Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [9]
Miss Susan sighed.
“Very good, Vincent,” she said and stood up. Every eye in the room watched her as she crossed over to the Stationery Cupboard. It seemed to have traveled with them and now, if there had been anyone to note such things, they might have seen faint lines in the air that denoted walls and windows and doors. And if they were intelligent observers, they’d have said: so…this classroom is in some way still in Ankh-Morpork and also in Genua, is it? Is this a trick? Is this real? Is it imagination? Or is it that, to this particular teacher, there is not much of a difference?
The inside of the cupboard was also present, and it was in that shadowy, paper-smelling recess that she kept the stars.
There were gold stars and silver stars. One gold star was worth three silver ones.
The headmistress disapproved of those, as well. She said they encouraged Competitiveness. Miss Susan said that was the point, and the headmistress scuttled away before she got the Look.
Silver stars weren’t awarded frequently, and gold stars happened less than once a fortnight, and were vied for accordingly. Right now Miss Susan selected a silver star. Pretty soon Vincent the Keen would have a galaxy of his very own. To give him his due, he was quite disinterested in which kind of star he got. Quantity, that was what he liked. Miss Susan had privately marked him down as Boy Most Likely To Be Killed One Day By His Wife.
She walked back to her desk and laid the star, tantalizingly, in front of her.
“And an extra special question,” she said, with a hint of malice. “Does that mean it’s ‘then’ there when it’s ‘now’ here?”
The hand slowed halfway in its rise.
“Ooo…” Vincent began and then stopped. “Doesn’t make sense, miss…”
“Questions don’t have to make sense, Vincent,” said Miss Susan. “But answers do.”
There was a kind of sigh from Penelope. To Miss Susan’s surprise, the face that one day would surely cause her father to have to hire bodyguards was emerging from its normal happy daydream and wrapping itself around an answer. Her alabaster hand was rising, too.
The class watched expectantly.
“Yes, Penelope?”
“It’s…”
“Yes?”
“It’s always ‘now’ everywhere, miss?”
“Exactly right. Well done! All right, Vincent, you can have the silver star. And for you, Penelope…”
Miss Susan went back to the cupboard of stars. Getting Penelope to step off her cloud long enough even to answer a question was worth a star, but a deep philosophical statement had to make it a gold one.
“I want you all to open your notebooks and write down what Penelope just told us,” she said brightly as she sat down.
And then she saw the inkwell on her desk beginning to rise like Penelope’s hand. It was a ceramic pot, made to drop neatly into a round hole in the woodwork. It came up smoothly and turned out to be balanced on the cheerful skull of the Death of Rats.
It winked one blue-glowing eye socket at Miss Susan.
With quick little movements, not even looking down, she whisked the inkwell aside with one hand and reached for a thick volume of stories with the other. She brought it down so hard on the hole that blue-black ink splashed from the inkwell onto the cobbles.
Then she raised the desk lid and peeped inside.
There was, of course, nothing there. At least, nothing macabre.
…Unless you counted the piece of chocolate half-gnawed by rat teeth and a note in heavy gothic lettering saying
SEE ME
and signed by a very familiar alpha-and-omega symbol and the word
Grandfather.
Susan picked up the note and screwed it into a ball, aware that she was trembling with rage. How dare he? And to send the rat, too!
She tossed the ball into the wastepaper basket. She never missed. Sometimes the basket moved in order to ensure that this was the case.
“And now we’ll go and see what the time is in Klatch,” she told the watching children.
On the desk, the book had fallen open at a certain page. And, later on, it would be story time. And Miss Susan would wonder, too late, why the book