Thief of Time

“Believe me, everything will be fine,” said Lady LeJean. “We will not be breaking any of the rules, after all. All that will happen is that time will stop. Everything thereafter will be neat. Alive, but not moving. Tidy.”

One said, And we can get the filing finished.

“Exactly,” said Lady LeJean. “And he wants to do it. That is the strange thing. He hardly thinks about the consequences.”

One said, Splendid.

There was one of those pauses when no one is quite ready to speak yet. And then…

One said, Tell us… What is it like?

“What is what like?”

One said, Being insane. Being human.

“Strange. Disorganized. Several levels of thinking go on at once. There are… things we have no word for. For example, the idea of eating seems now to have a… an attraction. The body tells me this.”

One said, Attraction? As in gravity?

“Ye-es. One is drawn towards food.”

One said, Food in large masses?

“Even in small amounts.”

One said, But eating is simply a function. What is the… attraction of performing a function? Surely the knowledge that it is necessary for continued survival is sufficient?

“I cannot say,” said Lady LeJean.

One Auditor said, You persist in using a personal pronoun.

And one added, And you have not died! To be an individual is to live, and to live is to die!

“Yes. I know. But it is essential for humans to use the personal pronoun. It divides the universe into two parts. The darkness behind the eyes, where the little voice is, and everything else. It is… a horrible feeling. It is like being… questioned, all the time.”

One said, What is the little voice?

“Sometimes thinking is like talking to another person, but that person is also you.”

She could tell this disturbed the other Auditors. “I do not wish to continue in this way any longer than necessary,” she added. And realized that she had lied.

One said, We do not blame you.

Lady LeJean nodded.

The Auditors could see into human minds. They could see the pop and sizzle of the thoughts. But they could not read them. They could see the energies flow from node to node, they could see the brain glittering like a Hogswatch decoration. What they couldn't see was what was happening.

So they'd built one.

It was the logical thing to do. They'd used human agents before, because early on they'd worked out that there were many, many humans who would do anything for sufficient gold. This was puzzling, because gold did not seem to the Auditors to hold any significant value for a human body—it needed iron and copper and zinc, but only the most minute traces of gold. Therefore, they'd reasoned, this was further evidence that the humans who required it were flawed, and this was why attempts to make use of them were doomed. But why were they flawed?

Building a human being was easy; the Auditors knew exactly how to move matter around. The trouble was that the result didn't do anything but lie there and, eventually, decompose. This was annoying, since human beings, without any special training or education, seemed to be able to make working replicas quite easily.

Then they learned that they could make a human body which worked if an Auditor was inside it.

There were, of course, huge risks. Death was one of them. The Auditors avoided death by never going so far as to get a life. They strove to be as indistinguishable as hydrogen atoms, and with none of the latter's joie de vivre. Some luckless Auditor might be risking death by “operating” the body. But lengthy consultation decided that if the driver took care, and liaised at all times with the rest of the Auditors, this risk was minimal and worth taking, considering the goal.

They built a woman. It was a logical choice. After all, while men wielded more obvious power than women, they often did so at the expense of personal danger, and no Auditor liked the prospect of personal danger. Beautiful women often achieved great things, on the other hand, merely by smiling at powerful men.

The whole subject of “beauty” caused the Auditors a lot of difficulty. It made no sense at a molecular level. But research turned up the fact that the woman in the picture Woman Holding Ferret by Leonard of Quirm was considered the epitome of beauty, and so they'd based Lady LeJean on that. They had made changes, of course. The face in the picture was asymmetrical and full of minor flaws, which they had carefully removed.