Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [31]
“But it must’ve happened!” snapped Vimes. “I told you, I can remember it! I was there yesterday!”
“Nice try, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore,” said the monk. “Trust me. Yes, it’s happened to you, but even though it has, it might not. ’Cos of quantum. Right now, there isn’t a Commander Vimes–shaped hole in the future to drop you into. It’s officially Uncertain. But might not be, if you do it right. You owe it to yourself, Commander. Right now, out there, Sam Vimes is learning to be a very bad copper indeed. And he learns fast.”
The little monk stood up. “I’ll let you think about that,” he said.
Vimes nodded, staring at the gravel garden.
Sweeper crept away quietly and went back into the temple. He walked to the other side of the office. He removed a strange key from around his neck and inserted it into a small door. The door opened. Brilliant sunlight burst ahead of him.
He walked on, his sandals leaving the cold flagstones and walking onto well-trodden earth in broad, hot daylight.
The river had a different course this far back in the past, and present-day residents of Ankh-Morpork would have been surprised at how pleasant it looked seven hundred thousand years ago. Hippos sunbathed on a sandbank out in midstream and, according to Qu, were getting troublesome lately—he’d had to set up a little temporal fence around the camp at night, so that any hippos trying to wander in among the tents found themselves back in the water with a headache.
Qu himself, his straw hat protecting his head from the hot sun, was supervising his assistants in a vined-off area. Lu-Tze sighed as he walked toward it.
There were going to be explosions, he knew it.
It wasn’t that he disliked Qu, the order’s Master of Devices. The man was a sort of engineering equivalent of the Abbott. The Abbott had taken thousand-year-old ideas and put them through his mind in a new way, and, as a result, the multiverse had opened for him like a flower. Qu, on the other hand, had taken the ancient technology of the Procrastinators, which could save and restore time, and had harnessed it to practical, everyday purposes, such as, yes, blowing people’s heads off. It was something that Lu-Tze tried to avoid. There were better things to do with people’s heads.
As Lu-Tze approached, a line of joyful, dancing Monks wove their way along a bamboo replica of a street, letting off firecrackers and banging gongs.
As they reached a corner, the last monk turned and lightly tossed a little drum into the outstretched arms of a straw dummy.
The air shimmered, and the figure disappeared with a small thunderclap.
“Nice to see something not blowing anyone’s head off,” said Lu-Tze, leaning on the vine rope.
“Oh, hello, Sweeper,” said Qu. “Yes. I wonder what went wrong. You see, the body should have moved forward by a microsecond and left the head where it was.” He picked up a megaphone. “Thank you, everyone! Places for another run! Soto, take over, please!”
He turned to Lu-Tze. “Well?”
“He’s thinking about it,” said Sweeper.
“Oh, for heavens’ sake, Lu-Tze! This is completely unauthorized, you know! We’re supposed to prune out rogue history loops, not expend vast amounts of time keeping them going!”
“This one’s important. We owe it to the man. It wasn’t his fault we had the major temporal shattering just as he fell through the dome.”
“Two timelines running side by side,” moaned Qu. “That’s quite unacceptable, you know. I’m having to use techniques that are completely untried.”
“Yes, but it’s only a few days.”
“What about Vimes? Is he strong enough? He’s got no training for this!”
“He defaults to being a copper. A copper’s a copper, wherever he is.”
“I really don’t know why I listen to you, Lu-Tze, I really don’t,” said Qu. He glanced at the arena and hurriedly raised his megaphone to his lips. “Don’t hold it that way up! I said don’t hold—”
There was a thunderclap. Lu-Tze didn’t bother to turn around.
Qu lifted the megaphone again and said wearily, “All right, someone please go and