Thief of Time

She didn't know if her other gift was from Death, but she'd always told the children that they had a lazy eye and a business eye. There were two ways of looking at the world. The lazy eye just saw the surface. The business eye saw through into the reality beneath.

She turned a page.

Seen through her business eye, history was very strange indeed. The scars stood out. The history of the country of Ephebe was puzzling, for example. Either its famous philosophers lived for a very long time, or they inherited their names, or extra bits had been stitched into history there. The history of Omnia was a mess. Two centuries had been folded into one, by the look of it, and it was only because of the mind-set of the Omnians, whose religion in any case mixed the past and future with the present, that it could possibly have passed unnoticed.

And what about Koom Valley? Everyone knew that there had been a famous battle there, between dwarfs and trolls and mercenaries on both sides, but how many battles had there actually been? Historians talked about the valley being in just the right place in disputed territory to become more or less the preferred local pitch for all confrontations, but you could just as easily believe—at least you could if you had a grandfather called Death—that a patch that just happened to fit had been welded into history several times, so that different generations went round through the whole stupid disaster again and again, shouting “Remember Koom Valley!” as they did so.13

There were anomalies everywhere.

And no one had noticed.

You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. Even her grandfather had remarked upon it. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up the evolutionary ladder. Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think “oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?”

And along with this had come an associated power, to make things normal. The world changed mightily, and within a few days humans considered it was normal. They had the most amazing ability to shut out and forget what didn't fit. They told themselves little stories to explain away the inexplicable, to make things normal.

Historians were especially good at it. If it suddenly looked as though hardly anything had happened in the fourteenth century, they'd weigh in with twenty different theories. Not one of these would be that maybe most of the time had been cut out and pasted into the nineteenth century, where the Crash had not left enough coherent time for everything that needed to happen, because it only takes a week to invent the horse collar.

The History Monks had done their job well, but their biggest ally was the human ability to think narratively. And humans had risen to the occasion. They'd say things like “Thursday already? What happened to the week?” and “Time seems to go a lot faster these days…” and “It seems like only yesterday…”

But some things remained.

The Monks had carefully wiped out the time when the Glass Clock had struck. It had been surgically removed from history. Almost…

Susan picked up Grim Fairy Tales again. Her parents hadn't bought her books like this when she was a child. They'd tried to bring her up normally; they knew that it is not entirely a good idea for humans to be too close to Death. They taught her that facts were more important than fancy. And then she'd grown up and found out that the real fantasies weren't the Pale Rider or the Tooth Fairy or bogeymen—they were all solid facts. The big fantasy was that the world was the place where the toast didn't care if it came butter side down or not, where logic was sensible, and where things could be made not to have happened.

Something like the Glass Clock had been too big to hide. It had leaked out via the dark, hidden labyrinths of the human mind, and had become a folk tale. People had tried to coat it with sugar and magic swords, but its true nature still lurked like a rake in an overgrown lawn, ready to rise up at the incautious foot.

Now someone was treading on it again, and the point, the key point, was that the chin it was rising to meet belonged to…

…someone like me.

She sat and stared at nothing for a while. Around her, historians climbed library ladders, fumbled books onto their lecterns and generally rebuilt the image of the past to suit the eyesight of today. One of them was in fact looking for his glasses.

Time had a son, she thought, someone who walks in the world.

There was a man who devoted himself to the study of time so wholeheartedly that, for him, time became real. He learned the ways of time and Time noticed him, Death had said. There was something there like love.

And Time had a son.