Thief of Time

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 had been on her desk when she had never even seen it before.
    And a splash of blue-black ink would stay on the cobbles of the square in Genua, until the evening rainstorm washed it away.
    Tick
    The first words read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world are read when they look into the Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.
    The first question they ask is: “Why was he eternally surprised?”
    And they are told: “Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. Therefore, he understood, there is, in truth, no Past, only a memory of the Past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.”
    The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Ankh-Morpork were “Rooms For Rent, Very Reasonable.” And he was glad of it.
    Tick
    Where there is suitable country for grain, people farm. They know the taste of good soil. They grow grain.
    Where there is good steel country, furnaces turn the sky to sunset-red all night. The hammers never stop. They make steel.
    There is coal country, and beef country, and grass country. The world is full of countries where one thing shapes the land and the people. And up here in the high valleys around the hub of the world, where the snow is never far away, this is enlightenment country.
    Here are people that know that there is no steel, only the idea of steel. * They give names to new things, and things that don’t exist. They seek the essence of being and the nature of the soul. They make wisdom.
    Temples command every glacier-headed valley, where there are particles of ice in the wind, even at the height of summer.
    There are the Listening Monks, seeking to discern within the hubbub of the world the faint echoes of the sounds that set the universe in motion.
    There are the Brothers of Cool, a reserved and secretive sect, which believes that only through ultimate coolness can the universe be comprehended, and that black works with everything, and that chrome will never truly go out of style.
    In their vertiginous temple criss-crossed with tightropes, the Balancing Monks test the tension of the world and then set out on long, perilous journeys to restore its equilibrium. The results may be seen on high mountains and isolated islets. They are small brass weights, none of them bigger than a fist. They work. Well, obviously they work. The world has not tipped up yet.
    And in the highest, greenest, airiest valley of all, where apricots are grown and the streams have floating ice in them even on the hottest day, is the monastery of Oi Dong and