Discworld 26 - The Thief of Time (16 page)

 
 
  
He wrenched it open.
'Two pints, sir, lovely and fresh,' said Mr Soak, handing him the bottles. 'And a day like this
just says fresh cream, doesn't it?'
Igor glared at him, but took the bottles. 'I prefer it when it'th going green,' he said haughtily.
'Good day to you, Mr Thoak.'
He shut the door.
'It wasn't her?' said Jeremy, when he arrived back in the workshop.
'It wath the milkman, thur.'
'She's twenty-five seconds late!' said Jeremy, looking concerned. 'Do you think anything
could have happened to her?'
'Real ladieth are often fathionably late, thur,' said Igor, putting the milk away. It was icy cold
under his fingers.
'Well, I'm sure her ladyship is a real lady.'
'I wouldn't know about that, thur,' said Igor, who in fact had the aforesaid very strong doubts
in that area. He walked back into the shop and took up position with his hand on the door
handle just as the knock came.
Lady LeJean swept past Igor. The two trolls ignored him and took up their positions just
inside the workshop. Igor put them down as hired rock, anyone's for two dollars a day plus
walking-around money.
Her ladyship was impressed.
The big clock was nearing completion. It wasn't the squat, blocky thing that Igor's
grandfather had told him about. Jeremy had, much to Igor's surprise - for there wasn't a scrap
of decoration anywhere in the house - gone for the impressive look.
'Your grandfather helped to make the first one,' Jeremy had said. 'So let's build a grandfather
clock, eh?' And there it stood - a slim, long-case clock in crystal and spun glass, reflecting the
light in worrying ways.
Igor had spent a fortune in the Street of Cunning Artificers. For enough money, you could
buy anything in Ankh-Morpork, and that included people. He'd made sure that no crystal-
cutter or glassworker had done enough of the work to give them any sort of clue about the
finished clock, but he'd worried needlessly about that. Money could buy a lot of uninterest.
Besides, who would believe you could measure time with crystals? Only in the workshop did
it all come together.
Igor bustled around, polishing things, listening. carefully as Jeremy showed off his creation.

 
 
  
'-no need for any metal parts,' he was saying. 'We've come up with a way of making the
tamed lightning flow across glass, and we've found a workman who can make glass that
bends slightly-'
'We', Igor noticed. Well, that was always the way of it. 'We' discovering things meant the
master asking for them and Igor thinking them up. Anyway, the flow of lightning was a
family passion. With sand and chemicals and a few secrets, you could make lightning sit up
and beg.
Lady LeJean reached out with a gloved hand and touched the side of the clock.
'This is the divider mechanism-' Jeremy began, picking up a crystalline array from the
workbench.
But her ladyship was still staring up at the clock. 'You've given it a face and hands,' she said.
'Why?'
'Oh, it will function very well in the measurement of traditional time,' said Jeremy. 'Glass
gears throughout, of course. In theory it will never need adjusting. It will take its time from
the universal tick.'
'Ah. You found it, then?'
'The time it takes the smallest possible thing that can happen to happen. I know it exists.'
She looked almost impressed. 'But the clock is still unfinished.'
'There is a certain amount of trial and error,' said Jeremy. 'But we will do it. Igor says there
will be a big storm on Monday. That should provide the power, he says. And then,' Jeremy's
face lit up with a smile, 'I see no reason why every clock in the world shouldn't say precisely
the same time!'
Lady LeJean glanced at Igor, who bustled with renewed haste.
'The servant is satisfactory?'
'Oh, he grumbles a bit. But he has got a good heart. And a spare, apparently. He is amazingly
skilled in all crafts, too.'
'Yes, Igors generally are,' said the lady distantly. 'They seem to have mastered the art of
inheriting talents.' She snapped her fingers and one of the trolls stepped forward and
produced a couple of bags.
'Gold and invar,' she said. 'As promised.'
'Hah, but invar will be worthless when we've finished the clock,' said Jeremy.
'We're sorry? You want more gold?'
'No, no! You have been very generous.'

 
 
  
Right, thought Igor, dusting the workbench vigorously.
'Until next time, then,' said Lady LeJean. The trolls were already turning towards the door.
'You'll be here for the start?' said Jeremy, as Igor hurried into the hall to open the front door
because, whatever he thought about her ladyship, there was such a thing as tradition.
'Possibly. But we have every confidence in you, Jeremy.'
'Um...'
Igor stiffened. He hadn't heard that tone in Jeremy's voice before. In the voice of a master, it
was a bad tone.
Jeremy took a deep, nervous breath, as if contemplating some minute and difficult piece of
clockwork that would, without tremendous care, unwind catastrophically and spray
cogwheels across the floor.
'Um ... I was wondering, um, your ladyship, um ... perhaps, um, you would like to take dinner
with me, um, tonight, um ...'
Jeremy smiled. Igor had seen a better smile on a corpse.
Lady LeJean's expression flickered. It really did. It seemed to Igor to go from one expression
to another as if they were a series of still pictures, with no perceptible movement of the
features between each one. It went from her usual blankness to sudden thoughtfulness and
then all the way to amazement. And then, to Igor's own astonishment, it began to blush.
'Why, Mr Jeremy, I... I don't know what to say,' her ladyship stammered, her icy composure
turning into a warm puddle. 'I really... I don't know... perhaps some other time? I do have an
important engagement, so glad to have met you, I must be going. Goodbye.'
Igor stood stiffly to attention, as upright as the average Igor could manage, and almost shut
the door behind her ladyship as she hurried out of the building down the steps.
She ended up, just for a moment, half an inch above the street. It was only for a moment, and
then she drifted downwards. No one except Igor, glaring balefully through the crack between
door and frame, could possibly have noticed.
He darted back into the workshop. Jeremy still stood transfixed, blushing as pinkly as her
ladyship had done.
'I'll jutht be nipping out to get that new glathwork for the multiplier, thur,' Igor said quickly.
'It thould be done by now. Yeth?'
Jeremy spun on his heel and marched very quickly over to the workbench.
'You do that, Igor. Thank you,' he said, his voice slightly muffled. Lady LeJean's party were
down the street when Igor slipped out and moved quickly into the shadows.

 
 
  
At the crossroad her ladyship waved one hand vaguely and the trolls headed off by
themselves. Igor stayed with her. For all the trademark limp, Igors could move fast when they
had to. They often had to, when the mob hit the windmill.[11]
Out in the open he could see more wrong things. She didn't move quite right. It was as though
she was controlling her body, rather than letting it control itself. That's what humans did.
Even zombies got the hang of things after a while. The effect was subtle, but Igors had very
good eyesight. She moved like someone unused to wearing skin.
The quarry headed down a narrow street, and Igor half hoped that some of the Thieves' Guild
were around. He'd very much like to see what happened if one of them gave her the tap on
the noggin that was their prelude to negotiations. One had tried it with Igor yesterday, and if
the man had been surprised at the metallic clang, he'd been astonished to have his arm
grabbed and broken with anatomical exactitude.
In fact, she turned into an alleyway between a couple of the buildings.
Igor hesitated. Letting yourself be outlined in the daylight at the mouth of an alley was item
one on the local checklist of death. But, on the other hand, he wasn't actually doing anything
wrong, was he? And she didn't look armed.
There was no sound of footsteps in the alley. He waited a moment and stuck his head round
the corner.
There was no sign of Lady LeJean. There was also no way out of the alley - it was a dead
end, full of rubbish.
But there was a fading grey shape in the air, which vanished even as he stared. It was a
hooded robe, grey as fog. It merged into the general gloom and disappeared.
She'd turned into an alleyway, and then she'd turned into... something else.
Igor felt his hands twitch.
Individual Igors might have their particular specialities, but they were all expert surgeons and
had an inbuilt desire not to see anybody wasted. Up in the mountains, where most of the
employment was for woodchoppers and miners, having an Igor living locally was considered
very fortunate. There was always the risk of an axe bouncing or a sawblade running wild, and
then a man was glad to have an Igor around who could lend a hand - or even an entire arm, if
you were lucky.
And while they practised their skills freely and generously in the community, the Igors were
even more careful to use them amongst themselves. Magnificent eyesight, a stout pair of
lungs, a powerful digestive system... It was terrible to think of such wonderful workmanship
going to the worms. So they made sure it didn't. They kept it in the family.
Igor really did have his grandfather's hands. And now they were bunching into fists, all by
themselves.
Tick

 
 
  
A very small kettle burned on a fire of wood shavings and dried yak dung.
'It was... a long time ago,' said Lu-Tze. 'Exactly when doesn't matter, 'cos of what happened.
In fact asking exactly “when” doesn't make any sense any more. It depends where you are. In
some places it was hundreds of years ago. Some other places ... well, maybe it hasn't
happened yet. There was this man in Uberwald. Invented a clock. An amazing clock. It
measured the tick of the universe. Know what that is?'
'No.'
'Me neither. The abbot's your man for that kind of stuff. Lemme see... okay... think of the
smallest amount of time that you can. Really small. So tiny that a second would be like a
billion years. Got that? Well, the cosmic quantum tick - that's what the abbot calls it - the
cosmic quantum tick is much smaller than that. It's the time it takes to go from now to then.
The time it takes an atom to think of wobbling. It's-'
'It's the time it takes for the smallest thing that's possible to happen to happen?' said Lobsang.
'Exactly. Well done,' said Lu-Tze. He took a deep breath. 'It's also the time it takes for the
whole universe to be destroyed in the past and rebuilt in the future. Don't look at me like that
- that's what the abbot said.'
'Has it been happening while we've been talking?' said Lobsang.
'Millions of times. An oodleplex of times, probably.'
'How many's that?'
'It's one of the abbot's words. It means more numbers than you can imagine in a yonk.'
'What's a yonk?'
'A very long time.'
'And we don't feel it? The universe is destroyed and we don't feel it?'
'They say not. The first time it was explained to me I got a bit jumpy, but it's far too quick for
us to notice.'
Lobsang stared at the snow for a while. Then he said, 'All right. Go on.'
'Someone in Uberwald built this clock out of glass. Powered by lightning, as I recall. It
somehow got down to a level where it could tick with the universe.'
'Why did he want to do that?'
'Listen, he lived in a big old castle on a crag in Uberwald. People like that don't need a reason
apart from “because I can”. They have a nightmare and try to make it happen.'

 
 
  
'But, look, you can't make a clock like that, because it's inside the universe, so it'll ... get
rebuilt when the universe does, right?'
Lu-Tze looked impressed, and said so. 'I'm impressed,' he said.
'It'd be like opening a box with the crowbar that's inside.'
'The abbot believes that part of the clock was outside, though.'
'You can't have something outside the-'
'Tell that to a man who has been working on the problem for nine lifetimes,' said Lu-Tze.
'You want to hear the rest of the story?'
'Yes, Sweeper.'
'So ... we were spread pretty thin in those days, but there was this young sweeper-'
'You,' said Lobsang. 'This is going to be you, right?'
'Yes, yes,' said Lu-Tze testily. 'I was sent to Uberwald. History hadn't diverged much in those
days, and we knew something big was going to happen around Bad Schüschein. I must have
spent weeks looking. You know how many remote castles there are along the gorges? You
can't move for remote castles!'
'That's why you didn't find the right one in time,' said Lobsang. 'I remember what you told the
abbot.'
'I was just down in the valley when the lightning struck the tower,' said Lu-Tze. 'You know it
is written, “Big events always cast their shadows.” But I couldn't detect where it was
happening until too late. A half-mile sprint uphill faster than a lightning bolt... No one could
do that. Nearly made it, though - I was actually through the door when it all went to hell!'
'No point in blaming yourself, then.'
'Yes, but you know how it is - you keep thinking “If only I'd got up earlier, or had gone a
different way...”' said Lu-Tze.
'And the clock struck,' said Lobsang.
'No. It stuck. I told you part of it was outside the universe. It wouldn't go with the flow. It was
trying to count the tick, not move with it.'
'But the universe is huge! It can't be stopped by a piece of clock work!'
Lu-Tze flicked the end of his cigarette into the fire .
'The abbot says the size wouldn't make any difference at all,' he said. 'Look, it's taken him
nine lifetimes to know what he knows, so it's not our fault if we can't understand it, is it?
History shattered. It was the only thing that could give. Very strange event. There were

 
 
  
cracks left all over the place. The... oh, I can't remember the words... the fastenings that tell
bits of the past which bits of the present they belong to, they were flapping allover the place.
Some got lost for ever.' Lu-Tze stared into the dying flames. 'We stitched it up as best we
could,' he added. 'Up and down history. Filling up holes with bits of time taken from
somewhere else. It's a patchwork, really.'
'Didn't people notice?'
'Why should they? Once we'd done it, it had always been like that. You'd be amazed at what
we got away with. F'rinstance-'
'I'm sure they'd spot it somehow.'
Lu-Tze gave Lobsang one of his sidelong glances. 'Funny you should say that. I've always
wondered about it. People say things like “Where did the time go?” and “It seems like only
yesterday.” We had to do it, anyway. And it's healed up very nicely.'
'But people would look in the history books and see-'
'Words, lad. That's all. Anyway, people have been messing around with time ever since there
were people. Wasting it, killing it, sparing it, making it up. And they do it. People's heads
were made to play with time. Just like we do, except we're better trained and have a few extra
skills. And we've spent centuries working to bring it all back in line. You watch the
Procrastinators even on a quiet day. Moving time, stretching it here, compressing it there...
it's a big job. I'm not going to see it smashed a second time. A second time, there won't be
enough left to repair.'
He stared at the embers. 'Funny thing,' he said. 'Wen himself had some very curious ideas
about time, come the finish. You remember I told you that he reckoned time was alive: He
said it acted like a living thing, anyway. Very strange ideas indeed. He said he'd met Time,
and she was a woman. To him, anyway. Everyone says that was just a very complicated
metaphor, and maybe I was simply hit on the head or something, but on that day I looked at
the glass clock just as it exploded and-'
He stood up and grabbed his broom.
'Best foot forward, lad. Another two or three seconds and we'll be down in Bong Phut.'
'What were you going to say?' said Lobsang, hurrying to his feet.
'Oh, just an old man rambling,' said Lu-Tze. 'The mind wanders a bit when you get to over
seven hundred. Let's get moving.'
'Sweeper?'
'Yes, lad?'
'Why are we carrying spinners on our backs?'
'All in good time, lad. I hope.'