With his divine foresight, which was really a capacity to see not just in three dimensions but in four, five and even six, the Clockmaker looked ahead through time with his great fiery eyes. He observed the trajectory of development of these tiny intricate clocks, and saw them diversifying and spreading, like a kind of restless rust that would gradually form itself again and again from the simple minerals of which a planet was made, until that planet’s entire surface was covered with a multiplicity of wriggling, bulging, blooming forms, climbing over one another, consuming one another, driving one another to yet higher levels of adaptation and complexity. Ultimately, he saw, this would affect the mechanism of the Great Clock itself in small but subtle ways. It would change the albedo of planetary surfaces, for instance, and in so doing, minutely alter the workings of the entire design.
‘Wipe it clean!’ he commanded.
Gabriel, that great archangel, bowed his head in submission, and reached with his hand deep into the Clock until his fingers were almost touching that little, spinning, half-cooled rock. He frowned with concentration for a moment as cleansing rays came pouring out from his fingertips, scorching the surface of the little stone, annihilating the tiny spheres and all their kin, and breaking down all but the most rudimentary of chemical bonds, so that the stone was returned in a matter of moments to its previous state as a simple mechanical component of the Clock.
A sigh rose and spread, outwards and upwards, through the multitude in the darkness beyond the arena. And Eli watched in silence from his own quiet corner.
‘Listen! All of you!’ the Clockmaker boomed out to his archangels. ‘Note carefully what Gabriel has just done and do exactly the same! That is a command, to be followed without exception. You must watch your sectors constantly for any unscheduled developments of that kind, and, as soon as you find them, they must be wiped away at once. Nothing must be allowed to tarnish my Clock’s perfection, or to disturb the smooth, clean flow of Time.’
So from then on each archangel carefully audited every one of the billions of planets within his area of control for the first signs of that strange new restless rust. And from time to time, only occasionally at first but gradually more frequently, one or other of them would suddenly reach into the Clock and blast clean the surface of some small stone that had showed signs of developing patterns on its surface that might possibly be able to replicate themselves.
Each time, the invisible host would sigh.
Like all the others, Eli watched his own little section of the Clock – his own galaxies, his own stars, his own planets – and for a long time, he did just as Gabriel had done and as the other archangels were now doing. Again and again, he reached in with his hand to wipe away imperfection with blasts of purifying energy.
He had done this many thousands of times when he spotted yet another stone on which a film of organic matter was starting to grow. Following his now-familiar routine, he extended his hand into the Clock in a business-like fashion and was about to let loose the cleansing rays when, for some reason, he hesitated. All the other archangels round him were still blasting away – there was Raphael for instance, over to his left, shooting out deadly rays right at that very moment – but Eli found, to his own surprise, that this time he simply couldn’t bring himself to do it. In fact, far from reaching in to destroy this new collection of little self-replicating clocks, he found himself shielding them so they couldn’t be seen by anyone other than himself. And, having done that, he amazed himself further by abandoning his vigil over the millions of other planets in his sector and instead settling down to watch the tiny clocks he’d saved as they very slowly grew and changed.
Time went by. That little stone wheeled around its star many hundreds of millions of times while Eli watched the little clocks on its surface. And he became so rapt, so enchanted, so focused on this one single stone, that he didn’t even notice the huge fiery eyes of the Clockmaker turning in his direction, homing in on him alone through all the spinning wheels of the Clock, and recognising at once what he was doing.
‘Eli, my son,’ the Clockmaker boomed. ‘You have disobeyed me.’
Eli started, rigid with terror, while gasps of shock echoed and re-echoed through the vast auditorium around them.
‘I have disobeyed you, Father,’ Eli acknowledged. He fell to his knees as the Clockmaker came striding through his own creation to stand towering above his disobedient servant. ‘And now, I know, it’s for you to decide what you wish to do with me.’
The Clockmaker shrugged. ‘Just wipe it clean, Eli,’ he said, with the merest of glances at the tiny world Eli had been watching for all those millions of years. ‘Wipe it clean, and, just this once, we’ll say no more about it.’
It was not so much a sigh this time as a gasp that arose around them in the darkness. Eli had been extraordinarily lucky – archangels had been exiled or annihilated for much smaller acts of disobedience – but, instead of gratefully accepting the lifeline, he stubbornly stood his ground.
‘I won’t, Father,’ he said. ‘I want to leave it alone, and see how it develops.’
Once again, like the sound of some great unseen ocean moving restlessly in its bowl, a sigh rippled back and up through the auditorium, to be followed by a deep expectant silence, as if the entire host was holding its breath.
Surprised by his servant’s intransigence, the Clockmaker looked back with slightly more interest at the growth on the surface of the little planet. Why did this matter so much to Eli, he was asking himself? With his omniscience and foreknowledge, he could see not only how Eli’s little clocks were functioning in the present, but how they would develop between now and the end of time if allowed to continue on their present trajectory. And he quickly established that, in this particular case, the effect on the Great Clock would be negligible, for it so happened that this small planet, and its star, and even the galaxy of which they formed a part, were relatively peripheral parts of the grand design.
‘Master,’ Eli persisted, ‘those tiny beings there, those little clocks, have developed in a strange new way that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen before. They’ve become a different thing entirely from those spheres that Gabriel found. In fact, some of them have become almost as we are. For they see, Father, they know they exist, and they are aware of the Clock moving around them as something separate to themselves. They’ve even begun to wonder what the Great Clock is, and who made it, and what purpose it serves.’