Thief of Time

Hardworking fellow, mark you, and friendly as anything provided you don’t touch his hair. Important lesson there: you don’t survive in the field by obeying all the rules, including those relating to mental processes. And what name were you given when you were enrolled?”
    “Lobsang, ven—uh, Sweeper.”
    “Lobsang Ludd?”
    “Er…yes, Sweeper.”
    “Amazing. So, Lobsang Ludd, you tried to count my surprises, did you? Everybody does. Surprise is the nature of Time, and five is the number of Surprise.”
    “Yes, Sweeper. I found the little bridge that tilts and throws you in the carp pool…”
    “Good. Good.”
    “…and I have found the bronze sculpture of a butterfly that flaps its wings when you breathe on it…”
    “That’s two.”
    “There’s the surprising way those little daisies spray you with venomous pollen…”
    “Ah, yes. Many people find them extremely surprising.”
    “And I believe the fourth surprise is the yodeling stick insect.”
    “Well done,” said Lu-Tze, beaming. “It’s very good, isn’t it.”
    “But I can’t find the fifth surprise.”
    “Really? Let me know when you find it,” said Lu-Tze.
    Lobsang Ludd thought about this as he trailed after the sweeper.
    “The Garden of Five Surprises is a test,” he said, at last.
    “Oh, yes. Nearly everything is.”
    Lobsang nodded. It was like the Garden of the Four Elements. Every novice found the bronze symbols of three of them—in the carp pond, under a rock, painted on a kite—but none of Lobsang’s classmates found Fire. There didn’t appear to be a fire anywhere in the garden.
    After a while Lobsang had reasoned thus: there were, in fact, five elements, as they had been taught. Four made up the universe, and the fifth, Surprise, allowed it to keep on happening. No one had said that the four in the garden were the material four, so the fourth element in the Garden could be Surprise at the fact that Fire wasn’t there. Besides, fire was not generally found in a garden, and the other signs were, truly, in their element. So he’d gone down to the bakeries and opened one of the ovens and there, glowing red-hot below the loaves, was the symbol of Fire.
    “Then…I expect that the fifth surprise is: there is no fifth surprise,” he said.
    “Nice try, but no cylindrical smoking thing,” said Lu-Tze. “And is it not written ‘Oo, you are so sharp you’ll cut yourself one of these days’?”
    “Um…I haven’t read that in the sacred texts yet, Sweeper,” said Lobsang uncertainly.
    “No, you wouldn’t have,” said Lu-Tze.
    They stepped out of the brittle sunlight into the deep cold of the temple, and walked on through ancient halls and down stairways cut into the rock. The sound of distant chanting followed them. Lu-Tze, who was not holy and therefore could think unholy thoughts, occasionally wondered whether the chanting monks were chanting anything , or were just going “aahaaahahah.” You could never tell with all that echo.
    He turned off the main passage and reached for the handles of a pair of large, red-lacquered doors. Then he looked behind him. Lobsang had stopped dead, some yards away.
    “Coming?”
    “But not even dongs are allowed in there!” said Lobsang. “You have to be a Third-Djim ting at least!”
    “Yeah, right. It’s a shortcut. Come on, it’s drafty out here.”
    With extreme reluctance, expecting at any moment the outraged scream of authority, Lobsang trailed after the sweeper.
    And he was just a sweeper! One of the people who swept the floors and washed the clothes and cleaned the privies! No one had ever mentioned it! Novices heard about Lu-Tze from their very first day—how he’d gone into some of the most tangled knots of time and unraveled them, how he’d constantly dodged the traffic on the crossroads of history, how he could divert time with a word and used this to develop the most subtle arts of battle…
    …and here was a little skinny man who was sort of generically ethnic, so that he looked as though he could have come from anywhere, in a robe than had once been white before it fell to all those stains and patches, and the sandals repaired with string. And the friendly grin, as if he was constantly waiting for something amusing to happen. And no belt at all , just another piece of string to hold his robe closed. Even some novices got to the level of gray dong in their first year!
    The dojo was busy with senior monks at practice. Lobsang had to dodge aside as a