Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

‘I’d have to say it was about-’

‘Nine hundred and eighty-two Twinmoons ago?’ The excitement was plain in his voice.

‘Give or take a handful of avens, yes.’

Steven focused his attention on the floor beneath the smallest wheel. ‘What you need, Gilmour, is a mathematician, and more than that, you need a mathematician who can tell you what Twinmoon it was when a miner named William Higgins walked into the Bank of Idaho Springs, now known as the First National Bank of Idaho Springs, home of the lowest-interest small business loans on the Front Range, and opened a basic interest-bearing account with more than seventeen thousand dollars in refined silver.’

‘And where would I find one of them, then?’ the Larion Senator asked, smiling.

‘It’s a clock,’ Steven broke in, too excited to banter any more, ‘but it doesn’t use a wound spring or a counterweight.’

‘If you say so,’ Gilmour said, sounding nonplussed. ‘Remember your telephones and calculators? I’m not one for higher-order maths quandaries.’

‘Well, this is one of the best, my friend. Because this clock uses the rotation of the world, the actual movement of Eldarn through the heavens, to determine the Twinmoon. It even charts them, up there. See those couplings, and those wires?’

‘Aha.’

‘It uses magic – although I bet I could get it to work with an electromagnet – because these wheels look like interlocking gears, but they actually hang here, just like this, completely independent of Eldarn’s rotation. They interact with one another, but they only interact with Eldarn on the aven.’

Steven interrupted himself, ignoring the gigantic ruined timepiece for a moment. ‘Have you really lived the last thousand Twinmoons without knowing the exact time of day or the exact day of the Twinmoon?’

Gilmour shrugged. ‘There are a few tally-fanatics out there who claim to have maintained an accurate count, but their sum totals all conflict with one another, so none have any real credibility.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Exactly how old? I don’t know.’

Steven looked shocked, then said, ‘Do you know the role that the mechanical clock plays in a culture? It’s one of the first steps in socialisation, centralisation and industrialisation. Business, city life and urban development, education, medicine and research, they all hinge on people agreeing upon what time it is and what time things happen.’

‘I know; I was there.’

‘Why didn’t you come back and start this thing up again?’ Steven asked.

‘I didn’t know how.’

Steven smirked. ‘I did.’

‘Show me.’

‘You see, if Eldarn has a north pole – and based on the construction of this clock, the orbit of your twin moons, the motion of your tides, the changing of your seasons, and a rack of other variables, we must assume that it does – anyway, if Eldarn has a north pole and you could suspend yourself above it for a full day with a writing instrument in your hand, what would you draw if you left its tip on the pole for eight avens?’

‘A very small circle?’ Gilmour guessed.

‘Top marks, but an even better answer is a dot, a spot, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree speck. The north pole, the south pole, too, for that matter, would rotate around the tip of your pencil, quill, whatever, forming a dot on the page.’

‘All right, I’m with you so far,’ Gilmour said.

‘Now, imagine you’re suspended above Eldarn’s centre point, its widest point: the equator. What would you draw?’

‘A huge circle?’

‘Right, the biggest circle you could draw and still be in Eldarn, and everywhere in between the dot and the gargantuan circle fits in the ratio between the tiny and the massive.’

‘Why don’t you forge ahead without me?’ Gilmour suggested, looking blank.

‘That was the tough part,’ Steven said, ‘and, as luck would have it-’

‘Good luck, or our luck?’

‘Good luck, for once! So as good luck would have it, all the work here has been done: the ratio has been calculated, and the mechanism put into place. I just had to figure out how to get it all back where it belongs.’ He cocked a hand on one hip and took in the strata of overlapping gears. To Gilmour, he looked like a grimy ditch-digger taking a break.

‘And it all hinges on that little wheel, there on the floor? What is that? An aven?’

‘Four, actually.’

‘Why four?’

‘These engineers were frigging brilliant – they knew how to measure avens exactly, and they did it every day, but they checked themselves twice during every four seasons, at the winter and summer solstices. You see, no one knows how long an aven is until someone measures it exactly. Whoever built this clock knew the longest day and longest night, and by using those lengths, dividing the full day by eight, and then knowing where this room was in relation to the pole and the equator – they knew exactly how far apart to space the cogs on this little wheel and the metal rods on this floor.’

‘So they didn’t measure an Eldarni day in eight avens?’ Gilmour asked.

‘Nope, they could be more accurate by measuring four avens and then repeating the process.’

‘So the floor moves with Eldarn’s rotation, but the wheels don’t, and the metal rods in those tiles on the floor move the cogs in this small wheel, the aven wheel, and the aven wheel completes two revolutions in one day…’

‘And Bingo was his name-o!’ Steven did a little dance.

Gilmour frowned. ‘And once each day, that rod sticking up there turns the next largest, the day wheel? And then the day wheel’s vertical rod turns one cog on the Moon gear every thirty days and the Moon wheel turns a cog on the Twinmoon gear every second time it rotates, because there are two Moons in every Twinmoon.’

Steven quoted his Larion mentor, saying, ‘You get it all started and it will go on for ever, like the Twinmoons.’

‘What about Ages and Eras?’ Gilmour asked.

‘I don’t have those figured yet, but I think they’re calculated by the interaction of those cables up on the wall near the ceiling. That’s a tough one, because Ages and Eras are specific to Eldarni time and I don’t know anything about them – I was only able to figure the clock mechanism, because I have some knowledge of maths and…’ Steven’s voice trailed off. ‘You old sonofabitch…’

‘What?’ Gilmour suppressed a grin.

Steven glanced at the door through which Gilmour had disappeared almost an aven earlier. His voice boomed to the rafters as he jogged towards it. ‘You tricked me! You knew!’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Gilmour followed. ‘Wait, Steven, wait! You shouldn’t go in there. It could be dangerous.’

Ignoring him, Steven threw open the door and cast a small light inside the empty closet. A cloud of aromatic pipe smoke billowed out. ‘Just as I thought: you did this on purpose.’

‘I knew you could do it,’ Gilmour beamed. ‘Magic is about knowledge. You deciphered the timepiece. No one in Eldarn could have done that, Steven, not me, Kantu, not even Nerak.’

‘Because I knew when William Higgins opened his account? It was October 1870; I’m not sure which day, but you could have come close, hell, even if you had guessed.’

‘But I don’t know the maths, all the calculating you’ve been doing, comparing your time to Eldarni time.’

‘I’ve tried to account for as many unknowns as I can. I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t know exactly how many minutes there are in an Eldarni day even after I’ve been here this long.’

‘You’ve had a lot on your mind,’ Gilmour excused him. ‘What’s your guess on the Twinmoon?’

Steven used his cloak to dry his sweat, then pulled his tunic on. ‘Based on a starting date of October 15, 1870, and something just over twenty hours in an Eldarni day, which is damned close, I’d call this next Twinmoon, the northern Twinmoon, nine hundred and eighty-five Twinmoons since Higgins opened the account.’