Pyramids (Discworld, #7)

by Terry Pratchett

It will certainly show what our ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today. People have often speculated about this. Would they approve of modern society, they ask, would they marvel at present-day achievements? And of course this misses a fundamental point. What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: “Why is it so dark in here?”

All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed.

There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification.

He was less certain than his sister about the unpleasantness of assassination; he’d been reluctantly in politics for a long time, and felt that while assassination was probably worse than debate it was certainly better than war,

A qualified assassin should be at home in any company, and able to play at least one musical instrument.

The only pyramids he felt comfortable about were the very small ones at the bottom of the garden, built every time one of the cats died.

“It’s quite all right, father,” he said. “Dios the high priest explained to me about taking regular baths, and not going blind.” His father blinked at him. “You’re not going blind?” he said. “Apparently not, father.”

All self-respecting river kingdoms have vast supernatural plagues, but the best the Old Kingdom had been able to achieve in the last hundred years was the Plague of Frog.*

His mother, as far as he could remember, had been a pleasant woman and as self-centered as a gyroscope. She’d liked cats. She didn’t just venerate them—everyone in the kingdom did that—but she actually liked them, too. Teppic knew that it was traditional in river kingdoms to approve of cats, but he suspected that usually the animals in question were graceful, stately creatures; his mother’s cats were small, spitting, flat-headed, yellow-eyed maniacs.

“What’s your name, kiddo?” Teppic drew himself up. He was getting fed up with this treatment. “Kiddo? I’ll have you know the blood of pharaohs runs in my veins!” The other boy looked at him unabashed, with his head on one side and a faint smile on his face. “Would you like it to stay there?” he said.

“Oh, just some new kid,” he said. “Arthur someone. Still hanging onto his mummy, I see. He won’t last long.” “Oh, I don’t know,” said Teppic. “We do, too, and we’ve lasted for thousands of years.”

(Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your

soles.

I’m sure sacred cats don’t leave dead ibises under the bed. And I’m certain that sacred cats that live surrounded by endless sand don’t come indoors and do it in the king’s sandals, Dios.”

If it’s true that there are billions of universes stacked alongside one another, the thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere. But wherever they are, no matter how mightily they try, no matter how magnificent the effort, they surely can’t manage to be as god-awfully stupid as us. I mean, we work at it. We were given a spark of it to start with, but over hundreds of thousands of years we’ve really improved on it.

You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated.

No one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it’s like having the auditors in unexpectedly.

It is astonishingly difficult to walk with legs full of straw when the brain doing the directing is in a pot ten feet away,

It must be brains, he thought manically, because semolina doesn’t squidge like that. I’ve collected my own thoughts, haha.

Its designer had a gilt complex, and had tried every trick with gold paint,

Ptraci didn’t just derail the train of thought, she ripped up the rails, burned the stations and melted the bridges for scrap.

Whereas Krona had, sitting on straw bales at the back of the stables, a couple of large men who were just beginning to take an interest in the proceedings. They looked like Alfonz’s older brothers. Every vehicle depot of any description anywhere in the multiverse has them. They’re never exactly grooms or mechanics or customers or staff. Their function is always unclear. They chew straws or smoke cigarettes in a surreptitious fashion. If there are such things as newspapers around, they read them, or at least look at the pictures.

Battle elephants were the fashion lately. They weren’t much good for anything except trampling on their own troops when they inevitably panicked, so the military minds on both sides had responded by breeding bigger elephants. Elephants were impressive.

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.

But the multiverse is full of little dimensionettes, playstreets of creation where creatures of the imagination can romp without being knocked down by serious actuality. Sometimes, as they drift through the holes in reality, they impinge back on this universe, when they give rise to myths, legends and charges of being Drunk and Disorderly.

a flame that might have turned any watchers not just into a pillar of salt but into a complete condiment set of their choice.