Thief of Time

was always too hot, too cold, too empty, too full, too tired…
    The key was discipline, she was sure. Auditors were immortal. If she couldn’t tell her body what to do, she didn’t deserve to have one. Bodies were a major human weakness.
    Senses, too. The Auditors had hundreds of senses, since every possible phenomenon had to be witnessed and recorded. She could only find five available now. Five ought to be easy to deal with. But they were wired directly into the rest of the body! They didn’t just submit information, they made demands!
    She’d walked past a stall selling roasted meats and her mouth had started to drool! The sense of smell wanted the body to eat without consulting the brain! But that wasn’t the worst part! The brain itself did its own thinking!
    That was the hardest part. The bag of soggy tissue behind the eyes worked away independently of its owner. It took in information from the senses, and checked them against memory, and presented options. Sometimes the hidden parts of it even fought for control of the mouth! Humans weren’t individuals, they were, each one, a committee!
    Some of the other members of the committee were dark and red and entirely uncivilized. They had joined the brain before civilization; some of them had got aboard even before humanity. And the bit that did the joined-up thinking had to fight, in the darkness of the brain, to get the casting vote!
    After little more than a couple of weeks as a human, the entity that was Lady LeJean was having real trouble.
    Food, for example. Auditors did not eat. They recognized that feeble life forms had to consume one another to obtain energy and body-building material. The process was astonishingly inefficient, however, and her ladyship had tried assembling nutrients directly out of the air. This worked, but the process felt…what was the word? Oh, yes… creepy.
    Besides, part of the brain didn’t believe it was getting fed and insisted that it was hungry. Its incessant nagging interfered with her thought processes and so, despite everything, she’d had to face up to the whole, well, the whole orifices business.
    The Auditors had known about these for a long time. The human body appeared to have up to eight of them. One didn’t seem to work and the rest appeared to be multifunctional, although surprisingly there seemed to be only one thing that could be done by the ears.
    So yesterday she’d tried a piece of dry toast.
    It had been the single worst experience of her existence.
    It had been the single most intense experience of her existence.
    It had been something else, too. As far as she could understand the language, it had been enjoyable.
    It seemed that the human sense of taste was quite different to the sense employed by an Auditor. That was precise, measured, analytical. But the human sense of taste was like being hit in the mouth by the whole world. It had been half an hour of watching fireworks in her head before she remembered to swallow.
    How did humans survive this?
    She’d been fascinated by the art galleries. It was clear that some humans could present reality in a way that made it even more real, that spoke to the viewer, that seared the mind…but what could possibly transcend the knowledge that the genius of an artist had to poke alien substances into his face? Could it be that humans had got used to it? And that was only the start…
    The sooner the clock was finished, the better. A species as crazy as this couldn’t be allowed to survive. She was visiting the clockmaker and his ugly assistant every day now, giving them as much help as she dared, but they always seemed one vital step away from completion—
    Amazing! She could even lie to herself ! Because another voice in her head, which was part of the dark committee, said: You’re not helping, are you, you’re stealing parts and twisting parts…and you go back every day because of the way he looks at you, don’t you…
    Parts of the internal committee that were so old they didn’t have voices, only direct control of the body, tried to interfere at this point. And she tried to put them out of her mind.
    And now she had to face the other Auditors. They would be punctual.
    She pulled herself together. Water had taken to running out of her eyes lately for no reason at all. She did the best she could with her hair, and made her way to the large drawing room.
    Grayness was already filling the air. In this space, there was no room for too many Auditors, but