Thief of Time

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 some 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