Going Postal - Terry Pratchett [147]
“Trust me,” said Moist.
“We’ll never get another chance like this,” said Mad Al.
“Exactly!” said Moist.
“One man has died for every three towers standing,” said Mad Al. “Did you know that?”
“You know they’ll never really die while the Trunk is alive,” said Moist. It was a wild shot, but it hit something, he sensed it. He rushed on: “It lives while the code is shifted, and they live with it, always Going Home. Will you stop that? You can’t stop it! I won’t stop it! But I can stop Gilt! Trust me!”
The canvas hung like a sail, as if someone intended to launch the tower. It was eighty feet high and thirty feet wide and moved a little in the wind.
“Where’s Adrian?” said Moist.
They looked at the sail. They rushed to the edge of the tower. They looked down into darkness.
“Adrian?” said Mad Al uncertainly.
A voice from below said: “Yes?”
“What are you doing?”
“Just, you know…hanging around? And an owl has just landed on my head.”
There was a small tearing noise beside Moist. Sane Alex had cut a hole in the canvas.
“Here it comes!” he reported.
“What?” said Moist.
“The message! They’re sending from Tower 2! Take a look—” Alex said, backing away.
Moist peered through the slit, back toward the city. In the distance, a tower was sparkling.
Mad Al strode over to the half-sized clacks array and grabbed the handles.
“All right, Mr. Lipwig, let’s hear your plan!” he said. “Alex, give me a hand! Adrian, just…hang on, all right?”
“It’s trying to push a dead mouse in my ear,” said a reproachful voice from below.
Moist shut his eyes, lined up the thoughts that had been buzzing for hours, and began to speak.
Behind and above him, the huge expanse of canvas was just enough to block the line of sight between the two distant towers. In front of him, the Smoking Gnu’s half-sized tower was just the right size to look, to the next tower in line, like a bigger tower a long way off. At night all you could see were the lights.
The clacks in front of him shook as the shutters rattled. And now a new message was dropping across the sky…
It was only a few hundred words. When Moist had finished, the clacks rattled out the last few letters and then fell silent.
After a while, Moist said: “Will they pass it along?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mad Al, in a flat voice. “They’ll send it. You’re sitting up in the tower in the mountains and you get a signal like that? You’ll get it away and out of your tower as fast as you can.”
“I don’t know if we ought to shake your hand or throw you off the tower,” said Sane Alex sullenly. “That was evil. What sort of person could dream up something like that?”
“Me. Now let’s pull Adrian up, shall we?” said Moist quickly. “And then I’d better get back to the city…”
AN OMNISCOPE is one of the most powerful instruments known to magic, and therefore one of the most useless.
It can see everything, with ease. Getting it to see anything is where wonders have to be performed, because there is so much everything—which is to say, everything that can, will, has, should, or might happen in all possible universes—that anything, any previously specified thing, is very hard to find. Before Hex had evolved the control thaumarhythms, completing in a day a task that would have taken five hundred wizards at least ten years, omniscopes were used purely as mirrors, because of the wonderful blackness they showed. This, it turned out, is because “nothing to see” is what most of the universe consists of, and many a wizard has peacefully trimmed his beard while gazing into the dark heart of the cosmos.
There were very few steerable omniscopes. They took a long time to make and cost a great deal. And the wizards were not at all keen on making any more. Omniscopes were for them to look at the universe, not for the universe to look back at them.
Besides, the wizards did not believe in making life too easy for people. At least, for people who weren’t wizards. An omniscope was a rare, treasured, and delicate thing.
But today was a special occasion, and they had thrown open the doors to the richer, cleaner,