Reaper Man
Page 27
“Yes?”
THAT WAS YOUR LIFE.
And, with great relief, and general optimism, and a feeling that on the whole everything could have been much worse, Windle Poons died.
Somewhere in the night, Reg Shoe looked both ways, took a furtive paintbrush and small pot of paint from inside his jacket, and painted on a handy wall: Inside Every Living Person is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out…
And then it was all over. The end.
Death stood at the window of his dark study, looking out onto his garden. Nothing moved in that still domain. Dark lilies bloomed by the trout pool, where little plaster skeleton gnomes fished. There were distant mountains.
It was his own world. It appeared on no map.
But now, somehow, it lacked something.
Death selected a scythe from the rack in the huge hall. He strode past the huge clock without hands and went outside. He stalked through the black orchard, where Albert was busy about the beehives, and on until he climbed a small mound on the edge of the garden. Beyond, to the mountains, was unformed land—it would bear weight, it had an existence of sorts, but there had never been any reason to define it further.
Until now, anyway.
Albert came up behind him, a few dark bees still buzzing around his head.
“What are you doing, master?” he said.
REMEMBERING.
“Ah?”
I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WAS STARS.
What was it? Oh, yes…
He snapped his fingers. Fields appeared, following the gentle curves of the land. “Golden,” said Albert. “That’s nice. I’ve always thought we could do with a bit more color around here.”
Death shook his head. It wasn’t quite right yet. Then he realized what it was. The lifetimers, the great room filled with the roar of disappearing lives, was efficient and necessary; you needed something like that for good order. But…
He snapped his fingers again and a breeze sprang up. The cornfields moved, billow after billow unfolding across the slopes.
ALBERT?
“Yes, master?”
HAVE YOU NOT GOT SOMETHING TO DO? SOME LITTLE JOB?
“I don’t think so,” said Albert.
AWAY FROM HERE, IS WHAT I MEAN.
“Ah. What you mean is, you want to be alone,” said Albert.
I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.
“Right. I’ll just go and, uh, do some little jobs back at the house, then,” said Albert.
YOU DO THAT.
Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway.
Somewhere, the tiny voice of Bill Door said: from the point of view of the owner, longer ones are best.
SQUEAK.
Death looked down.
A small figure was standing by his feet.
He reached down and picked it up, held it up to an investigative eye socket.
I KNEW I’D MISSED SOMEONE.
The Death of Rats nodded.
SQUEAK?
Death shook his head.
NO, I CAN’T LET YOU REMAIN, he said. IT’S NOT AS THOUGH I’M RUNNING A FRANCHISE OR SOMETHING.
SQUEAK?
ARE YOU THE ONLY ONE LEFT?
The Death of Rats opened a tiny skeletal hand. The tiny Death of Fleas stood up, looking embarrassed but hopeful.
NO. THIS SHALL NOT BE. I AM IMPLACABLE. I AM DEATH…ALONE.
He looked at the Death of Rats.
He remembered Azrael in his tower of loneliness.
ALONE…
The Death of Rats looked back at him.
SQUEAK?
Picture a tall, dark figure, surrounded by cornfields…
NO, YOU CAN’T RIDE A CAT. WHO EVER HEARD OF THE DEATH OF RATS RIDING A CAT? THE DEATH OF RATS WOULD RIDE SOME KIND OF DOG.
Picture more fields, a great horizon-spanning network of fields, rolling in gentle waves…
DON’T ASK ME I DON’T KNOW. SOME KIND OF TERRIER, MAYBE.
…fields of corn, alive, whispering in the breeze…
RIGHT, AND THE DEATH OF FLEAS CAN RIDE IT TOO. THAT WAY YOU KILL TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE.
…awaiting the clockwork of the seasons.
METAPHORICALLY.
And at the end of all stories Azrael, who knew the secret, thought: I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.
*In this case, three better places. The front gates of Nos 31, 7, and 34 Elm Street, Ankh-Morpork.
* At least, until the day they suddenly pick up a paper knife and carve their way out through Cost Accounting and into forensic history.
*The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centers of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he’s merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler at Unseen University was a philosopher who looked like a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all definitions.
*It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1,000,000) necessarily qualify under the term “running” or, for that matter, “water.”
* Although not common on the Discworld there are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite. They are, obviously, rare. Merely giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anti-crime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage and/or humiliation to the victim. So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity). Anti-crimes have never really caught on.
* i.e., everywhere outside the Shades.
* Rains of fish, for example, were so common in the little landlocked village of Pine Dressers that it had a flourishing smoking, canning and kipper-filleting industry. And in the mountain regions of Syrrit many sheep, left out in the fields all night, would be found in the morning to be facing the other way, without the apparent intervention of any human agency.
* Someone who will put certainly salt and probably pepper on any meal you put in front of them whatever it is and regardless of how much it’s got on it already and regardless of how it tastes. Behavioural psychiatrists working for fast-food outlets around the universe have saved billions of whatever the local currency is by noting the autocondimenting phenomenon and advising their employers to leave seasoning out in the first place. This is really true.
* Many songs have been written about the bustling metropolis, the most famous of course being: “Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!”, but others have included “Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork,” “I Fear I’m Going Back to Ankh-Morpork” and the old favorite, “Ankh-Morpork Malady.”
* It would say, for example, that you would shortly undergo a painful bowel movement.
* Mrs. Cake was aware that some religions had priestesses. What Mrs. Cake thought about the ordination of women was unprintable. The religions with priestesses in Ankh-Morpork tended to attract a large crowd of plain-clothes priests from other denominations who were looking for a few hours’ respite somewhere where they wouldn’t encounter Mrs. Cake.
* A song which, in various languages, is common on every known world in the multiverse. It is always sung by the same people, viz., the people who, when they grow up, will be the people who the next generation sing “We Shall Overcome” at.
* The only building on the campus less than a thousand years old. The senior wizards have never bothered much about what the younger, skinnier and more bespectacled wizard
s get up to in there, treating their endless requests for funding for thaumic particle accelerators and radiation shielding as one treats pleas for more pocket money, and listening with amusement to their breathless accounts of the search for the elementary particles of magic itself. This may one day turn out to be a major error on the part of the senior wizards, especially if they do let the younger wizards build whatever that blasted thing is they keep wanting to build in the squash court.
The senior wizards know that the proper purpose of magic is to form a social pyramid with the wizards on top of it, eating big dinners, but in fact the HEM building has helped provide one of the rarest foods in the universe—antipasta. Ordinary pasta is prepared some hours before being eaten. Antipasta is created some hours after the meal, whereupon it then exists backward in time, and if properly prepared should arrive on the taste buds at exactly the same moment, thus creating a true taste explosion. It costs five thousand dollars a forkful, or a little more if you include the cost of cleaning the tomato sauce off the walls afterward.
* People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.
* Vermine are small black-and-white rodents found in the Ramtop Mountains. They are ancestors of the lemming, which as is well known throws itself over cliffs and drowns in lakes on a regular basis. Vermine used to do that, too. The point is, though, that dead animals don’t breed, and over the millennia more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross lakes. When their rush leads them to the seashore they sit around avoiding one another’s gaze for a while, and then leave early to get home before the rush.
* The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.
* It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom.
* It is generally thought, on those worlds where the mall lifeform has seeded, that people take the wire baskets away and leave them in strange and isolated places, so that squads of young men have to be employed to gather them together and wheel them back. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. In reality the men are hunters, stalking their rattling prey across the landscape, trapping them, breaking their spirit, taming them and herding them to a life of slavery. Possibly.
* The most enthusiastic of these was the small but persistent and incredibly successful Casanunder the Dwarf, a name mentioned with respect and awe wherever stepladder owners are gathered together.
* “Lost Jewelled Temple Roof Repair Fund! Only 6,000 gold pieces to go!! Please Give Generously!! Thankyou!!!”
About the Author
Terry Pratchett is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.
Pratchett’s acclaimed novels are bestsellers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and have sold more than twenty-seven million copies worldwide. He lives in England, where he writes all the time. (It’s his hobby, as well.)
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise
CRITICS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE POND ARE MAD FOR TERRY PRATCHETT!
“Terry Pratchett is Britain’s best-selling living novelist…. What’s remarkable about him is that he is also first-rate, and in a better-ordered world he would be acclaimed as a great writer rather than a merely successful one…. Pratchett has two secret weapons up his sleeve—a terrific sense of humor and a most appealing personality.”
Sunday Telegraph (London)
“Philosophical humor of the highest order.”
Kirkus Reviews
“One of the reasons for Pratchett’s skyrocketing popularity (he has sold more than twenty million copies of his novels worldwide) is his use of multiple layers of satire. You can never pick up all the jokes he makes in one reading. And while you don’t need to have read any previous Discworld novels to appreciate a new one, he frequently weaves in elements from other stories to add dimension to the Discworld universe.”
Denver Post
“Engaging, surreal satire…nothing short of magical.”
Chicago Tribune
“Slyly comic.”
Houston Chronicle
“Unadulterated fun…witty, frequently hilarious.”
San Francisco Tribune
“Superb popular entertainment.”
Washington Post Book World
“Think J. R. R. Tolkien with a sharper, more satiric edge.”
Houston Chronicle
“Trying to summarize the plot of a Pratchett novel is like describing Hamlet as a play about a troubled guy with an Oedipus complex and a murderous uncle. Pratchett isn’t Shakespeare—for one thing, he’s funnier—but his books are richly textured and far more complex than they appear at first…Consider yourself grabbed by the collar, with me shouting, ‘You’ve got to read this book!’”
Barbara Mertz
“Discworld takes the classic funny universe through its logical, and comic, evolution.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Truly original…Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz…has the energy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the inventiveness of Alice in Wonderland…Brilliant!”
A. S. Byatt
Also by Terry Pratchett
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata
Truckers • Diggers • Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents*
The Discworld Series
The Color of Magic* • The Light Fantastic* • Equal Rites*
Mort* • Sourcery* • Wyrd Sisters* • Pyramids*
Guards! Guards!* • Eric (with Josh Kirby)*
Moving Pictures* • Reaper Man* • Witches Abroad*
Small Gods* • Lords and Ladies* • Men at Arms*
Soul Music* • Interesting Times* • Maskerade*
Feet of Clay* • Hogfather* • Jingo* • The Last Continent*
Carpe Jugulum* • The Fifth Elephant* • The Truth*
Thief of Time* • The Last Hero*
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic (with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
Coming Soon in Hardcover
Night Watch*
*Published by HarperCollins
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
REAPER MAN. Copyright © 2007 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without
the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2007 ISBN: 9780061807053
06 07 08 09 10
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Begin Reading
About the Author
Praise
Also by Terry Pratchett
Copyright
About the Publisher