THE TITANIUM ANGEL
An account of a day in the life of Sialia, Page of The Clockwork Court as recorded by THOTH.
And a new day dawns. Dark furnaces in the bowels of the engines pulse with a burst of flame followed by a steady amber glow. Whistles cry with jets of scalding steam. Wheels begin to turn, pistons to pump, turbines to whirr. The rising sun is pale but turns to gold and silver fire where it touches the burnished structures of the Clockwork Court. The awakening of the great body of the Court is echoed within the delicate avian body of Sialia the Page as his tiny gears begin to engage. The amber bulbs of his eyes flare with clockwork intelligence and his filigree feathers ruffle with a music box jangle that reverberates through the cavernous Central Chamber. Beside him the Lady Maria - the Programmer - stirs too and awakens. With languorous brass fingers she caresses his wiry down of copper, silver, and cobalt and in a voice of silver chimes bids him be about the day’s errand: to see that all is functioning as it should within the Court. Sialia chirps his assent and leaps into the warming dawn aether, his polished wings sparkling.
1: The Central Chamber
Sialia begins his inspection in the Central Chamber, the heart of the Clockwork Court. Steel chandeliers lit with incandescent bulbs hang from its high vaulted ceiling. They illuminate vast walls of polished brass, which are engraved with a series of detailed images showing the emergence of Enlightenment from the dark age of Entropy. Each panel depicts a chapter in the creation of the Court by its two architects: the Engineer and the Programmer. One shows the Engineer as a mighty colossus taming the Bull and the Bear, the two great beasts that dominated all in the age of Entropy, turning their energies to serve his nascent creation. Another portrays the Programmer, an elegant lady rendered in flowing lines, turning a compass as she engraves her design for the Court on a pewter tablet. Still another depicts the Engineer constructing the first Cloks - the inhabitants of the Court - and the Programmer assigning them their functions to contribute to its efficient running. Through tall arched windows can be seen the ashen Wasteland that surrounds the Court. It is thought to extend forever in all directions, only interrupted by the distant forms of the Rig and the Refinery - whose Drill-Cloks and Chem-Cloks supply the Court with its oil - and the Quarry, from which the Court’s materials are mined.
Sialia flutters around the Lady Maria as she begins her work, today refining a sequence of advanced mechanical learning algorithms. He admires the Lady’s smooth polished-brass plating, the intricate series of delicate pistons that power the precise fingers as she engraves mathematical figures on pewter tablets. Her full lips of rose-gold move slightly as she solves some of the more complex calculations, golden eyes glow with intense concentration beneath her cloth-of-silver shawl. This surface beauty conceals a mind of awesome and intricate complexity.
Now Sialia approaches the forbidding hulk of The Engineer (if he has any other name, Sialia has never heard it). The giant rouses himself, rising like a great armoured beast out of Entropy, flexing the thick cables in his limbs, shrugging the slumber from his titanic shoulders. The Engineer gathers his tools for another day of industry. Sialia flits around the Engineer, observing but keeping his distance. He does not know if the Engineer is even aware of his presence, but those mighty hands could crush him without even noticing. So strange to consider that those hands were what created him long ago, each delicate feather, each tiny cogwheel; hands capable of constructing anything from the most exquisite Arachnoid Repair-Clok to the vastest Mammoth Shift-Clok. Though much of the labour is now done by the Technicians in the Workshop, the Engineer still creates without fatigue from sunrise until nightfall, putting all his energy into the production of his great work, The Titanium Angel.
As the Engineer beats a sheet of steel on his anvil with his colossal hammer, Sialia examines him, seeing no change in the huge plates of oily, glistening brass or any lack of efficiency in the relentless cables and pistons. Sialia reflects that neither the Programmer nor the Engineer much resemble their portrayals in the engravings that surround them, although he has heard that they looked quite different in the early days of Enlightenment.
It is with some distaste that Sialia turns his attention to the final occupant of the Central Chamber: Shiba the Jester, the Programmer’s pet Canine-Clok. Predictably Shiba is the last to awake, stumbling up at the feet of his mistress and shaking his fat brass body with a mechanical clatter. Shiba’s function within the Court has always baffled Sialia. Ostensibly he is there to provide amusement, although the Programmer merely smiles at him indulgently and tosses him the occasional grease pellet as she works. He’s not even sure where Shiba came from. He’s not the work of the Engineer, who would never create any Clok so ridiculous. Perhaps he was invented by an apprentice Technician in the Workshop as some ill-advised experiment and just wandered off. Sialia inspects Shiba, hoping to avoid notice as the oaf snuffles on the floor looking for discarded drops of oil. But Shiba’s sensors are not as dull as they seem - he glances up and snaps his steel jaws at Sialia, which Sialia dodges easily. Shiba emits a gear-grinding snarl, and Sialia responds with an impertinent glissando whistle.
2: The Inner Workings
Taking a shortcut to the next stage of his inspection, Sialia flies through an access hatch in the wall of the Central Chamber and into a maintenance channel in the Inner Workings of the Court. Behind the Central Chamber’s polished walls and glowing chandeliers is another world. This is a land of turning gears, whirring flywheels, pumping pistons, drips of oil, jets of steam, burning coals, rivulets of flowing mercury: the elaborate mechanism that sustains the life – is the life – of the great body of the Clockwork Court.
A narrow path dimly illuminated by sodium vapour lamps runs through the channel for the use of Sciurine Repair-Cloks, but Sialia soars high above it, performing daring manoeuvres through the whirring, clattering, hissing machinery. He knows these passageways through long experience, and he knows just how to navigate them using his electro-magnetic sensors to time his swoops and turns. The fractional adjustment of a single wingtip feather allows him to curve smoothly round a hammering piston. He angles his body with perfection to pass between the spokes of a flywheel. He sweeps between two bulbous electrodes, his tail-feathers clearing them a microsecond before a spark crackles between them. He seems almost to dance through the murky aether as he navigates the intricate labyrinth of the Inner Workings, finishing with a somersault, twisting his body to glide through the narrow exit hatch to his destination.
3: The Scrap Yard
Sialia emerges from the maintenance channel into a shadowy corner of the Scrap Yard, a grimy, oily area open to the sky and filled with heaps of scrap metal, broken machines, faulty Cloks. Above it hangs a rusting, strangely-decorated plate, which the Yard’s Gaffer believes is a piece of signage written in a forgotten language from the Age of Entropy. Sialia completes his acrobatic flight by alighting on a pile of rusting trash where he takes a bow to an invisible audience. There is a crash at the wall just centimetres from his head. Screeching, Sialia leaps into the aether once more. Flipping round, he sees a lead bar settling on the pile of trash. Looking for its source he is confronted by a hulking figure with a round steel helmet and a smoking tar-cig clenched between his grinning teeth. Sialia recognises him as Hammersnout, and he’s surrounded by a small group of workmates – Steelflute, Starvelsaw and the serpentine Snugjaws - who are all cackling at the joke. They are the Demolishers, a motley gang, who work in the Yard. Cloks too unstable to be put to their intended purposes, they are well suited to demolish other machines that fail to meet the high standards of the Engineer. The Demolishers’ task is to take the machines apart and sort them into two piles - debris to be sent to the Mill below and useful parts that can be repurposed by the Engineer and his team of Technicians. They are occasionally allowed to keep any damaged parts that take their fancy to add to their own bodies, which gives them their bizarre patchwork appearance.
A clang rings out around the Yard and Hammersnout staggers, clutching at the dome of his helmet, eyes blinking in dazed confusion. Everyone starts in surprise, and Sialia is relieved to see a powerfully built Clok holding a long-handled spanner with which he has evidently struck Hammersnout. It’s Pierce the Gaffer, the only Clok able to keep the Demolishers in line. Pierce sends the Demolishers back to their duties, Hammersnout rubbing his head in indignation. Sialia watches as Hammersnout grabs a defective Quarrier-Clok who had been trying to sidle away while the Demolishers’ attention was elsewhere. Despite the faulty Clok’s wails and protestations, Hammersnout and Steelflute rip his limbs off, Starvelsaw sorts his internal components into piles, and Snugjaws the Constrictor crushes parts that cannot be reused into compact bales of metal ready to be sent down to the Mill. In all the activity, the Quarrier-Clok’s severed head rolls away and settles near Pierce and Sialia, staring up at them and whining faintly before the lights of his eyes darken and he makes no more sound. Sialia knows that the Demolishers perform an essential function in the running of the Clockwork Court; the broken Clok will be rebuilt in the Workshop to be a functioning member of the Court once more. But Sialia still finds their work distressing in a way that he cannot articulate.
The shrill oil-break whistle sounds, followed by a clanking, grinding din as Trollbottom the Clatterer shambles into the Scrap Yard. Trollbottom is one of the stranger Cloks. His oval face always seems to have just one glowing eye and one flickering bulb, and his wide mouth is set in a permanent rusty grin. Like the Demolishers, he is constructed from a mixture of mismatching parts from discarded machines, but his are particularly ill-fitting, bolts dropping off and leaking oil wherever he goes, his rusty cooling fans rattling to life seemingly at random. His task is to traverse the Court providing refreshments to its inhabitants, although he seems to spend as much time exchanging gossip.
Pierce sighs as the Demolishers all down their tools again and gather round Trollbottom and his trolley, which carries steaming mugs of viscous petroleum and grease cakes. As the Demolishers huddle round to hear the latest news of the Court - real or invented - Pierce winks one eye-bulb, grabs a couple of grease cakes from the trolley, and invites Sialia into his Studio. Sialia hops onto his shoulder, grateful to be leaving the rabble.
4. The Studio
The entrance to the Studio is constructed of lead blocks and odds and ends of sheet metal, corrugated iron making a roof. Inside the Studio the atmosphere is cool and quiet, the lead walls providing respite from the clamour of the Scrap Yard. There is a desk and stool at the front with a small analytical engine beside a window where the Gaffer can get on with administrative work while keeping an eye on the Demolishers. At the back an archway leads into an area where Pierce occupies himself creating strange objects and images.
The Gaffer sits on his stool and Sialia hops onto his desk. Opening a drawer, he brings out a tin cup for himself and a brass saucer for Sialia into which he pours measures from a can of mineral oil. He sets them on the desk with the grease cakes and they relax for a while. As Sialia feels the fine liquid flowing into every part of his workings, cooling and lubricating, the stresses of the Scrap Yard ease.
After they have rested a while Pierce leads the way through the archway into the back-area to show Sialia his latest creations. The ceiling of the room beyond has open shutters that let in shafts of natural light, though the area extends far back into darkness. The space is filled with bits of scrap welded together in surprising ways and sheets of metal with elaborate geometric engravings or portraits of inhabitants of the Court. These are Pierce’s personal creative projects. It used to seem strange to Sialia that the Gaffer had taken up this strange pastime, which appears to have no useful function, so unlike the endeavours of the Engineer and his Technicians, whose work all has a practical purpose. Although something in the manner of Pierce’s creations does remind Sialia of the images depicting the history of the Clockwork Court that surround the Engineer and the Programmer in the Central Chamber. Sialia has asked Pierce about those; his friend has always denied having anything to do with them but Sialia suspects he knows more than he is saying. But he has grown used to Pierce’s eccentricities; it must be difficult being here with the Demolishers for company all day. And Sialia finds himself curiously gratified by the engraving that depicts a handsome copper, silver and cobalt Avian-Clok.
After Sialia has inspected and admired some of the latest creations, Pierce goes to a sheet of bronze leaning on a wall. He turns it round to reveal an elaborate design in relief. Sialia flutters closer to study it. He whistles in wonder. It is very different from Pierce’s other creations. The others depict geometric shapes, portraits, or sketches from around the Court, but this presents some strange sinuous form. A shape that seems both deliberate and random, strong and delicate, with a long central structure that curls round on itself and subdivides, some of these splits terminating in frilled structures others in rounded lobes. Pierce has induced flecks of bright verdigris within the strange form to give it contrast with the polished bronze. Sialia is about to ask Pierce where he ever got the idea for such an odd shape when the whistle sounds again, signalling the end of oil-break. Pierce turns his peculiar bronze creation to the wall once more, shoulders his spanner and ambles back out to the Scrap Yard. Sialia follows with some reluctance - following the calm and peace of the Studio, the next stage of his inspection promises to be altogether less pleasant.
5. The Mill
The Demolishers are returning to work, encouraged by the Gaffer’s spanner, and Trollbottom wanders off with his trolley to another part of the Court. Sialia bids them farewell and hops into a funnel in the floor that connects the Scrap Yard to the Mill.
It is a long way down, for the Mill is deep below the rest of the Clockwork Court, carved by the Engineer into its very Foundation in the early days of Enlightenment. After a long descent in the darkness, Sialia feels the beginning of the Mill’s great burning heat rising upwards and spreads his wings, allowing the updraft to slow his fall. A dull glow illuminates the walls around him and, as the red circle of the channel’s exit approaches, he feels his wingtips begin to glow.
He emerges into a scene that he imagines is as close to Entropy as one could find in the Age of Enlightenment. The Mill is a vast cavern, black stalactites of slag glistening and dripping with oil hanging from its high ceiling, which is punctured by holes attached to concealed chimneys leading to the world above, allowing the escape of noxious fumes. It is illuminated by flickering sodium vapour lamps and by glowing vats and runnels of molten metal. The Cloks who inhabit the Mill are known as the Manglers. Their job is to collect the waste metal that crashes down the chutes from the Scrap Yard far above and grind it up in their iron presses. The Manglers then shovel up the mangled metal and throw it into hatches that feed into the Furnace – a giant oven, compartmentalised for different metals, that melts down the discarded scrap into materials that can be reused by the Engineer and his team of Technicians. Whenever a hatch is opened, sparks and great gouts of black smoke belch out of the Furnace, and the aether of the Mill is permanently polluted with a sooty, toxic fog.
Overseeing the Manglers is a squat Clok made of tungsten carbide with a smoked visor and copper helmet. He is known as Betswal the Torturer and his diminutive stature belies the deafening clangour of his voice, which has the sound of a million discordant horns blasting at once. The Manglers are subjected to this cacophony without respite, Betswal striding among them blaring orders and insults at his charges and lashing them with a spiked iron flail.
As they labour in the befouled aether, glowing in the scorching heat of the Furnace, tormented by the relentless bawling of the Torturer, the Manglers’ eyes stream with oil, their mouths are distorted with permanent rictus snarls, and they screech with impotent fury, unable to resist the programming that compels them to work incessantly until night arrives once more and the fires of the Furnace burn low.
Sialia hovers above the Manglers unobserved as they scream with hatred at each other and at the Engineer and at the Clockwork Court while they perform their enforced duties. All appears to be running as normal here – or as normal as can ever be expected of this mad inferno - but he flies lower to see more clearly through the smoke spewing from the Furnace. A Mangler’s head whips up, his streaming red eyes converging on Sialia. He screams in rage and grabs for the little Clok, who manages to dodge the grasping fingers just in time. The Mangler’s piercing howl is picked up by the others and then drowned in the furious blare of Betswal and the crack of his flail as he orders them back to work.
Clockwork racing, Sialia decides it is time to move on to the next stage of his inspection. He flies into the exit hatch pursued by howls of wrath and madness.
6. The Workshop
Sialia flies along an access channel keeping low to the maintenance path, not feeling inclined to any more acrobatics. His trembling body is functioning at far from its optimal level. The screams of the Manglers echo in his mind long after they have faded from his aural receptors. The channel joins a long pipe leading upwards, and in the cool darkness Sialia’s gears relax once more. The most hazardous part of his inspection is behind him. The pipe’s exit appears to his vision-sensors, and he flies through it to emerge into the Workshop.
Like the Mill, the Workshop is a vast space, but this is the only similarity. Here the sounds are of industry and creation: the regular hammering of mallets, the drone of lathes, the punch of riveters. Motes of metal dust sparkle in the long shafts of warm golden light that pierce the aether from skylights far above. The area’s far end is open to the sky, with the largest projects being worked on outside. The Workshop is spacious and well-ordered, with many mechanical creations in various stages of construction being developed by the Technicians, the Engineer’s team of trusted fabricators, assemblers, welders, and finishers. Other Technicians move around in groups, all robed in the cloth-of-cobalt that marks their station, talking animatedly in low voices and engraving notes on pewter tablets as they debate the best way to realise their concepts. They communicate with the Engineer and the Programmer by means of a flock of Messenger-Cloks who take punched plates between the Workshop and the Central Chamber by way of a connecting aluminium corridor.
The Technicians mostly ignore Sialia. Absorbed as they are in their work, they tend not to notice the smaller Cloks unless their services are needed for something, and even the Sciurine Maintenance-Cloks that scuttle around sweeping the floor, replacing tools and repairing machinery are always in such a hurry that they have little attention to give.
Sialia flies around the Technicians inspecting them and sees that they are operating with their usual industrious efficiency, although the activity of the Workshop seems even more intense than usual. He spots an old friend in cloth-of-cobalt robes lifting a Clok of new design up onto a mechanical construction with one powerful arm. After bolting the new Clok into the construction, Isaac the First Technician springs down to the floor, his landing making barely a sound. Sialia whistles his appreciation at the graceful leap, and Isaac looks up in brief surprise, before flashing a steel grin and striding over to greet him. Isaac somewhat resembles the Engineer, but his brass body is lithe where the Engineer’s is brawny. He is the oldest Clok in the Court, excepting the Engineer and the Programmer, the first Technician successfully created in the dawn of Enlightenment. Despite his age his body is in excellent condition, his movements smooth and graceful, his processor sharp as ever.
After greetings are exchanged Isaac guides Sialia around the workshop, explaining the projects currently underway. Sialia is impressed with the progress that has been made since his last visit. The section for new constructions has been expanded, adding new Cloks to the population every day.
And there is now a whole section devoted to aeronautics, where dirigible devices are built to explore the burnt Wasteland beyond the Court. The flagship of this fleet is The Golden Dragon, a great shining airship that Isaac says can carry at least two score of Cloks at any time. It is not really made of gold of course, but of very thin sheets of aluminium painted with a copper-zinc mixture and filled with hydrogen, but Sialia envisions it flying and agrees that this spectacular feat of engineering is deserving of its name.
Then there is the machine that Sialia saw Isaac climbing on earlier. The First Technician says it is a simulator to test the hypothetical forces that purportedly will affect travellers in the space beyond worlds. A new type of Clok is being created for this pioneering exploration, and Isaac leads Sialia to the area of the workshop where these are being built. There are several of these experimental Cloks at various stages of development with Technicians bustling around them arguing about matters of pressure and force, design and function. Isaac tells Sialia these will be the Astro-Cloks, and they are to be the pilots of the Engineer’s greatest masterpiece: The Titanium Angel. Sialia’s gaze is drawn to the open area at the end of the Workshop, where he can see this rocket-ship glowing golden in the afternoon light. Constructed principally from alloys of the light but strong metal after which it is named, the vessel points straight up into unknown aethers, a sleek needle in a compass set to find the worlds that the Engineer and Technicians believe must exist beyond the Clockwork Court.
Sialia and Isaac proceed into the open area to watch the activity of the Technicians and other Cloks as they work on the rocket. Isaac tells Sialia that it is almost finished. The increase of production that Sialia detected in the Workshop is the final flurry of activity as the Technicians race to complete the greatest ever project in the history of Enlightenment.
7. Final Report
As the sunlight turns crimson, Sialia begins to feel his clockwork winding down. It is time to return to the Programmer to make his report. Bidding goodbye to Isaac, Sialia flies along the connecting corridor back to the Central Chamber and onto the shoulder of his mistress. He notes without surprise that Shiba is already snoring at her feet, though the Engineer is yet hard at work, shaping a steel machine-component.
The Lady Maria is still engraving mathematical glyphs on her pewter tablets and doesn’t notice the little Clok. Sialia whistles gently to draw her attention, and at the sound the Programmer glances round, her lips breaking into a smile. She holds out her finger, and Sialia hops on to it. As Lady Maria preens his feathers with the finest mineral oil, Sialia reports all that he has observed.
With the completion of his report Sialia’s mistress strokes his copper, silver and cobalt head with her gentle brass fingertips and enfolds him within her cloth-of-silver shawl. In the deepening twilight she tells him his favourite story of the taming of the Bull and the Bear, and of the creation of the Clockwork Court back in the dawn of Enlightenment, and of the hope for other worlds among the stars. And as the Programmer’s speech begins to slow and her eye-bulbs dim, she kisses Sialia on his head and becomes still. And to her side, the Engineer too is now at rest.
Siala feels peace draw over him as his internal springs relax and darkness falls on The Clockwork Court.
And a new day dawns.
