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But perhaps everyone needs a tiny part of themselves that can, metaphorically, be allowed to run naked in the rain3, to think the unthinkable thoughts, to hide in corners and spy on the world, to do the forbidden but enjoyable deeds.
A moment later two sparklers spluttered fitfully into life and sizzled away on either side of the word: MALIGNITY. Death nodded. It was just as he’d suspected.
Intelligent life was, therefore, an anomaly.
He wished he liked people more, but somehow he could never get on with them.
Jeremy obediently held out a hand. Patient men at the Clockmakers’ Guild had spent a long time teaching him how to Relate to People before giving it up in despair, but some things had stuck.
She was young, but with an indefinable air of age about her.
Miss Susan did not let the children do what they liked. She let them do what she liked. It had turned out to be a lot more interesting for everyone.
‘It’s always now everywhere, miss?’
‘Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.’
‘So, in the patois of the world,’ said Rinpo, ‘there is no actual downside.’
It was muffled, and in a foreign language, but all swearing has a certain international content.
He found his pencil under the bed. He’d even sharpened it. In his sleep, he’d sharpened a pencil!
but Lu-Tze at least cared for people even if he did not care for rules.
There weren’t many people Lu-Tze respected. Mostly, they just got tolerated.
Some genetics are passed on via the soul.
Listening was an art he had developed over the years, having learned that if you listened hard and long enough people would tell you more than they thought they knew.
Susan did an unusual thing, and listened. That’s not an easy task for a teacher.
was not easy, and just occasionally she had the irresistible urge to annoy.
‘Cultural, is it?’ Dr Hopkins looked relieved. He was a man who tried to see the best in everybody, but the city had got rather complicated since he was a boy, with dwarfs and trolls and golems and even zombies. He wasn’t sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was ‘cultural’, apparently, and you couldn’t object to that, so he didn’t. ‘Cultural’ sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren’t really there.
‘I’ve heard that some people really seem to come alive in thunderstorms,’
This was just an essay, to see if he was on the right lines.
There was something pleasant about an empty classroom. Of course, as any teacher would point out, one nice thing was that there were no children in it, and particularly no Jason. But the tables and shelves around the room showed evidence of a term well spent.
The class had built a full-size white horse out of cardboard boxes, during which time they’d learned a lot about horses and Susan learned about Jason’s remarkably accurate powers of observation. She’d had to take the cardboard tube away from him and explain that this was a polite horse.
‘All that playing with history, running about, unsettling people … No, not really. I was never quite certain we should be doing it, to be honest. No, sweeping is good enough for me. There’s something … real about a nice clean floor.’ ‘This is a test, isn’t it?’ said Lobsang coldly. ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘I mean, I understand how it works. The master makes the pupil do all the menial jobs, and then it turns out that really the pupil is learning things of great value … and I don’t think I’m learning anything, really, except that people are pretty messy and inconsiderate.’ ‘Not a bad lesson, all the same,’
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‘Then …’ Lobsang nodded at the little volcano, which was gently smoking, ‘how does that work? It’s on a saucer!’ Lu-Tze stared straight ahead, his lips moving. ‘Page seventy-six, I think,’ he said. Lobsang turned to the page. ‘“Because,”’ he read. ‘Good answer,’ said Lu-Tze, gently caressing a minute crag with a camel-hair brush. ‘Just “Because”, Sweeper? No reason?’ ‘Reason? What reason can a mountain have? And, as you accumulate years, you will learn that most answers boil down, eventually, to “Because”.’
‘But did not Wen say that if the truth is anywhere, it is everywhere?’ said Lobsang.
‘They can be very dangerous, things that don’t look dangerous,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Not looking dangerous is what makes them dangerous. For it is written, “You can’t tell a book by its cover.”
‘Yeah, I know all about practising procedures for emergencies,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘And there’s always something missing.’ ‘Ridiculous! We take great pains to—’ ‘You always leave out the damn emergency.’
Lu-Tze almost smiled. ‘Very flexible things, human minds,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing what they can stretch to fit. We did a fine job there—’
It occurred to Lobsang, not for the first time, that the abbot was a little bit more than purely random in his attacks on the man. The acolyte was, indeed, the kind of mildly objectionable person who engendered an irresistible urge in any right-thinking person to pour goo into his hair and hit him with a rubber yak, and the abbot was old enough to listen to his inner child.
‘Few things get better if you pick at them,’
They called it slicing time … There is a way of playing certain musical instruments that is called ‘circular breathing’, devised to allow people to play the didgeridoo or the bagpipes without actually imploding or being sucked down the tube. ‘Slicing time’ was very much the same, except time was substituted for air and it was a lot quieter. A trained monk could stretch a second further than an hour …
when they thought about it at all. In fact each of them owned one
They built a woman. It was a logical choice. After all, while men wielded more obvious power than women, they often did so at the expense of personal danger, and no Auditor liked the prospect of personal danger. Beautiful women often achieved great things, on the other hand, merely by smiling at powerful men.
Auditors a lot of difficulty. It made no sense at a molecular level. But research turned up the
Or how much thinking the brain did all by itself? It was terrifying. Half the time her thoughts seemed not to be her own.
Lu-Tze got the feeling that he was taking part in a dialogue of one.
In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly: ‘Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?’ Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: ‘A fish!’ And Clodpool went away, satisfied.
‘Oh, go and calibrate the complexity resonator, will you?’
She didn’t know if her other gift was from Death, but she’d always told the children that they had a lazy eye and a business eye. There were two ways of looking at the world. The lazy eye just saw the surface. The business eye saw through into the reality beneath.
People had tried to coat it with sugar and magic swords, but its true nature still lurked like a rake in an overgrown lawn, ready to rise up at the incautious foot.
How? Susan had the kind of mind that would sour a narrative with a question like that. Time and a mortal man. How could they ever …? Well, how could they?
As she stared at her notes, her hair unwound itself from its tight bun and took up its ground-state position, which was the hair of someone who had just touched something highly electrical.
Lady LeJean was being strong. She’d never realized how much humans were controlled by their bodies. The thing nagged night and day. It was always too hot, too cold, too empty, too full, too tired …
The sense of smell wanted the body to eat without consulting the brain!
Yesterday she’d tried a piece of dry toast. It had been the single worst experience of her existence. It had been the single most intense experience of her existence.
When water fills a jug, it takes the shape of the jug. But the water is not the jug, nor is the jug the water. ‘Of course,’ said Lady LeJean. And, inside, a thought that she hadn’t known she was thinking, a thought that turned up out of the darkness behind the eyes, said: We are surely the most stupid creatures in the universe.
‘Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.’
