‘How did you get here, actually?’ said the druid. ‘We’re five hundred feet up, unless I’ve got the runes wrong again.’
Rincewind tried not to think about height. ‘We sort of dropped in as we were passing,’ he said.
‘On our way to the ground,’ Twoflower added.
‘Only your rock broke our fall,’ said Rincewind. His back complained. ‘Thanks,’ he added.
‘I thought we’d run into some turbulence a while back,’ said the druid, whose name turned out to be Belafon. ‘That must have been you.’ He shivered. ‘It must be morning by now,’ he said. ‘Sod the rules, I’m taking us up. Hang on.’
‘What to?’ said Rincewind.
‘Well, just indicate a general unwillingness to fall off,’ said Belafon. He took a large iron pendulum out of his robe and swung it in a series of baffling sweeps over the fire.
Clouds whipped around them, there was a horrible feeling of heaviness, and suddenly the rock burst into sunlight.
It levelled off a few feet above the clouds, in a cold but bright blue sky. The clouds that had seemed chillingly distant last night and horribly clammy this morning were now a fleecy white carpet, stretching away in all directions; a few mountain peaks stood out like islands. Behind the rock the wind of its passage sculpted the clouds into transient whirls. The rock—
It was about thirty feet long and ten feet wide, and blueish.
‘What an amazing panorama,’ said Twoflower, his eyes shining.
‘Um, what’s keeping us up?’ said Rincewind.
‘Persuasion,’ said Belafon, wringing out the hem of his robe.
‘Ah,’ said Rincewind sagely.
‘Keeping them up is easy,’ said the druid, holding up a thumb and squinting down the length of his arm at a distant mountain, ‘The hard part is landing.’
‘You wouldn’t think so, would you?’ said Twoflower.
‘Persuasion is what keeps the whole universe together,’ said Belafon. ‘It’s no good saying it’s all done by magic.’
Rincewind happened to glance down through the thinning cloud to a snowy landscape a considerable distance below. He knew he was in the presence of a madman, but he was used to that; if listening to this madman meant he stayed up here, he was all ears.
Belafon sat down with his feet dangling over the edge of the rock.
‘Look, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If you keep thinking the rock shouldn’t be flying it might hear you and become persuaded and you will turn out to be right, okay? It’s obvious you aren’t up to date with modern thinking.’
‘So it would seem,’ said Rincewind weakly. He was trying not to think about rocks on the ground. He was trying to think about rocks swooping like swallows, bounding across landscapes in the sheer joy of levity, zooming skywards in a—
He was horribly aware he wasn’t very good at it.
* * *
The druids of the Disc prided themselves on their forward-looking approach to the discovery of the mysteries of the Universe. Of course, like druids everywhere they believed in the essential unity of all life, the healing power of plants, the natural rhythm of the seasons and the burning alive of anyone who didn’t approach all this in the right frame of mind, but they had also thought long and hard about the very basis of creation and had formulated the following theory:
The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.{20}
Thus it was that the sun and moon orbited the disc because they were persuaded not to fall down, but didn’t actually fly away because of uncertainty. Charm allowed trees to grow and bloody-mindedness kept them up, and so on.
Some druids suggested that there were certain flaws in this theory, but senior druids explained very pointedly that there was indeed room for informed argument, the cut and thrust of exciting scientific debate, and basically it lay on top of the next solstice bonfire.
* * *
‘Ah, so you’re an astronomer?’ said Twoflower.
‘Oh no,’ said Belafon, as the rock drifted gently around the curve of a mountain, ‘I’m a computer hardware consultant.’
‘What’s a computer hardware?’
‘Well, this is,’ said the druid, tapping the rock with a sandalled foot. ‘Part of one, anyway. It’s a replacement. I’m delivering it. They’re having trouble with the big circles up on the Vortex Plains. So they say, anyway; I wished I had a bronze torc for every user who didn’t read the manual.’ He shrugged.
‘What use is it, then, exactly?’ asked Rincewind. Anything to keep his mind off the drop below.
‘You can use it to—to tell you what time of year it is,’ said Belafon.
‘Ah. You mean if it’s covered in snow then it must be winter?’
‘Yes. I mean no. I mean, supposing you wanted to know when a particular star is going to rise—’
‘Why?’ said Twoflower, radiating polite interest.
‘Well, maybe you want to know when to plant your crops,’ said Belafon, sweating a little, ‘or maybe—’
‘I’ll lend you my almanac, if you like,’ said Twoflower.
‘Almanac?’
‘It’s a book that tells you what day it is,’ said Rincewind wearily. ‘It’d be right up your leyline.’
Belafon stiffened. ‘Book?’ he said. ‘Like, with paper?’
‘Yes.’
‘That doesn’t sound very reliable to me,’ said the druid nastily. ‘How can a book know what day it is? Paper can’t count.’
He stamped off to the front of the rock, causing it to wallow alarmingly. Rincewind swallowed hard and beckoned Twoflower closer.
‘Have you ever heard of culture shock?’ he hissed.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s what happens when people spend five hundred years trying to get a stone circle to work properly and then someone comes up with a little book with a page for every day and little chatty bits saying things like “Now is a good time to plant broad beans” and “Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead,” and do you know what the most important thing to remember about culture shock’ Rincewind paused for breath, and moved his lips silently trying to remember where the sentence had got to, ‘is?’ he concluded.
‘What?’
‘Don’t give it to a man flying a thousand ton rock.’
* * *
‘Has it gone?’
Trymon peered cautiously over the battlements of the Tower of Art, the great spire of crumbling masonry that loomed over Unseen University. The cluster of students and instructors of magic, far below, nodded.
‘Are you sure?’
The bursar cupped his hands and shouted.
‘It broke down the hubward door and escaped an hour ago, sir,’ he yelled.
‘Wrong,’ said Trymon. ‘It left, we escaped. Well, I’ll be getting down, then. Did it get anyone?’
The bursar swallowed. He was not a wizard, but a kind, good-natured man who should not have had to see the things he had witnessed in the past hour. Of course, it wasn’t unknown for small demons, coloured lights and various half-materialised imaginings to wander around the campus, but there had been something about the implacable onslaught of the Luggage that had unnerved him. Trying to stop it would have been like trying to wrestle a glacier.
‘It—it swallowed the Dean of Liberal Studies, sir,’ he shouted.
Trymon brightened. ‘It’s an ill wind,’ he murmured. He started down the long spiral staircase. After a while he smiled, a thin, tight smile. The day was definitely improving.
There was a lot of organising to do. And if there was something Trymon really liked, it was organising.
* * *
The rock swooped across the high plains, whipping snow from the drifts a mere few feet below. Belafon scuttled about urgently, smearing a little mistletoe ointment here, chalking a rune there, while Rincewind cowered in terror and exhaustion and Twoflower worried abo
ut his Luggage.
‘Up ahead!’ screamed the druid above the noise of the slipstream. ‘Behold, the great computer of the skies!’
Rincewind peered between his fingers. On the distant skyline was an immense construction of grey and black slabs, arranged in concentric circles and mystic avenues, gaunt and forbidding against the snow. Surely men couldn’t have moved those nascent mountains—surely a troop of giants had been turned to stone by some…
‘It looks like a lot of rocks,’ said Twoflower.
Belafon hesitated in mid-gesture.
‘What?’ he said.
‘It’s very nice,’ added the tourist hurriedly. He sought for a word. ‘Ethnic,’ he decided.
The druid stiffened. ‘Nice?’ he said. ‘A triumph of the silicon chunk, a miracle of modern masonic technology—nice?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Twoflower, to whom sarcasm was merely a seven letter word beginning with S.
‘What does ethnic mean?’ said the druid.
‘It means terribly impressive,’ said Rincewind hurriedly, ‘and we seem to be in danger of landing, if you don’t mind—’
Belafon turned around, only slightly mollified. He raised his arms wide and shouted a series of untranslatable words, ending with ‘nice!’ in a hurt whisper.
The rock slowed, drifted sideways in a billow of snow, and hovered over the circle. Down below a druid waved two bunches of mistletoe in complicated patterns, and Belafon skilfully brought the massive slab to rest across two giant uprights with the faintest of clicks.
Rincewind let his breath out in a long sigh. It hurried off to hide somewhere.
A ladder banged against the side of the slab and the head of an elderly druid appeared over the edge. He gave the two passengers a puzzled glance, and then looked up at Belafon.
‘About bloody time,’ he said. ‘Seven weeks to Hogswatchnight and it’s gone down on us again.’
‘Hallo, Zakriah,’ said Belafon. ‘What happened this time?’
‘It’s all totally fouled up. Today it predicted sunrise three minutes early. Talk about a klutz, boy, this is it.’
Belafon clambered onto the ladder and disappeared from view. The passengers looked at each other, and then stared down into the vast open space between the inner circle of stones.
‘What shall we do now?’ said Twoflower.
‘We could go to sleep?’ suggested Rincewind.
Twoflower ignored him, and climbed down the ladder.
Around the circle druids were tapping the megaliths with little hammers and listening intently. Several of the huge stones were lying on their sides, and each was surrounded by another crowd of druids who were examining it carefully and arguing amongst themselves. Arcane phrases floated up to where Rincewind sat:
‘It can’t be software incompatibility—the Chant of the Trodden Spiral was designed for concentric rings, idiot…’
‘I say fire it up again and try a simple moon ceremony…’
‘… all right, all right, nothing’s wrong with the stones, it’s just that the universe has gone wrong, right?…’
Through the mists of his exhausted mind Rincewind remembered the horrible star they’d seen in the sky. Something had gone wrong with the universe last night.
How had he come to be back on the Disc?
He had a feeling that the answers were somewhere inside his head. And an even more unpleasant feeling began to dawn on him that something else was watching the scene below—watching it from behind his eyes.
The Spell had crept from its lair deep in the untrodden dirtroads of his mind, and was sitting bold as brass in his forebrain, watching the passing scene and doing the mental equivalent of eating popcorn.
He tried to push it back—and the world vanished…
He was in darkness; a warm, musty darkness, the darkness of the tomb, the velvet blackness of the mummy case. There was a strong smell of old leather and the sourness of ancient paper. The paper rustled.
He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors—and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine…
‘Rincewind,’ said a voice. Rincewind had never heard a lizard speak, but if one did it would have a voice like that.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘Yes?’
The voice chuckled—a strange sound, rather papery.
‘You ought to say “Where am I?”’ it said.
‘Would I like it if I knew?’ said Rincewind. He stared hard at the darkness. Now that he was accustomed to it, he could see something. Something vague, hardly bright enough to be anything at all, just the merest tracery in the air. Something strangely familiar.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re dreaming.’
‘Can I wake up now, please?’
‘No,’ said another voice, as old and dry as the first but still slightly different.
‘We have something very important to tell you,’ said a third voice, if anything more corpse-dry than the others. Rincewind nodded stupidly. In the back of his mind the Spell lurked and peered cautiously over his mental shoulder.
‘You’ve caused us a lot of trouble, young Rincewind,’ the voice went on. ‘All this dropping over the edge of the world with no thought for other people. We had to seriously distort reality, you know.’
‘Gosh.’
‘And now you have a very important task ahead of you.’
‘Oh. Good.’
‘Many years ago we arranged for one of our number to hide in your head, because we could foresee a time coming when you would need to play a very important role.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘You run away a lot,’ said one of the voices. ‘That is good. You are a survivor.’
‘Survivor? I’ve nearly been killed dozens of times!’
‘Exactly.’
‘Oh.’
‘But try not to fall off the Disc again. We really can’t have that.’
‘Who are we, exactly?’ said Rincewind.
There was a rustling in the darkness.
‘In the beginning was the word,’ said a dry voice right behind him.
‘It was the Egg,’ corrected another voice. ‘I distinctly remember. The Great Egg of the Universe. Slightly rubbery.’
‘You’re both wrong, in fact. I’m sure it was the primordial slime.’
A voice by Rincewind’s knee said: ‘No, that came afterwards. There was firmament first. Lots of firmament. Rather sticky, like candyfloss. Very syrupy, in fact—.’
‘In case anyone’s interested,’ said a crackly voice on Rincewind’s left, ‘you’re all wrong. In the beginning was the Clearing of the Throat—’{21}
‘—then the word—’
‘Pardon me, the slime—’
‘Distinctly rubbery, I thought—’
There was a pause. Then a voice said carefully, ‘Anyway, whatever it was, we remember it distinctly.’
‘Quite so.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And our task is to see that nothing dreadful happens to it, Rincewind.’
Rincewind squinted into the blackness. ‘Would you kindly explain what you’re talking about?’
There was a papery sigh. ‘So much for metaphor,’ said one of the voices. ‘Look, it is very important you safeguard the Spell in your head and bring it back to us at the right time, you understand, so that when the moment is precisely right we can be said. Do you understand?’
Rincewind thought: we can be said!
And it dawned on him what the tracery was, ahead of him. It was writing on a page, seen from underneath.
‘I’m in the Octavo?’ he said.
‘In certain metaphysical respects,’ said one of the voices in offhand tones. It came closer. He could feel the dry rustling right in front of his nose…
He ran away.
* * *
The single red dot glowed in its patch of darkness. Trymon, still wearing the ceremonial robes from his inauguration as head of the Order, c
ouldn’t rid himself of the feeling that it had grown slightly while he watched. He turned away from the window with a shudder.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘It’s a star,’ said the Professor of Astrology, ‘I think.’
‘You think?’
The astrologer winced. They were standing in Unseen University’s observatory, and the tiny ruby pinpoint on the horizon wasn’t glaring at him any worse than his new master.
‘Well, you see, the point is that we’ve always believed stars to be pretty much the same as our sun—’
‘You mean balls of fire about a mile across?’
‘Yes. But this new one is, well—big.’
‘Bigger than the sun?’ said Trymon. He’d always considered a mile-wide ball of fire quite impressive, although he disapproved of stars on principle. They made the sky look untidy.
‘A lot bigger,’ said the astrologer slowly.
‘Bigger than Great A’Tuin’s head, perhaps?’
The astrologer looked wretched.
‘Bigger than Great A’Tuin and the Disc together,’ he said. ‘We’ve checked,’ he added hurriedly, ‘and we’re quite sure.’
‘That is big,’ agreed Trymon. ‘The word “huge” comes to mind.’
‘Massive,’ agreed the astrologer hurriedly.
‘Hmm.’
Trymon paced the broad mosaic floor of the observatory, which was inlaid with the signs of the Disc zodiac. There were sixty-four of them, from Wezen the Double-headed Kangaroo to Gahoolie, the Vase of Tulips (a constellation of great religious significance whose meaning, alas, was now lost).
He paused on the blue and gold tilework of Mubbo the Hyaena, and turned suddenly.
‘We’re going to hit it?’ he asked.
‘I am afraid so, sir,’ said the astrologer.
‘Hmm.’ Trymon walked a few paces forward, stroking his beard thoughtfully. He paused on the cusp of Okjock the Salesman and The Celestial Parsnip.
‘I’m not an expert in these matters,’ he said, ‘but I imagine this would not be a good thing?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Very hot, stars?’
The astrologer swallowed. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘We’d be burned up?’
‘Eventually. Of course, before that there would be discquakes, tidal waves, gravitational disruption and probably the atmosphere would be stripped away.’
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