Thief of Time

1

Except in very small universes.

2

Mostly involving big, big beachballs.^{*}

* A cliché of 50’s “naturist” films was a group of women throwing around a large beachball.

3

Quite an overrated activity.

4

An edge witch is one who makes her living on the edges, in that moment when boundary conditions apply — between life and death, light and dark, good and evil and, most dangerously of all, today and tomorrow.

5

But they still use forks, or, at least, the idea of forks. There may, as the philosopher says, be no spoon, although this begs the question of why there is the idea of soup.^{*}

* Hardly there has ever been a philosopher who has made pronouncements about spoons, but “There is no spoon” is of course one of the better-known metaphysical mumbo-jumbo quotes from the original The Matrix movie.

6

And the story continues: The novice who had protested that it was only the shrine of a sweeper ran away from the temple, the student who said nothing remained a sweeper for the rest of his life, and the student who had seen the inevitable shape of the story went, after much agonizing and several months of meticulous sweeping, to Lu-Tze and knelt and asked to be shown the Right Way. Whereupon the Sweeper took him to the dojo of the Tenth Djim, with its terrible multi-bladed fighting machines and its fearsome serrated weapons such as the clong-clong and the uppsi. The story runs that the Sweeper then opened a cupboard at the back of the dojo and produced a broom and spake thusly: ‘One hand here and the other here, understand? People never get it right. Use good, even strokes and let the broom do most of the work. Never try to sweep up a big pile, you’ll end up sweeping every bit of dust twice. Use your dustpan wisely, and remember: a small brush for the corners.’

7

One reason for this was the club food. At his club, a gentleman could find the kind of food he’d got used to at school, like spotted dick, jam roly-poly and that perennial favourite, stodge and custard. Vitamins are eaten by wives.

8

Which is much harder than seeing things that aren’t there. Everyone does that.

9

This is true. A chocolate you did not want to eat does not count as chocolate. This discovery is from the same branch of culinary physics that determined that food eaten while walking contains no calories.

10

Not ‘Did’ anything, just ‘Did’. Some things were Done, and some things were Not Done. And the things that were Done, Igors Did.

11

Igors were loyal, but they were not stupid. A job was a job. When an employer had no further use for your services, for example because he’d just been staked through the heart by a crowd of angry villagers, it was time to move on before they decided that you ought to be on the next stake. An Igor soon learned a secret way out of any castle and where to stash an overnight bag. In the words of one of the founding Igors: ‘We belong dead? Ecthcuthe me? Where doeth it thay “we”?’^{*}

* This is based on Boris Karloff’s final words in the 1935 movie Bride of Frankenstein: “We belong dead”.

12

And it has to be said that there was nothing intrinsically evil about Igors themselves. They just didn’t pass judgement on other people. Admittedly, that was because if you worked for werewolves and vampires and people who looked on surgery as modern art rather than science, passing judgement would mean you’d never have time to get anything done.

13

Every society needs a cry like that, but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is ‘Remember-the-Atrocity-Committed-Against-Us-Last-Time-That-Will-Excuse-the-Atrocity-That-We’re-About-to-Commit-Today! And So On! Hurrah!’

14

The yeti of the Ramtops, where the Discworld’s magical field is so intense that it is part of the very landscape, are one of the few creatures to utilize control of personal time for genetic advantage. The result is a kind of physical premonition — you find out what is going to happen next by allowing it to happen. Faced with danger, or any kind of task that involves risk of death, a yeti will save its life up to that point and then proceed with all due caution, yet in the comfortable knowledge that, should everything go pancake-shaped, it will wake up at the point where it saved itself with, and this is the important part, knowledge of the events which have just happened but which will not now happen because it’s not going to be such a damn fool next time. This is not quite the paradox it appears because, after it has taken place, it hasn’t happened. All that actually remains is a memory in the yeti’s head, which merely turns out to be a remarkably accurate premonition. The little eddies in time caused by all this are just lost in the noise of all the kinks, dips and knots put in time by every other living creature.

15

But not tasteful.

16

Teaching small children for any length of time can do this to a vocabulary.

17

Up to $10 a pound, usually.

18

If you live in a country where the tradition calls for mayonnaise, just don’t ask. Just don’t.