Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [32]
“Don’t need to,” said Lu-Tze. “Got a brain. Anyway, I use the temporal toilet, don’t I?”
“A privy that discharges ten million years into the past was not a good idea, Sweeper. I’m sorry I let you persuade me.”
“It’s saving us fourpence a week to Harry King’s bucket boys, Qu, and that’s not to be sneezed at. Is it not written, ‘A penny saved is a penny earned?’ Besides, it all lands in a volcano anyway. Perfectly hygienic.”
There was another explosion. Qu turned and raised his megaphone.
“Do not bang the tambourine more than twice!” he bellowed. “It’s tap-tap-throw-duck! Please pay attention!”
He turned to Sweeper.
“Four more days at most, Lu-Tze,” he said. “I’m sorry, but after that I can’t hide it in the paperwork. And I’ll be amazed if your man can stand it. It’ll affect his mind sooner or later, however tough you think he is. He’s not in his right time.”
“We’re learning a lot, though,” Lu-Tze insisted. “For a perfectly logical chain of reasons Vimes ended up back in time even looking rather like Keel! Eyepatch and scar! Is that Narrative Causality, or Historical Imperative, or Just Plain Weird? Are we back to the old theory of the self-correcting history? Is there no such thing as an accident, as the Abbott says? Is every accident just a higher-order design? I’d love to find out!”
“Four days,” Qu insisted. “Any longer than that and this little exercise will show up, and the Abbot will be very, very annoyed with us.”
“Right you are, Qu,” said the Sweeper meekly.
He’ll be annoyed if he has to find out, certainly, he thought as he walked back to the door in the air. He’d been very specific. The Abbott of the History Monks (the Men In Saffron, No Such Monastery…they had many names) couldn’t allow this sort of thing, and he’d taken pains to forbid Lu-Tze from this course of action. He had added, “but when you do, I expect Historical Imperative will win.”
Sweeper went back to the garden and found Vimes still staring at the empty Baked-Bean Tin of Universal Oneness.
“Well, Commander?” he said.
“Are you really like…policemen, for Time?” said Vimes.
“Well, in a way,” said Sweeper.
“So…you make sure the good stuff happens?”
“No, not the good stuff. The right stuff,” said Sweeper. “But frankly, these days, we have our work cut out for us making sure anything happens. We used to think time was like a river, you could row up and down and come back to the same place. Then we found it acted like a sea, so you could go from side to side as well. Then it turned out to be like a ball of water; you could go up and down, too. Currently we think it’s like…oh, lots of spaces, all rolled up. And then there are time jumps, and time slips, and humans mess it up, too, wasting it and gaining it. And then there’s quantum, of course.” The monk sighed. “There’s always bloody quantum. So what with one thing and another, we think we’re doing well if yesterday happens before tomorrow, quite frankly. You, Mister Vimes, got caught up in a bit of…an event. We can’t put it right, not properly. You can.”
Vimes sat back. “I’ve got no choice, have I?” he said. “As my old sergeant used to say…you do the job that’s in front of you.” He hesitated. “And that’s going to be me, isn’t it? I taught me all I know…”
“No. I explained.”
“I didn’t understand it. But perhaps I don’t have to.”
Sweeper sat down.
“Good. And now, Mister Vimes, I’ll take you back inside and we’ll work out what you need to know from all this, and Qu’ll set up the spinners and we’ll just…bounce you in time a little so that you give yourself the message. You know you did it, because you saw it. We can’t have you running around knowing all about us.”
“I’ll get suspicious.”
“You’ll have to make it convincing.”
“I’ll still be suspicious.”
“You won’t trust even yourself?”
“I’m a devious character. I could be hiding something. How are you going to get me back to the Watch House? Don’t even think about giving me some kind