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Supposing you’d watched the slow accretion of snow over thousands of years as it was compressed and pushed over the deep rock until the glacier calved its icebergs into the sea, and you watched an iceberg drift out through the chilly waters, and you got to know its cargo of happy polar bears and seals as they looked forward to a brave new life in the other hemisphere where they say the ice floes are lined with crunchy penguins, and then wham! Tragedy loomed in the shape of thousands of tons of unaccountably floating iron and an exciting soundtrack . . .
Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.
‘And . . . Nipsie the Impaler?’ ‘Er, would you believe he ran a kebab thop, thur?’ ‘Did he?’ ‘Not conventhionally tho, thur.’
Madam Frout wasn’t very good at discipline, which was possibly why she’d invented the Method, which didn’t require any. She generally relied on talking to people in a jolly tone of voice until they gave in out of sheer embarrassment on her behalf.
She transferred Jason to Miss Susan’s class. It had been a cruel thing to do, but Madam Frout considered that there was now some kind of undeclared war going on. If children were weapons, Jason would have been banned by international treaty. Jason had doting parents and an attention span of minus several seconds, except when it came to inventive cruelty to small furry animals, when he could be quite patient. Jason kicked, punched, bit and spat. His artwork had even frightened the life out of Miss Smith, who could generally find something nice to say about any child. He was definitely a boy
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Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.
Honestly, thought Susan, once you learn the arts of defending the Stationery Cupboard, outwitting Jason and keeping the class pet alive until the end of term, you’ve mastered at least half of teaching.
There were lots of places like the warehouse. There always are, in every old city, no matter how valuable the building land is. Sometimes, space just gets lost. A workshop is built, and then another beside it. Factories and storerooms and sheds and temporary lean-tos crawl towards one another, meet and merge. Spaces between outside walls are roofed with tar paper. Odd-shaped bits of ground are colonized by nailing up a bit of wall and cutting a doorway. Old doorways are masked by piles of lumber or new tool racks. The old men who know what was where move on and die, just like the flies who
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‘Yes. I know. But it is essential for humans to use the personal pronoun. It divides the universe into two parts. The darkness behind the eyes, where the little voice is, and everything else. It is . . . a horrible feeling. It is like being . . . questioned, all the time.’
Building a human being was easy; the Auditors knew exactly how to move matter around. The trouble was that the result didn’t do anything but lie there and, eventually, decompose. This was annoying, since human beings, without any special training or education, seemed to be able to make working replicas quite easily.
They built a woman. It was a logical choice. After all, while men wielded more obvious power than women, they often did so at the expense of personal danger, and no Auditor liked the prospect of personal danger. Beautiful women often achieved great things, on the other hand, merely by smiling at powerful men.
GRIPPER ‘THE BUTCHER’ SMARTZ? The late Gripper rubbed his neck. ‘I demand a retrial!’ he said. THIS MAY NOT BE A GOOD TIME, said Death.
‘Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.’
‘Do you know what happens if you slice time on a magically powered vehicle travelling at more than seventy miles an hour?’ ‘No!’ ‘Me neither! And I don’t want to find out!’
‘They are my accountants,’ she added, some reading on her part having suggested that this might excuse most oddities.
Even the common people of the city had a keen eye for works like Caravati’s Three Large Pink Women and One Piece of Gauze or Mauvaise’s Man with Big Figleaf and, besides, a city with a history the length of Ankh-Morpork’s accumulated all kinds of artistic debris, and in order to prevent congestion in the streets it needed some sort of civic attic in which to store it.
These weren’t the sad old hunting-trophy bears or geriatric tigers whose claws had faced a man armed with nothing more than five crossbows, twenty loaders and a hundred beaters.
Seeing things a human shouldn’t have to see makes us human.
‘You look human, too. Human is a very popular look in these parts. You’d be amazed.’
It makes you wonder if there is anything to astrology after all.’ ‘Oh, there is,’ said Susan. ‘Delusion, wishful thinking and gullibility.’
There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime,’
AH? WELL, MATHS, said Death dismissively. GENERALLY I NEVER GET MUCH FURTHER THAN SUBTRACTION
I know a lot about wiches now they do not have warts they do not eat you they are just like your grane except your grane does not know difult words.
‘If iss is oo, Def o’ Raffs—’ she began. ‘It’s me,’ said Lobsang. Tick Even with nougat, you can have a perfect moment.
