Thief of Time

The noise here was shattering. Something mechanical was in agony.
    There was a “crump” and, a few moments after, a babble of voices.
    Several dozen monks, wearing thick cork hats as well as their traditional robes, came running around the corner. Most of them were yelling. A few of the brighter ones were saving their breath in order to cover the ground more quickly. Lu-Tze grabbed one of them, who tried to struggle free.
    “Let me go!”
    “What’s happening?”
    “Just get out of here before they all go!”
    The monk shook himself free and sped after the rest of them.
    Lu-Tze bent down, picked up a fallen cork helmet, and solemnly handed it to Lobsang.
    “Health and safety at work,” he said. “Very important.”
    “Will it protect me?” said Lobsang, putting it on.
    “Not really. But when they find your head, it may be recognizable. When we get into the hall, don’t touch anything .”
    Lobsang had been expecting some vaulted, magnificent structure. People talked about the Procrastinator Hall as if it was some kind of huge cathedral. But what there was, at the end of the passage, was a haze of blue smoke. It was only when his eyes got accustomed to the swirling gloom that he saw the nearest cylinder.
    It was a squat pillar of rock, about three yards across and six yards high. It was spinning so fast that it was a blur. Around it the air flickered with slivers of silver-blue light.
    “See? They’re dumping! Over here! Quick!”
    He ran after Lu-Tze, and saw there were hundreds, no, thousands of the cylinders, some of them reaching all the way to the cavern roof…
    There were still monks in here. Some of them were running to and from the wells with buckets of water, which flashed into steam when they threw it over the smoking stone bearings at the base of the cylinders.
    “Idiots,” the sweeper muttered. He cupped his hands and shouted, “Where-is-the-overseer?”
    Lobsang pointed down, to the edge of a wooden podium built onto the wall of the hall.
    There was a rotting cork hat there, and a pair of ancient sandals. In between was a pile of gray dust.
    “Poor fellow,” said Lu-Tze. “A full fifty thousand years in one jolt, I’d say.” He glared at the scurrying monks again. “Will you lot stop and come here! I ain’t going to ask you twice!”
    Several of them swept the sweat out of their eyes and trotted toward the podium, relieved to hear any kind of order, while behind them the Procrastinators screamed.
    “Right!” said Lu-Tze, as they were joined by more and more. “Now listen to me! This is just a surge cascade! You’ve all heard of them! We can deal with it! We just have to cross-link futures and pasts, fastest ones first—”
    “Poor Mr. Shoblang already tried that,” said a monk. He nodded at the sad pile.
    “Then I want two teams…” Lu-Tze stopped. “No, we haven’t got time! We’ll do it by the soles of our feet, like we used to do! One man to a spinner, just smack the bars when I say! Ready to go when I call the numbers!”
    Lu-Tze climbed onto the podium and ran his eye over a board covered with wooden bobbins. A red or blue nimbus hovered over each one.
    “What a mess,” he said. “What a mess .”
    “What do they mean ?” said Lobsang.
    Lu-Tze hands hovered over the bobbins.
    “Okay. The red-tinted ones are winding time out, speeding it up,” he said. “The blue-tinted ones, they’re winding time in, slowing it down. Brightness of the color, that’s how fast they’re doing it. Except that now they’re all freewheeling because the surge cut them loose, understand?”
    “Loose from what?”
    “From the load. From the world . See up there?” He waved a hand toward two long racks that ran all the way along the cavern wall. Each one held a row of swiveling shutters, one line blue, one line dark red.
    “The more shutters showing a color, the more time winding or unwinding?”
    “Good lad! Got to keep it balanced! And the way we get through this is, we couple the spinners up in twos, so that they wind and unwind one another. Cancel themselves out. Poor old Shoblang was trying to put them back into service, I reckon. Can’t be done, not during a cascade. You’ve got to let it all fall over, and then pick up the pieces when it’s nice and quiet.” He glanced at the bobbins, and then at the crowd of monks. “Right. You…one hundred to seventeen, and then forty-five to eighty-nine. Off you go. And you …five hundred and ninety-six to, let’s