Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [67]
Igor looked at his hand-me-down hands. They were beginning to worry him.
Now that the glass clock looked like a clock, they began to shake every time Igor came near it.
Tick
No one noticed Susan in the library of the Guild of Historians, leafing her way through a pile of books. Occasionally she’d make a note.
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 eyes, 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 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 mixed the past and future with the present in any case, 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.*
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 the contrary 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 them 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