Soul Music - Terry Pratchett [122]
And then the air became light, white as moonlight but as strong as sunlight. There was also a sound, like the roar of millions of voices.
It said: Let me show you who I am. I am the music.
Satchelmouth lit the coach lamps.
“Hurry up, man!” shouted Clete. “We want to catch them, you know! Hat. Hat. Hat.”
“I don’t see that it matters much if they get away,” Satchelmouth grumbled, climbing onto the coach as Clete lashed the horses into motion. “I mean, they’re away. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
“No! You saw them. They’re the…the soul of all this trouble,” said Clete. “We can’t let this sort of thing go on!”
Satchelmouth glanced sideways. The thought was flooding into his mind, and not for the first time, that Mr. Clete was not playing with a full orchestra, that he was one of those people who built their own hot madness out of sane and chilly parts. Satchelmouth was by no means averse to the finger-foxtrot and the skull fandango, but he’d never murdered anyone, at least on purpose. Satchelmouth had been made aware that he had a soul and, though it had a few holes in it and was a little ragged around the edges, he cherished the hope that some day the god Reg would find him a place in a celestial combo. You didn’t get the best gigs if you were a murderer. You probably had to play the viola.
“How about if we leave it right now?” he said. “They won’t be back—”
“Shut up!”
“But there’s no point—”
The horses reared. The coach rocked. Something went past in a blur and vanished in the darkness, leaving a line of blue flames that flickered for a little while and then went out.
Death was aware that at some point he would have to stop. But it was creeping up on him that in whatever dark vocabulary the ghost machine had been envisaged, the words “slow down” were as inconceivable as “drive safely.”
It was not in its very nature to reduce speed in any circumstances other than the dramatically calamitous at the end of the third verse.
That was the trouble with Music With Rocks In. It liked to do things its own way.
Very slowly, still spinning, the front wheel rose off the ground.
Absolute darkness filled the universe.
A voice spake: “Is that you, Cliff?”
“Yup.”
“Okay. Is this me: Glod?”
“Yup. Sounds like you.”
“Asphalt?”
“’Sme.”
“Buddy?”
“Glod?”
“And…er…the lady in black?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know where we are, Miss?”
There was no ground under them. But Susan didn’t feel that she was floating. She was simply standing. The fact that it was on nothing was a minor point. She wasn’t falling because there was nowhere to fall to, or from.
She’d never been interested in geography. But she had a very strong feeling that this place was not locatable on any atlas.
“I don’t know where our bodies are,” she said, carefully.
“Oh, good,” said the voice of Glod. “Really? I’m here, but we don’t know where my body is? How about my money?”
There was the sound of faint footsteps far away in the darkness. They approached, slowly and deliberately. And stopped.
A voice said: One. One. One, two. One, two.
Then the footsteps went back into the distance.
After a while, another voice said: One, two, three, four—
And the universe came into being.
It was wrong to call it a big bang. That would just be noise, and all that noise could create is more noise and a cosmos full of random particles.
Matter exploded into being, apparently as chaos, but in fact as a chord. The ultimate power chord. Everything, all together, streaming out in one huge rush that contained within itself, like reverse fossils, everything that it was going to be.
And, zigzagging through the expanding cloud, alive, that first wild live music.
This had shape. It had spin. It had rhythm. It had a beat, and you could dance to it.
Everything did.
A voice right inside Susan’s head said: And I will never die.
She said, aloud: “There’s a bit of you in everything that lives.”
Yes. I am the heartbeat. The back beat.
She still couldn’t see the others. The light was streaming past her.
“But he threw away the guitar.”
I wanted him to