The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

by The Wit

  *

  The dungeons of the Palace held a number of felons imprisoned ‘at his lordship’s pleasure’, and since Lord Vetinari was seldom very pleased they were generally in for the long haul.

  *

  Leonard of Quirm was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn’t just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

  *

  ‘So how come you left the Evil Dark Lord business, Harry?’ said Cohen.

  ‘Werl, you know how it is these days,’ said Evil Harry Dread.

  The Horde nodded. They knew how it was these days.

  ‘People these days, when they’re attacking your Dark Evil Tower, the first thing they do is block up your escape tunnel,’ said Evil Harry.

  ‘Bastards!’ said Cohen. ‘You’ve got to let the Dark Lord escape. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Caleb. ‘Got to leave yourself some work for tomorrow.’

  *

  ‘Anyone heard of Ning the Uncompassionate?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Boy Willie. ‘I killed him.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done! What was it he always said? “I shall revert to this vicinity!”‘

  ‘Sort of hard to do that,’ said Boy Willie, pulling out a pipe and beginning to fill it with tobacco, ‘when your head’s nailed to a tree.’

  *

  ‘How about Pamdar the Witch Queen?’ said Evil Harry. ‘Now there was—’

  ‘Retired,’ said Cohen.

  ‘She’d never retire!’

  ‘Got married,’ Cohen insisted.

  ‘But she was a devil woman!’

  ‘We all get older, Harry. She runs a shop now. Pam’s Pantry. Makes marmalade,’ said Cohen.

  ‘What? She used to queen it in a throne on top of a pile of skulls!’

  ‘I didn’t say it was very good marmalade.’

  *

  Hughnon Ridcully, Chief Priest of Blind Io, shared many of the characteristics of his brother Mustrum. He also saw his job as being, essentially, one of organizer. There were plenty of people who were good at the actual believing, and he left them to it. It took a lot more than prayer to make sure the laundry got done and the building was kept in repair.

  *

  There were so many gods now … at least two thousand. Many were, of course, still very small. But you had to watch them. Gods were very much a fashion thing. Look at Om, now. One minute he was a bloodthirsty little deity in some mad hot country and then suddenly he was one of the top gods. It had all been done by not answering prayers, but doing so in a sort of dynamic way that left open the possibility that one day he might and then there’d be fireworks.

  *

  And then, of course, you had your real newcomers like Aniger, Goddess of Squashed Animals. Who would have thought that better roads and faster carts would have led to that? But gods grew bigger when called upon at need, and enough minds had cried out, ‘Oh god, what was that I hit?’

  *

  Death tries to come to grips with Schroedinger’s Cat:

  In the study of his dark house on the edge of Time, Death looked at the wooden box.

  PERHAPS I SHALL TRY ONE MORE TIME, he said.

  He reached down and lifted up a small kitten, patted it on the head, lowered it gently into the box, and closed the lid.

  THE CAT DIES WHEN THE AIR RUNS OUT?

  ‘I suppose it might, sir,’ said Albert, his manservant. ‘But I don’t reckon that’s the point. If I understand it right, you don’t know if the cat’s dead or alive until you look at it.’

  THINGS WILL HAVE COME TO A PRETTY PASS, ALBERT, IF I DID NOT KNOW WHETHER A THING WAS DEAD OR ALIVE WITHOUT HAVING TO GO AND LOOK.

  ‘Er … the way the theory goes, sir, it’s the act of lookin’ that determines if it’s alive or not.’

  Death looked hurt. ARE YOU SUGGESTING I WILL KILL THE CAT JUST BY LOOKING AT IT?

  ‘It’s not quite like that, sir.’

  I MEAN, IT’S NOT AS IF I MAKE FACES OR ANYTHING.

  ‘To be honest with you, sir, I don’t think even the wizards understand the uncertainty business,’ said Albert.

  Death opened the box and took out the kitten. It stared at him with the normal mad amazement of kittens everywhere.

  I DON’T HOLD WITH CRUELTY TO CATS, said Death, putting it gently on the floor.

  ‘Some people say you achieve immortality through your children,’ said the minstrel.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Cohen. ‘Name one of your great-grandads, then.’

  Discworld briefly discovers space travel, and Carrot, Rincewind and Leonard of Quirm look down on the Disc from its moon:

  You know, I’m not sure I ever really believed it before,’ said Carrot. ‘You know … about the turtle and the elephants and everything. Seeing it all like this makes me feel very … very …’

  ‘Scared?’ suggested Rincewind.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Upset?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Easily intimidated?’

  ‘No.’

  Beyond the Rimfall, the continents of the world were coming into view under swirls of white cloud.

  You know .. . from up here … you can’t see the boundaries between nations,’ said Carrot, almost wistfully.

  ‘Is that a problem?’ said Leonard. ‘Possibly something could be done.’

  ‘Maybe huge, really huge buildings in lines, along the frontiers,’ said Rincewind. ‘Or … or very wide roads. You could paint them different colours to save confusion.’

  ‘Should aerial travel become widespread,’ said Leonard, ‘it would be a useful idea to grow forests in the shape of the name of the country, or of other areas of note. I will bear this in mind.’

  ‘I wasn’t actually sugges—’ Carrot began. And then he stopped, and just sighed.

  *

  On the veldt of Howondaland live the N’tuitif people, the only tribe in the world to have no imagination whatsoever.

  For example, their story about the thunder runs something like this: ‘Thunder is a loud noise in the sky, resulting from the disturbance of the air masses by the passage of lightning.’ And their legend ‘How the Giraffe Got His Long Neck’ runs: ‘In the old days the ancestors of Old Man Giraffe had slightly longer necks than other grassland creatures, and the access to the high leaves was so advantageous that it was mostly long-necked giraffes that survived, passing on the long neck in their blood just as a man might inherit his grandfather’s spear. Some say, however, that it is all a lot more complicated and this explanation only applies to the shorter neck of the okapi. And so it is.’

  The N’tuitif are a peaceful people, and have been hunted almost to extinction by neighbouring tribes, who have lots of imagination, and therefore plenty of gods, superstitions and ideas about how much better life would be if they had a bigger hunting ground.

  Of the events on the moon that day, the N’tuitif said: ‘The moon was brightly lit and from it rose another light which then split into three lights and faded. We do not know why this happened. It was just a thing.’

  They were then wiped out by a nearby tribe who knew that the lights had been a signal from the god Ukli to expand the hunting ground a bit more. However, they were soon defeated entirely by a tribe who knew that the lights were their ancestors, who lived in the moon, and who were urging them to kill all non-believers in the goddess Glipzo. Three years later they in turn were killed by a rock falling from the sky, as a result of a star exploding a billion years ago.

  What goes around, comes around. If not examined too closely, it passes for justice.

  *

  Few religions are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch. XXI, v.16) gives it as a cube 12,000 furlongs on a side. This is somewhat less than 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic feet. Even allowing that the Heavenly Host and other essential services take up at least two thirds of this space, this leaves about one million cubic feet of space for each hu
man occupant – assuming that every creature that could be called ‘human’ is allowed in, and that the human race eventually totals a thousand times the number of humans alive up until now. This is such a generous amount of space that it suggests that room has also been provided for some alien races or – a happy thought – that pets are allowed.

  *

  Many of the things built by the architect and freelance designer Bergholt Stuttley (‘Bloody Stupid’) Johnson were recorded in Ankh-Morpork, often on the line where it says ‘Cause of Death’. He was, people agreed, a genius, at least if you defined the word broadly. Certainly no one else in the world could make an explosive mixture out of common sand and water. A good designer, he always said, should be capable of anything. And, indeed, he was.

  TRUTH! Justice! Freedom! And a Hard-boiled Egg!

  Commander 8am Vimes of the Ankfe-Morpork City Watch bad it all. But now he’s back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing tip in when the lightning struck.

  Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. But he must survive, because he has a job to do. He must track down a murderer, teach his younger self how to be a good copper and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion. There’s a problem: if he wins, he’s got no wife, no child, no future.

  A Discworld Tale of One City, with a full chorus of street Urchins, ladies of negotiable affection, rebels, secret policemen and other children of the revolution.

  Plain old Sam Vimes had ended up with a dress uniform that at least looked as though its owner was male. But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armourers had made a new, gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armour. It was gilt by association.

  *

  ‘If I had a dollar for every copper’s funeral I’ve attended up here,’ said Colon, ‘I’d have … nineteen dollars and fifty pence.’

  ‘Fifty pence?’ said Nobby.

  ‘That was when Corporal Hildebiddle woke up just in time and banged on the lid,’ said Colon.

  Privilege just means ‘private law’. Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.

  Sweeper took a deep, long breath. ‘I like building gardens,’ he said. ‘Life should be a garden.’

  Vimes stared blankly at what was in front of them. ‘Okay’ he said. ‘The gravel and rocks, yes, I can see that. Shame about all the rubbish. It always turns up, doesn’t it…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘It’s part of the pattern.’

  ‘What? The old cigarette packet?’

  ‘Certainly. That invokes the element of air,’ said Sweeper.

  ‘And the cat doings?’

  ‘To remind us that disharmony, like a cat, gets everywhere.’

  ‘The cabbage stalks? The used sonky?’†

  ‘At our peril we forget the role of the organic in the total harmony. What arrives seemingly by chance in the pattern is part of a higher organization that we can only dimly comprehend. This is a very important fact, and has a bearing on your case.’

  ‘And the beer bottle?’

  For the first time since Vimes had met him, the monk frowned.

  ‘Y’know, some bugger always tosses one over the wall on his way back from the pub on Friday nights. If it wasn’t forbidden to do that kind of thing, he’d feel the flat of my hand and no mistake.’

  ‘It’s not part of the higher organization?’

  ‘Possibly. Who cares?’

  *

  The Night Watch. They were in the Night Watch because they were too scruffy, ugly, incompetent, awkwardly shaped or bloody-minded for the Day Watch. They were honest, in that special policeman sense of the word. That is, they didn’t steal things too heavy to carry. And they had the morale of damp gingerbread.

  *

  ‘A copper doesn’t keep flapping his lip. He doesn’t let on what he knows. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking. No. He watches and listens and he learns and he bides his time. His mind works like mad but his face is a blank. Until he’s ready’

  *

  Dr Lawn opened his back door and Vimes brushed past, the body over his shoulders.

  ‘You minister to all sorts, right?’ said Vimes.

  ‘Within reason, but—’

  ‘This one’s an Unmentionable,’ said Vimes. ‘Tried to kill me. Needs some medicine.’

  ‘Why’s he unconscious?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Didn’t want to take his medicine.’

  *

  Apart from the curfew and manning the gates, the Night Watch didn’t do a lot. This was partly because they were incompetent, and partly because no one expected them to be anything else. They walked the streets, slowly, giving anyone dangerous enough time to saunter away or melt into the shadows, and then rang the bell to announce to a sleeping world, or at any rate a world that had been asleep, the fact that all was, despite appearances, well. They also rounded up the quieter sort of drunk and the more docile kinds of stray cattle.

  ‘What’re you going to charge our man with, sarge?’ said Sam.

  ‘Attempted assault on a copper. You saw the knives.’

  You did kick him, though.’

  ‘Right, I forgot. We’ll do him for resisting arrest, too.’

  Dr Lawn put the tweezers down and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘That’s it,’ he said, wearily. ‘A bit of stitching and he’ll be fine.’

  ‘And there’s some others I need you to take a look at,’ said Vimes.

  ‘You know, that comes as no surprise,’ said the doctor.

  ‘One’s got a lot of holes in his feet, one dropped through the privy roof and has got a twisted leg, and one’s dead.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do much about the dead one,’ said the doctor. ‘How do you know he’s dead? I realize that I may regret asking that question.’

  ‘He’s got a broken neck from falling off a roof and I reckon he fell off because he got a steel crossbow bolt in his brain.’

  ‘Ah. That sounds like dead, if you want my medical opinion. Did you do it?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well, you’re a busy man, sergeant. You can’t be everywhere.’

  *

  ‘I understand, Havelock, that you scored zero in your examination for stealthy movement.’

  ‘May I ask how you found that out, madam?’

  ‘Oh, one hears things,’ Madam said lightly.

  ‘Well, it was true,’ said the Assassin.

  ‘And why was this?’

  ‘The examiner thought I’d used trickery, madam.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Of course. I thought that was the idea.’

  ‘And you never attended his lessons, he said.’

  ‘Oh, I did. Religiously’

  ‘He says he never saw you at any of them.’

  Havelock smiled. ‘And your point, madam, is … ?’

  *

  Vimes turned his back and faced the crowd. He said, ‘Anything’s a weapon, used right. Your bell is a club. Anything that pokes the other man hard enough to give you more time is a good thing. Never, ever threaten anyone with your sword unless you really mean it, because if he calls your bluff you suddenly don’t have many choices and they’re all the wrong ones. Don’t be frightened to use what you learned when you were kids. We don’t get marks for playing fair. And for close-up fighting, as your senior sergeant I explicitly forbid you to investigate the range of coshes, blackjacks and brass knuckles sold by Mrs Goodbody at No. 8 Easy Street, at a range of prices to suit all pockets, and should any of you approach me privately I absolutely will not demonstrate a variety of specialist blows suitable for these useful yet tricky instruments.’

  *

  Sometimes the principles behind a glorious revolution don’t stand much close examination.

  ‘I’ve got a question,’ said someone in the crowd of onlooker
s. ‘Harry Supple’s my name. Got a shoe shop in New Cobblers …’

  ‘Yes, comrade Supple?’

  ‘It says here in article seven of this here list—’ Mr Supple ploughed on.

  ‘—People’s Declaration of the Glorious Twenty-fourth of May’ said Reg.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, right … well, it says we’ll seize hold of the means of production, sort of thing, so what I want to know is, how does that work out regarding my shoe shop? I mean, I’m in it anyway, right? It’s not like there’s room for more’n me and my lad Garbut and maybe one customer.’

  ‘Ah, but after the revolution all property will be held in common by the people … er … that is, it’ll belong to you but also to everyone else, you see?’

  Comrade Supple looked puzzled. ‘But I’ll be the one making the shoes?’

  ‘Of course. But everything will belong to the people.’

  ‘So … who’s going to pay for the shoes?’ said Mr Supple.

  ‘Everyone will pay a reasonable price for their shoes and you won’t be guilty of living off the sweat of the common worker,’ said Reg, shortly. ‘Now, if we—’

  ‘You mean the cows?’ said Supple.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, there’s only the cows, and the lads at the tannery, and frankly all they do is stand in a field all day, well, not the tannery boys, obviously, but—’

  ‘Look,’ said Reg. ‘Everything will belong to the people and everyone will be better off. Do you understand?’

  The shoemaker’s frown grew deeper. He wasn’t certain if he was part of the people.

  *

  The major was not a fool, even though he looked like one. He was idealistic, and thought of his men as ‘jolly good chaps’ despite the occasional evidence to the contrary, and on the whole did the best he could with the moderate intelligence at his disposal. When he was a boy he’d read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines. Perhaps they just weren’t very good at them.