Discworld 26 - The Thief of Time (2 page)

 
 
  
'There is no time.'
'But I can't just walk right out and-'
'Now.'
Nanny reached behind the door for her birthing bag, always kept there for just such occasions
as this, full of the things she knew she'd want and a few of the things she always prayed she'd
never need.
'Right,' she said.
She left.
Tick
The kettle was just boiling when Nanny walked back into her kitchen. She stared at it for a
moment and then moved it off the fire.
There was still a drop of brandy left in the glass by her chair. She drained that, then refilled
the glass to the brim from the bottle.
She picked up her pipe. The bowl was still warm. She pulled on it, and the coals crackled.
Then she took something out of her bag, which was now a good deal emptier, and, brandy
glass in her hand, sat down to look at it.
'Well,' she said at last. 'That was... very unusual...'
Tick
Death watched the image fade. A few flakes of snow that had blown out of the mirror had
already melted on the floor, but there was still a whiff of pipe smoke in the air.
AH, I SEE, he said. A BIRTHING, IN STRANGE CIRCUMSTANCES. BUT IS THAT
WHAT THE PROBLEM WAS OR WAS THAT WHAT THE SOLUTION WILL BE?
SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats.
QUITE SO, said Death. YOU MAY VERY WELL BE RIGHT. I DO KNOW THAT THE
MIDWIFE WILL NEVER TELL ME.
The Death of Rats looked surprised. SQUEAK?
Death smiled. DEATH? ASKING AFTER THE LIFE OF A CHILD? NO. SHE WOULD
NOT .
''scuse me,' said the raven, 'but how come Miss Ogg became Mrs Ogg? Sounds like a bit of a
rural arrangement, if you catch my meaning.'

 
 
  
WITCHES ARE MATRILINEAL, said Death. THEY FIND IT MUCH EASIER TO
CHANGE MEN THAN TO CHANGE NAMES.
He went back to his desk and opened a drawer.
There was a thick book there, bound in night. On the cover, where a book like this might
otherwise say 'Our Wedding' or , Acme Photo Album', it said 'MEMORIES'.
Death turned the heavy pages carefully. Some of the memories escaped as he did so, forming
brief pictures in the air before the page turned, and they went flying and fading into the
distant, dark corners of the room. There were snatches of sound, too, of laughter, tears,
screams and for some reason a brief burst of xylophone music, which caused him to pause for
a moment.
An immortal has a great deal to remember. Sometimes its better to put things where they will
be safe.
One ancient memory, brown and cracking round the edges, lingered in the air over the desk.
It showed five figures, four on horseback, one in a chariot, all apparently riding out of a
thunderstorm. The horses were at a flat gallop. There was a lot of smoke and flame and
general excitement.
AH, THE OLD DAYS, said Death. BEFORE THERE WAS THIS FASHION FOR
HAVING A SOLO CAREER.
SQUEAK? the Death of Rats enquired.
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.
He turned a few more pages and sighed again. When you needed an ally, and you were
Death, on whom could you absolutely rely?
His thoughtful gaze fell on the teddy bear mug.
Of course, there was always family. Yes. He'd promised not to do this again, but he'd never
got the hang of promises.
He got up and went back to the mirror. There was not a lot of time. Things in the mirror were
closer than they appeared.
There was a slithering noise, a breathless moment of silence, and a crash like a bag of skittles
being dropped.
The Death of Rats winced. The raven took off hurriedly.
HELP ME UP, PLEASE, said a voice from the shadows. AND THEN PLEASE CLEAN UP
THE DAMN BUTTER.

 
 
  
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 his life was like that. It would be nice to reduce it to bits, spread them all out on
the table, clean and oil them properly and put them together so that they coiled and spun as
they ought to. But sometimes it seemed that the life of Jeremy had been assembled by a not
very competent craftsman, who had allowed a number of small but important things to go
ping into the corners of the room.
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. He envied the people who
made it as far as the kitchen. There would probably be the remains of the dip to eat, and a
bottle or two of cheap wine that someone had brought along that'd probably be okay if you
took out the drowned cigarette stubs. There might even be a girl in the kitchen, although
Jeremy knew the limits of his imagination.
But Jeremy never even got an invitation.
Clocks, now... clocks were different. He knew what made clocks tick.
His full name was Jeremy Clockson, and that was no accident. He'd been a member of the
Guild of Clockmakers since he was a few days old, and everyone knew what that meant. It
meant his life had begun in a basket, on a doorstep. Everyone knew how it worked. All the
Guilds took in the foundlings that arrived with the morning milk. It was an ancient form of
charity, and there were far worse fates. The orphans got a life, and an upbringing of a sort,
and a trade, and a future, and a name. Many a fine lady or master craftsman or city dignitary
had a telltale surname like Ludd or Doughy or Pune or Clockson. They'd been named after
trade heroes or patron deities, and this turned them into a family, of a sort. The older ones
remembered where they came from, and at Hogswatch they were free with donations of food
and clothing to the various younger brothers and sisters of the basket. It wasn't perfect, but,
then, what is?
So Jeremy had grown up healthy, and rather strange, and with a gift for his adoptive craft that
almost made up for every other personal endowment that he did not possess.
The shop bell rang. He sighed and put down his eyeglass. He didn't rush, though. There was a
lot to look at in the shop. Sometimes he even had to cough to attract the customer's attention.
That being said, sometimes Jeremy had to cough to attract the attention of his reflection when
he was shaving.
Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who,
having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to
Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available. He was

 
 
  
puzzled that people seemed to think he was a boring conversationalist. Why, he could talk
about all kinds of clock. Mechanical clocks, magical clocks, water clocks, fire clocks, floral
clocks, candle clocks, sand clocks, cuckoo clocks, the rare Hershebian beetle clocks... But for
some reason he always ran out of listeners before he ran out of clocks.
He stepped out into his shop, and stopped.
'Oh... I'm so sorry to have kept you,' he said. It was a woman. And two trolls had taken up
positions just inside the door. Their dark glasses and huge ill-fitting black suits put them
down as people who put people down. One of them cracked his knuckles when he saw
Jeremy looking at him.
The woman was wrapped in an enormous and expensive white fur coat, which might have
explained the trolls. Long black hair cascaded over her shoulders, and her face was made up
so pale that it was almost the shade of the coat. She was ... quite attractive, thought Jeremy,
who was admittedly no judge whatsoever, but it was a monochromatic beauty. He wondered
if she was a zombie. There were quite a few in the city now, and the prudent ones had taken it
with them when they died, and probably could afford a coat like that.
'A beetle clock?' she said. She had turned away from the glass dome.
'Oh, er, yes... The Hershebian lawyer beetle has a very consistent daily routine,' said Jeremy.
'I, er, only keep it for, um, interest.'
'How very ... organic,' said the woman. She stared at him as if he was another kind of beetle.
'We are Myria LeJean. Lady Myria LeJean.'
Jeremy obediently held out a hand. Patient men at the Clockmakers' Guild had spent a long
time teaching him how to Relate to People before giving it up in despair, but some things had
stuck.
Her ladyship looked at the waiting hand. Finally, one of the trolls lumbered over.
'Der lady does not shake hands,' it said, in a reverberating whisper. 'She are not a tactile kinda
person.'
'Oh?' said Jeremy.
'But enough of this, perhaps,' said Lady LeJean, stepping back. 'You make clocks, and we-'
There was a jingling noise from Jeremy's shirt pocket. He pulled out a large watch.
'If that was chiming the hour, you are fast,' said the woman.
'Er ... um ... no... you might find it a good idea to, um, put your hands over your ears...'
It was three o'clock. And every clock struck it at once. Cuckoos cuckooed, the hour pins fell
out of the candle clock, the water clocks gurgled and seesawed as the buckets emptied, bells
clanged, gongs banged, chimes tinkled and the Hershebian lawyer beetle turned a somersault.

 
 
  
The trolls had clapped their huge hands over their ears, but Lady LeJean merely stood with
her hands on her hips, head on one side, until the last echo died away.
'All correct, we see,' she said.
'What?' said Jeremy. He'd been thinking: perhaps a vampire, then?
'You keep all your clocks at the right time,' said Lady LeJean. 'You're very particular about
that, Mr Jeremy?'
'A clock that doesn't tell the right time is ... wrong,' said Jeremy. Now he was wishing she'd
go away. Her eyes were worrying him. He'd heard about people having grey eyes, and her
eyes were grey, like the eyes of a blind person, but she was clearly looking at him and
through him.
'Yes, there was a little bit of trouble over that, wasn't there?' said Lady LeJean.
'I... I don't ... I don't ... don't know what you're-'
'At the Clockmakers' Guild? Williamson, who kept his clock five minutes fast? And you-'
'I am much better now,' said Jeremy stiffly. 'I have medicine. The Guild was very kind. Now
please go away.'
'Mr Jeremy, we want you to build us a clock that is accurate.'
'All my clocks are accurate,' said Jeremy, staring at his feet. He wasn't due to take his
medicine for another five hours and seventeen minutes, but he was feeling the need for it
now. 'And now I must ask-'
'How accurate are your clocks?'
'Better than a second in eleven months,' said Jeremy promptly.
'That is very good?'
'Yes.' It had been very good. That was why the Guild had been so understanding. Genius is
always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood
has been cleaned up.
'We want much better accuracy than that.'
'It can't be done.'
'Oh? You mean that you can't do it?'
'No, I can't. And if I can't, then neither can any other clockmaker in the city. I'd know about it
if they could!'
'So proud? Are you sure?'

 
 
  
'I'd know.' And he would. He'd know for certain. The candle clocks and the water clocks...
they were toys, which he kept out of a sort of respect for the early days of timekeeping, and
even then he'd spent weeks experimenting with waxes and buckets and had turned out
primitive clocks that you could, well, very nearly set your watch by. It was okay that they
couldn't be that accurate. They were simple, organic things, parodies of time. They didn't
grind across his nerves. But a real clock... well, that was a mechanism, a thing of numbers,
and numbers had to be perfect.
She put her head on one side again. 'How do you test to that accuracy?' she said.
They'd often asked him that in the Guild, once his talent had revealed itself. He hadn't been
able to answer the question then, either, because it didn't make sense. You built a clock to be
accurate. A portrait painter painted a picture. If it looked like the subject, then it was an
accurate picture. If you built the clock right, it would be accurate. You didn't have to test it.
You'd know.
'I'd know,' he said.
'We want you to build a clock that is very accurate.'
'How accurate?'
'Accurate.'
'But I can only build to the limit of my materials,' said Jeremy. 'I have... developed certain
techniques, but there are things like... the vibration of the traffic in the street, little changes in
temperature, that sort of thing.'
Lady LeJean was now inspecting a range of fat imp-powered watches. She picked one up and
opened the back. There was the tiny saddle, and the pedals, but they were forlorn and empty.
'No imps?' she said.
'I keep them for historical interest,' said Jeremy. 'They were barely accurate to a few seconds
a minute, and they'd stop completely overnight. They were only any good if your idea of
accuracy was “around two-ish”.' He grimaced when he used the term. It felt like hearing
fingernails on a blackboard.
'How about invar?' said the lady, still apparently inspecting the museum of clocks.
Jeremy looked shocked. 'The alloy? I didn't think anyone outside the Guild knew about that.
And it is very expensive. Worth a lot more than its weight in gold.'
Lady LeJean straightened up. 'Money is no object,' she said. 'Would invar allow you to reach
total accuracy?'
'No. I already use it. It's true that it is not affected by temperature, but there are always...
barriers. Smaller and smaller interferences become bigger and bigger problems. It's Xeno's
Paradox.'

 
 
  
'Ah, yes. He was the Ephebian philosopher who said you couldn't hit a running man with an
arrow, wasn't he?' said the lady.
'In theory, because-'
'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.
'Then you're talking about... the famous “tick of the universe”,' he said. 'And no gear cutter
could possibly make gears that small...'
'It depends on what you would call a gear. Have you read this?'
Lady LeJean waved a hand at one of the trolls, who lumbered over and dropped an oblong
package on the counter.
Jeremy undid it. It contained a small book. 'Grim Fairy Tales?' he said.
'Read the story about the glass clock of Bad Schüschein,' said Lady LeJean.
'Children's stories?' said Jeremy. 'What can they tell me?'
'Who knows? We will call again tomorrow,' said Lady LeJean, 'to hear about your plans. In
the meantime, here is a little token of our good faith.'
The troll laid a large leather bag on the counter. It clinked with the heavy, rich clink of gold.
Jeremy didn't pay it a great deal of attention. He had quite a lot of gold. Even skilled
clockmakers came to buy his clocks. Gold was useful because it gave him the time to work
on more clocks. These earned him more gold. Gold was, more or less, something that
occupied the space between clocks.
'I can also obtain invar for you, in large quantities,' she said. 'That will be part of your
payment, although I agree that even invar will not serve your purpose. Mr Jeremy, both you
and I know that your payment for making the first truly accurate clock will be the opportunity
to make the first truly accurate clock, yes?'
He smiled nervously. 'It would be... wonderful, if it could be done,' he said. 'Really, it
would... be the end of clockmaking.'
'Yes,' said Lady LeJean. 'No one would ever have to make a clock again.'
Tick
This desk is neat.