Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [89]
It remained hanging in the air.
“Damn it,” he said. “Another idiot with a clock, eh?”
What he did then was not usual dairy practice. He walked into the center of the room and made a few passes in the air with his hands.
The air brightened. The water splashed. The bottle smashed—although, when Ronnie turned around and waved a hand at it, the glass slivers ran together again.
Then Ronnie Soak sighed and went into the cream settling room. Large wide bowls stretched away into the distance and, if Ronnie had ever allowed another to notice this, the distance contained far more distance than is usually found in a normal building.
“Show me,” he said.
The surface of the nearest bowl of milk became a mirror, and then began to show pictures…
Ronnie went back into the dairy, took his peaked cap off its hook by the door, and crossed the courtyard to the stable. The sky overhead was a sullen, unmoving gray as he emerged leading his horse.
It was black, glistening with health, and there was this about it that was odd: it shone as though it was illuminated by a red light. Redness spangled off its shoulders and flanks, even under the grayness.
And even when it was harnessed to the cart it didn’t look like any kind of horse that should be hitched to any kind of wagon, but people never noticed this and, again, Ronnie took care to make sure that they didn’t.
The cart gleamed with white paint, picked out here and there with a fresh green. The wording on the side declared proudly:
RONALD SOAK, HYGENIC DAIRYMAN.
ESTABLISHED
Perhaps it was odd that people never said, “Established when, exactly?” and, if they ever had, the answer would have had to be quite complicated.
Ronnie opened the gates to the yard and, milk crates rattling, set out into the timeless moment. It was terrible, he thought, the way things conspired against the small businessman.
Lobsang Ludd awoke to a little clicking, spinning sound.
He was in darkness, but it yielded reluctantly to his hand. It felt like velvet, and it was. He’d rolled under one of the display cabinets.
There was a vibration in the small of his back. He reached around gingerly, and realized that the portable Procrastinator was revolving in its cage.
So…
How did it go, now? He was living on borrowed time. He’d got maybe an hour, perhaps a lot less. But he could slice it, so…
…no. Something told him that trying that would be a really terminal idea with time stored in a device made by Qu. The mere thought made him feel that his skin was inches from a universe full of razor blades.
So…one hour, perhaps a lot less. But you could rewind a spinner, right?
No. The handle was at the back. You could rewind someone else’s spinner. Thank you, Qu, and your experimental models.
Could you take it off, then? No. The harness was part of it. Without it, different parts of your body would be traveling at different speeds. The effect would probably be rather like freezing a human body solid, and then pushing it down a flight of stone stairs.
Open the box with the crowbar that you will find inside…
There was a green-blue glow through the crack in the door. He took a step toward it, and heard the spinner suddenly pick up speed. That meant it was shedding more time, and that was bad when you had an hour, perhaps a lot less.
He took a step away from the door and the Procrastinator settled back into its routine clicking.
So…
Lu-Tze was out in the street and he had a spinner and that should have cut in automatically, too. In this timeless world, he was going to be the only person who could turn a handle.
The glass that he had broken in his leap through the window had opened around the hole like a great sparkling flower. He reached out to touch a piece. It moved as though alive, cut his finger, and then dropped toward the ground, stopping only when it fell out of the field around his body.
Don’t touch people, Lu-Tze had said. Don’t touch arrows. Don’t touch things that