Reaper Man (34 page)
*
Someone who will put certainly salt and probably pepper on any meal you put in front of them
whatever it is and regardless of how much it’s got on it already and regardless of how it tastes
. Behavioural psychiatrists working for fast-food outlets around the universe have saved billions of whatever the local currency is by noting the autocondimenting phenomenon and advising their employers to leave seasoning out in the first place. This is really true.
*
Many songs have been written about the bustling metropolis, the most famous of course being: “Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!”, but others have included “Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork,” “I Fear I’m Going Back to Ankh-Morpork” and the old favorite, “Ankh-Morpork Malady.”
*
It would say, for example, that you would shortly undergo a painful bowel movement.
*
Mrs. Cake was aware that some religions had priestesses. What Mrs. Cake thought about the ordination of women was unprintable. The religions with priestesses in Ankh-Morpork tended to attract a large crowd of plain-clothes priests from other denominations who were looking for a few hours’ respite somewhere where they wouldn’t encounter Mrs. Cake.
*
A song which, in various languages, is common on every known world in the multiverse. It is always sung by the same people, viz., the people who, when they grow up, will be the people who the next generation sing “We Shall Overcome” at.
*
The only building on the campus less than a thousand years old. The senior wizards have never bothered much about what the younger, skinnier and more bespectacled wizards get up to in there, treating their endless requests for funding for thaumic particle accelerators and radiation shielding as one treats pleas for more pocket money, and listening with amusement to their breathless accounts of the search for the elementary particles of magic itself. This may one day turn out to be a major error on the part of the senior wizards, especially if they
do
let the younger wizards build whatever that blasted thing is they keep wanting to build in the squash court.
The senior wizards know that the proper purpose of magic is to form a social pyramid with the wizards on top of it, eating big dinners, but in fact the HEM building has helped provide one of the rarest foods in the universe—antipasta. Ordinary pasta is prepared some hours before being eaten. Antipasta is created some hours
after
the meal, whereupon it then exists
backward in time
, and if properly prepared should arrive on the taste buds at exactly the same moment, thus creating a true taste explosion. It costs five thousand dollars a forkful, or a little more if you include the cost of cleaning the tomato sauce off the walls afterward.
*
People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and
in all that time
never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.
*
Vermine are small black-and-white rodents found in the Ramtop Mountains. They are ancestors of the lemming, which as is well known throws itself over cliffs and drowns in lakes on a regular basis. Vermine used to do that, too. The point is, though, that dead animals don’t breed, and over the millennia more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross lakes. When their rush leads them to the seashore they sit around avoiding one another’s gaze for a while, and then leave early to get home before the rush.
*
The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.
*
It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom.
*
It is generally thought, on those worlds where the mall lifeform has seeded, that people take the wire baskets away and leave them in strange and isolated places, so that squads of young men have to be employed to gather them together and wheel them back. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. In reality the men are hunters, stalking their rattling prey across the landscape, trapping them, breaking their spirit, taming them and herding them to a life of slavery. Possibly.
*
The most enthusiastic of these was the small but persistent and incredibly successful Casanunder the Dwarf, a name mentioned with respect and awe wherever stepladder owners are gathered together.
*
“Lost Jewelled Temple Roof Repair Fund! Only 6,000 gold pieces to go!! Please Give Generously!! Thankyou!!!”
Terry Pratchett
is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.
Pratchett’s acclaimed novels are bestsellers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and have sold more than twenty-seven million copies worldwide. He lives in England, where he writes all the time. (It’s his hobby, as well.)
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A. S. Byatt
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)
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents*
The Discworld Series
The Color of Magic* • The Light Fantastic* • Equal Rites*
Mort* • Sourcery* • Wyrd Sisters* • Pyramids*
Guards! Guards!* • Eric
(with Josh Kirby)*
Moving Pictures* • Reaper Man* • Witches Abroad*
Small Gods* • Lords and Ladies* • Men at Arms*
Soul Music* • Interesting Times* • Maskerade*
Feet of Clay* • Hogfather* • Jingo* • The Last Continent*
Carpe Jugulum* • The Fifth Elephant* • The Truth*
Thief of Time* • The Last Hero*
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)
Coming Soon in Hardcover
Night Watch*
*Published by HarperCollins
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.
REAPER MAN
. Copyright © 2007 by Terry and Lyn 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 © APRIL 2007 ISBN: 9780061807053
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