Thief of Time

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.”

“Good. That elevator should be getting down about… now.”

Slivers of blue light, like trout slipping through a stream, danced around the elevator door.

The Auditors gathered. They had been learning. Many of them had acquired weapons. And a number of them had taken care not to communicate to the others that gripping something offensive in the hand seemed a very natural thing to do. It spoke to something right down in the back of the brain.

It was therefore unfortunate that when a couple of them pulled open the elevator door it was to reveal, slightly melting in the middle of the floor, a cherry liqueur chocolate.

The scent wafted.

There was only one survivor and, when Miss Tangerine ate the chocolate, there wasn't even that.

“One of life's little certainties,” said Susan, standing on the edge of the museum's parapet, “is that there is generally a last chocolate hidden in all those empty wrappers.”

Then she reached down and grabbed the top of a drainpipe.