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The doctor sat back. “Fairly straightforward,” he said, thinking quickly. “A case of mortis portalis tackulatum with complications.” “What’s that mean?” said Chidder. “In layman’s terms,” the doctor sniffed, “he’s as dead as a doornail.” “What are the complications?” The doctor looked shifty. “He’s still breathing,” he said. “Look, his pulse is nearly humming and he’s got a temperature you could fry eggs on.” He hesitated, aware that this was probably too straightforward and easily understood; medicine was a new art on the Disc, and wasn’t going to get anywhere if people could understand it.
Look after the dead, said the priests, and the dead would look after you. After all, they were in the majority.
“But that’s ridiculous,” Ptaclusp protested weakly. “They’re not different people, they’re just doing it to themselves.” “That’s never stopped anyone, father,” said IIa. “How many men have stopped drinking themselves stupid at the age of twenty to save a stranger dying of liver failure at forty?”
“Don’t worry. It all evens out in the end,” said one of the IIas. “Everyone gets what’s coming to them.” “Yes. That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Ptaclusp.
It’s magic, or geometry, or one of those things.
There was always someone back home who wanted to be certain that deposed monarchs stayed that way. It was usually a case of heir today, gone tomorrow.
What a chap needed at a time like this was a sign, some sort of book of instructions. The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real.
It is now known to science that there are many more dimensions than the classical four. Scientists say that these don’t normally impinge on the world because the extra dimensions are very small and curve in on themselves, and that since reality is fractal most of it is tucked inside itself. This means either that the universe is more full of wonders than we can hope to understand or, more probably, that scientists make things up as they go along.
The Sphinx is an unreal creature. It exists solely because it has been imagined. It is well known that in an infinite universe everything that can be imagined must exist somewhere, and since many of them are not things that ought to exist in a well-ordered space-time frame they get shoved into a side dimension. This may go some way to explaining the Sphinx’s chronic bad temper, although any creature created with the body of a lion, bosom of a woman and wings of an eagle has a serious identity crisis and doesn’t need much to make it angry.
He reached instinctively for his wax tablet, and then stopped himself. Man was never intended to understand things he meddled with.
Everything that was magical was just a way of describing the world in words it couldn’t ignore.
