“Come along,” she said. “We've got to stick together, right?”
Like shards of glass, spinning through the air, fragments of history drifted and collided and intersected in the dark.
There was a lighthouse, though. The valley of Oi Dong held on to the ever-repeating day. In the hall almost all of the giant cylinders stood silent, all time run out. Some had split. Some had melted. Some had exploded. Some had simply vanished. But one still turned.
Big Thanda, the oldest and largest, ground slowly on its basalt bearing, winding time out at one end and back on the other, ensuring as Wen had decreed that the perfect day would never end.
Rambut Handisides was all alone in the hall, sitting beside the turning stone in the light of a butter lamp and occasionally throwing a handful of grease onto the base.
A clink of stone made him peer into the darkness. It was heavy with the smoke of fried rock.
There the sound was again and, then, the scratch and flare of a match.
“Lu-Tze?” he said. “Is that you?”
“I hope so, Rambut, but who knows, these days?” Lu-Tze stepped into the light and sat down. “Keeping you busy, are they?”
Handisides sprang to his feet. “It's been terrible, Sweeper! Everyone's up in the Mandala Hall! It's worse than the Great Crash! There's bits of history everywhere and we've lost half the spinners! We'll never be able to put it all—”
“Now, now, you look like a man who's had a busy day,” said Lu-Tze kindly. “Not got a lot of sleep, eh? Tell you what, I'll take care of this. You go and get a bit of shut-eye, okay?”
“We thought you were lost out in the world, and—” the monk burbled.
“And now I'm back,” smiled Lu-Tze, patting him on the shoulder. “There's still that little alcove round the corner where you repair the smaller spinners? And there's still those unofficial bunks for when it's the night shift and you only need a couple of lads to keep their eye on things?”
Handisides nodded, and looked guilty. Lu-Tze wasn't supposed to know about the bunks.
“You get along, then,” said Lu-Tze. He watched the man's retreating back and added, quietly, “and if you wake up you might turn out to be the luckiest idiot that ever there was. Well, wonder boy? What next?”
“We put everything back,” said Lobsang, emerging from the shadows.
“You know how long that took us last time?”
“Yes,” said Lobsang, looking around the stricken hall and heading towards the podium, “I do. I don't think it will take me as long.”
“I wish you sounded more certain,” said Susan.
“I'm… pretty certain,” said Lobsang, running his fingers over the bobbins on the board.
Lu-Tze waved a cautionary hand at Susan. Lobsang's mind was already on the way to somewhere else, and now she wondered how large a space it was occupying. His eyes were closed.
“The… spinners that axe left… Can you move the jumpers?” he said.
“I can show the ladies how to,” said Lu-Tze.
“Are there not monks who know how to do this?” said Unity.
“It would take too long. I am an apprentice to a sweeper. They would run around asking questions,” said Lobsang. “You will not.”
“He's got a point right enough,” said Lu-Tze. “People will start saying ‘What is the meaning of this?’ and ‘Bikkit!’, and we'll never get anything done.”
Lobsang looked down at the bobbins and then across at Susan.
“Imagine… that there is a jigsaw, all in pieces. But… I am very good at spotting edges and shapes. Very good. And all the pieces are moving. But because they were once linked, they have by their very nature a memory of that link. Their shape is the memory. Once a few are in the right position, the rest will be easier. Oh, and imagine that all the bits are scattered across the whole of eventuality, and mixing randomly with pieces from other histories. Can you grasp all that?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Good. Everything I have just said is nonsense. It bears no resemblance to the truth of the matter in any way at all. But it is a lie that you can… understand, I think. And then, afterwards—”
“You're going to go, aren't you,” said Susan. It was not a question.
“I will not have enough power to stay,” said Lobsang.
“You need power to stay human?” said Susan. She hadn't been aware of the rise of her heart, but now it was sinking.
“Yes. Even trying to think in a mere four dimensions is a terrible effort. I'm sorry. Even to hold in my mind the concept of something called ‘now’ is hard. You thought I was mostly human. I'm mostly not.” He sighed. “If only I could tell you what everything looks like to me… it's so beautiful.”
Lobsang stared into the air above the little wooden bobbins. Things twinkled. There were complex curves and spirals, brilliant against the blackness.
It was like looking at a clock in pieces, with every wheel and spring carefully laid out in the dark in front of him. Dismantled, controllable, every part of it understood… but a number of small but important things had gone ping into the corners of a very large room. If you were really good, then you could work out where they'd landed.
“You've only got about a third of the spinners,” came the voice of Lu-Tze. “The rest are smashed.”
Lobsang couldn't see him. There was only the glittering show before his eyes.
“That… is true, but once they were whole,” he said. He raised his hands and lowered them onto the bobbins.
Susan looked around at the sudden grinding noise and saw row after row of columns rising out of the dust and debris. They stood like lines of soldiers, rubble cascading from them.
“Good trick!” Lu-Tze shouted to Susan's ear, above the thunder. “Feeding time into the spinners themselves! Theoretically possible, but we never managed to do it!”
“Do you know what he's actually going to do?” Susan shouted back.
“Yeah! Snatch the extra time out of bits of history that are too far ahead and shove it into the bits that have fallen behind!”
“Sounds simple!”
“Just one problem!”
“What?”
“Can't do it! Losses!” Lu-Tze snapped his fingers, trying to explain time dynamics to a non-initiate. “Friction! Divergence! All sorts of stuff! You can't create time on the spinners, you can only move it around—”
There was a sudden bright blue glow around Lobsang. It flickered over the board, and then snapped across the air to form arcs of light leading to all the Procrastinators. It crawled between the carved symbols and clung to them in a thickening layer, like cotton winding on a reel.
Lu-Tze looked at the whirling light and the shadow within it, almost lost against the glow.
“—at least,” he added, “until now.”
The spinners wound up to their working speed and then went faster, under the lash of the light. It poured across the cavern in a solid, unending stream.
Flames licked around the bottom of the nearest cylinder. The base was glowing, and the noise from its stone bearing was joining a rising, cavern-filling scream of stone in distress.
Lu-Tze shook his head. “You, Susan, buckets of water from the wells! You, Miss Unity, you follow her with the grease pails!”
“And what are you going to do?” said Susan, grabbing two buckets.
“I'm going to worry like hell and that's not an easy job, believe me!”
Steam built up then, and there was a smell of burning butter. There was no time for anything but to run from the wells to the nearest spitting bearing and back, and there was not enough time even for that.
The spinners turned back and forth. There was no need for the jumpers now. The crystal rods that had survived the crash hung uselessly from their hooks as time arced overhead from one Procrastinator to another, showing up as red or blue glows in the air. It was a sight to frighten the knoptas off any trained spinnerdriver, Lu-Tze knew. It looked like a cascade running wild, but there was so
me control in there, some huge pattern being woven.
Bearings squealed. Butter bubbled. The bases of some spinners were smoking. But things held. They're being held, Lu-Tze thought. He looked up at the registers. The boards slammed back and forth, sending lines of red or blue or bare wood across the wall of the cavern. There was a pall of white smoke around them as their own wooden bearings gently charred.
Past and future were streaming through the air. The sweeper could feel them.
On the podium, Lobsang was wrapped in the glow. The bobbins were not being moved any more. What was going on now was on some other level, which didn't need the intervention of crude mechanisms.
Lion tamer, Lu-Tze thought. He starts off needing chairs and whips but one day, if he's really good, he can go into the cage and do the show using nothing more than eye and voice. But only if he's really good, and you'll know if he's really good because he'll come out of the cage again—
He stopped his prowl along the thundering lines because there was a change in the sound.
One of the biggest spinners was slowing down. It stopped as Lu-Tze watched, and didn't start again.
Lu-Tze raced around the cavern until he found Susan and Unity. Three more spinners stopped before he reached them.
“He's doing it! He's doing it! Come away!” he shouted. With a jolt that shook the floor, another spinner stopped.
The three ran towards the end of the cavern, where the smaller Procrastinators were still whirling, but the halt was already speeding down the rows. Spinner after spinner slammed to a standstill, the domino effect overtaking the humans until, when they reached the little chalk spinners, they were in time to see the last ones rattle gently to a halt.
There was silence, except for the sizzle of grease and the click of cooling rock.
“Is it all over?” said Unity, wiping the sweat from her face with her dress and leaving a trail of sequins.
Lu-Tze and Susan looked at the glow at the other end of the hall, and then at one another.
“I… don't… think… so,” said Susan.
Lu-Tze nodded. “I think it's just—” he began.
Bars of green light leapt from spinner to spinner and hung in the air as rigid as steel. They flickered on and off between the columns, filling the air with thunderclaps. Patterns of switching snapped back and forth across the cavern.
The tempo increased. The thunderclaps became one long roll of overpowering sound. The bars brightened, expanded and then the air was all one brilliant light
Which vanished. The sound ceased so abruptly that the silence clanged.
The trio got to their feet, slowly.
“What was that?” said Unity.
“I think he made some changes,” said Lu-Tze.
The spinners were silent. The air was hot. Smoke and steam filled the roof of the cavern.
Then, responding to the routine of humanity's eternal wrestle with time, the spinners began to pick up the load.
It came gently, like a breeze. And the spinners took the strain, from the smallest to the largest, settling once again into their gentle, ponderous pirouette.
“Perfect,” said Lu-Tze. “Almost as good as it was, I'll bet.”
“Only almost?” said Susan, wiping the butter off her face.
“Well, he's partly human,” said the sweeper. They turned to the podium, and it was empty. Susan was not surprised. He'd be weak now, of course. Of course, something like this would take it out of anyone. Of course, he'd need to rest. Of course.
“He's gone,” she said flatly.
“Who knows?” said Lu-Tze. “For is it not written, ‘You never know what's going to turn up’?”
The reassuring rumble of the Procrastinators now filled the cave. Lu-Tze could feel the time flows in the air. It was invigorating, like the smell of the sea. I ought to spend more time down here, he thought.
“He broke history and repaired it,” said Susan. “Cause and cure. That makes no sense!”
“Not in four dimensions,” said Unity. “In eighteen, it's all perfectly clear.”
“And now, may I suggest you ladies leave by the back way?” said Lu-Tze. “People are going to come running down here in a minute and it's all going to get very excitable. Probably best if you aren't around.”
“What will you do?” said Susan.
“Lie,” said Lu-Tze happily. “It's amazing how often that works.”
–ick
Susan and Unity stepped out of a door in the rock and took the path that led through rhododendron groves out of the valley. The sun was touching the horizon and the air was warm, although there were snowfields quite close by.
At the lip of the valley the water from the stream plunged over a cliff in a fall so long that it landed as a sort of rain. Susan pulled herself onto a rock, and settled down to wait.
“It is a long way to Ankh-Morpork,” said Unity.
“We'll have a lift,” said Susan. The first stars were already coming out.
“The stars are very pretty,” said Unity.
“Do you really think so?”
“I am learning to. Humans believe they are.”
“The thing is… I mean, there's times when you look at the universe and you think, ‘What about me?’ and you can just hear the universe replying, ‘Well, what about you?’”
Unity appeared to consider this.
“Well, what about you?” she said.
Susan sighed. “Exactly.” She sighed again. “You can't think about just one person while you're saving the world. You have to be a cold, calculating bastard.”
“That sounded as if you were quoting somebody,” said Unity. “Who said that?”
“Some total idiot,” said Susan. She tried to think of other things, and added, “We didn't get all of them. There's still Auditors down there somewhere.”
“That will not matter,” said Unity calmly. “Look at the sun.”
“Well?”
“It is setting.”
“And…?”
“That means time is flowing through the world. The body exacts its toll Susan. Soon my—my former colleagues, bewildered and fleeing, will become tired. They will have to sleep.”
“I follow you, but—”
“I am insane. I know this. But the first time it happened to me I found such horror that I cannot express it. Can you imagine what it is like? For an intellect a billion years old, in a body which is an ape on the back of a rat that grew out of a lizard? Can you imagine what comes out of the dark places, uncontrolled?”
“What are you telling me?”
“They will die in their dreams.”
Susan thought about this. Millions and millions of years of thinking precise, logical thoughts—and then humanity's murky past drops all its terrors on you in one go. She could almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
“But you didn't,” she said.
“No. I think I must be… different. It is a terrible thing to be different, Susan. Did you have romantic hopes in connection with the boy?”
The question came out of nowhere and there was no defence. Unity's face showed nothing but a kind of nervous concern.
“No,” said Susan. Unfortunately, Unity did not seem to have mastered some of the subtleties of human conversation, such as when a tone of voice means “Stop this line of inquiry right now or may huge rats eat you by day and by night.”
“I confess to strange feelings regarding his… self that was the clockmaker. Sometimes, when he smiled, he was normal. I wanted to help him, because he seemed so closed in and sad.”
“You don't have to confess to things like that,” Susan snapped. “How do you even know the word romantic, anyway?” she added.
“I found some books of poetry.” Unity actually looked embarrassed.
“Really? I've never trusted it,” said Susan. Huge, giant, hungry rats.
“I found it most curious. How can words on a page have a power like that? There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot b
e mastered in one lifetime,” said Unity sadly.
Susan felt a stab of guilt. It wasn't Unity's fault, after all. People learn things as they grow up, things that never get written down. And Unity had never grown up.
“What are you going to do now?” she said.
“I do have a rather human ambition,” said Unity.
“Well, if I can help in any way…”
It was, she realized later, one of those phrases like “How are you?” People were supposed to understand that it wasn't a real question. But Unity hadn't learned that, either.
“Thank you. You can indeed help.”
“Uh, fine, if—”
“I wish to die.”
And, galloping out of the sunset, some riders were approaching.
Tick
Small fires burned in the rubble, brightening the night. Most of the houses had been completely destroyed, although, Soto considered, the word “shredded” was much more accurate.
He was sitting by the side of the street, watching carefully, with his begging bowl in front of him. There were of course far more interesting and complex ways for a History Monk to avoid being noticed, but he'd adopted the begging bowl method ever since Lu-Tze had shown him that people never see anyone who wants them to give him money.
He'd watched the rescuers drag the bodies out of the house. Initially they'd thought that one of them had been hideously mutilated in the explosion, until it had sat up and explained that it was an Igor and in very good shape for an Igor, at that. The other he'd recognized as Dr Hopkins of the Guild of Clockmakers, who was miraculously unharmed.
Soto did not believe in miracles, however. He was also suspicious about the fact that the ruined house was full of oranges, that Dr Hopkins was babbling about getting sunlight out of them, and that his sparkling little abacus was telling him that something enormous had happened.
He decided to make a report and see what the boys at Oi Dong said.
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