Irregularity Read online

  The muse: she clicks her tongue in perfect rhythm, because this is how she comes to me. She touches my palm, and I understand her. It is more than blood: it needs more to it. It needs life. What has come from the cow is dead and cold, but I am the creator; I understand the weight that is needed.

  And we understand that we are the sum of ourselves. My blood, my design, my time: all of these things working together, in one beautiful unity. She touches my forehead. I am asleep and awake at the same time, and she is the silk of my curtains and my bedsheets and even of skin; the thinnest skin that has ever existed.

  I slice my hand open with my letter-opening blade, and the cut is sharp and straight: a line that breaks the skin but does no real harm. I do not think that I would even feel it were I not looking at the wound as I exact it. That blood runs out, down my fingers and into the box. I cannot tell if this is what was needed, but so it flows down. It ceases after a while — barely a percentage of the clock’s water itself, but still, it is there. Plumes of it; as a fungus. I shake the clock and listen to the dulled tick coming through the water, and I look at my hand, which has stopped bleeding; and then I put pressure on the wound, because there is more in there. I know that there is.

  I buy a medical journal, because my hand can only take so much, and I need to know where the blood in the body comes at its thickest. The concept of this seems so logical to me, now, that I can scarcely believe that I didn’t see it before. To take the body — such a perfect device of itself, and practically a clock, so permanent and constant is the rhythmic beating of the heart — and to somehow infuse my escapement with it! But the body has so many types of blood. I remember, years and years ago, cutting my foot when I trod on glass. The blood from there ran so weakly, but was almost ceaseless; every time I applied pressure, so it began again. But then, from inside me, the blood that I coughed up when I was lying in my bed, that was thick. It coagulated. Surely that is what I need?

  The journal speaks of devices used to drain blood in order to balance the humours. I am a man of science, I have to admit; my own dealings with such vague ancient ideas are long ignored. The body is a machine, of type, and it balances itself. But perhaps the tools used on the body in such instances might be useful to me?

  I send Yohann out to find me something that I can use. I am not feeling as though I should leave the house today; my limbs shake slightly too much, and my hand is greyer than I would like to admit, underneath the bandages.

  The drainage device is terrifying to look at. A clamp, two arms of metal, with protrusions that slide into the skin around the thigh, it reminds me of nothing less than an animal trap, left on the floor of the woods for unsuspecting rabbits or deer. And here I am, willingly putting myself to its jaws.

  The thing straps to my thigh. I sit in the chair in the workroom, trousers pulled to my ankles. My legs look dirty, I think, but that will not stem the blood when it comes. It is attached with leather belts that tighten to a point of near-pain in themselves, and the flesh underneath them swells with the redness of my trapped blood.

  On the top of the device, a lever, which I am to pull. This will lower the spikes into the skin; and, from there, the blood will drip down — or run, I am not entirely sure of the pace at which it will attempt to evacuate my body — so I have placed a bowl beneath, empty, ready for capturing. I must expedite transporting the blood to the clock, I think, because I am not sure how long life remains inside it. Is it while it is still warm? Does that make sense?

  I am not sure that I can do this, because it is one thing to be harmed, and yet another to harm yourself so willingly. In the name of invention, of course. That is what I say to myself. I do this in the name of invention.

  And I question, when I pull the lever, and the spikes slip into my skin and my muscle, and the blood pours, if I have entirely thought this through.

  She comes to me while I lie unconscious in the workshop, and she rouses me. She tells me, her fingers the essence of cold, that I am to wake up. She leaves trails of black on my cheeks, and she dances her fingers in the blood as it runs from my thigh, and she tells me that I am doing as I should. That a clock, I am to remember, is only as rhythmic as the rhythm with which it is constructed. She says, You put your soul into these things. Her voice is a echo through a drunken mind. She says, You are doing good work. Soon, eternity will be yours. She leaves me then, and I question eternity; because, if it never ends, what need have you for maintaining an awareness of the time in which you have endured it?

  The leather bracers holding the device in place have slackened, because my leg is thinner than it was. When I am fully awake — the grogginess will not leave, but I have worked in states far worse than this — I dip my finger into the bowl (tainting it, I am sure, but still this is my flesh going into it, which makes me feel that the purity of the thing is intact) and it is still warm. I remove the device from my leg. The spikes are so thin for so much blood! It flows again, when they leave my limb, and I attempt to stem this. I have got enough, I am sure.

  I stand, leaning on the table. My one leg trembles as though I were older than I am, but I am able. I heave the bowl from the floor and empty the contents into the clock. It threatens to drown the escapement, but does not. So much blood! How much can the human body hold, I wonder. I add water, because surely that is the crux of this? The blood and the water, mixed together. Through this, miracles are achieved.

  The mixture is thick. The escapement turns, and the blood-water churns. Fluidity, lubrication. The teeth of the gears click into place, silent inside this fluid. It works.

  I send Yohann — who despairs, and sobs, even as I press the coins into his hand — to book me another boat. This must be tested in the wild.

  Two seconds! A journey of near ceaseless sickness from my part, so choppy and unbridled were the waters, and only two seconds were lost!

  Yohann tells me that I should inform the society. They will want to know about this, and test it themselves. He says that he will take it to London. I am too sickly to go, he says. Too old. I tell him that my muse favours not the age of the man that she inspires, and he laughs. There is no muse, he says. There is science, of course.

  His answer to everything. But I agree. Maybe sending him across the continent in my stead is better.

  There is still work to be done.

  I wave Yohann off. I have taken to using a stick, because I siphoned more from my leg to make the second version of the watch for him: this time, smaller, far far smaller. It has not been tested in the wild, but the principles behind it are the same. There is no reason to suspect that it will not fulfil the task. If it can be as steady as it ought, the prize funds will be mine, and I can retire.

  But then, when I sleep — and my sleep is always fitful, a perpetual stream of visions of boats and seas and the arms of the watch face winding their way to some hateful, inevitable finality — she visits me again. She climbs inside me and inspires me. My task is not done. Imagine: two seconds! The tick is so constant and stable as to be close to infallible. But — but! — it could be closer. It could lose no time at all.

  The four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile. They are what, remedial science assumes, forms the balance of the human body. So, logic dictates, that if I am to search for balance — for a form of ballast, almost — using those things would only assist me?

  I build another watch. Smaller, still. Smaller and smaller I carve the escapement. No longer the drowned escapement, but this one the living escapement: created from that which once was. I turn to the journals, to see the easiest ways to extract the bile that I crave; and I let my mouth fill with the waters of my throat, hawking up from as deep as I can muster to spit into the bowl. The blood can come last for this, I think.

  I cough, because I am being so tough on my own throat, but that’s when the phlegm is best extracted. In the water, it congeals.

  Mercury is the best method for black bile extraction, say the journals, so I take balls into my system. I have
never felt such agony inside me! The tug and gnaw of them as I attempt to process them is violent. I lie on the floor of the workshop and I cradle myself. Would that Yohann were only here to see this! To see the endeavours that I am undertaking in the name of this most dedicated science! He would surely know that this was only logical and right, because even as I question it — and I pray for darkness, for the cold hand of she who visits me, who cradles me and speaks to me in her tongues of another life past this, and of all that I can achieve — I start to exhume the blackness from my body, letting it torrent into my cupped hands, overspilling into the bowl with the phlegm.

  Of course, it is not pure black. There is blood in there, as viscous as any I have ever seen. The bowl is full of a grey. I keep it warm, to protect the life that flows in there. In the morning, I feel better. Weak, still, but I find that the concoction has grown darker and thicker.

  It is time for the yellow bile.

  Hateful vomit! I lurch and quake to expel it, having taken in berries from the garden that I know to have the desired effect. Yohann, when he was a child, consumed them, and we spent days worrying for his safety. Now, I am in control, and this was the route of most ease. It is not the first vomits that I am interested in, of course, because that contains the little food that I have eaten; but what comes after, as my body purges.

  Yellow into the mixture, but it does not change the colour. The thickness is alarming; but, I know, it needs the blood to achieve completion.

  My other thigh is unmarked as yet, but then the spikes do their worst. I do not sleep this time, and yet still somehow she visits me. As my head lolls and I force my eyes to stay open, I see her. She creeps through the room, then wraps herself around my legs, underneath them; and she drinks from the bowl, lapping at it as though she were feline. It is nearly enough, she says. She says, I can taste your life, and it goes. Tick, tick, tick.

  The blood into the bowl, and it is complete. And then, into the watch. The escapement turns. It turns, still, and I know, without needing to test it, that it will not lose any time. It will be perfect.

  I do not eat, because I do not want to take my eyes from this new creation. She sits with me the whole time, stroking my hair. Her cold hands soothe my brow. For days all of my clocks are as they were, and then, after one final sleep, that changes. My new watch has stopped. The mixture is too thick, I consider; but then, it worked before. It turned. The pieces are degrading, I realise! Because they are not designed for the acids of the bile, perhaps? Because the coagulation of the blood is not conducive to their turning?

  The materials are too weak, she whispers. There must be something else. There simply must be.

  The escapement is of piston arms, and then gears of teeth. Replication is the way to creation; this we have known since we left the Garden, since our broods were born of our loins in facsimiles of our own images. This needs more of me, I know. That is what she has told me, though not in so many words.

  My teeth are loose, those that are left. I have twelve, which is enough. Two are abandoned, as they snap when I am prising them loose. The miniature tools that I had commissioned are, it transpires, the perfect size for the leverage required. I slide them into my gums and out they come. A collection: and my gums are so smooth. This blood runs thick in my mouth, and I ensure that I do not waste it.

  My most prominent bone is the ankle. And how round it is! How smooth, how apparent that it must be something that I can utilise in my clock! The shape of it is already perfect.

  I have a saw for metals that will find easier movement through the bone. And curious, when one considers that metals and ores degrade under the strain imposed by the body’s workings, where bone — so soft and malleable, of all materials — is able to somehow withstand them!

  It was to be expected that I would no longer be able to walk; or, perhaps more accurately, to bear any weight on the leg from whence I took the bone. It will heal, of that I have no doubt; and, until then, I have the workshop. This is, she tells me, all that I need. No sense in moving from room to room, attempting a sense of normality, when what has happened is so far beyond normal to me. This is inspiration! It is the very depths of what I have been attempting to achieve!

  The bone of my ankle-ball, shaven down and sliced, forms the three gears. Along the crest of that bone’s curve, so the gears become smaller still. They are, I discover, small enough to fit inside the casement that I have created for my watch! So small, and perfectly so. For the teeth of the gears, I have carved slices from my own detrenched molars, and these I have affixed in perfect symmetry. The space with which there is for them to lock between each other (thus forcing the turning of each subsequent gear) is slight, to be sure, but the mechanism works perfectly. Teeth slot together in a mouth, that is apparent — they grow and manipulate to form those slots — so why should the same not be true of this watch that I am building?

  She asks me if I am hungry, which I am not. Not that I know. She tells me, should I need it, that there is sustenance. The bucket; it cannot all fill the watch.

  Yohann is not yet returned home. Ha! What he would say, could he see my work! Bone and teeth and blood and bile and bile and phlegm: so the body is complete, transported. And see how this will work!

  She asks me where I thought, before this, that inspiration came from. She is my muse, and I know this; so I blame her. She takes this as a compliment. Here I am, weak and inspired.

  She says, Give me your all. She pushes her fingers down my throat, and I gag on her nutrients. There is more, she says. More of you.

  She shows me the pipes, from a douche. Simple as anything I have ever seen. I bore holes into the wood of the watch casing, and repeat my earlier sicknesses, for the biles. They drip from the escapement. I seal the box, and I attach the pipes, which are of a thick rubber, slightly worn but intact.

  She helps steady my hand, for the knife. No, not a knife; a scalpel. I use this to carve notches and whittle the insides of these machines; and how easily it slides into my skin, at my wrist. Quick, quick, the pipe goes in. It fills with blood. I have put a leather strap from the trap onto it, and I fasten it to my wrist, feeding the pipe inside me. The blood flows, a constant supply. Out of me and into it. Watch it. Squeeze the pipe; and how warm it feels.

  Harrison! Constrained by what he thinks he knows! What wonders could I have showed him, would that he had only been interested?

  She tells me that I have done it: a perfect escapement. It will never cease while I watch it; while I breathe.

  The watch does not stop while she — I cannot be sure that she is even human, now — stands behind me, proud of my work. She strokes my hair. I have not put a hole into the clock, for the blood to leave; to come back to me, where my body might recycle it.

  I have done only half of this. There is more, but I am weak.

  I watch the watch and shut my eyes. Thud, tick, tock; behind my eyes, the seconds go.

  The minutes.

  The watch stops. Oh never. Oh, never.

  The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle

  Adam Roberts

  “You will excuse me if I remark,” said Boyle, “how strongly I am struck by your resemblance to Brian May.”

  “I do not know the gentleman,” said Newton, attempting again to rise from his chair, but of course again failing so to do.

  “Of course not. My own acquaintanceship with him was but brief. We discussed the New Astronomy!” Boyle shook his wigless head. “The new astronomy. And is novelty the salience? When God made Adam and Eve, he made them perfect. Subsequent novelty in the generation of their offspring has produced only chromatic dissonance of skin and society! Of cutis and culture! Novelty must connote decadence, surely, or entropy is nothing?”

  Isaac noticed that, as he became agitated, Boyle’s Irish accent became more pronounced. “You promised me, sir,” he reminded him, “an explanation for my foul murder.”

  “So I did,” agreed Boyle. “And you shall have it! If only you m
ay comprehend it.”

  “I have not,” Newton said, pulling first his right hand and then his left against their respective chains to test the tensile strength of the links, “as yet encountered any marked problems in the realm of comprehension, sir.”

  “Of course not!” Boyle. “Oh but my admiration for your genius is sincere. Or for what your genius will surely accomplish!”

  “One does not usually express admiration for a fellow Christian, sir,” Newton noted with asperity, “by murdering him.”

  At this, Boyle laughed. His large and labile mouth opened wide enough to display the hump of his tongue. Laughing stretched his already long and narrow face longer still, emphasising his equinity. Even his laughter sounded like whinnying. “It is, eheu! on account of your very genius. Believe me, my friend, when I tell you the reason you will agree with me that it must be done. See! Plato!” He pointed with his gun at the monumental statue of the philosopher, away to Newton’s left. “He knew the truth.”

  “I know of no passage in Plato condoning assassination,” Newton observed.

  Boyle opened his eyes very wide. “I might clip off your ears with a knife, sir, as I saw in a play upon my travels. As —” And when Boyle sang, his voice was revealed as a surprisingly pleasant thing:

  Rustics to the left o’ me, jesters to the right o’ me, and I hither