“So, when were you going to tell me about your secret mine of Polishers’ Silver? I’m not jealous, but a wife likes to know where her husband has been digging.” Xiatokja waved a beautifully caramelized carrot to punctuate just how serious she was.
“My what? And since when have I been digging anywhere?” Xiatoktok looked bewildered. All he wanted was a quick dinner before meeting the Patriarch. His head was throbbing, a little better now than this morning, but he had been weirdly hungry all day. And this roast vegetable medley was not filling the hole, even though it was paired with noodles dressed with spicy oil and a bowl of crystal clear consommé.
“I have heard from no less than four sources that you arranged the Grand Renaissance in the Ramparts so that you could finally mine the deep vein of Polishers’ Silver you discovered all those years ago. To keep it hidden, you employ debt slaves in the harshest conditions. One person accused you of running elaborate, life or death gambling games, where the surviving losers were sentenced to the mines. Eternally.” She took a long sip of the consommé. “Buried Tears Mine, they call it.”
Xiatoktok just shook his head and got back into the noodles. The chew was perfect, and the oil really nailed the balance between spicy, smoky and fruity. He couldn’t eat another bite. He was still ravenous.
“Mind you, accused isn’t really the word. My informants looked worryingly excited by it. Especially the elaborate tortures and mutilations you subject the prisoners to before sending them into the depths.”
“Oh gods. Wait. If they are all tortured and mutilated, how are they going to meet their production quotas? I assume there are quotas.”
“Horribly punishing ones, yes, but I don’t think my informants really know anything about mining. The numbers were all over the place. You monster.”
“I truly am the worst.”
“No mine?”
“I have disappointed you yet again, beloved. How can I make it up to you?”
She pulled him gently over the table for a kiss.
“Come back alive.”
Xiatoktok presented himself at the gate to the Patriarch’s private courtyard at exactly seven forty three. He was expected, relieved of his heavy outer robes and escorted to meet the Patriarch. The courtyard was made up of four small buildings arranged around a little square, and the whole thing was surrounded by a modest privacy wall. A humble home, suitable for a yeoman farmer, in the middle of the city. Xiatoktok knew better.
Humble farmers don’t make their walls from stone quarried out of the ruins of imperial palaces. The flagstones were Second Swabian. The tiles gracing the walls of the Patriarch’s cloak room were the same tiles that once decorated the bishop’s cloakroom in the Cathedral of Dumpaline su Maz. Centuries of the emotions that came before and after leading five thousand souls in celebration of God. Twice a week. For a millennium. An outsider might doubt their authenticity. A Xia of the main line would feel the age on them like a radioactive glow.
The Patriarch was enjoying his garden. The courtyard had been converted into a flowering glade, just for the Patriarch. Heat stones had been carefully buried or disguised around the garden, to keep it comfortable through the winter and trick the flowers into blooming longer. The light, too, was controlled. The same light cores used in the greenhouse were employed here, though for aesthetic reasons the purple and red lights were omitted. The flowers were all planted in buried flowerpots, so that they could be rearranged and replaced at the Patriarch's whim.
Tonight, Xiatoktok was greeted by a blizzard of tropical flowers in full bloom. He vaguely recognized many of them from his few trips to the Southern Archipelago- five petals on the blossom, overlapping into an almost round shield with a seductive red stamen jutting proudly. The smell was incredible, dancing on the rising warm air before running into the cold winds above. The cold air made the smell precipitate, raining a tropical summer on those fortunate enough to be received by the Old Man.
“Busy days, young ’Tok.”
“I have managed to keep active, thanks to your support, Patriarch.”
“I warned you about inheritances. Don’t think you have seen the worst of it yet, either.”
“You did, and I will make considerably better preparations in the future.”
“Mmm.”
They admired the play of lights over the flowers. The gardener had a painter's eye- the colors evoked joy, but the textures of the leaves and the way the plants were clustered suggested struggle. Joy in the face of the coming winter.
Xiatoktok gently lifted a cloth wrapped package from the inside of his robes, and set it on the little table beside the Patriarch. It hurt to part with it.
“Oh? What’s this?”
“Something I have been treasuring for a long time. I think you might better appreciate it.”
The Patriarch’s fingers deftly unwrapped the cloth. A small book, spine carefully re-stitched, with a garish spray of colors decorating the covers. In big, careful letters, the words “Jessiline’s Diary PRIVATE DO NOT READ!” written in Early Swabian.
“Oh! This really is something special. Where did you find it?”
“Some prospectors found a little farmhouse cache in stunningly good condition. The farmer seemed to have been the careful sort, and his daughter apparently felt like adding her old diary to what they thought would be a time capsule. The rest of the cache was trash, but this…”
“I can feel the time twisting around it.” His old fingers gently turned the pages, admiring the doodles and crossed out words. Some of the words were very large, filling several lines at once. Others just stopped before they were finished. “Your progress in our Legacy has progressed far enough to let you feel it too.”
“Decades ago, yes. It was what awakened me to that ability. Totally unreliable until the last dozen years or so, I’m afraid. The diary has been my treasure.”
The Patriarch smiled and gently turned the page again. Oola had been a jerk. She and Jessiline were no longer friends. In fact, Jessiline never even really liked her.
“Describe your progression in the Legacy to me. Use your own words, don’t recite what you were taught in school.”
Xiatoktok gathered his thoughts for a moment. “It has become inseparable from my life. I don’t practice the disciplines any more, I live them. I feel the temporal weight of things as I feel the weight of my own hands. All the harvested time- I can feel it gathering around me. The Frozen World records the moments of my life, and I slowly find that I can not only strengthen my recollection, I can relive some moments.” This got a snort from the Patriarch, who flicked his fingers and urged Xiatoktok to continue.
“I have, exactly once, managed to push that time to work for me, accelerating the time experienced by a little fleck of chemicals for a fraction of a second.”
“And it cost you decades.”
“Yes, Patriarch.”
“And now you can’t access the Frozen World, and it physically hurt you to put down the diary.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Yes, Patriarch.”
“Hungry even though your belly is full? Headaches? Occasional bouts of paranoia where you come to firmly believe in the unreality of the world?”
“Yes, Patriarch. But not the last one. Just a strange hunger and migraine.”
“Oh? I always get the feeling that I am standing on a stage and the world is just a painted backdrop. Sometimes I see the backdrop shiver when someone walks behind it. Sometimes, when I am very, very hungry, I think I even see the audience.”
“Patriarch, if I may ask, what is this?”
“You said that you have been harvesting time. That’s not strictly correct. You have been accreting time, like a magnet dragged through iron sand. It is something that simply happened because of who you are and where you were. Most people accrue time at one second per second or less. You managed to collect an additional thirty years. Well done. But the palace of your abilities was built on a foundation of that accreted time. Remove the time…” He reached out and popped a flower blossom off its stem and just let it fall to the ground. Then he chuckled.
“A temporary setback. Our legacy is not so feeble.” Time
LUR
ched. Desrever.
tub deneppah reven ti ekiL
He did remember it happening! He saw
The blossom
Fall.
His head felt like it was splitting. What was that? The Legacy couldn’t reverse time! The Xia would rule the world if it could.
“Don’t strain yourself, all will be revealed. Think back to your lessons. What is time?”
Xiatoktok had to shake his head. He could hardly think.
“Space is time. Time is space. They are exactly as divisible as left is from right. Which is to say, it is only divisible relative to our perception of it. Our perception, our experience of time, changes, not time itself. It is only the limitations of our species that prevent us from seeing that we might experience time in the same way we do space. Not plodding in a straight line, but wandering as we please. At the very least, rising above the narrow path and placing ourselves where we pleased along it.”
The Old Man smiled and poked the blossom. The plant swayed back and forth gently. No harm done.
“Not that even the strongest Xia has reached such an incredible height. No, we just nibble around the edges of time. Since “time” as we carelessly use the word, is largely a matter of relative perception, we take control of that perception. That… lived time. All the rocks in this garden are millions of times the age of this diary, but the diary weighs more to our senses. Why? Because this was a person who lived. Who perceived time and interacted with that time. She was not merely subjected to it.”
Xiatoktok thought that sounded sort of logical, but right now, if he didn’t eat something he was going to scream.
“For example, I used some of my time to let us take a single step on a different path- destroying the blossom. Nobody cares about this blossom in particular. It was always going to fall eventually. Its weight in the world’s perception is almost nothing. It was a comparatively easy step to take. But even that little step, even though we pulled our foot back immediately, costs an immense amount of time. It takes a great deal of energy to step off the narrow path. I’m hungry. And I know you are too. So as your Patriarch, I think it is time I showed you how to eat.”
The Old Man raised his hand. The butler materialized from a shadow almost immediately.
“Refreshments for two. A light snack will do.”
The butler bowed and dematerialized. A short time later, a disoriented man was guided in front of them. He was staring around the courtyard. Xiatoktok could feel the wrongness of his time, like a tree shredded into fibers.
“Would you believe that he is a musical sensation, with thousands of adoring followers?”
“I can’t say that I recognize him.”
“No. You don’t. Not any more.”
“Pardon?”
“Watch what I do, then you do the same.”
The Patriarch pulled. Not pulled. The Patriarch became… more, somehow. More real. More substantial. Xiatoktok could feel the tugging at his time, at his sense of self, but it wasn’t too much for him to resist. The lost looking man was not so resilient. His time seemed to peel away from him. The disparate fibers were twisted into skeins and flowed smoothly to the Patriarch. The Old Man sighed contentedly, then turned to Xiatoktok.
“I have already shattered his time. You can think of this as me pre-chewing your food. You will find it much harder when you have to do it yourself. Now. Your body is telling you something. Listen to it.”
Something predatory was clawing out from inside of him. Something that understood that this wasn’t a person like him. It was food. It was to be eaten. He was hungry. Xiatoktok felt the hungry thing in him start clawing at the loose strands of time wafting around the food. He couldn’t get them to twist together, but a few of them drifted towards him. Instant relief. His headache quickly vanished, but the little specks he was collecting barely took the edge off his hunger. He kept trying and trying, but he never got that same twist and pull that the Patriarch managed.
“That’s enough. I know you are still hungry, but you can do yourself an injury if you keep flailing away like that.”
“I feel much better, thank you Patriarch.”
“Consider it a reward for your good work with the City.”
“I am honored you noticed!”
“Now that you know how to eat, go back and reread your school books. If you lost them, you can find them in the Archives. The Legacy hasn’t changed this epoch. You will find that there was more in those books than you realized.”
“I will do so immediately.”
“When I was young, every student was taught how to harvest even though so few of us ever reach this stage. Apparently it upset people, so we stopped. You didn’t come to see me about this. Why did you come, bearing such a precious gift?”
“I was hoping that you could secure approval for the reintroduction of the Joint Stock Company technology.”
“So soon after the Corporation was reintroduced to Cold Garden? Bold. Quick on your feet. Careful you don’t boldly and quickly step into a pit.” The Patriarch poked the flower again, as the confused musician looked uncomprehendingly at the garden.
“I don’t see any particular difficulty. It should be fairly easy to talk those old fogies around. Given the war with the Confederation, they will be delighted to jump on any economic efficiencies. Give it a month or two, you will have your permission.”
Xiatoktok bowed deeply. His eyes kept traveling back to the food- the musician.
“If I may ask, why does he look so lost? I don’t think he is aware we are here.”
“I shattered his time. His “time-” the time he perceived, and the time he has accumulated from the attention and sacrifices of others. He no longer has time, beyond a fleeting present. A present measured in the smallest amount of comprehensible time. Each instant is disconnected from any previous instant and vanishes before he can become disoriented or afraid. He remembers nothing, because he experiences nothing. The path travels in a straight line, but he is lost on it. As he loses time, he slowly fades from the world. He will never be completely forgotten. When we consume time, we can no more destroy it than we destroy our soup at supper. All the bits of his time that fell to other people will remain. But he will become less and less substantial. Less and less a person that struggled against time.”
The Patriarch smiled coldly.
“Read your books, and meditate on them. Goodbye, young ’Tok. May your coming days be a little less eventful.” He waved Xiatoktok towards the gate. “Oh, one last thing, consider it a final teaching for the day. You have started making investments and decisions based on the accumulated weight of time on certain objects or people. Don’t.”
“Patriarch?”
“The greatest accumulation of temporal weight I felt on a person outside the Clan was Mrs. Abaayee Solace, third wife of the Revealed Prophet Ben’Lam Solace, in the Valley of God Commune. They were a little religious community of about two hundred. Her every moment was a struggle to survive the infighting between the wives, trying to position her children for maximum advantage and defend herself against the erratic whims of her husband. The time she experienced, and the time focused on her, was extraordinary, and extraordinary constant. A spring constantly tensioned by anxiety.”
The Patriarch lifted the corner of his lip. A real knee-slapper of a funny memory, apparently. “And she was nobody. Her impact on history and the broader world was nothing. Her line died within two generations, the whole community silently returned to the dust. So why, beyond the time she accumulated herself, did she weigh so much?”
Xiatoktok thought for a moment.
“Because she affected you, and you affected thousands or millions more because of her.”
“Every day, my scribes become a little more like her. Inspiration can be found everywhere. Read your books, young man, and think a little more deeply.”