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An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.
“You don’t understand at all,” said the wizard wearily. “I’m so scared of you my spine has turned to jelly, it’s just that I’m suffering from an overdose of terror right now. I mean, when I’ve got over that then I’ll have time to be decently frightened of you.”
Being Ymor’s right-hand man was like being gently flogged to death with scented bootlaces.
Rincewind thought that a meeting with most of the Drum’s clientele would mean that Twoflower never went home again, unless he lived downriver and happened to float past.
Rincewind often suspected that there was something, somewhere, that was better than magic. He was usually disappointed.
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant “idiot.”
It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going around to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.
Rincewind relaxed slightly, which was to say that he still made a violin string look like a bowl of jelly.
Magic never dies. It merely fades away.
She still comes to see her old dad, my little girl. She was the only one with the strength of character to murder me. A chip off the old block.
It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.
“Don’t you understand?” snarled Rincewind. “We are going over the Edge, godsdammit!” “Can’t we do anything about it?” “No!” “Then I can’t see the sense in panicking,” said Twoflower calmly.
He wondered what kind of life it would be, having to keep swimming all the time to stay exactly in the same place. Pretty similar to his own, he decided.
Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.
We can’t help the way the Creator made us, that’s my view.
“Sometimes I think a man could wander across the Disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,” said Twoflower. “And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,” he paused, then added, “well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.”
“We know all about you, Rincewind the magician. You are a man of great cunning and artifice. You laugh in the face of Death. Your affected air of craven cowardice does not fool me.”
He was thinking: I’ve seen excitement, and I’ve seen boredom. And boredom was best.
“But what do you want to sacrifice us for?” asked Twoflower. “You hardly know us!” “That’s rather the point, isn’t it? It’s not very good manners to sacrifice a friend.
Rincewind tried not to think of World Turtles mating. It wasn’t completely easy.
The Launchcontroller swallowed. All this was very unfair on him, he was a practical magician rather than a diplomat, and that was why some wiser brains had seen to it that he would be the one to pass on the news.
