Thief of Time

light enough to have been designed for a doll. He turned round.

“But… I died,” said the shade of Unity.

YES, said Death. THIS IS THE NEXT PART…

Tick

Emma Robertson sat in the classroom with wrinkled brow, chewing on her pencil. Then, rather slowly, but with the air of one imparting great secrets, she set to work.

She wrote:

“We went to Lanker where there are witches they are kind they grow erbs. We met this which she was very jole and sang us a snog abot a hedghog it had dificut words. Jason try to kick her cat it chase him up a tre. I know a lot about wiches now they do not have warts they do not eat you they are just like your grane except your grane does not know difult words.”

At her high desk Susan relaxed. There was nothing like a classroom of bent heads. A good teacher used whatever materials there were to hand, and taking the class to visit Mrs Ogg was an education in herself. Two educations.

A classroom going well had its own smell: a hint of pencil shavings, poster paints, long-dead stick insect, glue, and, of course, the faint aroma of Billy.

There had been an uneasy meeting with her grandfather. She'd raged that he hadn't told her things. And he'd said, of course he hadn't. If you told humans what the future held, it wouldn't. That made sense. Of course it made sense. It was good logic. The trouble was that Susan was only mostly logical. And so, now, things were back in that uneasy, rather cool state where they spent most of their time, in the tiny little family that ran on dysfunctionality.

Maybe, she thought, that was a normal family state in any case. When push came to shove—thank you, Mrs Ogg, she'd always remember that phrase now—they'd rely on each other automatically, without a thought. Apart from that, they kept out of one another's way.

She hadn't seen the Death of Rats lately. It was too much to hope that he was dead. In any case, it hadn't slowed him down so far.

That thought made her think about the contents of her desk. Susan was very strict about eating in class and took the view that, if there were rules, then they applied to everyone, even her. Otherwise they were merely tyranny. But rules were there to make you think before you broke them.

There was still half a box of Higgs & Meakins' cheapest assortment tucked in there amongst the books and papers.

Opening the lid carefully and slipping her hand in was easy, and so was the maintenance of a suitably teachery face while she did so. Questing fingers found a chocolate in the nest of empty paper cups, and told her that it was a damn nougat. But she was resolute. Life was tough. Sometimes you got nougat.

Then she briskly picked up the keys and walked to the Stationery Cupboard with what she hoped was the purposeful step of someone about to check on the supply of pencils. After all, you never knew, with pencils. They needed watching.

The door clicked behind her, leaving only the dim light through the transom. She put the chocolate in her mouth and shut her eyes.

A faint, cardboardy sound made her open them. The lids were gently lifting on the boxes of stars.

They spilled out and whirled up into the shadows of the cupboard, brilliant against the darkness, a galaxy in miniature, gently spinning.

Susan watched them for a while, and then said, “All right, you have my full attention, whoever you are.”

At least, that was what she meant to say. The peculiar stickiness of the nougat caused it to come out as: “Allite, you ot my fo' a'nen'on, oover ooah.” Damn!

The stars spiralled around her head, and the cupboard's interior darkened into interstellar black.

“If iss is oo, Def o' Raffs—” she began.

“It's me,” said Lobsang.

Tick

Even with nougat, you can have a perfect moment.

The End

,

1. Except in very small universes

2. Mostly involving big, big beachballs.

3. Quite an overrated activity.

4. An edge witch is one who makes her living on the edges, in that moment when boundary conditions apply—between life and death, light and dark, good and evil and, most dangerously of all, today and tomorrow.

5. But they still use forks, or, at least, the idea of forks. There may, as the philosopher says, be no spoon, although this begs the question of why there is the idea of soup.

6. And the story continues: The novice who had protested that it was only the shrine of a sweeper ran away from the temple, the student who said nothing remained a sweeper for the rest of his life; and the student who had seen the inevitable shape of the story went, after much agonizing and several months of meticulous sweeping, to Lu-Tze and knelt and asked to be shown the Right Way. Whereupon the Sweeper took him to the dojo of the Tenth Djim, with its terrible multi-bladed fighting machines and its fearsome serrated weapons such as the clong-clong and the uppsi. The story runs that the Sweeper then opened a cupboard at the back of the dojo and produced a broom and spake thusly: “One hand here and the other here, understand? People never get it right. Use good, even strokes and let the broom do most of the work. Never try to sweep up a big pile, you'll end up sweeping every bit of dust twice. Use your dustpan wisely, and remember: a small brush for the corners.”

7. One reason for this was the club food. At his club, a gentleman could find the kind of food he'd got used to at school, like spotted dick, jam roly-poly and that perennial favourite, stodge and custard. Vitamins are eaten by wives.