Discworld 16 - Soul Music

by Terry Pratchett

“You?”

  “Me,” said Susan.

  Susan pulled the scythe out of its holster. The blade sprang out; snowflakes that fell on it split gently into two halves without a pause in their descent.

  “Let’s get your friends, shall we?”

  There was a friction in the air, as if the attention of the world were being focused. Death stared into the future.

  OH, BLAST.

  Things were coming apart. The Librarian had done his best, but mere bone and wood couldn’t take this sort of strain. Feathers and beads whirled away and landed, smoking, in the road. A wheel parted company from its axle and bounded away, shedding spokes, as the machine took a curve almost horizontally.

  It made no real difference. Something like a soul flickered in the air where the missing pieces had been.

  If you took a shining machine, and shone a light on it so that there were gleams and highlights, and then took away the machine but left the light…

  Only the horse’s skull remained. That and the rear wheel, which spun in forks now only flickering light, and was smoldering.

  The thing whirred past Dibbler, causing his horse to throw him into the ditch and bolt.

  Death was used to traveling fast. In theory he was already everywhere, waiting for almost anything else. The fastest way to travel is to be there already.

  But he’d never been this fast while going this slow. The landscape had often been a blur, but never while it was only four inches from his knee on the bends.

  The cart shifted again. Now even Cliff was looking down into the darkness.

  Something touched his shoulder.

  “HANG ON TO THIS. BUT DON’T TOUCH THE BLADE.”

  Buddy leaned past.

  “Glod, if you let go of the bag I can—”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “There’s no pockets in a shroud, Glod.”

  “You got the wrong tailor, then.”

  In the end Buddy grabbed a spare leg and hauled. One at a time, clambering over one another, The Band eased themselves back onto the road. And turned to look at Susan.

  “White horse,” said Asphalt. “Black cloak. Scythe. Um.”

  “You can see her too?” said Buddy.

  “I hope we’re not going to wish we couldn’t,” said Cliff.

  Susan held up a lifetimer and peered at it critically.

  “I suppose it’s too late to cut some sort of deal?” said Glod.

  “I’m just looking to see if you’re dead or not,” said Susan.

  “I think I’m alive,” said Glod.

  “Hold on to that thought.”

  They turned at a creaking sound. The cart slid forward and dropped into the gorge. There was a crash as it hit an outcrop halfway toward the bottom, and then a more distant thud as it smashed into the rocks. There was a “whoomph” and orange flames blossomed as the oil in the lamps exploded.

  Out of the debris, trailing flame, rolled a burning wheel.

  “We would have been in dat,” said Cliff.

  “You think maybe we’re better off now?” said Glod.

  “Yep,” said Cliff. “’Cos we’re not dyin’ in der wreckage of a burning cart.”

  “Yes, but she looks a bit…occult.”

  “Fine by me. I’ll take occult over deep-fried any day.”

  Behind them, Buddy turned to Susan.

  “I…think I’ve worked it out,” she said. “The music…twisted up history, I think. It’s not supposed to be in our history. Can you remember where you got it from?”

  Buddy just stared. When you’ve been saved from certain death by an attractive girl on a white horse, you don’t expect a shopping quiz.

  “A shop in Ankh-Morpork,” said Cliff.

  “A mysterious old shop?”

  “Mysterious as anything. There—”

  “Did you go back? Was it still there? Was it in the same place?”

  “Yes,” said Cliff.

  “No,” said Glod.

  “Lots of interesting merchandise that you wanted to pick up and learn more about?”

  “Yes!” said Glod and Cliff together.

  “Oh,” said Susan. “That kind of shop.”

  “I knew it didn’t belong here,” said Glod. “Didn’t I say it didn’t belong here? I said it didn’t belong here. I said it was eldritch.”

  “I thought that meant oblong,” said Asphalt.

  Cliff held out his hand.

  “It’s stopped snowing,” he said.

  “I dropped the thing into the gorge,” said Buddy. “I…didn’t need it anymore. It must have smashed.”

  “No,” said Susan. “It’s not as—”

  “The clouds…now they look eldritch,” said Glod, looking up.

  “What? Oblong?” said Asphalt.

  They all felt it…a sensation that the walls had been removed from around the world. The air buzzed.

  “What’s this now?” said Asphalt, as they instinctively huddled together.

  “You ought to know,” said Glod. “I thought you’ve been everywhere and seen everything?”

  White light crackled in the air.

  And then the air became light, white as moonlight but as strong as sunlight. There was also a sound, like the roar of millions of voices.

  It said: Let me show you who I am. I am the music.

  Satchelmouth lit the coach lamps.

  “Hurry up, man!” shouted Clete. “We want to catch them, you know! Hat. Hat. Hat.”

  “I don’t see that it matters much if they get away,” Satchelmouth grumbled, climbing onto the coach as Clete lashed the horses into motion. “I mean, they’re away. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

  “No! You saw them. They’re the…the soul of all this trouble,” said Clete. “We can’t let this sort of thing go on!”

  Satchelmouth glanced sideways. The thought was flooding into his mind, and not for the first time, that Mr. Clete was not playing with a full orchestra, that he was one of those people who built their own hot madness out of sane and chilly parts. Satchelmouth was by no means averse to the finger-foxtrot and the skull fandango, but he’d never murdered anyone, at least on purpose. Satchelmouth had been made aware that he had a soul and, though it had a few holes in it and was a little ragged around the edges, he cherished the hope that some day the god Reg would find him a place in a celestial combo. You didn’t get the best gigs if you were a murderer. You probably had to play the viola.

  “How about if we leave it right now?” he said. “They won’t be back—”

  “Shut up!”

  “But there’s no point—”

  The horses reared. The coach rocked. Something went past in a blur and vanished in the darkness, leaving a line of blue flames that flickered for a little while and then went out.

  Death was aware that at some point he would have to stop. But it was creeping up on him that in whatever dark vocabulary the ghost machine had been envisaged, the words “slow down” were as inconceivable as “drive safely.”

  It was not in its very nature to reduce speed in any circumstances other than the dramatically calamitous at the end of the third verse.

  That was the trouble with Music With Rocks In. It liked to do things its own way.

  Very slowly, still spinning, the front wheel rose off the ground.

  Absolute darkness filled the universe.

  A voice spake: “Is that you, Cliff?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay. Is this me: Glod?”

  “Yup. Sounds like you.”

  “Asphalt?”

  “’Sme.”

  “Buddy?”

  “Glod?”

  “And…er…the lady in black?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know where we are, Miss?”

  There was no ground under them. But Susan didn’t feel that she was floating. She was simply standing. The fact that it was on nothing was a minor point. She wasn’t falling because there was nowhere to fall to, or from.


  She’d never been interested in geography. But she had a very strong feeling that this place was not locatable on any atlas.

  “I don’t know where our bodies are,” she said, carefully.

  “Oh, good,” said the voice of Glod. “Really? I’m here, but we don’t know where my body is? How about my money?”

  There was the sound of faint footsteps far away in the darkness. They approached, slowly and deliberately. And stopped.

  A voice said: One. One. One, two. One, two.

  Then the footsteps went back into the distance.

  After a while, another voice said: One, two, three, four—

  And the universe came into being.

  It was wrong to call it a big bang. That would just be noise, and all that noise could create is more noise and a cosmos full of random particles.

  Matter exploded into being, apparently as chaos, but in fact as a chord. The ultimate power chord. Everything, all together, streaming out in one huge rush that contained within itself, like reverse fossils, everything that it was going to be.

  And, zigzagging through the expanding cloud, alive, that first wild live music.

  This had shape. It had spin. It had rhythm. It had a beat, and you could dance to it.

  Everything did.

  A voice right inside Susan’s head said: And I will never die.

  She said, aloud: “There’s a bit of you in everything that lives.”

  Yes. I am the heartbeat. The back beat.

  She still couldn’t see the others. The light was streaming past her.

  “But he threw away the guitar.”

  I wanted him to live for me.

  “You wanted him to die for you! In the wreckage of the cart!”

  What is the difference? He would be dead anyway. But to die in music…People will always remember the songs he never had the chance to sing. And they will be the greatest songs of all.

  Live your life in a moment.

  And then live forever. Don’t fade away.

  “Send us back!”

  You never left.

  She blinked. They were still on the road. The air flickered and crackled, and was full of wet snow.

  She looked around into Buddy’s horrified face.

  “We’ve got to get away—”

  He held up a hand. It was transparent.

  Cliff had almost vanished. Glod was trying to grip the handle of the money bag, but his fingers were slipping through it. His face was full of the terror of death or, possibly, of poverty.

  Susan shouted: “He threw you away! That’s not fair!”

  A piercing blue light was heading up the road. No cart could move that fast. There was a roar like the scream of a camel who has just seen two bricks.

  The light reached the bend, skidded, hit a rock, and leapt into space over the gorge.

  There was just time for a hollow voice to say OH B—

  …before it hit the far wall in one great, spreading circle of flame.

  Bones bounced and rolled down to the riverbed, and were still.

  Susan spun around, scythe ready to swing. But the music was in the air. It had no soul to aim for.

  You could say to the universe this is not fair. And the universe would say: Oh, isn’t it? Sorry.

  You could save people. You could get there in the nick of time. And something could snap its fingers and say, no, it has to be this way. Let me tell you how it has to be. This is how the legend has to go.

  She reached out and tried to take Buddy’s hand. She could feel it, but only as a coldness.

  “Can you hear me?” she shouted, above the triumphant chords.

  He nodded.

  “It’s…it’s like a legend! It has to happen! And I can’t stop it—how can I kill something like music?”

  She ran to the edge of the gorge. The cart was well on fire. They wouldn’t appear in it. They would have been in it.

  “I can’t stop it! It’s not fair!”

  She pounded at the air with her fists.

  “Grandfather!”

  Blue flames flickered fitfully on the rocks of the dry riverbed.

  A small fingerbone rolled across the stones until it came up against another, slightly larger, bone.

  A third bone tumbled off a rock and joined them.

  In the semidarkness there was a rattling among the stones, and a handful of little white shapes bounced and tumbled between the rocks until a hand, index finger reaching for the sky, rose into the night.

  Then there was a series of deeper, more hollow noises as longer, larger things skipped end over end through the gloom.

  “I was going to make it better!” shouted Susan. “What’s the good of being Death if you have to obey idiot rules all the time?”

  BRING THEM BACK.

  As Susan turned, a toe bone hopped across the mud and scuttled into place somewhere under Death’s robe.

  He strode forward, snatched the scythe from Susan and, in one movement, whirled it over his head and smashed it on a rock. The blade shattered.

  He reached down and picked up a fragment. It glittered in his fingers like a tiny star of blue ice.

  IT WAS NOT A REQUEST.

  When the music spoke, the falling snow danced.

  You can’t kill me.

  Death reached into his robe, and brought out the guitar. Bits of it had broken off, but this didn’t matter; the shape flickered in the air. The strings glowed.

  Death took a stance that Crash would have died to achieve, and raised one hand. In his fingers the sliver glinted. If light could have made a noise, it would have flashed ting.

  He wanted to be the greatest musician in the world. There has to be a law. Destiny runs its course.

  For once, Death appeared not to smile.

  He brought his hand down on the strings.

  There was no sound.

  There was, instead, a cessation of sound, the end of a noise which Susan realized she’d been hearing all along. All the time. All her life. A kind of sound you never notice until it stops…

  The strings were still.

  There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.

  Death played the empty chord.

  The beat slowed. And began to weaken. The universe spun on, every atom of it. But soon the whirling would end and the dancers would look around and wonder what do next.

  It’s not time for THAT! Play something else!

  I CANNOT.

  Death nodded toward Buddy.

  BUT HE CAN.

  He threw the guitar toward Buddy. It passed right through him.

  Susan ran and snatched it up, held it out.

  “You’ve got to take it! You’ve got to play! You’ve got to start the music again!”

  She strummed frantically at the strings. Buddy winced.

  “Please!” she shouted. “Don’t fade away!”

  The music screamed in her head.

  Buddy managed to grasp the guitar, but stood looking at it as if he’d never seen it before.

  “What’ll happen if he doesn’t play it?” said Glod.

  “You’ll all die in the wreckage!”

  AND THEN, said Death, THE MUSIC WILL DIE. AND THE DANCE WILL END. THE WHOLE DANCE.

  The ghostly dwarf gave a cough.

  “We’re getting paid for this number, right?” he said.

  YOU’LL GET THE UNIVERSE.

  “And free beer?”

  Buddy held the guitar to him. His eyes met Susan’s.

  He raised his hand, and played.

  The single chord rang out across the gorge, and echoed back with strange harmonics.

  THANK YOU, said Death. He stepped forward and took the guitar.

  He moved suddenly, and smashed the thing against a rock. The strings parted, and something accelerated away, toward the snow and the stars.

  Death looked at the wreckage wi
th some satisfaction.

  NOW THAT’S MUSIC WITH ROCKS IN.

  He snapped his fingers.

  The moon rose over Ankh-Morpork.

  The park was deserted. The silver light flowed over the wreckage of the stage, and the mud and half-consumed sausages that marked the spot where the audience had been. Here and there it glinted off broken sound traps.

  After a while some of the mud sat up and spat out some more mud.

  “Crash? Jimbo? Scum?” it said.

  “Is that you, Noddy?” said a sad shape hanging from one of the stage’s few remaining beams.

  The mud pulled some more mud out of its ears. “Right! Where’s Scum?”

  “I think they threw him into the lake.”

  “Is Crash alive?”

  There was a groan from under a heap of wreckage.

  “Pity,” said Noddy, with feeling.

  A figure emerged out of the shadows, squelching.

  Crash half crawled, half fell out of the rubble.

  “You’fe got to admit,” he mumbled, because at some stage in the performance a guitar had hit him in the teeth, “that waf Music Wif Rocks In…”

  “All right,” said Jimbo, slithered off his beam. “But next time, thanks all the same, I’d rather try sex ’n drugs.”

  “My dad said he’d kill me if I took drugs,” said Noddy.

  “This is your brain on drugs…” said Jimbo.

  “No, this is your brain, Scum, on this lump here”

  “Oh, cheers. Thanks.”

  “A painkiller’d be favorite right now,” said Jimbo

  A little closer to the lake a heap of sacking slid sideways.

  “Archchancellor?”

  “Yes, Mr. Stibbons?”

  “I think someone trod on my hat.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s still on my head.”

  Ridcully sat up, easing the ache in his bones.

  “Come on, lad,” he said. “Let’s go home. I’m not sure I’m that interested in music anymore. It’s a world of hertz.”

  A coach rattled along the winding mountain road. Mr. Clete was standing on the box, whipping the horses.

  Satchelmouth got unsteadily to his feet. The cliff edge was so close he could see right down into the darkness.

  “I’ve had just about altogether too much of this by half,” he shouted, and tried to snatch at the whip.