Thief of Time (Discworld 26)

'Why are we carrying spinners on our backs?'

'All in good time, lad. I hope.'

'We're carrying time, right? If time stops, we can keep going? Like... divers?'

'Full marks.'

'And-?'

'Another question?'

'Time is a “she”? None of the teachers have mentioned it and I don't recall anything in the scrolls.'

'Don't you think about that. Wen wrote... well, the Secret Scroll, it's called. They keep it in a locked room. Only the abbots and the most senior monks ever get to see it.' Lobsang couldn't let that one pass. 'So how did you-?' he began. 'Well, you wouldn't expect men like that to do the sweeping up in there, would you ?' said Lu-Tze. 'Terribly dusty, it got.'

'What was it about?'

'I didn't read much of it. Didn't feel it was right,' said Lu-Tze. 'You? What was it about, then?'

'It was a love poem. And it was a good one ...' Lu-Tze's image blurred as he sliced time. Then it faded and vanished. A line of footprints appeared across the snowfield. Lobsang wrapped time around himself and followed. And a memory came from nowhere at all: Wen was right. Tick There were lots of places like the warehouse. There always are, in every old city, no matter how valuable the building land is. Sometimes, space just gets lost. A workshop is built, and then another beside it. Factories and storerooms and sheds and temporary lean-tos crawl towards one another, meet and merge. Spaces between outside walls are roofed with tar paper. Odd-shaped bits of ground are colonized by nailing up a bit of wall and cutting a doorway. Old doorways are masked by piles of lumber or new tool racks. The old men who know what was where move on and die, just like the flies who punctuate the thick cobwebs on the grubby windows. Young men, in this noisome world of whirring lathes and paint shops and cluttered workbenches, don't have time to explore. And so there were spaces like this, a small warehouse with a crusted skylight that no fewer than four factory owners thought was owned by one of the other three, when they thought about it at all. In fact each of them owned one wall, and certainly no one recalled who roofed the space. Beyond the walls on all four sides men and dwarfs bent iron, sawed planks, made string and turned screws. But in here was a silence known only to rats.

The air moved, for the first time in years. Dust balls rolled across the floor. Little motes sparkled and spun in the light that forced its way down from the roof. In the surrounding area, invisible and subtle, matter began to move. It came from workmen's sandwiches and gutter dirt and pigeon feathers, an atom here, a molecule there, and streamed unheeded into the centre of the space. It spiralled. Eventually it became, after passing through some strange, ancient and horrible shapes, Lady LeJean. She staggered, but managed to stay upright. Other Auditors also appeared and, as they did so, it seemed that they had never really not been there. The dead greyness of the light merely took on shapes; they emerged like ships from a fog. You stared at the fog, and suddenly part of the fog was hull that had been there all along, and now there was nothing for it but to race for the lifeboats... Lady LeJean said: 'I cannot keep doing this. It is too painful.' One said, Ah, can you tell us what pain is like? We have often wondered. 'No. No, I don't think I can. It is... a body thing. It is not pleasant. From now on, I will retain the body.' One said, That could be dangerous. Lady LeJean shrugged. 'We have been through that before. It's only a matter of appearance,' she said. 'And it is remarkable how much easier it is to deal with humans in this form.' One said, You shrugged. And you are talking with your mouth. A hole for food and air. 'Yes. It is remarkable, isn't it?' Lady LeJean's body found an old crate, pulled it over and sat on it. She hardly had to think about muscle movements at all. One said, You aren't eating, are you? 'As yet, no.' One said, As yet? That raises the whole dreadful subject of. . . orifices. One said, And how did you learn to shrug? 'It comes with the body,' said her ladyship. 'We never realized this, did we? Most of the things it does it appears to do automatically. Standing upright takes no effort whatsoever. The whole business gets easier every time.' The body shifted position slightly, and crossed its legs. Amazing, she thought. It did it to be comfortable. I didn't have to think about it at all. We never guessed. One said, There will be questions.

The Auditors hated questions. They hated them almost as much as they hated decisions, and they hated decisions almost as much as they hated the idea of the individual personality. But what they hated most was things moving around randomly. 'Believe me, everything will be fine,' said Lady LeJean. 'We will not be breaking any of the rules, after all. All that will happen is that time will stop. Everything thereafter will be neat. Alive, but not moving. Tidy.' One said, And we can get the filing finished. 'Exactly,' said Lady LeJean. 'And he wants to do it. That is the strange thing. He hardly thinks about the consequences.' One said, Splendid. There was one of those pauses when no one is quite ready to speak. And then: One said, Tell us. ... What is it like? 'What is what like?' One said, Being insane. Being human. 'Strange. Disorganized. Several levels of thinking go on at once. There are... things we have no word for. For example, the idea of eating seems now to have an attraction. The body tells me this.' One said, Attraction? As in gravity? 'Ye-es. One is drawn towards food.' One said, Food in large masses? 'Even in small amounts.' One said, But eating is simply a function. What is the ... attraction of performing a function? Surely the knowledge that it is necessary for continued survival is sufficient? 'I cannot say,' said Lady LeJean. One Auditor said, You persist in using a personal pronoun. And one added, And you have not died! To be an individual is to live, and to live is to die! 'Yes. I know. But it is essential for humans to use the personal pronoun. It divides the universe into two parts. The darkness behind the eyes, where the little voice is, and everything else. It is... a horrible feeling. It is like being... questioned, all the time.' One said, What is the little voice?

'Sometimes thinking is like talking to another person, but that person is also you.' She could tell this disturbed the other Auditors. 'I do not wish to continue in this way any longer than necessary,' she added. And realized that she had lied. One said, We do not blame you. Lady LeJean nodded. The Auditors could see into human minds. They could see the pop and sizzle of the thoughts. But they could not read them. They could see the energies flow from node to node, they could see the brain glittering like a Hogswatch decoration. What they couldn't see was what was happening. So they'd built one. It was the logical thing to do. They'd used human agents before, because early on they'd worked out that there were many, many humans who would do anything for sufficient gold. This was puzzling, because gold did not seem to the Auditors to hold any significant value for a human body - it needed iron and copper and zinc, but only the most minute traces of gold. Therefore, they'd reasoned, this was further evidence that the humans who required it were flawed, and this was why attempts to make use of them were doomed. But why were they flawed? Building a human being was easy; the Auditors knew exactly how to move matter around. The trouble was that the result didn't do anything but lie there and, eventually, decompose. This was annoying, since human beings, without any special training or education, seemed to be able to make working replicas quite easily. Then they learned that they could make a human body which worked if an Auditor was inside it. There were, of course, huge risks. Death was one of them. The Auditors avoided death by never going so far as to get a life. They strove to be as indistinguishable as hydrogen atoms, and with none of the latter's joie de vivre. Some luckless Auditor might be risking death by 'operating' the body. But lengthy consultation decided that if the driver took care, and liaised at all times with the rest of the Auditors, this risk was minimal and worth taking, considering the goal. 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. The whole subject of 'beauty' caused the Auditors a lot of difficulty. It made no sense at a molecular level. But research turned up the fact that the woman in the picture Woman Holding Ferret by Leonard of Quirm was considered the epitome of beauty, and so they'd based Lady LeJean on that. They had made changes, of course. The face in the picture was asymmetrical and full of minor flaws, which they had carefully removed.

The result would have been successful beyond the Auditors' wildest dreams, had they ever dreamed. Now that they had their stalking horse, their reliable human, anything was possible. They were learning fast, or at least collecting data, which they considered to be the same as learning. So was Lady LeJean. She had been a human for two weeks, two astonishing, shocking weeks. Whoever would have guessed that a brain operated like this? Or that colours had a meaning that went way, way beyond spectral analysis? How could she even begin to describe the blueness of blue? Or how much thinking the brain did all by itself? It was terrifying. Half the time her thoughts seemed not to be her own. She had been quite surprised to find that she did not want to tell the other Auditors this. She did not want to tell them a lot of things. And she didn't have to! She had power. Oh, over Jeremy, that was not in question and was now, she had to admit, rather worrying. It was causing her body to do things by itself, like blush. But she had power over the other Auditors, too. She made them nervous. Of course, she wanted the project to work. It was their goal. A tidy and predictable universe, where everything stayed in its place. If Auditors dreamed, this would be another dream. Except... except... The young man had smiled at her in a nervous, worrying way, and the universe was turning out to be a lot more chaotic than even the Auditors had ever suspected. A lot of the chaos was happening inside Lady LeJean's head. Tick Lu-Tze and Lobsang passed through Bong Phut and Long Nap like ghosts in twilight. People and animals were blueish statues and were not, said Lu-Tze, to be touched in any circumstances. Lu-Tze restocked his travel bag with food from some of the houses, making sure to leave little copper tokens in their place. 'It means we're obliged to them,' he said, filling Lobsang's bag as well. 'The next monk through here might have to give someone a minute or two.'

'A minute or two isn't much.'

'For a dying woman to say goodbye to her children, it's a lifetime,' said Lu-Tze. 'Is it not written, “Every second counts”? Let's go.'

'I'm tired, Sweeper.'

'I did say every second counts.'

'But everybody has to sleep!'

'Yes, but not yet,' Lu-Tze insisted. 'We can rest in the caves down at Songset. Can't fold time while you're asleep, see?'

'Can't we use the spinners?'

'In theory, yes.'

'In theory? They could wind out time for us. We'd only sleep for a few seconds-'

'They're for emergencies only,' said Lu-Tze bluntly. 'How do you define an emergency, Sweeper?'

'An emergency is when I decide its time to use a clockwork spinner designed by Qu, wonder boy. A lifebelt's for saving your life. That's when I'll trust an uncalibrated, unblessed spinner powered by springs. When I have to. I know Qu says-' Lobsang blinked and shook his head. Lu-Tze grabbed his arm. 'You felt something again?'

'Ugh... like having a tooth out in my brain,' said Lobsang, rubbing his head. He pointed. 'It came from over there.'

'A pain came from over there?' said Lu-Tze. He glared at the boy. 'Like last time? But we've never found a way of detecting which way-' He stopped and rummaged in his sack. Then he used the sack to sweep snow off a flat boulder. 'Well see what-' Glass house. This time Lobsang could concentrate on the tones that filled the air. Wet finger on a wineglass? Well, you could start there. But the finger would have to be the finger of a god on the glass of some celestial sphere. And the wonderful, complex, shifting tones did not simply fill the air, they were the air. The moving blur beyond the walls was getting closer now. It was just beyond the closest wall, then it found the open doorway... and vanished. Something was behind Lobsang. He turned. There was nothing there that he could see, but he felt movement and, for just a moment, something warm brushed his cheek... '-the sand says,' said Lu-Tze, tipping the contents of a small bag onto the rock.

The coloured grains bounced and spread. They did not have the sensitivity of the Mandala itself, but there was a blue bloom in the chaos. He gave Lobsang a sharp look. 'It's been proved that no one can do what you just did,' he said. 'We've never found any way of detecting where a disturbance in time is actually being caused.'

'Er, sorry.' Lobsang raised a hand to his cheek. It was damp. 'Er, what did I do?'