Grist

Mr. Jenk­ins hur­tled with all pos­si­ble speed toward a mostly non­de­script but increas­ingly insuf­fer­able lit­tle blue dot tucked away in a for­got­ten cor­ner of the cos­mos and won­dered, not for the first time, why the one immutable Law of the Uni­verse had been writ­ten the way that it had. That Mr. Jenk­ins had been present for and indeed a part of its writ­ing did not lessen his con­found­ment. Nor did his frus­tra­tion abate when he was asked to shuck off his sev­eral quan­tum states and wedge him­self uncer­e­mo­ni­ously into a form rec­og­niz­able to the cit­i­zens of the blue planet, with all its binary nature and its wheez­ing bel­lows and its flu­ids. The thing couldn’t even hear spacesong.

He was unac­cus­tomed to hur­ry­ing. He was in charge of a cycle so com­plex, so replete with inter­de­pen­dent machi­na­tions, that he deigned to carry a pocket watch to keep track. Mr. Jenk­ins knew how much time should be left, given when the lat­est cycle had begun, and he knew that some­how a good deal less time actu­ally remained. The har­vest had fallen, unfath­omably, behind sched­ule. If such a thing were pos­si­ble he’d have sug­gested that his instru­ments had mal­func­tioned. But his pocket watch was the most care­fully cal­i­brated tool in exis­tence. It never ran fast, never needed wind­ing. If the watch slowed, time sim­ply slowed momen­tar­ily to accom­mo­date the watch. Nobody minded the occa­sional extra moment to savor or frit­ter away. Now the watch had ticked ahead, and had done so dan­ger­ously close to the mid­night hour.

It had never done so before, though it was clear enough what would hap­pen if a new day dawned pre­ma­turely. With­out the proper fuel, morn­ing could not come. Mr. Jenk­ins required every avail­able instant for the har­vest, the last speck wend­ing its way back from Earth at exactly the moment the pocket watch shud­dered across the merid­ian into the new cycle. There could be no mar­gin for error. So Mr. Jenk­ins has­tened toward his flock on the blue planet, his crip­pled human form deaf to cos­mic sounds and blind to any but the bright­est of blacks. No won­der they called space a void, if this was all they could detect.

This close to the end of a cycle, Mr. Jenk­ins was always weak. He had, in fact, intended to sleep his way through the exhaust­ing and some­times painful sec­onds on either cusp of the next cycle, but like any crea­ture of long habit, he’d been roused by the slight shift in the pat­tern, its atten­dant fore­bod­ing. His part­ner, per­haps also rest­less, was not abed when Mr. Jenk­ins woke. There wasn’t time to search. He’d remem­bered to leave a note, just in case.

He had not, how­ever, remem­bered to wear any pants. He was groggy and had done well, frankly, to remem­ber to don the human body. He’d find some­thing in stride with the local fash­ion once he arrived. It was hard, any­way, to achieve his­tor­i­cal accu­racy from this dis­tance. Recon­nais­sance data trav­eled at rel­a­tivis­tic speeds. Mr. Jenk­ins could do the same, though it meant burn­ing through nearly all of his reserves.

Nearer to Earth Mr. Jenk­ins slowed his approach. He had, for one thing, to dodge all the clut­ter sur­round­ing the planet. He’d also noticed a sec­ond moon in orbit and was pretty sure it wasn’t sup­posed to be there. The final burst of energy nec­es­sary to adjust course toward the ashen moon emp­tied him, and his human form crashed uncer­e­mo­ni­ously into what seemed from above to be a moun­tain range.

It was a moun­tain, but of chalk and dust instead of rock. Mr. Jenk­ins was forcibly reminded of the inef­fi­ciency of his breath­ing appa­ra­tus and exca­vated him­self at once from beneath the mound of debris, gasp­ing for air. He made note of the poor nasal design for later. It proved dif­fi­cult to get his bear­ings on a moon that ought not to have existed at all, but he trudged forth, keep­ing the Earth in front of him and try­ing to remem­ber not to stare into the sun if he hap­pened upon it. He did not man­age very many steps and was pre­pared to attribute this to another fail­ing of the human design when he real­ized he was starv­ing. He would require an early sam­ple of the harvest.

Com­ing toward him across the dunes was a hooded fig­ure bear­ing a shepherd’s crook. Mr. Jenk­ins, hop­ing he hadn’t been seen, ducked behind a rocky out­crop that looked very much like a stack of human spines. He fell upon the shep­herd and par­took of the man’s soul. The husk crum­pled to the ground. Mr. Jenk­ins relieved it of the hooded cloak and crook, then left the moon he now knew to call Grist, a mound of bones and fire, in search of his lost flock.

Every two weeks some friends and I cre­ate new posts on the same topic. This week’s syn­chroblog posts — about speed — are listed on our group blog, The Cre­ative Col­lec­tive. Please read them all.