Damon Knight - Orbit 16

A concern for time is a characteristic most typical of humanness. Perhaps that is how we shall judge the alien species we will someday meet. Do they have clocks? If they do, if they are as obsessed with time as we are,--we shall nobly grant them the patent of humanity.

The exiles and refugees of our civilization must often surprise themselves with their adherence to the patterns that are almost a part of their genetic legacy. Even when they no longer wait, they wait. They note the time, feel the need of a clock. It is hard to escape one’s own madness.

A man lost where he knows not the local rites of Cronos has a special dilemma. He can estimate the advent of noon and mark thee limits of night and day as they are passed. But at any single moment he is at a loss. His lame guesses are only less futile than the knowledge that his wristwatch, if it has slopped, is right twice a day. In desperation he may seek to resort to the venerable expedient of the sundial, only to realize that he is not sure how to read one, and to remember their inaccuracy. If he is floating on the sea he lacks a screen for a shadow’s projection. If he is in the desert, he lacks even the stick to cast it. When he realizes this he will grumble and rack his brains, until finally he drops his head in defeat, and looks, vanquished, at the ground, only to see his own shadow.

Exhausted, Friedriche shivers. The fat tome under his arm has begun to be a fatiguing burden. He holds it in his left hand for a while, and then in his right. He holds it with his short fingers, spine up, then down. He holds it with his elbow against his ribs. He holds it in his armpit, and against his chest. He shuttles it from place to place on his anatomy. He tries balancing it on his head; he laughs. The transfers come more and more rapidly; each resting place is used up after a few steps.

The book falls from his limp hand, he drops after it, and lies, legs out, a T square. He leans back and his scalp feels the grating of the sand. He aches with concentration after trying to unravel the convolutions of Henderson’s thought in a long, long sentence. It refuses to fall into place with satisfying clinks like a chain when it is laid down link by link on a hard surface. He decides to read the passage in question over again. Doing so, he finds the problem, a key preposition he had missed. He smiles.

Language is not a natural element. But like sand it has granularity. It is not amorphous, but composed of discrete particles. Units of energy modulated by meaning, sometimes encoded in print. As with sand, the contemplation of the particle does not lead to comprehension of the whole. The contemplation of the whole may leave, still, the particle in doubt. The one can be many, and the many composed of indistinguishable ones. This is the paradox that Henderson treats of in his writings.

Friedriche lacks for nothing. He shapes himself to the circumstance. He sleeps in the oven and lets the sun fire him with a glaze. His surroundings lack identity and substance. Homeostasis is maintained within him; locked in his mind are its reference standards, templates for the truth.

The ancient Egyptians discovered glass in a primitive process that gave a shiny glaze to their pottery. It sometimes left a noticeable layer of glass on the surface of the utensil. They soon realized that if they made the glass thick enough it could stand alone, without the pottery.

Sand alone is very hard to melt; very high temperatures are necessary. Adding potash facilitates the process; lime is added as well. The lime, for the glass as for us, gives sturdiness. Without it glass would crumble, as without our bones we would collapse inward upon ourselves like the morbid white stars, to a cold, compact existence and a colder end. Many times have men likened themselves to pottery. What then is the glaze—the veneer of civilization, or an externalization of the spirit?

Friedriche retires, to anneal and fix in the cool gray heat of a sand dune’s shadow. Henderson has molded him, shaped the contours; the desert and the beach, the silent walk, run over and away from him like water, and leave no sign. Gradually he relaxes and slumbers.

Frierhoff is a master of metaphor. He rarely reads a page number, but gauges the progress of his studies by the thickness of the remaining pages between thumb and forefinger. So should lives be measured.

Awake and walking again, Henderson began to have hallucinations. The sand turned to ashes. Obviously, he had been dwelling too long on the symbolism to be divined in his situation, too long on universal metaphors and world views. Strange that he should have hallucinations now; the juice and flesh of raw lizard fill his belly, and his morale is high. There are irritating grains of sand caught in his mouth, and between his teeth. They grate there. He spits some out, but there are always a few left. He enumerates them with his tongue. His morale is high. Civilization is surely just over the next ridge.

Breaking his rule, Henderson counts aloud, calling out the numbers to the cupped ears of the sand. Not even an echo answers. Finally he hears his own voice, and telling himself that he has a sore throat, he counts softly, and then silently, but he grins. What matter if silica chooses to become a crumbly combustion product? All that can be counted is identical. Distinctions cancel out. Henderson traverses the lunar plain.

We mistakenly isolate Earth from the milieu of the galaxy because of the trivial fact of our existence on it. Some writers dream wild dreams of exotic worlds circling alien stars and perfunctorily dismiss the wonders of their home world. Familiarity has bred ennui. Perhaps we should leave the old place and hit the high spots in the next star cluster. Give the Magna Mater a chance to rest from the hectic task of raising her mad children. Let all the old echoes die, the associations fade away, until the silence of a world refreshed is untainted by a human noise.

The ash has turned to sand again. Henderson wryly considers the transmutation. It isn’t hard to believe himself an alchemist. Certainly the subtle book he carries is appropriately obscure and profound. His readings continued and he made regular progress. One night, after he’d caught a sand lizard, he added five pages to his regular program. He walked one hundred thousand steps. He was tempted to make the effort every night. He hurried to reach the end of Frierhoff’s book. The words slip by like the sand underfoot.

Earth and sky are one. There are rains that provide a tenuous communication. They drop stones and fish, frogs, angel hair, ice, and blood, signaling the dirt in some mystic code. In a wide swath from China to Australia there are one hundred million tons of tektites: aerodynamically shaped pieces of moon glass, the chips chiseled from the crater Tycho. And every day ten tons of meteorites and one thousand tons of stellar dust add their mass to the Earth.

In darkness relieved only by starlight, it seems to Henderson that he stands at the edge of the world. Behind him there is nothing, and before him, far at the opposite horizon, the sky closes around the sea. Die allumfassend Metapher is tied in his belt and hangs over his left shoulder. He stands slackly, in the manner of a schoolboy, and fingers a seashell. He throws it in the water. He knows it will come back again. In his mind he counts the waves that will pile themselves on the beach before it returns. Henderson puts his right hand in his pocket and walks on.

For men, time is rhythm. We divide time into discrete units, then count them as they pass. The ticks of moving gears and balance wheel, with the hands of a clock. The vibration of a quartz crystal or the resonance of an atom, with an array of alphanumeric tubes. Or the grains of sand that are the hallowed model for it all. We count them, not one by one, but as a whole. Thus is half a paradox resolved. Though the contemplation of the particle reveals nothing of the whole, the contemplation of the whole hints something of the indistinguishable ones.