Thief of Time - Rebuild

'It was... a long time ago,' said Lu-Tze. 'Exactly when doesn't matter, 'cos of what happened. In fact asking exactly “when” doesn't make any sense any more. It depends where you are. In some places it was hundreds of years ago. Some other places ... well, maybe it hasn't happened yet. There was this man in Uberwald. Invented a clock. An amazing clock. It measured the tick of the universe. Know what that is?’

'No.'

'Me neither. The abbot's your man for that kind of stuff. Lemme see... okay... think of the smallest amount of time that you can. Really small. So tiny that a second would be like a billion years. Got that? Well, the cosmic quantum tick - that's what the abbot calls it - the cosmic quantum tick is much smaller than that. It's the time it takes to go from now to then. The time it takes an atom to think of wobbling. It's-’

'It's the time it takes for the smallest thing that's possible to happen to happen?' said Lobsang.

'Exactly. Well done,' said Lu-Tze. He took a deep breath. 'It's also the time it takes for the whole universe to be destroyed in the past and rebuilt in the future. Don't look at me like that - that's what the abbot said.'

'Has it been happening while we've been talking?' said Lobsang. 'Millions of times. An oodleplex of times, probably.'

'How many's that?'

'It's one of the abbot's words. It means more numbers than you can imagine in a yonk.'

'What's a yonk?'

'A very long time.'

'And we don't feel it? The universe is destroyed and we don't feel it?'

'They say not. The first time it was explained to me I got a bit jumpy, but it's far too quick for us to notice.' Lobsang stared at the snow for a while. Then he said, 'All right. Go on.'

'Someone in Uberwald built this clock out of glass. Powered by lightning, as I recall. It somehow got down to a level where it could tick with the universe.’

'Why did he want to do that?'

'Listen, he lived in a big old castle on a crag in Uberwald. People like that don't need a reason apart from “because I can”. They have a nightmare and try to make it happen.'

'But, look, you can't make a clock like that, because it's inside the universe, so it'll ... get rebuilt when the universe does, right?' Lu-Tze looked impressed, and said so. 'I'm impressed,' he said. 'It'd be like opening a box with the crowbar that's inside.'

'The abbot believes that part of the clock was outside, though.'

'You can't have something outside the-'

'Tell that to a man who has been working on the problem for nine lifetimes,' said Lu-Tze. 'You want to hear the rest of the story?'

'Yes, Sweeper.’

***

The Thief of Time - p156-158