Small Gods tds-13

by Terry David John Pratchett

  Death studiously did nothing to indicate his feelings either way.

  "Might meet a few friends on the way, eh?" said the soldier.

  POSSIBLY.

  Ichlos set out. On the whole, he thought, it could have been worse.

  Urn clambered across the shelves like a monkey, pulling books out of their racks and throwing them down to the floor.

  "I can carry about twenty," he said. "But which twenty?"

  "Always wanted to do that," murmured Didactylos happily. "Upholding truth in the face of tyranny and so on. Hah! One man, unafraid of the-”

  "What to take? What to take?" shouted Urn.

  "We don't need Grido's Mechanics," said Didactylos. "Hey, I wish I could have seen the look on his face! Damn good shot, considering. I just hope someone wrote down what I-”

  "Principles of gearing! Theory of water expansion!" shouted Urn. "But we don't need Ibid's Civics or Gnomon's Ectopia, that's for sure-”

  "What? They belong to all mankind!" snapped Didactylos.

  "Then if all mankind will come and help us carry them, that's fine," said Urn. "But if it's just the two of us, I prefer to carry something useful."

  "Useful? Books on mechanisms?"

  "Yes! They can show people how to live better!"

  "And these show people how to be people," said Didactylos. "Which reminds me. Find me another lantern. I feel quite blind without one-”

  The Library door shook to a thunderous knocking. It wasn't the knocking of people who expected the door to be opened.

  "We could throw some of the others into the-”

  The hinges leapt out of the walls. The door thudded down.

  Soldiers scrambled over it, swords drawn.

  "Ah, gentlemen," said Didactylos. "Pray don't disturb my circles."

  The corporal in charge looked at him blankly, and then down at the floor.

  "What circles?" he said.

  "Hey, how about giving me a pair of compasses and coming back in, say, half an hour?"

  "Leave him, corporal," said Brutha.

  He stepped over the door.

  "I said leave him."

  "But I got orders to-”

  "Are you deaf? If you are, the Quisition can cure that," said Brutha, astonished at the steadiness of his own voice.

  "You don't belong to the Quisition," said the corporal.

  "No. But I know a man who does," said Brutha. "You are to search the palace for books. Leave him with me. He's an old man. What harm can he do?"

  The corporal looked hesitantly from Brutha to his prisoners.

  "Very good, corporal. I will take over."

  They all turned.

  "Did you hear me?" said Sergeant Simony, pushing his way forward.

  "But the deacon told us-”

  "Corporal?"

  "Yes, sergeant?"

  "The deacon is far away. I am right here."

  "Yes, sergeant." Go.

  "Yes, sergeant."

  Simony cocked an ear as the soldiers marched away.

  Then he stuck his sword in the door and turned to Didactylos. He made a fist with his left hand and brought his right hand down on it, palm extended.

  "The Turtle Moves," he said.

  "That all depends," said the philosopher, cautiously.

  "I mean I am . . . a friend," he said.

  "Why should we trust you?" said Urn.

  "Because you haven't got any choice," said Sergeant Simony briskly.

  "Can you get us out of here?" said Brutha.

  Simony glared at him. "You?" he said. "Why should I get you out of here? You're an inquisitor!" He grasped his sword.

  Brutha backed away.

  "I'm not!"

  "On the ship, when the captain sounded you, you just said nothing," said Simony. "You're not one of us."

  "I don't think I'm one of them, either," said Brutha. "I'm one of mine."

  He gave Didactylos an imploring look, which was a wasted effort, and turned it towards Urn instead.

  "I don't know about this soldier," he said. "All I know is that Vorbis means to have you killed and he will burn your Library. But I can help. I worked it out on the way here."

  "And don't listen to him," said Simony. He dropped on one knee in front of Didactylos, like a supplicant. "Sir, there are . . . some of us . . . who know your book for what it is . . . see, I have a copy . . ."

  He fumbled inside his breastplate.

  "We copied it out," said Simony. "One copy! That's all we had! But it's been passed around. Some of us who could read, read it to the others! It makes so much sense!"

  "Er . . ." said Didactylos. "What?"

  Simony waved his hands in excitement. "Because we know it-I've been to places that-it's true! There is a Great Turtle. The turtle does move! We don't need gods!"

  "Urn? No one's stripped the copper off the roof, have they?" said Didactylos.

  "Don't think so."

  "Remind me not to talk to this chap outside, then."

  "You don't understand!" said Simony. "I can save you. You have friends in unexpected places. Come on. I'll just kill this priest . . ."

  He gripped his sword. Brutha backed away.

  "No! I can help, too! That's why I came. When I saw you in front of Vorbis I knew what I could do!"

  "What can you do?" sneered Urn.

  "I can save the Library."

  "What? Put it on your back and run away?" sneered Simony.

  "No. I don't mean that. How many scrolls are there?"

  "About seven hundred," said Didactylos.

  "How many of them are important?"

  "All of them!" said Urn.

  "Maybe a couple of hundred," said Didactylos, mildly.

  "Uncle! "

  "All the rest is just wind and vanity publishing," said Didactylos.

  "But they're books!"

  "I may be able to take more than that," said Brutha slowly. "Is there a way out?"

  "There . . . could be," said Didactylos.

  "Don't tell him!" said Simony.

  "Then all your books will burn," said Brutha. He pointed to Simony. "He said you haven't got a choice. So you haven't got anything to lose, have you?"

  "He's a-” Simony began.

  "Everyone shut up," said Didactylos. He stared past Brutha's ear.

  "There may be a way out," he said. "What do you intend?"

  "I don't believe this!" said Urn. "There's Omnians here and you're telling them there's another way out!"

  "There's tunnels all through this rock," said Didactylos.

  "Maybe, but we don't tell people!"

  "I'm inclined to trust this person," said Didactylos. "He's got an honest face. Speaking philosophically."

  "Why should we trust him?"

  "Anyone stupid enough to expect us to trust him in these circumstances must be trustworthy," said Didactylos. "He'd be too stupid to be deceitful."

  "I can walk out of here right now," said Brutha. "And where will your Library be then?"

  "You see?" said Simony.

  "Just when things apparently look dark, suddenly we have unexpected friends everywhere," said Didactylos. "What is your plan, young man?"

  "I haven't got one," said Brutha. "I just do things, one after the other."

  "And how long will doing things one after another take you?"

  "About ten minutes, I think."

  Simony glared at Brutha.

  "Now get the books," said Brutha. "And I shall need some light."

  "But you can't even read!" said Urn.

  "I'm not going to read them." Brutha looked blankly at the first scroll, which happened to be De Chelonian Mobile.

  "Oh. My god," he said.

  "Something wrong?" said Didactylos.

  "Could someone fetch my tortoise?"

  Simony trotted through the palace. No one was paying him much attention. Most of the Ephebian guard was outside the labyrinth, and Vorbis had made it clear to anyone who was thinking of venturing inside just what would happen to the pa
lace's inhabitants. Groups of Omnian soldiers were looting in a disciplined sort of way.

  Besides, he was returning to his quarters.

  There was a tortoise in Brutha's room. It was sit­ting on the table, between a rolled-up scroll and a gnawed melon rind and, insofar as it was possible to tell with tortoises, was asleep. Simony grabbed it without ceremony, rammed it into his pack, and hur­ried back towards the Library.

  He hated himself for doing it. The stupid priest had ruined everything! But Didactylos had made him promise, and Didactylos was the man who knew the Truth.

  All the way there he had the impression that someone was trying to attract his attention.

  "You can remember them just by looking?" said Urn.

  "Yes."

  "The whole scroll?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't believe you."

  "The word LIBRVM outside this building has a chip in the top of the first letter,' said Brutha. "Xeno wrote Reflections, and old Aristocrates wrote Platitudes, and Didactylos thinks Ibid's Discourses are bloody stupid. There are six hundred paces from the Tyrant's throne room to the Library. There is a-”

  "He's got a good memory, you've got to grant him that," said Didactylos. "Show him some more scrolls."

  "How will we know he's remembered them?" Urn demanded, unrolling a scroll of geometrical theorems. "He can't read! And even if he could read, he can't write! "

  "We shall have to teach him."

  Brutha looked at a scroll full of maps. He shut his eyes. For a moment the jagged outline glowed against the inside of his eyelids, and then he felt them settle into his mind. They were still there somewhere-he could bring them back at any time. Urn unrolled another scroll. Pictures of animals. This one, drawings of plants and lots of writing. This one, just writing. This one, triangles and things. They settled down in his memory. After a while, he wasn't even aware of the scroll unrolling. He just had to keep looking.

  He wondered how much he could remember. but that was stupid. You just remembered everything you saw. A tabletop, or a scroll full of writing. There was as much information in the grain and coloring of the wood as there was in Xeno's Reflections.

  Even so, he was conscious of a certain heaviness of mind, a feeling that if he turned his head sharply then memory would slosh out of his ears.

  Urn picked up a scroll at random and unrolled it partway.

  "Describe what an Ambiguous Puzuma looks like," he demanded.

  "Don't know," said Brutha. He blinked.

  "So much for Mr. Memory," said Urn.

  "He can't read, boy. That's not fair," said the philosopher.

  "All right. I mean-the fourth picture in the third scroll you saw," said Urn.

  "A four-legged creature facing left," said Brutha. "A large head similar to a cat's and broad shoulders with the body tapering towards the hindquarters. The body is a pattern of dark and light squares. The ears are very small and laid flat against the head. There are six whiskers. The tail is stubby. Only the hind feet are clawed, three claws on each foot. The fore feet are about the same length as the head and held up against the body. A band of thick hair-”

  "That was fifty scrolls ago," said Urn. "He saw the whole scroll for a second or two."

  They looked at Brutha. Brutha blinked again.

  "You know everything?" said Urn.

  "I don't know."

  "You've got half the Library in your head!"

  "I feel . . . a . . . bit . . ."

  The Library of Ephebe was a furnace. The flames burned blue where the melted copper roof dripped on to the shelves.

  All libraries, everywhere, are connected by the bookworm holes in space created by the strong spacetime distortions found around any large collections of books.

  Only a very few librarians learn the secret, and there are inflexible rules about making use of the fact. Because it amounts to time travel, and time travel causes big problems.

  But if a library is on fire, and down in the history books as having been on fire . . .

  There was a small pop, utterly unheard among the crackling of the bookshelves, and a figure dropped out of nowhere on to a small patch of unburned floor in the middle of the Library.

  It looked ape-like, but it moved in a very purposeful way. Long simian arms beat out the flames, pulled scrolls off the shelves, and stuffed them into a sack. When the sack was full, it knuckled back into the middle of the room . . . and vanished, with another pop.

  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.

  Brutha awoke with the smell of the sea in his nostrils. At least it was what people think of as the smell of the sea, which is the stink of antique fish and rotten seaweed.

  He was in some sort of shed. Such light as managed to come through its one unglazed window was red, and flickered. One end of the shed was open to the water. The ruddy light showed a few figures clustered around something there.

  Brutha gently probed the contents of his memory. Everything seemed to be there, the Library scrolls neatly arranged. The words were as meaningless to him as any other written word, but the pictures were interesting. More interesting than most things in his memory, anyway.

  He sat up, carefully.

  "You're awake, then," said the voice of Om, in his head. "Feel a bit full, do we? Feel a bit like a stack of shelves? Feel like we've got big notices saying "SILENCIOS!" all over the place inside our head? What did you go and do that for?"

  "I . . . don't know. It seemed like . . . the next thing to do. Where are you?"

  "Your soldier friend has got me in his pack. Thanks for looking after me so carefully, by the way."

  Brutha managed to get to his feet. The world revolved round him for a moment, adding a third astronomical theory to the two currently occupying the minds of local thinkers.

  He peered out of the window. The red light was coming from fires all over Ephebe, but there was one huge glow over the Library.

  "Guerrilla activity," said Om. "Even the slaves are fighting. Can't understand why. You think they'd jump at the chance to be revenged on their masters, eh?"

  "I suppose a slave in Ephebe has the chance to be free," said Brutha.

  There was a hiss from the other end of the shed, and a metallic, whirring noise. Brutha heard Urn say, "There! I told you. Just a block in the tubes. Lets get some more fuel in."

  Brutha tottered towards the group.

  They were clustered round a boat. As boats went, it was of normal shape-a pointed end in front, a flat end at the back. But there was no mast. What there was, was a large, copper­colored ball, hanging in a wooden framework toward the back of the boat.

  There was an iron basket underneath it, in which someone had already got a good fire going.

  And the ball was spinning in its frame, in a cloud of steam.

  "I've seen that," he said. "In De Chelonian Mobile. There was a drawing."

  "Oh, it's the walking Library," said Didactylos. "Yes. You're right. Illustrating the principle of reaction. I never asked Urn to build a big one. This is what comes of thinking with your hands."

  "I took it round the lighthouse one night last week," said Urn. "No problems at all."

  "Ankh-Morpork is a lot further than that," said Simony.

  "Yes, it is five times further than the distance between Ephebe and Omnia," said Brutha solemnly. "There was a scroll of maps," he added.

  Steam rose in scalding clouds from the whirring ball. Now he was closer, Brutha could see that half a dozen very short oars had been joined together in a star-shaped pattern behind the copper globe, and hung over the rear of the boat. Wooden cogwheels and a couple of endless belts fiIled the intervening space. As the globe spun, the paddles thrashed at the air.

  "How does it work?" he said.

&
nbsp; "Very simple," said Urn. "The fire makes-”

  "We haven't got time for this," said Simony.

  "-makes the water hot and so it gets angry," said the apprentice philosopher. "So it rushes out of the globe through these four little nozzles to get away from the fire. The plumes of steam push the globe around, and the cogwheels and Legibus's screw mechanism transfer the motion to the paddles which turn, pushing the boat through the water."

  "Very philosophical," said Didactylos.

  Brutha felt that he ought to stand up for Omnian progress.

  "The great doors of the Citadel weigh tons but are opened solely by the power of faith," he said. "One push and they swing open."

  "I should very much like to see that," said Urn.

  Brutha felt a faint sinful twinge of pride that Omnia still had anything he could be proud of.

  "Very good balance and some hydraulics, probably."

  "Oh."

  Simony thoughtfully prodded the mechanism with his sword.

  "Have you thought of all the possibilities?" he said.

  Urn's hands began to weave through the air. "You mean mighty ships ploughing the wine-dark sea with no-” he began.

  "On land, I was thinking," said Simony. "Perhaps . . . on some sort of cart . . ."

  "Oh, no point in putting a boat on a cart."

  Simony's eyes gleamed with the gleam of a man who had seen the future and found it covered with armor plating.

  "Hmm," he said.

  "It's all very well, but it's not philosophy," said Didactylos.

  "Where's the priest?"

  "I'm here, but I'm not a-”

  "How're you feeling? You went out like a candle back there."

  "I'm . . . better now."

  "One minute upright, next minute a draftexcluder."

  "I'm much better."

  "Happen a lot, does it?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Remembering the scrolls okay?"

  "I . . . think so. Who set fire to the Library?"

  Urn looked up from the mechanism.

  "He did," he said.

  Brutha stared at Didactylos.

  "You set fire to your own Library?"

  "I'm the only one qualified," said the philosopher. "Besides, it keeps it out of the way of Vorbis."

  "What?"

  "Suppose he'd read the scrolls? He's bad enough as it is. He'd be a lot worse with all that knowledge inside him."