Invisible Cities: Spindlemarch

[devi]

juggzy and jackfirecat wowed me with their guides to cities that don't exist, at least not tangibly. So I thought I'd do one of my own.



The city of Spindlemarch is built on a rock rising out of a wooded plain. You can see it from many miles away because it bristles with towers, spindly towers and squat towers, pale towers and dark towers, and every one of them is a clock tower. Time is all-important in Spindlemarch. Wasting it is the worst taboo. All its inhabitants are constantly busy.

When you've been there a few days you start to notice people referring to The Clock, in hushed, reverent tones. You can hear the capitals. You wonder if they mean the one on the cathedral, with its gold leaf, or the one on the bank, with its throaty bell, or any one of a dozen other splendid clocks. But if by some unlikely chance you should find yourself wandering the streets, not in a hurry, with some time to spare, you'll notice narrow stairways leading down into the rock. If you follow the stairs down far enough, through dimly lit, chilly tunnels, you'll emerge into a huge space that resounds with ticking and whirring. Beneath the city the rock is hollow and inside it live the massive, dully glowing cogs and springs of a clock that seems as big as the world, steadily and implacably measuring out the seconds. Once you've seen the great clock, even when you're back on the surface, you can feel it turning underneath you, always.

In other cities it's possible to have your own sense of time, to have wing-heeled days that trip past in a joyous rush or to lie for whole slow afternoons watching light move. There can be days when time feels like plasticine, to be moulded and stretched or compressed by your hands. Not in the city of clocks. Bells ring across the city at intervals throughout the day, a collision of staggered tones, triggered off by the great clock, neatly marking off another small piece of the inhabitants' lives.

Officially the bells ring on the quarter-hour, but as you go through your day's work it seems to you that the bells are sounding closer and closer together all the time. Could it be that the great clock is running faster all the time, winding itself tighter and tighter? Surely each gap between bells was longer when you first came here, when you weren't so tired, when your muscles didn't ache so much? But you don't think too hard about that. You just go back to work until the bells ring again, always sooner than you expected.

No one makes noise in the streets after they've been here a while. No one plays drums or blows whistles or turns up the volume on their stereos. By order of the city council, amplifiers in Spindlemarch must have their volume knobs welded to go no higher than three or four. If you watch the inhabitants walking you'll see they even make an effort to tread softly and speak quietly. They are painfully aware of the clock beneath their feet. They think that if they walked loudly (or played drums or blew whistles) the vibrations would jolt the mechanism of the clock into turning faster still.

When it snows all sound is muffled and it feels like a reprieve. Sometimes in snowy weather people can even be seen dancing in the streets. Then the bells ring, and they turn pale and go back indoors.



(Or you could go to Memoria, Flatsville, Mapenzia, Germantium, Dukuria, or various other places to be found in their journals that I'm too lazy to link to. You guys have any more up your sleeves?)

Edit: Or go to Velocester, now that it has its own post, but hurry, it won't always be where it is now...

Or make for the coast and Wessex Prime.

A small B-road off an obscure junction of the motorway north from Spindlemarch will take you to St. Ockwell and Stanger.

And there is Polopolis to the east, but leave your travel journal at home.

Comments

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

That looks cool. I wasn't aware of it when I wrote this, but I was aware that I wasn't doing anything original :)