Soul Music - Terry Pratchett [128]
LOOKS PERFECTLY LOGICAL TO ME.
Binky turned obediently away and trotted into the world.
The lands and cities of it lay before him. Blue light flamed along the blade of the scythe.
Death felt attention on him. He looked up at the universe, which was watching him with puzzled interest.
A voice which only he heard said: So you’re a rebel, little Death? Against what?
Death thought about it. If there was a snappy answer, he couldn’t think of one.
So he ignored it, and rode toward the lives of humanity.
They needed him.
Somewhere, in some other world far away from the Discworld, someone tentatively picked up a musical instrument that echoed to the rhythm in their soul.
It will never die.
It’s here to stay.
*Because of Quantum.
*The question seldom addressed is where Medusa had snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarrassing problem when it keeps biting the top of the deodorant bottle.
*Cabbages.
**Cabbages.
***Anything that ate cabbages and didn’t mind not having any friends.
*Until an unfortunate ax incident, Gloria had been captain of the school basketball team. Dwarfs don’t have height but they do have acceleration, and many a visiting team member got a nasty shock when Gloria appeared rising vertically out of the depths.
*Or methane crystals. Or sea anemones. The principle is the same. In any case, it soon fills up with whatever is the local equivalent of fast-food boxes and derelict lager cans.
*According to rural legend—at least in those areas where pigs are a vital part of the household economy—the Hogfather is a winter myth figure who, on Hogswatchnight, gallops from house to house on a crude sledge drawn by four tusked wild boars to deliver presents of sausages, black puddings, pork scratchings, and ham to all children who have been good. He says Ho Ho Ho a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it’s these little details which tell you it’s a tale for the little folk). There’s a song about him. It begins: You’d Better Watch Out…
The Hogfather is said to have originated in the legend of a local king who, one winter’s night, happened to be passing, or so he said, the home of three young women and heard them sobbing because they had no food to celebrate the midwinter feast. He took pity on them and threw a packet of sausages through the window.**
**Badly concussing one of them, but here’s no point in spoiling a good legend.
*Wizards did not have balls. There was a popular song about it. But they did hold their annual Excuse Me, or free-for-all dance, which was one of the highlights of the Ankh-Morpork social calendar. The Librarian in particular always looked forward to it, and used an amazing amount of hair cream.
*Well, except for Unseen University once, but that was just a student prank.
*The smallest room in Unseen University is in fact a broom cupboard on the fourth floor. He really meant the privy. The Reader had a theory that all the really good books in any building—at least, all the really funny ones**—gravitate to a pile in the privy but no one ever has time to read all of them, or even knows how they came to be there. His research was causing extreme constipation and a queue outside the door every morning.
**The ones with cartoons about cows and dogs. And captions like: “As soon as he saw the duck, Elmer knew it was going to be a bad day.”
*And didn’t appear to do anything to the enemy at all.
**He was a wizard. Tricks shots for a wizard aren’t the old three-times-round-the-table jobs. His best one was once off the cushion, once off a sea gull, once off the back of the head of the Bursar, who’d been walking along the corridor outside last Tuesday (a bit a temporal spin there), and a tricky rebound off the ceiling. He’d missed sinking the actual shot by a whisker, but it had been pretty tricky, even so.
***And this was true. Nature can adapt to practically anything. There were fish evolved to live in the river. They looked like a cross