The Teller of Time & Descent

by Carl Frederick

E-Robot Science Fiction presents short fiction by award-winning author, Carl Frederick. These tales are offered two at a time for the 'pulp era' price of ninety-nine cents.--Teller of Time--Many years back, on the deck of a ferry bound to England, I observed a man in rapt concentration. Sidling close, I saw that his eyes were riveted on a small book, its pages filled with rows of numbers. Being hyper-inquisitive (read, 'nosey'), I asked what it was. He told me he was studying a ringing method. From my blank look, he no doubt realized I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. So, for the next hour or so, he initiated me into the peculiarly English mysteries of Change Ringing (also called Method Ringing). I've been fascinated with the subject ever since. My story, The Teller of Time, is largely concerned with the 'science' (or exercise, as it is called) of Change Ringing. I'm pleased for the opportunity to here explain some of the possibly obscure ringing terms in the story—and also to give a short introduction to ringing itself.'Teller' is a word for a tolling bell—usually the lowest pitched bell in a ring ( a 'pack' of dogs, a 'sheaf' of papers, a 'ring' of bells).The bells in a ringing tower, are mounted so they can swing a full 360 degrees and are each worked with a rope—one person per bell. The towers usually have from three to twelve bells. Change Ringing involves ringing all combinations of the bells. The highest pitched bell is called the Treble, and the lowest, the Tenor.Suppose, the tower has three bells which we'll call bell 1, 2, and 3 (by convention, the highest pitched bell is 1.One could, for example, ring the bells in the following for three bells, there are only six possible rows (a row is also called a change). The sequence of rows is a 'method'. There are multiple methods for ringing the bells through all their possible permutations (ringing their 'extent'). There is a constraint Bells are heavy. By pulling the ropes harder or by 'checking' the ropes, a bell can be made to ring one (and only one) position off from its previous ringing position (e.g. two rows 12345 and 31245 can't be played sequentially since bell 3 would have to move two positions).For three bells, ringing the full extent (six changes) would take about fifteen seconds. For seven bells, there are 5040 changes and that would take about three hours. Nine bells would take a solid week. Ringing the extent of twelve bells (479,001,600 changes) would take about 36 years.Ringing methods have names, for example, Plain Bob Minor, Stedman Triples, Cambridge Surprise Major. The last word in the name (e.g. minor, triples, major) tells the number of bells involved in the method.Minimus - four bellsDoubles - five bellsMinor - six bellsTriples - seven bells,Major - eight bellsCaters - nine bellsRoyal - ten bellsCinques - eleven bellsMaximus - twelve bells.This story first appeared in Analog Magazine, Jul/Aug 2006.--Descent--'Man Descendent' was the original title of the story when it first appeared in the November, 2006 issue of Analog Magazine. But, in on-line reviews it Descendent was often replaced by Descendant. Both words could equally be used for the story. So, to avoid ambiguity, I changed the name.The log entries in the story have two time the local time and the coordinate time (different due to the effects of General Relativity). The time difference calculations were complex enough that I wrote a computer program to do them. But, I made an error in the program.

68 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 30, 2011

About the author

I am NOT the author of a book on EST. That's by a different Carl Frederick.
(And anyway, how can anyone write a whole book about Eastern Standard Time?)