Sourcery (Discworld, #5)

by Terry Pratchett

Banished! Me! For showing that I was human! And what would humans be without love?’ RARE, said Death. NEVERTHELESS—

Tap, tap, tap went Ipslore’s fingers on the metal of the staff. ‘Then they shall have their chance,’ he said, ‘when hell freezes over.’ NO. I AM NOT ALLOWED TO ENLIGHTEN YOU, EVEN BY DEFAULT, ABOUT CURRENT TEMPERATURES IN THE NEXT WORLD.

‘I meant,’ said Ipslore, bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that makes living worth while?’ Death thought about it. CATS, he said eventually, CATS ARE NICE. ‘Curse you!’ MANY HAVE, said Death, evenly.

Strangely enough, he wasn’t particularly angry. Anger is an emotion, and for emotion you need glands, and Death didn’t have much truck with glands and needed a good run at it to get angry. But he was mildly annoyed. He sighed again. People were always trying this sort of thing. On the other hand, it was quite interesting to watch, and at least this was a bit more original than the usual symbolic chess game, which Death always dreaded because he could never remember how the knight was supposed to move.

In some parts of the city curiosity didn’t just kill the cat, it threw it in the river with lead weights tied to its feet.

Terry Pratchett's golden humor.

Spelter was thinking, eight sons, that means he did it eight times. At least. Gosh.

He didn’t administer a reign of terror, just the occasional light shower.

Puntastic

Ankh-Morpork, a city once described as resembling an overturned termite heap without the charm.

Terry Pratchett galore!

you couldn’t expect a wizard to understand anything as basic as elementary civic espionage.

He stared around at the assembled wizards, but there was something about them that choked the words of outrage in his throat. They looked like sheep who had suddenly found a trapped wolf at exactly the same time as they heard about the idea of unity being strength.

‘Watch closely, pie-selling person,’ said the wizards. He stretched out his hand, made a strange gesture with his fingers, and produced a pie out of the air. It was fat, golden-brown and beautifully glazed. Just by looking at it Ardrothy knew it was packed edge to edge with prime lean pork, with none of those spacious areas of good fresh air under the lid that represented his own profit margin. It was the kind of pie piglets hope to be when they grew up.

‘My father always said that it was pointless to undertake a direct attack against an enemy extensively armed with efficient projectile weapons,’ she said. Rincewind, who knew Cohen’s normal method of speech, gave her a look of disbelief. ‘Well, what he actually said,’ she added, ‘was never enter an arse-kicking contest with a porcupine.’

The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist’s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the lift, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.16

Elevating DNA

By a strange coincidence, a philosopher who had been devoting some sleepless nights to the same mystery woke up that morning with a wonderful new idea for getting peanuts out of bird tables. Which brings us rather neatly on to the subject of magic.

Rincewind looked sideways at the hat. It said nothing. He looked back at the vizier. If the laughter had been weird, the smile made it sound as normal as birdsong. It looked as though the vizier had learned it from diagrams.

‘Talent just defines what you do,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t define what you are. Deep down, I mean. When you know what you are, you can do anything.’

So deep

For example, a popular spell at the time was Pelepel’s Temporal Compressor, which on one occasion resulted in a race of giant reptiles being created, evolving, spreading, flourishing and then being destroyed in the space of about five minutes, leaving only its bones in the earth to mislead forthcoming generations completely.

In the bath-tub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find...

Wizards always used to build a tower around themselves, like those . . . what do you call those things you find at the bottom of rivers?’ ‘Frogs.’ ‘Stones.’ ‘Unsuccessful gangsters.’ ‘Caddis flies is what I meant,’ said Rincewind.

They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.

Do it right and you were the power, it was part of you and you were capable of— Has it been pointed out that his feet were several inches off the ground? His feet were several inches off the ground.

He explained – although ‘explained’ is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length – that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it, because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete.

Behind them the carpet rose slowly over the side of the tower, with Rincewind trying hard to keep his balance. His eyes were wide with the sort of terror that comes naturally to anyone standing on a few threads and several hundred feet of empty air.

‘Is it heroic to die like this?’ said Conina. ‘I think it is,’ he said, ‘and when it comes to dying, there’s only one opinion that matters.’ ‘Oh.’