Grand Complication Successfully Tracks Moon Phases, Solar Cycles, and Owner's Increasing Debt

"The moon has never been wrong," Hollis Prewitt said, holding his wrist under Silas Tilling's bench lamp. "Not once in three years, and I've checked it against the almanac every new moon."

Tilling's shop hosts the monthly meeting, which is to say it hosts half of Basil Keene's group and all of Inez Bellamy's attendance, she having resigned in protest some years ago and continued arriving ever since. Prewitt had come for a second opinion, though he declined to say on what.

The watch is a Beaumont-Rey Grand Complication, reference 88, with perpetual calendar, moon-phase disc, equation of time and a 72-hour reserve. Prewitt produced a folded printout of six dates. On each, he said, the disc agreed with the almanac; the equation of time had come within a minute on two occasions he specified. He had the minutes written down.

"And the date window?" Keene asked.

"Correct to the day."

"I meant what you use it for."

Prewitt said he used it the same as anyone. He had financed the watch over thirty-six months, and the date window was the only reminder he trusted, phone notifications having failed him repeatedly. The payment fell due the same day every month, the same day the disc advanced, and he had never once checked the moon without also checking what was owed. The two had become, in his account of it, a single habit.

Tilling opened the case. He had serviced the watch eighteen months earlier and said, without ceremony, that the interval was up. He gave a figure. Prewitt said he would bring it in after the holidays, as he had said at the previous meeting, and Tilling wrote the figure down anyway and handed it over, which is more than most of us do for a promise.

Keene's group offered a reading. Precision, one of them said, is not a compartment; the man who times his escapement to the second times everything else, and the debt is simply being measured as accurately as it exists. Bellamy, from the chair she has never stopped occupying, said the man was being asked to admire a calendar for doing arithmetic.

Oksana's Counterclaim: The claim on the table tonight was that precision is portable, that a collector who verifies his moon phase carries the habit into his calendar. The receipt beside it is a monthly obligation met by watching a disc turn. Precision is not portable. It goes where the interest is. Claim retired pending better evidence, of which nobody in the shop produced any.

Prewitt, for his part, was not troubled. The perpetual calendar requires no correction until 2100, he said, and he had read that the tide of debt follows cycles as regular as any he could name on a dial. He would be right about the moon on the fifteenth, which was also the day something was due, and he intended to be in two places at once, the way the watch already was.

"It's accurate either way," Tilling said, closing the caseback. "The moon doesn't care which one you make."