The Watchmaker's Daughter - a Short Story of New Avalon, the City of Steam

They were called casing houses; narrow houses that had been divided into individual living quarters that catered to the young attendants of the University. These buildings could be found on any side street down the hill from the learned halls of academia like lichen that grew on a down slope. Brownstone Avenue, a place that had no doubt been named ironically, was the street that I sought. It was a slipped gear from the school itself, and though I'd seen it on maps I had never been to that place myself. I knew it only from the return address on the letters I received once a month like clockwork. Or at least that I had received up until these past two months, which was why I'd come to see what had happened.

It was like entering another world from the quarters I inhabited. The smell of fresh paper and quality leather was like the bass beat of the street's song, with the occasional high note of fresh tea from exotic locales or strong coffee favored by those with heavy purses and light spirits. Styles marked those walking the pave as surely as plumage of the jungle. There was the tweed of the young professor who would one day challenge the lions of academe for position, the flex of linen jackets dyed royal blue as the sons of privilege sauntered along with the security that only the weight of gold can give you, and there was the occasional glimpse of soft, white lace at the throat of the shy freshman who seemed to flit from place to place as if looking for safety as well as to avoid being eaten by the collegiate tropics that blared with the calls of galvanic theory and tittered with discussion about slipstream mechanics. An easy place to get lost in, but also an easy place to get directions, as none were so happy as those given the chance to prove they'd mastered the geography of the hill.

After only a single wrong turn I found myself before the address in question. I wanted to blame the tremble in my legs on the walk along the hill, or the pounding of my heart on my exertions in transit, but I couldn't. I took a moment to breathe, brushing imaginary dust from my hat and straightening my best waistcoat unnecessarily. I could feel the Complication in the pocket ticking away like a second heart, keeping the time of the universe. It calmed me, and soon my heartbeat was matching the subtle tick, tick, tick of that fine gift. My composure restored, I walked up the front of 2412 and reached for the buzzer.

Before my hand could touch the bell, the door opened. The woman that looked out at me was a wilted flower, beauty drawn down by the weight of cares and the chill of a season that only it could feel. Her hair was long and dark as oak varnish, and her lips were a bruised red as if she'd been worrying them till they were ready to bleed. But what struck me most were her eyes. Her beautiful, almond eyes had turned the color of dull glass from which the electric spark of merriment and wonder had died and left behind a cold, burned out glaze. I had never seen Mai look like that before in all the years I'd known her.

"Hello Patrick," Mai said before I could speak, her lips barely quirking into a quivering smile. "No, nothing's wrong yet. Please come upstairs."

Mai turned and walked back towards the staircase, ascending like a ghost. I stared after her like a man in a dream, or one seeing an apparition. But this Mai I had never seen before, this somber girl devoid of laughter or joy, didn't fade away. Nor did she wait for me, so I hastened to catch up to her.

"Mai-" I tried to say, but she raised her hand for silence. It was a gesture from her father, old Makato, and it was one I saw from her rarely. It stilled my tongue, and twisted my guts into a knot of dread. She unlocked her door.

I'd often wondered what Mai's home would look like in the flesh. I had always pictured a place with hanging pots, silk tapestries on the walls and a meticulous workspace that bled seamlessly into her living quarters. And what I saw was that, or it had once been. The scent of dying greenery permeated the air, mixed with the smells of old tea left to mildew in forgotten glasses. Piles of cast aside clothes and half eaten meals littered the floor, and pages of notes written in a crabbed, hurried hand were scattered like a hurricane. Still more sheaves of paper lay in stacks on every flat place, and they were tacked along the walls like the scales of a dying dragon. And the thing that dominated the room was something that I would never have been able to imagine in even my wildest dreams.

It was surrounded by step stools and benches littered with tools both fine and blunt, and the thing hung from a heavy, iron chain like some strange, and malignant fruit. It was framed in iron, but there was no skin to cover the guts of its workings. Gear oil and a red, hydraulic fluid I couldn't identify dripped from it like a mechanical martyr left hanging on the gallows, the fluids gathering in buckets and bowls while a collection of dials and gauges gave readings and kept times I couldn't make a jot of sense from. It looked like nothing so much as a madman's watch in a world where time had gone awry. Mai stood near the thing, staring into its face as if she could understand what it was trying to tell her. And she probably could.

"Mai, what's wrong?" I asked her, finally completing the inquiry. Again she smiled, her lips trembling and her eyes shining with tears.

"Nothing yet," she repeated, the words suspended in mid air like the bizarre centerpiece of her home. "Sit down. I'll make us some tea."

"No, I'll get that," I told her. I'd expected to have to force the issue, but Mai was already sitting down on a stool and facing the bizarre, motionless pendulum. I set my hat down, took off my jacket and went in search of a clean kettle and some fresh tea. I found the latter, and had to make the former, but within a few minutes there was tea and I poured some for both of us. I sat down near Mai, half turning my back on the thing that clacked and thrummed like an engine filled with ethereal currents. We drank our tea in silence for long moments, me watching Mai and she staring off to someplace only she could see.

"I suppose that I should begin at the beginning," she said, staring into her cup as if it held the answers to her questions as well as mine.

"You don't have to tell me, Mai," I started, but she was already shaking her head as if she knew that's what I was going to say.

"Oh but I do, Patrick," she said, reaching out a hand and resting it on the slick frame of the thing that hung there. "If I don't, then nothing I do here will ever make sense to you. And you deserve to know more than I could put in a letter."

I sipped my tea and waited. I wondered if Mai was going to explain why she'd stopped writing after ten years. A breakthrough, an invention like this, I could understand. Though if it was the reason for her distraction, then I couldn't figure why she was so worn. She looked as if she had tried to fight time itself, to grasp moments and hold them in her hands like fine sand in an hourglass. Mai hunched in her chair, staring at the device, and I tried to see the girl that I'd met all those years ago. The girl not yet out of braids whose tiny fingers and quick mind could see into the workings of any device and find what was wrong. The girl who had spent late nights in her father's shop showing the sweeping boy how to fix his father's old timepiece. The girl who had earned patronage and position at a place where only the most startling intellects were welcome in a city full of great minds. The girl that I'd fallen in love with so many, many years ago. She took a single, shuddering breath and dragged small, porcelain teeth over her lip.

"Father once told me that you could build a watch to do anything at all," Mai began. "Watches to tell you the phase of the moon, the day of the week, the direction, the constellations above you, where you were... anything."

I nodded. Makato had been a master of the Complication, and his unique time pieces had won him praise as well as patronage in his own right. Some of his watches could do things that no other watch could, and there were some that said many of Makato's devices had hidden functions that only the old Celestial had known about. I licked my own lips and felt my throat tighten with the memories of the old man.

"Your father could," I said. "And I have no doubt that you could too, if you put your mind to it."

"Oh but I did Patrick," Mai said. She was stroking the side of the device now, her fingers running in slow patterns through the thick, viscous blood of the thing. "Have you ever heard of temporal prediction theory?"

"No," I said. Mai blinked her eyes once, pushing back the veil of tears they wore. Her voice loosened, and she began to sound more like her old self.

"I learned about it when I came here," she said. "Professor Durham said it was an extension of the idea of cause and effect. That if you could measure a cause, you could predict the effect. Like how if you knew a spring's energy would come out in small intervals that you could use it to drive an accurate timer. Do you see?"

"Yes," I said, turning and looking around the room at the mess. At the theorems and formulas that lined the walls like tattoos in the belly of some great beast. "And no."

"There are laws to time Patrick, just like there are laws to anything," Mai said, pushing her disheveled hair out of her face, streaking it with grease. Color flushed back into her cheeks and she became more animated. "And there are formulas that you can use to make predictions. Controlling for time, temporal forces, chance and error statistics, flux coefficients, space root theory..."

Mai trailed off again. Now her eyes went to the walls, but it was as if she could see something that I couldn't. As if she could look out into the great gaps between the pages and glimpse the meaning there that had eluded other searchers. She stared at the guts of time by pulling apart the scabs of theory that had scratched the surface. Her breathing came faster, and tears began to slip down her cheeks in slow, salty streams. She took no notice.

"It's all too much for one person," Mai said, her voice tight but controlled. "Too much to puzzle even the simplest action that way. By the time you actually plug in the numbers and solve for all the variables the moment's come and gone. So I built a Complication. The biggest Complication ever, to do one thing and one thing only."

I looked from the walls, the ever widening loops and scrawls of smeared ink that had torn paper as the universe was reduced to an equation. Time in all its possible eddies made a variable. Choice turned into something to be controlled for. I couldn't see all that Mai saw, but I had known her once. Known her before sorrow had come to live in her heart. And I could see a phantom of her thoughts.

"Mai," I asked her very softly, as if the thing she had made might be listening to my words from its lofty perch. "What did you make it to do?"

"I never wanted another surprise like my father dying," Mai said. "It was just a thought game at first. Something to do when I'd finished my school work and I had some time for myself. But when I started drawing out the schematics, started drafting the size and the functions, it wasn't a game anymore."

I stood very still and stared at Mai. I listened to the thing beating, pulsing as it measured the stardust and moonbeams that made up every day life. I watched as her breath slowed, relaxing to match the pulse of the thing she had made. Then she turned and looked at me. I had never seen eyes as bleak or as empty as hers were in that moment. Those were eyes that would make a man standing on the hangman's trap seem gleeful by contrast.

"So I built, and I refined, and I built again," Mai continued, leaning closer to the device as she spoke. "And finally I finished it. And I had to test it. I had to know if it was all theories or if it worked."

"Well," I asked after I'd stood silent, listening to the infernal machine's heartbeat. "Did it work?"

"Better than I could ever have imagined," Mai said, returning her gaze to the churning innards of her brain child. "My Complication had solved the puzzle. It told me everything I had ever wanted to know, and then some."

There was something in Mai's voice. A resignation that I had never heard in her before that day. It was like hearing a dead woman speak, and it sent a shiver along my spine. Then I looked at the thing, and the implication hit me with the force of a mason's hammer. Mai had been waiting at the door when I had come unannounced.

"Mai," I asked. "I have a question to ask you."

"No," she said softly. Even as she spoke I could see that there were tears dripping from her eyelashes, a shower of sorrow caught in the leaves of a beautiful forest. "I will say no to you, Patrick. You will scream and try to break my Complication. You will cry. Then you'll leave. You will write me letters I'll never answer, but you'll never come back to this place again because you won't lower yourself to that. In time you'll meet a beautiful woman that will come to your shop and ask you to fix an old heirloom. You will, and her father will send for you. You and she will wed, and you'll have a family of children. You'll forget about me, except on days when it rains, and when you check the time with the watch my father gave you."

"Mai," I said, trying not to raise my voice and failing. She continued speaking, the soft torrent of her words rolling over me like the tide.

"Life is mystery, Patrick," she told me. "And that's the way that it's meant to be. When you see how things will happen, when you know what will happen with your own life, then you've lost all of your sorrows. But you've also lost all of your joys. They do truly balance out, as any proper equation should. But once you've seen it... once you know..."

"Mai," I said again, my voice soft and pleading. I went down to my knees, as if I was begging her. Trying to fight against the strange sickness that I felt creeping into my skin, filling me through my ears like I was a simple flask. I groped at the pocket of my waistcoat, pulling out the small, velvet lined box. Mai looked at me, and her face was empty, drained. It was as if I was a stranger. I offered the box to her, and she shook her head in negation.

"No, Patrick," she said, the words gentle, but firm.

"Why?" I asked her, my throat filling with tears as fast as I could blink them from my eyes. Mai just shook her head again, weary of it all.

"It isn't meant to be," she whispered to me.

I leaped to my feet, my free hand curling into a fist. Mai simply turned her body, reaching her arms up as if in supplication to the metallic soothe sayer. I watched as the thing's slick innards ground on, and it drooled the heavy, red oil. It fell on her arms, spattered her forehead like some grisly communion. There was no cry from her, no more words, just the thrum of her charge burrowing itself into my brain and grinding as the gears devoured one minute after another. I nearly did it anyway. Nearly struck both her and that thing she had made. But I didn't, and I lowered my fist. I let the box fall from my hand, and I gently prized the watch her father had given me by the chain from my waistcoat. I looked at it for a long time. I heard the soft tick of it matching the thrum of the greater Complication. I left it on the floor.

There was nothing else to say, but I tried to say it anyway. I tried to tell Mai about all the nights I'd spent thinking of her, or all the things she'd taught me that would always keep her a fresh hurt in my mind's eye. My lungs heaved for air to scream at her, and my blood tried to burst from my veins, but no words left my mouth. I couldn't think of a thing to say in the face of her belief. In the face of what she had discovered. Finally I tried to think of something to make her remember me. Something that would ring in her ears and echo along all the years she had left. Finally, something came.

"What happens to you?" I asked her, the words almost inhuman as I tried to force them through a body already toxic with grief. Mai just shrugged, stroking the glass that held the measure of her fate. I turned to go, my heart pumping molten lead that settled into my feet as I opened a door that I knew I would never walk through again. I turned back one more time, hoping that she'd look at me. Hoping that this strange Cassandra would have departed and that my Mai would have returned in her place. But Mai just stood there, caressing the face of her Complication and staring into the spinning hands that weighed her damnation one second at a time.

"It doesn't matter," she said, the echo of a ghost who tries to describe the grave from the inside. "Without real life, breath is just a clock."


For more stories by Neal Litherland, check out:

Love is a Broken Clock- You can find anything in the Grates, if you're willing to look hard enough. In the sulfurous swamp men will sell virginity from a doorway, and buy your sin away so that you leave clean and hollow. You can even find love, and the price of atonement, if you know just where to look.
Tears of Pandora- Alchemist's Alley is a place where you can buy the dreams of kings with the purse of a pauper. But the moment you forget the dreams are whispers of desire, things not to be spoken out loud, your dreams can quickly turn to nightmares. So learns one, unfortunate young man who thought he had everything he wanted.
Dead Man's Bluff- James Garnett was just a wandering gambler who held no truck with the games of Lady Luck. Or at least he didn't until the luck he didn't believe in ran dry, and he found himself face to face with the ghost of his sins.
Monster- In a world where creatures lurk on the fringes of the known, taking and destroying what they want, there are always darker shadows. Things for those beings that go bump in the night to really be afraid of.