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Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history . . . ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just . . . well, things happening one after another.
These aren’t books in which the events of the past are pinned like so many butterflies to a cork. These are the books from which history is derived. There are more than twenty thousand of them; each one is ten feet high, bound in lead, and the letters are so small that they have to be read with a magnifying glass. When people say “It is written . . .” it is written here.
Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
Many stories start long before they begin, and Brutha’s story had its origins thousands of years before his birth.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
“Oh, Me!” said the tortoise.
The tortoise bounced up and down furiously. “That wasn’t a curse! That was an order! I am the Great God Om!”
“Fetch him now, or there will be a shaking of the earth, the moon will be as blood, agues and boils will afflict mankind and diverse ills will befall. I really mean it,” it added.
Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, “It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting, do you want to be a plowman like your father?”
She believed like iron believes in metal.
The Omnians were a God-fearing people. They had a great deal to fear.
Not, of course, the six Archpriests or the Cenobiarch himself. They weren’t that important. They were merely at the top. The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done.
Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
“Smite you with thunderbolts!” A small, a very small black cloud appeared over Brutha’s head and a small, a very small bolt of lightning lightly singed an eyebrow.
In the rain-forests of Brutha’s subconscious the butterfly of doubt emerged and flapped an experimental wing, all unaware of what chaos theory has to say about this sort of thing . . .
“How should I know? I don’t know!” lied the tortoise. “But you . . . you’re omnicognisant,” said Brutha. “That doesn’t mean I know everything.” Brutha bit his lip. “Um. Yes. It does.”
He picked it up and examined it carefully, turning it over and over in his hands. Then he looked around the walled garden until he found a spot in full sunshine, and put the reptile down, on its back. After a moment’s thought he took a couple of pebbles from one of the vegetable beds and wedged them under the shell so that the creature’s movement wouldn’t tip it over.
What a bastard
That man who’d turned him over. That expression on that mild face. He’d remember that. That expression, not of cruelty, but of some different level of being. That expression of terrible peace . . .
He walked off slowly, keeping close to the wall to avoid the feet. He had no alternative to walking slowly in any case, but now he was walking slowly because he was thinking. Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.
People have reality-dampers. It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Dhblah,” he said. Everyone in the city knew Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah, purveyor of suspiciously new holy relics, suspiciously old rancid sweetmeats on a stick, gritty figs, and long-past-the-sell-by dates.
“I know you,” he said. “I have faced you many times.” Death gave him a long stare. NO YOU HAVEN’T. “I assure you—” YOU HAVE FACED MEN. IF YOU HAD FACED ME, I ASSURE YOU . . . YOU WOULD HAVE KNOWN.
You couldn’t put off the inevitable. Because sooner or later, you reached the place when the inevitable just went and waited. And this was it.
“Listen,” said the tortoise, “I am what I am. I can’t help it if people think something else.”
“Yes, but humans are more important than animals,” said Brutha. “This is a point of view often expressed by humans,” said Om.
When the Omnian Church found out about Koomi, they displayed him in every town within the Church’s empire to demonstrate the essential flaws in his argument. There were a lot of towns, so they had to cut him up quite small.
The shepherd had a hundred sheep, and it might have been surprising that he was prepared to spend days searching for one sheep; in fact, it was because he was the kind of man prepared to spend days looking for a lost sheep that he had a hundred sheep.
Om sighed. “If I don’t concentrate, I think like a tortoise!” “What? You mean slowly?” “No! Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst.” “Why?” “I don’t know. Because it often happens to them, I suppose.”
The Ephebians had gods in the same way that other cities had rats.
They're in biblical Ephesus
“What’s a philosopher?” said Brutha. “Someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,” said a voice in his head.
He wasn’t doing anything to Brutha. Brutha was doing it to himself. Brutha was beginning to think in godly ways. Brutha was starting to become a prophet. Om wished he had someone to talk to. Someone who understood.
The old man ignored Brutha but, with great difficulty, pulled a cobblestone loose and hefted it in his hand. Then he dived back through the doorway. There was a distant scream of rage. “Ah. Philosophy,” said Om.
“Gods?” said Xeno. “We don’t bother with gods. Huh. Relics of an outmoded belief system, gods.” There was a rumble of thunder from the clear evening sky. “Except for Blind Io the Thunder God,” Xeno went on, his tone hardly changing. Lightning flashed across the sky. “And Cubal the Fire God,” said Xeno. A gust of wind rattled the windows. “Flatulus the God of the Winds, he’s all right too,” said Xeno. An arrow materialized out of the air and hit the table by Xeno’s hand. “Fedecks the Messenger of the Gods, one of the all-time greats,” said Xeno.
No one is worshiping any other gods in Omnia, are they?” “They wouldn’t be allowed to,” said Brutha. “The Quisition would see to that.” “Yeah. It’s hard to kneel if you have no knees.”
Peace negotiations were not going well. “You attacked us!” said Vorbis. “I would call it preemptive defense,” said the Tyrant.
“Got to write a book, see, to prove you’re a philosopher. Then you get your scroll and free official philosopher’s loofah.”
You had to have a mind like Vorbis’s to plan your retaliation before your attack.
Who did Vorbis talk to when he prayed?
All libraries, everywhere, are connected by the bookworm holes in space created by the strong space-time distortions found around any large collections of books.
This has nothing to do with the story. Nor does the fact that, some time later, scrolls thought to have been destroyed in the Great Ephebian Library Fire turned up in remarkably good condition in the Library of Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork. But it’s nice to know, even so.
“We’ll never make it alive!” CORRECT.
In front of the crew the ship’s rats had assembled. There was a tiny robed shape in front of them. It said, SQUEAK. He thought: even rats have a Death . . .
this meant that the whole sun was a faster-than-light particle, a tachyon or, as Didactylos put it, a bugger.
own. Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life not believing, spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief . . .
something. Got to have a whole parcel of worshipers to live on Nob Hill. Got to be an anthropomorphic personification, one of them things.”
“You wanted me to abandon him last night,” said Brutha. “Did I?” said Om, his very shell radiating innocence.
“Any mushrooms in these parts?” said Brutha innocently. St. Ungulant nodded happily. “After the annual rains, yes. Red ones with yellow spots. The desert becomes really interesting after the mushroom season.”
Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah beamed over the top of his lukewarm ice-cold sherbet stand. “Heard it on the grapevine,” he said. “Here, have a slab of Klatchian Delight. Free. Onna stick.”
He might as well be talking to himself, and listening to himself. Like Vorbis.
unsung. The Citadel might have been dead, were it not for the huge indefinable background roar of tens of thousands of people being silent.
