Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [87]
“Just the two of us?” said War.
RIGHT IS ON OUR SIDE.
“Speaking as War,” said War, “I’d hate to tell you what happens to very small armies that have Right on their side.”
I HAVE SEEN YOU FIGHT.
“My old right arm isn’t what it was…” War murmured.
YOU ARE IMMORTAL. YOU ARE NOT ILL, said Death, but he could see the worried, slightly hunted look in War’s eyes and knew that there was only one way this was going to go.
To be human was to change, Death realized. The Horsemen…were horsemen. Men had wished upon them a certain shape, a certain form. And, just like the gods, and the Tooth Fairy, and the Hogfather, their shape had changed them. They would never be human, but they had caught aspects of humanity as though they were some kind of disease.
Because the point was that nothing, nothing had one aspect and one aspect alone. Men would envisage a being called Famine, but once they gave him arms and legs and eyes, that meant he had to have a brain. That meant he’d think. And a brain can’t think about plagues of locusts all the time.
Emergent behavior again. Complications always crept in. Everything changed.
THANK GOODNESS, thought Death, THAT I AM COMPLETELY UNCHANGING AND EXACTLY THE SAME AS I EVER WAS.
And then there was one.
Tick
The hammer stopped halfway across the room.
Mr. White walked over and picked it out of the air.
“Really, your ladyship,” he said. “You think we don’t watch you? You, the Igor, make the clock ready!”
Igor looked from him to Lady LeJean and back. “I only take orderth from Marthter Jeremy, thank you,” he said.
“The world will end if you start that clock!” said Lady LeJean.
“What a foolish idea,” said Mr. White. “We laugh at it.”
“Hahaha,” said the other Auditors obediently.
“I don’t need medicine!” Jeremy shouted, pushing Dr. Hopkins out of the way. “And I don’t need people to tell me what to do. Shut up!”
In the silence, thunder grumbled in the clouds.
“Thank you,” said Jeremy more calmly. “Now, I hope I am a rational man, and I will approach this rationally. A clock is a measuring device. I have built the perfect clock, my lady. I mean ladies. And gentlemen. It will revolutionize timekeeping.”
He reached up and moved the hands of the clock to almost one o’clock. Then he reached down, gripped the pendulum, and set it swinging.
The world continued to exist.
“You see? The universe doesn’t stop even for my clock,” Jeremy went on. He folded his hands, and sat down. “Watch,” he said calmly.
The clock ticked gently. Then something rattled in the machinery around it, and the big green tubes of acid began to sizzle.
“Well, nothing seems to have happened,” said Dr. Hopkins. “That’s a blessing.”
Sparks crackled around the lightning rod positioned above the clock.
“This is just making a path for the lightning,” said Jeremy happily. “We sent a little lightning up, and a lot more comes back—”
Things were moving inside the clock. There was a sound best represented as fizzle, and greenish-blue light filled the case.
“Ah, the cascade has initialized,” said Jeremy. “As a little exercise, the, ah, more traditional pendulum clock has been slaved to the Big Clock, you’ll see, so that every second it will be readjusted to the correct time.” He smiled, and one cheek twitched. “Some day all clocks will be like this,” he said, and added, “while I normally hate such an imprecise term as ‘any second now,’ nevertheless, I—”
Tick
There was a fight going on in the square. In the strange colors involved in the time-slicing state known as Zimmerman’s Valley, it was picked out in shades of light blue.
By the look of it, a couple of watchmen were trying to take on a gang. One man was airborne, and hung there without support. Another had fired a crossbow directly at one of the watchmen; the arrow was nailed unmoving in the air.
Lobsang examined it curiously.
“You’re going to touch it, aren’t you,” said a voice behind Lobsang. “You’re just going to reach out and touch it, despite everything