Discworld 26 thief of.., p.31
Discworld 26 - Thief of Time, page 31
The room vanished. Now there was a garden, with peacocks and fountains, and a stone seat, upholstered with moss.
Lawns unrolled toward woodlands that had the manicured look of an estate, which had been maintained for hundreds of years so that nothing grew here that was not wanted, or in the wrong place. Long-tailed birds, their plumage like living jewels, flashed from treetop to treetop. Deeper in the woods, other birds called.
As Susan watched, a kingfisher alighted on the edge of a fountain. It glanced at her and flew away, its wingbeats sounding like a snapping of fans.
“Look,” said Susan, “I don’t . . .I’m not . . .look, I understand this sort of thing. Really. I’m not stupid. My grandfather has a garden where everything is black. But . . .Lobsang built the clock! Well . . .part of him did. So he’s saving the world and destroying it, all at once?”
“Family trait,” said Wen. “It is what Time does at every instant.”
He gave Susan the look of a teacher confronted with a keen but stupid pupil.
“Think like this,” he said at last. “Think of everything. It’s an everyday word. But ‘everything’ means . . .everything. It’s a much bigger word than ‘universe.’ And everything contains all possible things that can happen at all possible times in all possible worlds. Don’t look for complete solutions in any one of them. Sooner or later, everything causes everything else.”
“Are you saying one little world is not important, then?” said Susan.
Wen waved a hand, and two glasses of wine appeared on the stone.
“Everything is as important as everything else,” he said.
Susan grimaced.
“You know, that’s why I’ve never liked philosophers,” she said. “They make it all sound grand and simple, and then you step out into a world that’s full of complications. I mean, look around. I bet this garden needs regular weeding, and the fountains have to be unblocked, and the peacocks shed feathers and dig up the lawn . . .and if they don’t do that, then this is just a fake.”
“No, everything is real,” said Wen. “At least, it is as real as anything else. But this is a perfect moment.” He smiled at Susan again. “Against one perfect moment, the centuries beat in vain.”
“I’d prefer a more specific philosophy,” said Susan. She tried the wine. It was perfect.
“Certainly. I expected that you would. I see you cling to logic as a limpet clings to a rock in a storm. Let me see . . .defend the small spaces, don’t run with scissors, and remember that there is often an unexpected chocolate,” said Wen. He smiled. “And never resist a perfect moment.”
A breeze made the fountains splash over the sides of their bowls, just for a second.
Wen stood up.
“And now, I believe, my wife and son have finished their meeting,” he said.
The garden faded. The stone seat melted like mist as soon as Susan got up, although up until then it had felt as solid as, well, rock. The wineglass vanished from her hand, leaving only a memory of its pressure on her fingers and the taste lingering in her mouth.
Lobsang was standing in front of the clock. Time herself was not visible, but the song that wove through the rooms had a different tone now.
“She’s happier,” said Lobsang. “She is free now.”
Susan looked around. Wen had vanished along with the garden. There was nothing but the endless glass rooms.
“Don’t you want to talk to your father?” she said.
“Later. There will be plenty of time,” said Lobsang. “I shall see to it.”
The way he said it, so carefully dropping the words into place, made her turn.
“You’re going to take over?” she said. “You are Time now?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re mostly human!”
“So?” Lobsang’s smile took after his father. It was the gentle and, to Susan, the infuriating smile of a god.
“What’s in all these rooms?” she demanded. “Do you know?”
“One perfect moment. In each one. An oodleplex of oodleplexes.”
“I’m not certain there’s such a thing as a genuinely perfect moment,” said Susan. “Can we go home now?”
Lobsang wrapped the edge of his robe around his fist and smashed it against the glass front panel of the clock. It shattered and dropped to the ground.
“When we get to the other side,” he said, “don’t stop and don’t look back. There will be a lot of flying glass.”
“I’ll try to dive behind one of the benches,” said Susan.
“They probably won’t be there.”
SQUEAK?
The Death of Rats had scurried up the side of the clock and was peering cheerfully over the top.
“What do we do about that?” said Lobsang.
“That looks after itself,” said Susan. “I never worry about it.”
Lobsang nodded.
“Take my hand,” he said. She reached out.
With his free hand, Lobsang grasped the pendulum and stopped the clock.
A blue-green hole opened in the world.
The return journey was a lot swifter but, when the world existed again, she was falling into water. It was brown, muddy, and stank of dead plants. Susan surfaced, fighting against the drag of her skirts, and trod water while she tried to get her bearings.
The sun was nailed to the sky, the air was heavy and humid, and a pair of nostrils was watching her from a few feet away.
Susan had been brought up to be practical, and that meant swimming lessons. The Quirm College for Young Ladies had been very advanced in that respect, and its teachers took the view that a girl who couldn’t swim two lengths of the pool with her clothes on wasn’t making an effort. To their credit, she’d left knowing four swimming strokes and several life-saving techniques, and was entirely at home in the water. She also knew what to do if you were sharing the same stretch of water with a hippopotamus, which was to find another stretch of water. Hippos only look big and cuddly from a distance. Close up, they just look big.
Susan summoned up all the inherited powers of the deathly voice plus the terrible authority of the schoolroom, and yelled: GO AWAY!
The creature floundered madly in its effort to turn around, and Susan struck out for the shore. It was an unsure shore, the water becoming land in a tangle of sandbanks, sucking black muck, rotted tree roots, and swamp. Insects swirled around and—
—the cobbles were muddy underfoot, and there was the sound of horsemen in the mist—
—and ice, piled up against dead trees—
—and Lobsang, taking her arm.
“Found you,” he said.
“You just shattered history,” said Susan. “You broke it!”
The hippo had come as a shock. She’d never realized one mouth could hold so much bad breath, or be so big and deep.
“I know. I had to. There was no other way. Can you find Lu-Tze? I know Death can locate any living thing, and since you—”
“All right, all right, I know,” said Susan darkly. She held out her hand and concentrated. An image of Lu-Tze’s extremely heavy lifetimer appeared and gathered weight.
“He’s only a few hundred yards over there,” she said, pointing to a frozen drift.
“And I know when he is,” said Lobsang. “Only sixty thousand years away. So . . .”
Lu-Tze, when they found him, was looking calmly up at an enormous mammoth. Under its huge hairy brow its eyes were squinting with the effort both of seeing him and of getting all three of its brain cells lined up so that it could decide whether to trample on him or gouge him out of the frostbound landscape. One brain cell was saying “gouge,” one was going for “trample,” but the third had wandered off and was thinking about as much sex as possible.
At the far end of its trunk, Lu-Tze was saying: “So . . .you’ve never heard of Rule One, then?”
Lobsang stepped out of the air beside him.
“We must go, Sweeper!”
The appearance of Lobsang did not seem to surprise Lu-Tze at all, although he did seem annoyed at the interruption.
“No rush, wonder boy,” he said. “I’ve got this perfectly under control—”
“Where’s the lady?” said Susan.
“Over by that snowdrift,” said Lu-Tze, indicating with his thumb while still trying to outstare a pair of eyes five feet apart. “When this turned up she screamed and twisted her ankle. Look, you can see I’ve made it nervous—”
Susan waded into the drift and hauled Unity upright.
“Come on, we’re leaving,” she said brusquely.
“I saw his head cut off!” Unity babbled. “And then suddenly we were here!”
“Yes, that kind of thing happens,” said Susan.
Unity stared at her, wild-eyed.
“Life is full of surprises,” said Susan, but the sight of the creature’s distress made her hesitate. All right, the thing was one of them, it was merely wearing—well, at least had started out merely wearing a body as a kind of coat, but now . . .after all, you could say that about everyone, couldn’t you?
Susan had even wondered if the human soul without the anchor of a body would end up, eventually, as something like an Auditor. Which, to be fair, meant that Unity, who was getting more firmly wrapped in flesh by the minute, was something like a human. And that was a pretty good definition of Lobsang and, if it came to it, Susan as well. Who knew where humanity began and where it finished?
“Come along,” she said. “We’ve got to stick together, right?”
* * *
Like shards of glass spinning through the air, fragments of history drifted and collided and intersected in the dark.
There was a lighthouse, though. The valley of Oi Dong held on to the ever-repeating day. In the hall almost all of the giant cylinders stood silent, all time ran out. Some had split. Some had melted. Some had exploded. Some had simply vanished. But one still turned.
Big Thanda, the oldest and biggest, ground slowly on its basalt bearing, winding time out at one end and back on the other, ensuring, as Wen had decreed, that the perfect day would never end.
Rambut Handisides was all alone in the hall, sitting beside the turning stone in the light of a butter lamp and occasionally throwing a handful of grease onto the base.
A clink of stone made him peer into the darkness. It was heavy with the smoke of fried rock.
There the sound was again, and then the scratch and flare of a match.
“Lu-Tze?” he said. “Is that you?”
“I hope so, Rambut, but who knows these days?” Lu-Tze stepped into the light and sat down. “Keeping you busy, are they?”
Handisides sprang to his feet. “It’s been terrible, Sweeper! Everyone’s up in the Mandala Hall! It’s worse than the Great Crash! There’s bits of history everywhere and we’ve lost half the spinners! We’ll never be able to put it all—”
“Now, now, you look like a man who’s had a busy day,” said Lu-Tze kindly. “Not got a lot of sleep, eh? Tell you what, I’ll take care of this. You go and get a bit of shut-eye, okay?”
“We thought you were lost out in the world, and—” the monk burbled.
“And now I’m back,” smiled Lu-Tze, patting him on the shoulder. “There’s still that little alcove around the corner where you repair the smaller spinners? And there’s still those unofficial bunks for when it’s the night shift and you only need a couple of lads to keep their eye on things?”
Handisides nodded and looked guilty. Lu-Tze wasn’t supposed to know about the bunks.
“You get along, then,” said Lu-Tze. He watched the man’s retreating back and added quietly, “and if you wake up you might turn out to be the luckiest idiot that ever there was. Well, wonder boy? What next?”
“We put everything back,” said Lobsang, emerging from the shadows.
“You know how long that took us last time?”
“Yes,” said Lobsang, looking around at the stricken hall and heading toward the podium. “I do. I don’t think it will take me as long.”
“I wish you sounded more certain,” said Susan.
“I’m . . .pretty certain,” said Lobsang, running his fingers over the bobbins on the board.
Lu-Tze waved a cautionary hand at Susan. Lobsang’s mind was already on the way somewhere else, and now she wondered how large a space it was occupying. His eyes were closed.
“The . . .spinners that are left . . .can you move the jumpers?” he said.
“I can show the ladies how to,” said Lu-Tze.
“Are there not monks who know how to do this?” said Unity.
“It . . .would take too long. I . . .am an apprentice to a sweeper. They . . .would run around asking questions,” said Lobsang. “You . . .will not.”
“He’s got a point right enough,” said Lu-Tze. “People will start saying ‘what is the meaning of this?’ and ‘Bikkit!’, and we’ll never get anything done.”
Lobsang looked down at the bobbins and then across at Susan.
“Imagine . . .that there is a jigsaw, all in pieces. But . . .I am very good at spotting edges and shapes. Very good. And all the pieces are moving. But . . .because they were once linked, they have by their very nature a memory of that link. Their shape is the memory. Once a few are in the right position, the rest will be easier. Oh . . .and imagine that all the bits are scattered across the whole of eventuality and mixing randomly with pieces from other histories. Can you grasp all that?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Good. Everything I have just said is nonsense. It bears no resemblance to the truth of the matter in any way at all. But it is a lie that you can . . .understand, I think. And then, afterward—”
“You’re going to go, aren’t you,” said Susan. It was not a question.
“I will not have enough power to stay,” said Lobsang.
“You need power to stay human?” said Susan. She hadn’t been aware of the rise of her heart, but now it was sinking.
“Yes . . .even trying to think in a mere four dimensions is a terrible effort. I’m sorry. Even to hold in my mind the concept of something called ‘now’ is hard. You thought I was mostly human. I’m mostly not.” He sighed. “If only I could tell you what everything looks like to me . . .it’s so beautiful.”
Lobsang stared into the air above the little wooden bobbins. Things twinkled. There were complex curves and spirals, brilliant against the blackness . . .
It was like looking at a clock in pieces, with every wheel and spring carefully laid out in the dark in front of him. Dismantled, controllable, every part of it understood . . .but a number of small but important things had gone ping into the corners of a very large room. If you were really good, then you could work out where they’d landed . . .
“You’ve only got about a third of the spinners,” came the voice of Lu-Tze. “The rest are smashed.”
Lobsang couldn’t see him. There was only the glittering show before his eyes.
“That . . .is true, but once they were whole,” he said. He raised his hands and lowered them on the bobbins.
Susan looked around at the sudden grinding noise and saw row after row of columns rising out of the dust and debris. They stood like lines of soldiers, dust cascading from them.
“Good trick!” Lu-Tze shouted into Susan’s ear, above the thunder. “Feeding time into the spinners themselves! Theoretically possible, but we never managed to do it!”
“Do you know what he’s actually going to do?” Susan shouted back.
“Yeah! Snatch the extra time out of bits of history that are too far ahead and shove it into the bits that have fallen behind!”
“Sounds simple!”
“Just one problem!”
“What?”
“Can’t do it! Losses!” Lu-Tze snapped his fingers, trying to explain time dynamics to a noninitiate. “Friction! Divergence! All sorts of stuff! You can’t create time on the spinners, you can only move it around—”
There was a sudden bright blue glow around Lobsang. It flickered over the desk and then snapped across the air to form arcs of light leading to all the Procrastinators. It crawled between the carved symbols and clung to them in a thickening layer, like cotton winding on a reel.
Lu-Tze looked at the whirling light and the shadow within it, almost lost against the glow.
“—at least,” he added, “up until now.”
The spinners wound up to their working speed and then went faster, under the lash of the light. It poured across the cavern in a solid, unending stream.
Flames licked around the bottom of the nearest cylinder. The base was glowing, and the noise from its stone bearing was joining a rising, cavern-filling scream of stone in distress. Lu-Tze shook his head.
“You, Susan, buckets of water from the wells! You, Miss Unity, you follow her with the grease pails!”
“And what are you going to do?” said Susan, grabbing two buckets.
“I’m going to worry like hell and that’s not an easy job, believe me!”
Steam built up then, and there was a smell of burning butter. There was no time for anything but to run from the wells to the nearest spitting bearing and back, and there was not enough time even for that.
The spinners turned back and forth. There was no need for the jumpers now. The crystal rods that had survived the crash hung uselessly from their hooks as time arced overhead from one Procrastinator to another, showing up as red or blue glow in the air. It was a sight to frighten the knoptas off any trained spinner driver, Lu-Tze knew. It looked like a cascade running wild, but there was some control in there, some huge pattern being woven . . .Bearings squealed. Butter bubbled. The bases of some spinners were smoking. But things held. They’re being held, Lu-Tze thought.
He looked up at the registers. The boards slammed back and forth, sending lines of red or blue or bare wood across the wall of the cavern. There was a pall of white smoke around them as their own wooden bearings gently charred.
Past and future were streaming through the air. The sweeper could feel them.
On the podium, Lobsang was wrapped in the glow. The bobbins were not being moved anymore. What was going on now was on some other level, which didn’t need the intervention of crude mechanisms.
