Mort (23 page)
Authors: Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett
lives in England, an island off the coast of France, where he spends his time writing Discworld novels in accordance with the Very Strong Anthropic Principle, which holds that the entire Purpose of the Universe is to make possible a being that will live in England, an island off the coast of France, and spend his time writing Discworld novels. Which is exactly what he does. Which proves the whole business true. Any Questions?
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UNANIMOUS
PRAISE
FOR TERRY PRATCHETT
“Superb popular entertainment.”
Washington Post Book World
“Pratchett has now moved beyond the limits of humorous fantasy, and should be recognized as one of the more significant contemporary English language satirists.”
Publishers Weekly
“Humorously entertaining…subtly thought-provoking…Pratchett’s Discworld books are filled with humor and with magic, but they’re rooted in—of all things—real life and cold, hard reason.”
Chicago Tribune
“Think J.R.R. Tolkien with a sharper, more satiric edge.”
Houston Chronicle
“His books are richly textured, and far more complex than they appear at first.”
Barbara Mertz
“Truly original…Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz…. Has the energy of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and the inventiveness of
Alice in Wonderland.
…Brilliant!”
A. S. Byatt
“For lighthearted escape with a thoughtful center, you can’t do better than…any…Discworld novel.”
Washington Post Book World
“Simply the best humorous writer of the twentieth century.”
Oxford Times
“A brilliant storyteller with a sense of humor…whose infectious fun completely engulfs you…. The Dickens of the twentieth century.”
Mail on Sunday
(London)
“If you are unfamiliar with Pratchetts unique blend of philosophical badinage interspersed with slapstick, you are on the threshold of a mind-expanding opportunity.”
Financial Times
(London)
“The funniest parodist working in the field today, period.”
New York Review of Science Fiction
“Pratchett demonstrates just how great the distance is between one- or two-joke writers and the comic masters whose work will be read into the next century.”
Locus
“Pratchett is a comic genius.”
Express
(London)
“As always he is head and shoulders above the best of the rest. He is screamingly funny. He is wise. He has style.”
Daily Telegraph
(London)
“Terry Pratchett does for fantasy what Douglas Adams did for science fiction.”
Today
(Great Britain)
“What makes Terry Pratchett’s fantasies so entertaining is that their humor depends on the characters first, on the plot second, rather than the other way around. The story isn’t there simply to lead from one slapstick pratfall to another pun. Its humor is genuine and unforced.”
Ottawa Citizen
“Terry Pratchett is more than a magician. He is the kindest, most fascinating teacher you ever had.”
Harlan Ellison
“Delightful…. Logically illogical as only Terry Pratchett can write.”
Anne McCaffrey
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata • Truckers
Diggers • Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead • Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat
(with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens
(with Neil Gaiman)
T
HE
D
ISCWORLD
®
S
ERIES
:
Going Postal • Monstrous Regiment • Night Watch
The Last Hero • The Truth • Thief of Time
The Fifth Elephant • Carpe Jugulum
The Last Continent • Jingo
Hogfather • Feet of Clay • Maskerade
Interesting Times • Soul Music • Men at Arms
Lords and Ladies • Small Gods
Witches Abroad • Reaper Man
Moving Pictures • Eric
(with Josh Kirby)
Guards! Guards! • Pyramids
Wyrd Sisters • Sourcery • Mort • Equal Rites
The Light Fantastic • The Color of Magic
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
(with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
(with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion
(with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp
(with Stephen Briggs)
The Pratchett Portfolio
(with Paul Kidby)
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MORT
. Copyright © 1987 by Terry Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2007 ISBN: 9780061803888
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*
Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir
instantaneously
. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.
*
The first pizza was created on the Disc by the Klatchian mystic Ronron “Revelation Joe” Shuwadhi, who claimed to have been given the recipe in a dream by the Creator of the Discworld Himself, Who had apparently added that it was what He had intended all along. Those desert travelers who had seen the original, which is reputedly miraculously preserved in the Forbidden City of Ee, say that what the Creator had in mind then was a fairly small cheese and pepperoni affair with a few black olives** and things like mountains and seas got added out of last-minute enthusiasm as so often happens.
**
After the Schism of the Turnwise Ones and the deaths of some 25,000 people in the ensuing jihad the faithful were allowed to add one small bayleaf to the recipe.
*
Although not the droopy moustache and round furry hat with the spike on it.
†
The speech has been passed on to later generations in an epic poem commissioned by his son, who wasn’t born in a saddle and could eat with a knife and fork. It began:
“See yonder the stolid foemen slumber
Fat with stolen gold, corrupt of mind.
Let the spears of your wrath be as the steppe fire on a
windy day in the dry season,
Let your honest blade thrust like the horns of
a five-year old yok with severe toothache….”
And went on for three hours. Reality, which can’t usually afford to pay poets, records that in fact the entire speech ran:
“Lads, most of them are still in bed, we should go through them like kzak fruit through a short grandmother, and I for one have had it right up to here with yurts, okay?”
*
The Disc’s greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents. However, the gods took pity on them and turned him into an ironing board** and her into a small brass bollard.
**
When you’re a god, you don’t have to have reasons.
*
There had been half a jar of elderly mayonnaise, a piece of very old cheese, and a tomato with white mold growing on it. Since during the day the pantry of the palace of Sto Lat normally contained fifteen whole stags, one hundred brace of partridges, fifty hogsheads of butter, two hundred jugs of hares, seventy-five sides of beef, two miles of assorted sausages, various fowls, eighty dozen eggs, several Circle Sea sturgeon, a vat of caviar and an elephant’s leg stuffed with olives, Cutwell had learned once again that one universal manifestation of raw, natural magic throughout the universe is this: that any domestic food store, raided furtively in the middle of the night, always contains, no matter what its daytime inventory, half a jar of elderly mayonnaise, a piece of very old cheese, and a tomato with white mold growing on it.
*
Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.
*
The stone garden of Universal Peace and Simplicity, laid out to the orders of the old Emperor One Sun Mirror**, used economy of position and shadow to symbolize the basic unity of soul and matter and the harmony of all things. It was said the secrets at the very heart of reality lay hidden in the precise ordering of its stones.
**
Whose other claim to fame was his habit of cutting off his enemies’ lips and legs and then promising them their freedom if they could run through the city playing a trumpet.
*
This is not precisely true. It is generally agreed by philosophers that the shortest time in which everything can happen is one thousand billion years.