Helichoidal
1 // Waterfall City
"What hour is it?" I asked, reaching instinctively for my pocket watch.
Malik took a step back. "Time for Kentrosaurus to hatch. Time to plant the millet. Time for the magnolia buds to open. Professor Denison, I'm afraid you persist in thinking of time as numbers."
-- Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time, by James Gurney
++++++++++++
Enit came to visit Malik in the morning of a crisp, classic Waterfall City autumn. The fierce deinonychus toeclaws clicked against the tiled floor of the well-lit, breezy Museum of Clocks and Sundials. A middle-aged woman, her hair shoulder-length and nut brown, her face wind-weathered, looked up from her inspection of a Roman sundial and smiled in awed recognition.
"Chief Librarian?" Her tone indicated a question and, though Enit was in a hurry, the saurian raised a foreclaw and clicked his way through the many ticking exhibits. As he approached, she turned and gestured to the case before her.
Ah. Enit nodded at it and turned to her, expectant, prepared to disguise his impatience at her fumbling of words. She surprised him, however, and reached out a hand to touch the stone pedestal.
"There are second hands on that watch, Chief Librarian. I would assume the outside world will only become better and better at measuring time in seconds." She looked up at the deinonychus and frowned, worry creasing her forehead. "What kind of person needs to understand seconds?"
Enit stepped back gracefully, and ducked, holding his head to his chest long enough to convey to her his similar ignorance. I know not either, my dear, he thought, and wished humans could speak deinonychus, and the same in reverse.
She nodded and, still troubled, looked again upon the exhibit. "Living by seconds makes time go by too quickly."
The chief librarian raised his head and clicked forward, reaching out with one foreclaw to rest it over her shoulder. Yes.
Still disturbed, she smiled through her confusion. "I'm keeping you, Chief Librarian. I apologise."
Enit shook his head and fluted a hopeful scale, then bowed properly and jerked his head at the door to the stairs.
"Good day, Chief Librarian."
With a farewell wave of his claw, Enit turned and gathered his wits about him as he strode on powerful limbs through the exhibits. Behind him, Arthur Denison's watch lay silent upon its blue silk pillow, atop the pedestal of stone. Stone that fell all the way to the core of the earth, and stone that was melting even as he spoke, rippling and rupturing because it had been wasting away before its time.
++++++++++++
"Malik!" Their conversation was to be in the particular dialect of saurian they both spoke fluently, but Enit allowed his to be sharpened by the worry he had not allowed the young woman in the outer museum to see. The deinonychus took the stairs down into the domed room with careful, awkward little steps. He hopped to the floor and straightened up, bobbing like a bird from agitation.
"Enit!" Malik pushed his spectacles up his nose and turned from his place a story below on the steps by the water wheel that creaked as the Polongo rushed through. Enit's sharp hearing swung him in the direction of the green and grey stenonychosaurus and Malik raised a claw in greeting as he came up the surrounding stairs. "I received your letter this morning; I thought you were to be earlier."
Enit snapped from frustration, not from anger at his friend. "Held up by a visiting Haven group."
A saurian less aware of Enit's priorities might have protested. Another hour would make no difference in the greater scheme of things, whereas inspiration could happen at any time and students were, always, the greatest resource of the educated. Malik shook his head and reached to grasp his friend's claw in commiseration. "Were they poets?"
"Not a lick of sense in the batch," the chief librarian growled. "Sharp tongued and eager only to receive, and not to share. Their teacher was appalled and will be short with them this afternoon."
Malik was tentative, turning to nod at the monument that spiraled to the ceiling. "Perhaps they were not all to blame," he suggested, and he could feel Enit's sudden, piercing gaze. The chief librarian was ready to seize onto this newest development, and Malik did not disappoint.
"There have been many youngsters who have stepped through my doors these past few days. None are more than fifty. They have never seen the scaffolding against the falls and they are worried. The rumors are circulating."
"A council meeting will be called." Enit thought best when moving and did so then, stalking around the wide walkway that circled the helichoidal geochonograph. He glanced back at Malik, who followed with rather less urgency. "I am a librarian and not an engineer, nor an architect, nor a mechanic. How could this happen?"
Malik stretched his neck, birdlike, and switched from authoritative lecture to gentle counseling. "I am only a timekeeper."
"They will ask for my recommendation." Enit turned gracefully on his tail and curtailed the range of his stalking to the immediate platform between the helichoid's waterwheel and the waterfall. "Counsel me."
The timekeeper stretched once more and stepped away from Enit, measuring his words with care. "We are the citizens of this proud city above the falls, are we not?" he asked, softly, rhetorically. Enit stopped moving in that way only carnivores can do; he became still as a statue, self composed and silent, waiting, listening. Malik continued: "And so, it is not impossible that we have reacted with haste because this is our home and the place in which we raise our families."
Enit gave a nod, a single jerk of his elegant head in agreement.
"My counsel is thus." Malik peered over the stone wall that kept the water in its course over the edge of the waterfall that became a thundering, mist shrouded morass far below. "When has nature ever run perfectly to time? The best calendars rely on leap days and tweaked seconds over thousands of years. If we are so emotional because this is our home, then why do we turn to the clocks and say, first of all, that it has only been sixty years since the last time the waters speared the cliffs this deeply and therefore assume the problem does not exist?"
This last the timekeeper said with his fluting dropped low, for footsteps were taking the stairs from the Museum into the spherical dome beneath the One Earth Globe; he and Enit shared a long, contemplating look, and then the deinonychus turned away.
"You forget, Timekeeper, that we must look to the future. We must know when to become worried. When an esteemed brachiosaur breaks her hip, we have waited too long. We have an obligation to our people to keep them safe. Sixty years." He said the words and shook his head, agitated once more. "Sixty years! How can we take on a project of this magnitude twice a decade?"
Malik's beak lifted in a sad smile. "You are short-sighted for all your age, Enit. If Sauropolis is the center of paperwork on this island, Waterfall City is the center of wonders. Ask for help and they will come, flocking to you like migrating birds across the seas. They will come, they will be strong, they will take the hammers, and they will make the walls of this city strong once more."
Enit paused on the stairs but did not look behind him. His tailtip twitched and he finally muttered, a guttural snarl from the primitive jungle whence his ancestors had come centuries before: "Sixty years!"
++++++++++++
Malik welcomed into the spherical room the pack of young maiasaurs and their human friends. He explained the facilities, how the waterwheel moved the geochronograph and the origins of this philosophy of time. They were all well behaved, though easily distracted, and he found himself relaxing after the odd meeting with the chief librarian. They had been friends for years, well respected by everyone in the city and by most across the island at large, but still there were things in which they disagreed.
"Some persist in thinking of time as only circular," he told his young charges. "And others persist in thinking of time as linear. From point A to point B, as it were." He turned to wave a claw. "Put the two thoughts together and you have what we have here..."
His lecture was well received and all of the youngsters were willing to be herded back up the steps into the Museum. Malik turned with a sigh of relief when the last cheeky burgundy maia child vanished around the bend. They were trained enough not to break anything and so he appreciated them, but their questions were always fascinating and they left the timekeeper drained. Perhaps, he considered, wandering back into the room-beneath-the-dome, it was time he stepped out to the new Thermalan cafe up Fountain Avenue near Sauropod Square.
He squawked surprise as he saw the thin, barefoot boy who still stood, alone, gazing up at the helichoid chronograph from behind the water wheel. Malik could see his slender, short frame clad in a grey tunic and blue pants through the slats of wood revolving, rising past his face.
Malik opened his beak but found himself without words. He knew maia and those children has translated, but this boy did not have a saurian partner with whom he could speak. The timekeeper remained frozen as the boy reached up with one thin hand to brush back his shaggy blond curls from his face; he turned and walked silently around the observation deck, gazing up at the great spiraling monument. Malik watched the boy's pale blue eyes tracking the pulleys and the joints of the attached metal machine; he caught the boy's lips moving and wondered if he were speaking and could not be heard over the waterfall, or if what he said was for himself alone.
What do you see?
The boy's face creased in concentration and his lips moved soundlessly; Malik could not step forward. The boy counted, slowly, his forehead creased, the effort painful for him.
Time is circular. The thought surfaced, suddenly, and Malik pounced on it, followed it through to its conclusion. You have been here before, and it was not you. It may be you once again, but it may be only an illusion. There is no way to know. We live only in the here and now. Many a philosopher dreams the future and the historian the past, but for the timekeepers everything would be gone, lost, derelict.
The elderly timekeeper said nothing, only watched the boy watch the helichoid; waiting for the realisation of the unraveling, circular yet linear, unfolding future of time itself. Moments later, the boy's lips froze and he raised an unaware hand again to brush away his curls, still gazing at the monument. He looked down at the waterfall rushing over the edge and Malik wondered what he saw.
Are you good at carpentry, boy? Masonry? Engineering? Design? Architecture? Moving bricks? Manual labor?
The boy looked at his fingers and, once more, back up at the helichoid. He gave one last cursory inspection of the island's history and the island's future. Malik realises that he, the timekeeper, must move soon, must go and find himself some lunch. Is this how Enit feels, when the student poets come and his presence is requested elsewhere?
Unaware of his intentions, Malik trilled softly over the rushing water of the falls and the creaking of the water wheel. The youngster looked up at him without fear or surprise, and held out both hands, fingers splayed.
"Today," he said. "I am ten years old."
Malik felt maniacal laughter battling its way up his throat and he wanted to leap with joy. "The year you were born," he fluted, instead, nodding up at the helichoid and feeling his mind race... The Dinotopian Olympics and the City Council meeting were held, Skybax Riders were commissioned, apprentices became masters, somewhere a craftsman made the best work he'd ever made, a dolphinback came ashore, two people had a falling out, two people became friends once more... but he could not find the words.
The boy pursed his lips, unable to understand Malik's language. He approached the saurian, though, and smiled as if he'd found gold nuggets in a rushing stream, reaching out to touch the timekeeper lightly on the shoulder.
"Everyone makes their own story," he said, without enmity.
Malik followed him onto the Museum floor and out the doors onto Fountain Avenue. The boy waited in the street, resting his bare feet in a patch of shade provided by overhanging gutters, while Malik turned his 'gone to eat' sign in the door. They walked together, without speaking, past two laughing jewelsmiths and around the corner towards Sauropod Square.
1 // Waterfall City
"What hour is it?" I asked, reaching instinctively for my pocket watch.
Malik took a step back. "Time for Kentrosaurus to hatch. Time to plant the millet. Time for the magnolia buds to open. Professor Denison, I'm afraid you persist in thinking of time as numbers."
-- Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time, by James Gurney
++++++++++++
Enit came to visit Malik in the morning of a crisp, classic Waterfall City autumn. The fierce deinonychus toeclaws clicked against the tiled floor of the well-lit, breezy Museum of Clocks and Sundials. A middle-aged woman, her hair shoulder-length and nut brown, her face wind-weathered, looked up from her inspection of a Roman sundial and smiled in awed recognition.
"Chief Librarian?" Her tone indicated a question and, though Enit was in a hurry, the saurian raised a foreclaw and clicked his way through the many ticking exhibits. As he approached, she turned and gestured to the case before her.
Ah. Enit nodded at it and turned to her, expectant, prepared to disguise his impatience at her fumbling of words. She surprised him, however, and reached out a hand to touch the stone pedestal.
"There are second hands on that watch, Chief Librarian. I would assume the outside world will only become better and better at measuring time in seconds." She looked up at the deinonychus and frowned, worry creasing her forehead. "What kind of person needs to understand seconds?"
Enit stepped back gracefully, and ducked, holding his head to his chest long enough to convey to her his similar ignorance. I know not either, my dear, he thought, and wished humans could speak deinonychus, and the same in reverse.
She nodded and, still troubled, looked again upon the exhibit. "Living by seconds makes time go by too quickly."
The chief librarian raised his head and clicked forward, reaching out with one foreclaw to rest it over her shoulder. Yes.
Still disturbed, she smiled through her confusion. "I'm keeping you, Chief Librarian. I apologise."
Enit shook his head and fluted a hopeful scale, then bowed properly and jerked his head at the door to the stairs.
"Good day, Chief Librarian."
With a farewell wave of his claw, Enit turned and gathered his wits about him as he strode on powerful limbs through the exhibits. Behind him, Arthur Denison's watch lay silent upon its blue silk pillow, atop the pedestal of stone. Stone that fell all the way to the core of the earth, and stone that was melting even as he spoke, rippling and rupturing because it had been wasting away before its time.
++++++++++++
"Malik!" Their conversation was to be in the particular dialect of saurian they both spoke fluently, but Enit allowed his to be sharpened by the worry he had not allowed the young woman in the outer museum to see. The deinonychus took the stairs down into the domed room with careful, awkward little steps. He hopped to the floor and straightened up, bobbing like a bird from agitation.
"Enit!" Malik pushed his spectacles up his nose and turned from his place a story below on the steps by the water wheel that creaked as the Polongo rushed through. Enit's sharp hearing swung him in the direction of the green and grey stenonychosaurus and Malik raised a claw in greeting as he came up the surrounding stairs. "I received your letter this morning; I thought you were to be earlier."
Enit snapped from frustration, not from anger at his friend. "Held up by a visiting Haven group."
A saurian less aware of Enit's priorities might have protested. Another hour would make no difference in the greater scheme of things, whereas inspiration could happen at any time and students were, always, the greatest resource of the educated. Malik shook his head and reached to grasp his friend's claw in commiseration. "Were they poets?"
"Not a lick of sense in the batch," the chief librarian growled. "Sharp tongued and eager only to receive, and not to share. Their teacher was appalled and will be short with them this afternoon."
Malik was tentative, turning to nod at the monument that spiraled to the ceiling. "Perhaps they were not all to blame," he suggested, and he could feel Enit's sudden, piercing gaze. The chief librarian was ready to seize onto this newest development, and Malik did not disappoint.
"There have been many youngsters who have stepped through my doors these past few days. None are more than fifty. They have never seen the scaffolding against the falls and they are worried. The rumors are circulating."
"A council meeting will be called." Enit thought best when moving and did so then, stalking around the wide walkway that circled the helichoidal geochonograph. He glanced back at Malik, who followed with rather less urgency. "I am a librarian and not an engineer, nor an architect, nor a mechanic. How could this happen?"
Malik stretched his neck, birdlike, and switched from authoritative lecture to gentle counseling. "I am only a timekeeper."
"They will ask for my recommendation." Enit turned gracefully on his tail and curtailed the range of his stalking to the immediate platform between the helichoid's waterwheel and the waterfall. "Counsel me."
The timekeeper stretched once more and stepped away from Enit, measuring his words with care. "We are the citizens of this proud city above the falls, are we not?" he asked, softly, rhetorically. Enit stopped moving in that way only carnivores can do; he became still as a statue, self composed and silent, waiting, listening. Malik continued: "And so, it is not impossible that we have reacted with haste because this is our home and the place in which we raise our families."
Enit gave a nod, a single jerk of his elegant head in agreement.
"My counsel is thus." Malik peered over the stone wall that kept the water in its course over the edge of the waterfall that became a thundering, mist shrouded morass far below. "When has nature ever run perfectly to time? The best calendars rely on leap days and tweaked seconds over thousands of years. If we are so emotional because this is our home, then why do we turn to the clocks and say, first of all, that it has only been sixty years since the last time the waters speared the cliffs this deeply and therefore assume the problem does not exist?"
This last the timekeeper said with his fluting dropped low, for footsteps were taking the stairs from the Museum into the spherical dome beneath the One Earth Globe; he and Enit shared a long, contemplating look, and then the deinonychus turned away.
"You forget, Timekeeper, that we must look to the future. We must know when to become worried. When an esteemed brachiosaur breaks her hip, we have waited too long. We have an obligation to our people to keep them safe. Sixty years." He said the words and shook his head, agitated once more. "Sixty years! How can we take on a project of this magnitude twice a decade?"
Malik's beak lifted in a sad smile. "You are short-sighted for all your age, Enit. If Sauropolis is the center of paperwork on this island, Waterfall City is the center of wonders. Ask for help and they will come, flocking to you like migrating birds across the seas. They will come, they will be strong, they will take the hammers, and they will make the walls of this city strong once more."
Enit paused on the stairs but did not look behind him. His tailtip twitched and he finally muttered, a guttural snarl from the primitive jungle whence his ancestors had come centuries before: "Sixty years!"
++++++++++++
Malik welcomed into the spherical room the pack of young maiasaurs and their human friends. He explained the facilities, how the waterwheel moved the geochronograph and the origins of this philosophy of time. They were all well behaved, though easily distracted, and he found himself relaxing after the odd meeting with the chief librarian. They had been friends for years, well respected by everyone in the city and by most across the island at large, but still there were things in which they disagreed.
"Some persist in thinking of time as only circular," he told his young charges. "And others persist in thinking of time as linear. From point A to point B, as it were." He turned to wave a claw. "Put the two thoughts together and you have what we have here..."
His lecture was well received and all of the youngsters were willing to be herded back up the steps into the Museum. Malik turned with a sigh of relief when the last cheeky burgundy maia child vanished around the bend. They were trained enough not to break anything and so he appreciated them, but their questions were always fascinating and they left the timekeeper drained. Perhaps, he considered, wandering back into the room-beneath-the-dome, it was time he stepped out to the new Thermalan cafe up Fountain Avenue near Sauropod Square.
He squawked surprise as he saw the thin, barefoot boy who still stood, alone, gazing up at the helichoid chronograph from behind the water wheel. Malik could see his slender, short frame clad in a grey tunic and blue pants through the slats of wood revolving, rising past his face.
Malik opened his beak but found himself without words. He knew maia and those children has translated, but this boy did not have a saurian partner with whom he could speak. The timekeeper remained frozen as the boy reached up with one thin hand to brush back his shaggy blond curls from his face; he turned and walked silently around the observation deck, gazing up at the great spiraling monument. Malik watched the boy's pale blue eyes tracking the pulleys and the joints of the attached metal machine; he caught the boy's lips moving and wondered if he were speaking and could not be heard over the waterfall, or if what he said was for himself alone.
What do you see?
The boy's face creased in concentration and his lips moved soundlessly; Malik could not step forward. The boy counted, slowly, his forehead creased, the effort painful for him.
Time is circular. The thought surfaced, suddenly, and Malik pounced on it, followed it through to its conclusion. You have been here before, and it was not you. It may be you once again, but it may be only an illusion. There is no way to know. We live only in the here and now. Many a philosopher dreams the future and the historian the past, but for the timekeepers everything would be gone, lost, derelict.
The elderly timekeeper said nothing, only watched the boy watch the helichoid; waiting for the realisation of the unraveling, circular yet linear, unfolding future of time itself. Moments later, the boy's lips froze and he raised an unaware hand again to brush away his curls, still gazing at the monument. He looked down at the waterfall rushing over the edge and Malik wondered what he saw.
Are you good at carpentry, boy? Masonry? Engineering? Design? Architecture? Moving bricks? Manual labor?
The boy looked at his fingers and, once more, back up at the helichoid. He gave one last cursory inspection of the island's history and the island's future. Malik realises that he, the timekeeper, must move soon, must go and find himself some lunch. Is this how Enit feels, when the student poets come and his presence is requested elsewhere?
Unaware of his intentions, Malik trilled softly over the rushing water of the falls and the creaking of the water wheel. The youngster looked up at him without fear or surprise, and held out both hands, fingers splayed.
"Today," he said. "I am ten years old."
Malik felt maniacal laughter battling its way up his throat and he wanted to leap with joy. "The year you were born," he fluted, instead, nodding up at the helichoid and feeling his mind race... The Dinotopian Olympics and the City Council meeting were held, Skybax Riders were commissioned, apprentices became masters, somewhere a craftsman made the best work he'd ever made, a dolphinback came ashore, two people had a falling out, two people became friends once more... but he could not find the words.
The boy pursed his lips, unable to understand Malik's language. He approached the saurian, though, and smiled as if he'd found gold nuggets in a rushing stream, reaching out to touch the timekeeper lightly on the shoulder.
"Everyone makes their own story," he said, without enmity.
Malik followed him onto the Museum floor and out the doors onto Fountain Avenue. The boy waited in the street, resting his bare feet in a patch of shade provided by overhanging gutters, while Malik turned his 'gone to eat' sign in the door. They walked together, without speaking, past two laughing jewelsmiths and around the corner towards Sauropod Square.
