A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘Bridge business? Sitting in a box all day charging people a silver piece to walk across? Half the time he ain’t even there! He just pays some dwarf to take the money. And he calls himself a troll! You can’t tell him from a human till you’re right up close!’

  Cohen nodded understandingly.

  ‘D’you know,’ said the troll, ‘I have to go over and have dinner with them every week? All three of ’em? And listen to ’em go on about moving with the times …’

  He turned a big, sad face to Cohen.

  ‘What’s wrong with being a troll under a bridge?’ he said. ‘I was brought up to be a troll under a bridge. I want young Scree to be a troll under a bridge after I’m gone. What’s wrong with that? You’ve got to have trolls under bridges. Otherwise, what’s it all about? What’s it all for?’

  They leaned morosely on the parapet, looking down into the white water.

  ‘You know,’ said Cohen slowly, ‘I can remember when a man could ride all the way from here to the Blade Mountains and never see another living thing.’ He fingered his sword. ‘At least, not for very long.’

  He threw the butt of his cigarette into the water. ‘It’s all farms now. All little farms, run by little people. And fences everywhere. Everywhere you look, farms and fences and little people.’

  ‘She’s right, of course,’ said the troll, continuing some interior conversation. ‘There’s no future in just jumping out from under a bridge.’

  ‘I mean,’ said Cohen, ‘I’ve nothing against farms. Or farmers. You’ve got to have them. It’s just that they used to be a long way off, around the edges. Now this is the edge.’

  ‘Pushed back all the time,’ said the troll. ‘Changing all the time. Like my brother-in-law Chert. A lumber mill! A troll running a lumber mill! And you should see the mess he’s making of Cutshade Forest!’

  Cohen looked up, surprised.

  ‘What, the one with the giant spiders in it?’

  ‘Spiders? There ain’t no spiders now. Just stumps.’

  ‘Stumps? Stumps? I used to like that forest. It was … well, it was darksome. You don’t get proper darksome any more. You really knew what terror was, in a forest like that.’

  ‘You want darksome? He’s replanting with spruce,’ said Mica.

  ‘Spruce!’

  ‘It’s not his idea. He wouldn’t know one tree from another. That’s all down to Clay. He put him up to it.’

  Cohen felt dizzy. ‘Who’s Clay?’

  ‘I said I’d got three brothers-in-law, right? He’s the merchant. So he said replanting would make the land easier to sell.’

  There was a long pause while Cohen digested this.

  Then he said, ‘You can’t sell Cutshade Forest. It doesn’t belong to anyone.’

  ‘Yeah. He says that’s why you can sell it.’

  Cohen brought his fist down on the parapet. A piece of stone detached itself and tumbled down into the gorge.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all right. Bits fall off all the time, like I said.’

  Cohen turned. ‘What’s happening? I remember all the big old wars. Don’t you? You must have fought.’

  ‘I carried a club, yeah.’

  ‘It was supposed to be for a bright new future and law and stuff. That’s what people said.’

  ‘Well, I fought because a big troll with a whip told me to,’ said Mica, cautiously. ‘But I know what you mean.’

  ‘I mean it wasn’t for farms and spruce trees. Was it?’

  Mica hung his head. ‘And here’s me with this apology for a bridge. I feel really bad about it,’ he said, ‘you coming all this way and everything—’

  ‘And there was some king or other,’ said Cohen, vaguely, looking at the water. ‘And I think there were some wizards. But there was a king. I’m pretty certain there was a king. Never met him. You know?’ He grinned at the troll. ‘I can’t remember his name. Don’t think they ever told me his name.’

  About half an hour later Cohen’s horse emerged from the gloomy woods on to a bleak, windswept moorland. It plodded on for a while before saying, ‘All right … how much did you give him?’

  ‘Twelve gold pieces,’ said Cohen.

  ‘Why’d you give him twelve gold pieces?’

  ‘I didn’t have more than twelve.’

  ‘You must be mad.’

  ‘When I was just starting out in the barbarian hero business,’ said Cohen, ‘every bridge had a troll under it. And you couldn’t go through a forest like we’ve just gone through without a dozen goblins trying to chop your head off.’ He sighed. ‘I wonder what happened to ’em all?’

  ‘You,’ said the horse.

  ‘Well, yes. But I always thought there’d be some more. I always thought there’d be some more edges.’

  ‘How old are you?’ said the horse.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Old enough to know better, then.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’ Cohen lit another cigarette and coughed until his eyes watered.

  ‘Going soft in the head!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Giving your last dollar to a troll!’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cohen wheezed a stream of smoke at the sunset.

  ‘Why?’

  Cohen stared at the sky. The red glow was as cold as the slopes of hell. An icy wind blew across the steppes, whipping at what remained of his hair.

  ‘For the sake of the way things should be,’ he said.

  ‘Hah!’

  ‘For the sake of things that were.’

  ‘Hah!’

  Cohen looked down.

  He grinned.

  ‘And for three addresses. One day I’m going to die,’ he said, ‘but not, I think, today.’

  The wind blew off the mountains, filling the air with fine ice crystals. It was too cold to snow. In weather like this wolves came down into villages, trees in the heart of the forest exploded when they froze. Except there were fewer and fewer wolves these days, and less and less forest.

  In weather like this right-thinking people were indoors, in front of the fire.

  Telling stories about heroes.

  THEATRE OF CRUELTY

  W. H. SMITH BOOKCASE MAGAZINE, JULY/AUGUST 1993

  This was written to length (1,000 words, but tweaked a bit longer now) for W. H. Smith’s free Bookcase magazine in 1993, and some lucky people spotted it and walked out of the stores with armfuls of copies.

  It works best if your culture includes at least folk memories of Punch and Judy, a glove-puppet show depicting wife-beating, child abuse, cruelty to animals, assault on an officer of the law, murder, and complete and total disrespect of Authority. It is for children, of course, who laugh themselves sick. The plot is: Mr Punch, who has a voice like a parrot with its foot caught in a power socket, beats up everyone, sometimes including the Devil, with his stick, while shouting ‘That’s the way to do it!’ It is, indeed, the original slapstick comedy.

  In many shows, the small dog Toby also appears, and does nothing but sit at the side of the stage and wear a ruff. In my opinion he is the brains of the outfit, and controls the Punch and Judy man by strange mental powers.

  Despite the feeling of people like Captain Carrot of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, who have occasionally tried to ban Punch, he survives and evolves. It can only be a matter of time before an anger management consultant is included amongst the puppets. I’d like to be there when it happens. Oh, happy day.

  It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the man would have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead.

  It would be hard to be deader without special training.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Sergeant Colon (Ankh-Morpork City Guard, Night Watch), consulting his notebook, ‘so far we has cause of death as a) being beaten with at least one blunt instrument, b) being strangled with a string of sausages, and c) being savaged by at least two animals with big sharp teeth. What do we do now, Nobby?’

  ‘Arrest the suspe
ct, sarge,’ said Corporal Nobbs, saluting smartly.

  ‘What suspect, Nobby?’

  ‘Him,’ said Nobby, prodding the corpse with his boot. ‘I call it highly suspicious, being dead like that.’

  ‘But he’s the victim, Nobby. He was the one what was killed.’

  ‘Ah, right. So we can get him as an accessory, too.’

  ‘Nobby—’

  ‘He’s been drinking, too. We could do him for being dead and disorderly.’

  Colon scratched his head. Arresting the corpse offered, of course, certain advantages. But …

  ‘I reckon,’ he said slowly, ‘that Captain Vimes’ll want this one sorted out. You’d better bring it back to the Watch House, Nobby.’

  ‘And then can we eat the sausages, sarge?’ said Corporal Nobbs.

  It wasn’t easy, being the senior policeman in Ankh-Morpork, greatest of cities of the Discworld.1 There were probably worlds, Captain Vimes mused in his gloomier moments, where there weren’t wizards (who made locked-room mysteries commonplace) or zombies (murder cases were really strange when the victim could be the chief witness) and where dogs could be relied on to do nothing in the night-time and not go around chatting to people. Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believes in ice – i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn’t the place for it. Just once, he thought, it’d be nice to solve something.

  He looked at the blue-faced body on the slab, and felt a tiny flicker of excitement. These were clues. He’d never seen proper clues before.

  ‘Couldn’t have been a robber, captain,’ said Sergeant Colon. ‘The reason being, his pockets were full of money. Eleven dollars.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call that full,’ said Captain Vimes.

  ‘It was all in pennies and ha’pennies, sir. I’m amazed his trousers stood the strain. And I have cunningly detected the fact that he was a showman, sir. He had some cards in his pocket, sir. “Chas Slumber, Children’s Entertainer”.’

  ‘I suppose no one saw anything?’ said Vimes.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Sergeant Colon helpfully, ‘I told young Corporal Carrot to find some witnesses.’

  ‘You asked Corporal Carrot to investigate a murder? All by himself?’ said Vimes.

  The sergeant scratched his head.

  ‘Yessir. I said he ought to try to find a witness, sir. And he said to me, did I know anyone very old and seriously ill?’

  And on the magical Discworld, there is always one guaranteed witness to any homicide. It’s his job.

  Corporal Carrot, the Watch’s youngest member, often struck people as simple. And he was. He was incredibly simple, but in the same way that a sword is simple, or an ambush is simple. He was also possibly the most linear thinker in the history of the universe.

  He’d been waiting by the bedside of an old man, who’d quite enjoyed the company right up until just a few seconds ago, whereupon he’d passed on to whatever reward was due him. And now it was time for Carrot to take out his notebook.

  ‘Now I know you saw something, sir,’ he said. ‘You were there.’

  WELL, YES, said Death. I HAVE TO BE, YOU KNOW. BUT THIS IS VERY IRREGULAR.

  ‘You see, sir,’ said Corporal Carrot, ‘as I understand the law, you are an Accessory After The Fact. Or possibly Before The Fact.’

  YOUNG MAN, I AM THE FACT.

  ‘And I am an officer of the Law,’ said Corporal Carrot. ‘There’s got to be a law, you know.’

  YOU WANT ME TO … ER … GRASS SOMEONE UP? DROP A DIME ON SOMEONE? SING LIKE A PIGEON? NO. NO ONE KILLED MR SLUMBER. I CAN’T HELP YOU THERE.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir,’ said Carrot. ‘I think you have.’

  DAMN.

  Death watched Carrot leave, ducking his head as he went down the narrow stairs of the hovel.

  NOW THEN, WHERE WAS I …

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the wizened old man in the bed. ‘I happen to be 107, you know. I haven’t got all day.’

  AH, YES. CORRECT.

  Death sharpened his scythe. It was the first time he’d ever helped the police with their inquiries. Still, everyone had a job to do.

  Corporal Carrot strolled easily around the town. He had a Theory. He’d read a book about Theories. You added up all the clues, and you got a Theory. Everything had to fit.

  There were sausages. Someone had to buy sausages. And then there were pennies. Normally only one subsection of the human race paid for things in pennies.

  He called in on a sausage-maker. He found a group of children, and chatted to them for a while.

  Then he ambled back to the scene of the crime in the alley, where Corporal Nobbs had chalked the outline of the corpse on the ground (colouring it in, and adding a pipe and a walking stick and some trees and bushes in the background – people had already dropped 7p in his helmet). He paid some attention to the heap of rubbish at the far end, and then sat down on a busted barrel.

  ‘All right … You can come out now,’ he said, to the world at large. ‘I didn’t know there were any gnomes left in the world.’

  The rubbish rustled. They trooped out – the little man with the red hat, the hunched back and the hooked nose, the little woman in the mob cap carrying the even smaller baby, the little policeman, the dog with the ruff around its neck, and the very small alligator.

  Corporal Carrot sat and listened.

  ‘He made us do it,’ said the little man. He had a surprisingly deep voice. ‘He used to beat us. Even the alligator. That was all he understood, hitting things with sticks. And he used to take all the money the dog Toby collected and get drunk. And then we ran away and he caught us in the alley and started on Judy and the baby and he fell over and—’

  ‘Who hit him first?’ said Carrot.

  ‘All of us!’

  ‘But not very hard,’ said Carrot. ‘You’re all too small. You didn’t kill him. I have a very convincing statement about that. So I went and had another look at him. He’d choked to death on something. What is this?’

  He held up a little leather disc.

  ‘It’s a swozzle,’ said the little policeman. ‘He used it for the voices. He said ours weren’t funny enough.’

  ‘“That’s the way to do it!”’ said the one called Judy, and spat.

  ‘It was stuck in his throat,’ said Carrot. ‘I suggest you run away, just as far as you can.’

  ‘We thought we could start a people’s cooperative,’ said the leading gnome. ‘You know … experimental drama, street theatre, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Technically it was assault,’ said Carrot. ‘But frankly I can’t see any point in taking you in.’

  ‘We thought we’d try to bring theatre to the people. Properly. Not hitting each other with sticks and throwing babies to crocodiles—’

  ‘You did that for children?’ said Carrot.

  ‘He said it was a new sort of entertainment. He said it’d catch on.’

  Carrot stood up, and flicked the swozzle into the rubbish.

  ‘People’ll never stand for it,’ he said. ‘That’s not the way to do it.’

  1 Which is flat and goes through space on the back of an enormous turtle, and why not …

  THE SEA AND LITTLE FISHES

  LEGENDS, ED. ROBERT SILVERBERG, HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK, 1998

  Short stories, as I have said, cost me blood. I envy those people who can write one with ease, or at least what looks like ease. I doubt if I’ve done more than fifteen in my life.

  The Sea and Little Fishes, though, was one of the rare story ideas that just popped up. About two weeks later Bob Silverberg popped up, too, and asked if I could write a story for the Legends anthology.

  I’m not sure what would have happened if he hadn’t; it would probably have become the start of a novel, or a thread in one. It was originally about a thousand words longer, containing a scene that did nothing but slow it down, according to Bob. He was right. It was quite a good scene, nevertheless, and turned up later in Carpe Ju
gulum.

  The title? Totally made up, but it sounded right. For reasons I can’t quite remember now, some years ago I invented the ‘ancient’ saying, ‘The big sea does not care which way the little fishes swim’, and put it in the mouth of a character. It sounds wise, in a slightly stupid kind of way, and I thought it also sounded like the kind of title you got on an award-winning story, in which surmise I turned out to be entirely wrong.

  Trouble began, and not for the first time, with an apple.

  There was a bag of them on Granny Weatherwax’s bleached and spotless table. Red and round, shiny and fruity; if they’d known the future they should have ticked like bombs.

  ‘Keep the lot; old Hopcroft said I could have as many as I wanted,’ said Nanny Ogg. She gave her sister witch a sidelong glance. ‘Tasty, a bit wrinkled, but a damn good keeper.’

  ‘He named an apple after you?’ said Granny. Each word was an acid drop on the air.

  ‘’Cos of my rosy cheeks,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘An’ I cured his leg for him after he fell off that ladder last year. An’ I made him up some jollop for his bald head.’

  ‘It didn’t work, though,’ said Granny. ‘That wig he wears, that’s a terrible thing to see on a man still alive.’

  ‘But he was pleased I took an interest.’

  Granny Weatherwax didn’t take her eyes off the bag. Fruit and vegetables grew famously in the mountains’ hot summers and cold winters. Percy Hopcroft was the premier grower and definitely a keen man when it came to sexual antics among the horticulture with a camel-hair brush.

  ‘He sells his apple trees all over the place,’ Nanny Ogg went on. ‘Funny, eh, to think that pretty soon thousands of people will be having a bite of Nanny Ogg.’

  ‘Thousands more,’ said Granny, tartly. Nanny’s wild youth was an open book, although only available in plain covers.

  ‘Thank you, Esme.’ Nanny Ogg looked wistful for a moment, and then opened her mouth in mock concern. ‘Oh, you ain’t jealous, are you, Esme? You ain’t begrudging me my little moment in the sun?’

  ‘Me? Jealous? Why should I be jealous? It’s only an apple. It’s not as if it’s anything important.’