow. ‘A new clock has appeared within your own!’

The Clockmaker had been busy elsewhere, but, hearing this news, he looked across at once, his huge blazing eyes piercing through all the intervening nebulae and galactic clusters, to home in on the stone which Gabriel was pointing to. Eli looked too, of course. The stone was a rocky shell, still molten on the inside, of a kind so common throughout the Clock that they could be found spinning around almost every star. Minor irregularities pocked its surface. There were little bumps and hollows, and, as sometimes occurred on these half-cooled stones, liquid water had gathered in the hollows. But Gabriel was looking into that liquid, pointing at objects so minute that they were as small in relation to the half-cooled stone as the stone itself was small in relation to the galaxy that contained it. These new, tiny objects took the form of little spheres, moving this way and that through the water.

Now of course stars, stones, water and specks of dust were all parts of the Great Clock, and, a clock being an assemblage of moving parts, they were meant to move in relation to one another. But the Clockmaker could see at once that what Gabriel had found was a new kind of movement, and so could Eli, and the other archangels, and the hidden host. These microscopic spheres weren’t simply being pushed and pulled by the forces around them. They weren’t just being tugged downwards by gravity, or lifted by buoyancy, or tossed about by the convection currents that kept the water constantly turning over.

No, the motion of these little spheres was something else entirely, for it was driven from within themselves. Chemical processes unfolding inside them provided energy to thousands of tiny fibres on their outer surfaces, and these fibres were beating together in rhythmic waves that sent the little spheres rolling and tumbling through the water in directions that couldn’t be explained by gravity, buoyancy or currents.

Along with all the other archangels, Eli could see at once that Gabriel had spoken the truth: each of these little spheres was indeed another clock in its own right. But what particularly fascinated Eli was the way they perpetuated themselves. They weren’t bodies of matter in the way that a star or a planet or a stone was a body of matter. Rather they were patterns that passed through matter, just as those spiral pressure waves he himself had spotted had passed through drifts of stars, or ripples passed through water, or sounds passed through the air. In every single moment, each of those minuscule spheres was simultaneously taking in new matter from its surroundings, and expelling matter from within itself. In a very short time, each one had completely replaced the building blocks of which it was made. And yet, like a spiral arm, it still retained the same essential form.

And what a form! There was silence in the arena and in the darkness beyond, and the archangels glanced uneasily at one another. They all knew that the Clockmaker hadn’t built these tiny structures, that they had arisen on their own, and were a purely accidental by-product of the forces that the Clockmaker had set in motion, much as the complicated eddies and cross-currents of a mountain stream are a by-product of its headlong rush downhill. And yet, accidental or not, there was an obvious fact in front of them which they could all see but none of them dared name out loud: every one of these little rolling spheres was at least as complex and as perfect as the Great Clock in its entirety. What would their master think about that?

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