“Twins,” said Mrs Ogg. She picked up the brandy glass, looked at it, and put it down. “There wasn't one. There was twins. Two boys. But…”
She turned on Susan a glare like a thermic lance. “You'll be thinking, this is an old biddy of a midwife,” she said. “You'll be thinking, what does she know?”
Susan paid her the courtesy of not lying.
“Part of me was,” she admitted.
“Good answer! Part of us thinks all kinds of things,” said Mrs Ogg. “Part of me is thinking, who's this haughty little miss who talks to me as if I was a kiddie of five? But most of me is thinking: she's got a heap of troubles of her own and has seen plenty of things a human shouldn't have to see. Mind you, part of me says: so have I. Seeing things a human shouldn't have to see makes us human. Well, miss… if you've any sense, part of you is thinking, there's a witch in front of me who's seen my granddad many times, when she's sat by a sickbed that's suddenly become a deathbed, and if she's ready to spit in his eye when the time comes then she could probably bother me considerably right now if she puts her mind to it. Understand? Let's all keep our parts to ourselves,” and suddenly she gave Susan a wink, “as the High Priest said to the actress.”
“I absolutely agree,” said Susan. “Completely.”
“Right,” said Mrs Ogg. “So… twins… well, it was her first time, and human wasn't exactly a familiar shape with her, I mean, you can't do what comes naturally when you ain't exactly natural and… twins ain't quite the right word…”
“A brother,” said Lobsang. “The clockmaker?”
“Yes,” said Susan.
“But I was a foundling!”
“So was he.”
“I want to see him now!”
“That might not be a good idea,” said Susan.
“I am not interested in your opinion, thank you.” Lobsang turned to Lady LeJean. “Down that passage?”
“Yes. But he's asleep. I think the clock upset his mind, and also he was hit in the fight. He says things in his sleep.”
“Says what?”
“The last thing I heard him say before I came to find you was, ‘We're so close. Any passage might do,’” said her ladyship. She looked from one to the other. “Have I said the wrong thing?”
Susan put her hand over her eyes. Oh dear…
“I said that,” said Lobsang. “Just after we came up the stairs.” He glared at Susan. “Twins, right? I've heard about this sort of thing! What one thinks the other thinks too?”
Susan sighed. Sometimes, she thought, I really am a coward. “Something like that, yes,” she said.
“I'm going to see him, then, even if he can't see me!”
Damn, thought Susan, and hurried after Lobsang as he headed along the passage. The Auditor trailed behind them, looking concerned.
Jeremy was lying on a bed, although it was no softer than anything else in the timeless world. Lobsang stopped, and stared.
“He looks… quite like me,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” said Susan.
“Thinner, perhaps.”
“Could be, yes.”
“Different… lines on his face.”
“You've led different lives,” said Susan.
“How did you know about him and me?”
“My grandfather takes, er, an interest in this sort of thing. I found out some more by myself, too,” she said.
“Why should we interest anyone? We're not special.”
“This is going to be quite hard to explain.” Susan looked round at Lady LeJean. “How safe are we here?”
“The signs upset them,” said her ladyship. “They tend to keep away. I… shall we say… took care of the ones who followed you.”
“Then you'd better sit down, Mr Lobsang,” said Susan. “It might help if I told you about me.”
“Well?”
“My grandfather is Death.”
“That's a strange thing to say. Death is just the end of life. It's not a… a person—”
“PAY ATTENTION TO ME WHEN I AM TALKING TO YOU…”
A wind whipped around the room, and the light changed. Shadows formed on Susan's face. A faint blue light outlined her.
Lobsang swallowed.
The light faded. The shadows vanished.
“There is a process called death, and there is a person called Death,” said Susan. “That is how it works. And I am Death's granddaughter. Am I going too fast for you?”
“Er, no, although right up until just now you looked human,” said Lobsang.
“My parents were human. There's more than one kind of genetics.” Susan paused. “You look human, too. Human is a very popular look in these parts. You'd be amazed.”
“Except that I am human.”
Susan gave a little smile that, on anyone less obviously in full control of themself, might have seemed slightly nervous.
“Yes,” she said. “And, then again, no.”
“No?”
“Take War, now,” said Susan, backing away from the point. “Big man, hearty laugh, tends to fart after meals. As human as the next man, you say. But the next man is Death. He's human-shaped, too. And that's because humans invented the idea of… of… of ideas, and they think in human shapes—”
“Get back to the ‘and, then again, no’, will you?”
“Your mother is Time.”
“No one knows who my mother is!”
“I could take you to the midwife,” said Susan. “Your father found the best there's ever been. She delivered you. Your mother was Time.”
Lobsang sat with his mouth open.
“It was easier for me,” said Susan. “When I was very small my parents used to let me visit my grandfather. I thought every grandfather had a long black robe and rode a pale horse. And then they decided that maybe that wasn't the right environment for a child. They were worried about how I was going to grow up!” She laughed mirthlessly. “I had a very strange education, you know? Maths, logic, that sort of thing. And then, when I was a bit younger than you, a rat turned up in my room and suddenly everything I thought I knew was wrong.”
“I'm a human! I do human things! I'd know if—”
“You had to live in the world. Otherwise, how could you learn to be human?” said Susan, as kindly as she could.
“And my brother? What about him?”
Here it comes, Susan thought. “He's not your brother,” she said. “I lied a bit. I'm sorry.”
“But you said—”
“I had to lead up to it,” said Susan. “It's one of those things you have to get hold of a bit at a time, I'm afraid. He's not your brother. He's you.”
“Then who am I?”
Susan sighed. “You. Both of you… are you.”
“And there I was, and there she was,” said Mrs Ogg, “and out the baby came, no problem there, but that's always a tryin' moment for the new mum, and there was…” she paused, her eyes peering through the windows of memory, “like… like a feelin' that the world had stuttered, and I was holdin' the baby and I looked down and there was me deliverin' a baby, and I looked at me, and I looked at me, and I remember saying, ‘This is a fine to-do, Mrs Ogg,’ and she, who was me, said, ‘You never said a truer word, Mrs Ogg,’ and then it all went strange and there I was, just one of me, holdin' two babies”.
“Twins,” Susan said.
“You could call them twins, yes, I s'pose you could,” said Mrs Ogg. “But I always thought that twins is two little souls born once, not one born twice.”
Susan waited. Mrs Ogg looked in the mood to talk.
“So I said to the man, I said, ‘What now?’ and he said, ‘Is that any business of yours?’ and I said he could be damn sure it was my business and he could look me in the eye and I'd speak my mind to anyone. But I was thinking, you're in trouble now, my girl, 'cos it'd all gone myffic.”
“Mythic?” said schoolteacher Susan.
“Yep. With extra myff. And you can get into big trouble, with myffic. But the man just smiled and said
that he must be brought up human until he's of age and I thought, yep, it's gone myffic all right. I could see he hadn't got a clue about what to do next and it was all going to be down to me.”
Mrs Ogg took a suck at her pipe and her eyes twinkled at Susan through the smoke. “I don't know how much experience you have with this sort of thing, my girl, but sometimes when the high and mighty make big plans they don't always think about the fine detail, right?”
Yes. I'm a fine detail, Susan thought. One day Death took it into his skull to adopt a motherless child, and I'm a fine detail. She nodded.
“I thought, how does this go, in a myffic kind of way?” Mrs Ogg went on. “I mean, technic'ly I could see we're in that area where the prince gets brought up as a swineherd until he manifests his destiny, but there's not that many swineherding jobs around these days, and poking hogs with a stick is not all it's cracked up to be, believe you me. So I said, well, I'd heard the Guilds down in the big cities took in foundlings out of charity, and looked after them well enough, and there's many well set-up men and women who started life that way. There's no shame in it, plus, if the destiny doesn't manifest as per schedule, he'd have set his hands to a good trade, which would be a consolation. Whereas swineherding 's just swineherding. You're giving me a stern look, miss.”
“Well, yes. It was rather a chilly decision, wasn't it?”
“Someone has to make 'em,” said Mrs Ogg sharply. “Besides, I've been around for some time and I've noticed that them as has it in them to shine will shine through six layers of muck, whereas those who ain't shiny won't shine however much you buff 'em. You may think otherwise, but it was me standing there.”
She investigated the bowl of her pipe with a matchstick.
Eventually she went on: “And that was it. I would have stayed, of course, because there wasn't so much as a crib in the place, but the man took me aside and said thank you and that it was time to go. And why would I argue? There was love there. It was in the air. But I won't say that I don't sometimes wonder how it all turned out. I really do.”
There were differences, Susan had to admit. Two different lives had indeed burned their unique tracks on the faces. And the selves had been born a second or so apart, and a lot of the universe can change in a second.
Think of identical twins, she told herself. But they are two different selves occupying bodies that, at least, start out identical. They don't start out as identical selves.
“He looks quite like me,” said Lobsang, and Susan blinked. She leaned closer to the unconscious form of Jeremy.
“Say that again,” she said.
“I said, he looks quite like me,” said Lobsang.
Susan glanced at Lady LeJean, who said, “I saw it too, Susan.”
“Who saw what?” said Lobsang. “What are you hiding from me?”
“His lips move when you speak,” said Susan. “They try to form the same words.”
“He can pick up my thoughts?”
“It's more complicated than that, I think.” Susan picked up a limp hand and gently pinched the web of skin between thumb and forefinger.
Lobsang winced, and glanced at his own hand. A patch of white skin was reddening again.
“Not just thoughts,” said Susan. “This close, you feel his pain. Your speech controls his lips.”
Lobsang stared down at Jeremy.
“Then what will happen,” he said slowly, “when he comes round?”
“I'm wondering the same thing,” said Susan. “Perhaps you shouldn't be here.”
“But this is where I have to be!”
“We at least should not stay here,” said Lady LeJean. “I know my kind. They will have been discussing what to do. The signs will not hold them for ever. And I have run out of soft centres.”
“What are you supposed to do when you are where you're supposed to be?” said Susan.
Lobsang reached down and touched Jeremy's hand with his fingertip.
The world went white.
Susan wondered later if this was what it would be like at the heart of a star. It wouldn't be yellow, you wouldn't see fire, there would just be the searing whiteness of every overloaded sense screaming all at once.
It faded, gradually, into a mist. The walls of the room appeared, but she could see through them. There were other walls beyond, and other rooms, transparent as ice and visible only at the corners and where the light caught them. In each one another Susan was turning to look at her.
The rooms went on for ever.
Susan was sensible. It was, she knew, a major character flaw. It did not make you popular, or cheerful, and—this seemed to her to be the most unfair bit—it didn't even make you right. But it did make you definite, and she was definite that what was happening around her was not, in any accepted sense, real.
That was not in itself a problem. Most of the things humans busied themselves with weren't real, either. But sometimes the mind of the most sensible person encountered something so big, so complex, so alien to all understanding, that it told itself little stories about it instead. Then, when it felt it understood the story, it felt it understood the huge incomprehensible thing. And this, Susan knew, was her mind telling itself a story.
There was a sound like great heavy metal doors slamming, one after another, getting louder and faster…
The universe reached a decision.
The other glass rooms vanished. The walls clouded. Colour rose, pastel at first, then darkening as timeless reality flowed back.
The bed was empty. Lobsang had gone. But the air was full of slivers of blue light, turning and swirling like ribbons in a storm.
Susan remembered to breathe again. “Oh,” she said aloud. “Destiny.”
She turned. The bedraggled Lady LeJean was still staring at the empty bed.
“Is there another way out of here?”
“There's an elevator at the end of the corridor, Susan, but what happened to—?”
“Not Susan,” said Susan sharply. “It's Miss Susan. I'm only Susan to my friends, and you are not one of them. I don't trust you at all.”
“I don't trust me either,” said Lady LeJean meekly. “Does that help?”
“Show me this elevator, will you?”
It turned out to be nothing more than a large box the size of a small room, which hung from a web of ropes and pulleys in the ceiling. It had been installed recently, by the look of it, to move the large works of art around. Sliding doors occupied most of one wall.
“There are capstans in the cellar for winching it up,” said Lady LeJean. “Downward journeys are slowed safely because of a mechanism by which the weight of the descending elevator causes water to be pumped up into rainwater cisterns on the roof, which in turn can be released back into a hollow counterweight that assists in the elevation of heavier items of—”
“Thank you,” said Susan quickly. “But what it really needs in order to descend is time.” Under her breath she added, “Can you help?”
The ribbons of blue light orbited her, like puppies anxious to play, and then drifted towards the elevator.
“However,” she added, “I believe Time is on our side now.”
Miss Tangerine was amazed at how fast a body learned.
Until now Auditors had learned by counting. Sooner or later, everything came down to numbers. If you knew all the numbers, you knew everything. Often the later was a lot later, but that did not matter because for an Auditor time was just another number. But a brain, a few soggy pounds of gristle, counted numbers so fast that they stopped being numbers at all. She'd been astonished at how easily it could direct a hand to catch a ball in the air, calculating future positions of hand and ball without her even being aware of it.
The senses seemed to operate and present her with conclusions before she had time to think.
At the moment she was trying to explain to other Auditors that not feeding an elephant when there was no elephant not to feed was not in fact impossible. Miss Tangerine was one of the faster-learning
Auditors and had already formulated a group of things, events and situations that she categorized as “bloody stupid”. Things that were “bloody stupid” could be dismissed.
Some of the others were having difficulty understanding this, but now she stopped in mid-harangue when she heard the rumble of the elevator.
“Do we have anyone upstairs?” she demanded.
The Auditors around her shook their heads. “IGNORE THIS NOTICE” had produced too much confusion.
“Then someone is coming down!” said Miss Tangerine. “They are out of place! They must be stopped!”
“We must discuss—” an Auditor began.
“Do what I say, you organic organ!”
“It's a matter of personalities,” said Lady LeJean, as Susan pushed open a door in the roof and stepped out onto the leads.
“Yes?” said Susan, looking around at the silent city. “I thought you didn't have them.”
“They will have them now,” said Lady LeJean, climbing out behind her. “And personalities define themselves in terms of other personalities.”
Susan, prowling along the parapet, considered this strange sentence.
“You mean there will be flaming rows?” she said.
“Yes. We have never had egos before.”
“Well, you seem to be managing.”
“Only by becoming completely and utterly insane,” said her ladyship.
Susan turned. Lady LeJean's hat and dress had become even more tattered, and she was shedding sequins. And then there was the matter of the face. An exquisite mask on a bone structure like fine china had been made up by a clown. Probably a blind clown. And one who was wearing boxing gloves. In a fog. Lady LeJean looked at the world through panda eyes and her lipstick touched her mouth only by accident.
“You don't look insane,” lied Susan. “As such.”
“Thank you. But sanity is defined by the majority, I am afraid. Do you know the saying ‘The whole is greater than the sum of the parts’?”
“Of course.” Susan scanned the rooftops for a way down. She did not need this. The… thing seemed to want to talk. Or, rather, to chatter aimlessly.
“It is an insane statement. It is a nonsense. But now I believe that it is true.”
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