Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [68]
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 that 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 in-cautious foot.
Now someone was treading on it again, and the point, the key point, was 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 has said. There was something there like love.
And Time had a son.
How? Susan had the kind of mind that would sour a narrative with a question like that. Time and a mortal man. How could they ever…well, how could they?
Then she thought: My grandfather is Death. He adopted my mother. My father was his apprentice for a while. That’s all that happened. They were both human, and I turned up in the normal way. There is no way I should be able to walk through walls and live outside time and be a little bit immortal, but I am, and so this is not an area where logic and, let’s face it, basic biology have any part to play.
In any case, Time is constantly creating the future. The future contains things that didn’t exist in the past. A small baby should be easy for something…someone that rebuilds the universe once every instant.
Susan sighed. And you had to remember that Time probably wasn’t time, in the same way that Death wasn’t exactly the same as death and War wasn’t exactly the same as war. She’d met War, a big fat man with an inappropriate sense of humor and a habit of repeating himself, and he certainly didn’t personally attend every minor fracas. She disliked Pestilence, who gave her funny looks, and Famine was just wasted and weird. None of them ran their…call it their discipline. They personified it.
Given that she’d met the Tooth Fairy, the Soul Cake Duck, and Old Man Trouble, it amazed Susan that she had grown up to be mostly human, nearly normal.
As she stared at her notes, her hair unwound itself from its tight bun and took up its ground-state position, which was that of someone who had just touched something highly electrical. It spread out around her head like a cloud, with one black streak of nearly normal hair.
Grandfather might be an ultimate destroyer of worlds and the final truth of the universe, but that wasn’t to say he didn’t take an interest in the little people. Perhaps Time did, too.
She smiled.
Time waited for no man, they said.
Perhaps she’d waited for one, once.
Susan was aware that someone was looking at her, turned, and saw the Death of Rats peering through the lens of the glasses that a mildly distracted man was searching for on the other side of the room. Up on a long-disregarded bust of a former historian the raven preened himself.
“Well?” she said.
SQUEAK!
“Oh, he is, is he?”
The doors of the library were nuzzled open and a white horse walked in. There is a terrible habit among horsey people to call a white horse “gray,” but even one of that bowlegged fraternity would have had to admit that this one, at least, was white—not as white as snow, which is a dead white, but at