Reaper Man
Terry Pratchett
Reaper Man
A Novel of Discworld
®
Contents
T
he Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it’s springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.
It is danced innocently by raggedy-bearded young mathematicians to an inexpert accordion rendering of “Mrs. Widgery’s Lodger” and ruthlessly by such as the Ninja Morris Men of New Ankh, who can do strange and terrible things with a simple handkerchief and a bell.
And it is never danced properly.
Except on the Discworld, which is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which travel through space on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the world turtle.
And even there, only in one place have they got it right. It’s a small village high in the Ramtop Mountains, where the big and simple secret is handed down across the generations.
There, the men dance on the first day of spring, backward and forward, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping. People come and watch. There’s an ox roast afterward, and it’s generally considered a nice day out for all the family.
But that isn’t the secret.
The secret is the
other
dance.
And that won’t happen for a while yet.
There is a ticking, such as might be made by a clock. And, indeed, in the sky there is a clock, and the ticking of freshly minted seconds flows out from it.
At least, it looks like a clock. But it is in fact exactly the opposite of a clock, and the biggest hand goes around just once.
There is a plain under a dim sky. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you’d be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away.
Three gray figures floated just above it. Exactly what they were can’t be described in normal language. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosy-cheeked about them. They might be numbered among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Call them auditors. Auditors of reality.
They were in conversation without speaking. They didn’t need to speak. They just changed reality so that they had spoken.
One said, It has never happened before. Can it be done?
One said, It will have to be done. There is a
personality
. Personalities come to an end. Only forces endure.
It said this with a certain satisfaction.
One said, Besides…there have been irregularities. Where you get personality, you get irregularities. Well-known fact.
One said, He has worked inefficiently?
One said, No. We can’t get him there.
One said, That is the point. The word is
him
. Becoming a personality
is
inefficient. We don’t want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to
like
people?
One said, Got a crush on them, sort of thing?
One said, in a voice that would have been even chillier if it was not already at absolute zero, No.
One said, Sorry. Just my little joke.
One said, Besides, sometimes he wonders about his job. Such speculation is dangerous.
One said, No argument there.
One said, Then we are agreed?
One, who seemed to have been thinking about something, said, Just one moment. Did you not just use the singular pronoun, “my?” Not developing a personality, are you?
One said, guiltily, Who? Us?
One said, Where there is personality, there is discord.
One said, Yes. Yes. Very true.
One said, All right. But watch it in future.
One said, Then we are agreed?
They looked up at the face of Azrael, outlined against the sky. In fact, it
was
the sky.
Azrael nodded, slowly.
One said, Very well. Where is this place?
One said, It is the Discworld. It rides through space on the back of a giant turtle.
One said, Oh, one of
that
sort. I hate them.
One said, You’re doing it again. You said “I.”
One said, No! No! I didn’t! I never said “I”!…oh, bugger…
It burst into flame and burned in the same way that a small cloud of vapor burns, quickly and with no residual mess. Almost immediately, another one appeared. It was identical in appearance to its vanished sibling.
One said, Let that be a lesson. To become a personality is to end. And now…let us go.
Azrael watched them skim away.
It is hard to fathom the thoughts of a creature so big that, in real space, his length would be measured only in terms of the speed of light. But he turned his enormous bulk and, with eyes that stars could be lost in, sought among the myriad worlds for a flat one.
On the back of a turtle. The Discworld—world and mirror of worlds.
It sounded interesting. And, in his prison of a billion years, Azrael was bored.
And this is the room where the future pours into the past via the pinch of the now.
Timers line the walls. Not hour-glasses, although they have the same shape. Not egg-timers, such as you might buy as a souvenir attached to a small board with the name of the holiday resort of your choice jauntily inscribed on it by someone with the same sense of style as a jelly doughnut.
It’s not even sand in there. It’s seconds, endlessly turning the
maybe
into the
was
.
And every lifetimer has a name on it.
And the room is full of the soft hissing of people living.
Picture the scene…
And now add the sharp clicking of bone on stone, getting closer.
A dark shape crosses the field of vision and moves up the endless shelves of sibilant glassware. Click, click. Here’s a glass with the top bulb nearly empty. Bone fingers rise and reach out. Select. And another. Select. And more. Many, many more. Select, select.
It’s all in a day’s work. Or it would be, if days existed here.
Click, click, as the dark shape moves patiently along the rows.
And stops.
And hesitates.
Because here’s a small gold timer, not much bigger than a watch.
It wasn’t there yesterday, or wouldn’t have been if yesterdays existed here.
Bony fingers close around it and hold it up to the light.
It’s got a name on it, in small capital letters.
The name is DEATH.
Death put down the timer, and then picked it up again. The sands of time were already pouring through. He turned it over experimentally, just in case. The sand went on pouring, only now it was going upward. He hadn’t really expected anything else.
It meant that, even if tomorrows could exist here, there wasn’t going to be any. Not anymore.
There was a movement in the air behind him.
Death turned slowly, and addressed the figure that wavered indistinctly in the gloom.
W
HY
?
It told him.
B
UT THAT IS
…
NOT RIGHT
.
It told him that No, it was right.
Not a muscle moved on Death’s face, because he hadn’t got any.
I
SHALL APPEAL
.
It told him,
he
should know that there was no appeal. Never any appeal. Never any appeal.
Death thought about this, and then he said:
I
HAVE ALWAYS DONE MY DUTY AS
I
SAW FIT
.
The figure floated closer. It looked vaguely like a gray-robed and hooded monk.
It told him, We know. That is why we’re letting you keep the horse.
The sun was near the horizon. The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours. Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching.
“You don’t get the kind of sun now that you used to get,” said one of them.
“You’re right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff.”
“It were higher, too.”
“It was. You’re right.”
“And nymphs and larvae showed you a bit of respect.”
“They did. They did,” said the other mayfly vehemently.
“I reckon, if mayflies these hours behaved a bit better, we’d still be having proper sun.”
The younger mayflies listened politely.
“I remember,” said one of the oldest mayflies, “when all this was fields, as far as you could see.”
The younger mayflies looked around.
“It’s still fields,” one of them ventured, after a polite interval.
“I remember when it was
better
fields,” said the old mayfly sharply.
“Yeah,” said his colleague. “And there was a cow.”
“That’s right! You’re right! I remember that cow! Stood right over there for, oh, forty, fifty minutes. It was brown, as I recall.”
“You don’t get cows like that these hours.”
“You don’t get cows at all.”
“What’s a cow?” said one of the hatchlings.
“See?” said the oldest mayfly triumphantly. “That’s modern Ephemeroptera for you.” It paused. “What were we doing before we were talking about the sun?”
“Zigzagging aimlessly over the water,” said one of the young flies. This was a fair bet in any case.
“No, before that.”
“Er…you were telling us about the Great Trout.”
“Ah, yes. Right. The Trout. Well, you see, if you’ve been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down properly—”
“—taking heed of your elders and betters—”
“—yes, and taking heed of your elders and betters, then eventually the Great Trout—”
Clop
Clop
“Yes?” said one of the younger mayflies.
There was no reply.
“The Great Trout what?” said another mayfly, nervously.
They looked down at a series of expanding concentric rings on the water.
“The holy sign!” said a mayfly. “I remember being told about that! A Great Circle in the water! Thus shall be the sign of the Great Trout!”
The oldest of the young mayflies watched the water thoughtfully. It was beginning to realize that, as the most senior fly present, it now had the privilege of hovering closest to the surface.
“They say,” said the mayfly at the top of the zigzagging crowd, “that when the Great Trout comes for you, you go to a land flowing with…flowing with…” Mayflies don’t eat. It was at a loss. “Flowing with water,” it finished lamely.
“I wonder,” said the oldest mayfly.
“It must be really good there,” said the youngest.
“Oh? Why?”
“’Cos no one ever wants to come back.”
Whereas the oldest things on the Discworld were the famous Counting Pines, which grow right on the permanent snowline of the high Ramtop Mountains.
The Counting Pine is one of the few known examples of borrowed evolution.
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.
This is probably fine from the species’ point of view, but from the perspective of the actual individuals involved it can be a real pig, or at least a small pink root-eating reptile that might one day evolve into a real pig.
So the Counting Pines avoided all this by letting other vegetables do their evolving for them. A pine seed, coming to rest anywhere on the Disc, immediately picks up the most effective local genetic code via morphic resonance and grows into whatever best suits the soil and climate, usually doing much better at it than the native trees themselves, which it usually usurps.
What makes the Counting Pines particularly noteworthy, however, is the way they count.
Being dimly aware that human beings had learned to tell the age of a tree by counting the rings, the original Counting Pines decided that this was
why humans cut trees down
.
Overnight every Counting Pine readjusted its genetic code to produce, at about eye-level on its trunk, in pale letters, its precise age. Within a year they were felled almost into extinction by the ornamental house number plate industry, and only a very few survive in hard-to-reach areas.
The six Counting Pines in this clump were listening to the oldest, whose gnarled trunk declared it to be thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four years old. The conversation took seventeen years, but has been speeded up.
“I remember when all this wasn’t fields.”
The pines stared out over a thousand miles of landscape. The sky flickered like a bad special effect from a time travel movie. Snow appeared, stayed for an instant, and melted.
“What was it, then?” said the nearest pine.
“Ice. If you can call it ice. We had
proper
glaciers in those days. Not like the ice you get now, here one season and gone the next. It hung around for ages.”
“What happened to it, then?”
“It went.”
“Went where?”
“Where things go. Everything’s always rushing off.”
“Wow. That was a sharp one.”
“What was?”
“That winter just then.”
“Call that a winter? When I was a sapling we had winters—”
Then the tree vanished.
After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: “He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!”
If the other trees had been humans, they would have shuffled their feet.
“It happens, lad,” said one of them, carefully. “He’s been taken to a Better Place,
*
you can be sure of that. He was a
good
tree.”