Thief of Time (Discworld, #26; Death, #5)

by Terry Pratchett

.you’d want to know the whole story. And this one starts with desks.

Only someone whose life contains very little else, one feels, would treasure a piece of gimcrackery like this. It currently holds tea, with a slice of lemon. The bleak desktop also contains a paper knife in the shape of a scythe, and a number of hourglasses. Death picks up the mug in a skeletal hand . . . . . .and took a sip, pausing only to look again at the wording he’d seen thousands of times before, and then put it down.

The small figure by the machine saluted smartly and beamed, if a rat skull could beam. It pulled a pair of goggles over its eye sockets, hitched up its robe, and clambered into the machine.

They were not life-forms. They were . . .nonlife-forms. They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell. And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history, and belief.

A year ago astronomers across the Discworld had been puzzled to see the stars gently wheel across the sky as the world-turtle executed a roll. The thickness of the world never allowed them to see why, but Great A’Tuin’s ancient head had snaked out and down and had snapped right out of the sky the speeding asteroid that would, had it hit, have meant that no one would ever have needed to buy a diary ever again.

EVERY CAUSE HAS ITS EFFECT, he said aloud. SO EVERY EFFECT HAS ITS CAUSE. He nodded at the Death of Rats. SHOW ME, said Death. SHOW ME . . .A BEGINNING. Tick

WITCHES ARE MATRILINEAL, said Death. THEY FIND IT MUCH EASIER TO CHANGE MEN THAN TO CHANGE NAMES.

OH, YES, said Death. ONCE THERE WERE FIVE OF US. FIVE HORSEMEN. BUT YOU KNOW HOW THINGS ARE. THERE’S ALWAYS A ROW. CREATIVE DISAGREEMENTS, ROOMS BEING TRASHED, THAT SORT OF THING. He sighed. AND THINGS SAID THAT PERHAPS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SAID.

Tick This desk was a field of galaxies. Things twinkled. There were complex wheels and spirals, brilliant against the blackness . . . Jeremy always liked the moment when he had a clock in pieces, with every wheel and spring carefully laid out on the black velvet cloth in front of him. It was like looking at Time, dismantled, controllable, every part of it understood . . .

He wished he liked people more, but somehow he could never get on with them. He never knew what to say. If life was a party, he wasn’t even in the kitchen.

“But Xeno came up with four paradoxes, I believe,” said Lady LeJean. “They involved the idea that there is such a thing as the smallest possible unit of time. And it must exist, mustn’t it? Consider the present. It must have a length, because one end of it is connected to the past and the other is connected to the future, and if it didn’t have a length then the present couldn’t exist at all. There would be no time for it to be the present in.” Jeremy was suddenly in love. He hadn’t felt like this since he’d taken the back off the nursery clock when he was fourteen months old.

Tick This desk is neat. There is a pile of books on it, and a ruler. There is also, at the moment, a clock made out of cardboard. Miss Susan picked it up.

The pigeon on Miss Susan’s desk fluttered down and joined the other pigeons prospecting for scraps among the flagstones, cooing very gently to them in pidgin pigeon.

Miss Susan had privately marked him down as Boy Most Likely To Be Killed One Day By His Wife.

There was, of course, nothing there. At least, nothing macabre. . . .Unless you counted the piece of chocolate half-gnawed by rat teeth and a note in heavy gothic lettering saying SEE ME and signed by a very familiar alpha-and-omega symbol and the word Grandfather.

The rumor is that the monks have some kind of duty to see that tomorrow happens according to some mystic plan devised by some man who kept on being surprised. In fact, for some time now, and it would be impossible and ridiculous to say how long, the truth has been stranger and more dangerous. The job of the History Monks is to see that tomorrow happens at all.

But it is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise. And another is that tranquillity is always a good thing.

Lu-Tze had no time at all. Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn’t live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.

“Do you not want to know the name of the man you are about to destroy?” The fighter held his stance, glaring at Lu-Tze. “I don’t need to know name of sweeper,” he said. Lu-Tze rolled the cigarette into a skinny cylinder and winked at the angry man, which only stoked the anger. “It is always wise to know the name of a sweeper, boy,” said the dojo master. “And my question was not addressed to you.”

“Dojo! What is Rule One!” Even the cowering challenger mumbled along with the chorus: “Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man!”

To say that it was black and bound up in a ponytail is to miss the opportunity of using the term “elephantine.” It was hair with personality.

“Look, I’m offering you the opportunity of a lifetime, do you understand?” “Why is it the opportunity of a lifetime, Mr. Soto?” “No, you misunderstand me. You, that is Newgate Ludd, are being offered, that is by me, the opportunity of having a lifetime. Which is more than you will have shortly.”

“He saw the patterns,” said Lu-Tze. “And reacted to the Mandala.” He did not add: and the Mandala reacted to him. He wanted to think about that. When you look into the abyss, it’s not supposed to wave back.

twig. Madam Frout cringed back in her chair when Miss Susan looked up. The girl had this terrible ability to give you Her Full Attention. You had to be a better person than Madam Frout to survive the intensity of that attention. It inspected your soul, putting little red circles around the bits it didn’t like. When Miss Susan looked at you, it was as if she was giving you marks.

She transferred Jason to Miss Susan’s class. It had been a cruel thing to do, but Madam Frout considered that there was now some kind of undeclared war going on. If children were weapons, Jason would have been banned by international treaty. Jason had doting parents and an attention span of minus several seconds, except when it came to inventive cruelty to small furry animals, when he could be quite patient. Jason kicked, punched, bit, and spat. His artwork had even frightened the life out of Miss Smith, who could generally find something nice to say about any child. He was definitely a boy with special needs. In the view of the staff, they began with an exorcism.

“A man with all bones came to talk to us he was not scarey at all, he had a big white hors. We pated the hors. He had a sighyve. He told us interesting things and to be careful when crosing the road.”

“Sometimes I really think people ought to have to pass a proper exam before they’re allowed to be parents. Not just the practical, I mean.”

No door was closed to Miss Susan. It ran in the family. Some genetics are passed on via the soul.

It was a mystery to her why Death had started using the place. Of course, he did have many of the qualities of a gentleman; he had a place in the country—a far, dark country—was unfailingly punctual, was courteous to all those he met—and sooner or later he met everyone—was well if soberly dressed, at home in any company, and, proverbially, a good horseman. The fact that he was the Grim Reaper was the only bit that didn’t quite fit.

WOULD A LITTLE SMALL TALK HURT? Susan sighed. She knew what was behind that, and it wasn’t a happy thought. It was a small, sad, and wobbly little thought, and it ran: each of them had no one else but the other. There. It was a thought that sobbed into its own handkerchief, but it was true.

Of course someone would be that stupid. Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying “End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,” the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

“Except in the case of the Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein,” said Susan, watching his skull. “They found that quite upsetting, even though it’s got a kind of happy ending.” IT MAY BE BECAUSE THE STORY IS TRUE.

There was a drum roll. Susan glanced down. The Death of Rats was seated in front of a tiny drum kit. OBSERVE.

BUT THIS WAS REAL, said Death. “How real do you mean?” TIME HAD A SON. “How could—” TIME HAD A SON. SOMEONE MOSTLY MORTAL. SOMEONE LIKE YOU.

Igor took refuge in silence. In his experience, many of the world’s greatest discoveries were made by men who would be considered mad by conventional standards. Insanity depended on your point of view, he always said, and if it was the view through your own underpants then everything looked fine.

Susan walked back through the motionless streets, sat down in Madam Frout’s office, and let herself sink back into the stream of time. She had never found out how this worked. It just did. Time didn’t stop for the rest of the world, and it didn’t stop for her—it was just that she entered a kind of loop of time, and everything else stayed exactly as it was until she’d finished what she needed to do. It was another inherited family trait. It worked best if you didn’t think about it, just like tightrope walking.

“But that’s far too difficult for seven-year-olds!” “Yes, but I didn’t tell them that and so far they haven’t found out,” said Susan.

“Just ‘Because,’ master? 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.’”

History needs shepherds, not butchers.”

“Deja-fu?” That got a reaction. Lu-Tze’s eyebrows raised. “Deja-fu? You heard that rumor? Time as a weapon?” he said.

He squinted at Lobsang. “You’re not the reincarnation of someone, are you? That happens a lot in these parts.”

There wasn’t anything written down about all this, Lu-Tze knew. You couldn’t teach it in a classroom, although they tried. A good spin driver learned it through the soles of his feet, for all the theory that they taught you these days. He’d learn to feel the flows, to see the rows of Procrastinators as wells or fountains of time.

Death looked around. TO WHOM DO YOU REFER? “That boy up on the podium, see him?” NO, I’M AFRAID I SEE NO ONE THERE.

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS, STAYS HAPPENED. “What kind of philosophy is that?” THE ONLY ONE THAT WORKS.

“Sorry? You don’t have to be sorry. I don’t know what you are, son. You’re too quick. You’re taking to this place like a duck to water. You don’t have to learn stuff that takes other people years to get the hang of. Old Shoblang, may he be reincarnated somewhere nice and warm, even he couldn’t balance the load down to a second. I mean, a second. Over a whole damn world!” He shuddered. “Here’s a tip. Don’t let it show. People can be funny about that sort of thing.”

But age and wisdom don’t necessarily go together, I’ve always found,” said Lu-Tze, as they approached the abbot’s rooms. “Some people just become stupid with more authority.

On the way out they passed a lesser acolyte carrying a small potty with a pattern of bunny rabbits around it. “It’s not easy, reincarnating,” said Lu-Tze, running down the corridor.

I’ll tell you, the day someone pulls the plug out of the bottom of the universe, the chain will lead all the way to Ankh-Morpork and some bugger saying ‘I just wanted to see what would happen.’ All roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.”

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 . . .

“Lu-Tze?” “Yes, lad?” “I’ve got a question. Can you give me a straight answer?” “I’ll try, of course.” “What the hell is going on?” Lu-Tze brushed the snow off a rock. “Oh,” he said. “One of the difficult questions.”