Stephen had rather wanted to talk with Henry Winter at length, if for no other reason than to cement his hopeful deduction that Henry's recent wedding had well and truly laid to rest the remnants of old animosity concerning the woman who was now Mrs. Winter. Unfortunately, there had simply been no time for conversation. Stephen had brought little
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At the moment he was incapable of such concern. He was eminently distractible, and Susan's hand on his wrist made him blink and start. "What? Oh. --"
She wore gloves, and the fabric of his coat and his sweater added to the protective barrier between his skin and hers, so that there was none of the electric surge he'd felt on Halloween, that pulse of blood palpable beneath the skin. This he did note, and thought maybe he should tell her it might help her to wear gloves all the time, to shield herself from the world --
then a different electricity, frozen time and frozen snow, a zap as she touched a suspended snowflake, and he realized belatedly what it was she'd done. He'd seen her suspend time before, of course, only he had been too distracted to realize it until now --
"You cannot touch it without destroying it, then?" A pity; he would have liked to regard its structure. He peered through the gloom to find a snowflake, and careful not to touch it, contorted a little to see it better.
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She herself had never felt the urge to stare at them so much as to poke them. Stopping Time wasn't something she'd learned to do herself until she was nearly grown up, but of course her grandfather could do it, and she had a few memories of being very small, racing through a frozen snowstorm and exploding the flakes by the hundred. Of course Stephen would want to study at it, but Susan, uncharacteristically forgetful of adult dignity, left him to do so in peace. Depositing rucksack and notebook on the unyielding grass, she pulled off a glove and, wholly unselfconscious, ran out over the lawn and swatted at the hovering snowflakes. A succession of blue flashes surrounded her hand, and she laughed--this was far from the first time she'd done this, though nobody else had ever seen her do it before. Even the best-regulated mind needed a chance to be a complete and utter dork child, sometimes.
"When you've done with that one, try this," she called. "I can't even describe it...it's a silly little thing, but I've always loved doing it."
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"They are like fireflies," he said, "only blue, and frozen ..."
He found he disliked the idea of breaking the snowflakes himself. It seemed somehow careless, wrong in its carelessness; these things were so beautiful, and to destroy them would surely be a waste. For Susan it was different. She was Death; it was her job.
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She made her slow way back to him, still poking snowflakes at random. "I don't wonder why he wanted to share it, either," she said. "Oh, look there--I think it's an owl."
She pointed to a shape that had started to swoop down from a distant tree--a blob, nailed in place, that upon closer inspection did indeed prove to be an owl.
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Stephen sprang up and ran through the snow to where he thought he saw the owl.
Cue his standing beneath that spot, peering upward, soundless, for a very long time.
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"Let me know if you need me to move the light," she said, adjusting her cloak and sitting cross-legged on the snow, the Thermos next to her feet. "What is it, exactly? Aside from an owl, I mean." She was still laughing--a laugh more delighted than anything else, without a trace of anything like mockery.
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"No, I can't say that I am," she said, sipping more tea. "Though I'm starting to think it's a good thing you haven't got this particular power, or you might spend so much time watching birds and bugs and beasts that you'd forget to eat or sleep."
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If he had such powers, he would be entirely too wrapped up in observation of flora and fauna to register such a thing as loneliness.
"Imagine, too, the potential for surgery," his thoughts raced on aloud. "Would the blood stop entirely, circulation cease, with all of time frozen, so that the surgeon might work with view unoccluded by the usual welling of blood in wounds or in the surgical incision itself? Does it cause harm to the fabric of the universe that you exercise this stopping of time, so that you would not wish to make use of it routinely? Were I to dissect this owl, and then stitch it up again, would it be whole at the end? No, the damage would still be done, as with those snowflakes ... Hm."
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"Yes, that sort of thing only really works if you're truly immortal," she said. "Otherwise it's a sort of uneasy mish-mash of effects. Then again, the History Monks make their living manipulating Time--or they did, at least. But the Discworld is in some ways so very much different from Earth."
She put the lid back on the Thermos, standing and circling the owl with her lighted wand. "Do you want me to let him move at all?" she asked.
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"The Discworld does indeed sound to be extremely different from Earth. Perhaps part of your difficulty consists in this difference."
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She sat again, glancing up at the frozen owl, and held out the Thermos in a silent offer. "I didn't tell you--I met an applicant in the Sorting Room who said he'd map out my genes for me. Apparently he comes from a thousand years in the future, and has equipment that can actually do that. I've no idea what he might find, but at least he'll find something."
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"He works with people from all sorts of different planets, so he may well be able to," she said. "I gather the world is a very different place in a thousand years' time." It would probably be as different to the average Earth person of today as the present Earth seemed to her, when compared with the Discworld. Gods only knew what she herself would have made of it, had she seen it.
Her hand met Stephen's as she passed him the Thermos, and even though they were both wearing gloves it sent a jolt up her arm. Her mouth quirked in a half rueful smile, and when he'd taken it she dug through her pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes. That might well prove annoying, if it didn't go away.
"From what I gather, he's quite used to dealing with non-humans, too. He's not really human himself, come to that, and though he's quite young he's almost unfortunately intelligent." She still hadn't quite grasped the whole twelf-level-intellect-vs.-sixth-level, but she understood it enough to realize that being around average people probably drove him to distraction much of the time.
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