I would love to learn how to time slice. Can anyone help me with that.
Summary
Susan talks to Madam Frout and messes about with things just enough to get herself a few days off and put the suggestion of a raise into Frout’s head. She takes care of things in her classroom and prepares to leave. Lobsang spends his days sweeping, but eventually confronts Lu-Tze about whether or not he’s going to learn anything. Lu-Tze notes that Lobsang is truly advanced because he instinctually know how to slice time (that’s how he’s such an adept thief). Lobsang makes the mistake of bringing up the master vs. apprentice dojo fight, and Lu-Tze decides that they will go do that right now, since Lobsang clearly wants to know if he’s surpassed anything Lu-Tze could teach him. Lobsang is mortified, but they get into the dojo and Lu-Tze asks Lobsang to strike him down before there’s an alarm raised and everyone is told to head to the mandala hall. As they’re walking down the Clock Path (the clock is the garden along the path, a natural clock), Lobsang is distracted by a vision of a glass realm far from here with a clock; it makes him cry, though he’s uncertain why. Lu-Tze is then distracted by the sensation of a Procrastinator going overspeed, leading to time leaks that affect the Clock Path.
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Witch King
Time is going haywire, so Lu-Tze takes Lobsang down to the Procrastinator Hall (even though novices aren’t allowed), otherwise they’ll die. When they arrive the Procrastinators are indeed going wild, and the monk in charge, Shoblang, has died. Lu-Tze takes charge, giving instruction for what to do during the surge cascade. Lobsang understands the Procrastinators immediately once they’ve been explained, so Lu-Tze gives him control of the board and he immediately gets the whole system back under control—only he’s got forty years to account for achieving absolute balance. Lu-Tze tells him that he can just dump that forty years out into the ocean, a common occurrence, but Lobsang figures out where the forty years can go and manages to balance the thing perfectly. Death comes to collect Shoblang, who has technically died before his time. Shoblang tries to draw Death’s attention to Lobsang’s incredible feat of balancing the board, but Death can’t see him. Lu-Tze knows a new glass clock is being built, and slightly tricks the abbot into sending them to Ankh-Morpork (he pretends he wants to go to Uberwald where he insists the new clock is being built, and instead gets them sent elsewhere for Lobsang’s education).
Lu-Tze takes Lobsang to meet Qu, who makes a lot of gear for the monks, but all the sweeper wants is the portable Procrastinators he’s been working on. They set out toward Ankh-Morpork, slicing time as they go. Igor is worried about Lady LeJean, but Jeremy won’t hear anything about it, and shows her the clock’s construction, which is continuing at speed. He asks her if she would be interested in dining with him tonight, and she flickers through several expressions before appearing to get embarrassed and hurrying away. Igor follows her, noting that her feet don’t touch the ground at points, and she heads down an alley where she eventually vanishes. Lu-Tze tells Lobsang about the glass clock and how it broke time when it was last created, how he nearly stopped it from happening, but was just a moment too late. He also tells the novice that there’s a secrete scroll of Wen who described Time as a living being, a woman in fact. The secret scroll is a love poem. Lady LeJean checks in with the Auditors—she is, herself, an Auditor piloting a human body they have created, and is having strange reactions to having a human body. She wants to complete their project of stopping time to create an ordered universe. Or least… she thinks she does.
Lu-Tze and Lobsang come across a yeti that’s been trapped by hunters and Lu-Tze notes that it is a protected species and he has no intention of letting them kill it. He wonders aloud if they know what happens when a bunch of armed men attack an old monk with no weapons. Lobsang slices time to dispatch the entire group, dismayed that his master let him do all the work. He tells his apprentice to grab a sword and asks the yeti to give them a lift to the next spot on their journey so they can sleep. Igor is having Lady LeJean followed and learns that she’s experiencing a great deal of art, though never eating food. He finds that his grandfather’s hands (which are currently his own) now shake when he gets close to the clock. Susan is at the library of the Guild of Historians, reading up to see what the History Monks did to time when the last glass clock was built. The Death of Rats arrives and so does Binky. Susan mounts the horse and leaves. Lu-Tze has told Lobsang that when they finish their journey, he’s to cut off the yeti’s head. Lobsang won’t do it, despite the fact that the yeti insists that he doesn’t mind it, so Lu-Tze takes the sword and beheads the yeti himself.
Commentary
It’s a bit squiffy when you get to areas like this in these books. I’m all for a good parody or pun, but when you make so many jokes around another cultures’ arts and language, it has a tendency to come off more like laughing at than laughing with. Particularly where the martial arts are concerned—while I love the idea of slicing time being the reason for the monks appearing to fight so quickly, it has a bit of an “ancient aliens” feel to things, the idea that we can’t explain the accomplishments of people of color without insisting upon the intervention of alien life or magic. And what’s more, it can prevent you from really digging into the discipline, skill, and athletic prowess that make up martial arts like this.
And while I like the relationship building between Lu-Tze and Lobsang, a little too much of the humor in these section relies on that, rather than enjoyable parodies of kung-fu or wuxia films. It’s a problem that crops up frequently in western takes on eastern narratives, which is such a shame to my mind. It’s not as though it can’t be done (see Avatar: The Last Airbender as pretty much the gold standard on that).
What I wind up more hung up on in this section is the story of Time and Wen, and Susan’s musings in the library. With the former it’s for no reason other than being a complete sucker for “relative godlike figure falls in love with small mortal human” stories. The whole “Time waited for no man, they said. Perhaps she’d waited for one, once,” is… ugh, look, it’s rude, is what it is. Did I mention that the end of Picard season two destroyed me? It did, okay. There’s a little of this same style story happening with Lady LeJean, so that’s fun to watch playing out.
With Susan’s thoughts in the library, I’m pulled in several directions, starting with her noting: Humans have the miraculous power to make things boring and/or normal. Susan thinks that boredom well over intelligence pushed humanity upward in the evolutionary sense—boredom is what makes us try wild things, resulting in propelling us forward. Which makes me wonder whether you could argue that curiosity is ultimately byproduct of boredom? Because… I feel like you could, at a base level. (It reminds me a lot of that hilarious set of Tumblr posts talking about how humans are so important to the Federation because humanity regularly tries wild things that no other species would ever attempt just to see if it can be done.)
And then there’s normality, by which Susan means the ability to look on something relatively new and decide it fits and is the way things have always been. Which is certainly great from the adaptability side of things, but frankly awful when you account for our short species memory. Just for a simple ground floor example: cars. We have reordered nearly the entire world around the requirement of having access to a motor vehicle. They didn’t exist just over a hundred years ago. They are normal now when there’s literally nothing normal about their existence at all. When you think about things like that, we’re a baffling species.
Another thought occurs: Susan’s parents taught her “facts were more important than fancy” as a way of keeping her grounded and normal, and this actually brought her closer to Death by accident. Because all it really did was enable Susan to see the bigger lies and fancies that power our lives with utter clarity. It made her more her grandfather’s granddaughter than either or them could have ever perceived because they erroneously believed that Death existed in a place of fancy, and completely missed out on the fantasy of their own very real lives. It’s interesting to me that Susan blames Death for her unique perspective more than her parents, because they are the ones entirely responsible for the disconnect she feels in this.
But I suppose that’s a thought to harp on more as we go.
Asides and little thoughts:
- I have to admit, the abbot joke is not working for me. The vacillation between baby talk and adult speak kinda falls flat and reads overwrought.
- Strange thought: Lady LeJean talks about how humans need personal pronouns because it divides the world into two parts: “The darkness behind the eyes, where the little voice is, and everything else.” Obviously this is a way of separating individual consciousness from the rest of existence, but it’s also about the constant internal monologue, and the funny thing is, not every person has that. There are some people who don’t have an internal monologue running, and I find myself wondering if Pratchett ever found out about that, and what he thought of it.
- I wonder if the bit where Susan notes that Omnian history is a mess and seems to pack two centuries into one is a reference to the fact that it really doesn’t make sense that Small Gods took place a century ago? Maybe? Because it still bugs the heck out of me.
Pratchettisms:
The noise in here was shattering. Something mechanical was in agony.
Now the cold crept in, slowly, like a sadist’s knife.
She gave Igor the willies, and he was a man not usually subject to even the smallest willy.
They were learning fast, or at least collecting data, which they considered to be the same as learning.
“Yes, but I’ve had a lifetime of experience and cynicism!” Lu-Tze scooped the sand back into its bag. “You’re just gifted. Come on.”
A blur in the air hit the intellectual on the back of the neck.
The yeti was clapping. It had to be a slow handclap because of the creature’s long arms. But when the hands met, they’d come a long way and were glad to see one another.
Igor looked at his hand-me-down hands. They were beginning to worry him.
The historians paid him no attention. Horses did not walk into libraries.
Next week we’ll read up to:
“And what are all you… organs looking at?” she added. “Get on with it!”
