A Piece of Time
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Most everyone I know who is earth born carries with them something to remind them of home. It’s usually something small and easy to carry and a lot of people wear pendants or rings filled with a small amount of soil from their hometown. Sometimes when you are in deep space it’s nice to be able to hold something from earth in your hand to help put things back into perspective.
Myself, I have a pocket watch that is close to 500 years old. I acquired it on a planet far from earth and it was suspended in a block of acrylic to be used as what the person I bought it from called a paperweight. It was such an intriguing find that I had to un-encase it from the acrylic.
I was surprised to say the least that the watch was not only still intact but actually worked. It is powered by a spiral metallic spring that you engage with the knurled knob at the top by winding the knob back and forth until there it enough resistance to determine that the spring is at its maximum tension. The spring then releases its energy through a series of gears that in turn move the hands and then show the time by the position of the hands on the face of the watch. Did I mention that its almost 500 years old? I found a paper label inside the rear compartment cover that reads: This watch is guaranteed for one year and will be repaired by us free. Provided it has not been misused. Sold May 27 1910 Leonard Watch Company Boston Mass. I wonder what they would think if they knew their watch was still working after all these years?
Since I found this watch I’ve acquired an interest in how different alien cultures keep track of time and I started a small collection of timepieces. The first and probably the most unique timepiece I found was at a one of those bazaars you always find on a trade planet set up for the tourists. They had the usual local produce and crafts until I found this one fellow’s booth who had what he called a reproduction of an artifact timekeeper.
Apparently it was the fashion rage on this planet because as soon as I saw what he had for sale I noticed that almost every native was wearing one. A piece of bark with some sort of cord holding it onto the upper arm. I thought it was just jewelry but it was in fact a timepiece and not your ordinary mechanical timepiece either.
In this planets distant past the inhabitants used to hunt these enormous snail like creatures the size of earth’s elephants called tooTeds. They could only hunt the male tooTeds because the females were poisonous. Actually the males were poisonous too except for a brief period of time during breeding season when a hormonal change would make the poison in their flesh inert. The hunters would have to stand watch on the males for days and sometimes weeks on end to try and identify when the males were ready to breed and therefore be viable as poison free meat. When the change happened the underbelly of the males turned a pastel blue green. The change would only last for at the most a day and in many instances only a couple of hours or until the male mated with a female. So the hunters were hard pressed to invent something to help identify when a male came into season.
And so the “tooTeds edann” which loosely translates as happy tooTeds was invented and it’s an amazing piece of low tech – high tech.
The bark comes from a tree that produces a sweet sap not unlike earth’s bee honey and has similar antioxidant and antiseptic properties. The cords were actually the flesh of the male tooTeds sex organ cut into long strips to bind the bark close to the skin on the upper arm. With the barks antiseptic properties the flesh could stay viable for weeks on end rather than rot away quickly.
The tooTeds edann was worn by the men and when a male tooTeds came into season the flesh cords would turn blue green and swell up in a sympathetic chemical response to the tooTeds hormonal changes released into the air. Because every male of age in a village wore the tooTeds edann it was like an early warning system and they could identify in which direction to find a viable male tooTeds. When one of them would feel the flesh cords tighten on their arm they would call out an alarm and every hunter male in hearing distance would freeze in place. As the flesh cords tightened each would begin to chant, low at first and then louder as the bands tightened even more. As more of them began to chant they could then identify the general direction from which the scent was coming from and on cue they would, as a group, move together in that direction. The position of the cords on the upper arm and with a knotted section under the arm directly over a major artery effectively created a tourniquet so that the arm of the one closest to the tooTeds began to turn blue as they got closer. As they reached the male tooTeds the ones with the bluest colored arms would be the ones allowed to dispatch it and then they had the rights to the choicest pieces of meat.
Of course the reproductions I saw before me in the vendors booth didn’t have any flesh of the tooTeds as they were long ago extinct. But leave it up to an enterprising merchant to come up with an interesting alternative. The cords where a long chain polymer with a pheromone reactive dopamine polysynthetic chemical base. The bark was a biometalic interface fashioned to appear as natural bark that prevented feedback to the cords so it wouldn’t react with the wearer own pheromones. The other difference unlike the tooTeds edann was that these were made for both male and female wearers.
What that means is that when you are in the proximity of someone of the opposite sex with a heightened sexual presence their pheromones would react with the arm band and as was the case with the original arm bands, turn blue green and started to swell up constricting the blood flow to the arm of the wearer. You could then identify who was “in the mood” as it were. Not until I discovered this did I realize why I would see groups of several or more native men or women walking in unison in the same direction. Social networking at its most primal level.
Of course I had to buy a couple for my collection, all in the name of science of course.
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