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Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn’t bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces.
Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that. It’s happening already.
The energy streaming up from their paracosmic peaks may, in chapters to come, illuminate many mysteries: why tortoises hate philosophy, why too much religion is bad for goats, and what it is that handmaidens actually do.
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?”
And the sun toiled across the sky. Many people have wondered why. Some people think a giant dung beetle pushes it. As explanations go it lacks a certain technical edge, and has the added drawback that, as certain circumstances may reveal, it is possibly correct.
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.
It was high summer in Ankh-Morpork. In fact it was more than high. It was stinking.
Morpork was not a good address. Morpork was twinned with a tar pit. 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.
They said he’d even killed the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Not the present one, that is. One of the dead ones.
In order to establish continuity with later events, this may be the time to point out that the greatest mathematician in the history of the Discworld was lying down and peacefully eating his supper. It is interesting to note that, owing to this mathematician’s particular species, what he was eating for his supper was his lunch.
Anyone inhumed by a graduate of the Guild school could go to his rest satisfied that he had been annulled by someone of taste and discretion.
Oh, Djelibeybi*
The only curse they could afford to put on a tomb these days was “Bugger Off.”
Djelibeybi really was a small, self-centered kingdom. Even its plagues were half-hearted. 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.*
It is a well-known fact that when one is about to die the senses immediately become excruciatingly sharp and it has always been believed that this is to enable their owner to detect any possible exit from his predicament other than the obvious one.
The phenomenon is a classical example of displacement activity. The senses are desperately concentrating on anything apart from the immediate problem—which in Teppic’s case consisted of a broad expanse of cobblestones some eighty feet away and closing—in the hope that it will go away. The trouble is that it soon will.
The Assassins didn’t have a very strenuous entrance examination; the school was easy to get into, easy to get out of (the trick was to get out upright).
Teppic hadn’t been educated. Education had just settled on him, like dandruff.
His parents, being high born, naturally tolerated conditions for their children which would have been rejected out of hand by destitute sandflies.
The goat, in the confusion, had chewed through its rope and trotted out of the door, vowing to give up religion in future.
On Thursday a small war broke out between those who worshipped the Mother Goddess in her aspect of the Moon and those who worshipped her in her aspect of a huge fat woman with enormous buttocks. After that the masters intervened and explained that religion, while a fine thing, could be taken too far.
He thought for a while. He had slip-on priests in his pouch. They were devilish things to prowl around a room in, but he shuffled into them anyway. (Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke.)
“Hallo,” he said. “You’d be—” DEATH, said Death. The king looked surprised. “I understood that Death came as a three-headed giant scarab beetle,” he said. Death shrugged. WELL. NOW YOU KNOW.
And then he’d decided that, since no one ever really expected to die anyway, he might as well please himself and he’d henceforth stuck to the familiar black-cowled robe, which was neat and very familiar and acceptable everywhere, like the best credit cards.
Dios, First Minister and high priest among high priests, wasn’t a naturally religious man. It wasn’t a desirable quality in a high priest, it affected your judgment, made you unsound. Start believing in things and the whole business became a farce.
Teppic realized what it was about the man’s speech that was strange. Dios would bend any sentence to breaking point if it meant avoiding a past tense.
them. But those first pyramids had been built by human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium, who had cut rocks into pieces and then painfully put them back together again in a better shape. They were old.
He knew that a great many mutually-contradictory things were all true.
You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated.
Squiggle, constipated eagle, wiggly line, hippo’s bottom, squiggle’: And in the year of the Cycle of Cephnet the Sun God Teppic had Plumbing Installed and Scorned the Pillows of his Forebears.”
It seemed that people only had respect for the dead when they thought the dead were listening.
Dios bowed. Teppic recognized No. 49, Horrified Disdain.
More time wound onto the spool of eternity and then the silence beyond the cell, which had been the silence caused by absence of sound, very slowly became the silence caused by someone making no noise.
Caltraps didn’t kill anyone, they just slowed them down a bit. One or two of them in the sole of the foot induced extreme slowness and caution in all except the terminally enthusiastic.
Throughout the history of the Disc most high priests have been serious, pious and conscientious men who have done their best to interpret the wishes of the gods, sometimes disembowelling or flaying alive hundreds of people in a day in order to make sure they’re getting it absolutely right.
The king still didn’t seem to be able to get alongside the idea that the last thing the people wanted was a man of the people.
The original builders, who were of course ancients and therefore wise, knew this very well and the whole point of a correctly-built pyramid was to achieve absolute null time in the central chamber so that a dying king, tucked up there, would indeed live forever—or at least, never actually die. The time that should have passed in the chamber was stored in the bulk of the pyramid and allowed to flare off once every twenty-four hours.
Enthusiastic soldiers with no fighting to do soon get bored and start thinking dangerous thoughts, like how much better they could run the country.
It was around about this point that the greatest mathematician in the world, lying in cozy flatulence in his stall below the palace, stopped chewing the cud and realized that something very wrong was happening to numbers. All the numbers.
His eyes fixed on Teppic’s face, and Teppic realized that the high priest was, indeed, truly mad. It was the rare kind of madness caused by being yourself for so long that habits of sanity have etched themselves into the brain.
And then the world went mad. All right, madder.
It’s not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It’s because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.
It’s not generally realized that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involve ballistics.
And this particular camel, the result of millions of years of selective evolution to produce a creature that could count the grains of sand it was walking over, and close its nostrils at will, and survive under the broiling sun for many days without water, was called You Bastard. And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.
It was a magnificent volley. The gob of cud had commendable lift and spin and hit with a sound like, a sound like half a pound of semi-digested grass hitting someone in the face. There was nothing else it could sound like. The silence that followed was by way of being a standing ovation.
“See, Gern, the sun is coming up!” They stood and watched it. Then Gern whimpered, very quietly. Rising up the sky, very slowly, was a great flaming ball. And it was being pushed by a dung beetle bigger than worlds.
“He said he liked my singing, too. Everyone else said it sounded like a flock of vultures who’ve just found a dead donkey.”
I’ll whistle if it’s safe to follow me.” “What will you do if it isn’t safe?” “Scream.”
“The tortoise did beat the hare,” said Xeno sulkily. “The hare was dead, Xeno,” said the tall man patiently. “Because you shot it.”
And the people of the Old Kingdom were learning that, for example, Vut the Dog-Headed God of the Evening looks a lot better painted on a pot than he does when all seventy feet of him, growling and stinking, is lurching down the street outside.
