Thief of Time

knew he was just a man, despite everything that happened after. It was because he was panicking, to tell you the truth. Pregnant fathers often panic. He was going on about me coming right away and how there was no time. He had all the time in the world, he just wasn't thinking properly, 'cos husbands never do when the time comes. They panic 'cos it ain't their world any more.”

“And what happened next?” said Susan.

“He took me in his, well, it was like one of them old chariots, he took me to…” Mrs Ogg hesitated. “I've seen a lot of strange things in my life, I'll have you know,” she said, as if preparing the ground for a revelation.

“I can believe it.”

“It was a castle made of glass.” Mrs Ogg gave Susan a look that dared her to disbelieve. Susan decided to hurry things up.

“Mrs Ogg, one of my earliest memories is of helping to feed the Pale Horse. You know? The one outside? The horse of Death? His name is Binky. So please don't keep stopping. There is practically no limit to the things I find normal.”

“There was a woman… well eventually there was a woman,” said the witch. “Can you imagine someone exploding into a million pieces? Yes, I expect you can. Well, imagine it happening the other way. There's a mist and it's all flying together and then, whoosh, there's a woman. Then, whoosh, back into a mist again. And all the time, this noise…” Mrs Ogg ran her finger round the edge of the brandy glass, making it hum.

“A woman kept… incarnating and then disappearing again? Why?”

“Because she was frightened, of course! First time, see?” Mrs Ogg grinned. “I person'ly never had any problems in that area, but I've been at a lot of births when it's all new to the girl and she'll be frightened as hell and when push comes to shove, if you take my meaning, old midwifery term, she'll be yellin' and swearin' at the father and I reckon that she'd give anything to be somewhere else. Well, this lady could be somewhere else. We'd have been in a real pickle if it wasn't for the man, as it turned out.”

“The man who brought you?”

“He was kind of foreign, you know? Like the Hub people. Bald as a coot. I remember thinking ‘You look like a young man, mister, but you look like you've been a young man for a long, long time if I'm any judge.’ Normally I wouldn't have any man there, but he sat and talked to her in his foreign lingo and sang her songs and little poems and soothed her and back she came, out of thin air, and I was ready and it was one, two, done. And then she was gone. Except that she was still there, I think. In the air.”

“What did she look like?” said Susan.

Mrs Ogg gave her a Look. “You've got to remember the view I got where I was sitting,” she said. “The kind of description I might give you ain't a thing anyone'd put on a poster, if you get my meaning. And no woman looks at her best at a time like that. She was young, she had dark hair…” Mrs Ogg refilled her brandy glass and this meant the pause went on for some time. “And she was old, too, if you're after the truth of it. Not old like me. I mean old.”

She stared at the fire. “Old like darkness and stars,” she said, to the flames.

“The boy was left outside the Thieves' Guild,” said Susan, to break the silence. “I suppose they thought that with gifts like that he'd be all right.”

“The boy? Hah. Tell me, miss… why are we talking about he?”

Tick

Lady LeJean was being strong.

She'd never realized how much humans were controlled by their bodies. The thing nagged night and day. It was always too hot, too cold, too empty, too full, too tired…

The key was discipline, she was sure. Auditors were immortal. If she couldn't tell her body what to do, she didn't deserve to have one. Bodies were a major human weakness.

Senses, too. The Auditors had hundreds of senses, since every possible phenomenon had to be witnessed and recorded. She could find only five available now. Five ought to be easy to deal with. But they were wired directly into the rest of the body! They didn't just submit information, they made demands!

She'd walked past a stall selling roasted meats and her mouth had started to drool! The sense of smell wanted the body to eat without consulting the brain! But that wasn't the worst of it! The brain itself did its own thinking!

That was the hardest part. The bag of soggy tissue behind the eyes worked away independently of its owner. It took in information from the senses, and checked it all against memory, and presented options. Sometimes the hidden parts of it even fought for control of the mouth! Humans weren't individuals, they were, each one, a committee!

Some of the other members of the committee were dark and red and entirely uncivilized. They had joined the brain before civilization; some of them had got aboard even before humanity. And the bit that did the joined-up thinking had to fight, in the darkness of the brain, to get the casting vote!

After little more than a couple of weeks as a human, the entity that was Lady LeJean was having real trouble.

Food, for example. Auditors did not eat. They recognized that feeble life forms had to consume one another to obtain energy and body-building material. The process was astonishingly inefficient, however, and her ladyship had tried assembling nutrients directly out of the air. This worked, but the process felt… What was the word? Oh, yes… creepy.

Besides, part of the brain didn't believe it was getting fed and insisted that it was hungry. Its incessant nagging interfered with her thought processes and so, despite everything, she'd had to face up to the whole, well, the whole orifices business.

The Auditors had known about these for a long time. The human body appeared to have up to eight of them. One didn't seem to work and the rest appeared to be multi-functional, although surprisingly there seemed to be only one thing that could be done by the ears.

Yesterday she'd tried a piece of dry toast.

It had been the single worst experience of her existence.

It had been the single most intense experience of her existence.

It had been something else, too. As far as she could understand the language, it had been enjoyable.

It seemed that the human sense of taste was quite different from the sense as employed by an Auditor. That was precise, measured, analytical. But the human sense of taste was like being hit in the mouth by the whole world. It had been half an hour of watching fireworks in her head before she remembered to swallow.

How did humans survive this?

She'd been fascinated by the art galleries. It was clear that some humans could present reality in a way that made it even more real, that spoke to the viewer, that seared the mind… but what could possibly transcend the knowledge that the genius of an artist had to poke alien substances into his face? Could it be that humans had got used to it? And that was only the start…

The sooner the clock was finished, the better. A species as crazy as this couldn't be allowed to survive. She was visiting the clockmaker and his ugly assistant every day now, giving them as much help as she dared, but they always seemed one vital step away from completion—

Amazing! She could even lie to herself! Because another voice in her head, which was part of the dark committee, said, “You're not helping, are you? You're stealing parts and twisting parts… and you go back every day because of the way he looks at you, don't you?”

Parts of the internal committee that were so old they didn't have voices, only direct control of the body, tried to interfere at this point. She tried in vain to put them out of her mind.

And now she had to face the other Auditors. They would be punctual.

She pulled herself together. Water had taken to running out of her eyes lately for no reason at all. She did the best she could with her hair, and made her way to the large drawing room.