Others that looked so deep into the fabric of everything that the quivering threads of reality could be examined, then prised apart, to see what lay beyond. Some that could peer so far into the sky that the past itself was glimpsed. Machines bigger than houses or smaller than ants. Gabbling nonsense, or so it then seemed, of the times when the arrow of time flew straight and true. Sometimes, though, although I wished she wouldn’t, begin to speak in a crackling, quavering voice that came and went like dry leaves. Why should I have to endlessly draw and redraw the same street maps of our town, or memorise the weights of every recent harvest, or count the number of seconds in each hour, or copy out calendars from years long erased? After all, I had already seen much farther than here, and believed I would see farther still. I also I found myself irritated by many other things, not least my father’s bumbling inability to manage his own buttons, let alone our town, and the pointless and repetitive tasks we children were expected to perform at school. The narrator later follows the Chronologist out of town, but loses his nerve when the latter disappears in the time haze.Īfter the Chronologist’s visit the temporal irregularities that had been plaguing the town end, their long summer gives way to autumn, and we learn more about the strictures of this community and the world in which it exists: The narrator has this wanderlust reverie as he watches the Chronologist service the town clock in the tower (he manages to sneak up with his father the mayor), and later steals a book from the man’s bag.

I was sure that snowy mountains lay out there, too, and the fabled salty lakes known as oceans, and other places and realms beyond anything we in our town were ever permitted to know. And beyond even this lay a staggering sense of ever-greater distance, where lights twinkled, and towers and spires far higher and more fabulous than our own gave off signal glints. But from up here, peering on through the time-haze, I believed I could make out a little of what lay beyond, and for one moment I was sure there were fields as prim and regular as our own, and the next I saw hills and sunlit meadows, and deep woodlands, and places of ravaged gloom. MacLeod (Tor.com, January-February 2020) opens with the narrator of the story revealing how, when he was an eleven-year-old, the Chronologist came out of the time haze to service the town clock:Īfter the last hedge and scrap of farmland lay a boundary of unkempt wasteland that we had all been warned never to approach, let alone cross.

The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod