The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,112

position of hands. That is a record of perfection as extraordinary in its way as a clock that has never once been wrong, for as you know, a timepiece that runs slow or fast will eventually mark the correct time, if only briefly and, as it were, in passing. Even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day. But our clock, to the extent it has been observed, has never, ever been right.’

‘Not once? For that to be true, the hands would have to move backwards as well as forwards!’

‘And so they do, back and forward and back again, as if time were as capricious as the wind. The minute and hour hands often move in opposite directions, at disproportional rates. Have you ever encountered such a marvel, Herr Gray?’

‘I confess I have not.’

‘Surely you can see that to repair such a clock would be tantamount to destroying it.’

‘I don’t agree. To impose order upon this chaos would be—’

Doppler interrupted, leaning towards me intently. ‘But there is already order here, Herr Gray.’

‘If by order you mean the clock’s record of being consistently and invariably wrong, I suppose I must grant you the point in a philosophical sense. But it is an impractical sort of order, to be sure.’

‘Are all things to be judged by their practicality? What about a painting, a statue? Does not a different standard apply to such works of art, one of beauty rather than utility?’

‘Even beauty has its uses, Herr Doppler, if only to give us pleasure. But the highest art unites beauty and utility. What, after all, is more beautiful and useful than a well-made clock? An accurate clock is beautiful in its functioning, regardless of the trappings in which it is set. A timepiece that embraces inaccuracy, however beautiful in appearance and impressive in design, is a perversion of the true clockmaker’s art, which, after all, seeks but to reflect with ever-greater precision the divine ordering that men call time.’

‘A pretty speech,’ Doppler replied. ‘But have you considered the possibility that this clock reflects that divine order more accurately than any other?’

I laughed. ‘Now you are being absurd, Herr Doppler!’

‘To human senses, time seems to flow in one direction only, by a progression of discrete intervals, like grains of sand through an hourglass. But to the Almighty, whose senses are infinite and omnipresent, surely time is something quite different. An eternal instant in which past and future are equally perceptible, equally accessible. Equally real. Have I shocked you?’

‘The concept is interesting, but hardly shocking,’ I replied. Yet in truth, my hand trembled as I raised the mug to my lips and took a deep swallow, though less from shock than from excitement. I remembered how everything had shone with a peculiar blue light in my dream, and how I had associated that radiance with the sacred essence of time. What Herr Doppler was saying resonated with that dream epiphany, confirming my intuition that the clock had much to teach me, if only I could examine it.

‘No doubt you are well versed in all manner of horological speculation,’ Doppler continued. ‘Like Papist Inquisitors, the journeymen of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers are more knowledgeable about heresies than the heretics themselves, eh?’

‘Are you a heretic, then, Herr Doppler?’

‘One can hardly live in proximity to Wachter’s Folly without developing a unique perspective into the nature of time.’

‘That much I’ll grant you. Who was this Wachter? Did you know him?’

‘I was a boy when he disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Herr Wachter was not a native of Märchen. He arrived one day with his daughter. No one knew whence they had come. He was a clockman, a master of the Worshipful Company, or so he said.’

‘You had reason to doubt him?’

‘Not at first. He took rooms here, at the Hearth and Home, and began to ply his trade with such skill that no one thought to question his claims. He did not merely repair the timepieces that were brought to him, Herr Gray: he improved them. So it was that when he approached the burgomeister – that is, my father – with plans for a tower clock that would make Märchen famous throughout the empire, a monument to the piety of our town, he was listened to with respect and, finally, refused with regret, for he was an eloquent and persuasive man. My father allowed me to be present, and believe me, when Wachter spoke of the clock he had in mind to build, it was as though your own Shakespeare