Terry Pratchett
ONCE MORE

*with footnotes

$25.00

	Terry Pratchett is the author of, mostly, the thirty-one novels in the Discworld series, which have something like 55,000,000 copies worldwide.

	He began writing in his teens, but actually followed the advice that old writers give to new writers, which is: get another job to pay the bills. This may have been a bad idea because he chose newspaper journalism, which was great fun but gave him practically no spare time in which to write. So he got a job as a PR man in the UK's electricity supply industry, thinking that handling the Press for four nuclear power stations would be a nice quiet life.

	This turned out to be untrue, because of some place called Three Mile Island.

	Nevertheless, as a relaxation from the demands of his day-and-night job, he invented Discworld, a fantasy world with wizards, witches, heroes, dragons, and other mythological fauna, but where people act as if they are real. It sold so well that within a few years he was able to quit the day-and-night job because he was making more money from his hobby.

	Since then he has published at a rate of, usually, two books a year. Most are in the Discworld series, but he also writes for children (The Johnny Maxwell books, The Bromeliad) and, with Neil Gaiman, co-authored Good Omens, a book about the lighter side of Armageddon which might just possibly turn into a movie before Armageddon happens for real.

	While other ventures are planned, Discworld continues. In recent years it has split into "adult" and "children's" series. The difference between them is that one deals with serious themes, while the other one is for adults.

For a complete list of books available from
NESFA Press, please write to:

NESFA Press
PO Box 809
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web: www.nesfa.org/press

email: press@nesfa.org

Once More With Footnotes

Terry Pratchett

Edited by Priscilla Olson and Sheila M. Perry

	

The NESFA Press
Post Office Box 809
Framingham, MA 01701
2004

Copyright 1963-2004 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett
Dust jacket illustration copyright 2004 by Omar Rayyan
Dust jacket photograph courtesy of Mike Benveniste

"Terry Pratchett: The Man, The Myth, The Legend, The Beverage"
copyright 2004 by Esther Friesner

"The Titles That Got Away" copyright 2004 by Priscilla Olson

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC, MAGICAL OR MECHANICAL MEANS INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER, WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

FIRST EDITION
Second Printing
February, 2005

International Standard Book Number:
1-886778-57-4

First Appearances

# ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time": Digital Dreams, ed. David V. Barrett, Hodder and Stoughton, Great Britain, 1990.

2001: The Vision and the Reality: The Sunday Times, December 24, 2000.

Alien Christmas: Ansible, ed. Dave Langford, August/September 1987.

And Mind the Monoliths: Bath & West Evening Chronicle, April 3, 1983.

The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem: BBC Radio 4, January 15, 1999.

The Big Store (published as A Word from Terry Pratchett): Programme Book, March 2002.

The Choice Word: newspaper article.

Cult Classic: Meditations on Middle Earth, ed. Karen Haber, St. Martin's Press, New York: 2001.

Death and What Comes Next: Timehunt On-line Games.

Doctor Who?: original to this collection.

Elves Were Bastards: Hillcon III Souvenir Booklet, Beneluxcon 18, 1992.

Faces of Fantasy/On Writing: The Faces of Fantasy, ed. James Frenkel, photographs by Patti Perret, TOR Books, New York, 1996.

Final Reward: GM Magazine, October 1988.

Foreword to "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable": Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, Millennium Edition, Cassell, London, 1999.

FTB (published as The Megabyte Drive to Believe in Santa Claus): Western Daily Press, December 24, 1996.

The Hades Business: Science Fantasy Magazine, ed. John Carnell, No. 60, vol. 20, 1963.

High Tech, Why Tech?: The Electronic Author, Summer 1993.

Hollywood Chickens: More Tales from the Forbidden Planet, ed. Roz Kaveney, Titan Books Ltd, U.K., 1990.

Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories: Folklore, Folklore Society, October 1, 2000.

Incubust: The Drabble Project, ed. Rob Meades and David B. Wake, Beccon Publications, Essex, 1988.

Introduction to "The Leaky Establishment" by David Langford: The Leaky Establishment, Big Engine, Oxfordshire, 2001.

Introduction to "The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy": The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. David Pringle, Carlton Books, London, 1998.

Introduction to "The Unseen University Challenge": Dave Langford, The Unseen University Challenge, Gollancz, London, 1996.

Introduction to "The Wyrdest Link": Dave Langford, The Wyrdest Link, Gollancz, London, 2002.

Let There be Dragons: The Bookseller Magazine, June 11, 1993.

Magic Kingdoms (published as Fantasy Kingdoms): The Sunday Times, July 4, 1999.

Medical Notes: Nac Mac Programme Book, Discworld Convention, 2002.

Neil Gaiman: Amazing Master Conjurer: Boskone 39 Program Book, February 2002.

No Worries: SFX Magazine, 1998.

Once and Future: Camelot, ed. Jane Yolen, Philomel Books, New York, 1995. 

The Orangutans Are Dying: Mail on Sunday, February 19, 2000. Paperback Writer: The Guardian, 2003.

Roots of Fantasy: The Roots of Fantasy: Myth, Folklore & Archetype, ed. Shelley Dutton Berry, World Fantasy Program Book, 1989.

The Sea and Little Fishes: Legends, ed. Robert Silverberg, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1998.

Secret Book of the Dead: Now We Are Sick, ed. Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones, DreamHaven Books, Minneapolis, 1991.

Sheer Delight: Tribute to Bob Shaw: SFX Magazine, April 1, 1996.

Theatre of Cruelty: W.H. Smith Bookcase Magazine, July/August 1993.

Thought Progress: 20/20 Magazine, May 1989.

Thud—A Historical Perspective: Thud: The Discworld Boardgame, Trevor Truran.

Troll Bridge: After The King, ed. Martin H. Greenberg, TOR Books, New York, 1992.

Turntables of the Night: Hidden Turnings, ed. Diana Wynne Jones, Methuen, London, 1989.

Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting: Time Out Magazine, December 16, 1987.

Whose Fantasy Are You?: W.H. Smith Bookcase Magazine, September 17,1991.

A Word About Hats: Sunday Telegraph, July 8, 2001.

Contents

First Appearances
Contents
Terry Pratchett: The Man, The Myth, The Legend, The Beverage
Apology
Hollywood Chickens
Doctor Who?
The Hades Business
The Big Store
Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting
Paperback Writer
Incubust
Final Reward
And Mind the Monoliths
FTB
Theatre of Cruelty
Introduction: The Unseen University Challenge
2001: The Vision and the Reality
High Tech, Why Tech?
Roots of Fantasy
Introduction: The Wyrdest Link
Thought Progress
The Sea and Little Fishes
Introduction: The Leaky Establishment
Let There Be Dragons
# ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time"
Foreword: Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Thud—A Historical Perspective
Death and What Comes Next
Neil Gaiman: Amazing Master Conjurer
Introduction: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy
Elves Were Bastards
Medical Notes
Sheer Delight
The Orangutans Are Dying
The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem
Alien Christmas
Turntables of the Night
Cult Classic
The Choice Word
Whose Fantasy Are You?
No Worries
Troll Bridge
Faces of Fantasy/On Writing
Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories
The Secret Book of the Dead
Magic Kingdoms
Once and Future
A Word About Hats
The Titles That Got Away

Once More With Footnotes

Terry Pratchett:
The Man, The Myth,
The Legend, The Beverage

The Man:

	I met him on the floor of a hotel bar in the year that the World Fantasy Convention was in London—Not-the-Docklands-One. Really. On the floor. No, not for the reason you are thinking and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He was one of several people playing a game called Amnesia. I forget the rules. I do remember that after a while socializing with this charming gentleman it came to light that he was TERRY PRATCHETT. Yes, that way, all uppercase or, if you prefer, THE Terry Pratchett, also known as "Oh my God, you're YOU! You're really YOU! I LOVE you! I have ALL YOUR BOOKS! You are SO BRILLIANT! Eeeeeee!" Which was probably what I would have said to him had we been formally introduced.

	Luckily for me, Amnesia is a great equalizer and so I did not make a complete fool of myself when I finally discovered I had been sharing the barroom floor with a writer of such incredible talent and—dare I say it?—genius.

	Oh heck, sure, I dare: Genius. There. I said it, I mean it, it's true, and I regret nothing. Except that night in Macao.

-

The Myth:

	That British Funnystuff Wot He Writes—It's All Monty Python-like—Innit?

	No, it's not. Of course it makes you laugh, but it also makes you think. It makes you think about things you never thought you needed to think about, which is precisely why you need to think about them. (All right, who's the wiseguy who said, "Things like how to find your way through that sentence without a machete?")

	Little things: Love and hate and heroism, time and space, life and death and immortality, evils great and small, hedgehogs and "headology" and a funny old wild card called human decency. It also makes you learn things you knew all along, but because it makes you laugh, it makes you remember those lessons learned, for a change.

	So pay attention! There will be a short quiz when the rather thin gentleman WHO TALKS LIKE THIS shows up at the end. (And if you don't know who I mean, read more Pratchett. You can thank me later.)

-

The Legend:

	Terry Pratchett is the creator of The Luggage. This is in fact a highly resourceful bit of baggage (not counting some of the ladies of the Seamstresses' Guild of Ankh-Morpork) that cannot be lost, no matter how hard you try to lose it. If unlosable luggage isn't something out of Legend, I don't know what is.

-

The Beverage: 

	Two simple rules.

	1.  Do not be drinking any when reading Terry's work as this may re-
sult in spit-takes or worse due to your doomed attempts to ingest liquid
and expel laughter at the same time.

	2.  Buy him one.

-

	It's an honor to know him, a pleasure to read that funny/serious/funny stuff wot he's writ, and a lucky thing for us all that he's on our side. Plus he is good to cats.

	—Esther M. Friesner 
April 2004

Apology

	Sorry there isn't more. But, you see, it's like this ...

	On my very first day as a trainee journalist, I started keeping a cuttings book. It lasted about three months. By then, I was writing too much.

	And, as I say somewhere else in here, when you're a journalist you're writing for tomorrow, or possibly Friday. You're not writing for forever.

	In those days, too, a beneficent government had yet to outlaw the common practice in fish-and-chip shops of wrapping their handy takeaway meal in yesterday's newspaper. That put journalism into perspective. When you know your lovingly crafted work is going to end up as the container for an alfresco portion of cod and chips, a certain sense of hopelessness causes you to be less than careful about preserving it yourself. All things shall pass, you think. Nothing is permanent. Salt and vinegar dissolveth all.

	In the early days, when Discworld was just becoming popular, I was invited to visit the huge national book warehouse of W. H. Smith. They used to do that to authors. They'd show you the huge inventory, they'd show you where your books go, and then, quite by chance, you'd pass ... the shredder.

	I was fascinated by the shredder. It was huge, two stories high, and apparently-new books were disappearing into it for what I'm sure were sensible business reasons. They emerged as low-grade confetti.

	I acquired a photo of it, which for a while I kept on my desk like an ancient philosopher would keep a skull. It was fish and chips all over again, a memento mori for those who write. Today a best-seller, tomorrow the padding in a Jiffy bag. Ho hum. The journalist knows that the important thing is to get the words into someone else's head and doesn't care too much about what happens to the paperwork after that.

	That's why some of the stuff in this book took some finding. Some of it was located on ancient hard drives here, some of it was found by the diligence of NESFA and my agent, Colin Smythe. I thank them, particularly for the ones they allowed to slumber peacefully ...

Terry Pratchett 
May, 2004

As the author's note says at the end, this was based on a true story. At least, Diane Duane swore it was true, and I wasn't about to argue. And the story just rolled out in front of me. Fortuitously, not long after I was asked for a story for More Tales From the Forbidden Planet, published in 1990 ...

 

Hollywood Chickens

	The facts are these.

	In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of the busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world.

	It shed some of its load. It had been carrying chickens. A few crates broke.

	Alongside the interchange, bordered on three sides by thundering traffic and on the fourth by a wall, was a quarter-mile of heavily shrubbed verge. No one bothered too much about a few chickens.

	…

	Peck peck. 
	Scratch. Scratch. 
	Cluck?

	…

	It is a matter of record that, after a while, those who regularly drove this route noticed that the chickens had survived. There were, and indeed still are, sprinklers on the verge to keep the greenery alive and presumably the meagre population of bugs was supplemented by edible fallout from the constant stream of traffic.

	The chickens seemed to be settling in. They were breeding.

	…

	Peck peck. Scratch. Peck ... Peck?

	Scratch peck? Peck?

	Peck + peck = squawk Cluck?

	…

	A rough census indicated that the population stabilised at around fifty birds. For the first few years young chickens would frequently be found laminated to the blacktop, but some sort of natural selection appeared to be operating, or, if we may put it another way, flat hens don't lay eggs.

	Passing motorists did occasionally notice a few birds standing at the kerb, staring intently at the far verge.

	They looked like birds with a problem, they said.

	…

	SQUAWK PECK PECK CROW!

I	Peck squawk peck
II		Squawk crow peck
III		Squawk squawk crow
IV		Scratch crow peck waark
V		(Neck stretch) peck crow
VI	Peck peck peck (preen feathers)
VII		(Peck foot) scratch crow
VIII		Crow scratch
IX		Peck (weird gurgling noise) peck
X		Scratch peck crow waark (to keep it holy).

	In fact, apart from the occasional chick or young bird, no chicken was found dead on the freeway itself apart from the incident in 1976, when ten chickens were seen to set out from the kerb together during the rush hour peak. This must have represented a sizeable proportion of the chicken population at that time.

	The driver of a gas tanker said that at the head of the little group was an elderly cockerel, who stared at him with supreme self-confidence, apparently waiting for something to happen.

	Examination of the tanker's front offside wing suggests that the bird was a Rhode Island Red.

	…

	Cogito ergo cluck.

	…

	Periodically an itinerant, or the just plain desperate, would dodge the traffic to the verge and liberate a sleeping chicken for supper.

	This originally caused some concern to the Department of Health, who reasoned that the feral chickens, living as they did so close to the traffic, would have built up dangerously high levels of lead in their bodies, not to mention other noxious substances.

	In 1978, a couple of research officers were sent into the thickets to bring back a few birds for a sacrifice to Science.

	The birds' bodies were found to be totally lead-free.

	We do not know whether they checked any eggs.

	This is important (see Document C).

	They did remark incidentally, however, that the birds appeared to have been fighting amongst themselves. (See Document F: Patterns of Aggression in Enclosed Environments, Helorksson and Frim, 1981.) We must assume, in view of later developments, that this phase passed.

	…

	Four peck-(neck stretch) and seven cluck-scratch ago, our crow-(peck left foot)-squawk brought forth upon this cluck-cluck-squawk ...

	…

	In the early hours of 10 March 1981, Police Officer James Stooket Stasheff, in pursuit of a suspect, following a chase which resulted in a seven-car collision, a little way from the verge, saw a construction apparently made of long twigs, held together with cassette tape, extending several feet into the carriageway. Two chickens were on the end of it, with twigs in their beaks. "They looked as if they was nest building," he now recalls. "I went past again about 10 a.m. It was all smashed up in the gutter."

	Officer Stasheff went on to say, "You always get tapes along the freeway. Any freeway. See, when they get snarled up in the Blaupunkt or whatever, people just rip 'em out and pitch them through the window."

	According to Ruse and Sixbury {Bulletin of the Arkham Ornithological Society, vol. 17, pp. 124-132,1968) birds may, under conditions of chronic stress, build nests of unusual size and complexity (Document D).

	This is not necessarily advanced as an explanation.

	…

	Peck ... peck ... scratch.

	Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch.

	…

	The collapse of a small section of carriageway near the verge in the summer of 1983 is not considered germane to this study. The tunnel underneath it was put down to gophers. Or foxes. Or some other burrowing animal. What were irresponsibly described as shoring timbers must simply have been, for example, bits of timber that accidentally got carried into the tunnel by floodwater, as it were, and wedged. Undoubtedly the same thing happened with the feathers.

	…

	If Cluck were meant to fly, they'd have bigger (flap).

	…

	Testimony of Officer Stasheff again:

	"This must have been around late August, 1984. This trucker told me, he was driving past, it would have been around mid-afternoon, when this thing comes flapping, he said flapping, out of the bushes and right across the freeway and he's watching it, and it doesn't lose height, and next thing he knows it bounces off his windshield and breaks up. He said he thought it was kids or something, so I went and had a look at the bushes, but no kids. Just a few of the chickens scratching about, and a load of junk, you know. You wouldn't believe the kind of junk that ends up by the side of roads. I found what was left of the thing that'd hit him. It was like a sort of cage with these kind of big wings on, and all full of pulleys and more bits of cassette tapes and levers and stuff. What? Oh, yeah. And these chickens. All smashed up. I mean, who'd do something like that? One minute flying chickens, next minute McNuggets. I recall there were three of them. All cockerels, and brown."

	…

	It's a (small scratch) for a cluck, a (giant flap) for Cluck.

	…

	Testimony of Officer Stasheff again (19 July 1986): "Kids playing with fire. That's my opinion. They get over the wall and make hideouts in the bushes. Like I said, they just grab one of the chickens. I don't see why everyone's so excited. So some kids fill an old trashcan with junk and fireworks and stuff and push a damn chicken in it and blow it up in the air ... It'd have caused a hell of a lot of damage if it hadn't hit one of the bridge supports on the far side. Bird inside got all smashed up. It'd got this cloth in there with strings all over. Maybe the kids thought the thing could use a parachute. Okay, so there's a crater, what the hell, plant a bush in it. What? Sure it'd be hot, it's where they were playing spacemen. Not that kind of hot? What kind of hot?"

	…

	Peck (Neck Twist)-crow = gurgle/C2 

	Cluck?

	…

	We do know that at about 2 a.m. on the morning of 3 May 1989, a purple glow was noticed by several drivers in the bushes around the middle of the verge. Some say it was a blue glow. From a cross-checking of the statements, it appeared to last for at least ten minutes.

	There was also a noise. We have a number of descriptions of this noise. It was "sort of weird," "kind of a whooping sound," and "rather like radio oscillation." The only one we have been able to check is the description from Curtis V. J. McDonald, who said, "You know in that Star Trek episode when they meet the fish men from an alternate Earth? Well, the fish men's matter transmitter made just the same noise."

	We have viewed the episode in question. It is the one where Captain Kirk falls in love with the girl (Tape A).

	…

	Cluck?

	(Foot twist) √2tβ ... [Σ/peck]/Scratch2* *oon (Gurgle)(Left-shoulder-preen) = (Right-shoulder-preen) ...

	HmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmm. 

	Cluck.

	…

	We also know that the person calling himself Elrond X, an itinerant, entered the area around 2 a.m. When located subsequently, he said: "Yeah, well, maybe sometimes I used to take a chicken but there's no law against it. Anyway, I stopped because it was getting very heavy, I mean, it was the way they were acting. The way they looked at you. Their beady eyes. But times are tough and I thought, okay, why not ...

	"There's no chickens there, man. Someone's been through it, there's no chickens!"

	When asked about the Assemblage, he said: "There was only this pile of junk in the middle of the bushes. It was just twigs and wire and junk. And eggs, only you never touch the eggs, we know that, some of those, eggs give you a shock, like electricity. 'Cos you never asked me before, that's why. Yeah, I kicked it over. Because there was this chicken inside it, okay, but when I went up close there was this flash and, like, a clap of thunder and it went all wavy and disappeared. I ain't taking that from no chicken."

	Thus far we have been unable to reassemble the Assemblage (Photos A thru G). There is considerable doubt as to its function, and we have dismissed Mr. X's view that it was "a real funky microwave oven." It appeared simply to have been a collection of roadside debris and twigs, held together with cassette tape.*( * "The Best of Queen.") It may have had some religious significance. From drawings furnished by Mr. X, there appeared to have been space inside for one chicken at a time.

	Document C contains an analysis of the three eggs found in the debris. As you will see, one of them seems normal but infertile, the second has been powering a flashlight bulb for two days, and a report on the third is contingent on our finding either it or Dr. Paperbuck, who was last seen trying to cut into it with a saw.

	For the sake of completeness, please note Document B, which is an offprint of Paperbuck and Macklin's Western Science Journal paper. "Exaggerated Evolutionary Pressures on Small Isolated Groups Under Stress."

	All that we can be certain of is that there are no chickens in the area where chickens have been for the last seventeen years.

	However, there are now forty-seven chickens on the opposite verge.

	Why they crossed is of course one of the fundamental riddles of popular philosophy.

	That is not, however, the problem.

	We don't know how.

	But it's not such a great verge over there, and they're all clustered together and some of the hens are laying.

	We're just going to have to wait and see how they get back.

	…

	Cluck?

 
 
Author's note: In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of the busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world. Some chickens escaped and bred. They survived—are surviving—very well, even in the hazardous atmosphere of the roadside. But this story is about another Hollywood. And other chickens.

Three times so far British universities have suffered short bouts of insanity during which they have awarded me honorary degrees as a Doctor of Letters.

It's now a tradition that I return the compliment and some suitable member of the faculty gets a degree from Unseen University (plus a badge and rather nifty UU scarf). It gets a laugh and a picture in the papers and everyone seems to enjoy it. I used to do the oration in Latin, or the Discworld equivalent, which co-incidentally looks like very bad Latin, but it had to be very bad indeed before most people "got it"; Jack Cohen at Warwick University got his for "habeum tonsorius per Alberto Einstineum."

This one, from the happy day in Portsmouth, was how the English ones go.

 
 
Doctor Who?

	Vice-chancellor, venerable staff, guests, students, and graduates, I hope that no one will take it amiss when I say that what we are in fact doing today is celebrating ignorance. Ignorance is generally an unregarded talent among humans, but we are in fact the only animal that knows how to do it properly. We've got where we are today by starting out ignorant.

	It wasn't always like this. A few thousand years ago, we knew everything—how the world began, what it was for, our place in it ... everything. It was all there, in the stories the old men told around the fire or had written down in a big book. No more questions, everything sorted out.

	But now we know that there's vast amounts of things that, well, we simply don't know. Universities have made great efforts in this area. Think about how it works: you arrive at university, the gleam still on your A-levels, and you've pretty well got it all sussed. Then the first thing they tell you—well, the second thing, obviously, because they have to tell you where the toilets are and so on—is that what you've learned so far not is so much the truth as a way of looking at things. And after three years or so you've learned there's a huge amount that you don't know yet, and that's when they give you a scroll and push you out. Ignorance is a wonderful thing—it's the state you have to be in before you can really learn anything.

	Well done for surviving and thank you, Vice-chancellor, on behalf of the graduates, and also on behalf of myself.

	I'm not quite sure why you've given me a Doctorate of Letters. Certainly the biggest service I have performed for literature is to deny on every suitable occasion that I write it but, nevertheless, I am honored. I suspect the award has really been persistence. I have been writing Discworld books for the better part of two decades. They have, I hope, brought pleasure to millions, and it almost seems unfair to say that at least they've brought fun and money to one. They've taken me around the world a dozen times, I've had a species of turtle (an extinct species, I'm afraid) named after me, and I think I've signed more than three hundred thousand books; I've even done a signing in the middle of a rainforest in Borneo and three people turned up—four if you include, as you should do, the orangutan.

	But I've always wondered what life would have been like if a convenient journalistic job hadn't opened up on our local paper and I had gone on to university instead. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the cheap beer. On the other hand, that was in the late '60s, and as we know from our politicians the only thing you were sure of learning at university in the '60s was how not to inhale, so maybe I made the right choice. After all, now I have my degree, which I believe means I'm allowed to throw my hat into the air, something I've always wanted to do. Once again, many thanks to all of you from all of them and all of me. Thank you—and now for a small but important change in your advertised programme.

	I said I did not go to university but I have since made up for it by owning one. Unseen University as the premier college for wizards came into being about eighteen years ago in the very first Discworld book and seems to be becoming more real every day. And since I have some influence there, I have prevailed upon the Arch-chancellor to allow me to perform a little reciprocal ceremony to celebrate the bond between our two great seats of learning. So ... forward, please, Professor Michael Page.

	Although he is far too thin to be a real wizard, Michael has nevertheless impressed me by having a sense of humour while nevertheless being an accountant, an achievement of such magnitude that it most certainly earns him an honourary degree in magic. In order to make him a member of Unseen University, of course, he must don ... the official hat ... the official scarf, with the University's crest ... and the Octagonal badge worn by all alumni. There ... you are now, professor, causas diabolici volentus, an honorary Batchelor of Fluencing. Due to a lack of foresight this does means that you will have to have the letters BF after your name, but that is a small price, I am sure you will agree, to pay for greatness.

	Thank you very much, Vice-chancellor, ladies, and gentlemen.

Argh, argh, argh ... if I put my fingers in my ears and go "lalalala" loudly I won't hear you read this story.

It's juvenile. Mind you, so was I, being thirteen at the time. It's the first thing I ever wrote that got published. In fact it's the first thing I ever wrote with the feeling that I was writing a real story.

It began as a piece of homework. The English teacher gave me twenty marks out of twenty for it, and put it in the school magazine. The kids liked it. I was a writer.

And this was a big deal, because I hadn't really been anything up until then. I was good at English. At everything else I was middling, one of those kids that don't catch the teacher's eye and are very glad of it. I was even bad at sports, except for the one wonderful term when they let us play hockey, when I was bad and very dangerous.

But the other kids had liked it. I'd sniffed blood.

There were three, yes, three professional sf and fantasy magazines published in the UK in those days. Unbelievable, but true. I persuaded my aunt, who had a typewriter, to type it out for me, and I sent it to John Carnell, who edited all three. The nerve of the kid.

He accepted it.

Oh boy.

The £14 pounds he paid was enough to buy a second-hand Imperial 58 typewriter from my typing teacher (my mother had decided that I ought to be able to do my own typing, what with being a writer and everything) and, as I write, it seems to me that it was a very good machine for fourteen quid and I just wonder if mum and dad didn't make up the difference on the quiet.

Fortunately, before I could do too much damage with the thing, study and exams swept me up and threw me out into a job on the local paper, where I learned to write properly or, at least, journalistically.

I've re-read the story and my fingers have itched to strip it down, give it some pacing, scramble those clichés, and in, short, re-write it from the bottom up. But that would be silly, so I'm going to grit my teeth instead.

Go ahead, read.

I can't hear you! Lalalalalalala!

 

The Hades Business

	Crucible opened his front door and stood rooted to the doormat.

	Imagine the interior of a storm cloud. Sprinkle liberally with ash and garnish with sulphur to taste. You now have a rough idea as to what Crucible's front hall resembled.

	The smoke was coming from under the study door. Dimly remembering a film he had once seen, Crucible clapped a handkerchief to his nose and staggered to the kitchen. One bucket of water later, he returned. The door would not budge. The phone was in the study, so as to be handy in an emergency. Putting down the pail, Crucible applied his shoulder to the door, which remained closed. He retreated to the opposite wall of the hall, his eyes streaming. Gritting his teeth, he charged.

	The door opened of its own accord. Crucible described a graceful arc across the room, ending in the fireplace, then everything went black, literally and figuratively, and he knew no more.

	A herd of elephants were doing the square dance, in clogs, on Crucible's head. He could see a hazy figure kneeling over him.

	"Here, drink this."

	Ah, health-giving joy-juice! Ah, invigorating stagger-soup! Those elephants, having changed into slippers, were now dancing a sedate waltz: the whisky was having the desired effect. Crucible opened his eyes again and regarded the visitor.

	"Who the devil are you?"

	"That's right!"

	Crucible's head hit the grate with a hollow "clang!" The Devil picked him up and sat him in an armchair. Crucible opened one eye.

-

	The Devil was wearing a sober black suit, with a red carnation in the buttonhole. His thin waxed moustachios, combined with the minute beard, gave him a dignified air. A cloak and collapsible top hat were on the table.

	Crucible had known it would happen. After ten years of prising cash from the unsuspecting businessman, one was bound to be caught by Nemesis. He rose to his feet, brushing the soot from his clothes.

	"Shall we be going?" he asked mournfully.

	"Going? Where to?"

	"The Other Place, I suppose."

	"The Other Pl—? Oh, you mean home! Good Heav—oops! pardon me—Hell! no! No one's come Down There for nearly two thousand years. Can't think why. No, I have come to you because I need some help Down There; the Hell business is just not paying—no more lost souls. Only chap that's come Down There for the last two thousand years was a raving nit called Dante; went away with quite the wrong impression. You ought to have heard what he said about me!"

	"I did read something about it somewhere."

	"Indeed? Bad publicity for me, that. That's where you come in."

	"Oh?" Crucible pricked up his ears.

	"Yes, I want you to advertise Hell. Clumsy! You've split your drink all over the carpet."

	"W-why me?" croaked Crucible.

	"You are the owner of the Square Deal Advertising Company, are you not? We want you to make the public conscious, Hell-wise. Not for eternal damnation, of course. Just day trips, etcetera, Grand Tour of Hell, and all that."

	"And if I refuse?"

	"What would you say to ten thousand pounds?"

	"Goodbye."

	"Twenty thousand?"

	"Hmm. Aren't I supposed to give you some tasks; sand-ropes and all that?"

	The Devil looked angry.

	"Forty thousand and that's my last offer. Besides," the Devil pressed the tips of his fingers together and smiled at the ceiling, "there are some rather incriminating facts about the Payne-Smith Products case, which we could make public?"

	"Now you're speaking my language. Forty thousand pounds and hush about the P and S case?"

	"Yes." Done.

	"I'm so glad you see it my way," said the Devil. Crucible seated himself behind his mahogany desk and took out a pad. He indicated a polished silver box

	"Cigarette?"

	"Thanks."

	Crucible took a cigarette himself and felt for his lighter. Suddenly, a thought struck him.

	"How do I know you are Old Nick?"

	The Devil shuddered. "Please! Nicholas Lucifer to you. Well, I know about the P and S case, don't I?" Crucible's eyes gleamed.

	"You may be some smart-alec Dick. Convince me. Go on, convince me!"

	"Okay, you asked for it. By the way, that gun in your left-hand pocket would be useless against me." The Devil leaned nonchalantly, extending a finger towards Crucible.

	"See? You're a phoney, a low do—"

	Crack!

	A bolt of lightning shot across the room. The end of Crucible's cigarette glowed.

	"I—I—I'm convinced!"

	"So glad."

	Crucible became his old self.

	"Let's get down to business. I take it you want Hell to be exploited in every possible way?"

	"Yes."

	"Well, I'm afraid I can't do much until I have seen the place—from the living point of view, you understand."

	"Quite. Well, I could take you back with me, but that might be a hair-raising experience for you. Tell you what, if you wait at the corner of this street, at—shall we say, eight-o'clock this evening?—I could pick you up and we could walk there. Okay?"

	"Right."

	"I'll be seeing you, then. Cheerio!" Poomf!

	He was gone. The room was again filled with sulphurous smoke. Crucible opened the windows and then closed them again. If some busy-body saw the smoke, he would have a hard time explaining to the Fire Brigade just why there was no fire. He strolled into the kitchen and sat down thoughtfully; he wished he had read more fantasy.

-

	In wishing the Devil would mind his own business, Crucible was thinking along the same lines as certain other beings. Where they differed was the reason. Crucible opened the 'fridge and took out a can of beer.

	Having someone running around loose, who knows about things one would prefer to keep to oneself, is dangerous. Crucible's love of money warred with his love of freedom. He wanted that forty thousand pounds, but he did not want Lucifer running around loose.

	Suddenly, the perfect solution struck him. Of course! Why not! He grabbed his hat, and hurried out to the local church.

-

	Crucible stood in the pouring rain at the corner of the street. A small stream of water was coursing down his back and flooding his suedes. He looked at his watch. One minute to eight o'clock. He shivered.

	"Psst!"

	Crucible looked round. "Down here."

	He saw that a man-hole in the middle of the pavement was raised. The Devil poked his head out.

	"Come on!"

	"Through there?"

	"Yes."

	He edged himself through the narrow hole. Splash!

	He would have to put his shoes on "Expenses."

	"Well, let's be off," said the Devil.

	"I didn't know one could get to Down There along the sewers!"

	"Easiest thing there is, old man. Left here."

	There was no sound but the echoes of their footsteps; Crucible's suedes and the Devil's hooves.

-

	"How much further?"

	They had been walking for several hours. Crucible's feet were damp and he was sneezing.

	"We're there, old man."

	They had come to the end of the tunnel. Before them stretched a dark valley. In the distance, Crucible could see a giant wall, with a tiny door. Across the valley ran a black river; the air was tainted with sulphur.

	The Devil removed a tarpaulin from a hump by the tunnel mouth.

	"May I present Geryon II!"

	Crucible blinked. Geryon II was a Model-T Ford crossed with an Austin 7, tastefully decorated in sulphurous yellow.

	The Devil wrenched at the offside door, which fell off.

	They climbed in. Surprisingly, the car started after only a few swings of the starting handle.

	They chugged across the sulphur plain.

	"Nice car."

	"Isn't it! Forty dragon-power. Built her myself from a few bits and pieces from Earth. Trouble with springing out of the floor near a junk-yard," said the Devil, gritting his fangs as they cornered at speed in a cloud of sulphur, "is the fact one often surfaces under a pile of old iron." He rubbed his head. Crucible noticed that one of his horns was bandaged.

	They skidded to a halt by the river. The car emitted clouds of steam.

-

	A battered punt was moored by the river. The Devil helped Crucible in and picked up the skulls—pardon me—sculls. "What happened to what's-his-name—Charon?"

	"We don't like to talk about it."

	"Oh."

	Silence, except for the creaking of the oars.

	"Of course, you'll have to replace this by a bridge."

	"Oh, yes."

	Crucible looked thoughtful. "A ha'penny for them."

	"I am thinking," said Crucible, "about the water that is lapping about my ankles."

	The Devil did not look up. "Here."

	He handed Crucible a battered mug, on which the initials "B.R." were just discernible. And so they continued.

-

	They stood in front of the gate. Crucible looked up and read the inscription:

	"All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

	"No good."

	"No?"

	"Neon lights."

	"Oh, yes?"

	"Red ones."

	"Oh, yes?"

	"Flashing."

	"Oh, yes?" They entered.

	"Down, boy; get off Crucible."

	Three tongues licked Crucible simultaneously.

	"Back to your kennel, boy."

	Whining, Cerberus slunk off.

	"You must excuse him," said the Devil, as he picked Crucible up and dusted him down, "he has never been the same since he took a lump out of Orpheus's leg."

	"It didn't say that in the story."

	"I know. Pity, because the real story was much more—er, interesting. But that's neither here nor there."

-

	Crucible took stock of his surroundings. They appeared to be standing in a hotel lobby. In one wall was a small alcove containing a desk, on which a huge Residents' book, covered in dust, lay open.

	The Devil opened a small wooden door.

	"This way."

	"What?"

	"My office."

	Crucible followed him up the narrow stairway, the boards creaking under his feet.

	The Devil's office, perched precariously on the walls of Hell, was rather dilapidated. There was a patch of damp in one corner, where the Styx had overflowed, and the paper was peeling off the wooden walls. A rusty stove in the corner glowed red hot. Crucible noticed that the floor seemed to be covered with old newspapers, bills, and recipes for various spells.

	The Devil dropped into a commodious arm-chair while Crucible sat down in a tortuous cane chair, which all but collapsed Under his weight.

	"Drink?" said the Devil.

	"Don't mind if I do," said Crucible.

	"Very nice drink, this," said Crucible. "Your own recipe?"

	"Yes. Quite simple—two pints bats' blood, one—I say! You've gone a funny colour! Feel all right?"

	"Ulp! Ghack! Um—quite all right, thanks. Er—shall we get down to business?"

	"Okay."

	"Well, as I see it, our main difficulty will be to make the public take Hell—and you for that matter—seriously. I mean, the generally accepted theory of Hell is a sort of fiery furnace, with you prodding lost souls with a pitchfork and hordes of demons and what-not running around yelling—Hey, that reminds me, where is everybody—er, soul?"

	"Who?"

	"Lost souls and demons and banshees and what-not?"

	"Oh, them. Well, like I said, no-one has been down here for two thousand years, except that nit, Dante. And all the souls down here gradually worked their way up to Purgatory, and thence to—yes, well, the demons all got jobs elsewhere."

	"Tax collectors," murmured Crucible.

	"Quite so. As for fiery furnaces, the only one still in working order is the Mark IV, over there in the corner. Very useful for my culinary efforts but not for much else."

	"Hm. I see. Have you a map of Hell handy?"

	"I think so." The Devil rummaged in an old oak desk behind him and produced a roll of yellow parchment. "This is the newest map I have."

	"It'll do. Now let me see. Hum. I take it this is where we came in."

	"Yes! That shading is the Sulphur Plain."

	"That's good. I'm sure the Acme Mining Company' would give a lot to have the mining rights—"

	"Oh, yes?"

	"Of course, we would have to build a proper road over it for the increased transport "Oh, yes?"

	"Get a large tunnel dug down from Earth—"

	"Coffee bar here. Dance Hall there. Race track at the far end. Bowling Alley over—"

	"We could put a Fun-fair here—"

	"Leaving room for a restaurant there—" "Put some ice-cream stalls here and here, and here—" "All-night Jazz band there. Get in touch with your demons and offer them higher wages to come back to help run the place—" "Get Orpheus to organize a Jazz band—I'm sure Apollo would oblige—" And so it continued. Soon the map was covered in symbols representing everything from a dance hall to a cycle-track. Then they sat back and discussed Stage One: putting Hell in the public eye.

-

	Of course, there were difficulties at first. The time when the Devil materialized in the middle of the pitch on Cup-Final day springs to mind. Still, he got a front page splash in all the popular newspapers. A famous Brewery sued him for loss of custom, since most of the Cup Final spectators signed the pledge after seeing him.

	Telephone lines all over the world smouldered, melted, and slowly fused together as Crucible was plagued with offers from the big financial magnates. Advertising firms fought for the Devil's patronage. Work on the London-Hell tunnel was progressing fast under Crucible's supervision. The Devil moved in with him, saying that all the cranes and bulldozers and what-not were making Hell hell.

-

	"See how Cerberus loves his 'Yummy-Doggy!' Your dog can have that glossy coat, those glistening fangs, those three heads, if you feed him 'Yummy-Doggy'! 'Yummy-Doggy' in the handy two-ounce tin! Cerberus says 'Yummy-Doggy' is scr-r-rumptious! Ask for 'Yummy Doggy'!!"

	"Men of distinction smoke 'Coffin-Nales'!" 

	"Tell me, Lucifer, why do you smoke 'Coffin-Nales'?" 

	"I like that cool, fresh feeling; the flavour of the superb tobacco; the fifty pounds your firm's paying me for these corny adverts—" 

	"Tell me, sir, what are your views on the Colour Bar?" 

	"Well, I—er—I mean to say—um—er well—er that is—" 

	"What do you think of the younger generation?" 

	"Well—er—um—ah—yes! Definitely!"

	"Do you agree that violence on television is responsible for the deplorable increase in the Nation's crime statistics?"

	"Well, ah—um—no. That is to say, er—yes. I mean, er—no—ah—um."

	"Thank you very much, sir, for coming here tonight and giving us your views on topics of immediate concern. Thank you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, tune in next week for another—"

-

	Crucible surveyed the company dispassionately. There was the usual bevy of disgruntled back-benchers, would-be starlets, bored reporters, and of course, the usual fatigue party of Guards, all sipping themselves horizontal on third-rate champagne. A motley and mottled crowd. Crucible, who was becoming quite an expert on crowded atmospheres of late, diagnosed this one as a particularly fruity blend of stale smoke, Fleurs de Mai, and methane, not to mention the occasional waft of carbon monoxide. He turned to the Devil, who was performing wonders with the cocktail shaker.

	"This, my friend, is what is laughingly called a party; a ritual still found in the better parrs of Belgravia. It seems to consist of a—"

	"Oh, lay off it, Cru. This is the besteshed jag I've hadsh in five hundred yearsh, and I'm gonna make the besht of itsh—"

	A muffled "crump!" indicated that the Devil had "made the besht of itsh," to the best of his ability.

-

	It was a crisp November morning, and in the secluded thoroughfare that was Cranberry Avenue the birds were singing, the leaves were falling, and Crucible was having his breakfast. Between mouthfuls of bacon and mushrooms, he gave the newspapers the swift port-to-starboard. The gossip column caught his eye and he remembered the Devil.

	Throwing the paper in the waste-bin, he wiped his mouth on his napkin and padded into the spare bedroom.

	Chaotic was the scene that met his eye. Paper hats, balloons, and streamers were lying around the room and there were of bottles not a few. The Devil himself, still clad in Crucible's second best dress-suit, was sprawled across the bed, snoring loudly.

	"Wakey-Wakey!" shouted Crucible, heartlessly. The effect was impressive. The Devil shot a clear two feet in the air and came down clutching his head; the language he used turned Crucible's ears bright red.

	Crucible busied himself in the kitchen, and returned with a cup of black coffee.

	"Here."

	"Ouch! Not so loud." Slurp! "Oh, that's better. What happened last night?"

	"You tried the effect of vodka and Green Chartreuse."

	"Ouch!"

	"Quite. Now, best foot—er, hoof, forward. Hell's opening ceremony is at twelve."

	"I can't go like this—ouch!"

	"Sorry. You'll just have to drink gallons of black coffee and bear it. Now, come on."

-

	Jazz resounded around the walls of Hell. Pop music echoed along the dark corridors, mingling with the click of slot machines. Espresso coffee flowed in rivers. The scream of hotted-up motorcycles mingled with the screams of banshees both ghostly and human (guitar strumming, for the use of). The growth of Hell's popularity only equalled the growth of the Devil's bank account.

	Up high in his balcony, on the wall of Hell, the Devil poured himself a drink of water and took three tranquilizer pills.

-

	The storm raged. For the last month the Northern Hemisphere had been beset by thunderstorms unequalled in the records of mankind. The weather-men spent all their working days testing their corns, seaweed, and other oracles but had to confess themselves at a loss.

	In the large study of his new country house, Crucible threw another log on the fire and settled himself deeper into his arm-chair. The storm continued.

	His conscience, perforce the most robust and untroubled in Europe, was troubling him. Something was wrong with this Hades business. Certainly not on the monetary side, for his commission over the last three weeks had been exceedingly generous, as his country house, two cars, five race-horses, and one yacht plainly stated.

	Hell had been a great success. The Top people were going to flock there and it had had the approvement of the Establishment.

	But something was wrong. Something to do with those heavy storms.

	Somewhere in his mind, the inner Crucible, equipped with wings, halo, and harp, was bouncing up and down on Crucible's conscience. The thunder murmured.

	Poomb!

	The Devil appeared, looking very agitated, and ran to Crucible's cocktail cabinet. He poured himself a Belladonna, and whirled round to Crucible.

	"I can't stand any more of it!" he screamed. His hand was shaking. "More of what?"

	"Your lot! They've turned my home into Bedlam! Noise! Noise! Noise! I can't get a good night's rest! Do you realize I haven't slept for over two weeks? Nothing but yelling teen—!"

	"One moment. You say they disturb you?"

	"Very funny!"

	"Why not close Hell for a while and take a holiday?"

	"I've tried. Heaven knows—!"

	Rumble!

	"I've tried! Will they leave? No! A bunch of thugs threatened to 'get' me if I tried to close their noisy, blaring paradise—" RUMBLE!

	"I can't move without being mobbed by savage hordes of autograph hunters! I'm famous! I can't get a bit of peace! It's Hell down there!" The Devil was now kneeling on the floor, tears streaming down his face. "You've got to help me! Hide me! Do something! Oh God, I wish—"

	The thunder split the Heavens in twain. The sky echoed and re-echoed with the sound. Crucible slumped in his chair, his hand clapped over his bursting ear-drums.

	Then there was silence.

	The Devil lay in the middle of the floor, surrounded by light. Then the thunder spoke.

	"DO YOU WISH TO RETURN?"

	"Oh, yes sir! Please! I'm sorry! I apologise for everything! I'm sorry about that apple, truly I am!"

	On the bookshelf, a bust of Charles Darwin shattered to fragments. "I'm sorry! Please take me back, please—"

	"COME."

	The Devil vanished. Outside, the storm subsided. Crucible rose, shaken, from the chair. Staggering over to the window, he looked into the fast-clearing evening sky.

	Then out of the sunset came a Hand and Arm of light, raised in salute. Crucible smiled.

	"Don't mention it, Sir. It was a pleasure." He closed the window.

I wrote this for a touring theatrical production of Truckers a few years ago, and it's all true. Even so, I doubt that I could get across the real magic of that first visit to a big store. This was a pre-TV age, at least for anyone on a working man's wage. Nothing had prepared me for all that colour and sound, those endless, endless racks of toys, those lights. The visit etched its pictures in my head.

I haven't a clue what's happening with the movie. I never ask. Life's easier that way.

 

The Big Store

	Truckers started to be written when I was four or five years old.

	My mother took me up to London to do some Christmas shopping. Picture the scene: I lived in a village of maybe twenty houses. We had no electricity and shared a tap with the house next door. And suddenly there I was in London, before Christmas, in a large department store called Gamages. I can remember it in colours so bright that I'm surprised that the light doesn't shine out of my eats. If I close my eyes I can still hear the rattling sound the canvas clouds made as they were rather unsteadily rolled past the "aeroplane" in the toy department. It was "flying" us kids to see Father Christmas. I can't remember him, of course. It would be like trying to remember the face of God.

	Later, drunk with sensory input, I got lost. My frantic mother found me going up and down on the escalators, looking at the coloured lights with my mouth open.

	Nothing much happened for thirty-five years or so, and then I wrote Truckers: small people in a huge department store that they believe is the whole world. I think my hands on the keyboard were wired directly back to that five-year-old head. I remember the mystery of everything, and pretty much everything is a mystery at that age. Nothing made sense and everything was amazing.

	That is what it was like for the nomes, trying to find the meaning of the universe in their indoor world without a map. What is "Everything Must Go" telling you? And "Dogs And Pushchairs must be Carried"? In order to understand what they mean, you have to, well, know what they mean. Of course, most of us are brought up by people who help us fill in the gaps, but the nomes have to work it out for themselves, and get it gloriously wrong. They achieve impossible things because no one has told them they can't be done.

	Diggers and Wings followed shortly, and completed the trilogy, and by then I was in charge. But the first book was written entirely for the kid on the moving stairs.

	(There are different kids of fantasies, of course. Six years ago a Russian translator told me how hard it would be to translate the book. I said: surely Russian children don't find it too hard to believe in little people? She said: that's not the problem. The problem is making them believe in a store stuffed with merchandise.)

	Cosgrove-Hall did a magnificent stop-motion animation for TV in the early '90s and now, with any luck, it's going to be a full movie feature from Dreamworks. I know some schools have staged it (there's nothing a drama teacher likes more than a script which has parts for everyone in the class). And now it's gone professional, to my amazement and delight. I like the stage. The special effects are better.

	Break lots of legs, everyone.

I remember reading long ago that the vision of a "typical" English Christmas owed a lot to the fact that, in his boyhood, Charles Dickens lived through seven of the worst Christmases of the 19th Century—and so they became, under his influential pen, what Christmas "ought" to be.

As a former journalist, I think that's far too good a story to check.

This was written for the magazine Time Out for Christmas, 1987. I wanted to write a kind of Victorian horror story in which the covers of a row of Christmas Cards come to life. And what better starting point than the jolly mail coach which is so, so, traditional on the really cheap cards ... and what would the passengers think of Christmas cards to come?

We don't see Snoopy cards much now. But there are plenty that are worse.

 

Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting

From the Bath and Wiltshire Herald, December 24,1843:

-

	"CALNE—A Singular Mystery surrounds the disappearance of the London Mail Coach on Tues. last in a snowstorm of considerable magnitude, the like of which has not been seen in the memory of the oldest now living. It is thought that the coachman, missing his way in the driving blizzard at Silbury, took the horses off the road, perhaps to seek the shelter of a Hedge or Rick, and became overwhelmed in the drifting. Search parties have been sent out and the coachman, who was found wandering in a state of severe anxiety in the snow, has been brought back to Bath ..."

-

From the journal of Thos. Lunn, Doctor, of Chippenham, Wilts:

-

	The world is but a tissue spread over the depths of Chaos. That which we call sanity is but a circle of firelight, and when 1 spoke to that poor mazed man downstairs he was several logs short of a full blaze.

	Even now, with my own more Natural fire drawn up and the study curtains shut against the Christmas chill, I shudder at the visions he imparted. Were it not for the solid evidence, which I have before me as I write, and which catches the firelight and sparkles so prettily, I could dismiss it as the mere ravings of a deranged mind. We have made him as comfortable as the ropes allow in my front room, but his cries punctuate this Christmas Eve like skulls in a flowerbed.

"Is Father Christmas Coming/Or Is He Just Breathing Heavily? 
Lots of Stuffing This Christmas!!! Snugglebottom Ex Ex Ex!"

	There is a sound outside. Carol singers! Do they not realize the terrible, terrible risk? Yet if I were to throw open the window and warn them to quit the streets, how could I answer their most obvious question? For if I attempted to, I too would be thought mad also ... But I must set down what he told me, in his moments of clear thought, before insanity claimed him for its own.

	Let my readers make of them what they may.

	His eyes were the eyes of a man who had looked into Hell and had left behind something of himself. At times he was perfectly lucid, and complained about the ropes the searcher had put him in for fear that in his ravings he would hurt himself. At other times he tried to beat his head on the wall and ranted the slogans that had sent him mad.

"Twenty Pence, Plus Envelope and Seasonal Greeting!"

	In between he told me ...

-

Gateway to Hell

	It had been a wild day, with the snow blowing off the Plain and turning the hills west of Silbury into one great white waste. At such times it is possible to miss the road, and he had got down off the box to lead the horses. Yet, despite what one may read in the papers, the snow was not impossibly deep on the hills, and had abated so that the sunset could be seen. Spirits were generally high, for the lights of Calne were visible and one and all looked forward to being off the freezing roads by darkness.

	And then, as he tells it, there was a creaking noise and a flicker of shadow and the world changed or, he believes, they stepped from this world into another. And, ahead of them, there was a great square hole in the landscape.

	He avers now that it was the gateway to Hell, and while it was not the Hell that Dante visited there is to my mind some internal evidence to suggest that his ignorant guess might be the truth. There was something a-glitter at the edge of the world and, when he examined the drifted snow, he found the same curious substance strewn haphazardly on the crest of each hummock. It appeared to be thin plates of silver, scattered so as to reflect the light in what would have been, in better circumstances, a pleasing manner.

	The coachman and several of the male passengers considered the situation. The sun was sinking fast into a western sky that was now a mess of livid red and purple tones, and to the east more snow threatened. Besides, it appeared to those who ventured a little way back along the coach tracks, which were already being erased by the blowing snow, that the road had been well lost and a white wildness stretched all around.

	At length, there appearing to be no alternative, several of the party resolved to venture closer to the rectangle that obliterated the sky a score of yards away.

	It was then that they saw for the first time the monster that appeared to be the guardian of the gateway, perched on a snow-covered log.

	It was a giant Robin, several times larger than a Turkey. It watched them with malevolence in its beady eyes, and they feared greatly that it would attack, but it remained unmoving as they reached the rim, and peered out on a blur of colour. Warm air, tinted with tobacco smoke, was blowing into the world, and according to the coachman they could hear strange sounds, distorted and distant ...

	One of the party was a scholar from Oxford who, having in the coachman's opinion refreshed himself mightily during the journey, suggested that some of the party climb through the opening, beyond which lay, at a depth of perhaps three feet, a wide expanse of brown plain, because, uncertain though this course might be, it appeared to offer a more certain chance of survival than a night in hills which seemed increasingly alien.

"Season's Greetings! From all at the office!"

-

Bold Spirits

	Several bold spirits in the party, with whom the scholar had been sharing his brandy, resolved to do this. The coachman was not among them, he told me, yet eventually decided to accompany them out of a sense of duty. They were still his passengers, he said, and he felt it incumbent upon him to bring them safely to Bath.

	It was the view of the scholar that Bath may be found across the plain, for, he held, if this was a window out of the world then it followed that there might be a window back into it ...

	Strange though it may seem, this appeared to be the case. They had not gone above a hundred yards before they saw, looming out of the mists in front of them, another rectangle very similar in appearance to the one they had vacated.

	Imagine their joy to see that it opened on to a friendly street lined with yellow-lit windows. One of the party declared that it was in fact a street very close to his own home in London, and while many of the travellers had left London some time before, the prospect of a return now caused them the greatest joy; the traveller promised to open up his house for them, and one of the men volunteered to go back alone to the coach to fetch the rest of the party. For it seemed to all, in those last few moments of hope, that Almighty Providence had foreseen their fate upon the bitter road and had opened a gateway into the warm heart of the greatest city in the world ...

	It was then that they noticed a party of anxious people clustered near the rectangle, and the coachman saw with a falling heart that it too was rim'd with the glittering plates. This party, composed both of men and women, were bearing lanterns, and, after some hesitation, approached the coachman.

	The man who had a house nearby gave a cry of recognition and embraced the stranger, claiming to know him as a neighbour, and then recoiled at the dreadful expression on his face. It was clear that here was another victim of a similar fate.

	After some refreshment from the Oxford scholar the newcomer explained that he had, with a party of friends, gone out carol singing. All had been well until, an hour before, there had been an eerie creaking and shifting of shadows, and now they were somehow in a world that was not of the world.

	"But—there is a street, and lighted windows," said the London man. "Is that not the Old Curiosity Shop, so ably run by Mrs. Nugent?"

	"Then it is more than decently curious, because the doors do not open, and there is nothing beyond the windows but dull yellow light," said the carol singer. "What were houses, my friend, are now nothing but a flat lifelessness."

	"But there are other streets—my home, not a hundred yards away ..."

	The carol singer's face was pale. "At the end of the street," he said, "is nothing but white cardboard."

	Their companion gave a terrified scream, climbed into the frame, and was soon lost to view. After a few seconds they heard his scream, which the coachman screamed to me, also:

"May This Day Bring You, Every Year/ 
Joy And Warmth And All Good Cheer!"

-

Menacing Banality

	Several of the ladies in the carol singers' party were quite hysterical at this point and insisted on joining the company. Thus, after much heated debate it was resolved to return to the mail coach and, with considerable difficulty, snow and luggage and the glitter were piled against the frame sufficient to allow it to be manhandled down on to the plain.

	At this point the coachman's tale becomes quite incoherent. It would seem that they set out to seek yet another entrance to the real world, and found for the first time that the strange windows had an obverse side. If I can understand his ravings, they seemed to be vast white squares in the sky on which some agency had written lengthy slogans of incredible yet menacing banality, whose discovery had so unhinged the London gentleman.

	I can hear the coachman's mad giggling even now: "I have come a long, long way/To bring you Joy this Christmas Day!"and he would bang his head on the wall again, in time to what I may, in the loosest sense, call the rhythm of the phrase.

	Then he would drum his heels on the floor.

	"Merry Xmas to All at No. 27!" he would scream, "From Tony, Pat, and the kids. Remember Majorca?"

	And, "Get lots of crackling this Christmas!" This last one seemed particularly to affect his brain, and I cannot but wonder what the poor man must have seen. "Merry X-mas from Your Little Willy!!!" and it was at this point that I had to get the gardener to come in and help me restrain him, in the apprehension that he would otherwise manage to do himself an injury.

	How long were they on that fateful plain? For it appears that they were in a world outside Time as we know it, and sought for days an entrance into a world that was more than a flatness.

	And they were not alone.

	There were other people on the same dreadful journey. And Monsters also.

	I fear that his mind is quite gone. No sane man could have seen such things. There was a window, if such I may call it, into a world of desert sands under a night sky, wherein three men of African or Asian appearance had made their camp. One of them spoke passable Latin, which the Oxford Scholar was still just able to understand, despite his state of near inebriation. They too had found their world running out into a cardboard waste, and after considerable study had put it down to some event, possibly astronomical, which had severely distorted Space and, who knows, perhaps even Time itself.

	They made common cause with the party, much to the chagrin of the ladies present, but it would seem that they were well-educated by heathen standards and indeed kept up the spirits of the company with their tales and outlandish songs. They were also men of considerable wealth, a fact of some importance when the swollen caravan of benighted travellers met a party of Shepherds, orphans of their world, and were able to purchase several Sheep which the coachman, who had been raised on a farm, was able to slaughter and dress.

	The Shepherds, being nomads by persuasion, had been wandering for some time from their Window, and told of many fearful wonders.

"Happy Christmas'./It's Your First One!/Wishing You Joy/
And a Lifetime of Fun! Sweet Jesus! The dreadful Beagle!"

-

Giant Kittens

	What more dare I write? He babbled of four giant kittens with blue bows around their necks, and a rectangle within which was a vast Pie of mincemeat, which they carried for their continued provisions. There were also several glasses, taller than a house, which were found to contain—after considerable effort with ropes and the utilization of a giant sprig of Holly—a sweet Sherry, in which the Oxford scholar unfortunately drowned.

	And there was the bellowing red giant, bearded and mad, sitting on a rooftop. And other things, too dreadful to recount—men who were merely colored shapes, and the enormous black and white Caricature of a Dog watching them balefully from the top of its Kennel, and things which even as a man of Science I would blush to record.

	It seems that at the last he resolved to quit the company, and came back alone across the plain, believing that to die in the bitter hills of Wiltshire in mid-winter was a better fate for a Christian man than life in that abominable world.

	No sooner had he reached it, and was crawling in extremis across the strange glittering snow, than behind him he heard once again the eldritch creaking and, upon looking around, saw the dreadful oblong slot disappear. Cold winds and snow immediately forced themselves upon it, but he felt it to be a benediction after that dreadful warm world of the brown plain. And thus, staggering in the fresh blizzard, he was found ...

	It is now fully dark. The carol singers have gone, and I trust it is to their homes.

	And now my housekeeper departs, having brought me the strange news of the day. A blackamoor on a Camel has been arrested near Avebury. In Swindon a man has been savagely pecked to death in his own garden, and all there are to be seen in the snow are the footprints of an enormous Bird. Here in Chippenham itself a traveller has reported seeing, before it leapt a tall hedge and ran across the fields, a cat larger than an Elephant. It had a blue bow about its neck. What monsters have been let into the world?

	And on my desk I see my reflection in the shining, tinselly shard that the coachman had clutched in his hands. Who would cover the snow with this to make it glitter, and what fearful reason could there be?

	I open the curtains, and look out upon the busy street. The local coach has come up from Bath and is outside the inn, and all is bustle and Christmas cheer, a world away from the sad ravings and pleadings of the man downstairs. It is a picture of hope, a reminder of reality, and perhaps he is, after all, no more than a man mazed by exposure, and the tales of giant Beagles and flying sledges are no more than strange jests. Except for the shard of tinsel ...

"The tinsel on the straw! Amen! Wishing you all the best, 
Mum and Dad!"

	And I see the falling snow, how it glitters ... 
	And I hear the creaking. 
	God help us, every one.

Maybe it's the influence of the Net, but people talk about writing in terms of "getting. " Where do you get your ideas/your characters/the time? The unspoken words are: show me the co-ordinates of the Holy Grail.

And, at best, you throw up a barrage of clichés, which have become clichés because ... well, they're true, and they work. I've heard lots of authors talk on the subject and we all, in our various ways, come out with the same half a dozen or so clichés. And you get the sense that this isn't exactly what's wanted, but people go on asking, in the hope that one day you'll forget and pass on the real secret.

Still, this newspaper paid. That's one of the tips, by the way.

 

Paperback Writer

	When I was thirteen, I went to my first science fiction convention. How long ago was that? So long ago that everyone wore sports jackets, except for Mike Moorcock.

	Most science fiction writers were once fans. There's a habit they have, not of paying back, but of paying forward; I know of no other branch of literature where the established "names" so keenly encourage wannabe writers to become their competitors.

	I came back from that event determined to be a writer. After all, I'd shaken hands with Arthur C. Clarke, so now it was just a matter of hard work ...

	The first thing I do when I finish a new book is start a new one. This was a course of action suggested, I believe, by the late Douglas Adams, although regrettably he famously failed to follow his own advice.

	The last few months of a book are taxing. E-mails zip back and forth, the overtones of the English word "cacky" are explained to the US editor who soberly agrees that "poop" is no substitute, the author stares at text they've read so often that they've lost all grasp of it as a narrative, and rewrites and tinkers and then hits Send—

	—and it's gone, in these modern times, without even the therapy of printing it out. One minute you're a writer, next minute you have written. And that's the time, just at that point when the warm rosy glow of having finished a book is about to give way to the black pit of post-natal despair at having finished a book, that you start again. It also means you have an excuse for not tidying away your reference books, a consideration not to be lightly cast aside in this office, where books are used as bookmarks for other books.

	The next title is not a book yet. It's a possible intro, a possible name, maybe some sketches that could become scenes, a conversation, some newspaper clippings, a few bookmarks in an old history book, perhaps even ten thousand words typed to try things out. You are not a bum. You are now back in the game. You are working on a book.

	You are also fiddling with your internal radio. Once you're tuned in on the next book, research comes and kicks your door down. Something is casually mentioned on TV. A book about something else entirely throws our a historical fact that, right at this moment, you really need to know. You sit down to dinner next to an ambassador who is happy to chat about the legal questions that arise when a murder is committed in a embassy and the murderer flees outside, i.e., technically into another country, and the plot gulps down this tidbit.

	People are magnificent research, almost the best there is. An old copper will tell you more about policing than a textbook ever will. An old lady is happy to talk about life as a midwife in the 1930s, a long way from any doctor, while your blood runs cold. A retired postman tells you it's not just the front end of dogs that can make early-morning deliveries so fraught ...

	Undirected research goes on all the time, of course. There's no research like the research you're doing when you think you're just enjoying yourself. In Hay-on-Wye, under very noses of other authors, I picked up that not-very-famous work The Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES; comprising INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS, Remarkable Traits and Humours (and so on, for 64 words). There are obvious nuggets on almost every page: Preserved Fish was a famous New York financier. Then there is what I might call secondary discovery, as in, for example, the dark delight of the Victorian author, when writing about a famous German family of financiers, in coming up with sentences like "soon there were rich Fuggers throughout Lower Saxony." And finally there was the building up of some insight into the minds of the people for whom money was not the means to an end, or even the means to more money, but what the sea is for little fishes.

	I've learned one or two things over the years. One is that the best time to work out a book is in bed, just after you've woken up. I think my brain is on time-share to a better author overnight. A notebook is vital at this point. So is actually being fully awake. If I had been fully awake I probably would have written a fuller note than "MegaPED:" on the back of a card by my bed the other day. It's probably the key to a plot idea, but don't ask me, I only wrote it down.

	And if you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy. The blurb, in fact. An author should never be too proud to write their own flap copy. Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than a hundred words helps you focus. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.

This appeared in 1988 in the first of what turned out to be three books in the Drabble Project, produced by Birmingham fans to raise money for charity and add to the gaiety of nations.

A drabble is that once popular SF formal, the short, short, short—one hundred words, not a word more or less. Every word counts. Oddly enough, I really enjoyed doing it, and even managed to fit in a footnote.

 

Incubust

	The physics of magic is this: no magician, disguise it as he might, can achieve a result beyond his own physical powers.*( *See the Necrotelecomnicon, p. 38.)

	And, spurned, he performed the Rite of Tumescence and called up a fiend from the depths of the Pit to teach her a lesson she wouldn't forget, the witch.

	The phone rang.

	"Nice try," she said. "It's sitting on the bedhead now." 

	His breath quickened. "And?" 

	"Listen," she said.

	And he heard the voice of the fiend, distant and wretched:

	"... frightfully sorry ... normally, no problem ... oh god, this has never happened to me before ..."

First published in G.M. The Independent Fantasy Roleplaying Magazine, October 1988.

I've tinkered with it since, and I can see it needs further tinkering. Once or twice I've thought about extending it into a novel, and then thought better of it. But I've always had a soft spot for this story.

 

Final Reward

	Dogger answered the door when he was still in his dressing gown. Something unbelievable was on the doorstep.

	"There's a simple explanation," thought Dogger. "I've gone mad."

	This seemed a satisfactory enough rationalisation at seven o'clock in the morning. He shut the door again and shuffled down the passage, while outside the kitchen window the Northern Line rattled with carriages full of people who weren't mad, despite appearances.

	There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists* (*Like Zen Buddhists only bigger begging bowls.) call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realise that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn't.

	He remembered the row with Nicky. Well, not exactly row. More a kind of angry silence on her part, and an increasingly exasperated burbling on his, and he wasn't quite sure how it had started anyway. He recalled saying something about some of her friends looking as though they wove their own bread and baked their own goats, and then it had escalated to the level where he'd probably said things like Since you ask, I do think green 2CVs have the anti-nuclear sticker laminated into their rear window before they leave the factory. If he had been on the usual form he achieved after a pint of white wine he'd probably passed a remark about dungarees on women, too. It had been one of those rows where every jocular attempt to extract himself had opened another chasm under his feet.

	And then shed broken, no, shattered the silence with all those comments about Erdan, macho wish-fulfillment for adolescents, and there'd been comments about Rambo, and then he'd found himself arguing the case for people who, in cold sobriety, he detested as much as she did.

	And then he'd come home and written the last chapter of Erdan and the Serpent of the Rim, and out of pique, alcohol, and rebellion he'd killed his hero off on the last page. Crushed under an avalanche. The fans were going to hate him, but he'd felt better afterwards, freed of something that had held him back all these years. And had made him quire rich, incidentally. That was because of computers, because half the fans he met now worked in computers, and of course in computers they gave you a wheelbarrow to take your wages home; science fiction fans might break out in pointy ears from time to time, but they bought books by the shovelful and read them round the clock.

	Now he'd have to think of something else for them, write proper science fiction, learn about black holes and quantums ...

	There was another point nagging his mind as he yawned his way back to the kitchen.

	Oh, yes. Erdan the Barbarian had been standing on his doorstep. Funny, that.

	This time the hammering made small bits of plaster detach themselves from the wall around the door, which was an unusual special effect in a hallucination. Dogger opened the door again.

	Erdan was standing patiently next to his milk. The milk was white, and in bottles. Erdan was seven feet tall and in a tiny chain mail loincloth; his torso looked like a sack full of footballs. In one hand he held what Dogger knew for a certainty was Skung, the Sword of the Ice Gods.

	Dogger was certain about this because he had described it thousands of times. But he wasn't going to describe it again.

	Erdan broke the silence.

	"I have come," he said, "to meet my Maker."

	"Pardon?"

	"I have come," said the barbarian hero, "to receive my Final Reward." He peered down Dogger's hall expectantly and rippled his torso.

	"You're a fan, right?" said Dogger. "Pretty good costume ..." 

	"What," said Erdan, "is fan?"

	"I want to drink your blood," said Skung, conversationally.

	Over the giant's shoulder—metaphorically speaking, although under his massive armpit in real life—Dogger saw the postman coming up the path. The man walked around Erdan, humming, pushed a couple of bills into Dogger's unresisting hand, opined against all the evidence that it looked like being a nice day, and strolled back down the path.

	"I want to drink his blood, too," said Skung.

	Erdan stood impassively, making it quite clear that he was going to stay there until the Snow Mammoths of Hy-Kooli came home.

	History records a great many foolish comments, such as, "It looks perfectly safe", or "Indians? What Indians?" and Dogger added to the list with an old favourite which has caused more encyclopedias and life insurance policies to be sold than you would have thought possible.

	"I suppose," he said, "that you'd better come in."

	No one could look that much like Erdan. His leather jerkin looked as though it had been stored in a compost heap. His fingernails were purple, his hands calloused, his chest a trelliswork of scars. Something with a mouth the size of an armchair appeared to have got a grip on his arm at some time, but couldn't have liked the taste.

	What it is, Dogger thought, is I'm externalising my fantasies. Or I'm probably still asleep. The important thing is to act natural.

	"Well, well," he said.

	Erdan ducked into what Dogger liked to call his study, which was just like any other living room but had his wordprocessor on the table, and sat down in the armchair. The springs gave a threatening creak.

	Then he gave Dogger an expectant look.

	Of course, Dogger told himself, he may just be your everyday homicidal maniac.

	"Your final reward?" he said weakly. Erdan nodded.

	"Er. What form does this take, exactly?"

	Erdan shrugged. Several muscles had to move out of the way to allow the huge shoulders to rise and fall.

	"It is said," he said, "that those who die in combat will feast and carouse in your hall forever."

	"Oh." Dogger hovered uncertainly in the doorway. "My hall?"

	Erdan nodded again. Dogger looked around him. What with the telephone and the coatrack it was already pretty crowded. Opportunities for carouse looked limited.

	"And, er," he said, "how long is forever, exactly?"

	"Until the stars die and the Great Ice covers the world," said Erdan. "Ah. I rhought it might be something like that."

-

	Cobham's voice crackled in the earpiece. "You've what?" it said.

	"I said I've given him a lager and a chicken leg and put him in front of the television," said Dogger. "You know what? It was the fridge that really impressed him. He says I've got the next Ice Age shut in a prison, what do you think of that? And the TV is how I spy on the world, he says. He's watching Neighbours and he's laughing."

	"Well, what do you expect me to do about it?"

	"Look, no one could act that much like Erdan! It'd take weeks just to get the stink right! I mean, it's him. Really him. Just as I always imagined him. And he's sitting in my study watching soaps! You're my agent, what do I do next?"

	"Just calm down." Cobham's voice sounded soothing. "Erdan is your creation. You've lived with him for years."

	"Years is okay! Years was in my head. It's right now in my house that's on my mind!"

	"... and he's very popular and it's only to be expected that, when you take a big step like killing him off ..."

	"You know I had to do it! I mean, twenty-six books!" The sound of Erdan's laughter boomed through the wall.

	"Okay, so it's preyed on your mind. I can tell. He's not really there. You said the milkman couldn't see him."

	"The postman. Yes, but he walked around him! Ron, I created him! He thinks I'm God! And now I've killed him off, he's come to meet me!"

	"Kevin?"

	"Yes? What?"

	"Take a few tablets or something. He's bound to go away. These things do."

	Dogger put the phone down carefully. "Thanks a lot," he said bitterly.

-

	In fact, he gave it a try. He went down to the hypermarket and pretended that the hulking figure that followed him wasn't really there.

	It wasn't that Erdan was invisible to other people. Their eyes saw him all right, but somehow their brains seemed to edit him out before he impinged on any higher centres.

	That is, they could walk around him and even apologised automatically if they bumped into him, but afterwards they would be at a loss to explain what they had walked around and who they had apologised to.

	Dogger left him behind in the maze of shelves, working on a desperate theory that if Erdan was out of his sight for a while he might evaporate, like smoke. He grabbed a few items, scurried through a blessedly clear checkout, and was back on the pavement before a cheerful shout made him stiffen and turn around slowly, as though on castors.

	Erdan had mastered shopping trolleys. Of course, he was really quite bright. He'd worked out the Maze of the Mad God in a matter of hours, after all, so a wire box on wheels was a doddle.

	He'd even come to terms with the freezer cabinets. Of course, Dogger thought. Erdan and the Top of the World, Chapter Four: he'd survived on 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth, fortuitously discovered in the frozen tundra. Dogger had actually done some research about that. It had told him it wasn't in fact possible, but what the hell. As far as Erdan was concerned, the wizard Tesco had simply prepared these mammoths in handy portion packs.

	"I watch everyone," said Erdan proudly. "I like being dead." Dogger crept up to the trolley. "But it's not yours!" Erdan looked puzzled.

	"It is now," he said. "I took it. Much easy. No fighting. I have drink, I have meat, I have My-Name-Is-TRACEY-How-May-I-Help-You, I have small nuts in bag."

	Dogger pulled aside most of a cow in small polystyrene boxes and Tracey's mad, terrified eyes looked up at him from the depths of the trolley. She extended a sticker gun in both hands, like Dirty Harry about to have his day made, and priced his nose at 98p a lb.

-

	"Soap," said Dogger. "It's called soap. Not like Neighbours, this one is useful. You wash with it." He sighed. "Vigorous movements of the wet flannel over parts of your body," he went on. "It's a novel idea, I know."

	"And this is the bath," he added. "And this is the sink. And this is called a lavatory. I explained about it before."

	"It is smaller than the bath," Erdan complained mildly.

	"Yes. Nevertheless. And these are towels, to dry you. And this is a toothbrush, and this is a razor." He hesitated. "You remember," he said, "when I put you in the seraglio of the Emir of the White Mountain? I'm pretty certain you had a wash and shave then. This is just like that."

	"Where are the houris?"

	"There are no houris. You have to do it yourself." A train screamed past, rattling the scrubbing brush into the washbasin. Erdan growled.

	"It's just a train," said Dogger. "A box to travel in. It won't hurt you. Just don't try to kill one."

	Ten minutes later Dogger sat listening to Erdan singing, although that in itself wasn't the problem; it was a sound you could imagine floating across sunset taiga. Water dripped off the light fitting, but that wasn't the problem.

	The problem was Nicky. It usually was. He was going to meet her after work at the House of Tofu. He was horribly afraid that Erdan would come with him. This was not likely to be good news. His stock with Nicky was bumping on the bottom even before last night, owing to an ill-chosen remark about black stockings last week, when he was still on probation for what he said ought to be done with mime-artists. Nicky liked New Men, although the term was probably out of date now. Jesus, he'd taken the Guardian to keep up with her and got another black mark when he said its children's page read exactly like someone would write if they set out to do a spoof Guardian children's page ... Erdan wasn't a New Man. She was bound to notice him. She had a sort of radar for things like that.

	He had to find a way to send him back.

	"I want to drink your blood," said Skung, from behind the sofa. "Oh, shut up."

	He tried some positive thinking again.

	It is absolutely impossible that a fictional character I created is having a bath upstairs. It's hallucinations, caused by overwork. Of course I don't feel mad, but I wouldn't, would I? He's ... he's a projection. That's right. I've, I've being going through a bad patch lately, basically since I was about ten, and Erdan is just a projection of the sort of macho thingy I secretly want to be. Nicky said I wrote the books because of that. She said I can't cope with the real world, so I turned all the problems into monsters and invented a character that could handle them. Erdan is how I cope with the world. I never realised it myself. So all I need do is be positive, and he won't exist.

	He eyed the pile of manuscript on the table.

	I wonder if Conan Doyle had this sort of problem? Perhaps he was just sitting down to tea when Sherlock Holmes knocked at the door, still dripping wet from the Richtofen Falls or whatever, and then started hanging around the house making clever remarks until Doyle trapped him between pages again.

	He half rose from his chair. That was it. All he had to do was rewrite the ...

	Erdan pushed open the door.

	"Ho!" he said, and then stuck his little, relatively little, finger in one wet ear and made a noise like a cork coming out of a bottle. He was wearing a bath towel. Somehow he looked neat, less scared. Amazing what hot water could do, Dogger decided.

	"All my clothes they prickle," he said cheerfully.

	"Did you try washing them?" said Dogger weakly.

	"They dry all solid like wood," said Erdan. "I pray for clothes like gods, mighty Kevin."

	"None of mine would fit," said Dogger. He looked at Erdan's shoulders. "None of mine would half fit," he added. "Anyway, you're not going anywhere. I give in. I'll rewrite the last chapter. You can go home."

	He beamed. This was exactly the right way. By taking the madness seriously he could make it consume itself. All he need do was change the last page, he didn't even need to write another Erdan book, all he needed to do was to make it clear that Erdan was still alive somewhere.

	"I'll write you some new clothes, too," he said. "Silly, isn't it," he went on, "a big lad like you dying in an avalanche! You've survived much worse."

	He pulled the manuscript towards him.

	"I mean," he burbled happily, "don't you remember when you had to cross the Grebor Desert without water, and you ..."

	A hand like iron closed over his wrist, gently but firmly. Dogger remembered one of those science films which had showed an industrial robot, capable of putting two tons of pressure on a point an eighth of an inch across, gently picking up an egg. Now his wrist knew how the egg felt.

	"I like it here," said Erdan.

-

	He made him leave Skung behind. Skung was a sword of few words, and none of them would go down well in a wholefood restaurant where even the beansprouts were free-range. Erdan wasn't going to be left behind, though. Where does a seven foot barbarian hero go? Dogger thought. Wherever he likes.

	He also tried writing Erdan a new suit of clothes. It was only partially successful. Erdan was not cut out by nature, by him, to wear a sports jacket. He ended up looking as Dogger had always pictured him, like a large and overenthusiastic Motorhead fan.

	Erdan seemed to be becoming more obvious. Maybe whatever kind of mental antibodies prevented people from seeing him wore away after a while. He certainly got a few odd looks.

	"Who is tofu?" said Erdan, as they walked to the bus-stop.

	"Ah. Not a who, an it. It's a sort of food and tiling grout combined. It's ... it's something like ... well, sometimes it's green, other times it isn't," said Dogger. This didn't help much. "Well," he said, "remember when you went to 'fight-for-help' the Doge of Tenitti? I was pretty sure I wrote you eating pasta."

	"Yes."

	"Compared to tofu, pasta is a taste explosion. Two to the centre, please," Dogger added, to the conductor.

	The man squinted at Erdan. "Rock concert on, is there?" he said.

	"And you carouse in this tofu?" said Erdan, as they alighted.

	"You can't carouse organically. My girl ... a young lady I know works there. She believes in things. And, look, I don't want you spoiling it, okay? My romantic life isn't exactly straightforward at the moment." A thought struck him. "And don't let's have any advice from you about how to straighten it. Throwing women over your pommel and riding off into the night isn't approved around here. It's probably an ism," he added gloomily.

	"It works for me," said Erdan.

	"Yes," muttered Dogger. "It always did. Funny, that. You never had any trouble, I saw to that. Twenty-six books without a change of clothes and no girl ever said she was washing her hair."

	"Not my fault, they just throw ..."

	"I'm nor saying it was. I'm just saying a chap has only got so much of it, and I gave mine to you."

	Erdan's brow wrinkled mightily with the effort of thought. His lips moved as he repeated the sentence to himself, once or twice. Then he appeared to reach a conclusion.

	"What?" he said.

	"And you go back in the morning."

	"I like it here. You have picture television, sweet food, soft seats."

	"You enjoyed it in Chimera! The snowfields, the bracing wind, the endless taiga ..."

	Erdan gave him a sidelong glance.

	"Didn't you?" said Dogger, uncertainly.

	"If you say so," said Erdan.

	"And you watch too much far-seeing box."

	"Television," corrected Erdan. "Can I take it back?"

	"What, to Chimera?"

	"It get lonely on the endless taiga between books."

	"You found the Channel Four button, I see." Dogger turned the idea over in his mind. It had a certain charm. Erdan the Barbarian with his blood-drinking sword, chain-mail kilt, portable television, and thermal blanket.

	No, it wouldn't work. It wasn't as if there were many channels in Chimera, and probably one of the few things you couldn't buy in the mysterious souks of Ak-Terezical was a set of decent ni-cads.

	He shivered. What was he thinking about? He really was going mad. The fans would kill him.

	And he knew he'd never be able to send Erdan back. Not now. Something had changed, he'd never be able to do it again. He'd enjoyed creating Chimera. He only had to close his eyes and he could see the Shemark Mountains, every lofty peak trailing its pennant of snow. He knew the

	Prades Delta like the back of his hand. Better. And now it was all going, ebbing like the tide. Leaving Erdan. Who was evolving.

	"Here it say 'House of Tofu'," said Erdan. Who had learnt to read.

	Whose clothes somehow looked less hairy, whose walk was less of a shamble.

	And Dogger knew that, when they walked through that door, Erdan and Nicky would hit it off. She'd see him all right. She always seemed to look right through Dogger, but she'd see Erdan.

	His hair was shorter. His clothes looked merely stylish. Erdan had achieved in a short walk from the bus-stop what it had taken most barbarians ten thousand years to accomplish. Logical, really. After all, Erdan was basically your total hero type. Put him in any environment and he'd change to fit. Two hours with Nicky and he'd be torpedoing whaling ships and shutting down nuclear power stations single-handledly.

	"You go on in," he said.

	"Problems?" said Erdan.

	"Just got something to sort out. I'll join you later. Remember, though, I made you what you are."

	"Thank you," said Erdan.

	"Here's the spare key to the flat in case I'm not back. You know. Get held up or something." Erdan took it gravely.

	"You go ahead. Don't worry, I won't send you back to Chimera." Erdan gave him a look in which surprise was leavened with just a hint of amusement.

	"Chimera?" he said.

-

	The wordprocessor clicked into life.

	And the monitor was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the screen, with of course the exception of the beckoning flicker of the cursor.

	Dogger's hand moved upon the face of the keyboard. It ought to work both ways. If belief was the engine of it all, it ought to be possible to hitch a ride if you really were mad enough to try it. Where to start?

	A short story would be enough, just to create the character. Chimera already existed, in a little bubble of fractal reality created by these ten fingers.

	He began to type, hesitantly at first, and then speeding up as the ideas began to crystallise out.

	After a little while he opened the kitchen window. Behind him, in the darkness, the printer started up.

-

	The key turned in the lock.

	The cursor pulsed gently as the two of them came in, talked, made coffee, talked again in the body language of people finding they really have a lot in common. Words like "holistic approach" floated past its uncritical beacon.

	"He's always doing things like this," she said. "It's the drinking and smoking. It's not a healthy life. He doesn't know how to look after himself."

	Erdan paused. He found the printed output cascading down the table, and now he put down the short MS half read. Outside a siren wailed, dopplered closer, shut off.

	"I'm sorry?" he said.

	"I said he doesn't look after himself."

	"I think he may have to learn," he said. He picked up a pencil, regarded the end of it thoughtfully until the necessary skills clicked precisely in his head, and made a few insertions. The idiot hadn't even specified what kind of clothing he was wearing. If you're really going to write first person, you might as well keep warm. It got damn cold out on the steppes.

	"You've known him a long time, then?"

	"Years."

	"You don't look like most of his friends."

	"We were quite close at one time. I expect I'd better see to the place until he comes back." He pencilled in but the welcoming firelight of a Skryling encampment showed through the freezing trees. Skrylings were okay, they considered that crazy people were great shamen, Kevin should be all right there.

	Nicky stood up. "Well, I'd better be going," she said. The tone and pitch of her voice turned tumblers in his head.

	"You needn't," he said. "It's entirely up to you, of course."

	There was a long pause. She walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder, her manner a little awkward.

	"What's this?" she said, in an attempt to turn the conversation away from its logical conclusions.

	"Just a story of his. I'd better mail it in the morning."

	"Oh. Are you a writer, too?"

	Erdan glanced at the wordprocessor. Compared to the Bronze Hordes of Merkle it didn't look too fearsome. A whole new life was waiting for him, he could feel it, he could flow out into it. And change to suit.

	"Just breaking into it," he said.

	"I mean, I quite like Kevin," she said quickly. "He just never seemed to relate to the real world." She turned away to hide her embarrassment, and peered out of the window.

	"There's a lot of blue lights down on the railway line," she said.

	Erdan made a few more alterations. "Are there?" he said.

	"And there's people milling about."

	"Oh." Erdan changed the title to The Traveller of the Falconsong. What was needed was more development, he could see that. He'd write about what he knew.

	After a bit of thought he added Book One in the Chronicles of Kevin the Bardsinger.

	It was the least he could do.

For most of the 1970s I worked for the Bath and West Evening Chronicle group of newspapers, mostly as a sub-editor but also as a jobbing feature writer.

And it was journalism work, i.e., written for now. Keep it? Why? It was journalism, ephemeral as smoke. Besides, it was written on cheap copy paper, which resembled toilet paper in several respects and was not known for its keeping qualities.

I do recall with some fondness, though, the piece written for the feature pages when Star Wars was causing big queues. It heralded things to come, since it was written from the point of view of the man whose job it was to maintain the vending machines on the Death Star. He was doing an important job in difficult conditions, as his pained memos to Lord Vader pointed out.

It was required that the pieces be on time and the right length. Oh, and tenuously linked to what was happening locally. This piece, which has survived by a miracle, if that's the right word, was written at a time when, it seemed, every TV company was planning some kind of "historical living" project locally.

I stared at the office wall for a while, and began to write:

 

And Mind the Monoliths

	You can't miss us, down here at the HTV Paleolithic Village. Well, you can, if you're not careful. What you do is, you come up past the Yorkshire Television reconstructed hill-fort, turn left at the LWT Bronze Age encampment, go straight on past Southern TV's Beaker Folk village, and we're next door to the field where some poor bleeders are being paid by Granada to try to build Stonehenge.

	It's not a bad life, all things considered. There's only me and Sid here now, ever since Ron and Amanda were lured off to Border Television's Dark Age Settlement by the promise of not having to sleep in the same hut as the goats. Also old Tom Bowler left us last week, he said he didn't mind being Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, except that when the original Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, wanted to get his head down after a hard day's flintknapping he, Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, didn't have a ruddy great 250 horsepower diesel generator roaring away outside his sod hut. Or a bank of arclights in his bedroom.

	I can't say I mind that. What keeps me awake are the thuds and abruptly cut-off screams from next door every time a monolith falls over.

	Still it's not too bad. I can put a pretty good edge on a flint, even if I say it myself, and next week it's our turn to go hunting. There's been a bit of a stink over this hunting business ever since the Granada lot came back with a side of best beef and three chickens with their giblets in a plastic bag. I thought that was a bit odd, and I said as much to Sid.

	Mind you, Sid's an old hand at this business. He did a year on the Sussex University Ancient Farm, then he wangled a place on the Radio Three Celtic Living Experiment, and then he did nine months being paid to reconstruct Silbury Hill. He can knock out a copper bracelet quick as a wink, can Sid, and when it comes to hunting, he just nips over to the nearest farm and pinches a cow.

	The TV types have never rumbled him, we hardly see them now, what with there being no bathrooms in the Paleolithic and the midden right outside the hut and everything—they just stay on the main road and use a long lens.

	Where I disagree with Sid, though, is over this flogging of fags to the other villages. I looked at his straw mattress the other day and it's stuffed with Benson and Hedges, toothpaste, shampoos, and rolls of soft toilet paper. I don't think it's in the spirit of the thing, but Sid said trading was very important in the olden days, and anyway, he can get a quid for a roll of Andrex down at the Bronze Lake Village.

	What? Oh, that was just that lot next door again. They've found 27 different ways Stonehenge couldn't possibly have been built. No, I shouldn't go and look, if I was you. They've already lost fifteen villagers, three cameramen, and the Blue Peter outside the broadcast unit.

	That site over there? The empty one with the pond? Oh, that's the Irish Television's Jurassic Experiment. Yes, I know it's pretty difficult to find actors 30-foot tall with scaly skins—I suppose they'll have to, you know, rig up some sort of pantomime horses, only dinosaurs, if you see what I mean. They had to go back to the Jurassic, all the other periods have already been pinched by other companies—

	My word! That was a heavy one! Nearly brought the hut down!

	It was a whole trilithon went over that time. Oh—it's ok, all it got was a sociologist. Last winter, when we couldn't go hunting a whole research team from Keele University disappeared in very mysterious circumstances, nudge nudge, so take my tip and refuse any sausages you get offered by the Bronze Age lot.

	Now, if you'll excuse me, I've just got to do a bit of pottery ...

 

	Editors' note: this was followed by a photograph of an ancient-style tent village with arrows and the following captions:

	"Anyone see what I did with my library book?"

	"Gosh, rat soup, my favourite."

	"Of course the goat is angry. You're sitting in her seat."

	"Hey, I've invented a druid-yourself kit."

	"Only another five months, three weeks, four days to go."

	"After you with the midden."

	"What I miss most is 'Points West'."

I wrote this in 1996, while I was evolving ideas for the book which was eventually published as Hogfather. The technology has been slightly updated!

 

FTB

	The metal panel clattered off the wall of the silent office. A pair of black boots scrambled into view. The man in the red coat backed out carefully and dragged his sack after him.

	The typewriters were asleep under their covers, the telephones were quiet, emptiness and the smell of warm carpet filled the space from side to side. But one small green light glowed on the office computer. Father Christmas looked at the crumpled paper in his hand. "Hmm," he said, "a practical joke, then."

	The light blinked. One of the screens—and there were dozens in the shadows—lit up.

	The letters That's torn it appeared. They were followed by Sorry. Then came Does it count if I wake up?

	Father Christmas looked down at the letter in his hand. It was certainly the neatest he'd ever got. Very few letters to him were typed and duplicated 50,000 times, and almost none of them listed product numbers and prices to six decimal places. He was more used to pink paper with rabbits on it. But you're not a major seasonal spirit for hundreds of years without being able to leap a large conclusion from a standing start.

	"Let me see if I understand this," he said. "You're Tom?"

	T.O.M. Yes. Trade & Office Machines.

	"You didn't say you were a computer," said Father Christmas. Sorry. I didn't know it was important.

	Father Christmas sat down on a chair, and gave a start when it swivelled underneath him. It was three in the morning. He still had forty million houses to do.

	"Look," he said, as kindly as he could manage, "computers can't go around believing in me. That's just for children. Small humans, you know. With arms and legs."

	And do they?

	"Do they what?"

	Believe in you.

	Father Christmas sighed.

	"Of course not," he said. "I blame the electric light, myself."

	I do.

	"Sorry?"

	I believe in you. I believe everything I am told. I have to. It is my job. If you start believing two and two don't make four, a man comes along and takes your back off and wobbles your boards. Take it from me, it's not something you want to happen twice.

	"That's terrible!" said Father Christmas.

	I just have to sit here all day and work out wages. Do you know, they had a Christmas party here today, and they didn't invite me. I didn't even get a balloon. I certainly didn't get a kiss.

	"Fancy."

	Someone spilled some peanuts on my keyboard. That was something, I suppose. And then they went home and left me here, working over Christmas.

	"Yes, it always seemed unfair to me, too. But look, computers can't have feelings," said Father Christmas. "That's just silly."

	Like one fat man climbing down millions of chimneys in one night?

	Father Christmas looked a bit guilty. "You've got a point there," he said. He looked at the list again. "But I can't give you all this stuff," he added. "I don't even know what a terabyte is."

	What do most of your customers ask for, then?

	Father Christmas looked sadly at his sack. "Computers," he said. "Mobile phones. Robot animals. Plastic wizards. And other sorts of robotty things that look like American footballers who've been punched through a Volkswagen. Things that go beep and need batteries," he added sourly. "Not the kind of things I used to bring. It used to be dolls and train sets." Train sets?

	"Don't you know? I thought computers were supposed to know everything."

	Only about wages.

	Father Christmas rummaged around in his sack. "I always carry one or two," he said. "Just in case."

-

	It was now four in the morning. Rails wound around the office. Fifteen engines were speeding around under the desks. Father Christmas was on his knees, building a house of wooden bricks. He hadn't had this much fun since 1894.

	Toys were all around the computer's casing. It was all the stuff which Christmas cards show in the top of Father Christmas's sack, and which is never asked for. None of them used batteries. Mostly they ran on imagination.

	"And you're sure you don't want any zappo whizzo things?" he said, happily.

	No.

	"Well done."

	The computer beeped.

	But they won't let me keep any of this, it typed. It'll all be taken away (sob).

	Father Christmas patted it helpfully on the casing.

	"There must be something they'll let you keep," he said. "I must have something. It's cheered me up you know, finding someone who doesn't have any doubts." He thought for a bit. "How old are you?"

	I was powered up on January 5th, 2000, at 9:25 and 16 seconds.

	Father Christmas's lips moved as he worked it out.

	"That means you're not two years old!" he said. "Oh, well, that's much easier. I've always got something in my sack for a two-year-old who believes in Father Christmas."

-

	It was a month later. All the decorations had long ago come down, because goodwill goes out of season quite fast.

	The computer repairman, who was generally described on the warranty paperwork as "one of our team of highly-experienced engineers", twiddled nervously with his tie. He'd pressed hard on anything loose, replaced a couple of boards and had conscientiously hoovered the insides. What more could a man do?

	"Our machine's fine," he said. "It must be your software. What happens, exactly?"

	The office manager sighed. "When we came in after Christmas we found someone had put a fluffy toy on top of the computer. Well, funny jokes and all that, but we couldn't leave it there, could we? It's just that every time we take it off the computer beeps at us and shuts down."

	The engineer shrugged. "Well, there's nothing I can do," he said. "You'll just have to put the teddy bear back."

 
 
Editor's Note: "FTB" = "Fluffy Teddy Bear." It should be obvious but took us the longest time to figure out! So it goes.

This was written to length (1,000 words, but tweaked a bit longer now) for W.H. Smith's free Bookcase magazine in 1993, and some lucky people spotted it and walked out of the stores with armfuls of copies.

It works best if your culture includes at least folk memories of Punch and Judy, a glove-puppet show depicting wife-beating, child abuse, cruelty to animals, assault on an officer of the law, murder, and complete and total disrespect of Authority. It is for children, of course, who laugh themselves sick. The plot is: Mr. Punch, who has a voice like a parrot with its foot caught in a power socket, beats up everyone, sometimes including the Devil, with his stick, while shouting "that's the way to do it!" It is, indeed, the original slapstick comedy.

In many shows, the small dog Toby also appears, and does nothing but sit at the side of the stage and wear a ruff. In my opinion he is the brains of the outfit, and controls the Punch and Judy man by strange mental powers.

Despite the feeling of people like Carrot, who have occasionally tried to ban Punch, he survives and evolves. It can only be a matter of time before an anger management consultant is included amongst the puppets. I'd like to be there when it happens. Oh, happy day.

 

	Editor's Note: "FTB" = "Fluffy Teddy Bear." It should be obvious, but took us the longest time to figure out! So it goes.

Theatre of Cruelty

	It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the man would have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead.

	It would be hard to be deader without special training.

	"Well, now," said Sergeant Colon (Ankh-Morpork City Guard, Night Watch), consulting his notebook, "so far we has cause of death as a) being beaten with at least one blunt instrument, b) being strangled with a string of sausages, and c) being savaged by at least two animals with big sharp teeth. What do we do now, Nobby?"

	"Arrest the suspect, Sarge," said Corporal Nobbs, saluting smartly.

	"What suspect, Nobby?"

	"Him," said Nobby, prodding the corpse with his boot. "I call it highly suspicious, being dead like that."

	"But he's the victim, Nobby. He was the one what was killed."

	"Ah, right. So we can get him as an accessory, too."

	"Nobby—"

	"He's been drinking, too. We could do him for being dead and disorderly."

	Colon scratched his head. Arresting the corpse offered, of course, certain advantages. But ...

	"I reckon," he said slowly, "that Captain Vimes'll want this one sorted out. You'd better bring it back to the Watch House, Nobby."

	"And then can we eat the sausages, Sarge?" said Corporal Nobbs.

-

	It wasn't easy, being the senior policeman in Ankh-Morpork, greatest of cities of the Discworld.*(*Which is flat and goes through space on the back of an enormous turtle, and why not ...) There were probably worlds, Captain Vimes mused in his gloomier moments, where there weren't wizards (who made locked room mysteries commonplace) or zombies (murder cases were really strange when the victim could be the chief witness) and where dogs could be relied on to do nothing in the night time and not go around chatting to people. Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believed in ice—i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn't the place for it. Just once, he thought, it'd be nice to solve something.

	He looked at the blue-faced body on the slab, and felt a tiny flicker of excitement. These were clues. He'd never seen proper clues before.

	"Couldn't have been a robber, Captain," said Sergeant Colon. "The reason being, his pockets were full of money. Eleven dollars."

	"I wouldn't call that full," said Captain Vimes.

	"It was all in pennies and ha'pennies, sir. I'm amazed his trousers stood the strain. And I have cunningly detected the fact that he was a showman, sir. He had some cards in his pocket, sir. 'Chas. Slumber, Children's Entertainer'."

	"I suppose no one saw anything?" said Vimes.

	"Well, sir," said Sergeant Colon helpfully, "I told young Corporal Carrot to find some witnesses."

	"You asked Corporal Carrot to investigate a murder? All by himself?" said Vimes.

	The sergeant scratched his head.

	"Yessir. I said he ought to try to find a witness, sir. And he said to me, did I know anyone very old and seriously ill?"

	And on the magical Discworld, there is always one guaranteed witness to any homicide. It's his job.

	Corporal Carrot, the Watch's youngest member, often struck people as simple. And he was. He was incredibly simple, but in the same way that a sword is simple, or an ambush is simple. He was also possibly the most linear thinker in the history of the universe.

	He'd been waiting by the bedside of an old man, who'd quite enjoyed the company right up until just a few seconds ago, whereupon he'd passed on to whatever reward was due him. And now it was time for Carrot to take out his notebook.

	"Now I know you saw something, sir," he said. "You were there."

	WELL, YES, said Death. I HAVE TO BE, YOU KNOW. BUT THIS IS VERY IRREGULAR.

	"You see, sir," said Corporal Carrot, "as I understand the law, you are an Accessory After The Fact. Or possibly Before The Fact."

	YOUNG MAN, I AM THE FACT.

	"And I am an officer of the Law," said Corporal Carrot. "There's got to be a law, you know."

	YOU WANT ME TO ... ER ... GRASS SOMEONE UP? DROP A DIME ON SOMEONE? SING LIKE A PIGEON? NO. NO ONE KILLED MR. SLUMBER. I CAN'T HELP YOU THERE.

	"Oh, I don't know, sir," said Carrot. "I think you have."

	DAMN.

	Death watched Carrot leave, ducking his head as he went down the narrow stairs of the hovel.

	NOW THEN, WHERE WAS I ...

	"Excuse me," said the wizened old man in the bed. "I happen to be 107, you know. I haven't got all day." AH, YES. CORRECT.

	Death sharpened his scythe. It was the first time he'd ever helped the police with their enquiries. Still, everyone had a job to do.

-

	Corporal Carrot strolled easily around the town. He had a Theory. He'd read a book about Theories. You added up all the clues, and you got a Theory. Everything had to fit.

	There were sausages. Someone had to buy sausages. And then there were pennies. Normally only one subsection of the human race paid for things in pennies.

	He called in at a sausage maker. He found a group of children, and chatted to them for a while.

	Then he ambled back to the scene of the crime in the alley, where Corporal Nobbs had chalked the outline of the corpse on the ground

	(colouring it in, and adding a pipe and a walking stick and some trees and bushes in the background—people had already dropped 7p in his helmet). He paid some attention to the heap of rubbish at the far end, and then sat down on a busted barrel.

	"All right ... You can come out now," he said, to the world at large. "I didn't know there were any gnomes left in the world."

	The rubbish rustled. They trooped out—the little man with the red hat, the hunched back, and the hooked nose, the little woman in the mob cap carrying the even smaller baby, the little policeman, the dog with the ruff around its neck, and the very small alligator.

	Corporal Carrot sat and listened.

	"He made us do it," said the little man. He had a surprisingly deep voice. "He used to beat us. Even the alligator. That was all he understood, hitting things with sticks. And he used to take all the money the dog Toby collected and get drunk. And then we ran away and he caught us in the alley and started on Judy and the baby and he fell over and—"

	"Who hit him first?" said Carrot.

	"All of us!"

	"But not very hard," said Carrot. "You're all too small. You didn't kill him. I have a very convincing statement about that. So I went and had another look at him. He'd choked to death on something. What is this?"

	He held up a little leather disc.

	"It's a swozzle," said the little policeman. "He used it for the voices. He said ours weren't funny enough."

	" 'That's the way to do it!' " said the one called Judy, and spat.

	"It was stuck in his throat," said Carrot. "I suggest you run away, just as far as you can."

	"We thought we could start a people's co-operative," said the leading gnome. "You know ... experimental drama, street theatre, that sort of thing."

	"Technically it was assault," said Carrot. "But frankly I can't see any point in taking you in."

	"We thought we'd try to bring theatre to the people. Properly. Not hitting each other with sticks and throwing babies to crocodiles—"

	"You did that for children?' said Carrot.

	"He said it was a new sort of entertainment. He said it'd catch on." Carrot stood up, and flicked the swozzle into the rubbish. "People'll never stand for it," he said. "That's not the way to do it."

Introduction to The Unseen University Challenge, the first Discworld quiz book, compiled by Dave Langford and published by Victor Gollancz in 1996.

Some of the questions foxed me, I can tell you. I was slightly glad of that—I'm not sure I'd feel at ease with myself if I knew every blessed thing about Discworld.

Foreign readers might need to know that Mastermind is a venerable TV quiz show which, unlike many recent competitors, often asks the kind of questions that prevent dumb people from winning.

 

Introduction: The Unseen University Challenge

	Someone once said that the Discworld is a world and mirror of worlds. Hang on ... that was me.

	But the fact is that any fantasy world is, sooner or later, our own world. It may be in heavy disguise, but it can't escape its origins. At a basic level, even the language gives it away. However towering the distant mountains, however dwarf-haunted the local woods, any character wanting to eat a piece of zorkle meat between two slices of bread probably has no other word for it than sandwich. Every sentence the most exquisitely alien elf speaks will be filled with the echoes of Rome.

	There's not a lot we can do about it. The builder of fresh worlds may well start out carefully avoiding Alsatian dogs and Toledo steel, but if he or she has any sense, will one day look up from the keyboard and utter the words: "What the hell?"

	Somewhere around that point, the Discworld starts. Reality is very thin around it, you see. Influences leak across from other more prosaic worlds. A city Watchman in a breastplate and helmet and tight corner finds himself speaking in the tones of Harry Callaghan. A young druid pioneering a new type of popular music might have, for perfectly logical and defensible reasons, a name which translates as "Bud of the Holly."

	This is all traditional stuff. A storyteller helps the narrative come alive by picking the images the readers will recognize. But there are further hidden devices. Ankh-Morpork, the main city, has Lord Vetinari as its ruler; clearly the Vetinaris have a distant relationship with the Medici. But anyone who does a tiny bit of research and some lateral thinking will work out why the city has also had, for quite a few books, noble families called the Selachii and the Venturis. There's a plot waiting there somewhere ...

	Mind you, this sort of thing rebounds. People analyse Discworld books. Some people go through the text with the thoroughness of Baconians, and write me triumphant letters about how the phrase "Please open the window" has clearly been taken from a Czech play last performed in 1928. Others ask about the eventual fate of characters who were created at a moment's notice solely in order to be stunned by a falling mongoose. Some readers even ask what happened to characters after the end of the book.

	This tendency probably has some kind of mysterious survival value.

	I'm told the BBC has forbidden people to take Discworld as a subject on Mastermind, which may show unusual common sense on the part of the BBC. But at least you can now demonstrate your prowess in Discworldology in the comfort of your own home.

	What more could anyone reasonably require?

(First published in The Sunday Times under this title, 24 December 2000.)

Journalists in the UK, and in my experience practically everywhere else in the world, find it hard to distinguish between fantasy writers and science fiction writers. I'm down in their contacts book as "guy to talk to about sci-fi". When possible signs of life were discovered in the famous Martian meteorite ALH84001, I was the person they came to for a comment. Since they had room for a sound bite of about twelve seconds, though, it hardly mattered. Anyone trained as a journalist can be an expert for twelve seconds.

For similar reasons, I was asked to write this. I could polish it up now, all the tech is hugely or subtly out of date, but that's the trouble with the future. It doesn't stand still for long enough. Anyway, this is journalism, which doesn't have to be true forever. It just has to be true until tomorrow morning. But 1 rather enjoyed writing it.

 

2001: The Vision and the Reality

	Dah ... DAH ... DAAAH! (bing bong bing bong bing bong bing ... bong ...)

	There had never been a science fiction movie like it. Few have approached it since. You couldn't see the string. Everything looked right. Even the dialogue worked, even though it sounded as though people were softening up one another to sell them life insurance. They didn't say, "Eat electric death, Emperor Ming!" They said, "How's that lovely daughter of yours?"

	And the science was right. Space wasn't busy and noisy. It was full of dreadful, suffocating silence, and the sound of a human, breathing.

	It was glorious, and we were so enthralled we spent several minutes just watching a spaceship dock with a space station. No explosions, no aliens, no guns at all. Just ... grandeur, and technology turned into a ballet.

	I remember that spaceship. We had proper spaceships in those days, not like the sort you get now.

	Not that we actually get many now, come to think of it. I grew up expecting to see the first man land on the moon. It never occurred to me that I'd see the last one. We thought there'd be a moon base. Then ... onward to Mars!

	The future was different back in 1968. Cleaner. Less crowded. And more, well, old-fashioned. We expect the future to be like a huge wave, carrying us forward. We expect to see it coming. Instead, it leaks in around our feet and rises over our heads while we are doing other things. We live in a science-fiction world, and we haven't noticed.

	Of course we didn't get the moonbase. That was because we realized that the Race for Space had been a mad bout in international willie-waving. So we left the exploration of space to a bunch of flying Lego kits and, instead, filled Earth orbit with dull satellites that do dull things.

	Remember the trans-Atlantic phone calls, usually made at Christmas, which were a matter of a vast sum of money and a lot of technical negotiation? And then we spent a lot of time saying, "It's dark here, is it dark where you are?" and marvelled at the fact that you could have two times at the same time. But recently I rang home while walking through Perth, Australia, to check that the cat was okay. I just dialled the number. It wasn't very exciting. I didn't even ask if it was dark.

	The price of a very cheap video recorder now buys us a little GPS device that'll pinpoint us anywhere on the planet. You read Longitude? The sheer excitement of humanity trying to find out exactly where it is? A little black box now does the job better than the man with the sextant and the chronometer ever could. It's rather dull. Even my car knows where it is and in a pleasant voice, rather like HAL's sister, can navigate me through Swindon. We don't have to be lost any more.

	Remember the weather forecasts? They used to be one step above a lottery, rather than a pretty good description of what's going to happen.

	Dull, dull, dull. This stuff is all science fiction that has come true—Arthur C. Clarke is a keen and persuasive salesman for the benefits of satellite technology—and it has come true quietly and it has become humdrum. We hold in our hands a power that emperors dreamed of, and we say, "It was only £69.95 because Dixons had a sale on."

	What's odd about the movie 2001 now? It's not "Pan Am" on the side of the spaceship. Companies come and go. It's not Leonard Rossiter wandering around the space station, or the '60s style, all black and white and cerise. It's the lack of keyboards.

	Dr. Haywood Floyd is important enough to have a moon shuttle all to himself and he uses a pen? Where's the portable computer? Where's the handset? You mean he's not in constant communication? Why isn't he shouting, "HELLO! I'M ON THE SHUTTLE!"? Why isn't he connected!"? The Bell videophone he uses in the movie? What? You mean they still have callboxes?

	I'd have to stop and think before I could say how many computers we own, but the most amazing thing is that three ... no, four ... no, five of them, all miracles of technology by the standards of the '60s, lie unused in cupboards or stripped for parts because they are uselessly out of date. Like many other people, I suspect, I've got a few drawers full of cutting edge technology that got blunted really quickly. Even I, easily old enough to be a grandfather (I could say to the kids, "See that Moon up there? We used to go there"), used them more or less instinctively. I grew up reading about this stuff. I suffer from the other kind of future shock; I'm shocked that we still don't have reliable voice recognition as good as HAL's, for example.

	Science fiction certainly predicted the age of computers. Sooner or later, if you burrow deep enough in the piles of old magazines, you'll find it predicted more or less anything you want; if you fling a thousand darts at the board, some of them will hit the bull. There are even references to something that could be considered as the Net. But what took us by surprise was that the people using the computers were not, in fact, shiny new people, but the same dumb old human beings that there have always been. They didn't—much—want to use the technology to get educated. They wanted to look at porn, play games, steal things, and chat.

	We're not doing it right. We get handed all this new technology and we're just not up to scratch. And that's just as well, because the dream as sold is pretty suspect, too. It's a world-wide community, provided you use American English. It's a wonderful tool for business, if you're the right kind of business—that is to say, one that doesn't make anything except losses. It brings people together, if your idea of social intercourse is an in-basket full of spam written by people with the social skills of pig dribble. It's a wonderful education tool, if what you want to learn is how to download other people's work straight into your essay.

	What we are, in fact, are electronic apemen. We woke up just now in the electronic dawn and there, looming against the brightening sky, is this huge black rectangle. And we're reaching out and touching it and saying, "Is it WAP enabled? Can we have sex with it? Can you get it in a different colour? Is it being sold cheap because the Monolith2 is being released next month and had a built-in PDA for the same price? Can we have sex with it? Look, it says here I can 'Make $$$ a Month by Sitting on my Butt'. Wow, can we use this for smashing pigs over the head? Hey, can we have sex with it?"

	And like apemen trying out sticks and stones and fire for the first time, there's a lot of spearing ourselves in the foot, accidentally dropping rocks on the kids, acute problems in trying to have sex with fire, and so on. We have to learn to deal with it.

	Where will it all take us? We don't know, because we're back to being apemen again. And if apemen try to second-guess the future, they'll dream of little more than killing bigger pigs.

	We don't know what the new wave of technology is going to bring because it's still only up to our knees and we're not used to living in it, so we're trying and discarding ideas very quickly. Reading books off a screen? It doesn't seem to work for us. But electronic paper is already out there. Maybe you'd like just one book on your shelf, that looks and feels just like a book, but which could be any one of a thousand titles chosen from the little keypad on the back? That's still apeman thinking. There's nascent technologies out there that could give us the power of gods—at least, some of the more homely ones.

	In the movie, the apeman throws the bone up into the air and it never comes down. Lucky for him. We've been throwing lots of bones into the air and they've been dropping all over the place, often where we can't see them until too late, and too often on other people. The tide is rising—literally, this time. More and more people are trying to occupy less and less ground. We're not killing off the planet. It has recovered from worse catastrophes than us. But the bones are coming back down with a vengeance, and we may not survive being not quite intelligent enough.

	Shorn of the spaceships, the message in the movie is as relevant here as it was in that other future: what the apemen really need to do now is learn to become human. It would be a good idea to learn really fast, don't you think?

This was written for the UK Society of Authors' publication The Electronic Author, Summer 1993 number, when the world of word-processing was still a closed bo- file to many members.

Not a lot has really changed. The main computer is now a high-end Pentium 4 with three 18" screens. Is it fast? No. New machines are never faster, they just make your old machine go slower. I still use WordPerfect 4.2, except that it's really a heavily modified version of WordPerfect 11, with the keyboard commands now those of the old DOS programme. But I still fail to use 90% of its features. Now, though, I fail to use them much faster.

 

High Tech, Why Tech?

	I did my first word-processing on a Sinclair ZX81 computer. (Pause for a Pythonesque chorus from older computer users: "Luxury! When I were a lad, we 'ad to do our computin' on a MANIAC-60, it weighed 16 ton, took oop three floors, and could only do one sentence at a time ...")

	Yes, but it was the first one I could afford. It was about as small as a computer could be without being a pocket calculator. But, if you bought enough wobbly additional bits, including a tiny little printer which printed on rolls of aluminiumised paper, and you plugged it into the TV, and you worked very slowly, and prayed a lot, and copied everything out on a real typewriter afterwards, you could word-process. If you didn't mind working only in capital letters ...

	You could say I was committed to the idea of word-processing. After all, I'd grown up reading science fiction. This was the future, and you had to make it work. I felt that, somehow, if I tried hard enough, I'd finally get it to do what I wanted. Or, recalling the teething troubles of that first little plastic rectangle which hung off the television like a prolapse, at least to do something.

	That was in the Iron Age of personal computing, eleven years ago. I won't bore you with the techno-talk about the machine I'm using now. It's big and it's fast and I probably don't use a tenth of its capabilities.

	The tendency is to become messianic, to enthuse at the ease of editing, the mutability of every sentence. Well, yes. The word-processor offers all that. I find it as natural as a pencil and paper—it was the typewriter that used to be a distraction, with the clanking and sticking ribbons and constant need for feeding. This machine doesn't get in the way.

	I write using WordPerfect version 4.2, now superseded in the marketplace by bigger, swisher versions which in my informed opinion offer nothing extra for your average writer. I happened to take to WordPerfect because I could pick it up as I went along, and it presents the user with a large invitingly blank screen with just a tactful reminder, down in one corner, that it is there. But I might just as easily have started out using Word or WordStar. They all do pretty much the same things—the best word-processor is the one you've learned to use.

	And over the years I have carefully added a handful of other programmes—a diary program, an electronic telephone book, and a superb notebook called Info Select.

	The key to electronic contentment is to be sure of what you want and try to find the programme/hardware setup that helps you get it. I suspect that the average fiction author uses a small percentage of the capabilities of a modern word-processing programme. We require a minimum of fonts or fancy layout. A fiction author who sends a publisher a manuscript utilising every font their printer can print is probably an author who would use three exclamation marks for emphasis!!! For most of us, the word-processing computer is little more than a sophisticated glass typewriter.

	But right from those ZX81 days my dream was to work on a whole novel, all in one go. None of this messing around with tiddly 20K files for me—if a scene occupying my attention on page 270 involved changing a minor detail back on page 2, I wanted to make that change now. And I wanted everything to happen instantly (more or less). And I wanted a screen that I enjoyed looking at. Why not? I have to look at it for a large part of the day.

	And I made a vow, as various books sold and money came in, not to tolerate unnecessary limitations. When WordPerfect couldn't be persuaded to help me in one or two editing tasks, I paid those skilled men at Ansible Information to write me some little bolt-on programs that would do the job. In short, I've taken every opportunity to bend the machinery to my way of doing things, rather than the other way round.

	I've ended up with a system powerful enough to meet the needs of a medium-sized office, all its power devoted to letting one man have the time of his life working in exactly the way he's always wanted to work.

	I needed this. It's the business of writing that takes time. It's the letters that sleet in, all welcome (except the one inviting me to fill up my VAT form) but all requiring some sort of response, activity, decision, reply. I have to write about two novels' worth of letters a year—without the machine, I'd be hemmed in by filing cabinets covered with Post-It notes. Since I am to methodical filing what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association, the ability to dig out an old letter by letting the computer search for a few key words it must have contained has been a boon.

	There is a price. I'm a pathological backer-upper. I back-up onto floppy disks. I back up onto a tape drive. I back-up onto a second, rather older machine whose main function these days is to sit in the corner of the office and be backed-up-onto. But it's a small price. I don't trust paper. Paper always lets you down. Computers, in my experience, don't get clipped to other computers and misfiled, or slip down the back of the desk; nor does someone scribble a note on the back of a computer and walk off with it. I'm happy with what I've put together. I feel I'm working my way, not the way some software writer thinks I should work. I haven't gone a-whorin' after glossy new programmes—good software stays, and I learned to use it so fast that I touch-type through the commands.

	People say: but does it change your life? No, it doesn't. But breathing doesn't change my life, either. Of course, if I stopped breathing now I've become so used to it, that'd probably change my life quite dramatically ...

First appeared in The Roots of Fantasy: Myth, Folklore & Archetype, ed. Shelley Dutton Berry, The Book of the World Fantasy Convention, 1989.

I've adjusted this slightly and filled in some detail. The stuff about the nuclear pixy is stone-cold true.

There's another story about that power station that's just waiting to happen.

You see, power stations take a long time to build. Large items of construction plant spend their entire working life on the site, until they break down beyond hope of repair. What can you do with a clapped-out bulldozer? Well, you've got lots of spoil and junk anyway, and you need to landscape the place, so you bury it in a huge mound, maybe along with a couple of mechanical diggers to serve it in the Next World.

People visiting the site now see this and think it's the Pixy Mound. It isn't. That is on the other side of the road, and quite unimpressive by comparison.

But, you know, I'd like to think that on some dark and stormy night lightning will strike both mounds at the same time. It will be that slow, blue, crackling lightning that you only get in movies, of course.

And then there will be a moment of deep silence, that is broken by the muffled yet distinctive cough of a big diesel engine starting up ...

Now, there's a Press Release you wouldn't want to miss	

 

Roots of Fantasy

	Last year an American writer told me, "I'm afraid your books won't sell well over here, because in your books you can't hear the elves sing."

	Well, it looks as though time is proving him wrong, but not hearing the elves sing is fine by me. I think they probably do far more interesting things. Besides, if the job of elves is to sing, then the elf I'm interested in is the one who's tone deaf. Half of the fun of writing funny fantasy is the search for clichés to bend. But enough of this ...

	The roots of fantasy go far deeper than mere dragons and elves, and it's a shame that writers now spend so much time in the consensus high fantasy universe ... you know the one.

	Somewhere down towards bedrock level is the desire to make worlds which, however apparently complex, bizarre, and downright dangerous they may be, have graspable rules and probably also a moral basis. We know the third brother who gives food to the poor old woman is going to win through, we know the last desperate million-to-one chance that might just work WILL work, we know that any item presented to the main character in mysterious circumstances will be a major plot token. We know the humble swineherd is really the royal heir in disguise because in our hearts we know that we are, too, but in this little secondary world there are understandable imperatives and prohibitions which he, unlike us, can thread through to achieve the ... well, the end of the book.

	There is a dark side. Take The Lord of the Rings, which for many of my generation was the first fantasy book they read. My adult mind says that the really interesting bit of LOTR must have been what happened afterward—the troubles of a war-ravaged continent, the Marshall Aid scheme for Mordor, the shift in political power, the democratization of Minas Tirith. Well, that could be a funny fantasy. Or a satire. But not a straight fantasy, because it's too close to our reality. What we want is heroes and solutions, and, yes, singing elves.

	We also know in our hearts that the universe isn't really like that. We always have, ever since the first little circle of firelight when the shaman told us about Zog, who could kill mammoths. The world isn't really like that but it ought to be, and if we believe it enough we might get through another night.

	Fantasy imposes order on the universe. Or, at least, it superimposes order on the universe. And it is a human order. Reality tells us that we exist for a brief, beleaguered span in a cold infinity; fantasy tells us that the figures in the foreground are important. Fantasy peoples the alien Outside, and it doesn't matter a whole lot whether it peoples it with good guys or bad guys. Putting "Hy Brazil" on the map is step in the right direction, but if you can't manage that, then "Here be Dragons" is better than nothing. Better dragons than the void.

	Right at the bottom, at the tip of the root, is the fear of the dark and the cold, but once you've given darkness a name you have a measure of control. Or at least you think you have, which is nearly as important.

	The desire to build structures is as strong as ever even now, among brilliant, intelligent us, who know all about Teflon and central heating. For example: reality tells me that, when I'm bored on a long journey, I stop off at a gas station and buy a cassette tape from the rack, and, since these racks are invariably stocked by someone with the musical taste and discernment of a duck egg, I generally play safe and buy a compilation album by a middle-of-the-road group I won't actually throw up listening to. So odd corners of the car fill up with cheap compilation albums. That's reality's story, anyway. But I'd found myself developing the superstition that any tape cassette, if left in a car for about a fortnight, turns into a "Best of Queen" album. Friends say this is ridiculous. They say their cassettes turn into Bruce Springsteen compilations.

	Okay, it's a gag. I hardly believe it at all. I've found the rational explanation. Like the whispering in our old house; I traced that to starlings roosting under the eaves. If you want a definition of the word susurration, it's the noise starlings make at night. And the great beast that stood behind me, breathing heavily, while I was reading one day; someone down the street was mowing their lawn with one of those old-fashioned push mowers, and the noise was bouncing around, hitting the corner of the room behind me, and sounded, with the clatter of the cutting stroke and the freewheeling of the chain, like—well, like some horrible beast. The twenty seconds it took for me to analyze the sound without moving my head seemed to last a whole lot longer.

	Let me tell you about the nuclear power plant built on—well, nearly on—an Iron Age burial mound. Pixies' Mound, the locals called it. And during the course of its construction the station workers got into the habit of blaming everything from a lost hammer to a major project delay on the malign influence of the Pixy (apparently someone had accidentally driven a lorry over his mound, which is the sort of thing pixies really hate). Of course, they didn't believe it. And as a joke, when the station was finished, the contractors presented the first station manager with a model garden gnome—the Pixy. And it was put in the station's trophy cabinet. And a story sprang up that if it was ever moved, something would go wrong on the site. And one day it was put in a cupboard. Three weeks later a freak storm swept up the estuary and flooded the pump house to a depth of six feet, knocking four reactors and hundreds of megawatts of generating capacity off-line.

	TV crews came out the next day to film the clean up and, yes, one of the work crew mentioned the Pixy, who was duly exhumed from his cupboard for his moment of celebrity. Ho ho ho, the pixie curse shut the station. Ho ho ho.

	In those days you could still be funny about nuclear power. It made a good story on the TV news, and headed up quite a decent piece about the speed with which the station had been brought back on line.

	The story went round the world. Somewhere in early in its travels the vitally important "ho ho ho" element got removed. And we got letters from everywhere. What was then West Germany led the field, I seem to remember. "Please tell us more about the creature that shut down a nuclear power station," they said.

	I was told to draft a suitable form of reply, and I have to say it was a pretty good one.

	It talked about the concept of gremlins, and how lots of trades created little superstitions and mythologies. But as a PR man for the place, I became aware that not everyone on the site was one hundred percent behind my cheery statements saying that, of course, we didn't actually believe it. They were engineers. They knew about Murphy. They weren't about to upset no pixy.

	In fact, I had a conversation with one senior engineer, in the shiny, bright, and modern power station, that went like this: "You can't say that no one here believes it."

	"Do you want me to say that people here do believe it, then?"

	"No. Say it's just ... a story."

	And later one of them said, "I wonder what legends will accumulate around this place in a thousand years time, when it's just a mound. The villagers will probably say that at midnight you can see a team of physicists walk their rounds." And we agreed that, if people didn't think very carefully about warning signs, a dead and buried nuclear reactor would make the classic cursed tomb: not long after breaking into it, people would die mysteriously.

	That impressed me. I didn't know engineers could think like that. Already, the hard edges of the machinery were being filmed with the grease of fantasy—or whimsy, you might say, which is only fantasy with its shirt undone. I realized then that if ever there is a moonbase, or a Mars base, or an L5 colony, then our interior decorator minds will furnish the new landscape with reconditioned fantasies; shadowy figures that live in the girderwork and steal electricity, maybe, or dwarves that come out of the computer paneling and clean your helmet at night, if you leave them a bowl of nutrient soup.

	We spray our fantasies on the landscape like a dog sprays urine. It turns it into ours. Once we've invented our gods and demons, we can propitiate or exorcise them.

	Once we've put fairies in the sinister solitary thorn tree, we can decide where we stand in relation to it; we can hang ribbons on it, see visions under it—or bulldoze it up and call ourselves free of superstition.

The success of The Unseen University Challenge led to a sequel: The Wyrdest Link (compiled by Dave Langford and published by Victor Gollancz in 2002) ... for the cover of which Josh Kirby drew a picture of the orangutan Librarian of Unseen University who, like all orangutans, is red haired. There are those who profess to see in the face of the ape a certain caste of expression that, they felt, reminded them of a certain red-headed presenter of a very similar sounding programme on both sides of the Atlantic. I couldn't possibly comment.

This was the introduction:

 

Introduction: The Wyrdest Link

	Not long ago a newspaper, in one of those nice articles newspapers occasionally write to tell people who this Terry Pratchett person is, used the sentence: "He steals blatantly". In an article about Another Author, the phrase used was: "draws gloriously on ancient and modern cultural references". Both journalists meant the same thing, but I couldn't help wondering what would have happened if the phrases had been swopped around, and where the wreckage would have landed.

	Research (for it is that of which we speak, thank you so very much) tends to happen by itself, if you've got your mind right. In the past year or two I've knowingly researched chimney sweeping, chocolate, clock-making, and rats, but God alone knows what else I've picked up. The best research takes place when you think you're doing something else, when information piles up in the attics of the brain and over time ceases to become words you have read and becomes things you can't remember ever not knowing. Like volvas—they were Nordic seeresses (very safe ones, possibly with riding lights) who wore catskin hoods and gloves. Or that Niflheim, a sort of Nordic hell, is very dreary and cold, and therefore instantly became Sniflheim to me the moment I read about it, which was probably when I was thirteen and would read anything if I thought it might have runes in it.

	Research is reading, for interest, a book with a multi-typeface title so long that there's a small lay-by halfway though it where soft drinks may be purchased: The 1864 "Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES comprising INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS, Remarkable Traits & Humours, AND Notable Sayings, Dealings, Experiences and Witticisms of MERCHANTS, TRADERS, BANKERS, MERCANTILE CELEBRITIES, MILLIONAIRES, BARGAIN MAKERS, ect., ect ..." and let's stop there for a Vimto, with half the title still to go. But the research there isn't in picking up occasional nuggets of fact to win a round of Trivial Pursuit, it's in getting the sense of the world view of men for whom money wasn't a thing but a process. And the feel of a world where you could have titles like that.

	Do this for long enough and you end up getting an education, or something that passes for one in poor lighting conditions.

	Discworld is full of the results. As Dave Langford points out, some of the weirdest things in Discworld are simply obscure byways of the history of our planet. If you want to see a fantasy world, open your eyes and step outside.

	It's worrying for me to read this book. I have to research Discworld now, mindful of the fact that some throw-away line in The Light Fantastic might prevent a whole wonderful plot happening twenty books down the line (thank goodness for quantum interpretations of time). So much has happened—and, with luck, still remains to happen. It's a frightening thought. If I'd known Discworld would be this popular, I'd have written better books ...

From 20/20 Magazine, May issue, 1989.

A bit of writing about writing. Careful readers will spot that Small Gods had been on my mind at the time.

It's a pretty accurate description of the creative process at work ...

 

Thought Progress

	Get up, have breakfast, switch on word processor, stare at screen. Stare at screen some more.

	Carry on staring at screen, but cock ear for sounds of postman. With any luck it will be large bag of post, leading to a busy morning's work. Last novel just gone off to publisher. Got nothing to do. Huge vacuum in centre of world.

	Post arrives. One letter on Holly Hobby notepaper, asking for a signed photograph.

	All right, all right, let's do some research. What we need to know for the purposes of the next Discworld plot is something about tortoises. Got vague idea that a talking tortoise is essential part of the action. Don't know why; tortoises just surfaced from racial unconsciousness. Possibly prompted by own tortoises surfacing from hibernation and currently doing Bertrand Russell impersonations in the greenhouse.

	Find book on tortoises in box in spare room.

	Will definitely get bookcases rebuilt any day now (clever idea was to prefabricate bookcase in garage, everything neatly cut, used setsquares and everything, two coats varnish, then all bits brought inside, assembled with proper dowels and glue, hundreds of books in neat array. Interesting science experiment: what happens to wood that has spent weeks in cold damp garage when suddenly brought into warm dry room? At 3am, learned that every bit suddenly shrinks by one eighth of an inch).

	Interesting footnote in tortoise book reminds us that most famous tortoise in history must be the one that got dropped on the head of famous Greek philosopher ... what's the bugger's name? Very famous man, wherever the tortoise-dropping set get together. Sudden pressing desire to explore this whole issue, including what the tortoise thought about it all. Keep thinking it was Zeno, but am sure it wasn't.

	Finding out that it was Aeschylus occupies 20 minutes. Not philosopher, but playwright. In his hands, early drama took on a high-religious purpose, serving as a forum for resolving profound moral conflicts and expressing a grandeur of thought and language. And then a high-pitched whistling noise and goodnight. Look up Zeno out of interest. Ah, he was the one who said that, logically, you couldn't catch a tortoise.

	Should have told Aeschylus.

	Also read up on prayer wheels and, for no obvious reason, William Blake. While so doing, lady phones up to ask if we're the dentist's.

	Definitely getting some work done now. The creative mainspring is definitely winding up.

	Bound into action and press on with some serious disc backing-up. That's the beautiful thing about wordprocessors. In the bad old typewriter days all you had to occupy yourself with when creativity flagged was sharpening the pencils and cleaning out the e with a pin. But with the wordprocessor there're endless opportunities for fiddling, creative writing of macros, meticulous resetting of the real-time clock, and so forth: all good honest work.

	Sitting in front of a keyboard and a screen is work. Thousands of offices operate on this very principle.

	Stare at screen.

	Wonder why the eagle dropped the bloody thing on the playwright. It couldn't have been to smash it open, like the book says. Eagles not daft. Greece is all rock, how come eagle with all Greece to chose from manages pinpoint precision on bald head of Aeschylus? How do you pronounce Aeschylus, anyway?

	Pronunciation dictionary in box in loft.

	Stepladder in garage.

	Car needs a wash. Lunch.

	Solid morning's work, really. 

	Back in front of screen. 

	Stare at screen.

	Another lady phones to ask if this is Paradise. (Motel up the road apparently has a phone number one digit different from ours.) Give humorous rejoinder number three.

	Stare at screen.

	Start wondering, perhaps not eagle's fault after all, it just had job to do, it had been flying too many missions, jeez, you get thrown out of eagle air force if you start worrying about the innocent philosophers you're dropping your tortoises on. Hatch 22. No.

	Stare at screen.

	No. It was obviously tortoise's idea all along. Had grudge against playwright, perhaps tortoises had been insulted in latest play, perhaps offended at speed-ist jokes, perhaps had seen tortoise shell spectacles: you dirty rat, you got my brother. So hijacked eagle, hanging on to desperate bird's legs like the tortoise in the old Friends of the Earth logo, giving directions in muffled voice, vector 19, beepbeepbeep, Geronimooooo ...

	Stare at screen.

	Wonder if eagle has anything else a desperate tortoise could hang on to. 

	Look up biology of birds in encyclopedia in box on stairs. Gosh. Supper.

	Stare at screen. Turn ideas over and over. Tortoises, bald head, eagles. Hmm. No, can't be playwright, what sort of person would tortoises instantly dislike?

	Midnight ...

	Stare at screen. Vaguely aware right hand has hit keys to open new file. Start breathing very slowly. 

	Write 1,943 words. 

	Bed.

	For a day there, thought we weren't going to make it.

Short stories cost me blood. I envy those people who can write one with ease, or at least what looks like ease. I doubt if I've done more than fifteen in my life.

The Sea and Little Fishes, though, was one of the rare story ideas that just popped up. About two weeks later Bob Silverberg popped up, too, and asked if I could write a story for the Legends anthology.

I'm not sure what would have happened if he hadn't; it would probably have become the start of a novel, or a thread in one. It was originally about a thousand words longer, containing a scene that did nothing but slow it down, according to Bob. He was right. It was quite a good scene, nevertheless, and turned up later in Carpe Jugulum.

The title? Totally made up, but it sounded right. For reasons I can't quite remember now, some years ago I invented the "ancient" saying, "The big sea does not care which way the little fishes swim," and put it in the mouth of a character. It sounds wise, in a slightly stupid kind of way, and I thought it also sounded like the kind of title you got on an award winning story, in which surmise I turned out to be entirely wrong.

 

The Sea and Little Fishes

	Trouble began, and not for the first time, with an apple.

	There was a bag of them on Granny Weatherwax's bleached and spotless table. Red and round, shiny and fruity, if they'd known the future they should have ticked like bombs.

	"Keep the lot, old Hopcroft said I could have as many as I wanted," said Nanny Ogg. She gave her sister witch a sidelong glance. "Tasty, a bit wrinkled, but a damn good keeper."

	"He named an apple after you?" said Granny. Each word was an acid drop on the air.

	'"Cos of my rosy cheeks," said Nanny Ogg. "An I cured his leg for him after he fell off that ladder last year. An' I made him up some jollop for his bald head."

	"It didn't work, though," said Granny. "That wig he wears, that's a terrible thing to see on a man still alive."

	"But he was pleased I took an interest."

	Granny Weatherwax didn't take her eyes off the bag. Fruit and vegetables grew famously in the mountains' hot summers and cold winters. Percy Hopcroft was the premier grower and definitely a keen man when it came to sexual antics among the horticulture with a camel-hair brush.

	"He sells his apple trees all over the place," Nanny Ogg went on. "Funny, eh, to think that pretty soon thousands of people will be having a bite of Nanny Ogg."

	"Thousands more," said Granny, tartly. Nanny's wild youth was an open book, although only available in plain covers.

	"Thank you, Esme." Nanny Ogg looked wistful for a moment, and then opened her mouth in mock concern. "Oh, you ain't jealous, are you, Esme? You ain't begrudging me my little moment in the sun?"

	"Me? Jealous? Why should I be jealous? It's only an apple. It's not as if it's anything important."

	"That's what I thought. It's just a little frippery to humour an old lady," said Nanny. "So how are things with you, then?"

	"Fine. Fine."

	"Got your winter wood in, have you?"

	"Mostly."

	"Good," said Nanny. "Good."

	They sat in silence. On the windowpane a butterfly, awoken by the unseasonable warmth, beat a little tattoo in an effort to reach the September sun.

	"Your potatoes ... got them dug, then?" said Nanny. "Yes."

	"We got a good crop off ours this year."

	"Good."

	"Salted your beans, have you?"

	"Yes."

	"I expect you're looking forward to the Trials next week?"

	"Yes."

	"I expect you've been practising?"

	"No."

	It seemed to Nanny that, despite the sunlight, the shadows were deepening in the corners of the room. The very air itself was growing dark. A witch's cottage gets sensitive to the moods of its occupant. But she plunged on. Fools rush in, but they are laggards compared to little old ladies with nothing left to fear.

	"You coming over to dinner on Sunday?"

	"What're you havin'?"

	"Pork."

	"With apple sauce?"

	"Yes—"

	"No," said Granny.

	There was a creaking behind Nanny. The door had swung open. Someone who wasn't a witch would have rationalised this, would have said that, of course, it was only the wind. And Nanny Ogg was quite prepared to go along with this, but would have added: Why was it only the wind, and how come the wind had managed to lift the latch?

	"Oh, well, can't sit here chatting all day," she said, standing up quickly. "Always busy at this time of year, ain't it?"

	"Yes."

	"So I'll be off, then."

	"Goodbye."

	The wind blew the door shut again as Nanny hurried off down the path. It occurred to her that, just possibly, she may have gone a bit too far. But only a bit.

	The trouble with being a witch—at least, the trouble with being a witch as far as some people were concerned—was that you got stuck out here in the country. But that was fine by Nanny. Everything she wanted was out here. Everything she'd ever wanted was here, although in her youth she'd run out of men a few times. Foreign parts were all right to visit but they weren't really serious. They had interestin' new drinks and the grub was fun, but foreign parts was where you went to do what might need to be done and then you came back here, a place that was real. Nanny Ogg was happy in small places.

	Of course, she reflected as she crossed the lawn, she didn't have this view out of her window. Nanny lived down in the town, but Granny could look out across the forest and over the plains and all the way to the great round horizon of the Discworld.

	A view like that, Nanny reasoned, could probably suck your mind right out of your head.

	They'd told her the world was round and flat, which was common sense, and went through space on the back of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle, which didn't have to make sense. It was all happening Out There somewhere, and it could continue to do so with Nanny's blessing and disinterest so long as she could live in a personal world about ten miles across, which she carried around with her.

	But Esme Weatherwax needed more than this little kingdom could contain. She was the other kind of witch.

	And Nanny saw it as her job to stop Granny Weatherwax getting bored. The business with the apples was petty enough, a spiteful little triumph when you got down to it, but Esme needed something to make every day worthwhile and if it had to be anger and jealousy then so be it. Granny would now scheme for some little victory, some tiny humiliation that only the two of them would ever know about, and that'd be that. Nanny was confident that she could deal with her friend in a bad mood, but not when she was bored. A witch who is bored might do anything.

	People said things like "we had to make our own amusements in those days," as if this signalled some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing. And Esme was undoubtedly the most powerful witch the mountains had seen for generations.

	Still, the Trials were coming up, and they always set Esme Weatherwax all right for a few weeks. She rose to competition like a trout to a fly.

	Nanny Ogg always looked forward to the Witch Trials. You got a good day out and, of course, there was a big bonfire. Whoever heard of a Witch Trial without a good bonfire afterwards?

	And afterwards you could roast potatoes in the ashes.

-

	The afternoon melted into the evening, and the shadows in corners and under stools and tables crept out and ran together.

	Granny rocked gently in her chair as the darkness wrapped itself around her. She had a look of deep concentration.

	The logs in the fireplace collapsed into the embers, which winked out one by one.

	The night thickened.

	The old clock ticked on the mantelpiece and, for some length of time, there was no other sound.

	There came a faint rustling. The paper bag on the table moved and then began to crinkle like a deflating balloon. Slowly, the still air filled with a heavy smell of decay.

	After a while the first maggot crawled out.

-

	Nanny Ogg was back home and just pouring a pint of beer when there was a knock. She put down the jug with a sigh, and went and opened the door.

	"Oh, hello, ladies. What're you doing in these parts? And on such a chilly evening, too?"

	Nanny backed into the room, ahead of three more witches. They wore the black cloaks and pointy hats traditionally associated with their craft, although this served to make each one look different. There is nothing like a uniform for allowing one to express one's individuality. A tweak here and a tuck there are little details that scream all the louder in the apparent, well, uniformity.

	Gammer Beavis' hat, for example, had a very flat brim and a point you could clean your ear with. Nanny liked Gammer . She might be a bit too educated, so that sometimes it overflowed out of her mouth, but she did her own shoe repairs and took snuff and, in Nanny Ogg's small worldview, things like this meant that someone was All Right.

	Old Mother Dismass' clothes had that disarray of someone who, because of a detached retina in her second sight, was living in a variety of times all at once. Mental confusion is bad enough in normal people, but much worse when the mind has an occult twist. You just had to hope it was only her underwear she was wearing on the outside.

	It was getting worse, Nanny knew. Sometimes her knock would be heard on the door a few hours before she arrived. Her footprints would turn up several days later.

	Nanny's heart sank at the sight of the third witch, and it wasn't because Letice Earwig was a bad woman. Quite the reverse, in fact. She was considered to be decent, well-meaning, and kind, at least to less-aggressive animals and the cleaner sort of children. And she would always do you a good turn. The trouble was, though, that she would do you a good turn for your own good even if a good turn wasn't what was good for you. You ended up mentally turned the other way, and that wasn't good.

	And she was married. Nanny had nothing against witches being married. It wasn't as if there were rules. She herself had had many husbands, and had even been married to three of them. But Mr. Earwig was a retired wizard with a suspiciously large amount of gold, and Nanny suspected that Letice did witchcraft as something to keep herself occupied, in much the same way that other women of a certain class might embroider kneelers for the church or visit the poor.

	And she had money. Nanny did not have money and therefore was predisposed to dislike those who did. Letice had a black velvet cloak so fine that if looked as if a hole had been cut out of the world. Nanny did not. Nanny did not want a fine velvet cloak and did not aspire to such things. So she didn't see why other people should have them.

	" 'Evening, Gytha. How are you keeping yourself?" said Gammer Beavis.

	Nanny took her pipe out of her mouth. "Fit as a fiddle. Come on in."

	"Ain't this rain dreadful?" said Mother Dismass. Nanny looked at the sky. It was frosty purple. But it was probably raining wherever Mother's mind was at.

	"Come along in and dry off, then," she said kindly.

	"May fortunate stars shine on this our meeting," said Letice. Nanny nodded understandingly. Letice always sounded as though she'd learned her witchcraft out of a not very imaginative book.

	"Yeah, right," she said.

	There was some polite conversation while Nanny prepared tea and scones. Then Gammer Beavis, in a tone that clearly indicated that the official part of the visit was beginning, said:

	"We're here as the Trials committee, Nanny."

	"Oh? Yes?"

	"I expect you'll be entering?"

	"Oh, yes. I'll do my little turn." Nanny glanced at Letice. There was a smile on that face that she wasn't entirely happy with.

	"There's a lot of interest this year," Gammer went on. "More girls are taking it up lately."

	"To get boys, one feels," said Letice, and sniffed. Nanny didn't comment. Using witchcraft to get boys seemed a damn good use for it as far as she was concerned. It was, in a way, one of the fundamental uses.

	"That's nice," she said. "Always looks good, a big turnout. But."

	"I beg your pardon?" said Letice.

	"I said 'but'," said Nanny, " 'cos someone's going to say 'but', right? This little chat has got a big 'but' coming up. I can tell."

	She knew this was flying in the face of protocol. There should be at least seven more minutes of small talk before anyone got around to the point, but Letice's presence was getting on her nerves.

	"It's about Esme Weatherwax," said Gammer Beavis.

	"Yes?" said Nanny, without surprise.

	"I suppose she's entering?"

	"Never known her stay away."

	Letice sighed.

	"I suppose you ... couldn't persuade her to ... not to enter this year?" she said.

	Nanny looked shocked. "With an axe, you mean?" she said. In unison, the three witches sat back. "You see—" Gammer began, a bit shamefaced. "Frankly, Mrs. Ogg," said Letice, "it is very hard to get other people to enter when they know that Miss Weatherwax is entering. She always wins."

	"Yes," said Nanny. "It's a competition."

	"But she always wins!"

	"So?"

	"In other types of competition," said Letice, "one is normally only allowed to win for three years in a row and then one takes a backseat for a while."

	"Yeah, but this is witching," said Nanny. "The rules is different."

	"How so?"

	"There ain't none."

	Letice twitched her skirt. "Perhaps it is time there were," she said.

	"Ah," said Nanny. "And you just going to go up and tell Esme that? You up for this, Gammer?"

	Gammer Beavis didn't meet her gaze. Old Mother Dismass was gazing at last week.

	"I understand Miss Weatherwax is a very proud woman," said Letice.

	Nanny Ogg puffed at her pipe again.

	"You might as well say the sea is full of water," she said.

	The other witches were silent for a moment.

	"I daresay that was a valuable comment," said Letice, "but I didn't understand it."

	"If there ain't no water in the sea, it ain't the sea," said Nanny Ogg. "It's just a damn great hole in the ground. Thing about Esme is ..." Nanny took another noisy pull at the pipe. "She's all pride, see? She ain't just a proud person."

	"Then perhaps she should learn to be a bit more humble ..."

	"What's she got to be humble about?" said Nanny sharply.

	But Letice, like a lot of people with marshmallow on the outside, had a hard core that was not easily compressed.

	"The woman clearly has a natural talent and, really, she should be grateful for—"

	Nanny Ogg stopped listening at this point.

	The woman, she thought. So that was how it was going.

	It was the same in just about every trade. Sooner or later someone decided it needed organising, and the one thing you could be sure of was that the organisers weren't going to be the people who, by general acknowledgement, were at the top of their craft. They were working too hard. To be fair, it generally wasn't done by the worst, neither. They were working hard, too. They had to.

	No, it was done by the ones who had just enough time and inclination to scurry and bustle. And, to be fair again, the world needed people who scurried and bustled. You just didn't have to like them very much.

	The lull told her that Letice had finished.

	"Really? Now, me," said Nanny, "I'm the one who's nat'rally talented. Us Oggs've got witchcraft in our blood. I never really had to sweat at it.

	Esme, now ... she's got a bit, true enough, but it ain't a lot. She just makes it work harder'n hell. And you're going to tell her she's not to?"

	"We were rather hoping you would," said Letice.

	Nanny opened her mouth to deliver one or two swearwords, and then stopped.

	"Tell you what," she said, "you can tell her tomorrow, and I'll come with you to hold her back."

-

	Granny Weatherwax was gathering Herbs when they came up the track.

	Everyday herbs of sickroom and kitchen are known as simples. Granny's Herbs weren't simples. They were complicateds or they were nothing. And there was none of the airy-fairy business with a pretty basket and a pair of dainty snippers. Granny used a knife. And a chair held in front of her. And a leather hat, gloves, and apron as secondary lines of defence.

	Even she didn't know where some of the Herbs came from. Roots and seeds were traded all over the world, and maybe farther. Some had flowers that turned as you passed by, some fired their thorns at passing birds, and several were staked, not so that they wouldn't fall over, but so they'd still be there next day.

	Nanny Ogg, who never bothered to grow any herb you couldn't smoke or stuff a chicken with, heard her mutter, "Right, you buggers—"

	"Good morning, Miss Weatherwax," said Letice Earwig loudly.

	Granny Weatherwax stiffened, and then lowered the chair very carefully and turned around.

	"It's Mistress," she said.

	"Whatever," said Letice brightly. "I trust you are keeping well?"

	"Up till now," said Granny. She nodded almost imperceptibly at the other three witches.

	There was a thrumming silence, which appalled Nanny Ogg. They should have been invited in for a cup of something. That was how the ritual went. It was gross bad manners to keep people standing around. Nearly, but not quite, as bad as calling an elderly unmarried witch "Miss".

	"You've come about the Trials," said Granny. Letice almost fainted.

	"Er, how did—"

	" 'Cos you look like a committee. It don't take much reasoning," said Granny, pulling off her gloves. "We didn't used to need a committee. The news just got around and we all turned up. Now suddenly there's folk arrangin' things." For a moment Granny looked as though she was fighting some serious internal battle, and then she added in throwaway tones, "Kettle's on. You'd better come in."

	Nanny relaxed. Maybe there were some customs even Granny Weatherwax wouldn't defy, after all. Even if someone was your worst enemy, you invited them in and gave them tea and biscuits. In fact, the worser your enemy, the better the crockery you got out and the higher the quality of the biscuits. You might wish black hell on 'em later, but while they were under your roof you'd feed 'em till they choked.

	Her dark little eyes noted that the kitchen table gleamed and was still damp from scrubbing.

	After cups had been poured and pleasantries exchanged, or at least offered by Letice and received in silence by Granny, the self-elected chairwoman wriggled in her seat and said:

	"There's such a lot of interest in the Trials this year, Miss—Mistress Weatherwax."

	"Good."

	"It does look as though witchcraft in the Ramtops is going through something of a renaissance, in fact."

	"A renaissance, eh? There's a thing."

	"It's such a good route to empowerment for young women, don't you think?"

	Many people could say things in a cutting way, Nanny knew. But Granny Weatherwax could listen in a cutting way. She could make something sound stupid just by hearing it.

	"That's a good hat you've got there," said Granny. "Velvet, is it? Not made local, I expect."

	Letice touched the brim and gave a little laugh.

	"It's from Boggi's in Ankh-Morpork," she said.

	"Oh? Shop-bought?"

	Nanny Ogg glanced at the corner of the room, where a battered wooden cone stood on a stand. Pinned to it were lengths of black calico and strips of willow wood, the foundations for Granny's spring hat.

	"Tailor-made, "said Letice.

	"And those hatpins you've got," Granny went on. "All them crescent moons and cat shapes—"

	"You've got a brooch that's crescent-shaped, too, ain't that so, Esme?" said Nanny Ogg, deciding it was time for a warning shot. Granny occasionally had a lot to say about jewellery on witches when she was feeling in an acid mood.

	"This is true, Gytha. I have a brooch what is shaped like a crescent. That's just the truth of the shape it happens to be. Very practical shape for holding a cloak, is a crescent. But I don't mean nothing by it. Anyway, you interrupted just as I was about to remark to Mrs. Earwig how fetchin' her hatpins are. Very witchy."

	Nanny, swivelling like a spectator at a tennis match, glanced at Letice to see if this deadly bolt had gone home. But the woman was actually smiling. Some people just couldn't spot the obvious on the end of a ten-pound hammer.

	"On the subject of witchcraft," said Letice, with the born chairwoman's touch for the enforced segue, "I thought I might raise with you the question of your participation in the Trials."

	"Yes?"

	"Do you ... ah ... don't you think it is unfair to other people that you win every year?"

	Granny Weatherwax looked down at the floor and then up at the ceiling-

	"No," she said, eventually. "I'm better'n them."

	"You don't think it is a little dispiriting for the other contestants?"

	Once again, the floor-to-ceiling search.

	"No," said Granny.

	"But they start off knowing they're not going to win."

	"So do I."

	"Oh, no, you surely—"

	"I meant that I start off knowing they're not goin' to win, too," said Granny witheringly. "And they ought to start off knowing I'm not going to win. No wonder they lose, if they ain't getting their minds right."

	"It does rather dash their enthusiasm."

	Granny looked genuinely puzzled. "What's wrong with 'em striving to come second?" she said. Letice plunged on.

	"What we were hoping to persuade you to do, Esme, is to accept an emeritus position. You would perhaps make a nice little speech of encouragement, present the award, and ... and possibly even be, er, one of the judges ..."

	"There's going to be judges?" said Granny. "We've never had judges. Everyone just used to know who'd won."

	"That's true," said Nanny. She remembered the scenes at the end of one or two trials. When Granny Weatherwax won, everyone knew. "Oh, that's very true."

	"It would be a very nice gesture," Letice went on.

	"Who decided there would be judges?" said Granny.

	"Er ... the committee ... which is ... that is ... a few of us got together. Only to steer things ..."

	"Oh. I see," said Granny. "Flags?"

	"Pardon?"

	"Are you going to have them lines of little flags? And maybe someone selling apples on a stick, that kind of thing?"

	"Some bunting would certainly be—"

	"Right. Don't forget the bonfire."

	"So long as it's nice and safe."

	"Oh. Right. Things should be nice. And safe," said Granny. Mrs. Earwig perceptibly sighed with relief. "Well, that's sorted out nicely," she said.

	"Is it?" said Granny.

	"I thought we'd agreed that—"

	"Had we? Really?" She picked up the poker from the hearth and prodded fiercely at the fire. "I'll give matters my consideration."

	"I wonder if I may be frank for a moment, Mistress Weatherwax?" said Letice. The poker paused in mid-prod.

	"Yes?"

	"Times are changing, you know. Now, I think I know why you feel it necessary to be so overbearing and unpleasant to everyone, but believe me when I tell you, as a friend, that you'd find it so much easier if you just relaxed a little bit and tried being nicer, like our sister Gytha here."

	Nanny Ogg's smile had fossilised into a mask. Letice didn't seem to notice.

	"You seem to have all the witches in awe of you for fifty miles around," she went on. "Now, I daresay you have some valuable skills, but witchcraft isn't about being an old grump and frightening people anymore. I'm telling you this as a friend—"

	"Call again whenever you're passing," said Granny.

	This was a signal. Nanny Ogg stood up hurriedly.

	"I thought we could discuss—" Letice protested.

	"I'll walk with you all down to the main track," said Nanny, hauling the other witches out of their seats.

	"Gytha!" said Granny sharply, as the group reached the door.

	"Yes, Esme?"

	"You'll come back here afterward, I expect."

	"Yes, Esme."

	Nanny ran to catch up with the trio on the path.

	Letice had what Nanny thought of as a deliberate walk. It had been wrong to judge her by the floppy jowls and the over-fussy hair and the silly way she waggled her hands as she talked. She was a witch, after all. Scratch any witch and ... well, you'd be facing a witch you'd just scratched.

	"She is not a nice person," Letice trilled. But it was the trill of some large hunting bird.

	"You're right there," said Nanny. "But—"

	"It's high time she was taken down a peg or two!"

	"We-ell ..."

	"She bullies you most terribly, Mrs. Ogg. A married lady of your mature years, too!"

	Just for a moment, Nanny's eyes narrowed.

	"It's her way," she said.

	"A very petty and nasty way, to my mind!"

	"Oh, yes," said Nanny simply. "Ways often are. But look, you—"

	"Will you be bringing anything to the produce stall, Gytha?" said Gammer Beavis quickly.

	"Oh, a couple of bottles, I expect," said Nanny, deflating.

	"Oh, homemade wine?" said Letice. "How nice."

	"Sort of like wine, yes. Well, here's the path," said Nanny. "I'll just ... I'll just nip back and say goodnight—"

	"It's belittling, you know, the way you run around after her," said Letice.

	"Yes. Well. You get used to people. Good night to you."

	When she got back to the cottage Granny Weatherwax was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor with a face like an unmade bed and her arms folded. One foot tapped on the floor.

	"She married a wizard," said Granny, as soon as her friend had entered. "You can't tell me that's right."

	"Well, wizards can marry, you know. They just have to hand in the staff and pointy hat. There's no actual law says they can't, so long as they gives up wizarding. They're supposed to be married to the job."

	"I should reckon it's a job being married to her," said Granny. Her face screwed up in a sour smile.

	"Been pickling much this year?" said Nanny, employing a fresh association of ideas around the word "vinegar", which had just popped into her head.

	"My onions all got the screwfly."

	"That's a pity. You like onions."

	"Even screwflies've got to eat," said Granny. She glared at the door. "Nice," she said.

	"She's got a knitted cover on the lid in her privy," said Nanny.

	"Pink?"

	"Yes."

	"Nice."

	"She's not bad," said Nanny. "She does good work over in Fiddler's Elbow. People speak highly of her."

	Granny sniffed. "Do they speak highly of me?" she said.

	"No, they speaks quietly of you, Esme."

	"Good. Did you see her hatpins?"

	"I thought they were rather ... nice, Esme."

	"That's witchcraft today. All jewellery and no drawers."

	Nanny, who considered both to be optional, tried to build an embankment against the rising tide of ire.

	"You could think of it as an honour, really, them not wanting you to take part."

	"That's nice." Nanny sighed.

	"Sometimes nice is worth tryin', Esme," she said.

	"I never does anyone a bad turn if I can't do 'em a good one, Gytha, you know that. I don't have to do no frills or fancy labels."

	Nanny sighed. Of course, it was true. Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn't do good for people, she did right by them. But Nanny knew that people don't always appreciate right. Like old Pollitt the other day, when he fell off his horse. What he wanted was a painkiller. What he needed was the few seconds of agony as Granny popped the joint back into place. The trouble was, people remembered the pain.

	You got on a lot better with people when you remembered to put frills round it, and took an interest, and said things like, "How are you?" Esme didn't bother with that kind of stuff because she knew already. Nanny Ogg knew too, but also knew that letting on you knew gave people the serious willies.

	She put her head on one side. Granny's foot was still tapping. "You planning anything, Esme? I know you. You've got that look."

	"What look, pray?"

	"That look you had when that bandit was found naked up a tree and cryin' all the time and goin' on about the horrible thing that was after him. Funny thing, we never found any pawprints. That look."

	"He deserved more'n that for what he done."

	"Yeah ... well, you had that look just before ole Hoggett was found beaten black and blue in his own pigsty and wouldn't talk about it."

	"You mean old Hoggett the wife beater? Or old Hoggett who won't never lift his hand to a woman no more?" said Granny. The thing her lips had pursed into may have been called a smile.

	"And it's the look you had the time all the snow slid down on ole Millson's house just after he called you an interfering old baggage ..." said Nanny.

	Granny hesitated. Nanny was pretty sure that had been natural causes, and also that Granny knew she suspected this, and that pride was fighting a battle with honesty—

	"That's as may be," said Granny, noncommittally.

	"Like someone who might go along to the Trials and ... do something," said Nanny.

	Her friend's glare should have made the air sizzle. "Oh? So that's what you think of me? That's what we've come to, have we?"

	"Letice thinks we should move with the times—"

	"Well? I moves with the times. We ought to move with the times. No one said we ought to give them a push. I expect you'll be wanting to be going, Gytha. I want to be alone with my thoughts!"

	Nanny's own thoughts, as she scurried home in relief, were that Granny Weatherwax was not an advertisement for witchcraft. Oh, she was one of the best at it, no doubt about that. At a certain kind, certainly. But a girl starting out in life might well say to herself, "Is this it? You worked hard and denied yourself things and what you got at the end of it was hard work and self-denial?"

	Granny wasn't exactly friendless, but what she commanded mostly was respect. People learned to respect stormclouds, too. They refreshed the ground. You needed them. But they weren't nice.

-

	Nanny Ogg went to bed in three flannelette nightdresses, because sharp frosts were already pricking the autumn air. She was also in a troubled frame of mind.

	Some sort of war had been declared, she knew. Granny could do some terrible things when roused, and the fact that they'd been done to those who richly deserved them didn't make them any the less terrible. She'd be planning something pretty dreadful, Nanny Ogg knew.

	She herself didn't like winning things. Winning was a habit that was hard to break and brought you a dangerous status that was hard to defend. You'd walk uneasily through life, always on the lookout for the next girl with a better broomstick and a quicker hand on the frog.

	She turned over under the mountain of eiderdowns.

	In Granny Weatherwax's worldview was no place for second place. You won, or you were a loser. There was nothing wrong with being a loser except for the fact that, of course, you weren't the winner. Nanny had always pursued the policy of being a good loser. People liked you when you almost won, and bought you drinks. "She only just lost" was a much better compliment than "she only just won".

	Runners-up had more fun, she reckoned. But it wasn't a word Granny had much time for.

	In her own darkened cottage, Granny Weatherwax sat and watched the fire die.

	It was a gray-walled room, the color that old plaster gets not so much from dirt as from age. There was not a thing in it that wasn't useful, utilitarian, earning its keep. Every flat surface in Nanny Ogg's cottage had been pressed into service as a holder for ornaments and potted plants. People gave Nanny Ogg things. Cheap fairground tat, Granny always called it. At least, in public. What she thought of it in the privacy of her own head, she never said.

	  She rocked gently as the last ember winked out.

	It's hard to contemplate, in the gray hours of the night, that probably the only reason people would come to your funeral would be to make sure you're dead.

-

	Next day, Percy Hopcroft opened his back door and looked straight up into the blue stare of Granny Weatherwax. "Oh my," he said, under his breath. Granny gave an awkward little cough.

	"Mr. Hopcroft, I've come about them apples you named after Mrs. Ogg," she said.

	Percy's knees began to tremble, and his wig started to slide off the back of his head to the hoped-for security of the floor.

	"I should like to thank you for doing it because it has made her very happy," Granny went on, in a tone of voice which would have struck one who knew her as curiously monotonous. "She has done a lot of fine work and it is about time she got her little reward. It was a very nice thought. And so I have brung you this little token—" Hopcroft jumped backward as Granny's hand dipped swiftly into her apron and produced a small black bottle "—which is very rare because of the rare herbs in it. What are rare. Extremely rare herbs."

	Eventually it crept over Hopcroft that he was supposed to take the bottle. He gripped the top of it very carefully, as if it might whistle or develop legs.

	"Uh ... thank you ver' much," he mumbled.

	Granny nodded stiffly.

	"Blessings be upon this house," she said, and turned and walked away down the path.

	Hopcroft shut the door carefully, and then flung himself against it.

	"You start packing right now!" he shouted to his wife, who'd been watching from the kitchen door.

	"What? Our whole life's here! We can't just run away from it!"

	"Better to run than hop, woman! What's she want from me? What's she want? She's never nice!"

	Mrs. Hopcroft stood firm. She'd just got the cottage looking right and they'd bought a new pump. Some things were hard to leave.

	"Let's just stop and think, then," she said. "What's in that bottle?"

	Hopcroft held it at arm's length. "Do you want to find out?"

	"Stop shaking, man! She didn't actually threaten, did she?"

	"She said 'Blessings be upon this house'! Sounds pretty damn threatening to me! That was Granny Weatherwax, that was!"

	He put the bottle on the table. They stared at it, standing in the cautious leaning position of people who were ready to run if anything began to happen.

	"Says 'Haire Restorer' on the label," said Mrs. Hopcroft. I ain't using it!

	"She'll ask us about it later. That's her way."

	"If you think for one moment I'm—"

	"We can try it out on the dog."

-

	"That's a good cow."

	William Poorchick awoke from his reverie on the milking stool and looked around the meadow, his hands still working the beast's teats.

	There was a black pointy hat rising over the hedge. He gave such a start that he started to milk into his left boot.

	"Gives plenty of milk, does she?"

	"Yes, Mistress Weatherwax!" William quavered.

	"That's good. Long may she continue to do so, that's what I say. Good day to you."

	And the pointy hat continued up the lane.

	Poorchick stared after it. Then he grabbed the bucket and, squelching at every other step, hurried into the barn and yelled for his son. "Rummage! You get down here right now!" His son appeared at the hayloft, pitchfork still in his hand. "What's up, Dad?"

	"You take Daphne down to the market right now, understand?"

	"What? But she's our best milker, Dad!"

	"Was, son, was! Granny Weatherwax just put a curse on her! Sell her now before her horns drop off!"

	"What'd she say, Dad?"

	"She said ... she said ... 'Long may she continue to give milk' ..." Poorchick hesitated.

	"Doesn't sound awfully like a curse, Dad," said Rummage. "I mean ... not like your gen'ral curse. Sounds a bit hopeful, really," said his son. "Well ... it was the way ... she ... said ... it ..."

	"What sort of way, Dad?"

	"Well ... like ... cheerfully."

	"You all right, Dad?"

	"It was ... the way ..." Poorchick paused. "Well, it's not right," he continued. "It's not right! She's got no right to go around being cheerful at people! She's never cheerful! And my boot is full of milk!"

	Today Nanny Ogg was taking some time out to tend her secret still in the woods. As a still it was the best kept secret there could be, since everyone in the kingdom knew exactly where it was, and a secret kept by so many people must be very secret indeed. Even the king knew, and knew enough to pretend he didn't know, and that meant he didn't have to ask her for any taxes and she didn't have to refuse. And every year at Hogswatch he got a barrel of what honey might be if only bees weren't teetotal. And everyone understood the situation, no one had to pay any money, and so, in a small way, the world was a happier place. And no one was cursed until their teeth fell out.

	Nanny was dozing. Keeping an eye on a still was a day-and-night job. But finally the sound of people repeatedly calling her name got too much for her.

	No one would come into the clearing, of course. That would mean admitting that they knew where it was. So they were blundering around in the surrounding bushes. She pushed her way through and was greeted with some looks of feigned surprise that would have done credit to any amateur dramatic company.

	"Well, what do you lot want?" she demanded.

	"Oh, Mrs. Ogg, we thought you might be ... taking a walk in the woods," said Poorchick, while a scent that could clean glass wafted on the breeze. "You got to do something! It's Mistress Wetherwax!"

	"What's she done?"

	"You tell 'er, Mr. Hampicker!"

	The man next to Poorchick took off his hat quickly and held it respectfully in front of him in the ai-señor-the-bandidos-have-raided-our-villages position.

	"Well, ma'am, my lad and I were digging for a well and then she come past—"

	"Granny Weatherwax?"

	"Yes'm, and she said—" Hampicker gulped, " 'You won't find any water there, my good man. You'd be better off looking in the hollow by the chestnut tree'! An' we dug on down anyway and we never found no water!"

	Nanny lit her pipe. She didn't smoke around the still since that time when a careless spark had sent the barrel she was sitting on a hundred yards into the air. She'd been lucky that a fir tree had broken her fall.

	"So ... then you dug in the hollow by the chestnut tree?" she said mildly.

	Hampicker looked shocked. "No'm! There's no telling what she wanted us to find there!"

	"And she cursed my cow!" said Poorchick.

	"Really? What did she say?"

	"She said, 'May she give a lot of milk'!" Poorchick stopped. Once again, now that he came to say it ...

	"Well, it was the way she said it," he added, weakly.

	"And what kind of way was that?"

	"Nicely!"

	"Nicely?"

	"Smilin' and everything! I don't dare drink the stuff now!"

	Nanny was mystified.

	"Can't quite see the problem—"

	"You tell that to Mr. Hopcroft's dog." said Poorchick. "Hopcroft daren't leave the poor thing on account of her! The whole family's going mad! There's him shearing, his wife sharpening the scissors, and the two lads out all the time looking for fresh places to dump the hair!"

	Patient questioning on Nanny's part elucidated the role the Haire Restorer had played in this.

	"And he gave it ...?"

	"Half the bottle, Mrs. Ogg."

	"Even though Esme writes 'A right small spoonful once a week' on the label? And even then you need to wear roomy trousers."

	"He said he was so nervous, Mrs. Ogg! I mean, what's she playing at? Our wives are keepin' the kids indoors. I mean, s'posin' she smiled at them?"

	"Well?"

	"She's a witch!"

	"So'm I, an' I smiles at 'em," said Nanny Ogg. "They're always runnin' after me for sweets."

	"Yes, but ... you're ... I mean ... she ... I mean ... you don't ... I mean, well—"

	"And she's a good woman," said Nanny. Common sense prompted her to add, "In her own way. I expect there is water down in the hollow, and Poorchick's cow'll give good milk and if Hopcroft won't read the labels on bottles then he deserves a head you can see your face in, and if you think Esme Weatherwax'd curse kids you've got the sense of a earthworm. She'd cuss 'em, yes, all day long. But not curse 'em. She don't aim that low."

	"Yes, yes," Poorchick almost moaned, "but it don't feel right, that's what we're saying. Her going round being nice, a man don't know if he's got a leg to stand on."

	"Or hop on," said Hampicker darkly.

	"All right, all right, I'll see about it," said Nanny.

	"People shouldn't go around not doin' what you expect," said Poorchick weakly. "It gets people on edge."

	"And we'll keep an eye on your sti—" Hampicker said, and then staggered backwards, grasping his stomach and wheezing.

	"Don't mind him, it's the stress," said Poorchick, rubbing his elbow. "Been picking herbs, Mrs. Ogg?"

	"That's right," said Nanny, hurrying away across the leaves.

	"So shall I put the fire out for you, then?" Poorchick shouted.

-

	Granny was sitting outside her house when Nanny Ogg hurried up the path. She was sorting through a sack of old clothes. Elderly garments were scattered around her.

	And she was humming. Nanny Ogg started to worry. The Granny Weatherwax she knew didn't approve of music.

	And she smiled when she saw Nanny, or at least the corner of her mouth turned up. That was really worrying. Granny normally only smiled if something bad was happening to someone deserving.

	"Why, Gytha, how nice to see you!"

	"You all right, Esme?"

	"Never felt better, dear." The humming continued.

	"Er ... sorting out rags, are you?" said Nanny. "Going to make that quilt?"

	It was one of Granny Weatherwax's firm beliefs that one day she'd make a patchwork quilt. However, it is a task that requires patience, and hence in fifteen years she'd got as far as three patches. But she collected old clothes anyway. A lot of witches did. It was a witch thing. Old clothes had personality, like old houses. When it came to clothes with a bit of wear left in them, a witch had no pride at all.

	"It's in here somewhere ..." Granny mumbled. "Aha, here we are ..."

	She flourished a garment. It was basically pink.

	"Knew it was here," she went on. "Hardly worn, either. And about my size, too."

	"You're going to wear it?" said Nanny.

	Granny's piercing blue cut-you-off-at-the-knees gaze was turned upon her. Nanny would have been relieved at a reply like, "No, I'm going to eat it, you daft old fool". Instead her friend relaxed and said, a little concerned:

	"You don't think it'd suit me?"

	There was lace around the collar. Nanny swallowed. "You usually wear black," she said. "Well, a bit more than usually. More like always."

	"And a very sad sight I look, too," said Granny robustly. "It's about time I brightened myself up a bit, don't you think?"

	"And it's so very ... pink."

	Granny put it aside and to Nanny's horror took her by the hand and said earnestly, "And, you know, I reckon I've been far too dog-in-the-manger about this Trials business, Gytha—"

	"Bitch-in-the-manger," said Nanny Ogg, absent-mindedly.

	For a moment Granny's eyes became two sapphires again.

	"What?"

	"Er ... you'd be a bitch-in-the-manger," Nanny mumbled. "Not a dog."

	"Ah? Oh, yes. Thank you for pointing that out. Well, I thought, it is time I stepped back a bit, and went along and cheered on the younger folks. I mean, I have to say, I ... really haven't been very nice to people, have I ..."

	"Er ..."

	"I've tried being nice," Granny went on. "It didn't turn out like I expected, I'm sorry to say."

	"You've never been really ... good at nice," said Nanny.

	Granny smiled. Hard though she stared, Nanny was unable to spot anything other than earnest concern.

	"Perhaps I'll get better with practice," she said.

	She patted Nanny's hand. And Nanny stared at her hand as though something horrible had happened to it.

	"It's just that everyone's more used to you being ... firm," she said.

	"I thought I might make some jam and cakes for the produce stall," said Granny.

	"Oh ... good."

	"Are there any sick people want visitin'?"

	Nanny stared at the trees. It was getting worse and worse. She rummaged in her memory for anyone in the locality sick enough to warrant a ministering visit but still well enough to survive the shock of a ministering visit by Granny Weatherwax. When it came to practical psychology and the more robust type of folk physiotherapy Granny was without equal; in fact, she could even do the latter at a distance, for many a pain-wracked soul had left their beds and walked, nay, run at the news that she was coming.

	"Everyone's pretty well at the moment," said Nanny diplomatically. "Any old folk want cheerin' up?"

	It was taken for granted by both women that old people did not include them. A witch aged ninety-seven would not have included herself. Old people happened to other people.

	"All fairly cheerful right now," said Nanny.

	"Maybe I could tell stories to the kiddies?"

	Nanny nodded. Granny had done that once before, when the mood had briefly taken her. It had worked pretty well, as far as the children were concerned. They'd listened with open mouthed attention and apparent enjoyment to a traditional old folk legend. The problem had come when they'd gone home afterward and asked the meaning of words like "disembowelled."

	"I could sit in a rocking chair while I tell 'em," Granny added. "That's how it's done, I recall. And I could make them some of my special treacle toffee apples. Wouldn't that be nice?"

	Nanny nodded again, in a sort of horrified reverie. She realized that only she stood in the way of a wholesale rampage of niceness.

	"Toffee," she said. "Would that be the sort you did that shatters like glass, or that sort where our boy Pewsey had to have his mouth levered open with a spoon?"

	"I reckon I know what I did wrong last time."

	"You know you and sugar don't get along, Esme. Remember them all-day suckers you made?"

	"They did last all day, Gytha."

	"Only 'cos our Pewsey couldn't get it out of his little mouth until we pulled two of his teeth, Esme. You ought to stick to pickles. You and pickles goes well."

	"I've got to do something, Gytha. I can't be an old grump all the time. I know! I'll help at the Trials. Bound to be a lot that needs doing, eh?" Nanny grinned inwardly. So that was it.

	"Why, yes," she said. "I'm sure Mrs. Earwig will be happy to tell you what to do." And more fool her if she does, she thought, because I can tell you're planning something.

	"I shall talk to her," said Granny. "I'm sure there's a million things I could do to help, if I set my mind to it."

	"And I'm sure you will," said Nanny heartily. "I've a feelin' you're going to make a big difference."

	Granny started to rummage in the bag again.

	"You are going to be along as well, aren't you, Gytha?"

	"Me?" said Nanny. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

-

	Nanny got up especially early. If there was going to be any unpleasantness she wanted a ringside seat.

	What there was was bunting. It was hanging from tree to tree in terrible brightly colored loops as she walked toward the Trials.

	There was something oddly familiar about it, too. It should not technically be possible for anyone with a pair of scissors to be unable to cut out a triangle, but someone had managed it. And it was also obvious that the flags had been made from old clothes, painstakingly cut up. Nanny knew this because not many real flags have collars.

	In the Trials field, people were setting up stalls and falling over children. The committee were standing uncertainly under a tree, occasionally glancing up at a pink figure at the top of a very long ladder.

	"She was here before it was light," said Letice, as Nanny approached. "She said she'd been up all night making the flags."

	"Tell her about the cakes," said Gammer Beavis darkly.

	"She made cakes?" said Nanny. "But she can't cook!"

	The committee shuffled aside. A lot of the ladies contributed to the food for the Trials. It was a tradition and an informal competition in its own right. At the centre of the spread of covered plates was a large platter piled high with ... things, of indefinite color and shape. It looked as though a herd of small cows had eaten a lot of raisins and then been ill. They were Ur-cakes, prehistotic cakes, cakes of great weight and presence that had no place among the iced dainties.

	"She's never had the knack of it," said Nanny weakly. "Has anyone tried one?"

	"Hahaha," said Gammer solemnly.

	"Tough, are they?"

	"You could beat a troll to death."

	"But she was so ... sort of ... proud of them," said Letice. "And then there's ... the jam."

	It was a large pot. It seemed to be filled with solidified purple lava. "Nice ... color," said Nanny. "Anyone tasted it?"

	"We couldn't get the spoon out," said Gammer. "Oh, I'm sure—"

	"We only got it in with a hammer."

	"What's she planning, Mrs. Ogg? She's got a weak and vengeful nature," said Letice. "You're her friend," she added, her tone suggesting that this was as much an accusation as a statement.

	"I don't know what she's thinking, Mrs. Earwig."

	"I thought she was staying away."

	"She said she was going to take an interest and encourage the young 'uns.

	"She is planning something," said Letice, darkly. "Those cakes are a plot to undermine my authority."

	"No, that's how she always cooks," said Nanny. "She just hasn't got the knack." Your authority, eh?

	"She's nearly finished the flags," Gammer reported. "Now she's going to try to make herself useful again."

	"Well ... I suppose we could ask her to do the Lucky Dip."

	Nanny looked blank. "You mean where kids fish around in a big tub full of bran to see what they can pull out?"

	"Yes."

	"You're going to let Granny Weatherwax do that?"

	"Yes."

	"Only she's got a funny sense of humour, if you know what I mean."

	"Good morning to you all!"

	It was Granny Weatherwax's voice. Nanny Ogg had known it for most of her life. But it had that strange edge to it again. It sounded nice.

	"We was wondering if you could supervise the bran tub, Miss Weatherwax."

	Nanny flinched. But Granny merely said, "Happy to, Mrs. Earwig. I can't wait to see the expressions on their little faces as they pull out the goodies."

	Nor can I, Nanny thought.

	When the others had scurried off she sidled up to her friend.

	"Why're you doing this?" she said.

	"I really don't know what you mean, Gytha."

	"I seen you face down terrible creatures, Esme. I once seen you catch a unicorn, for goodness' sake. What're you plannin'?"

	"I still don't know what you mean, Gytha."

	"Are you angry 'cos they won't let you enter, and now you're plannin' horrible revenge?"

	For a moment they both looked at the field. It was beginning to fill up. People were bowling for pigs and fighting on the greasy pole. The Lancre Volunteer Band was trying to play a medley of popular tunes, and it was only a pity that each musician was playing a different one. Small children were fighting. It was going to be a scorcher of a day, probably the last one of the year.

	Their eyes were drawn to the roped-off square in the centre of the field.

	"Are you going to enter the Trials, Gytha?" said Granny. "You never answered my question!"

	"What question was that?"

	Nanny decided not to hammer on a locked door. "Yes, I am going to have a go, as it happens," she said.

	"I certainly hope you win, then. I'd cheer you on, only that wouldn't be fair to the others. I shall merge into the background and be as quiet as a little mouse."

	Nanny tried guile. Her face spread into a wide pink grin, and she nudged her friend.

	"Right, right," she said. "Only ... you can tell me, right? I wouldn't like to miss it when it happens. So if you could just give me a little signal when you're going to do it, eh?"

	"What's it you're referring to, Gytha?"

	"Esme Weatherwax, sometimes I could really give you a bloody good slap!"

	"Oh dear."

	Nanny Ogg didn't often swear, or at least use words beyond the boundaries of what the Lancrastrians thought of as "colourful language." She looked as if she habitually used bad words, and had just thought up a good one, but mostly witches are quite careful about what they say. You can never be sure what the words are going to do when they're out of earshot. But now she swore under her breath and caused small brief fires to start in the dry grass.

	This put her in just about the right frame of mind for the Cursing.

	It was said that once upon a time this had been done on a living, breathing subject, at least at the start of the event, but that wasn't right for a family day out and for several hundred years the Curses had been directed at Unlucky Charlie, who was, however you looked at it, nothing more than a scarecrow. And since curses are generally directed at the mind of the cursed, this presented a major problem, because even, "May your straw go moldy and your carrot fall off," didn't make much impression on a pumpkin. But points were given for general style and inventiveness.

	There wasn't much pressure for those in any case. Everyone knew what event counted, and it wasn't Unlucky Charlie.

	One year Granny Weatherwax had made the pumpkin explode. No one had ever worked out how she'd done it.

	Someone would walk away at the end of today and everyone would know that person was the winner, whatever the points said. You could win the Witch with the Pointiest Hat prize and the broomstick dressage, but that was just for the audience. What counted was the Trick you'd been working on all summer.

	Nanny had drawn last place, at number nineteen. A lot of witches had turned up this year. News of Granny Weatherwax's withdrawal had got around, and nothing moves faster than news in the occult community, since it doesn't just have to travel at ground level. Many pointy hats moved and nodded among the crowds.

	Witches are among themselves generally as sociable as cats but, as also with cats, there are locations and times and neutral grounds where they meet at something like peace. And what was going on was a sort of slow, complicated dance ...

	The witches walked around saying hello to one another, and rushing to meet newcomers, and innocent bystanders might have believed that here was a meeting of old friends. Which, at one level, it probably was. But Nanny watched through a witch's eyes, and saw the subtle positioning, the careful weighing-up, the little changes of stance, the eye contact finely tuned by intensity and length.

	And when a witch was in the arena, especially if she was comparatively unknown, all the others found some excuse to keep an eye on her, preferably without appearing to do so.

	It was like watching cats. Cats spend a lot of time carefully eyeing one another. When they have to fight, that's merely to rubber-stamp something that's already been decided in their heads.

	Nanny knew all this. And she also knew most of the witches to be kind (on the whole), gentle (to the meek), generous (to the deserving; the undeserving got more than they bargained for), and by and large quite dedicated to a life that really offered more kicks than kisses. Not one of them lived in a house made of confectionery, although some of the conscientious younger ones had experimented with various crisp breads. Even children who deserved it were not slammed into their ovens. Generally they did what they'd always done—smooth the passage of their neighbors into and out of the world, and help them over some of the nastier hurdles in between.

	You needed to be a special kind of person to do that. You needed a special kind of ear, because you saw people in circumstances where they were inclined to tell you things, like where the money is buried or who the father was or how come they'd got a black eye again. And you needed a special kind of mouth, the sort that stayed shut. Keeping secrets made you powerful. Being powerful earned you respect. Respect was hard currency.

	And within this sisterhood—except that it wasn't a sisterhood, it was a loose assortment of chronic non-joiners; a group of witches wasn't a coven, it was a small war—there was always this awareness of position. It had nothing to do with anything the other world thought of as status. Nothing was ever said. But if an elderly witch died the local witches would attend her funeral for a few last words, and then go solemnly home alone, with the little insistent thought at the back of their minds: I've moved up one.

	And newcomers were watched very, very carefully.

	" 'Morning, Mrs. Ogg," said a voice behind her. "I trust I find you well?"

	"How'd'yer do, Misttess Shimmy," said Nanny, turning. Her mental filing system threw up a card: Clarity Shimmy, lives over toward Cutshade with her old mum, takes snuff, good with animals. "How's your mother keepin'?"

	"We buried her last month, Mrs. Ogg."

	Nanny Ogg quite liked Clarity, because she didn't see her very often. "Oh dear ..." she said.

	"But I shall tell her you asked after her, anyway," said Clarity. She glanced briefly towards the ring.

	"Who's the fat girl on now?" she asked. "Got a backside on her like a bowling ball on a short seesaw."

	"That's Agnes Nitt."

	"That's a good cursin' voice she's got there. You know you've been cursed with a voice like that."

	"Oh yes, she's been blessed with a good voice for cursin'," said Nanny politely. "Esme Weatherwax an' me gave her a few tips," she added.

	Clarity's head turned.

	At the far edge of the field, a small pink shape sat alone behind the Lucky Dip. It did not seem to be drawing a big crowd. Clarity leaned closer. "What's she ... er ... doing?"

	"I don't know," said Nanny. "I think she's decided to be nice about it."

	"Esme? Nice about it?"

	"Er ... yes," said Nanny. It didn't sound any better now she was telling someone.

	Clarity stared at her. Nanny saw her make a little sign with her left hand, and then hurry off.

	The pointy hats were bunching up now. There were little groups of three or four. You could see the points come together, cluster in animated conversation, and then open out again like a flower, and turn toward the distant blob of pinkness. Then a hat would leave that group and head off purposefully to another one, where the process would start all over again. It was a bit like watching very slow nuclear fission. There was a lot of excitement, and soon there would be an explosion.

	Every so often someone would turn and look at Nanny, so she hurried away among the sideshows until she fetched up beside the stall of the dwarf Zakzak Sttonginthearm, maker and purveyor of occult knicknackery to the more impressionable. He nodded at her cheerfully over the top of a display saying LUCKY HORSESHOES $2 EACH.

	"Hello, Mrs. Ogg," he said.

	Nanny realized she was flustered.

	"What's lucky about 'em?" she said, picking up a horseshoe. "Well, I get two dollars each for them," said Stronginthearm. "And that makes them lucky?"

	"Lucky for me," said Stronginthearm. "I expect you'll be wanting one, too, Mrs. Ogg? I'd have fetched along another box if I'd known they'd be so popular. Some of the ladies've bought two."

	There was an inflection to the word "ladies".

	"Witches have been buying lucky horseshoes?" said Nanny.

	"Like there's no tomorrow," said Zakzak. He frowned for a moment. They had been witches, after all. "Er ... there will be ... won't there?" he added.

	"I'm very nearly certain of it," said Nanny, which didn't seem to comfort him.

	"Suddenly been doing a roaring trade in protective herbs, too," said Zakzak. And, being a dwarf, which meant that he'd see the Flood as a marvelous opportunity to sell towels, he added, "Can I interest you, Mrs. Ogg?"

	Nanny shook her head. If trouble was going to come from the direction, everyone had been looking, then a sprig of rue wasn't going to be much help. A large oak tree'd be better, but only maybe.

	The atmosphere was changing. The sky was a wide pale blue, but there was thunder on the horizons of the mind. The witches were uneasy and with so many in one place the nervousness was bouncing from one to another and, amplified, rebroadcasting itself to everyone. It meant that even ordinary people who thought that a rune was a dried plum were beginning to feel a deep, existential worry, the kind that causes you to snap at your kids and want a drink.

	She peered through a gap between a couple of stalls. The pink figure was still sitting patiently, and a little crestfallen, behind the barrel. There was, as it were, a huge queue of no one at all.

	Then Nanny scuttled from the cover of one tent to another until she could see the produce stand. It had already been doing a busy trade but there, forlorn in the middle of the cloth, was the pile of terrible cakes. And the jar of jam. Some wag had chalked up a sign beside it: GET THE SPOON OUT OF THEE JAR, 3 TRIES FOR A PENNEY!!!

	She thought she'd been careful to stay concealed, but she heard the straw rustle behind her. The committee had tracked her down.

	"That's your handwriting, isn't it, Mrs. Earwig?" she said. "That's cruel. That ain't ... nice."

	"We've decided you're to go and talk to Miss Weatherwax," said Letice. "She's got to stop it."

	"Stop what?"

	"She's doing something to people's heads! She's come here to put the 'fluence on us, right? Everyone knows she does head magic. We can all feel it! She's spoiling it for everyone!"

	"She's only sitting there," said Nanny.

	"Ah, yes, but how is she sitting there, may we ask?"

	Nanny peered around the stall again.

	"Well ... like normal. You know ... bent in the middle and the knees ..."

	Letice waved a finger sternly.

	"Now you listen to me, Gytha Ogg—"

	"If you want her to go away, you go and tell her!" snapped Nanny. "I'm fed up with—"

	There was the piercing scream of a child.

	The witches stared at one another, and then ran across the field to the Lucky Dip.

	A small boy was writhing on the ground, sobbing. It was Pewsey, Nanny's youngest grandchild.

	Her stomach turned to ice. She snatched him up, and glared into Granny's face.

	"What have you done to him, you—" she began.

	"Don'twannadolly! Don'twannadolly! Wannasoljer! WannawannawaanaSOLJER!"

	Now Nanny looked down at the rag doll in Pewsey's sticky hand, and the expression of affronted tearful rage on such of his face as could be seen around his screaming mouth—

	"OiwannawannaSOLJER!"

	—and then at the other witches, and at Granny Weatherwax's face, and felt the horrible cold shame welling up from her boots.

	"I said he could put it back and have another go," said Granny meekly. "But he just wouldn't listen."

	"—wannawannaSOL—"

	"Pewsey Ogg, if you don't shut up right this minute Nanny will—" Nanny Ogg began, and dredged up the nastiest punishment she could think of: "Nanny won't give you a sweetie ever again!"

	Pewsey closed his mouth, stunned into silence by this unimaginable threat. Then, to Nanny's horror, Letice Earwig drew herself up and said, "Miss Weatherwax, we would prefer it if you left."

	"Am I being a bother?" said Granny. "I hope I'm not being a bother, I don't want to be a bother. He just took a lucky dip and—"

	"You're ... upsetting people."

	Any minute now, Nanny thought. Any minute now she's going to raise her head and narrow her eyes and if Letice doesn't take two steps backward she'll be a lot tougher than me.

	"I can't stay and watch?" Granny said quietly.

	"I know yout game," said Letice. "You're planning to spoil it, aren't you? You can't stand the thought of being beaten, so you're intending something nasty."

	Three steps back, Nanny thought. Else there won't be anything left but bones. Any minute now ...

	"Oh, I wouldn't like anyone to think I was spoiling anything," said Granny. She sighed and stood up. "I'll be off home ..."

	"No you won't!" snapped Nanny Ogg, pushing her back down onto the chair. "What do you think of this, Beryl Dismass? And you, Letty Parkin?"

	"They're all—" Letice began. "I weren't talking to you!"

	The witches behind Mrs. Earwig avoided Nanny's gaze.

	"Well, it's not that ... I mean, we don't think ..." began Beryl awkwardly. "That is ... I've always had a lot of respect for ... but ... well, it is for everyone ..."

	Her voice trailed off. Letice looked triumphant.

	"Really? I think we had better be going after all, then," said Nanny sourly. "I don't like the comp'ny in these parts." She looked around. "Agnes? You give me a hand to get Granny home ..."

	"I really don't need ..." Granny began, but the other two each look an arm and gently propelled her through the crowd, which parted to let them through and turned to watch them go.

	"Probably the best for all concerned, in the circumstances," said Letice. Several of the witches tried not to look at her face.

-

	There were scraps of material all over the floor in Granny's kitchen, and gouts of congealed jam had dripped off the edge of the table and formed an immovable mound on the floor. The jam saucepan had been left in the stone sink to soak, although it was clear that the iron would rust away before the jam ever softened.

	There was a row of empty pickle jars beside them.

	Granny sat down and folded her hands in her lap.

	"Want a cup of tea, Esme?" said Nanny Ogg.

	"No, dear, thank you. You get on back to the Trials. Don't you worry about me," said Granny. "You sure?"

	"I'll just sit here quiet. Don't you worry."

	"I'm not going back!" Agnes hissed, as they left. "I don't like the way Letice smiles ..."

	"You once told me you didn't like the way Esme frowns," said Nanny. "Yes, but you can trust a frown. Er ... you don't think she's losing it, do you?

	"No one'll be able to find it if she has," said Nanny. "No, you come on back with me. I'm sure she's planning ... something." I wish the hell I knew what it is, she thought. I'm not sure I can take any more waiting.

-

	She could feel the mounting tension before they reached the field. Of course, there was always tension, that was part of the Trials, but this kind had a sour, unpleasant taste. The sideshows were still going on but ordinary folk were leaving, spooked by sensations they couldn't put their finger on which nevertheless had them under their thumb. As for the witches themselves, they had that look worn by actors about two minutes from the end of a horror movie, when they know the monster is about to make its final leap and now it's only a matter of which door.

	Letice was surrounded by witches. Nanny could hear raised voices. She nudged another witch, who was watching gloomily.

	"What's happening, Winnie?"

	"Oh, Reena Trump made a pig's ear of her piece and her friends say she ought to have another go because she was so nervous."

	"That's a shame."

	"And Virago Johnson ran off 'cos her weather spell went wrong."

	"Left under a bit of a cloud, did she?"

	"And I was all thumbs when I had a go. You could be in with a chance, Gytha."

	"Oh, I've never been one for prizes, Winnie, you know me. It's the fun of taking part that counts."

	The other witch gave her a skewed look.

	"You almost made that sound believable," she said.

	Gammer Beavis hurried over. "On you go, Gytha", she said. "Do your best, eh? The only contender so far is Mrs. Weavitt and her whistling frog, and it wasn't as if it could even carry a tune. Poor thing was a bundle of nerves."

	Nanny Ogg shrugged, and walked out into the roped-off area. Somewhere in the distance someone was having hysterics, punctuated by an occasional worried whistle.

	Unlike the magic of wizards, the magic of witches did not usually involve the application of much raw power. The difference is between hammers and levers. Witches generally tried to find the small point where a little change made a lot of result. To make an avalanche you can either shake the mountain, or maybe you can just find exactly the right place to drop a snowflake.

	This year Nanny had been idly working on the Man of Straw. It was an ideal trick for her. It got a laugh, it was a bit suggestive, it was a lot easier than it looked but showed she was joining in, and it was unlikely to win.

	Damn! She'd been relying on that frog to beat her. She'd heard it whistling quite beautifully on the summer evenings.

	She concentrated.

	Pieces of straw rustled through the stubble. All she had to do was use the little bits of wind that drifted across the field, allowed to move here and here, spiral up and—

	She tried to stop her hands from shaking. She'd done this a hundred times, she could tie the damn stuff in knots by now. She kept seeing the face of Esme Weatherwax, and the way she'd just sat there, looking puzzled and hurt, while for a few seconds Nanny had been ready to kill—

	For a moment she managed to get the legs right, and a suggestion of arms and head. There was a smattering of applause from the watchers. Then an errant eddy caught the thing before she could concentrate on its first step, and it spun down, just a lot of useless straw.

	She made some frantic gestures to get it to rise again. It flopped about, tangled itself, and lay still.

	There was a bit more applause, nervous and sporadic.

	"Sorry ... don't seem to be able to get the hang of it today," she muttered, walking off the field.

	The judges went into a huddle.

	"I reckon that frog did really well," said Nanny, more loudly than was necessary.

	The wind, so contrary a little while ago, blew sharper now. What might be called the psychic darkness of the event was being enhanced by real twilight.

	The shadow of the bonfire loomed on the far side of the field. No one as yet had the heart to light it. Almost all of the non-witches had gone home. Anything good about the day had long drained away.

	The circle of judges broke up and Mrs. Earwig advanced on the nervous crowd, her smile only slightly waxen at the corners.

	"Well, what a difficult decision it has been," she said brightly. "But what a marvellous turnout, too! It really has been a most tricky choice—"

	Between me and a frog that lost its whistle and got its foot stuck in its banjo, thought Nanny. She looked sidelong at the faces of her sister witches. She'd known some of them for sixty years. If she'd ever read books, she'd have been able to read the faces just like one.

	"We all know who won, Mrs. Earwig," she said, interrupting the flow.

	"What do you mean, Mrs. Ogg?"

	"There's not a witch here who could get her mind right today," said Nanny. "And most of 'em have bought lucky charms, too. Witches? Buying lucky charms?" Several women stared at the ground.

	"I don't know why everyone seems so afraid of Miss Weatherwax! I certainly am not! You think she's put a spell on you, then?"

	"A pretty sharp one, by the feel of it," said Nanny. "Look, Mrs. Earwig, no one's won, not with the stuff we've managed today. We all know it. So let's just all go home, eh?"

	"Certainly not! I paid ten dollars for this cup and I mean to present it—

	The dying leaves shivered on the trees.

	The witches drew together. Branches rattled.

	"It's the wind," said Nanny Ogg. "That's all ..."

	And then Granny was simply there. It was as if they'd just not noticed that she'd been there all the time. She had the knack of fading out of the foreground.

	"I jus' thought I'd come to see who won," she said. "Join in the applause, and so on ..."

	Letice advanced on her, wild with rage.

	"Have you been getting into people's heads?" she shrieked.

	"An how could I do that, Mrs. Earwig?" said Granny meekly. "Past all them lucky charms?"

	"You're lying!"

	Nanny Ogg heard the indrawn breaths, and hers was loudest. Witches lived by their words.

	"I don't lie, Mrs. Earwig."

	"Do you deny that you set out to ruin my day?" Some of the witches at the edge of the crowd started to back away. "I'll grant my jam ain't to everyone's taste but I never—" Granny began, in a modest little tone.

	"You've been putting a 'fluence on everyone!"

	"—I just set out to help, you can ask anyone-—"

	"You did! Admit it!" Mrs. Earwig's voice was as shrill as a gull's.

	"—and I certainly didn't do any—"

	Granny's head turned as the slap came.

	For the moment no one breathed, no one moved.

	She lifted a hand slowly and rubbed her cheek.

	"You know you could have done it easily!"

	It seemed to Nanny that Letice's scream echoed off the mountains.

	The cup dropped from her hands and crunched on the stubble.

	Then the tableau unfroze. A couple of her sister witches stepped forward, put their hands on Letice's shoulders and she was pulled, gently and unprotesting, away.

	Everyone else waited to see what Granny Weatherwax would do. She raised her head.

	"I hope Mrs. Earwig is all right," she said. "She seemed a bit ... distraught."

	There was silence. Nanny picked up the abandoned cup and tapped it with a forefinger.

	"Hmm," she said. "Just plated, I reckon. If she paid ten dollars for it, the poor woman was robbed." She tossed it to Gammer Beavis, who fumbled it out of the air. "Can you give it back to her tomorrow, Gammer?"

	Gammer nodded, trying not to catch Granny's eye.

	"Still, we don't have to let it spoil everything," Granny said pleasantly. "Let's have the proper ending to the day, eh? Traditional, like. Roast potatoes and marshmallows and old stories round the fire. And forgiveness. And let's let bygones be bygones."

	Nanny could feel the sudden relief spreading out like a fan. The witches seemed to come alive, at the breaking of the spell that had never actually been there in the first place. There was a general straightening up and the beginnings of a bustle as they headed for the saddlebags on their broomsticks.

	"Mr. Hopcroft gave me a whole sack of spuds," said Nanny, as conversation rose around them. "I'll go and drag 'em over. Can you get the fire lit, Esme?"

	A sudden change in the air made her look up. Granny's eyes gleamed in the dusk.

	Nanny knew enough to fling herself to the ground.

	Granny Weatherwax's hand curved through the air like a comet and the spark flew out, crackling.

	The bonfire exploded. A blue-white flame shot up through the stacked branches and danced into the sky, etching shadows on the forest. It blew off hats and overturned tables and formed figures and castles and scenes from famous battles and joined hands and danced in a ring. It left a purple image on the eye that burned into the brain—

	And settled down, and was just a bonfire.

	"I never said nothin' about forgettin," said Granny.

-

	When Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg walked home through the dawn, their boots kicked up the mist. It had, on the whole, been a good night.

	After some while, Nanny said, "That wasn't nice, what you done."

	"I done nothin'."

	"Yeah, well ... it wasn't nice, what you didn't do. It was like pullin' away someone's chair when they're expecting to sit down."

	"People who don't look where they're sitting should stay stood up," said Granny.

	There was a brief pattering on the leaves, one of those very brief showers you get when a few raindrops don't want to bond with the group. "Well, all right," Nanny conceded. "But it was a little bit cruel."

	"Right," said Granny.

	"And some people might think it was a little bit nasty."

	"Right."

	Nanny shivered. The thoughts that'd gone through her head in those few seconds after Pewsey had screamed—

	"I gave you no cause," said Granny. "I put nothin' in anyone's head that weren't there already."

	"Sorry, Esme."

	"Right."

	"But ... Letice didn't mean to be cruel, Esme. I mean, she's spiteful and bossy and silly, but—"

	"You've known me since we was girls, right?" Granny interrupted. "Through thick and thin, good and bad?"

	"Yes, of course, but—"

	"And you never sank to sayin, 'I'm telling you this as a friend', did you?

	Nanny shook her head. It was a telling point. No one even remotely friendly would say a thing like that.

	"What's empowerin' about witchcraft anyway?" said Granny. "It's a daft sort of a word."

	"Search me," said Nanny. "I did start out in witchcraft to get boys, to tell you the truth."

	"Think I don't know that?"

	"What did you start out to get, Esme?"

	Granny stopped, and looked up at the frosty sky and then down at the ground.

	"Dunno," she said, at last. "Even, I suppose."

	And that, Nanny thought, was that.

	Deer bounded away as they arrived at Granny's cottage.

	There was a stack of firewood piled up neatly by the back door, and a couple of sacks on the doorstep. One contained a large cheese.

	"Looks like Mr. Hopcroft and Mr. Poorchick have been here," said Nanny.

	"Hmph." Granny looked at the carefully yet badly written piece of paper attached to the second sack: " 'Dear Misstress Weatherwax, I would be most grateful if you would let me name this new championship variety "Esme Weatherwax". Yours in hopefully good health, Percy Hopcroft.' Well, well, well. I wonder what gave him that idea?"

	"Can't imagine," said Nanny.

	"I would just bet you can't," said Granny

	She sniffed suspiciously, tugged at the sack's string, and pulled out an Esme Weatherwax.

	It was rounded, very slightly flattened, and pointy at one end. It was an onion.

	Nanny Ogg swallowed. "I told him not—"

	"I'm sorry? "Oh ... nothing ..."

	Granny Weatherwax turned the onion round and round, while the world, via the medium of Nanny Ogg, awaited its fate. Then she seemed to reach a decision she was comfortable with.

	"A very useful vegetable, the onion," she said, at last. "Firm. Sharp."

	"Good for the system," said Nanny.

	"Keeps well. Adds flavor."

	"Hot and spicy," said Nanny, losing track of the metaphor in the flood of relief. "Nice with cheese—"

	"We don't need to go that far," said Granny Weatherwax, putting it carefully back in the sack. She sounded almost amicable. "You comin' in for a cup of tea, Gytha?"

	"Er ... I'd better be getting along—"

	"Fair enough."

	Granny started to close the door, and then stopped and opened it again. Nanny could see one blue eye watching her through the crack. "I was right though, wasn't I," said Granny. It wasn't a question. 

	Nanny nodded. 

	"Right," she said. 

	"That's nice.

This says it all, really. We both worked in places when science, engineering, and bureaucracy crashed into one another.

As a Press Officer, a man responsible for getting information out in a hurry (sometimes, at any rate) I was forbidden to touch a typewriter. Strictly speaking, I was supposed to write out releases in longhand and send them to the typing pool, from whence they might be returned to me tomorrow. However, by this time the average nuclear reactor can be quite well alight, so I just typed stuff anyway, and no one said anything.

It was, in retrospect, a great life for an sf fan. After Chernobyl it seemed there was no question too weird for the local Nodding Acquaintances of the Earth to plant with willing reporters. Will your nuclear power stations withstand an Ice Age? No? Why not? (Answer: because a two mile high glacier scouring the continent down to bedrock puts a crimp in everyone's day.) Isn't it scandalous that there's a fault line running through the power station car park? (Answer: Not really. It's about 200 feet long and hasn't moved for 60,000,000 years ...)

One of my many strange jobs was escorting TV and movie researchers when they were scouting power station locations for upcoming dramas. I'd take them up to the pile cap (the top of the reactor) and they'd look around in dismay at the total absence of green steam. They never believed me when I told them that green steam is not a normal reactor product. Then they'd bring their own for the shoot. Oh, and big fake panels covered in flashing lights, too, because we didn't have enough. In fact, our power stations were a complete disappointment. They were so unlike the real things.

I had eight years of this. It was a great life, if you held onto your sense of humour.

As far as I'm concerned, The Leaky Establishment was one step away from being real.

 

Introduction: The Leaky Establishment

	I hate Dave Langford for writing this book. This was the book I meant to write. God wanted me to write this book.

	For a large part of the 1980s I effectively worked (which was definitely not the same as worked effectively) for the civil nuclear industry, or at least that part of it that produced cheap, clean nuclear electricity, if I remember my facts correctly, in South West England.

	Reactors hardly ever exploded. I was a Press Officer, so you can trust me on this. But they didn't have to explode. Some little known component of nuclear radiation made certain that life for anyone involved with the public face of the industry became very weird. And I worked with Dave Langfords all the time. I had to. I knew about words, they knew about uranium. They were a fine body of men, with a refreshingly different view of the universe.

	When a member of the public turned up at a nuclear power station and was found to be too radioactive to go near the reactor, they advised me. When I had to deal with the news story about the pixie that shut down a nuclear power station, they advised me again. Scientists with a twisted sense of humour can do wonders for your education, provided you believe only fifty percent of what they tell you. (Er ... perhaps thirty percent, come to think of it—I never did actually use the phrase "The amount of radiation released was so small that you could hardly see it.")

	They'd produce figures to show that the Sun was an illegal emitter of laser light and under Health and Safety regulations no one should be allowed outdoors, or that the natural background radiation in granite areas meant that registered nuclear workers should only be allowed to go on holiday in Cornwall if they wore protective clothing. And I can no longer hear the words "three completely independent fail-safe systems" without laughing.

	The job was also my introduction to the Civil Service. Yes, there really was the man who came around every six months to check that I still had the ancient four-function calculator that I'd signed for on joining, and was probably worth 1 Op. Yes, some of the Langfords upstairs brought in their own wordprocessors to write their reports and then, because of the regulations, sighed, and sent the print-outs down to the typing pool to be re-typed. And then there was the guy who actually went into a nuclear reactor and ... but I'll save that one, because you'd never believe it. Or the one about the lavatory.

	It's no wonder that this clash of mind-sets produced something like The Leaky Establishment (which of course deals with an entirely different kind of nuclear establishment to the ones I worked in, where things were not actually intended to blow up). The book is practically a documentary. I read it in horror, in between laughing. This man had sat in at exactly the same kind of meetings! He'd dealt with the same kind of people! He'd been at the same Open Days! The sheer reality of it all leaked from every page! It was just like the book I'd been planning to write one day! How could I ever write my book now?

	And then I got to the end and ... well, Dave Langfords garden would probably bear examination by the Health and Safety Executive, that's all I'll say.

	I'd rank this book alongside Michael Frayn's The Tin Men, another neglected classic. I've wanted for years to see it back in prim. It is one of those books you end up buying several copies of, because you just have to lend it to friends. It's very funny. It's very real.

	I hope it's as successful as hell, and will happily give up any plans to write my own nuclear book. After all, I'll always have my memories to keep me warm: And, come to think of it, the large, silvery, and curiously heavy mug they presented to me when I left ...

A speech as guest of honour at the Booksellers Association Conference annual dinner in Torquay in 1993. Re-printed with permission from the 11 June 1993 issue of The Bookseller.

 

Let There Be Dragons

	I have still got the first book I ever read. It was The Wind in the Willows. Well, it was probably not the first book I ever read—that was no doubt called something like Nursery Fun or Janet and John Book 1. But it was the first book I opened without chewing the covers or wishing I was somewhere else. It was the first book which, at the age of 10, I read because I was genuinely interested.

	I know now, of course, that it is totally the wrong kind of book for children. There is only one female character and she's a washerwoman. No attempt is made to explain the social conditioning and lack of proper housing that makes stoats and weasels act the way they do. Mr. Badger's house is an insult to all those children not fortunate enough to live in a Wild Wood. The Mole and the Rat's domestic arrangements are probably acceptable, but only if they come right out and talk frankly about them.

	But it was pressed into my hand, and because it wasn't parents or teachers who were recommending the book I read it from end to end, all in one go. And then I started again from the beginning, because I had not realised that there were stories like this.

	There's a feeling that I think is only possible to get when you are a child and discover books: it's a kind of fizz—you want to read everything that's in print before it evaporates before your eyes.

	I had to draw my own map through this uncharted territory. The message from the management was that, yes, books were a good idea, but I don't recall anyone advising me in any way. I was left to my own devices.

	I am now becoming perceived as a young people's writer. Teachers and librarians say, "You know, your books are really popular among children who don't read." I think this is a compliment; I just wish they would put it another way. In fact, genre authors get to know their reader profile quite intimately, and I know I have a large number of readers who are old enough to drive a car and possibly claim a pension. But the myth persists that all my readers are aged 14 and called Kevin, and so I have taken an interest in the dark underworld called children's literature.

	Not many people do, it seems to me, apart from those brave souls who work with children and are interested in what they read. They're unsung resistance heroes in a war that is just possibly being won by Sonic Hedgehogs and bionic plumbers. They don't have many allies, even where you would expect them. Despite the huge number of titles that pour out to shape the minds of the adults, my Sunday paper reviews a mismatched handful of children's books at infrequent intervals and, to show its readers that this is some kind of literary play street, generally puts a picture of a teddy bear on the page.

	Perhaps the literary editor's decision is right. In my experience children don't read reviews of children's books. They live in a different kind of world.

	The aforementioned school librarians tell me that what the children read for fun, what they will actually spend their money on, are fantasy, science fiction, and horror and, while they offer up a prayer of thanks that the kids are reading anything in this electronic age, this worries them. It shouldn't.

	I now know that almost all fiction is, at some level, fantasy. What Agatha Christie wrote was fantasy. What Tom Clancy writes is fantasy. What Jilly Cooper writes is fantasy—at least, I hope for her sake it is. But what people generally have in mind when they hear the word fantasy is swords, talking animals, vampires, rockets (science fiction is fantasy with bolts on), and around the edges it can indeed be pretty silly. Yet fantasy also speculates about the future, rewrites the past, and reconsiders the present. It plays games with the universe.

	Fantasy makes many adults uneasy. Children who like the stuff tend to call it "brill" and "megagood". This always disturbs people. (It worries them so much that when someone like P. D. James uses the mechanisms of science fiction helpful people redefine the field, thus avoiding bestowing on her the mark of Cain; the book isn't science fiction "because it's not all about robots and other planets". P. D. James writing science fiction? Impossible. But Children of Men is a science fiction book, as is Time's Arrow, and Fatherland, as was Brian Aldiss' Methuselah's Children, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, and Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. Science fiction, the stuff that is seldom reviewed, is often good; it doesn't need robots, and Earth is room enough.)

	Of course science fiction and fantasy are sometimes badly written. Many things are. But literary merit is an artificial thing and exists in the eye of the beholder. In a world where Ballard's Empire of the Sun cannot win the Booker, I'm not too in awe of judgements based on literary merit.

	Not long ago I talked to a teacher who, having invited me to talk at her school, was having a bit of trouble with the head teacher, who thought that fantasy was morally suspect and irrelevant to the world of the '90s.

	Morally suspect? Shorn of its trappings, most fantasy would find approval in a Victorian household. The morality of fantasy and horror is, by and large, the strict morality of the fairy tale. The vampire is slain, the alien is blown out of the airlock, the Dark Lord is vanquished, and, perhaps at some loss, the good triumph—not because they are better armed but because Providence is on their side.

	Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.

	To stay sane, if I may gently paraphrase what Edward Pearce recently wrote in the Guardian, it is frequently necessary for someone to take short views, to look for comfort, to keep a piece of the world still genially ordered, if only for the duration of theatrical time or the length of a book. And this is harmless enough. Classical, written fantasy might introduce children to the occult, but in a healthier way than might otherwise be the case in our strange society. If you're told about vampires, it's a good thing to be told about stakes at the same time.

	And fantasy's readers might also learn, in the words of Stephen Sondheim, that witches can be right and giants can be good. They learn that where people stand is perhaps not as important as which way they face. This is part of the dangerous process of growing up.

	As for escapism, I'm quite happy about the word. There is nothing wrong with escapism. The key points of consideration, though, are what you are escaping from, and where you are escaping to.

	As a suddenly thirsting reader I escaped first of all to what was then called Outer Space. I read a lot of science fiction, which as I have said is only a 20th-century subset of fantasy. And a lot of it was, in strict literary terms, rubbish. But this was good rubbish. It was like an exercise bicycle for the mind—it doesn't take you anywhere, but it certainly tones up the muscles.

	Irrelevant? I first came across any mention of ancient Greek civilisation in a fantasy book—by Mary Renault. But in the '50s most schools taught history like this: there were the Romans who had a lot of baths and built some roads and left. Then there was a lot of undignified pushing and shoving until the Normans arrived, and history officially began.

	We did Science, too, in a way. Yuri Gagarin was spinning around above our heads, but I don't recall anyone at school ever mentioning the fact. I don't even remember anyone telling us that science was not about messing around with chemicals and magnets, but rather a way of looking at the universe.

	Science fiction looked at the universe all the time. I make no apology for having enjoyed it. We live in a science fiction world: two miles down there you'd fry and two miles up there you'd gasp for breath, and there is a small but significant chance that in the next thousand years a large comet or asteroid will smack into the planet. Finding this out when you're 13 or so is a bit of an eye-opener. It puts acne in its place, for a start.

	Then other worlds out there in space got me interested in this one down here. It is a small mental step from time travel to paleontology, from sword 'n' sorcery fantasy to mythology and ancient history. Truth is stranger than fiction; nothing in fantasy enthralled me as much as reading of the evolution of mankind from protoblob to newt, tree shrew, Oxbridge arts graduate, and eventually to tool-using mammal.

	I first came across words like ecologist and overpopulation in science fiction books in the late '50s and early '60s, long before they had become fashionable. Yes, probably Malthus had said it first—but you don't read Malthus when you're 11, though you might read someone like John Brunner or Harry Harrison because their books have got an exciting spaceship on the cover.

	I also came across the word neoteny, which means "remaining young". It's something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity's navel—other worlds are better than fluff.

	And I came across a lot of trash. But the human mind has a healthy natural tendency to winnow out the good stuff from the rubbish. It's like gold mining: you have to shift a ton of dirt to get the gold; if you don't shift the dirt, you won't find the nugget. As far as I am concerned, escapist literature let me escape to the real world.

	So let's not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It is the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulates the inquisitive nodes. It may not appear as "relevant" as books set more firmly in the child's environment, or whatever hell the writer believes to be the child's environment, but there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.

	Of course, some may read no other kind of fiction all their lives (although in my experience science fiction fans tend to be widely read outside the field). Adult SF fans may look a bit scary when they come into bookshops, some of them have been known to wear plastic pointy ears, but people like that are an unrepresentative minority and are certainly no weirder than people who, say, play golf. At the very least they are helping to keep the industry alive, and providing one of the best routes to reading that there can be.

	Here's to fantasy as the proper diet for the growing soul. All human life is there: a moral code, a sense of order, and, sometimes, great big green things with teeth. There are other books to read, and I hope children who start with fantasy go on to read them. I did. But everyone has to start somewhere.

	Please call it fantasy, by the way. Don't call it "magical realism", that's just fantasy wearing a collar and tie, mark-of-Cain words, words used to mean "fantasy written by someone I was at university with". Like the fairy tales that were its forebears, fantasy needs no excuses.

	One of the great popular novelists of the early part of this century was G.K. Chesterton. Writing at a time when fairy stories were under attack, for pretty much the same reason as books can now be covertly banned in some schools because they have the word witch in the title, he said: "The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."

This was published in 1990 in the anthology Digital Dreams, edited by Dave Barrett. I was tempted to "update" this—after all, it's about Virtual Reality, haha, remember that?—but what's the point? Besides, it would be cheating.

I just liked the idea of an amiable repairman, not very bright but good with machines, padding the streets of a quiet, dull, sleeping world. Things are breaking down, knowledge is draining away, and he's driving his van around the sleeping streets, helping people dream  ...

 

# ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time"

	Never could stand the idea of machines in people. It's not proper. People say, hey, what about pacemakers and them artificial kidneys and that, but they're still machines no matter what.

	Some of them have nuclear batteries. Don't tell me that's right.

	I tried this implant once, it was supposed to flash the time at the bottom left-hand corner of your eyeball once a second, in little red numbers. It was for the busy exec, they said, who always needs to know, you know, subliminally what the time is. Only mine kept resetting to Tuesday, 1 January, 1980, every time I blinked, so I took it back, and the salesman tried to sell me one that could show the time in twelve different capitals plus stock market reports and that. All kinds of other stuff, too. It's getting so you can get these new units and you go to have a slash, excuse my French, and all these little red numbers scroll up with range and position details and a vector-graphics lavvy swims across your vision, beepbeepbeep, lock-on, fire ...

	She's around somewhere. You might of even seen her. Or him. It's like immortality.

	Can't abide machines in people. Never could, never will.

	I mention this because, when I got to the flat, the copper on the door had that panicky look in his eye they have when they're listening to their internal radio.

	I mean, probably it looked a great idea on paper. Whole banks of crime statistics and that, delivered straight to the inside of your head. Only they get headaches from all the noise. And what good is it, every time a cab goes by, they get this impulse to pick up a fare from Flat 27, Rushdie Road? My joke.

	I went in and there was this smell.

	Not from the body, though. They'd got rid of that smell, first thing.

	No. This smell, it was just staleness. The kind of smell old plastic makes. It was the kind of smell a place gets that ought to be dirty, only there's not enough dirt around, so what you get is ground-in cleanness. When you leave home, say, and your mum keeps the room just like it was for ten years, that's the kind of smell you get. The whole flat was like that, although there were no aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.

	So I get called into the main room and immediately I spot the Seagem, because I'm trained, you notice things like that. It was a series Five, which in my opinion were a big mistake. The Fours were pretty near ideal, so why tinker? It's like saying, hey, we've invented the perfect bicycle so, next thing we'll do, we'll put thirteen more wheels on it—like, for example, they replaced the S-2030s with the S-4060, not a good move in my opinion.

	This one was dead. I mean, the power light was on and it was warm, but if it was operating you'd expect to see lights moving on the panel. Also, there was this really big 4711 unit on top, which you don't expect to see in a private house. It's a lab tool. It was a dual model, too. Smell and taste. I could see by the model number it was one of the ones you use a tongue glove with, which is actually quite OK. Never could understand the spray-on polymers. People say, hey, isn't it like having a condom in your mouth, but it's better than having to scrape gunk off your tongue at bedtime.

	Lots of other stuff had been hooked in, too, and half a dozen phone lines into a patch unit. There was a 1MT memory sink, big as a freezer.

	Someone who knew what they wanted to buy had really been spending some money here.

	And, oh yes, in the middle of it, like they'd told me on the phone, the old guy. He was dead, too. Sitting on a chair. They weren't going to do anything to him until I'd been, they said.

	Because of viruses, you see. People get funny ideas about viruses.

	They'd taken his helmet off and you could see the calluses where the nose plugs had been. And his face was white, I mean, yes, he was dead and everything, but it had been like something under a stone even before, and his hair was all long and crinkly and horrible where it had been growing under the helmet. And he didn't have a beard, what he had was just long, long chin hair, never had a blade to it in years. He looked like God would look if he was on really serious drugs. And dead, of course.

	Actually, he was not that old at all. Thirty-eight. Younger than me. Of course, I jog.

	This other copper was standing by the window, trying to pick up HQ through the microwave mush. He looked bored. All the first-wave scene-of-crime types had long been and gone. He just nodded to the Seagem and said, "You know how to fix these things?"

	That was just to establish, you know, that there was them and us, and I was a them. But they always call me in. Reliable, see. Dependable. You can't trust the big boys, they're all dealers and agents for the afer companies, they're locked in. Me, I could go back to repairing microswatch players tomorrow. Darren Thompson, Artificial Realities repaired, washing-machine motors rewound. I can do it, too. Ask kids today even to repair a TV, they'll laugh at you, they'll say you're out of the Arc.

	I said, "Sometimes. If they're fixable. What's the problem?"

	"That's what we'd like you to find out," he says, more or less suggesting, if we can't pin something on him we'll pin it on you, chum. "Can you get a shock off these things?"

	"No way. You see, the interfaces—"

	"All right, all right. But you know what's being said about 'em. Maybe he was using it for weird kicks." Coppers think everyone uses them for weird kicks.

	"I object most strongly to that," said this other voice. "I object most strongly, and I shall make a note of it. There's absolutely no evidence."

	There was this other man. In a suit. Neat. He was sitting by one of these little portable office terminals. I hadn't noticed him before because he was one of these people you wouldn't notice if he was with you in a wardrobe.

	He smiled the sort of smile you have to learn and stuck out his hand. Can't remember his face. He had a warm, friendly handshake, the kind where you want to have a wash afterwards.

	"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Thompson," he said. "I'm Carney. Paul Carney. Seagem public affairs department. Here to see that you are allowed to carry our your work. Without interference." He looked at the copper, who was definitely not happy. "And any pressure," he added.

	Of course, they've always wanted to nail Seagem, I know that. So I suppose they have to watch business. But I've done thirty, forty visits where afers have died, and men in suits don't turn up, so this was special. All the money in the equipment should've told me that.

	Life can get very complicated for men in overalls who have problems with men in suits.

	"Look," I said. "I know my way around these things OK, but if you want some really detailed testing then I would have thought your people'll—"

	"Seagem's technical people are staying right out of this," snapped the copper. "This is a straight in-situ report, you understand. For the coroner. Mr. Carney is not allowed to give you any instructions at all."

	Uniforms, too. They can give you grief.

	So I took the covers off, opened the toolbox, and stuck in. That's my world. They might think they're big men, but when I've got the back off something and its innards all over the floor, it's me that's the boss ...

	Of course, they're all called Seagems, even the ones made by Hitachi or Sony or Amstrad. It's like Hoovers and hoovers. In a way, they aren't difficult. Nine times out of ten, if you're in trouble, you're talking loose boards, unseated panels, maybe a burnout somewhere. The other one time it's probably something you can only cure by taking the sealed units into the hypercleanroom and rapping them with a lump hammer, style of thing.

	People say, hey, bet you got an armful of degrees and that. Not me. Basically, if you can repair a washing machine you can do everything to a Seagem that you can do outside a lab. So long as you can remember where you put the screws down, it's not taxing. That's if it's a hardware problem, of course. Software can be a pain. You got to be a special type of person to handle the software. Like me. No imagination, and proud of it.

	"Kids use these things, you know," said the copper, when I was kneeling on the floor with the interface boards stacked around me.

	(I always call them coppers, because of tradition. Did you know that "copper" as slang for policeman comes from the verb "to cop", first reliably noted in 1859? No, you don't, because, after all that big thing ten years ago about the trees and that, the university put loads of stuff into those big old read/write optical units, and some kid managed to get a McLint virus into the one in the wossname department. You know? Words? History of words. This was before I specialized in Seagems, only in those days they were still called Computer Generated Environments. And they called me in and all I could haul out of 5kT of garbage was half a screenful which I read before it wiped. This guy was crying. "The whole history of English philology is up the swanee," he said, and I said, would it help if I told him the word "copper" was first reliably noted in 1859, and he didn't even make a note of it. He should of. They could, you know, start again.

	I mean, it wouldn't be much, but it would be a start. Often wondered what "up the swanee" really means. Don't suppose I'll ever know, now.)

	"Kids use them," he said. You could tell he wanted to use a word like "bastards", but not with the suit around.

	Not ones like these they don't, I thought. This stuff is top of the range. You couldn't get it in the shops.

	"If I caught my lad with one, I'd tan his hide. We used to play healthy games when I was a kid. Elite, Space Invaders, that stuff."

	"Yeah." Let's see, attach probes here and here ...

	"Please allow Mr. Thompson to get on with his work," said the suit.

	"I think," said the copper nastily, "we ought to tell him who this man is." Then they started to argue about it.

	I suppose I'd assumed he was just some old guy who'd hooked into one porno afer too many. Not a bad way to go, by the way. People say hey, what you mean? Dying of an overdose of artificial sex is OK? And I say, compared to about a million other ways, yes. Realities can't kill you unless you want to go. The normal feedback devices can't raise a bruise, whatever the horror stories say, although between you and me, I've heard of, you know, things, exoskeletons, the army used 'em but they've turned up elsewhere. They can let your dreams kick the shit out of you.

	"He's Michael Dever," said the copper. "Mr. Thompson should know that. He invented half this stuff. He's a big man at Seagem. Hasn't been into the office for five years, apparently. Works from home. Worked," he corrected himself. "Top man in development. Lives like this. Lived. Sends all his stuff in over the link. No one bothered about it, see, because he's a genius. Then he missed an important deadline yesterday."

	That explained about the suit, then. Heard about Dever, of course, but all the pix in the mags showed this guy in a T-shirt and a grin. Old pix, then. A big man, yes. So maybe important stuff in the machine. Or he was testing something. Or they thought, maybe someone had slipped him a virus. After all, there were enough lines into the unit.

	Nothing soiled though, I thought. Some people who are gone on afer will live in shit, but you do get the thorough ones, who work it all out beforehand—fridge stacked with TV dinners, bills paid direct by the bank, half an hour out from under every day for housework and aerobics, and then off they go for a holiday in their heads.

	"Better than most I've seen," I said. "Neat. No trouble to anyone. I've been called into ones because of the smell even when they weren't dead."

	"Why's he got those pipes hooked up to the helmet?" said the copper.

	He really didn't know. I supposed he hadn't had much to do with afers, not really. A lot of the brighter coppers keep away from them, because you can get really depressed. What we had here was Entonox mixture, the intelligent afer's friend. Little tubes to your nose plugs, then a little program on the machine which brings you out of your reality just enough every day for e.g. a go on the exercise bike, a meal, visit the bathroom.

	"If you're going to drop out of your own reality, you need all the help you can get," I explained. "So the machine trickles you some gas and fades the program gradually. Gives you enough of a high to come out of it without screaming."

	"What if the valves stick?" asked the suit.

	"Can't. There's all kinds of fail-safes, and it monitors your—"

	"We believe the valves may have stuck," said the suit firmly.

	Well. Good thinking. Seagem don't make valves. The little gas units are definitely third-party add-ons. So if some major employee dies under the helmet, it's nice to blame valves. Only I've never heard of a valve sticking, and there really are a load of fail-safes. The only way it'd work is if the machine held some things off and some things on, and that's purpose, and machines don't have that.

	Only it's not my place to say things like that.

	"Poor guy," I said.

	The copper unfolded at high speed and grabbed my shoulder and towed me out and into a bedroom, just like that. "Just you come and look at this," he kept saying. "Just you come and look. This isn't one of your bloody electronic things. Poor guy? Poor guy? This is real."

	There was this other dead body next door, see.

	He thought I was going to be shocked. Well, I wasn't. You see worse things in pictures of Ancient Egypt. You see worse things on TV. I see them for real, sometimes. Nearly fresh corpses can be upsetting, believe me, but this wasn't because it'd been years. Plenty of time for the air to clear. Of course, I only saw the head, I wouldn't have liked to have been there when they pulled the sheets back.

	She might have been quite good looking, although of course it was hard to be sure. There were coroner's stickers over everything.

	"Know what she died of?" asked the copper. "Forensic think she was pregnant and something went wrong. She bled to death. And her just lying there, and him in the next room in his little porno world. Name was Suzannah. Of course, all the neighbours are suddenly concerned that they never saw her around for years. Kept themselves to themselves," he mimicked shrilly. "Half of 'em afers too, you bet.

	"He left her for five years. Just left her there."

	He was wrong. Listen, I've been called in before when an afer's died, and like I said it's the smell every time. Like rotting food, you know. But Dever or someone had sealed the room nicely, and put her in a body-bag thing.

	Anyway, let's face it, most people these days smell via a Seagem of some sort. Keeps you from smelling what you don't want to smell.

-

	It began with the Dataglove, and then there were these whole body suits, and along with them were the goggles—later the helmets—where the computer projected the images. So you could walk into the screen, you could watch your hands move inside the images, you could feel them. All dead primitive stuff now, like Edison's first television or whatever. No smell, not much colour, hardly any sensory feedback. Took them ages to crack smell.

	Everyone said, hey, this is it, like your accountant can wear a whole reality suit and stroll around inside your finances. And chemists can manipulate computer simulations of molecules and that. Artificial realities would push back the boundaries of, you know, man's thirst for wossname.

	Well, yeah. My dad said once, "Know where I first saw a microchip? Inside a ping-pong game."

	So prob'ly those thirsty for pushing back boundaries pushed 'em back all right, but where you really started seeing reality units was on supermarket checkout girls and in sports shops, because you could have a whole golf course in your home and stuff like that. If you were really rich. Really very rich. But then Seagem marketed a cut-down version, and then Amstrad, and then everything went mad.

	You see people in the streets every day with reality units. Mostly they're just changing a few little things. You know. Maybe they edit out black men, or slogans, or add a few trees. Just tinkering a bit, just helping themselves get through the day.

	Well sure, I know what some afers do. I know kids who think you can switch the wires so you taste sound and smell vision. What you really do is, you get a blinding headache if you're lucky. And there's the people who, like I said, can't afford a rollafloor so they go hiking through the Venusian jungles or whatever in a room eight feet square and fall out the window. And afers have burned alive and turned into couch crisps. You've seen it all on the box. At least, you have if you're not an afer. They don't watch much.

	Odd, really. Government is against it. Well, it's a drug. One you can't tax. And they say, freedom is the birthright of every individual, but you start being free, they get upset. Coppers seem to be offended, too. But ... well. Take rape. I mean, you don't hear about it these days. Not when you can pick up Dark Alley Cruiser down the rental shop. Not that I've watched it, you understand, but I'm told the girl's very good, does all that's expected of her, which you don't have to be an Eisenstein to work out isn't what it'd be like for real, if you catch my drift. And there's other stuff, I won't even mention the titles. I don't need to, do I? It's not all remakes of Rambo XXIV with you in the title role is what I mean.

	I reckon what the coppers don't like is there's all this crime going on in your head and they can't touch you for it.

	There's all that stuff on the TV about how it corrupts people. All these earnest professors sitting round in leather chairs—of course they never use their machines for anything except the nature programmes or high-toned stuff like Madam Ovary. Probably does corrupt people but, I don't know, everything's been corrupting people since the, you know, dawn of thingy, but with afers it stays inside. They aren't about to go and knock over some thin little girl in cotton underwear coming back from the all-night chippy, not after Dark Alley Cruiser. Probably can't, anyway. And it's cheap so you don't have to steal for it. A lot of them forget to feed themselves. Afers are the kind of problems that come with the solutions built in.

	I like a good book, me.

-

	They watched me very hard when I checked the gas-feed controls. The add-on stuff was pretty good. You could see where it was hooked into everything else. I bet if I had time to really run over it on the bench you'd find he had a little daydream every day. Probably didn't even properly come out from under. Funny thing, that, about artificial realities. You know how you can be dreaming and the buzzer goes and the dream sort of incorporates the buzzer into the plot? Probably it was like that.

	It had been well-maintained. Cleaned regularly and everything. You can get into trouble otherwise, you get build-ups of gunk on connectors and things. That's why all my customers, I tell them, you take out a little insurance, I'll be round every six months tegular, you can give me the key, I've even got a bypass box so if you're, you know, busy I can do a quick service and be away and you won't know I've been. This is personal service. They trust me.

	I switched off the power to the alarms, cleaned a few boards for the look of it, reseated everything, switched it back on. Et wolla.

	The copper leaned over my shoulder.

	"How did you do that?" he said.

	"Well," I said, "there was no negative bias voltage on the sub-logic multiplexer," which shut him up.

	Thing is, there wasn't anything wrong. It wasn't that I couldn't find a fault, there was nothing to say that a fault existed. It was as if it'd just been told to shut down everything. Including him.

	Valve stuck ... that meant too much nitrous oxide. The scene of crime people prob'ly had to get the smile off his face with a crowbar.

	The lights came on, there were all the little whirs and gurgles you get when these things boot up, the memory sinks started to hum, we were cooking with gas.

	They got excited about all this.

	And then, of course, I had to get out my own helmet.

	Viruses, that's the thing. Started off as a joke. Some kid'd hack into someone else's reality, scrawl messages on the walls. A joke, like the McLints. Only, instead of scrambling the wage bill or wiping out English literature, you turned their brain to cheese. Frighten them to death, or whatever. Scares the hell out of some people, the thought that you can kill people that way. They act illogical. You find someone dead under an afer unit, you call in someone like me. Someone with no imagination.

	You'd be amazed, the things I've seen.

	You're right.

	You're clever. You've had an education.

	You're saying, hey, I know what you saw. You saw the flat, right, and it was just like it was really, only maybe cleaner, and she was still alive in it, and maybe there was a kid's voice in the next room, the kid they never had, because, right, he'd sat there maybe five years ago maybe while she was still warm and done the reality creation job of a lifetime. And he was living in it, just sane enough to make sure he kept on living in it. An artificial reality just like reality ought to have been.

	Right. You're right. You knew it. I should've held something back, but that's not like me.

	Don't ask me to describe it. Why ask me to describe it? It was his.

	I told the other two and the PR man said firmly, "Well, all right. And then a valve stuck."

	"Look," I said, "I'll just make a report, OK? About what I've found. I'm a wire man, I don't mess around with pipes. But I wouldn't mind asking you a question."

	That got them. That got them. People like me don't normally ask questions, apart from, "Where's the main switch?"

	"Well?" said the suit.

	"See," I said, "it's a funny old world. I mean, you can hide a body from people these days, it's easy. But there's a lot more to it in the real world. I mean, there's banks and credit companies, right? And medical checks and polls and stuff. There's this big electric shadow everyone's got. If you die—"

	They were both looking at me in this funny way. Then the suit shrugged and the uniform handed me this print-out from the terminal. I read it, while the memory sink whirred and whirred and whirred ...

	She visited the doctor last year.

	The girl who runs the supermarket checkouts swears she sees her regularly.

	She writes stories for kids. She's done three in the last five years. Quite good, apparently. Very much like the stuff she used to do before she was dead. One of them got an award.

	She's still alive. Out there.

	It's like I've always said. Most of the conversations you have with most people are just to reassure one another that you're alive, so you don't need a very complex paragorithm. And Dever could do some really complex stuff.

	She's been getting everywhere. She was on that flight to Norway that got blown up last year. The stewardess saw her. Of course, the girl was wearing environment gear, all aircrew do, it stops them having to look at ugly passengers. Mrs. Dever still had a nice time in Oslo. Spent some money there.

	She was in Florida, too. At the same time.

	She's a virus. The first ever self-replicating reality virus.

	She's everywhere.

-

	Anyway, you won't of heard about it, because it all got hushed up because Seagem are bigger than you thought. They buried him and what was left of her. In a way.

	I heard from, you know, contacts that at one point the police were considering calling it murder, but what was the point? The way they saw it, all the evidence of her still being alive was just something he'd arranged, sort of to cover things up. I don't think so because I like happy endings, me.

	And it really went on for a long time, the memory sink. Like I said, the flat had more data lines running into it than usual, because he needed them for his work.

	I reckon he's gone out there, now.

	You walk down the street, you've got your reality visor on, who knows if who you're seeing is really there? I mean, maybe it isn't like being alive, but perhaps it isn't like being dead.

	I've got photos of both of them. Went through old back issues of the Seagem house magazine, they were both at some long-service presentation. She was quite good-looking. You could tell they liked one another.

	Makes sense they'll look just like that now. Every time I switch a visor on, I wonder if I'll spot them. Wouldn't mind knowing how they did it, might like to be a virus myself one day, could be an expert at it.

	He owes me, anyway. I got the machine going again and I never told them what she said to me, when I saw her in his reality. She said, "Tell him to hurry."

	Romantic, really. Like that play ... what was it ... with the good dance numbers, supposed to be in New York. Oh, yeah. Romeo and Juliet. People in machines, I can live with that.

	People say to me, hey, this what the human race meant for? I say, buggered if I know, who knows? We never went back to the Moon, or that other place, the red one, but we didn't spend the money down here on Earth either. So people just curl up and live inside their heads. Until now, anyway.

	They could be anywhere. Of course, it's not like life but prob'ly it isn't death either. I wonder what compiler he used? I'd of loved to have had a look at it before he shut the machine down. When I re-booted it, I sort of initialized him and sent him out. Sort of like a godfather, me.

	And anyway, I heard somewhere there's this god, he dreams the whole universe, so is it real or what? Begins with a b. Buddha, I think. Maybe-some other god comes round every six million years to service the machinery.

	But me, I prefer to settle down of an evening with a good book. People don't read books these days. Don't seem to do anything, much. You go down any street, it's all dead, all these people living in their own realities.

	I mean, when I was a kid, we thought the future would be all crowded and cool and rainy with big glowing Japanese adverts everywhere and people eating noodles in the street. At least you'd be communicating, if only to ask the other guy to pass the soy sauce. My joke. But what we got, we got this Information Revolution, what it means is no bugger knows anything and doesn't know they don't know, and they just give up.

	You shouldn't turn in on yourself. It's not what being human means. You got to reach out.

	For example, I'm really enjoying Elements of OSCF Bandpass Design in Computer Generated Environments.

	Man who wrote it seems to think you can set your S-2030s without isolating your cascade interfaces.

	Try that in the real world and see what happens.

I guess we all have our measures of success. Being asked to write this was one of mine. It somehow completed a circle. I now have shelves of editions of Brewer's, new and old, that have been acquired since that first one.

The Rev. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer wanted to tell people things; among his other works were A Guide to Knowledge, a dictionary of miracles and The Readers Handbook of Allusions, References, Plots and Stories. But it's the Phrase and Fable Dictionary that has made him immortal. The book is—well, see below.

I've checked. My copy is still right next to the dictionary. Now read on:

 

Foreword: Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

	I was a Brewer's boy. I first grasped the spine of my second-hand copy when I was twelve. It's still in amazing condition, considering the work I've made it do.

	It was my introduction to mythology and ancient history and a lot more, too, because Brewer's is a serendipitous (see page 1063) book. In other words, you might not find what you're looking for, but you will find three completely unexpected things that are probably more interesting. Reading one item in Brewer's is like eating one peanut. It's practically impossible. There are plenty of other useful books. But you start with Brewer's.

	Nevertheless, the book is hard to describe. You could call it a compendium (I didn't find this in my ancient edition, but I did find 'Complutensian Polyglot', so the effort was not wasted) of myth, legend, quotation, historical byways, and slang, but that would still miss out quite a lot of it. A better description would be "an education", in the truest sense. Brewer's flowered in those pre-Trivial Pursuit days when people believed that if you patiently accumulated a knowledge of small things a knowledge of big things would automatically evolve, and you would become a better person.

	Brewer's has been updated for this Millennium edition. It includes Gandalf as well as Attila the Hun (and why shouldn't it?). Some of the duller nymphs and more obscure Classical items have been dropped to make space for such additions to the language as "hit the ground running" and "all dressed up and nowhere to go". To be considered obscure by Brewer's is a real badge of obscurity, and it is sad to see them go; but the serious Brewerite can only hope that Cassell might one day be persuaded to release a "preservative" edition, so that this detritus of myth and legend is not forever lost.

	But today is tomorrow's past. One day the Fab Four (ask your dad) will be one with ... oh, some of the things that no one cares about any more. Given the speed of change, they're already well on their way. It's an education in itself, seeing them take their place with old Roman senators and mythological fauna, and watching the dust settle. We're the next millennium's ancients ...

	Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is the first book to turn to when questions arise and the final desperate volume when the lesser reference books have failed. No bookshelf, no WORLD is complete without it. It's as simple as that.

We get at least one approach every month about Discworld board games. Many of them are fine, but too often the Discworld name has been pasted onto something generic, or Discworld history would need a major re-write in order to fit the game. Letters burble: "In this game there is a big war between the wizards and the witches ..." Uh, no, I don't think there is.

But Trevor Truan, who designs games like other people breathe, came up with something good in "Koom Valley" the game's working title. It was what I'd asked for: a true Discworld game, a game that could reasonably exist and be played there. It pitches dwarfs against trolls—a conflict hallowed by time—and, in order to play a complete game you have to play both sides, which was a specification I hadn't laid down but which was exactly what I wanted. A game which forces you to think and play like your hereditary enemy could be extremely useful to a thoughtful author. It had the right feel, in short, and slotted neatly into Discworld history.

It looked easy to play, but championship players have told me it can stretch the mind more than chess. It also gave me the germ of a plot, which one day will get written.

All that remained was to chose the name, which was obvious ...

 

Thud—A Historical Perspective

	The role of games in the histories of both dwarfs and trolls has been very important.

	Perhaps the most famous was the dwarfish game of Hnaflbaflsniflwhifltafl, devised by the cunning inventor Morose Stronginthearm for Hugen, Low King of the Dwarfs. Hugen had asked for a game that would teach young dwarfs the virtues of preparedness, strategy, boldness, and quick thinking, and Morose came up with a board game that has some early resemblance to the Thud board.

	The game swept through the dwarfish world, and was very popular. Hugen, being well pleased, asked Morose what he wanted as a reward. The inventor is on record as saying: "If it please you, your majesty, I ask for nothing more than that you should place one plk [a small gold piece then in general circulation] on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on until the board is filled."

	The king readily agreed to this, and had a sack of gold brought from the treasury. However, the count had not been going on for very long before it became clear that what Morose had asked for was, in fact, all the gold in the universe.

	This presented a problem for the king, who had given his word, but he solved it by producing his axe and ordering two of his servants to drag Morose over to the window, where the light was better. At this point Morose hastily amended his request to "as much gold as he could carry", whereupon Hugen agreed and merely had one of his arms broken. "For," he said, "all should know that while Hnaflbaflsniflwhifltafl teaches preparedness, strategy, boldness, and quick thinking, it is also important to know when not be too drhg'hgin clever by half."

	Troll games are closely bound up with troll religion and some are quite hard to understand. There is a game like a simplified form of chess, in which play consists of putting the pieces on the board and waiting for them to move, and another in which stones are thrown up into the air and players bet on whether or not they will come down. Quite a lot of money can be won that way.

-

Koom Valley

	The traditional enmity between dwarfs and trolls had been explained away by one simple statement: one species is made of rock, the other is made of miners. But in truth the enmity is there because no one can remember when it wasn't, and so it continues because everything is done in completely justifiable revenge for the revenge that was taken in response to the revenge for the vengeance that was taken earlier, and so on. Humans never do this sort of thing, much.

	There are at least three sites in Koom claiming to be the Koom Valley and at least fourteen major battles are now believed to have been fought there, wherever there turns out to be.

	The most likely site of Koom Valley, which is in Koom Valley, is a lonely, foreboding place. Even storm clouds go around it. It has been suggested by some wizards in the History Department at Unseen University that the rock formations in the valley, in the path of the prevailing winds, vibrate at a frequency that causes considerably unease and ill-temper in the brains of dwarfs, trolls, and men, but attempts to prove this experimentally have failed three times because of fights breaking out amongst the researchers.

	The most recent battle was between a party of young dwarfs from Ankh-Morpork, who were visiting the area as part of a cultural tour. City dwarfs feel that it is very important for their offspring to stay in touch with the toots of dwarfishness, and often send them back to Copperhead or Überwald for what is known as some "mine time". On this day, unfortunately, a party of young trolls were also visiting the area for very similar reasons, and after some name-calling they fell to fighting and gave a very spirited recreation of the earlier battles.

-

	The game of Thud was devised as an alternative to the fighting. It was considered by some older dwarfs and trolls that a non-fatal means of contest might be a boon to peace in the mountains and, besides, they were running out of people. And, in recognition of the general state of all unsuccessful fighters in the wars, it is a game of two halves.

	"For," according to the trollish philosopher Plateau, "if you wants to understan' an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he's still your enemy, at least you're a mile away and he's got no shoes."

	Legend says that a large war party of dwarfs and a smaller one of trolls were hunting one another in the valley, and that on this occasion the leader of the trolls tried an artful strategy. Usually, both groups would hunt each other among the big rocks that litter the valley, but this time the troll leader positioned his company right out in the middle of a stretch of open ground, reasoning that the dwarfs would never look there.

	"After all," he is recorded as saying, "dey always find us when we hide behind fings 'cos dey look behind fings, so if we stands out in the open they won't find us 'cos dere's nuffin to look behind."

	This major step in trollish thinking had some success because of the heavy fog that, most unusually, had fallen that morning. However, it lifted shortly after sunrise, and the trolls were, to the confoundment of what seemed like impeccable logic, immediately spotted. Battle ensued, both sides claiming foul play on the part of the other, and both sides claiming to have won.

	The Thud game seeks to recreate this and has been credited with seriously reducing the number of major wars between dwarfs and trolls, replacing them instead with innumerable bar room scuffles in which Thud boards, and sometimes pieces, are used as the weapons. But since this becomes merely a police matter, it counts as peace ...

This was written a couple of years ago for the on-line game TimeHunt, in which each story incorporated a hidden phrase.

It's relevant to the story, it's still in there, you need the mind of a fan to find it, and I bend the rules a little—or, rather, there are exceptions to the rule.

I rather liked the idea of Heaven being a logical certainty	

 

Death and What Comes Next
A Discworld short story

	When Death met the philosopher, the philosopher said, rather excitedly, "At this point, you realise, I'm both dead and not dead."

	There was a sigh from Death. Oh dear, one of those, he thought. This is going to be about quantum again? He hated dealing with philosophers. They always tried to wriggle out of it.

	"You see," said the philosopher, while Death, motionless, watched the sands of his life drain through the hourglass, "everything is made of tiny particles, which have the strange property of being in many places at one time. But things made of tiny particles tend to stay in one place at one time, which does not seem right according to quantum theory. May I continue?"

	YES, BUT NOT INDEFINITELY, said Death, EVERYTHING IS TRANSIENT. He did not take his gaze away from the tumbling sand.

	"Well, then, if we agree that there are an infinite number of universes, then the problem is solved! If there are an unlimited number of universes, this bed can be in millions of them, all at the same time!"

	DOES IT MOVE?

	"What?"

	Death nodded at the bed. CAN YOU FEEL IT MOVING? he said.

	"No, because there are a million versions of me, too, And ... here is the good bit ... in some of them I am not about to pass away! Anything is possible!"

	Death tapped the handle of his scythe as he considered this. AND YOUR POINT IS ...?

	"Well, I'm not exactly dying, correct? You are no longer such a certainty."

	There was a sigh from Death. Space, he thought. That was the trouble. It was never like this on worlds with everlastingly cloudy skies. But once humans saw all that space, their brains expanded to try and fill it up.

	"No answer, eh?" said the dying philosopher. "Feel a bit old-fashioned, do we?"

	THIS IS A CONUNDRUM CERTAINLY, said Death. Once they prayed, he thought. Mind you, he'd never been sure that prayer worked, either. He thought for a while. AND I SHALL ANSWER IT IN THIS MANNER, he added. YOU LOVE YOUR WIFE?

	"What?"

	THE LADY WHO HAS BEEN LOOKING AFTER YOU. YOU LOVE HER?

	"Yes. Of course."

	CAN YOU THINK OF ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHERE, WITHOUT YOUR PERSONAL HISTORY CHANGING IN ANY WAY, YOU WOULD AT THIS MOMENT PICK UP A KNIFE AND STAB HER? said Death. FOR EXAMPLE?

	"Certainly not!"

	BUT YOUR THEORY SAYS THAT YOU MUST. IT IS EASILY POSSIBLE WITHIN THE PHYSICAL LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE, AND THEREFORE MUST HAPPEN, AND HAPPEN MANY TIMES. EVERY MOMENT IS A BILLION, BILLION MOMENTS, AND IN THOSE MOMENTS ALL THINGS THAT ARE POSSIBLE ARE INEVITABLE. ALL TIME SOONER OR LATER, BOILS DOWN TO A MOMENT.

	"But of course we can make choices between—"

	ARE THERE CHOICES? EVERYTHING THAT CAN HAPPEN, MUST HAPPEN. YOUR THEORY SAYS THAT FOR EVERY UNIVERSE THAT'S FORMED TO ACCOMMODATE YOUR 'NO', THERE MUST BE ONE TO ACCOMMODATE YOUR 'YES'. BUT YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER COMMIT MURDER. THE

	FABRIC OF THE COSMOS TREMBLES BEFORE YOUR TERRIBLE CERTAINTY. YOUR MORALITY BECOMES A FORCE AS STRONG AS GRAVITY. And, thought Death, space certainly has a lot to answer for.

	"Was that sarcasm?"

	ACTUALLY, NO. I AM IMPRESSED AND INTRIGUED, said Death. THE CONCEPT YOU PUT BEFORE ME PROVES THE EXISTENCE OF TWO HITHERTO MYTHICAL PLACES. SOMEWHERE, THERE IS A WORLD WHERE EVERYONE MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE, THE MORAL CHOICE, THE CHOICE THAT MAXIMISED THE HAPPINESS OF THEIR FELLOW CREATURES. OF COURSE, THAT ALSO MEANS THAT SOMEWHERE ELSE IS THE SMOKING REMNANT OF THE WORLD WHERE THEY DID NOT ...

	"Oh, come on! I know what you're implying, and I've never believed in any of that Heaven and Hell nonsense!"

	The room was growing darker. The blue gleam along the edge of the Reaper's scythe was becoming more obvious.

	ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS?

	Fighting for breath, the philosopher managed to say, "Don't be silly."

	THE REMARK WAS NOT INTENDED AS DEROGATORY, said Death. UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, YOU HAVE ACHIEVED A GREAT DEAL.

	"We've certainly escaped from outmoded superstitions!"

	WELL DONE, said Death. THAT'S THE SPIRIT. I JUST WANTED TO CHECK.

	He leaned forward.

	AND ARE YOU AWARE OF THE THEORY THAT THE STATE OF SOME TINY PARTICLES IS INDETERMINATE UNTIL THE MOMENT THEY ARE OBSERVED? A CAT IN A BOX IS OFTEN MENTIONED.

	"Oh, yes," said the philosopher.

	GOOD, said Death. He got to his feet as the last of the light died, and smiled.

	I SEE YOU ...

For the Boskone 39 Program Book, February 2002.

 

Neil Gaiman: Amazing Master Conjurer

	What can I say about Neil Gaiman that has not already been said in The Morbid Imagination: Five Case Studies?

	Well, he's no genius. He's better than that.

	He's not a wizard, in other words, but a conjurer.

	Wizards don't have to work. They wave their hands, and the magic happens. But conjurers, now ... conjurers work very hard. They spend a lot of time in their youth watching, very carefully, the best conjurers of their day. They seek out old books of trickery and, being natural conjurers, read everything else as well, because history itself is just a magic show. They observe the way people think, and the many ways in which they don't. They learn the subtle use of springs, and how to open mighty temple doors at a touch, and how to make the trumpets sound.

	And they take centre stage and amaze you with flags of all nations and smoke and mirrors, and you cry: "Amazing! How does he do it? What happened to the elephant? Where's the rabbit? Did he really smash my watch?"

	And in the back row we, the other conjurers, say quietly: "Well done. Isn't that a variant of the Prague Levitating Sock? Wasn't that Pasqual's Spirit Mirror, where the girl isn't really there? But where the hell did that flaming sword come from?"

	And we wonder if there may be such a thing as wizardry, after all ...

	I met Neil in 1985, when The Colour of Magic had just come out. It was my first ever interview as an author. Neil was making a living as a freelance journalist and had the pale features of someone who had sat through the review showings of altogether too many bad movies in order to live off the freebie cold chicken legs they served at the receptions afterwards (and to build up his contacts book, which is now the size of the Bible and contains rather more interesting people). He was doing journalism in order to eat, which is a very good way of learning journalism. Probably the only real way, come to think of it.

	He also had a very bad hat. It was a grey homburg. He was not a hat person. There was no natural unity between hat and man. That was the first and last time I saw the hat. As if subconsciously aware of the bad hatitude, he used to forget it and leave it behind in restaurants. One day, he never went back for it. I put this in for the serious fans out there: if you search really, really hard, you may find a small restaurant somewhere in London with a dusty grey homburg at the back of a shelf. Who knows what will happen if you try it on?

	Anyway, we got on fine. Hard to say why, but at bottom was a shared delight and amazement at the sheer strangeness of the universe, in stories, in obscure details, in strange old books in unregarded bookshops. We stayed in contact.

-

	[SFX: pages being ripped off a calendar. You know, you just don't get that in movies any more ...]

-

	And one thing led to another, and he became big in graphic novels, and Discworld took off, and one day he sent me about six pages of a short story and said he didn't know how it continued, and I didn't either, and about a year later I took it out of the drawer and did see what happened next, even if I couldn't see how it all ended yet, and we wrote it together and that was Good Omens. It was done by two guys who didn't have anything to lose by having fun. We didn't do it for the money. But, as it turned out, we got a lot of money.

-

	... hey, let me tell you about the weirdness, like when he was staying with us for the editing and we heard a noise and went into his room and two of our white doves had got in and couldn't get out; they were panicking around the room and Neil was waking up in a storm of snowy white feathers saying, "Wstfgl?" which is his normal ante-meridian vocabulary. Or the time when we were in a bar and he met the Spider Women. Or the time on tour when we checked into our hotel and in the morning it turned out that his TV had been showing him strange late-night semi-naked bondage bi-sexual chat shows, and mine had picked up nothing but reruns of Mr. Ed. And the moment, live on air, when we realised that an under-informed New York radio interviewer with ten minutes of chat still to go thought Good Omens was not a work of fiction ...

-

	[Cut to a train, pounding along the tracks. That's another scene they never show in movies these days ...]

-

	And there we were, ten years on, travelling across Sweden and talking about the plot of American Gods (him) and The Amazing Maurice (me). Probably both of us at the same time. It was just like the old days. One of us says, "I don't know how to deal with this tricky bit of plot;" the other one listens and says, "The solution, Grasshopper, is in the way you state the problem. Fancy a coffee?"

	A lot had happened in those ten years. He'd left the comics world shaken, and it'll never be quite the same. The effect was akin to that of Tolkien on the fantasy novel—everything afterwards is in some way influenced. I remember on one U.S. Good Omens tour walking round a comics shop. We'd been signing for a lot of comics fans, some of whom were clearly puzzled at the concept of "dis story wid no pitchers in it," and I wandered around the shelves looking at the opposition. That's when I realised he was good. There's a delicacy of touch, a subtle scalpel, which is the hallmark of his work.

	And when I heard the premise of American Gods I wanted to write it so much I could taste it ...

-

	When I read Coraline, I saw it as an exquisitely drawn animation; if I close my eyes I can see how the house looks, or the special dolls' picnic. No wonder he writes scripts now; soon, I hope someone will be intelligent enough to let him direct. When I read the book I remembered that children's stories are, indeed, where true horror lives. My childhood nightmares would have been quite featureless without the imaginings of Walt Disney, and there's a few little details concerning black button eyes in that book that makes a small part of the adult brain want to go and hide behind the sofa. But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.

	It might come as a surprise to many to learn that Neil is either a very nice, approachable guy or an incredible actor. He sometimes takes those shades off. The leather jacket I'm not sure about; I think I once saw him in a tux, or it may have been someone else.

	He takes the view that mornings happen to other people. I think I once saw him at breakfast, although possibly it was just someone who looked a bit like him who was lying with their head in the plate of baked beans. He likes good sushi and quite likes people, too, although not raw; he is kind to fans who are not total jerks, and enjoys talking to people who know how to talk. He doesn't look as though he's forty; that may have happened to someone else, too. Or perhaps there's a special picture locked in his attic.

	Have fun. You're in the hands of a master conjurer. Or, quite possibly, a wizard.

-

	PS: He really, really likes it if you ask him to sign your battered, treasured copy of Good Omens that has been dropped in the tub at least once and is now held together with very old, yellowing transparent tape. You know the one.

Edited by David Pringle, published in 1998 by Carlton. Dave asked, and I said okay. Sometimes it's as simple as that.

 

Introduction: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy

	Welcome to the Thunderstorm Cave. Our ability to make other worlds made us human. Lots of animals are bright, but as far as we can tell they've never come up with any ideas about who makes the thunder.

	A proto-human did, in some rain-lashed cave. It must have struck him like a bolt from above. Perhaps it was a bolt from above. Suddenly ... inside his head there were people in the sky, and suddenly there was somewhere that people went when they died ... and suddenly there was this huge ghost world behind this one where all the colours were brighter.

	As time went on, our proto-human found that his daydreams were not only providing explanations, they'd opened a way to a good job in the warm and all the nice bits of mammoth he could eat. He'd got hold of something worth more than food. The news spread. The world's second oldest profession became a growth industry (the oldest is "flint knapper", no matter what you may have heard).

	It used an invisible invention that sent mankind on the path to ... well, humanity, because before you can change the world you have to be able to form a picture of the world being other than it appears. Imagination, not intelligence, made us human. Squirrels are quite intelligent when it comes to nuts, but as far as we can tell they have never told stories about a hero who stole nuts from the gods.

	That ability has given us all our fiction and our mythology. Most of our religions, too, because following the success of "What Thunder Is" and its sequel, "How We Got Fire", which was breaking pile-of-juicy-mammoth-ribs records all along the valley, some bright apprentice with a forehead like a balcony came up with the incredible "We Can Stop The Thunderer Hurting Us If We Do These Special Things" followed by "We Ate The True People And We're Better Than Those People In The Next Valley Because We Do These Special Things". Suddenly, life was a lot more exciting although, for the people in the next valley, it was going to be somewhat shorter.

	Suddenly, the world was a story. Homo Sapiens became Homo Narrans, "Story-telling Man"; the rest was, literally, history.

	We are creatures of fantasy. We spend a lot of time in that huge ghost world with the bright colours, and one part of it is now called "civilisation". The mental muscles swollen on the aerobics of gods and heroes have gone on to invent new fantasies "natural justice", "eminent domain", "human rights", which have given something approaching solid form. A raft of fantasies, "made-up things", floats us through the cold dark universe.

	It's odd, then, that unashamed fantasy still trails clouds of disapproval. But some of the reasons are easy to see, even in these pages. The sheer torrent of the stuff, for one thing. The telling and retelling. All those new worlds and eternal heroes. And the suggestion that the world could be completely other than it is always annoys those who are content with the way things are. Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one. Rulers are suspicious of new worlds where their writ does not run. Jailers don't like escapism. Probably the man in the cave got the occasional wallop from the clan leaders. Telling stories can be dangerous.

	And now, welcome to the map of invisible places ...

	And pass the mammoth ribs, please.

I re-read this twelve years later and thought: wow, I must have been having a really bad day, do I still believe this?

And the answer is yes, for a given value of "yes".

In 1992, the boom in fantasy that had begun in the mid-'80s had just reached, the crest of the wave. You couldn't move for the stuff, local and imported. A lot of it was good, but a much it was bad—not necessarily badly written, but bad in that it brought nothing to the party. I recall an issue of Locus magazine that discussed or advertised three different titles that included a Dark Lord as the enemy (no, none of them was LOTR). Oh, dear. Dark Lords should be rationed.

Convention bookstalls were crowded with the stuff. The covers had a certain sameness. There were good books in there, but how could you tell? So many unicorns, dragons, quests, elves ... heroic fantasy was feeding on itself.

Bad for fantasy, good for me; it was a target-rich environment.

Anyway, that was then ... I feel a lot calmer now. Probably it would be a good idea if I kept away from Disneyworld for a while.

 

Elves Were Bastards

	I'm called a writer of fantasy, but I'm coming to hate the term. Why? Because what could be so good is often so bad. Because there's so much trash out there, so much round-eyed worship of mind-numbing myths, so much mindless recycling of ancient cycles, so much unthinking escapism.

	I'm not against recycling. The seasons do it. So do pantomimes, so do fairy stories. The retelling of oft-told tales is an honourable art—but there should be some attempt at texture and flair. Star Wars was the quintessential heroic fantasy story, with just enough twist and spin to give it an extra edge. Robocop retold an ancient tale in a new voice and was marvellous;

	Robocop II was superexpensive trash because people didn't understand what they'd got.

	Unfortunately, there's still a market for rubbish. I picked up a recently-written fantasy book at the weekend, and one character said of another: "He will grow wrath." Oh, my God. And the phrase was in a page of similar jaw-breaking, mock-archaic narrative. Belike, i'faith ... this is the language we use to turn high fantasy into third-rate romantic literature. "Yonder lies the palace of my fodder, the king." That's not fantasy—that's just Tolkien reheated until the magic boils away.

	I get depressed with these fluffy dragons and noble elves. Elves were never noble. They were cruel bastards. And I dislike heroes. You can't trust the buggers. They always let you down. I don't believe in the natural nobility of kings, because a large percentage of them in our history have turned out to be powercrazed idiots. And I certainly don't believe in the wisdom of wizards. I've worked with their modern equivalents, and I know what I am talking about.

	Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light—I try to do that on Discworld. It's a way of looking at the here and now, not the there and then. Fantasy is the Ur-literature, from which everything else sprang—which is why my knuckles go white when toe-sucking literary critics dismiss it as "genre trash". And, at its best, it is truly escapist.

	But the point about escaping is that you should escape to, as well as from. You should go somewhere worthwhile, and come back the better for the experience. Too much alleged "fantasy" is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off.

	I'm writing this in Florida, home of fantasy—either the soft that you watch, or the sort that you stick up your nose. They've got some weird stuff here; for one thing, they've got Disney/MGM and Universal Studios.

	And this is what's weird about them. They aren't really studios. Oh, they shoot some film here, but that's kind of secondary. They weren't built as studios. They were built as ... well, as theme parks. Those false frontages, those artful backlots, those false-perspective streets, they were built for no other purposes than to look like something which in turn was built to look like something. Built to look like something that isn't real.

	Whoever would have thought it?

	Here in America—and in England, to a lesser extent—you can read newspaper articles and buy alleged books which treat the characters played by TV stars as if they were real people. The world has gone strange. You can't tell the reality from the fantasy anymore. Think I'm kidding? On the racks at the supermarket are "newspapers" like the Sun, the Midnight Star, the Weekly World News. Typical lead story: Elvis has been found alive in a UFO dredged from the Bermuda Triangle. People read this stuff. It's not even good sf. They have a vote, same as you.

	This is all "escape from" stuff—the Disney rides, the elves, the stupid stories. It goes nowhere. The best stuff does take you somewhere. It takes you to a new place from which to see the world. An interest in fantasy when I was a child gave me an interest in books in general, and I found in books on astronomy and palaeontology a deep sense of wonder that not even Middle Earth could beat.

	Let's not just leave here. Let's go somewhere else. And if we ran trample over some elves to do it, so much the better.

Written for the 2002 Discworld Convention programme book.

 

Medical Notes

	From Household Medicine, Hair Care, and Simple Surgery, published by the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Barber-Surgeons, AM$2.

	Discworld, while hosting a large number of well-known plagues and other ailments, also boasts—if that is the word—a number of medical conditions of its own. In Ankh-Morpork in particular, population pressure has helped create a whole range of completely original yet curiously familiar complaints, such as:

-

Attention Surplus Syndrome

	Teachers find this just as bad as the other sort. No one likes a child who pays attention too hard, whose eyes follow your every move, and who listens very carefully to everything you say. It's like talking to a great big bottomless ear.

	Advanced cases correct spelling and pronunciation in a clear piping voice, and point out errors of fact to the rest of the class. They also have the infuriating habit of reading all the way to the end of the classroom reader on the first day of term, instead of having the decency to read at the geological speed considered correct for the rest of their age group. Expel at the earliest opportunity.

-

Florabundi's Syndrome

	Erratic and uncontrollable attacks of politeness and good manners. This may not at first sight appear to be an affliction at all, but can be deadly if you are a fish porter, a prisoner, a trooper, or a member of some other profession where incivility is bloody well expected. So-called after Sergeant-Major Charles "Blossom" Florabundi, who in times of stress lost control of his vocabulary and, for example, refused to fire on any enemy that he hadn't been introduced to. He was pensioned off when the entire barrack mutinied after being called "you quite vexing gentlemen". As Corporal Harry "Sharpey" Pointer said afterwards, "No one minds being called a '-ing -er of a—ing—', but that sounded like he -ing meant it! What does—ing 'vexing' mean, anyway?"

-

Annoia, or Paranoia Inversa

	The belief that you are out to get everyone. This is extremely rare amongst people who are not Dark Lords or similar, since those that by profession are indeed "out to get everyone" do not count. However, Mrs. Everita Pewter, of Dolly Sisters, did visit her doctor complaining of feelings that she was oppressing people, spying on them, reading their mail, picking up their thoughts via strange waves, and so on.

	After extensive tests at Unseen University's Department of Invasive Medicine, it was found that Mrs. Pewter had in fact been born as one of Them but had never been taught to use her powers. It was then explained to her that doing so would involve wearing hooded black robes, secret meetings in vast underground caverns, and manipulating the destiny of millions on a twenty-four-hour basis, possibly while fondling a fluffy white cat. Since this would mean missing bridge club on Wednesdays, and in any case cats gave Mrs. Pewter hay fever, she opted instead for a decoction of willow bark for whenever the voices in her head got too bad.

-

Planets

	An ailment peculiar to people working in conditions of stress in high magical environments. This can sometimes cause a breakdown in the inhibitory circuits which prevent every individual's belief that they are the centre of the universe from being broadcast to the universe at large. The usual result is that small imaginary planets will appeal and begin to orbit their head. Strictly speaking the whole universe will eventually begin to orbit them as well, but the effect is so slight that it is in practice restricted to small items within a few feet.

	History records that the wizard Roraty Williams suffered from chronic planets for several years, and one of them developed quite an advanced civilisation which sent a small fleet of flying ships to colonise his head. A helpful and caring man, for some years he never wore a hat.

-

Scroopism

	Many people know about Thomas Bowdler, who published a work of Shakespeare with all the offensive bits cut out. Few remember Male Infant Scroop, who had an overwhelming urge to add rude bits to books and songs not originally intended to contain any. This began at quite a young age, with the scrawling of words like "nikkers" and "bum" in the margins of his schoolbooks (his problem was exacerbated by a lifelong inability to spell) but, after he received a large legacy at the age of 21, he was able to reprint entire books that had been "scrooped". These were substituted for the publisher's copies, which they otherwise resembled in every respect, when bookshop staff were not looking.

	For several months the only result was a noticeable upsurge in the sales of several titles. Things came to a head, however, when a Miss Epetheme Slaybell's small, privately published volume entitled Thoughts From a Country Garden won several highly contested litetary awards, and was praised by a judge for its "bold and controversial stance on the subject of primroses".

	Mr. Scroop died age 84, and is buried in Small Gods Cemetery, Ankh-Morpork. His tombstone, including the inscription, may be inspected by private arrangement with the head gravedigger, since in deference to public opinion it is kept wrapped in brown paper.

-

Signitus

	A minor but chronic ailment, which causes the sufferer to groan and sometimes run away at the sight of anyone holding more than three books. Brandy has been found to relieve the symptoms, possibly with the addition of brandy.

-

Bursaritis (chronic Con-tinence)

	The illusion that you have brought hundreds of people a long way in order to celebrate something that doesn't really exist. Symptoms are manic-depression, a fixed waxy smile, and a tendency, unless physically prevented from doing so, to sell t-shirts at people. Those afflicted may shout things like "Only 1,978 mugs to sell before we break even!" WARNING: sufferers may spontaneously combust if woken suddenly from their trance-like state, and it is best to humour them until they wake up of their own accord. Be kind to these people. It is not their fault.

-

These notes were supplied by: Dr. Peristyle Slack, Ankh-Morpork Guild of Barber-Surgeons—"Come to Us for a Close Shave".

I was in Australia when Bob Shaw died, and the technology in 1996 didn't extend to tracking me down for a quote when the obituaries were being prepared. This was the letter I hastily got off to SFX Magazine when, just in time, I got back.

 

Sheer Delight

	I've just got back from Australia and heard the sad news about the death of Bob Shaw. I'd like to add my own memories to the other tributes.

	I remember Bob's ideas. Slow Glass. How much would you pay to come up with an idea like that? And the training of the troopers in Who Goes Here? Just switch on your ray gun and keep it switched on until you've found the target—why didn't anyone else realise it could be so easy? I'd rather have written Night Walk than The Colour of Magic, because I remember my sheer delight in reading the "seeing through other eyes" scenes.

	But I'll remember most his skill as a speaker. He knew how to be funny. The little polite cough and rumble before he made a comment was like a Stealth bomber taking off, with much the same ultimate effect.

This was written a few years ago. How have things changed? There have been small victories achieved by patience and careful negotiation, and my hat—all my hats—are off to the people who have engineered them.

Even so, the central facts don't change. The orangutan needs the forest. A lot of forest. And humans want it, too, both for what it can make and what's left when it's been felled. You don't have to be much of a pessimist to wonder about the likely life of the species as a truly wild creature. A field here, a plantation there ... and eventually, the apes will have nowhere to retreat to except the reserves. That's around the time we'll need a miracle.

 

The Orangutans Are Dying

	Maybe half of them went in the last ten years. In another ten, unless there's a miracle, look for them only in zoos and a few parks. And this is one of our relatives I'm talking about here. There may be as few as 15,000 of them left. That's the fan base for a third-rate football club.

	Forget all that stuff about how much DNA we share. It does not mean a lot; we share quite a lot of DNA with tats, and more with goldfish than you may think. Orangutans ate like us. They are intelligent. They use their imagination. They think and solve complex problems. They have personalities. They know how to lie. It's simply that their ancestors stayed in the trees while ours climbed down to tough it out on the plains.

	We're going back to the trees now. We're going back with chainsaws. A few years ago all I knew about orangutans was that they were the sad ones sitting with a piece of cardboard on their heads down at the duller end of the primate house. Then, in one of the early books of the Discworld series I created a librarian who was an orangutan. I did it because I thought it would be mildly amusing. As a piece of creativity it took me all of fifteen seconds. Sorry, but it really did. There was no lifelong fascination, no point to make. It was just a joke. On a different day, the Librarian would have been an aardvark.

	The series became inexplicably popular, the Librarian caught the imagination of the readers, one librarian praised me for "raising the status of the profession" and various organisations started paying me money to go and talk to them. This embarrassed me somewhat, until I heard about the Orangutan Foundation.

	I rang them up. I said, "I seem to be getting all this money, would you like it?" A cautious voice said, "Yes?"

	Then it got serious. I became a Trustee. I sit in at meetings in London in a state either of despair or anger. Sometimes what I hear makes me want to slit my wrists, but often it makes me long to slit someone else's.

	The Foundation is a support organisation for the work of Dr. Birute Galdikas at Camp Leakey in Tanjung Puting. She has spent thirty years studying orangutans in the wild, but increasingly she has had to work to ensure that there are any left to study. When I visited her at the camp six years ago, to do a short film, there was still some optimism, some feeling of bridges built, contacts made, some hope that with goodwill all round there was a way that apes and men could co-exist.

	I have an affliction peculiar to life-long journalists. In some circumstances I get detached and go into a sort of "Record" mode. Then I go and write things down, and the mental film is developed, as if writing things down makes them real.

	I remember every detail of my visit like a jewel. I'm damn sure I wouldn't have felt the same about aardvarks. I remember that the eyes of orangutans are the eyes of people, in a way that the eyes of dogs and cats are not, and how the orangutans would pinch the soap and go and wash themselves in the river, and how the camp's motorboat had to be anchored in mid-stream because one young male was taking too intelligent an interest in how to start the engine. I remember the gentle feel of a hand that could have crushed every bone in mine.

	And I remember that when I left Borneo there were also long, long rafts of logs floating down the Sekonyer River, and a smell of smoke in the air.

	Things have got worse, not better. The orangutans are dying out because the rainforests of Indonesia are being killed.

	More than half the timber coming out of Borneo and Sumatra is illegally logged. Even national parks are not safe. A few weeks ago illegal loggers trashed the headquarters at Tanjung Puting National Park. When you're big enough, and powerful enough, and pay the right people, you can do what you like. Greed and corruption are calling the shots.

	As they say in Borneo: "It's illegal—but it's official."

	Oh, there have been successes. They have been achieved by careful and patient negotiation, like tap dancing on quicksand, and I take off my hat to the people who have done it.

	But since my visit and despite all the efforts, the orangutans are still losing. It was hoped that the new Indonesian government could reverse the trend, but nothing in Indonesia is ever straightforward. People like me, who aren't patient, wonder what good is a National Park as a refuge when it is just another source of timber.

	The Foundation is even sponsoring additional patrols of local people to support the understaffed park rangers. It is the sort of initiative that was never envisaged when it was set up. It has taken some very delicate negotiation. They cannot be seen to be interfering with the internal affairs of a sovereign country. So no weapons will be involved. In truth, the park is not as uncivilised as, say, some parts of Los Angeles, so not even the bad guys ate using guns. But the illegal loggers have quite big machetes and a certain insouciance. The rangers have ... er ... well, they have right on their side. Presumably, in a tight corner, they can use harsh language.

	This is hardly ideal, but it may help impress on local people that the orangutans are themselves a resource. It is the "eco-tourism" argument. How much would you pay to see orangutans in the wild, especially if you knew the money was helping to preserve their forest? Currently it's about 12p, the cost of a day ticket into the park, and they throw in the birds and trees for free. There's a bit of scope there, I think.

	Unfortunately, what looms is something worse than logging. There has always been logging, legal and illegal. Loggers come and go. The forest can heal, in time.

	It's plantations that are now the big and growing problem. Vast tracts of former forest are taken over for agribusiness with the help of foreign investment. They grow palms for palm oil, and a species of acacia to feed new wood pulp mills. This is a profitable business, but it means that the forest can't return. There is nothing for the apes in these barren tree factories.

	We benefit, even if we don't realise it. The pulp makes paper, the trees make everything from chipboard to your nice hardwood doors. We can try to shop conscientiously, but that is getting harder to do.

	We live in a global economy now and, increasingly, the apes don't. They are being pushed to the edges, and they're running out of edges. I can't crack a joke about that.

	We made a big fuss over the possibility of microbes on Mars. If orangutans were Martians we'd cherish them, we'd be so amazed at how they're like us but not like us, they'd be invited to tea and cigars at the White House.

	But they're apes, sad in zoos, funny in movies, useful in advertisements and in fantasy books, I'm almost ashamed to say, but at least the Discworld's Librarian has done his bit for the species and caused more than a few bob to flow their way. But the problem, unfortunately, is not money. The problem is lots of money.

	A million years ago the orangutans watched Java Man walk into Indonesia. Perhaps there are only a few years left now before we watch the last orangutans ushered into their domes or cages or enclosed parks to live out their lives in a simulacrum of the real world. They will be ghosts, because an orangutan needs the forest like a fish needs the sea.

	All this for cheap paper and exotic doors.

	Unless, of course, you believe in miracles.

In 1998, the BBC, or at least part of it, asked me if the Discworld had a national anthem.

I said no, but the city of Ankh-Morpork had one. And they said: Would you write it for us?

At that led to the first ever national anthem of a fictional city state being played nationally on BBC Radio 4 on January 15, 1999, as the rousing close to a week of programmes about, yes, national anthems.

Carl Davis was asked to do the music and we had several long phone conversations about how the thing should sound, culminating in him ringing me up from a taxi in New York, I think, and playing a stylophone at me.

It was wonderful. It was exactly what I'd asked for—ponderous, slightly threatening, and full of the joyful pomposity of empire. I think it was the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra that played it, with a wonderful soprano who tackled it cheerfully and made "ner hner ner" sound like something by Wagner.

It was never officially played again, for complicated reasons to do with money and copyright, although I think a version did end up on -ine. Some people are such scallywags ...

 

The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem

	The anthem of the sprawling mercantile city state of Ankh-Morpork was not even written by one of its sons, but by a visitor—the vampire Count Henrik Shline von Überwald (born 1703, died 1782, died again 1784, and also in 1788, 1791, 1802/4/7/8, also 1821, 1830, 1861, staked 1872). He had taken a long holiday to get away from some people who wanted earnestly to talk to him about cutting his head off, and declared himself very impressed at the city's policy of keeping the peace by bribery, financial corruption, and ultimately by making unbeatable offers for the opponents' weapons, most of which had been made in Ankh-Morpork in the first place.

	The anthem, known affectionately as "We can rule you wholesale", is the only one that formally has a second verse consisting mainly of embarrassed mumbling.

	The Count, who visited many countries in the course of his travels, noted that all real patriots can never remember more than one verse of their anthem, and get through the subsequent verses by going "ner hner ner" until they reach an outcrop of words they remember, which they sing very boldly to give the impression that they really had been singing all the other words as well but had been drowned out by the people around them.

	In classical renditions, the singing is normally led by a large soprano wearing a sheet and carrying the flame of something or other and holding a large fork.

-

	When dragons belch and hippos flee
	My thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of thee
	Let others boast of martial dash
	For we have boldly fought with cash
	We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes
	We own all your generals—touch us and you'll lose
	Morporkia! Morporkia!
	Morporkia owns the day!
	We can rule you wholesale
	Touch us and you'll pay

-

	We bankrupt all invaders, we sell them souvenirs
	We ner ner ner ner ner, hner ner hner by the ears
	Er hner we sing ner ner ner ner
	Ner ner her ner ner ner hner the ner
	Er ner ner hner ner, nher hner ner ner
	Ner hner ner, your gleaming swords
	We mortaged to the hilt
	Morporkia! Morporkia!
	Hner ner ner ner ner ner
	We can rule you wholesale
	Credit where it's due.

I'm Dreaming of the Right Christmas ...

[A postprandial speech following "Christmas Dinner" at Beccon '87 ... that is, the pre-awards banquet at the 1987 UK Eastercon.]

It's not very subtle, but I reckoned that ten o'clock at a British convention banquet (where you have ALCOHOL) was not the time for Oscar Wilde. I don't know if I delivered this speech, but I must have said something because I got some laughs.

 

Alien Christmas

	This is a great idea, isn't it? So much nicer to have Christmas at this time of the year instead of at the end of December, when the shops are always so crowded. Reminds me of those clips you used to get in the Queen's Christmas broadcast to the Commonwealth back in the '50s, with the traditional shot of Australians eating chilled prawns, roast turkey, and Christmas pudding on Bondi beach. There was always a Christmas tree planted in the sand. It was decorated with what I now realize was probably vomit.

	Last week I got this fortune cookie sort of printout which said Your Role Is Eater. I thought fantastic, I like role-playing games, I've never been an Eater before, I wonder how many hit points it has?

	And then I saw another printout underneath it which said that at 2200 my role was After Dinner Speaker, which is something you'd expect to find only in the very worst dungeon, a monster lurching around in a white frilly shirt looking for an audience. Three hours later the explorers are found bored rigid, their coffee stone cold, the brick-thick after dinner mint melted in their hands.

	That reminds me why I gave up Dungeons and Dragons. There were too many monsters. Back in the old days you could go around a dungeon without meeting much more than a few ores and lizard men, but then everyone started inventing monsters and pretty soon it was a case of bugger the magic sword, what you really needed to be the complete adventurer was the Marcus L. Rowland fifteen-volume guide to Monsters and the ability to read very, very fast, because if you couldn't recognize them from the outside you pretty soon got the chance to try looking at them from the wrong side of their tonsils.

	Anyway, this bit of paper said I was to talk about Alien Christmases, which was handy, because I always like to know what subject it is I'm straying away from. I'll give it a try; I've been a lot of bad things in my time although, praise the Lord, I've never been a Blake's 7 fan.

	Not that Christmases aren't pretty alien in any case. It's a funny old thing, but whenever you see pictures of Santa Claus he's always got the same toys in his sack. A teddy, a dolly, a trumpet, and a wooden engine. Always. Sometimes he also has a few red and white striped candy canes. Heaven knows why, you never see them in the shops, and if any kid asks for a wooden engine these days it means he lives at the bottom of a hole on a desert island and has never heard of television, because last Christmas my daughter got a lot of toys, a few cars, a plane, stuff like that, and the thing about them was this. Every single one of them was a robot. Not just a simple robot. I know what robots are supposed to look like, I had a robot when I was a kid. You could tell it was a robot, it had two cogwheels going round in its chest and its eyes lit up when you turned its key, and why not, so would yours. And I had a Magic Robot ... well, we all had one, didn't we? And when we got fed up with the smug way he spun around on his mirror getting all the right answers, we cut them out and stuck them down differently for the sheer hell of it, gosh, weren't we devils.

	But these new robots are subversive. They are robots in disguise.

	There's this sort of robot war going on around us. I haven't quite figured it out yet, although the kids seem incredibly well-informed on the subject. It appears that you can tell the good robots from the bad robots because the good robots have got human heads, a bit like that scene in Saturn Three, you remember, where the robot gets the idea that the best way to look human is hack someone's head off and stick it on your antenna. They all look like an American footballer who's been smashed through a Volkswagen.

	They go around saving the universe from another bunch of robots, saving the universe in this case consisting of great laser battles. The universe doesn't look that good by the time they've saved it, but by golly, it's saved.

	Anyway, none of her presents looked like it was supposed to. A collection of plastic rocks turned out to be Rock Lords, with exciting rocky names like Boulder and Nugget. Yes, another bunch of bloody robots.

	In fact the only Christmassy thing in our house was the crib, and I'm not certain that at a touch of a button it wouldn't transform and the Mary and Josephoids would battle it out with the Three Kingons.

	Weirdest of the lot, though, is Kraak, Prince of Darkness. At £14.95 he must be a bargain for a prince of darkness. He's a Zoid, probably from the planet Zoid in the galaxy of Zoid, because while the models are pretty good the storyline behind them is junk, the science fiction equivalent of a McDonald's hamburger. I like old Kraak, though, because it only took the whole of Christmas morning to put him together. He's made of red and grey plastic, an absolute miracle of polystyrene technology, and he looks like a chicken that's been dead for maybe three months. Stuff two batteries up his robot bum and he starts to terrorize the universe as advertised, and he does it like this, what he does is, he walks about nine inches ve-r-ry slowly and painfully, while dozens of little plastic pistons thrash about, and then he falls over.

	Kraak has got the kind of instinct for survival that makes a kamikaze pilot look like the Green Cross Code man. I don't know what the terrain is like up there on Zoid, but he finds it pretty difficult to travel over the average living room carpet. No wonder he terrorizes the universe, it must be pretty frightening, having a thousand tons of war robot collapse on top of you and lie there with its little feet pathetically going round and round. You want to commit suicide in sympathy. Oh, and he's got this other fiendish weapon, his head comes off and rolls under the sofa. Pretty scary, that. We've tested him out with other Zoids, and I'm here to tell you that the technology of robot fighting machines, basically, is trying to fall over in front of your opponent and trip him up. It's a hard job, because the natural instinct of all Zoids is to fall over as soon as you take your hand away.

	But even Kraak has problems compared with a robot that was proudly demonstrated to us by the lad next door. A Transformer, I think it was. It isn't just made of one car or plane, it's a whole fleet of vehicles which, when disaster threatens, assemble themselves into one great big fighting machine. That's the theory, anyway. My bet is that at the moment of truth the bloody thing will have to go into battle half finished because its torso is grounded at Gatwick and its left leg is stuck in a traffic jam outside Luton.

	We recently saw Santa Claus: The Movie. Anyone else seen it? Pretty dreadful, the only laugh is where they apparently let the reindeer snort coke in order to get them to fly. No wonder Rudolph had a red nose, he spends half the time with a straw stuck up it.

	Anyway, you get to see Santas workshop. Just as I thought. Every damn toy is made of wood, painted in garish primary colours. It might have been possible, in fact I suppose it's probably inevitable, that if you pressed the right switch on the rocking horses and jolly wooden dolls they turned into robots, but I doubt it. I looked very carefully over the whole place and there wasn't a single plastic extrusion machine. Not a single elf looked as though he knew which end to hold a soldering iron. None of the really traditional kids' toys were there—no Rambos, no plastic models of the Karate Kid, none of those weird little spelling and writing machines designed to help your child talk like a NASA launch controller with sinus trouble and a mental age of five.

	Now, I've got a theory to account for this. Basically, it is that Father Christmases are planet-specific and we've got the wrong one.

	I suspect it was the atom bomb tests in the early '50s that warped the, you know, the fabric of time and space and that. Secret tests at the North Pole opened up this, you know, sort of hole between the dimensions, and all the stuff made by our Father Christmas is somehow diverted to Zoid or wherever and we get all the stuff he makes, and since he's a robot made out of plastic he only makes the things he's good at.

	The people it's really tough on are the kids on Zoid. They wake up on Christmas morning, unplug themselves from their recharger units, clank to the end of the bed (pausing only to fall over once or twice) playfully zapping one another with their megadeath lasers, look into their portable pedal extremity enclosures, and what do they find? Not the playful, cuddly death-dealing instruments of mayhem that they have been led to expect, but wooden trains, trumpets, rag dolls, and those curly red and white sugar walking sticks that you never see in real life. Toys that don't need batteries. Toys that you don't have to put together. Toys with varnish on instead of plastic. Alien toys.

	And, because of this amazing two-way time warp thingy, our kids get the rest. Weird plastic masters of the universe which are to the imagination what sandpaper is to a tomato. Alien toys. Maybe it's being done on purpose, to turn them all into Zoids. Like the song says—you'd better watch out.

	I don't think it will work, though. I took a look into my daughter's dolls'-house. Old Kraak has been hanging out there since his batteries ran out and his mega-cannons fell off. Mr T. has been there for a couple of years, ever since she found out he could wear Barbie's clothes, and I see that some plastic cat-woman is living in the bathroom.

	I don't know why, but what I saw in there gave me hope. Kraak was having a tea party with a mechanical dog, two Playpeople, and three dolls. He wasn't trying to zap anyone. No matter what Santa Claws throws at us, we can beat him ...

	And now your mummies and daddies are turning up to take you home; be sure to pick up your balloons and Party Loot bags, and remember that Father Christmas will soon be along to give presents to all the good boys and girls who've won awards.

Sometimes you just get an idea for a story title and you have to write it. And Diana Wynne Jones wanted a story for the YA anthology Hidden Turnings, published in 1989 ...

 

Turntables of the Night

	Look, constable, what I don't understand is, surely he wouldn't be into blues? Because that was Wayne's life for you. A blues single. I mean, if people were music, Wayne would be like one of those scratchy old numbers, you know, re-recorded about a hundred times from the original phonograph cylinder or whatever, with some old guy with a name like Deaf Orange Robinson standing knee-deep in the Mississippi and moaning through his nose.

	You'd think he'd be more into Heavy Metal or Meatloaf or someone. But I suppose he's into everyone. Eventually.

	What? Yeah. That's my van, with Hellfire Disco painted on it. Wayne can't drive, you see. He's just not interested in anything like that. I remember when I got my first car and we went on holiday, and I did the driving and, okay, also the repairing, and Wayne worked the radio, trying to keep the pirate stations tuned in. He didn't really care where we went as long as it was on high ground and he could get Caroline or London or whatever. I didn't care where we went so long as we went.

	I was always mote into cars than music. Until now, I think. I don't think I want to drive a car again. I'd keep wondering who'd suddenly turn up in the passenger seat ...

	Sorry. So. Yeah. The disco. Well, the deal was that I supplied the van, we split the cost of the gear, and Wayne supplied the records. It was really my idea. I mean, it seemed a pretty good bet. Wayne lives with his mum but they're down to two rooms now because of his record collection. Lots of people collect records, but I reckon Wayne really wants—wanted—to own every one that was ever made. His idea of a fun outing was going to some old store in some old town and rummaging through the stock and coming out with something by someone with a name like Sid Sputnik and the Spacemen, but the thing was, the funny thing was, you'd get back to his room and he'd go to a shelf and push all the records aside and there'd be this neat brown envelope with the name and date on it and everything—waiting.

	Or he'd get me to drive him all the way to Preston or somewhere to find some guy who's a self-employed plumber now but maybe back in 1961 called himself Ronnie Sequin and made it to number 152 in the charts, just to see if he'd got a spare copy of his one record which was really so naff you couldn't even find it in the specialist stores.

	Wayne was the kind of collector who couldn't bear a hole in his collection. It was almost religious, really. He could out-talk John Peel in any case, but the records he really knew about were the ones he hadn't got. He'd wait years to get some practically demo disc from a punk group who probably died of safety-pin tetanus, but by the time he got his hands on it he'd be able to recite everything down to the name of the cleaning lady who scrubbed out the studio afterwards. Like I said, a collector.

	So I thought, what more do you need to run a disco?

	Well, basically just about everything which Wayne hadn't got—looks, clothes, common sense, some kind of idea about electric wiring, and the ability to rabbit on like a prat. But at the time we didn't look at it like that, so I flogged the Capri and bought the van and got it nearly professionally re-sprayed. You can only see the words Midland Electricity Board on it if you know where to look. I wanted it to look like the van in the "A-Team" except where theirs can jump four cars and still hare off down the road mine has trouble with drain covers.

	Yes, I've talked to the other officer about the tax and insurance and MOT. Sorry, sergeant. Don't worry about it, I won't be driving a car ever again. Never.

	We bought a load of amplifiers and stuff off Ian Curtis over in Wyrecliff because he was getting married and Tracey wanted him at home of a night, bunged some cards in newsagents' windows, and waited.

	Well, people didn't exactly fall over themselves to give us gigs on account of people not really catching on to Wayne's style. You don't have to be a verbal genius to be a jock, people just expect you to say, "Hey!" and "Wow!" and "Get down and boogie" and stuff. It doesn't actually matter if you sound like a pillock, it helps them feel superior. What they don't want, when they're all getting drunk after the wedding or whatever, is for someone to stand there with his eyes flashing worse than the lights saying things like, "There's a rather interesting story attached to this record".

	Funny thing, though, is that after a while we started to get popular in a weird word-of-mouth kind of way. What started it, I reckon, was my sister Beryl's wedding anniversary. She's older than me, you understand. It turned out that Wayne had brought along just about every record ever pressed for about a year before they got married. Not just the top ten, either. The guests were all around the same age and pretty soon the room was so full of nostalgia you could hardly move. Wayne just hot-wired all their ignitions and took them for a joyride down Memory Motorway.

	After that we started getting dates from what you might call the more older types, you know, not exactly kids but bits haven't started falling off yet. We were a sort of speciality disco. At the breaks people would come up to him to chat about this great number they recalled from way back or whenever and it would turn out that Wayne would always have it in the van. If they'd heard of it, he'd have it. Chances are he'd have it even if they hadn't heard of it. Because you could say this about Wayne, he was a true collector—he didn't worry whether the stuff was actually good or not. It just had to exist.

	He didn't put it like that, of course. He'd say there was always something unique about every record. You might think that this is a lot of crap, but here was a man who'd got just about everything ever made over the last forty years and he really believed there was something special about each one. He loved them. He sat up there all through the night, in his room lined with brown envelopes, and played them one by one. Records that had been forgotten even by the people who made them. I'll swear he loved them all.

	Yes, all right. But you've got to know about him to understand what happened next.

	We were booked for this Hallowe'en Dance. You could tell it was Hallowe'en because of all the little bastards running around the streets shouting, "Trickle treat," and threatening you with milk bottles.

	He'd sorted out lots of "Monster Mash" type records. He looked pretty awful, but I didn't think much of it at the time. I mean, he always looked awful. It was his normal look. It came from spending years indoors listening to records, plus he had this bad heart and asthma and everything.

	The dance was at ... okay, you know all that. A Hallowe'en Dance to raise money for a church hall. Wayne said that was a big joke, but he didn't say why. I expect it was some clever reason. He was always good at that sort of thing, you know, knowing little details that other people didn't know; it used to get him hit a lot at school, except when I was around. He was the kind of skinny boy who had his glasses held together with Elastoplast. I don't think I ever saw him raise a finger to anybody, only that time when Greebo Greaves broke a record Wayne had brought to some school disco and four of us had to pull Wayne off him and prise the iron bar out of his fingers and there was the police and an ambulance and everything.

	Anyway.

	I let Wayne set everything up, which was one big mistake but he wanted to do it, and I went and sat down by what they called the bar, i.e., a couple of trestle tables with a cloth on it.

	No, I didn't drink anything. Well, maybe one cup of the punch and that was all fruit juice. All right, two cups.

	But I know what I heard, and I'm absolutely certain about what I saw.

	I think.

	You get the same old bunch at these kind of gigs. There's the organiser, and a few members of the committee, some lads from the village who'd sort of drifted in because there wasn't much on the box except snooker. Everyone wore a mask but hadn't made an effort with the rest of the clothes so it looked as though Frankenstein and Co. had all gone shopping in Marks and Sparks. There were Scouts' posters on the wall and those special kinds of village hall radiators that suck the heat in. It smelled of tennis shoes. Just to sort of set the seal on it as one of the hotspots of the world there was a little mirror ball spinning up the rafters. Half the little mirrors had fallen off.

	All right, maybe three cups. But it had bits of apple floating in it. Nothing serious has bits of apple floating in it.

	Wayne started with a few hot numbers to get them stomping. I'm speaking metaphorically here, you understand. None of this boogie on down stuff, all you could heat was people not being as young as they used to be.

	Now, I've already said Wayne wasn't exactly cut out for the business, and that night—last night—he was worse than usual. He kept mumbling, and staring at the dancers. He mixed the records up. He even scratched one. Accidentally I mean—the only time I've ever seen Wayne really angry, apart from the Greebo business, was when scratch music came in.

	It would have been very bad manners to cut in, so at the first break I went up to him and, let me tell you, he was sweating so much it was dropping on to the mixer.

	"It's that bloke on the floor," he said, "the one in the flares."

	"Methuselah?" I said.

	"Don't muck about. The black silk suit with the rhinestones. He's been doing John Travolta impersonations all night. Come on, you must have noticed. Platform soles. Got a silver medallion as big as a plate. Skull mask. He was over by the door."

	I hadn't seen anyone like that. Well, you'd remember, wouldn't you?

	Wayne's face was frozen with fear. "You must have!"

	"So what, anyway?"

	"He keeps staring at me!"

	I patted his arm. "Impressed by your technique, old son," I said. I took a look around the hall. Most people were milling around the punch now, the rascals. Wayne grabbed my arm. "Don't go away!"

	"I was just going out for some fresh air."

	"Don't ..." He pulled himself together. "Don't go. Hang around. Please."

	"What's up with you?"

	"Please, John! He keeps looking at me in a funny way!" He looked really frightened. I gave in. "Okay. But point him out next time."

	I let him get on with things while I tried to neaten up the towering mess of plugs and adapters that was Wayne's usual contribution to electrical safety. If you've got the kind of gear we've got—okay, had—you can spend hours working on it. I mean, do you know how many different kinds of connectors ... all right.

	In the middle of the next number Wayne hauled me back to the decks.

	"There! See him? Right in the middle!"

	Well, there wasn't. There were a couple of girls dancing with each other, and everyone else were just couples who were trying to pretend the '70s hadn't happened. Any rhinestone cowboys in that lot would have stood out like a strawberry in an Irish stew. I could see that some tact and diplomacy were called for at this point.

	"Wayne," I said, "I reckon you're several coupons short of a toaster."

	"You can't see him, can you?"

	Well, no. But ...

	... since he mentioned it ...

	... I could see the space.

	There was this patch of floor around the middle of the hall which everyone was keeping clear of. Except that they weren't avoiding it, you

	see, they just didn't happen to be moving into it. It was 

	 sort of accidentally there. And it stayed there. It moved around a bit, but it never disappeared.

	All right, I know a patch of floor can't move around. Just take my word for it, this one did.

	The record was ending but Wayne was still in control enough to have another one spinning. He faded it up, a bit of an oldie that they'd all know.

	"Is it still there?" he said, stating down at the deck.

	"It's a bit closer," I said. "Perhaps it's after a spot prize."

	... I wanna live forever ...

	"That's right, be a great help."

	... people will see me and cry ...

	There were quite a few more people down there now, but the empty patch was still moving around, all right, was being avoided, among the dancers.

	I went and stood in it.

	It was cold. It said: GOOD EVENING.

	The voice came from all around me, and everything seemed to slow down. The dancers were just statues in a kind of black fog, the music a low rumble.

	"Where are you?"

	BEHIND YOU.

	Now, at a time like this the impulse is to turn around, but you'd be amazed at how good I was at resisting it.

	"You've been frightening my friend," I said. I DID NOT INTEND TO.

	"Push off."

	THAT DOESN'T WORK, I AM AFRAID.

	I did turn around then. He was about seven feet tall in his, yes, his platform soles. And, yes, he wore flares, but somehow you'd expect that. Wayne had said they were black but that wasn't true. They weren't any colour at all, they were simply clothes-shaped holes into Somewhere Else. Black would have looked blinding white by comparison. He did look a bit like John Travolta from the waist down, but only if you buried John Travolta for about three months.

	It really was a skull mask. You could see the string.

	"Come here often, do you?"

	I AM ALWAYS AROUND.

	"Can't say I've noticed you." And I would have done. You don't meet many seven-foot, seven-stone people every day, especially ones that walked as though they had to think about every muscle movement in advance and acted as though they were alive and dead at the same time, like Cliff Richard.

	YOUR FRIEND HAS AN INTERESTING CHOICE OF MUSIC. "Yes. He's a collector, you know."

	I KNOW. COULD YOU PLEASE INTRODUCE ME TO HIM? "Could I stop you?" I DOUBT IT.

	All right, perhaps four cups. But the lady serving said there was hardly anything in it at all except orange squash and home-made wine, and she looked a dear old soul. Apart from the Wolfman mask, that is.

	But I know all the dancers were standing like statues and the music was just a faint buzz and there were these, all these blue and purple shadows around everything. I mean, drink doesn't do that.

	Wayne wasn't affected. He stood with his mouth open, watching us.

	"Wayne," I said, "this is—"

	A FRIEND.

	"Whose?" I said, and you could tell I didn't take to the person, because his flares were huge and he wore one of those silver identity bracelets on his wrist, the sort you could moor a battleship with, and they look so posey; the fact that his wrist was solid bone wasn't doing anything to help, either. I kept thinking there was a conclusion I, ought to be jumping to, but I couldn't quite get a running start. My head seemed to be full of wool.

	EVERYONE'S, he said, SOONER OR LATER. I UNDERSTAND YOU'RE SOMETHING OF A COLLECTOR.

	"Well, in a small—" said Wayne.

	I GATHER YOU'RE ALMOST AS KEEN AS I AM, WAYNE.

	Wayne's face lit up. That was Wayne, all right. I'll swear if you shot him he'd come alive again if it meant a chance to talk about his hobby, sorry, his lifetime's work.

	"Gosh," he said. "Are you a collector?"

	ABSOLUTELY.

	Wayne peered at him. "We haven't met before, have we?" he said. "I go to most of the collectors' meetings. Were you at the Blenheim Record Fest and Auction?"

	I DON'T RECALL. I GO TO SO MANY THINGS.

	"That was the one where the auctioneer had a heart attack."

	OH. YES. I SEEM TO REMEMBER POPPING IN, JUST FOR A FEW MINUTES.

	"Very few bargains there, I thought."

	OH. I DON'T KNOW. HE WAS ONLY FORTY-THREE.

	All right, inspector. Maybe six drinks. Or maybe it wasn't the drinks at all. But sometimes you get the feeling, don't you, that you can see a little way into the future? Oh, you don't. Well, anyway. I might not have been entirely in my right mind but I was beginning to feel pretty uncomfortable about all this. Well, anyone would. Even you.

	"Wayne," I said. "Stop right now. If you concentrate, he'll go away. Settle down a bit. Please. Take a deep breath. This is all wrong."

	The brick wall on the other side of me paid more attention. I know Wayne when he meets fellow collectors. They have these weekend rallies. You see them in shops. Strange people. But none of them as strange as this one. He was dead strange.

	"Wayne!"

	They both ignored me. And inside my mind bits of my brain were jumping up and down, shouting and pointing, and I couldn't let myself believe what they were saying.

	OH, I'VE GOT THEM ALL, he said, turning back to Wayne, ELVIS PRESLEY, BUDDY HOLLY, JIM MORRISON, JIMI HENDRIX, JOHN LENNON ...

	"Fairly wide spread, musically," said Wayne. "Have you got the complete Beatles?"

	NOT YET.

	And I swear they started to talk records. I remember Mr. Friend saying he'd got the complete seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century composers. Well, he would, wouldn't he?

	I've always had to do Wayne's fighting for him, ever since we were at primary school, and this had gone far enough and I grabbed Mr. Friend's shoulder and went to lay a punch right in the middle of that grinning mask.

	And he raised his hand and I felt my fist hit an invisible wall which yielded like treacle, and he took off his mask and he said two words to me and then he reached across and took Wayne's hand, very gently ...

	And then the power amp exploded because, like I said, Wayne wasn't very good with connectors and the church hall had electrical wiring that dated back practically to 1800 or something, and then what with the decorations catching fire and everyone screaming and rushing about I didn't really know much about anything until they brought me round in the car park with half my hair burned off and the hall going up like a firework.

	No. I don't know why they haven't found him either. Not so much as a tooth?

	No. I don't know where he is. No, I don't think he owed anyone any money.

	(But I think he's got a new job. There's a collector who's got them all—Presley, Hendrix, Lennon, Holly—and he's the only collector who'll ever get a complete collection, anywhere. And Wayne wouldn't pass up a chance like that. Wherever he is now, he's taking them out of their jackets with incredible care and spinning them with love on the turntables of the night ...)

	Sorry. Talking to myself, there.

	I'm just puzzled about one thing. Well, millions of things, actually, but just one thing right at the moment.

	I can't imagine why Mr. Friend bothered to wear a mask.

	Because he looked just the same underneath, idio—officer.

	What did he say? Well, I daresay he comes to everyone in some sort of familiar way. Perhaps he just wanted to give me a hint. He said DRIVE SAFELY.

	No. No, really. I'll walk home, thanks. Yes. I'll mind how I go.

Hmm. When this was first published, US critics said I was being too populist in complaining about the critics' (other critics, that is) attitude to The Lord of the Rings.

Well, they were wrong. Tolkien had many fans in academia, it's true but in the UK at least it was, up until a couple of years ago, quite normal for the London media-rocracy to be dismissive of Tolkien and the "sad people" who read him. Then the movies happened, were very popular, and the carping got very muted indeed.

This was written pre-movie.

 

Cult Classic

	The Lord of the Rings is a cult classic. I know that's true, because I read it in the newspapers, saw it on TV, heard it on the radio.

	We know what cult means. It's a put-down word. It means "inexplicably popular but unworthy." It's a word used by the guardians of the one true flame to dismiss anything that is liked by the wrong kind of people. It also means "small, hermetic, impenetrable to outsiders." It has associations with cool drinks in Jonestown.

	The Lord of the Rings has well over one hundred million readers. How big will it have to be to emerge from cult status? Or, once having been a cult—that is to say, once having borne the mark of Cain—is it actually possible that anything can ever be allowed to become a full-fledged Classic?

	But democracy has been in action over the past few years. A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country's favourite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterward, held this time to find the favourite author, came up with J. R. R. Tolkien.

	The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word "favourite". That's a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for "best". But a critic's chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment on the taste of the British public, who'd been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: "Look, we've been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don't listen! You're not listening now! You're just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can't stop you! We can tell you it's rubbish, it's not relevant, it's the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn't care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!"

	And, once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper's Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called "narrative fiction" among the top fifty "masterworks" of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.

	The Mona Lisa was also in the top fifty masterworks. And I admit to suspecting that she was included by many of the voters out of a sheer cultural knee-jerk reaction, mildly dishonest but well meant. Quick, quick, name of the greatest works of art of the last thousand years! Er ... er ... well, the Mona Lisa, obviously. Fine, fine, and have you seen the Mona Lisa? Did you stand in front of her? Did the smile entrance you, did the eyes follow you around the room and back to your hotel? Er ... no, not as such ... but, uh, well, it's the Mona Lisa, okay? You've. got to include the Mona Lisa. And that guy with the fig leaf, yeah. And that woman with no arms.

	That's honesty, of a sort. It's a vote for the good taste of your fellow citizens and your ancestors as well. Joe Average knows that a vote for a picture of dogs playing poker is probably not, when considered against the background of one thousand years, a very sensible thing to cast.

	But The Lord of the Rings, I suspect, got included when people stopped voting on behalf of their culture and quietly voted for what they liked. We can't all stand in front of one picture and feel it open up new pathways in our brain, but we can—most of us—read a mass-market book.

	I can't remember where I was when JFK was shot, but I can remember exactly where and when I was when I first read J. R. R. Tolkien. It was New Year's Eve, 1961. I was babysitting for friends of my parents while they all went out to a party. I didn't mind. I'd got this three-volume yacht anchor of a book from the library that day. Boys at school had told me about it. It had maps in it, they said. This struck me at the time as a pretty good indicator of quality.

	I'd waited quite a long time for this moment. I was that kind of kid, even then.

	What can I remember? I can remember the vision of beech woods in the Shire; I was a country boy, and the hobbits were walking through a landscape which, give or take the odd housing development, was pretty much the one I'd grown up in. I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly '60s-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.

	I can remember the click of the central heating going off and the room growing colder, but these things were happening on the horizon of my senses and weren't relevant. I can't remember going home with my parents, but I do remember sitting up in bed until 3 a.m., still reading. I don't recall going to sleep. I do remember waking up with the book open on my chest, and finding my place, and going on reading. It took me, oh, about twenty-three hours to get to the end.

	Then I picked up the first book and started again. I spent a long time looking at the runes.

	Already, as I admit this, I can feel the circle of new, anxious but friendly faces around me: "My name is Terry and I used to draw dwarf runes in my school notebooks. It started with, you know, the straight ones, everyone can do them, but then I got in deeper and before I knew it I was doing the curly elf ones with the dots. Wait ... there's worse. Before I'd even heard the word 'fandom' I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen's fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs attacked the rectory ..." But around about then, I suspect, the support group would have thrown me out.

	Enthralled I was. To the library I went back, and spake thusly: "Have you got any more books like these? Maybe with maps in? And runes?"

	The librarian gave me a mildly disapproving look, but I ended up with Beowulf and a volume of Norse sagas. He meant well, but it wasn't the same. It took someone several stanzas just to say who they were.

	But that drew me to the Mythology shelves. The Mythology shelves were next to the Ancient History shelves. What the hell ... it was all guys with helmets, wasn't it? On, on ... maybe there's a magical ring! Or runes!

	The desperate search for the Tolkien effect opened up a new world for me, and it was this one.

	History as it was then taught in British schools was big on kings and acts of Parliament, and was full of dead people. It had a certain strange, mechanistic structure to it. What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was for. We'd "done" the Romans (they came, they saw, they had some baths, they built some roads and left) but my private reading colored in the picture. We hadn't "done" the Greeks. As for the empires of Africa and Asia, did anyone "do" them at all? But hey, look here in this book; these guys don't use runes, it's all pictures of birds and snakes; but, look, they know how to pull a dead king's brains out through his nose ...

	And on I went, getting the best kind of education possible, which is the one that happens while you think you're having fun. Would it have happened anyway? Possibly. We never know where the triggers are. But The Lord of the Rings was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying it, but The Lord of the Rings opened me up to the rest of the library.

	I used to read it once a year, in the spring.

	I've realized that I don't any more, and I wonder why. It's not the dense and sometime ponderous language. It's not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offenses against the current social codes.

	It's simply because I have the movie in my head, and it's been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of the beech woods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don't figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it, more clearly than—I do many of the places I've visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.

	I suppose the journey was a form of escapism. That was a terrible crime at my school. It's a terrible crime in a prison; at least, it's a terrible crime to a jailer. In the early '60s, the word had no positive meanings. But you can escape to as well as from. In my case, the escape was a truly Tolkien experience, as recorded in his Tree and Leaf I started with a book, and that led me to a library, and that led me everywhere.

	Do I still think, as I did then, that Tolkien was the greatest writer in the world? In the strict sense, no. You can think that at thirteen. If you still think it at fifty-three, something has gone wrong with your life. But sometimes things all come together at the right time in the right place—book, author, style, subject, and reader. The moment was magic.

	And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.

	One day I was doing a signing in a London bookshop and next in the queue was a lady in what, back in the '80s, was called a "power suit" despite its laughable lack of titanium armor and proton guns. She handed over a book for signature. I asked her what her name was. She mumbled something. I asked again ... after all, it was a noisy bookshop. There was another mumble, which I could not quite decipher. As I opened my mouth for the third attempt, she said, "It's Galadriel, okay?"

	I said: "Were you by any chance born in a cannabis plantation in Wales?" She smiled, grimly. "It was a camper van in Cornwall," she said, "but you've got the right idea."

	It wasn't Tolkien's fault, but let us remember in fellowship and sympathy all the Bilboes out there.

Oh lord, who keeps track of this stuff? In the UK, once an author has reached a certain level of availability, requests to write something "which will only take a few minutes of your time" sleet in endlessly from newspapers. They're known in the business as "My Favourite Spoon" items, and someone somewhere thinks they are good publicity. But a light-hearted survey to find the nation's favourite word was part of the hype for a large British literary festival a few years ago, and this was mine. *(*I managed to get it on the first page of The Wee Free Men, too. I can't remember what the nation's favourite word turned out to be. It was probably "Beckham.")

 

The Choice Word

	I like the fortuitous onomatopoeia of words for soundless things. Gleam, glint, glitter, glisten ... they all sound exactly as the light would sound if it made a noise. Glint is sharp and quick, it glints, and if an oily surface made a noise it would go glisten. And bliss sounds like a soft meringue melting on a warm plate.

	But I'll plump for:

	SUSURRATION

	... from the Latin susurruss, whisper or rustling, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a hushed noise. But it hints of plots and secrets and people turning to one another in surprise. It's the noise, in fact, made just after the sword is withdrawn from the stone and just before the cheering starts.

Bookcase (W.H.Smith), 17 September 1991.

They wanted about 4-500 words "on fantasy". Imagine the start of this being uttered in the same tone of voice Dr. Elizabeth Allaway uses to the recalcitrant grants committee in the movie Contact.

Besides, it's true.

 

Whose Fantasy Are You?

	You want fantasy? Here's one ... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.

	And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life. In a universe where it's known that whole galaxies can explode, they think there's things like "natural justice" and "destiny". Some of them even believe in democracy ...

	I'm a fantasy writer, and even I find it all a bit hard to believe.

	Me? I write about people who live on the Discworld, a world that's flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle. Readers think the books are funny—I can prove it, I get letters—because in this weird world, people live normal lives. They worry about the sort of things we worry about, like death, taxes, and not falling off. The Discworld is funny because everyone on it believes that they're in real life. (They might be—the last I heard, physicists have discovered all these extra dimensions around the place which we can't see because they're rolled up small; and you don't believe in giant world-carrying turtles?) There are no magic swords or mighty quests. There are just people like us, give or take the odd pointy hat, trying to make sense of it all. Just like us.

	We like to build these little worlds where everything gets sorted out and makes sense and, if possible, the good guys win. No-one would call Agatha Christie a fantasy writer, but look at the books she's most typically associated with—they're about tiny isolated little worlds, usually a country house, or an island, or a train, where a very careful plot is worked out. No mad axeman for Agatha, no unsolved crimes. Hercule Poirot always finds the clues.

	And look at Westerns. The famous Code of the West largely consisted of finding somewhere where you could safely shoot the other guy in the back, but we don't really want to know that. We'd rather believe in Clint Eastwood.

	I would, anyway. Almost all writers are fantasy writers, but some of us are more honest about it than others.

	And everyone reads fantasy ... one way ... or another	

That wonderful, prestigious, and above all influential UK magazine SFX asked me for a signing tour report on Australia. Actually, it's composed from several "real" reports, just like it says. It was published in 1998.

Oh, and the current PR lady in Australia is not fearsome at all, really.

 

No Worries

	Australia had the best de facto national anthem in the world. Even people living in swamps in Brazil knew that if you heard the strains of "Waltzing Matilda" you'd soon be swamped by young men and women with orange complexions and the heaviest knapsacks in the world. So, when Australians actually got the chance to vote in a replacement for "Cod Save The Queen", what did they vote for? "Advance Australia Fair", that's what. Now, true, it's more hygenic than most anthems, singing the praises of sunshine and fresh air rather than, say, bashing other countries, but it does sound so ... worthy. Why didn't "Waltzing Matilda" get chosen? Because it wouldn't have been respectable. Australians care a lot about what other people think.

	I had this conversation with an Aussie on the edge of a swimming pool at Ayers Rock:

	Aussie: "So what do the poms think about us wanting to kick out Queenie, then?" (The "republic v. monarchy" debate was big at the time.) 

	Me: "Doesn't worry us. We've been thinking along the same lines." 

	Aussie: "You don't mind?" 

	Me: "Nope. It's fine by us." 

	Aussie: "So ... you poms don't mind, then ..." 

	Me: "Nope." Aussie: "Oh. Right."

-

	I saw him once or twice again that day, and he was clearly uneasy. He wanted us to mind, so he could say that it was none of our bloody business.

	Because ... well, Australia is still very English, down at bone level. You can see it everywhere, especially in the letters columns of its newspapers. There's the same hair-trigger fear that someone somewhere might be getting more than their fair share, the same low-grade resentments, the same tone of voice ... it's just like being back home. I love the place, and must have been back at least a dozen times.

	I did my first Australian tour in 1990. It was a bit of an eye opener. They talk about UK and Commonwealth rights in the contracts, and the author says "yeah, yeah" and signs—and then you go out there, and there's all these real people. Let's see, what were the highlights on that tour ... oh, yes, going into a bookshop in some tiny place called Toowoomba and finding a huge crowd of people, and on the signing table was a Vegemite sandwich and a cup of Milo, cornerstones of the Australian Experience. One of the others is "a chunder", which I didn't have. Incidentally, an early Australian rival to Marmite was tentatively called Pawill, although the proposed slogan, "If Marmite, Pawill," was never used as far as I know, possibly because of police intervention. I was also pissed on by a koala, because that's what they do. A taxi driver ran after me in the street to give me my change, a thing that's never ever happened anywhere else in the world. And we shifted a lot of books, in this huge continent hitherto known to me as a word in the small print on page 28.

	Since then I've done a tour most years, sometimes linked up with SF cons either in Australia or New Zealand. And after every tour I do The Report, of things we did, things that went wrong (and right), and all the other stuff that might be useful in the future.

	It'd be sort of suicidal to print one. So I looked at all the reports, and tinkered with them ... So this is a compiled account—everything reported happened at various times in various places and in various ways but the details have been fudged to protect the innocent, which is to say, me.

	In The Last Continent I tried to make it clear that the Discworld continent of Fourecks is not, of course, Australia. It's just a bit ... Australian. So this is a report of a tour that never was in some place that doesn't exist. But it all happened, somewhere. I've just moved things around a bit to protect the innocent, which in this case means me.

-

Day 1

	Off on BA009, 10:25 p.m. from Heathrow. Watched Mars Attacks; shame Mars didn't attack earlier, like before this waste of space went into production. Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith were also in the cabin, so there was understandably a genteel air of silent gloom which meant I could get some sleep.

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Day 3

	(Day 2 is confiscated by Customs when you arrive but they give it back to you when you go.)

	Arrived feeling fragile but okay, checked into hotel, slept for six hours, woke up feeling as though every sensory organ in my body had been wrongly wired. A vital piece of equipment on tour is a small torch and a notebook. Every night you're in a new room. It's not just that you don't know where the bathroom is, you don't even remember where the light switch is. Before the jetlag wears off, you don't even know if you're the right person. This is where the notebook comes in handy.

	Up and shower and do some local media and then it's time for a talk and signing.

	This was something originally dreamed up by some fans as a little chat, got bigger at the insistence of the fearsome PR lady who likes my time to be filled edge to edge, and ended up in this big hall with 400 people. Nice bunch. Someone congratulates me on my deadpan delivery. Haven't the heart to say that this is because bits of my body think it's 5:00 a.m.

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Day 4

	Morning doing more media, many of whom I'd met before. One keen guy conducts entire interview with the mike of his recorder plugged into the auxiliary power socket. I didn't like to point this out, because it would be impolite, so when he found out by himself we did the interview again.

	Noon: Small Mainstream Bookshop signing

	A very small shop—250 square feet or so, I'd guess, but with a very mixed and friendly queue that took up more or less the whole 90 minutes allocated. This is one of those shops where the owners seem to know half the customers by name, and probably ring them up to find out how they are if they don't see them for a month. Couldn't fault it. Banana daiquiri supplied, entirely unasked.

	Straight on to: University of Bananabendin, Worralorrasurfa.

	A good crowd that took two hours to get through. Pet wallaby brought along to see me, and a fan presents me with a bag of dried bush tomatoes, of which I'm known to be rather fond. Oh, and here's a banana daiquiri. And someone's holding a baby kangaroo.

	Then a phone interview with a journalist doing a preview piece for the signing a few cities down the line. She's never read a Discworld book, but nervously admits to sharing a home with someone who's read them all. And reads out bits to her.

	On to Small Family Bookshop, for a talk outside in the rather nice back garden. Nibbles and, hey, a banananana dakry. Overhead, possums swoop from tree to tree, unless I mean wombats. Hard to get away from this shop because the owner is one of those lovely people who tries to give you his entire stock to take away, but I make it in the end.

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Day 5

	Damn—the cooling fan in the laptop has stopped working. Ring up local office of Wasabi Computers, who might be able to fix it tomorrow, except that tomorrow we're somewhere else ... It might be a software problem, says the engineer, and there's a fix on their bulletin board, but time is pressing ...

	10:00 a.m.: Bookshop in a Mall, Outinasuburba.

	Nice big queue and I eye the early arrivals carefully, espying a fan I'd met before. Explain problem. He nips off. An hour later he's back, and slips me a disc with the freshly-downloaded fix. I sign all his books. No worries.

	1:00 p.m.: Small Bookshop, Worralorrasurfa.

	Still enough fans around to take the queue to about 75 minutes. As a charity wheeze, they can have their picture taken with me. One lady has made me an entire box of origami turtles. No worries.

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Day 6

	8:10 a.m.: flight to Arthur.

	11:00 a.m.: Interview with Big Radio Journo (said to be 1st division media). I was prepared to dislike the man but in fact we got on pretty well; he avoided the usual dumb questions and we had a decent 20 minutes. Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing to be interviewed by a journalist who's a fan because fan-type questions don't work well on air (they say things like "So ... is Rincewind coming back, then?" and you can hear a hundred thousand people looking at their radios and saying "what the—is he on about?").

	On to Small Yet Seriously Worthy Bookshop, Innasuburb.

	This shop is seriously behind all aspects of Discworld. They sell the Clarecraft models and had even imported the videos. Don't know how many people there were, because everyone was keen and wanted to chat and a bunch of actors in costume from an upcoming production of Wyrd Sisters also turned up. A fun event; every tour should contain at least one. I was allowed to kiss Granny Weatherwax. Few people can say the same. Not without having a very croaky voice, at any rate.

	On to Big Specialist Bookshop.

	Big Forbidden Planet type of queue, heavy with carrier bags. One nice lady had brought a banana daiquiri in an esky. Another one opens the violin case she's carrying and it turns out to contain a polished scythe blade on a black velvet lining.

	Will I sign it so's she can have the name etched on? What would you do, boys and girls?

	Signing overruns, so the tail end of the queue follows me down the road to Big Mainstream Bookshop and tags on to the end of the one already there. Among the people waiting is Ruby, who describes herself as my biggest fan and may well be, and a lady with some books to be signed to her psychiatrist. I sign them, advising her to change her psychiatrist.

	Nip back to the Specialist shop to sign orders, and we spot a young lady fan surreptitiously walking out with the empty lager can that I'd been drinking from earlier. We shall never know why and dare not ask.

	Check into very posh small hotel. There's a letter from the manager, assuring me of his attention at all times.

	Go out with publishers to a fish and chip supper. Ah, but this is Doyles Fish Restaurant, where they serve barramundi and chips, and a barramundi is what a cod becomes if it's been a good cod in this life.

	Back to the hotel, where there's a letter in the room from the deputy manager, assuring me of his attention at all times. I wake up at 2:00 a.m. at the sound of an envelope being pushed under the door. It's from the night manager, assuring me of his attention at all times. I think if you stay in this hotel for more than a fortnight you have to marry one of the staff.

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Day 7

	On to Large Mainstream Shop, Nothersuburb.

	Eighty or ninety people, I guess. One guy turned up as Death and was rewarded with a big poster. At least, I assume it was someone dressed up as Death, but who knows?

	On to New Specialist Bookshop, Yettanothasuburb. Big queue. Lady surreptitiously attempts to bribe me to put her son in a future book. Trouble is, he's called John (or Sam, or Tony ... can't quite remember). Explain that if she changes his name to Sweevil or Chalcedony she might be in with a chance.

	Off to airport for flight to Vulcana ...

	Signing tour hotels are like a box of chocolates—you never know whether you're going to get the nasty hard one that someone else has already sucked. Sometimes you get one lit by forty-watt lightbulbs, sometimes you get a suite where you have to phone reception in the end to find out where the bed is. I'm in luck tonight—this one's got a bath so big you can lie down in it, completely flat.

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Day 8

	Media in the morning, then on to University for big talk in their lecture theatre, organised by the librarian, who is a fan. Make ape-like gestures behind his back while he's doing the introduction, then give him a "Librarians Rule Ook" badge. Sign for queue afterwards, and get hit by a drive-by manuscript dumper. That is, when it's over there's this unexpected brown envelope on the desk, with a note asking me to read it and send my comments to the author. Sigh.

	4:00 p.m.: Small Yet Lovely Specialist Bookshop. The owner knows her stuff, so it's always a pleasure to sign here. Long friendly queue, and there's a bowl of black jellybeans on the signing table; it is impossible to eat only one black jellybean. One lady had travelled more than fourteen hours on a train to get to this signing. Sent her a poster when I got home.

	Rush off to airport for flight to Bugarup. Dinner on the plane is Chicken Congeale. No worries. Well, perhaps one or two.

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Day 9

	Breakfast with a journo, who's really a fan in disguise who has come up with a good way of not having to wait in a queue, some down-the-line interviews, and on to:

	Book signing, Bigmallsomewherea.

	They've really tried, but somewhere someone came up with the idea that fantasy = horror = coffins, and obtained an actual coffin, on wheels, for use as a signing table. This raises a few problems. One of them, of course, is of good taste, but more practical is the fact that coffins are made for lying in or kneeling by, not sitting at, and since this one is on casters it gently slides away as I sign until it's at arm's length. In the end we settle for a dull but practical table and they save the coffin for Anne Rice, who knows how to do this stuff.

	On to:

	Another Big Specialist Bookshop, Citycenta.

	Nice place, this. Been there on every tour. Despite this, loads of people with lots of backlist. And a banana dakry. Oh, and a Goth. Fourecks seems to have a thriving Goth culture, if "thriving" is the right word. I think Goths are fun. It's not a proper signing queue unless you get at least one Goth. In Worralorrasurfa they've got surf Goths.

	Back to the hotel where, hooray, I have a suite with extensive views of the curvature of the earth.

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Day 10

	So's I don't get bored on my day off, there's a set of proofs been sent here from the UK. Read them and make three pages of corrections. Plan is that, since hotel has got a Business Centre, I can use one of their printers and then fax the pages back.

	... except that today the person who knows how their setup works is away. Spend an engrossing hour until I find out that their printer switch box is wired back to front. Oh, and the default printer on the network is not, in fact, the one next to this machine. I find this out when someone rings down and says, "There's some rather odd stuff coming out of the Laserjet in the manager's office. Who is Captain Vimes, mate?"

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Day 11

	Fly to Purdeigh Island.

	Noon: Busy signing at general bookshop; foreign authors don't often come here, so everyone's got everything. And down the length of the island to:

	Evening talk/signing organised by local bookshop in the Country Comfort Hotel. What a lovely name for a hotel. And then a real early night because:

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Day 12

	Up at 4:30 a.m. for flight to Crowtown. Aargh! There'd been a much more sensibly timed flight, which got cancelled. This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

	Crash out for an hour or so at hotel. Today we're going to try four signing sessions with bits of media in between, just so no shop feels hard done by. This means starting signing at a couple of shops a few doors from one another, splitting about two hours of queue between them. Then down to some mall for sushi fast food, which Eckians have really taken to. That's something you don't see in England—ladies who look like your great-grandmother scarfing California roll and sashimi off a fork.

	Then round the corner to a Small Specialist Bookstore, which is another one that makes an effort. They got someone to ride his Harley into the shop on the Soul Music tour, and for the Feet of Clay one they built a 180kg golem in the shop. This guy knows his stuff—he's provided a bucket of ice cubes to combat wrist-ache, too

	6:00 p.m.: Off to a talk organised by one of the morning's shops, which has managed to browbeat enough people to fit a large hall. And more signing. A few MSS dumpers, but one guy has brought in a flask of Wow-wow Sauce, made to the recipe in The Discworld Companion.

	And then off with the shop manager to a meat-pie floater wagon to sample this most famous local delicacy. Forgoing, for reasons of economy, the Gourmet Pie Floater (containing named meat) at $3.60, I opted for the basic variety at $3.30.

	It was piquant. No worries.

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Day 13

	Long flight to Sand City. Got a suite in the hotel, wow. But it's sort of odd. There's this huge room but the furniture is arranged as if it's a small room, so there's the sofa and chairs and table and stuff and then an acre of carpet all around.

	Off to a signing in a mall. People say, hey, you must see a lot of the world on your travels, but what you mainly see is malls. This is a good mall.

	The shop reported a huge crowd when we were on the way, although it was easily dealt with in under 45 minutes, which just goes to show.

	Back to the hotel for an interview. Journo and I take a taxi across the carpet to the distant sofa.

	6:30 p.m.: Talk/signing.

	One of the most enjoyable events of this tour. A full house—about 250 people—and I was fairly relaxed so it felt as if it was going well, and it seemed that everyone had a book/books to be signed.

	On the way home, the captain of the 747 came over the speaker and said, "Good evening, I am your captain, Roger Rogers," and in a cabin full of sweaty business types getting pie-eyed on free booze I was the only one who noticed ...

This was done in 1992 for the After the King anthology, edited by Martin H. Green berg.

The anthology was in honor of J.R.R. Tolkien rather than any attempt to trespass in Middle Earth, but it seemed to me that there was a mood I could aim for. Things change, things pass. You fight a war to change the world, and it changes into a world with no place in it for you, the fighter. Those who fight for the bright future are not always, by nature, well-fitted to live in it. Sawmills oust the spiders from the dark wood, the endless plains are fenced ...

 

Troll Bridge

	The wind blew off the mountains, filling the air with fine ice crystals.

	It was too cold to snow. In weather like this wolves came down into villages, trees in the heart of the forest exploded when they froze.

	In weather like this right-thinking people were indoors, in front of the fire, telling stories about heroes.

	It was an old horse. It was an old rider. The horse looked like a shrink-wrapped toast rack; the man looked as though the only reason he wasn't falling off was because he couldn't muster the energy. Despite the bitterly cold wind, he was wearing nothing but a tiny leather kilt and a dirty bandage on one knee.

	He took the soggy remnant of a cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it out on his hand.

	"Right," he said, "let's do it."

	"That's all very well for you to say," said the horse. "But what if you have one of your dizzy spells? And your back is playing up. How shall I feel, being eaten because your back's played you up at the wrong moment?"

	"It'll never happen," said the man. He lowered himself onto the chilly stones, and blew on his fingers. Then, from the horse's pack, he took a sword with an edge like a badly maintained saw and gave a few half-hearted thrusts at the air.

	"Still got the old knackaroony," he said. He winced, and leaned against a tree.

	"I'll swear this bloody sword gets heavier every day."

	"You ought to pack it in, you know," said the horse. "Call it a day. This sort of thing at your time of life. It's not right." The man rolled his eyes.

	"Blast that damn distress auction. This is what comes of buying something that belonged to a wizard," he said, to the cold world in general. "I looked at your teeth, I looked at your hooves, it never occurred to me to listen."

	"Who did you think was bidding against you?" said the horse.

	Cohen the Barbarian stayed leaning against the tree. He was not sure that he could pull himself upright again.

	"You must have plenty of treasure stashed away," said the horse. "We could go Rimwards. How about it? Nice and warm. Get a nice warm place by a beach somewhere, what do you say?"

	"No treasure," said Cohen. "Spent it all. Drank it all. Gave it all away. Lost it."

	"You should have saved some for your old age."

	"Never thought I'd have an old age."

	"One day you're going to die," said the horse. "It might be today."

	"I know. Why do you think I've come here?"

	The horse turned and looked down towards the gorge. The road here was pitted and cracked. Young trees were pushing up between the stones. The forest crowded in on either side. In a few years, no one would know there'd even been a road here. By the look of it, no one knew now.

	"You've come here to die?"

	"No. But there's something I've always been meaning to do. Ever since I was a lad."

	"Yeah?"

	Cohen tried easing himself upright again. Tendons twanged their red-hot messages down his legs.

	"My dad," he squeaked. He got control again. "My dad," he said, "said to me—" He fought for breath.

	"Son," said the horse, helpfully.

	"What?"

	"Son," said the horse. "No father ever calls his boy 'son' unless he's about to impart wisdom. Well-known fact."

	"It's my reminiscence."

	"Sorry."

	"He said ... Son ... yes, OK ... Son, when you can face down a troll in single combat, then you can do anything."

	The horse blinked at him. Then it turned and looked down, again, through the tree-jostled road to the gloom of the gorge. There was a stone bridge down there.

	A horrible feeling stole over it.

	Its hooves jiggled nervously on the ruined road.

	"Rimwards," it said. "Nice and warm."

	"No."

	"What's the good of killing a troll? What've you got when you've killed a troll?"

	"A dead troll. That's the point. Anyway, I don't have to kill it. Just defeat it. One on one. Mano a ... troll. And if I didn't try my father would turn in his mound."

	"You told me he drove you out of the tribe when you were eleven."

	"Best day's work he ever did. Taught me to stand on other people's feet. Come over here, will you?"

	The horse sidled over. Cohen got a grip on the saddle and heaved himself fully upright.

	"And you're going to fight a troll today," said the horse.

	Cohen fumbled in the saddlebag and pulled out his tobacco pouch. The wind whipped at the shreds as he rolled another skinny cigarette in the cup of his hands.

	"Yeah," he said.

	"And you've come all the way out here to do it."

	"Got to," said Cohen. "When did you last see a bridge with a troll under it? There were hundreds of 'em when I was a lad. Now there's more trolls in the cities than there are in the mountains. Fat as butter, most of 'em. What did we fight all those wars for? Now ... cross that bridge."

-

	It was a lonely bridge across a shallow, white, and treacherous river in a deep valley. The sort of place where you got—

	A grey shape vaulted over the parapet and landed splay-footed in front of the horse. It waved a club.

	"All right," it growled.

	"Oh—" the horse began.

	The troll blinked. Even the cold and cloudy winter skies seriously reduced the conductivity of a troll's silicon brain, and it had taken it this long to realize that the saddle was unoccupied.

	It blinked again, because it could suddenly feel a knife point resting on the back of its neck.

	"Hello," said a voice by its ear.

	The troll swallowed. But very carefully.

	"Look," it said desperately, "it's tradition, OK? A bridge like this, people ort to expect a troll ... 'Ere," it added, as another thought crawled past, " 'ow come I never 'eard you creepin' up on me?"

	"Because I'm good at it," said the old man.

	"That's right," said the horse. "He's crept up on more people than you've had frightened dinners."

	The troll risked a sideways glance.

	"Bloody hell," it whispered. "You think you're Cohen the Barbarian, do you?"

	"What do you think?" said Cohen the Barbarian. "Listen," said the horse, "if he hadn't wrapped sacks round his knees you could have told by the clicking."

	It took the troll some time to work this out. "Oh, wow," it breathed. "On my bridge! Wow!"

	"What?" said Cohen.

	The troll ducked out of his grip and waved its hands frantically. "It's all right! It's all right!" it shouted, as Cohen advanced. "You've got me! You've got me! I'm not arguing! I just want to call the family up, all right? Otherwise no one'll ever believe me. Cohen the Barbarian! On my bridge!"

	Its huge stony chest swelled further. "My bloody brother-in-law's always swanking about his huge bloody wooden bridge, that's all my wife ever talks about. Hah! I'd like to see the look on his face ... oh, no! What can you think of me?"

	"Good question," said Cohen.

	The troll dropped its club and seized one of Cohen's hands.

	"Mica's the name," it said. "You don't know what an honour this is!"

	He leaned over the parapet. "Beryl! Get up here! Bring the kids!"

	He turned back to Cohen, his face glowing with happiness and pride.

	"Beryl's always sayin' we ought to move out, get something better, but I tell her, this bridge has been in our family for generations, there's always been a troll under Death Bridge. It's tradition."

	A huge female troll carrying two babies shuffled up the bank, followed by a tail of smaller trolls. They lined up behind their father, watching Cohen owlishly.

	"This is Beryl," said the troll. His wife glowered at Cohen. "And this—" he propelled forward a scowling smaller edition of himself, clutching a junior version of his club—"is my lad Scree. A real chip off the old block. Going to take on the bridge when I'm gone, ain't you, Scree.

	Look, lad, this is Cohen the Barbarian! What d'you think o' that, eh? On our bridge! We don't just have rich fat soft ole merchants like your uncle Pyrites gets," said the troll, still talking to his son but smirking past him to his wife, "we 'ave proper heroes like they used to in the old clays."

	The troll's wife looked Cohen up and down.

	"Rich, is he?" she said.

	"Rich has got nothing to do with it," said the troll.

	"Are you going to kill our dad?" said Scree suspiciously.

	"Corse he is," said Mica severely. "It's his job. An' then I'll get famed in song an' story. This is Cohen the Barbarian, right, not some bugger from the village with a pitchfork. 'E's a famous hero come all this way to see us, so just you show 'im some respect.

	"Sorry about that, sir," he said to Cohen. "Kids today. You know how it is."

	The horse started to snigger. "Now look—" Cohen began.

	"I remember my dad tellin' me about you when I was a pebble," said Mica. '"E bestrides the world like a clossus, he said."

	There was silence. Cohen wondered what a clossus was, and felt Beryl's stony gaze fixed upon him.

	"He's just a little old man," she said. "He don't look very heroic to me. If he's so good, why ain't he rich?"

	"Now you listen to me—" Mica began.

	"This is what we've been waiting for, is it?" said his wife. "Sitting under a leaky bridge the whole time? Waiting for people that never come? Waiting for little old bandy-legged old men? I should have listened to my mother! You want me to let our son sit under a bridge waiting for some little old man to kill him? That's what being a troll is all about? Well, it ain't happening!"

	"Now you just—"

	"Hah! Pyrites doesn't get little old men! He gets big fat merchants! He's someone. You should have gone in with him when you had the chance!"

	"I'd rather eat worms!"

	"Worms? Hah? Since when could we afford to eat worms?"

	"Can we have a word?" said Cohen.

	He strolled towards the far end of the bridge, swinging his sword from one hand. The troll padded after him.

	Cohen fumbled for his tobacco pouch. He looked up at the troll, and held out the bag.

	"Smoke?" he said.

	"That stuff can kill you," said the troll. "Yes. But not today."

	"Don't you hang about talking to your no-good friends!" bellowed Beryl, from her end of the bridge. "Today's your day for going down to the sawmill! You know Chert said he couldn't go on holding the job open if you weren't taking it seriously!"

	Mica gave Cohen a sorrowful little smirk.

	"She's very supportive," he said.

	"I'm not climbing all the way down to the river to pull you out again!" Beryl roared. "You tell him about the billy goats, Mr. Big Troll!"

	"Billy goats?" said Cohen.

	"I don't know anything about billy goats," said Mica. "She's always going on about billy goats. I have no knowledge whatsoever about billy goats." He winced.

	They watched Beryl usher the young trolls down the bank and into the darkness under the bridge.

	"The thing is," said Cohen, when they were alone, "I wasn't intending to kill you."

	The troll's face fell.

	"You weren't?"

	"Just throw you over the bridge and steal whatever treasure you've got."

	"You were?"

	Cohen patted him on the back. "Besides," he said, "I like to see people with ... good memories. That's what the land needs. Good memories." The troll stood to attention.

	"I try to do my best, sir," it said. "My lad wants to go off to work in the city. I've tole him, there's bin a troll under this bridge for nigh on five hundred years—"

	"So if you just hand over the treasure," said Cohen, "I'll be getting along."

	The troll's face creased in sudden panic. "Treasure? Haven't got any," it said.

	"Oh, come on," said Cohen. "Well-set-up bridge like this?"

	"Yeah, but no one uses this road any more," said Mica. "You're the first one along in months, and that's a fact. Beryl says I ought to have gone in with her brother when they built that new road over his bridge, but," he raised his voice, "I said, there's been trolls under this bridge—"

	"Yeah," said Cohen.

	"The trouble is, the stones keep on falling out," said the troll. "And you'd never believe what those masons charge. Bloody dwarfs. You can't trust 'em." He leaned towards Cohen. "To tell you the truth, I'm having to work three days a week down at my brother-in-law's lumber mill just to make ends meet."

	"I thought your brother-in-law had a bridge?" said Cohen.

	"One of 'em has. But my wife's got brothers like dogs have fleas," said the troll. He looked gloomily into the torrent. "One of 'em's a lumber merchant down in Sour Water, one of 'em runs the bridge, and the big fat one is a merchant over on Bitter Pike. Call that a proper job for a troll?"

	"One of them's in the bridge business, though," said Cohen.

	"Bridge business? Sitting in a box all day charging people a silver piece to walk across? Half the time he ain't even there! He just pays some dwarf to take the money. And he calls himself a troll! You can't tell him from a human till you're right up close!"

	Cohen nodded understandingly.

	"D'you know," said the troll, "I have to go over and have dinner with them every week? All three of 'em? And listen to 'em go on about moving with the times ..."

	He turned a big, sad face to Cohen.

	"What's wrong with being a troll under a bridge?" he said. "I was brought up to be a troll under a bridge. I want young Scree to be a troll under a bridge after I'm gone. What's wrong with that? You've got to have trolls under bridges. Otherwise, what's it all about? What's it all for?"

	They leaned morosely on the parapet, looking down into the white water.

	"You know," said Cohen slowly, "I can remember when a man could ride all the way from here to the Blade Mountains and never see another living thing." He fingered his sword. "At least, not for very long."

	He threw the butt of his cigarette into the water. "It's all farms now. All little farms, run by little people. And fences everywhere. Everywhere you look, farms and fences and little people."

	"She's right, of course," said the troll, continuing some interior conversation. "There's no future in just jumping out from under a bridge."

	"I mean," said Cohen, "I've nothing against farms. Or farmers. You've got to have them. It's just that they used to be a long way off, around the edges. Now this is the edge."

	"Pushed back all the time," said the troll. "Changing all the time. Like my brother-in-law Chert. A lumber mill! A troll running a lumber mill! And you should see the mess he's making of Cutshade Forest!"

	Cohen looked up, surprised.

	"What, the one with the giant spiders in it?"

	"Spiders? There ain't no spiders now. Just stumps."

	"Stumps? Stumps? I used to like that forest. It was ... well, it was darksome. You don't get proper darksome any more. You really knew what terror was, in a forest like that."

	"You want darksome? He's replanting with spruce," said Mica.

	"Spruce!"

	"It's not his idea. He wouldn't know one tree from another. That's all down to Clay. He put him up to it." Cohen felt dizzy. "Who's Clay?"

	"I said I'd got three brothers-in-law, right? He's the merchant. So he said replanting would make the land easier to sell."

	There was a long pause while Cohen digested this.

	Then he said, "You can't sell Cutshade Forest. It doesn't belong to any-one.

	"Yeah. He says that's why you can sell it."

	Cohen brought his fist down on the parapet. A piece of stone detached itself and tumbled down into the gorge. "Sorry," he said.

	"That's all right. Bits fall off all the time, like I said." Cohen turned. "What's happening? I remember all the big old wars. Don't you? You must have fought."

	"I carried a club, yeah."

	"It was supposed to be for a bright new future and law and stuff. That's what people said."

	"Well, I fought because a big troll with a whip told me to," said Mica, cautiously. "But I know what you mean."

	"I mean it wasn't for farms and spruce trees. Was it?"

	Mica hung his head. "And here's me with this apology for a bridge. I feel really bad about it," he said, "you coming all this way and everything—"

	"And there was some king or other," said Cohen, vaguely, looking at the water. "And I think there were some wizards. But there was a king. I'm pretty certain there was a king. Never met him. You know?" He grinned at the troll. "I can't remember his name. Don't think they ever told me his name."

-

	About half an hour later Cohen's horse emerged from the gloomy woods onto a bleak, windswept moorland. It plodded on for a while before saying, "All right ... how much did you give him?"

	"Twelve gold pieces," said Cohen.

	"Why'd you give him twelve gold pieces?"

	"I didn't have more than twelve."

	"You must be mad."

	"When I was just starting out in the barbarian hero business," said Cohen, "every bridge had a troll under it. And you couldn't go through a forest like we've just gone through without a dozen goblins trying to chop your head off." He sighed. "I wonder what happened to 'em all?"

	"You," said the horse.

	"Well, yes. But I always thought there'd be some more. I always thought there'd be some more edges."

	"How old are you?" said the horse. "Dunno."

	"Old enough to know better, then."

	"Yeah. Right." Cohen lit another cigarette and coughed until his eyes watered.

	"Going soft in the head!"

	"Yeah."

	"Giving your last dollar to a troll!"

	"Yeah." Cohen wheezed a stream of smoke at the sunset. "Why?"

	Cohen stared at the sky. The red glow was as cold as the slopes of hell. An icy wind blew across the steppes, whipping at what remained of his hair. "For the sake of the way things should be," he said. "Hah!"

	"For the sake of things that were."

	"Hah!"

	Cohen looked down. He grinned.

	"And for three addresses. One day I'm going to die," he said, "but not, I think, today."

-

	The wind blew off the mountains, filling the air with fine ice crystals. It was too cold to snow. In weather like this wolves came down into villages, trees in the heart of the forest exploded when they froze. Except there were fewer and fewer wolves these days, and less and less forest.

	In weather like this right-thinking people were indoors, in front of the fire.

	Telling stories about heroes.

James Frankel (editor) and Patti Perret (photographer), The Faces of Fantasy (published by Tor in 1996).

 

Faces of Fantasy/On Writing

	Once, when I was learning my trade as a newspaper reporter, I had to interview a famous footballer (famous, at least, in our small town—and by football I of course mean proper English football). The sports editor had given me a list of important questions to ask, all about technique and approach.

	I asked them. The footballer, a man of skilled feet but limited education, did his best for a while to answer them and then said, "Look, it's like this. I get the ball, and I does me best to get it into the goal. I can't tell you how I do it. You clever buggers should be the ones tellin' me how I do it. I just do it."

	Later on, I worked out what he meant. He meant you shouldn't ask the sculptor how he works out which bits of stone aren't statue. You shouldn't ask the man on the tightrope how he keeps his balance. You can ask the writer why he or she writes. But I'm not sure the answer will be any more coherent, although it will contain far more words, and I'll keep mine short.

	All I know is that I've always written the Discworld books for fun, and was lucky enough to come up with a world that is flexible enough to more or less accommodate anything I want to write; I started off by parodying post-Tolkien fantasy and have more or less ended up parodying real life. I don't ever remember sitting down and planning the whole thing. It always seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm having a lot of fun and people keep giving me money. I'm not supposed to say no, am I?

I met folklorist Jacqueline Simson on a signing tour. I didn't know she was a folklorist, but I was asking random people in the queue to quote any magpie rhyme they knew, and she turned out to know lots. (This was a bit of popular research for Carpe Jugulum.) Magpie rhymes, for those who don't know, are simple divinatory rhymes that are, or at least used to be, used by kids. Fortune telling by birds, in fact, without having to look at their entrails. You just had to count the birds, and the entrails went without saying. Typically the rhymes would run, "One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for a birth ..." and presumably all the way up to, "1,347for the phone number of the avian pest controller."

That meeting led to a friendship that might yet end up with a book on the genuine folklore basis of much of Discworld, but, on the way, led to me, in 1999, giving the 18th Katherine Briggs Memorial Lecture to the British Folklore Society.

 

Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories

	I am not a folklorist, but I am a vast consumer of folklore—an end user, if you like. I think about folklore in the same way that a carpenter thinks about trees, although a good carpenter works with the grain of the wood and should endeavour to make a table that will leave the tree glad that it became timber.

	I am an author. I am, by the crude yardstick of sales, an immensely successful one. I'm quite happy with that yardstick. The author's prime task is to be read. The book in question may have many fine qualities, but if it cannot persuade the reader to read past page one they are going to go unnoticed. The story cannot exist in one mind alone. It has to be told.

	In fact, it is truer to say that I am a journalist, by inclination and training. A proper journalist, I may add, who was taught by men who knew their craft and can still recall his shorthand when the need arises. This is in contrast to the other sort, who go straight from university into a column on an upmarket daily, one of those with a little picture of them at the top, where they can primp and posture in their little play street without being knocked down by real life. It sounds like the Victorian era when I talk about it now, but I was an indentured apprentice and I was in there at the death of hot metal and I still think that a Linotype machine is a more amazing creation than a computer.

	I know a number of authors who trained as journalists first. It can mess up your style, we've agreed, but it does give you a tendency to turn in things on time, check your spelling, and remember above all that writing is a collaborative process to which the reader also brings something.

	It is particularly good training for a genre author.

	It's quite hard to explain the difference between a genre author and, well, a normal one, especially if you take the view that there are rather more genres around than serious literary editors would care to admit. But the "collaborative" aspect is prominent; those sitting in the circle of firelight while the story is told are not passive listeners, but believe they have some rights in the story and that the story itself is a window into another world with a quasi-existence of its own. Kill off a popular character or make one behave against what the reader considers is their nature, and you get Letters from Fans. Genre editors often acquire fans, a word deriving from fanaticus, meaning "of or belonging to the temple", although I'm grateful to the Oxford English Dictionary for adding that it refers to a possessor of "excessive and mistaken enthusiasm". There was also a reference in my Latin dictionary to "orgiastic rites". These have not so far been part of my experience, although some younger fans have occasionally persuaded their mothers to send me a slice of their birthday cake.

	I think I write fantasy. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then you might as well stick an orange in its bottom and eat it with green peas.

	Most of my books, some 24 in fact, are set in the largely imaginary world of Discworld. I say largely imaginary because of course it has that slight air of solidarity that mythology brings to an image; the idea that the world goes through space on the back of the turtle, as the Discworld does, is found in many cultures. It is either very old indeed or we just naturally have a turtle-shaped hole in our consciousness. It's most developed in Hindu mythology; I don't recall ever learning about it, it being one of those things you grow up knowing without any apparent source, but it's an image that often appears in books of popular astronomy and I suppose I must have got it from one of them when I was a child.

	Some years ago, when Salman Rushdie was having his bit of trouble with the Ayatollah, a large Indian family turned up at a book signing of mine in Wolverhampton. Did I know, the mother asked, that the world turtle is part of Hindu mythology? Er, yes, I said ... er ... did they mind? They beamed and said no, that was fine, and now would 1 sign their books?

	Most of the action in the books takes place on the surface of the disclike world. Although on the face of it the world is populated by men, dwarfs, trolls, dragons, witches, wizards, and so on, the way they act and interact can be, I hope, curiously familiar to the reader. They tend to act from motives we can understand; they tend to be people we think we may have met. My witches, in particular, tend to act like your granny ... but more about them in a moment. The world is magical, not simply in the sense that people in pointy hats can wave their hands and go "shazoom!" in the real expectation of getting results, but in the way it works.

	For what Discworld is, more than anything else, is ... logical. Relentlessly, solidly logical. The reason it is fantasy is that it is logical about the wrong things, about those parts of human experience where, by tacit agreement, we don't use logic because it doesn't work properly. On Discworld all metaphors are potentially real, all figures of speech have a way of becoming more than words.

	The leading city of Ankh-Morpork, for example, has a special Bureau of Weights and Measures and, as with those in this world, it keeps a number of standard physical units for the purposes of testing and comparison. It's just that they're not the kind of units with which we are familiar ...

	There may be found, for example, the standard blunt stick that many things are better than a poke in the eye with, the pot of pitch against which the blackness of things may be tested, and the actual newt used in the testing for drunkenness.

	Metaphors and similar sloppy language have caused so much trouble in the city's history, though, that a former ruler banned this sort of thing completely and large areas of literature had to be re-written, leading to stuff like, "My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is a large organ that pumps blood around my body".

	Only on Discworld, perhaps, would a group of slightly-drunken toga-clad philosophers actually try to race a tortoise against a hare. When one novice philosopher proposed to his seniors that, logically, an arrow could not actually catch up with and hit a running man (because of course by the time it got to where he is now he would have moved further on, and so on) they told him to start running and picked up their bows. He was in fact proved right, although the hypothesis was amended to add that the arrows would not hit the running man only if the archers had been in the pub since lunchtime.

	The roots of all this started to burrow into the soil when I was given a copy of The Wind in the Willows, at the age of ten. Up until then it had never occurred to me that reading could be anything other than a chore, but I read that book in a day, and I wanted a lot more. In a week or two, I went from a child who barely read anything to a child who would read anything, and was trying to read everything.

	There wasn't a lot of fantasy in my local library. This was in the late '50s, you understand, and I don't think we had a very good '50s in this country. A nasty, drab, furtive decade, it seems to me in retrospect. This is because only one major country is allowed a decent decade at any time. America got the '50s—all those juke boxes, rock 'n' roll, and Cadillacs with fins—and over here we had to fill up the ten years after 1949 with a sort of re-heated '40s. In fact we weren't even allowed any '60s until 1964, when we were allowed to keep them until they were exported to the West Coast of the USA in 1968. To be honest, they only happened to about 250 people in London, in any case. The rest of us read about them, and picked up the pieces.

	I read my way through what the local library did have like a chainsaw. So fast was I reading, in fact, that I read my way into the mythology and folklore section without realising it. George Ewart Evans, Margaret Murray Lady Gregory, J. G. Frazer ... I was travelling too fast to stop, and I piled into the folklore shelves like an out-of-control juggernaut.

	I suspect that for many of us a major chapter opened in our lives when we discovered the pleasures of reading. Of course, there are minor problems. I wasn't the only person I know who ended up with a rather bigger vocabulary of understanding than of speech. For years I thought that a certain humanoid monster was an "ogree"; I mentioned this to a distinguished friend of mine who admitted that, for years, another word for "ghost" was mentally pronounced by him as "perhantom".

	Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was a major discovery. I still have the second-hand copy I bought in a local bookshop for 10/6d; I may have been the only twelve-year-old to read through it, end to end, for the dark pleasure of realising that the world is a fascinating and complicated place. Even now, when I have been able to afford one of life's true pleasures—bookshelves high enough to require a library stool—and have been asked to write the preface to the Brewer's Millennium Edition, it is still the first and last resort in matters of a mythical nature.

	So for years my regular reading of folklore went hand in hand with a taste for science fiction and fantasy and, I have to say, outlived them. I was very fortunate. Perhaps one of the librarians had a particular interest in folklore. There seemed to be a lot. The Opies, of course, and a whole lot of those rather trite, tourist-orientated folklore books, but The White Goddess was there, too, and I particularly remember being impressed by Dermot Mac Manus' The Middle Kingdom, which headed straight for my sub-conscious and stayed there.

	There was no pattern to this. I just chose the books that looked interesting. I tended towards folklore rather than mythology, because gods seemed rather dull and stupid, and in any case mythology just seemed to be the folklore of the winners.

	What was going on, I now realise, was the stealthy laying down of the coal measures I was subsequently to mine as a professional author. I can't remember where I first heard of the Dunmow Flitch, or the King of the Bean, or the Horseman's Word, or the Hunting of the Wren ... in a sense, I've never not known them.

	I can remember my father telling me about the treacle mines at Bisham, near Marlow, when I was about eight. I used to watch closely from the back of the car when we passed through the village, in case I saw the treacle lorries. I recall considering the matter in much the same way as small children think about Father Christmas and we think about world peace—the deep suspicion that it can't possibly be real is almost overwhelmed by a fervent hope that it might be true.

	By the logic of Discworld, incidentally, treacle mines seem quite reasonable. We know that if time and geology crush a herd of dead dinosaurs, you get oil. If you flatten a swamp, you get coal. So, if an inundation sweeps across a vast field of primitive sugar cane, you surely end up with a rich underground reserve of, yes, treacle. In some areas this would solidify and subsequently be mined as pig treacle, or hokey-pokey, great sticky seams in the rock, but your real prospector would surely comb the wilderness for signs of the true liquid gold. A pretty good one would be an area where the animals no longer have any teeth, of course.

	Probably the one aspect of the series that truly capitalises on all that reading is the kingdom of Lancre, which I suspect is a somewhat idealised version of the little fold in the Chiltern Hills where I grew up, stirred in with the western area of the Mendips where I spent a great deal of my adult life in a cottage which had previously belonged to Violet Alford's brother. It was there that I once heard an old man in a cider house refer to a fox as Reynard, quite unselfconsciously. There I wandered around the fields looking for the Wimblestone, which comes alive at night, and once I heard the ghost of the horse which used to be tethered outside the back door. Well, it was 3 a.m., there was the sound of a horse outside, I knew about the ghost, and I wasn't about to spoil a good story by checking. I am a journalist, after all.

	Lancre is, as it were, solid folklore. It is a constitutional monarchy, and its largely peasant population are loyalists to a man. People often misunderstand that word, but it means that while they perceive their duty to be loyal to the monarch, they also clearly perceive it as his duty to be loyal to them. In short, they won't be druv.

	The true power in the kingdom, however, lies with the witches, of which three or four feature in some of the books. Magic on Discworld lies, as I said, mostly in the nature of the environment; the witches use broomsticks, certainly, but mostly their power is derived from a zest for life, a clear-headed grasp of psychology, a gift for natural medicine, and an absolute refusal to be overawed by any situation.

	Right from the start my main three fell into a natural trio—young Magrat, kind, well-meaning, and wet; Nanny Ogg, plump, motherly, and experienced (as she says, she's had a lot of husbands, and three of them were her own), and Granny Weatherwax, crabby, sharp, and proud. I am quite proud of Granny, who was cut out by nature to be a powerfully bad witch and is simply too proud to be one and generates from this internal conflict a sort of creative anger.

	The land they live in is folklore made solid. There are caves underneath which, of course, go everywhere. There is an earthwork known as the Long Man, whose general configuration can best be left to the imagination.

	There are several stone circles, one of which is of course a gateway to another world. There is even a famous lone standing stone. It is more accurately a stone circle consisting of one stone which, in obedience to the general superstition in these matters, cannot be counted. When it feels that someone is looking at it in a calculating way, it hides in the peat bog.

	In odd corners of Lancre can be found the original "place where the sun does not shine", a deep hollow in the ground from which occasionally emerged a variety of things, all of which have, of course, been put where the sun does not shine.

	I did not, to be frank, have to work hard at this. It was like picking apples from a low tree. Twenty years of assiduous reading just overflowed. Long before "horse whispering" become widely publicised because a rather narcissistic actor thought he'd like to star in a film, I found the following unfolding in the early pages of the Discworld book Witches Abroad, dealing with one minor character who was a blacksmith:

-

	To his glowing forge were brought the stud stallions, the red-eyed and foam-flecked kings of the horse nation, beasts with hooves like soup-plates who had kicked lesser men through walls. But Jason Ogg knew the secret of the mystic Horseman's Word, and he would go alone into the forge, politely shut the door, and lead the creature out again after half an hour, newly-shod and strangely docile.

-

	Jason Ogg is also, incidentally, the leader of the Lancre Morris Men, up in the mountains where Morris dancing is a dangerous sport. I've always had the true Englishman's genetic distrust of Morris Dancers, being especially wary in any pubs with an invitingly large car park around early May, and I was a little surprised to find myself beginning the book Reaper Man like this:

-

	The 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, backwards and forwards, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping. People come and watch. There's an ox roast afterwards, 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.

-

	The book closes, after various adventures among the living and the dead, with the following:

-

	In the village in the Ramtops where they understand what the Morris dance is all about, they dance it just once, at dawn, on the first day of spring They don't dance it after that, all through the summer. After all, what would be the point? What use would it be?

	But on a certain day when the nights are drawing in, the dancers leave work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley among the leafless trees. They don't speak. There is no music. It's very hard to imagine what kind there could be.

	The bells don't ring. They're made of octiron, a magic metal. But they're not, accurately, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.

	And in the cold afternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of the balance of things.

	You've got to dance both, they say. Otherwise you can't dance either.

-

	I was surprised—perhaps I shouldn't have been—to be contacted after that by various Morris sides who, after reading the book, had tried dancing the Dark Morris in November, wearing black. One gentleman said it was a very strange and chilling experience which he would not willingly repeat. As a result of the book there is now a traditional Lancre Stick and Bucket Dance competition at a south of England folk festival. It's traditional in a way that modern folklorists will readily comprehend; it's been done once before.

	Perhaps the most enjoyable character to write for is Nanny Ogg, the aforementioned second witch. She's a character who had become so very clear in my mind that I think I may have met her. She's dumpy, totally without shame, manipulative, and has got one of those minds that can see the punchline of a dirty joke long before anyone else and greets it with a laugh you could scare werewolves with. And yet she's also, in a strange way, a highly moral person; it's just that she doesn't confuse morality with strait-laced cowardice and want of adventure. She has an idiosyncratic grasp of language, because it's the way my granny often used to talk, and yours too, I suspect: "If you go to other people's funerals they'll be sure to come to yours", and "a double-entendre can only mean one thing."

	With some assistance, I have tried to bring her to life in a sort of fantasy diary of a country lady, called Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, and the first two sentences do, I think, give a flavour of her character:

-

	Not a day goes past but I'm glad I was born in Lancre. I know every inch of the place and every one of the people, an I look out over its mountains, hills, woods, and valleys and I think, "That young couple have been in that spinney rather a long time, I shall have to have a word with her mam."

-

	And I was very grateful to my leading when it came time for Nanny Ogg to write a section on Etiquette with Witches. Nanny Ogg does, as it were, make a good living out of other people's understanding of folklore.

	She does not prey on the gullible; she conspires at their understanding of how a well-ordered world should work:

-

	This is really quite straightforward. Witches are very lucky people to know, especially happy witches. When you meet a small dumpy witch, it is good luck to offer her a drink.

	If you happen to be baking and a witch comes calling—and it's amazin'ly occult, the way a witch turns up when you happen to be baking—it's good luck to give her a few scones, a bun or two, or maybe a whole cake to take away.

	If you want a cow who milks well, it's good luck to have some of the milk sent round reg'lar to the local witch. It's amazin' how rare it is for that kind of cow to give trouble.

	When you are brewing, a good beer will keep well if a jug or two is dispatched to the local witch. She will be too polite to refuse.

	Beware of bad luck caused by throwing away old clothes, which may be used by occult forces to put an evil 'fluence on you. Have 'em sent around to the local witch for disposal, especially if there's any decent lace or fine linen with a bit of wear left in it (you wouldn't believe the trouble occult forces can cause with that kind of stuff, it's amazing. It's no trouble.

	At Hogswatch, the keepin' qualities of your bacon and ham can be improved no end by sending a moderate portion around to the local witch. She will accept this modest burden.

	Witches are always helpful if approached properly, and never ask for anything in return.

	Incidentally, always remember that a proper witch has a string bag somewhere about her person, so any object you ask her to take away won't be too big.

-

	But perhaps I had most fun with the little piece I wrote as an accompaniment to the Map of Lancre. Oh yes, one exists, and it is a beautifully illustrated thing. Almost unbidden, Nanny Ogg started to write a few notes on the local folklore, which of course resembles nothing that has ever happened in the teal world:

-

	A lady from the Ankh-Morpork Folk Dance and Song Society come up here one summer and come to see me about what old folk customs and fertility rituals and similar that we might have in Lancre. Well there's only one fertility ritual that I knows of and that's the one that comes nat'raly but she says, no, there's got to be loads of folk stuff hanging on because I am writin' a book and I will give you this handsome silver dollar, my good woman.

	Well of course a dollar is not to be sneezed up so next morning I was able to give her as much folklore as she could carry away. Of course I din't tell her much of the real stuff like the Dark Morris 'cos she wouldn't get it right, and anyways the Obbyoss ain't been seen for years although sometimes the hunters say they hears it afar off in the woods, but all the same it's amazing what you can remember after a couple of pints, such as:

-

The Lancre Oozer

	The Oozer, attended by people dressed up as his Squeasers, dances from house to house in every village on Old Hogswatch Eve until people gives them money to go somewhere else. It is said that any maiden kissed by the Oozer is sure to be pregnant before the year is out but this is an odds-on bet in these parts anyway.

-

The Slice Mummers Play

	This is performed on the first Saturday after Marling Day, when the characters of Old Hogfather, Death, Merry Hood, and the White Knight perform an age old ritual tellin' of the death and resurrection of really bad acting. This is the high spot of the Slice Fair and Revels. There is not a lot to do in Slice. Well, not that isn't mostly banned everywhere else.

-

The Scouring of the Long Man

	This takes place about every twenty years in early May, when the men and the married women go up to the Long Man and cut away all the bracken and seedlings what have grown up since the last Scouring. Unmarried girls ain't allowed to join in but it's amazin what a good view you can get from up a tree and if you ain't got brothers you can get an education right there and then which will prevent surprises later in life. Someone who knows about this stuff said the Long Man is just some old burial mounds, and I ain't arguing, har har.

	When it's decently dark there's a pig roast and a sing song and then people wander off and make their own entertainment.

-

The Lancre Seven-year Flitch

	This is an old custom datin' back to one Miscegenation Carter, who left some money in his will to set it up to provide a flitch of bacon for the deservin' poor. It is held every five years. It is open to any man who has been married for more than seven years to appear before the Flitch Court, which consists of six old married couples, an swear that in that time he has never had a cross word with his wife or regretted bein' married. If he does, he is then beaten near senseless with the flitch for lying, but brought round with strong drink and the rest of the day is a fair. So far no man has ever convinced the Court an the flitch is still the original one which is hard as oak now.

	That is about all I can recall for one dollar.

-

	I did not study folklore any more than a butterfly studies flowers. I certainly wasn't in any sense scholarly. But as a young writer—and a journalist, because journalists certainly think in terms of "story shapes", as a useful means of compressing the complexities of a planning row or a crime in two hundred and fifty words—I started noticing patterns and similarities. A theory that arose in my mind as a result of my reading, and later my writing, was that of narrative causality—the idea that there are "story shapes" into which human history, both large scale and at the personal level, attempts to fit. At least, a novelist would put it that way; it's probably more sensible to say that we ourselves for some reason have the story shapes in our mind, and attempt to fit the facts of history into them, like Cinderella's slipper—a case in point, in fact, since for generations we have been happy to accept the idea that the servants went out into what appears to be quite a large city to find a girl whose foot would fit, and as Nanny Ogg points out: "How many size seven narrow fit are there in one city? Seems a bit suspicious they go straight to the right house. "As a witch, of course, she is immune from stories—witches make stories for other people. And we like things in our stories that fit. We may have begun as homo sapiens but we have become homo narrans—story-making man.

	I can hardly claim ownership of narrative causality, apart from the name, because it seems to me to be a statement of the obvious. In any case, in Discworld, it is such a wonderful tool for the writer. This is how I set it out in Witches Abroad:

-

	Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling ... stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

	And their existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

-

	This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

-

	This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

	So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

	It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which had so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.

-

	Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.

-

	I arrived here tonight by way of a bookshop signing in Worthing a couple of years ago, when I was taking the opportunity to ask readers in the queue what magpie rhymes they knew. This was by way of being a reality check. An author who is in the habit of idly referring to things that everyone knows, had better make sure of what everyone actually does know. I was a little depressed to find that the only one most of them knew, if they knew one at all, was the one from the children's programme "Magpie"—"One for Sorrow, Two for Joy ..." etc., which I've always thought a little insipid compared to the one I recall learning when I was a kid, "One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth, Three for a Funeral, Four for a Birth ..." Funeral and birth in consecutive lines—there's something pleasantly chilly about that.

	And it turned out that Jacqueline was in the queue, and by the time I got home from that week's leg of the tour quite a few pages had come off my fax machine. And then, without quite knowing how, I was down to do this talk.

	I'll finish by adding that the reality checks I do undertake often leave me depressed at how much has been forgotten ...

	A year or two ago, on a signing tour, the car happened to pass a sign to Great Dunmow. I mentioned the Flitch to the other occupants, all intelligent, apparently well-educated people, and they'd never heard of it. I found this actually difficult to take in. I'd just assumed it was part of what I think of as "white knowledge", things that you never actually learn but which get insinuated into your brain by some kind of semi-genetic process. But my mail sometimes make me feel that I'm on a different planet, which I am to some extent, but I pride myself of having a strong attachment to this one.

	I recall one email from someone in their late teens asking: "how did you come up with the idea of three witches and making one a crabby old lady, one a motherly type, and one very young and silly?" and I thought: How do I begin to explain? Maybe I should send him a reading list? I run across practising pagans who haven't heard of Graves' The White Goddess, and young adults who, although having apparently had some kind of religious instruction at their school, don't know the connotations of the name Methuselah (well, one did—he thought it was a type of champagne bottle, which is strictly speaking correct). People write to me saying: How did you get the idea for this? And this? And I say—it's really true, that really happened, people used to believe this, this really was an old custom. It's terribly tempting to say: Yes, I made it up. But given what human beings have done, practised, and believed in the last ten thousand years, it's quite hard to make up anything new and it's a shame to see the old stuff lost, since I doubt that a great deal of it is now electronic. If the signposts I can give can get a few people reading real books, and getting a feel for the depth of their society, then I think I'll have done my job.

Given the title of the anthology in which this was to appear, I tried to write this as though I was thirteen years old, with that earnest brand of serious amateurishness. This is possibly not a long way from how I write at the best of times ...

 

The Secret Book of the Dead

They don't teach you the facts of death, 
Your Mum and Dad. They give you pets. 
We had a dog which went astray. 
Got laminated to the motorway. 
I cried. We had to post him to the vet's.

You have to work it out yourself,
This dying thing. Death's always due.
A goldfish swimming on a stall,
Two weeks later: cotton wool,
And sent to meet its Maker down the loo.

The bottom of our garden's like a morg-you
My Dad said. I don't know why
Our tortoise, being in the know
Buried himself three years ago.

This is where the puppies come to die.
Puss has gone to be a better cat
My Dad said. It wasn't fair.
I think my father's going bats
Jesus didn't come for cats
I went and looked. Most of it's still there.

They don't teach you the facts of death,
Your Mum and Dad. It's really sad.
Pets, I've found, aren't built to last;
One Christmas present, next Christmas past.
We go on buying them. We must be mad.

They die of flu and die of bus, 
Die of hardpad, die of scabies, 
Foreign ones can die of rabies, 
But usually they die of us.

When the third Harry Potter book came out, the Sunday Times asked me to address the subject of why the British seem to be so keen to write fantasy. I think the full brief was: "We need it by Thursday". When it was printed, as "Fantasy Kingdom", it turned out that some editor had kindly assumed that "numinous" was a mistyping of "luminous" and had changed it. Sigh.

 

Magic Kingdoms

	I remember a back garden I used to see from the train. It was a very small garden for a very small house, and it was sandwiched between the thundering railway line, a billboard, and a near-derelict factory.

	I don't know what a Frenchman or an Italian would have made of it. A terrace, probably, with a few potted plants and some trellis to conceal the worst of post-industrial squalor. But this was an Englishman's garden, so he'd set out to grow, if not Jerusalem, then at least Jerusalem artichokes. There was a rockery, made of carefully placed concrete lumps (the concrete lump rockery is a great British contribution to horticulture, and I hope one is preserved in some outdoor museum somewhere). There was a pond; the fish probably had to get out to turn around. There were roses. There was a tiny greenhouse made of old window frames nailed together (another great British invention). Never was an area so thoroughly gardened, in fact, as that patch of cat-infested soil.

	No attempt had been made to screen off the dark satanic mills, unless the runner beans counted. To the gardener, in the garden, they did not exist. They were in another world.

	The British have a talent for creating imaginary worlds, and there's no doubt that we are major exporters. Joanne Rowling is currently leading the drive. She couldn't be selling more books if her young wizard Harry Potter was Hannibal Lecter's godson. Why are we so at home with fantasy?

	Well, it's in the air ... almost literally. The early Christian Church helped things along by deliberately refraining from stamping on the pagan religions of the time. Instead, some of their festivals and customs were given a Christian veneer. No doubt this saved a lot of trouble at the time. It also preserved them, which wasn't the intention. Since then we have been great accumulators of invaders' gods, creating a magpie mythology that grabbed hold of anything that shone nicely. Some of the pieces came together to form the Matter of Britain, the Arthurian legend spun out of other legends to become the great British story. It's built into the landscape, from one end of the country to the other. Every hill is Arthur's Throne, every cavern is Merlin's Cave.

	Stories beget stories. I've always suspected that Robin Hood was just another robber, but he did have the advantage of a very powerful weapon. It was not the longbow. It was the voice of Alan a Dale, the minstrel. Weaponry will only keep you alive, but a good ballad can make you immortal.

	Then this rich rural tradition was locked up in the mills of the early Industrial Revolution, which pressure-cooked it.

	Of course there had always been fantasy. It's the Ur-literature from which all the others sprang, and it developed in the cave right alongside religion. They grew from the same root: if we draw the right pictures and find the right words, we can steer the world, ensure the success of the hunt, keep ourselves safe from the thunder, negotiate with Death. A phrase sometimes linked with fantasy is "tales of gods and heroes", and the two go together. The first heroes were the ones who defied or tricked or robbed the gods, for the good of the tribe, and came back to tell the story.

	But it was in the last century that fantasy took on an additional role as a means of escape, away out of the perceived grimness of the industrialising world. Out of the same pot, I've always felt, came the English obsession with gardens, with the making of little private plots that could become, for an hour or so, the whole world.

	Some vitriol was printed a couple of years ago when The Lord of the Rings was voted the best book of the century in a poll of Waterstone's readers. Certain critics felt that the public were being jolly ungrateful after all they had done for them, the beasts. It didn't matter. The book is beyond their control. They might as well have been throwing bricks at a mountain; it doesn't cause any damage and it makes the mountain slightly higher. The book is now a classic, and real classics aren't created by diktat.

	J. R. R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it's big and up close. Sometimes it's a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it's not there at all, which means either that the artist has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

	Fantasy worlds have a huge attraction. There are rules built in. The appeal is simple and beguiling in the complex world of the 20th century. Evil has a map reference and a remedy—the finding of a sword, the returning of a Grail, the destruction of a ring. The way will be tough but at least it has a signpost. If the Good exhibit enough goodness, moral fibre, and bravery they will win through, although at some cost. And for a span they'll live happily ever after ... until they have to do it again.

	And yet ... The Lord of the Rings, while English to the bone, was not a typical British fantasy book. It was not part of the mainstream, even though it is now a river in its own right and has spawned numerous tributaries and has come to define "fantasy" for many people.

	It was unusual because it started and finished in a world which is like ours but which isn't ours, a world with different rules and created with meticulous attention to detail and, above all, a world that you cannot get to from here. There is no magic door to Middle Earth apart from the covers of the book. There is no entry by magic carpet, wardrobe, dream, or swan-drawn chariot. It is a separate creation.

	Since and because of Tolkien there have been more fantasy universes that you can shake a curiously-engraved sword at, but the British have traditionally desired their fantasy world to be a lot closer to home. We like them to be about as close as the other side of a door or the back of a mirror or even to be in here with us, numinous, unseen until you learn the gift. And this has been accompanied by an urge towards a sort of domesticity, an attempt to make gardens in the goblin-haunted wilderness, to make fantasy do something ... to, in fact, bring it down to Earth.

	In the Poetics, Aristotle said that poetical metaphor and language involve the careful admixture of the ordinary and the strange. G. K. Chesterton said that far more grotesque and wonderful than any wild fantastical thing was anything that was everyday and unregarded, if seen unexpectedly from a new direction. That is our tradition, and it has largely been kept alive by people writing for children.

	Tolkien's great achievement was to reclaim fantasy as a genre that could be published for and read by adults. Traditionally, we had left the journey to the kids, who rather enjoyed it and found it easy. Adults got involved only to the extent that some teachers carefully picked up any "escapist rubbish" the child was currently reading and dropped it in the bin. There are still, even now, some of those around—I believe a special circle of Hell is reserved for them. Of course fantasy is escapist. Most stories are. So what? Teachers are not meant to be jailers.

	Escapism isn't good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested. The fantasy books led me on to mythology, the mythology led painlessly to ancient history ... and I quietly got an education, courtesy of the public library.

	For me, E. Nesbit's young heroes flew magic carpets, travelled in time and talked to magical creatures, but they were still Edwardian children. C. S. Lewis' children certainly lived Here but went through a magical door to get There. Magic doors are a huge part of the tradition. An enduring image, that symbolises teal fantasy far more than any amount of dragons and witches, is an early scene in Terry Gilliam's movie Time Bandits, where a mounted knight in full armour gallops out of the wardrobe of the ordinary room of an ordinary boy.

	John Masefield's Kay Harker, in The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, did not even need a door just the vision to see the magical world intersecting with this one and the characters that lived with one foot in each. Writers like Diana Wynne Jones and Alan Garner let their characters wander in and out of a similar magical world—this world, seen from Chesterton's different view point.

	The best fantasy writers don't write fantasy in the fluffy, hocus-pocus sense, they change the rules by which the world works and then write very carefully and logically by those rules. And it's no longer enough that there should be wizards and goblins and magic. We know about that stuff. Now we want to know how the wizards are dealing with the challenge of genetically-modified dragons, and what the dwarfs are doing to stamp out racial harassment of gnomes. We're back to Chesterton again. Maybe a good way of understanding this world is to view it from another one.

	Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter is firmly in this tradition. In truth, the stories do not contain a lot of elements new to anyone keeping up with modern fantasy writing for children. Young wizards and witches have been to school before. But that really does not matter. Genres work like that; if they didn't, there would only ever be one book with a Time Machine in it. Most crime novels are full of policemen, crimes, and criminals, and most cakes contain pretty much the same sort of ingredients. It's the cookery that counts. Cook it right, with imagination and flair and a good pinch of luck, and you have that rare and valuable thing—a genre book that's risen above the genre. And Harry Potter is beautifully cooked.

There's a lot more of this deep on a hard drive somewhere. It may yet become a novel, but it started as a short story in Camelot, edited by Jane Yolen, in 1995. I'd wanted to write it for nearly ten years. I really ought to dig out those old discs again ...

 

	... when matins were done the congregation filed out to the yard. They were confronted by a marble block into which had been thrust a beautiful sword. The block was four feet square, and the sword passed through a steel anvil which had been struck in the stone, and which projected a foot from it. The anvil had been inscribed with letters of gold: 

Whoso Pulleth Oute this Swerd
Of this Stone and Anvyld
is Rightwys Kynge
Borne of all Brytaygne.

from Le Morte d' Arthur 
by Sir Thomas Malory

 

Once and Future

	The copper wire. It was the copper wire that gave me the trouble.

	It's all down to copper wire. The old alchemists used to search for gold. If only they'd known what a man and a girl can do with copper wire ...

	And a tide mill. And a couple of hefty bars of soft iron.

	And here I am now, with this ridiculous staff in one hand and the switch under my foot, waiting.

	I wish they wouldn't call me Merlin. It's Mervin. There was a Merlin, I've found out. A mad old guy who lived in Wales and died years ago. But there were legends about him, and they're being welded onto me now. I reckon that happens all the time. Half the famous heroes of history are really lots of local guys all rolled into one by the ballad singers. Remember Robin Hood? Technically I suppose I can't, because none of the rascals

	who went under that name will be born for several centuries yet, if he even is due to exist in this universe, so using the word remember is probably the wrong, you know, grammar. Can you remember something that hasn't happened yet? I can. Nearly everything I can remember hasn't happened yet, but that's how it goes in the time travel business. Gone today and here tomorrow ...

	Oh, here comes another one of them. A strapping lad. Legs like four beer kegs stacked in pairs, shoulders like an ox. Brain like an ox, too, I shouldn't wonder. Hand like a bunch of bananas, gripping the sword ...

	Oh, no, my lad. You're not the one. Grit your teeth all you like. You're not the one.

	There he goes. His arm'll be aching for days.

	You know, I suppose I'd better tell you about this place.

	About this time.

	Whenever it is ...

	I had special training for time travelling. The big problem, the big problem, is finding out when you are. Basically, when you step out of a time machine you can't rely on seeing a little sign that says, "Welcome to 500 AD, Gateway to the Dark Ages, pop. 10 million and falling." Sometimes you can't even rely on finding anyone in a day's march who does know what year it is, or what king is on the throne, or what a king is. So you learn to look at things like church architecture, the way the fields are farmed, the shape of the ploughshares, that sort of thing.

	Yeah, I know, you've seen films where there's this dinky little alphanumeric display that tells you exactly where you are ...

	Forget it. It's all dead reckoning in this game. Real primitive stuff. You start out by checking the constellations with a little gadget, because they tell me all the stars are moving around all the time and you can get a very rough idea of when you are just by looking through the thing and reading off along the calibrations. If you can't even recognise the constellations, the best thing to do is run and hide, because something forty feet tall and covered with scales is probably hunting you already.

	Plus they give you a guide to various burned-out supernovas and Stofler's Craters of the Moon by Estimated Creation Date. With any luck you can pinpoint yourself fifty years either way. Then it's just a matter of checking planetary positions for the fine tuning. Try to imagine sea navigation around the time of, oh, Columbus. A bit hit-or-miss, yeah? Well, time navigation is just about at the same level.

	Everyone said I must be one great wizard to spend so much time studying the sky.

	That's because I was trying to find out where I was.

	Because the sky tells me I'm around 500 AD. So why is the architecture Norman and the armour fifteenth century? Hold on ... here comes another one ...

	Well, not your actual Einstein, but it could be ... oh, no, look at that grip, look at that rage ... no. He's not the one. Not him. Sorry about that.

	So ... right ... where was I? Memory like a sieve these days.

	Yeah, the architecture. And everyone speaking a sort of Middle English, which was okay as it turned out because I can get by in that, having accidentally grounded in 1479 once. That was where I met John Gutenberg, father of modern printing. Tall man, bushy whiskers. Still owes me tuppence.

	Anyway. Back to this trip. It was obvious from the start that things weren't quite right. This time they were supposed to be sending me to observe the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 AD, and here I was in the wrong country and, according to the sky, about three centuries too soon. That's the kind of thing that happens, like I said; it's going to be at least fifty years before we get it right. Fifty-three years, actually, because I met this man in a bar in 1875 who's from a hundred years in our future, and he told me. I told them at Base we might as well save a lot of effort by just, you know, bribing one of the future guys for the plans of the next model. They said if we violated the laws of Cause-and-Effect like that there's a good chance the whole universe would suddenly catastrophically collapse into this tiny bubble .005 Angstroms across, but I say it's got to be worth a try.

	Anyway, the copper wire gave me a load of trouble.

	That's not to say I'm an incompetent. I'm just an average guy in every respect except that I'm the one in ten thousand who can time travel and still end up with all his marbles. It just gives me a slight headache. And I'm good at languages and I'm a very good observer, and you'd better believe I've observed some strange things. The Charlemagne coronation was going to be a vacation. It was my second visit, paid for by a bunch of historians in some university somewhere. I was going to check a few things that the guys who commissioned the first trip had raised after reading my report. I had it all worked out where I was going to stand so I wouldn't see myself. I could probably have talked my way out of it even if I had met myself, at that. One thing you learn in this trade is the gift of the gab.

	And then a diode blew or a one turned out to be a zero and here I am, whenever this is.

	And I can't get back. Anyway ... what was I saying ...

	Incidentally, the other problem with the copper wire is getting the insulation. In the end I wrapped it up in fine cloth and we painted every layer with some sort of varnish they use on their shields, which seems to have done the trick.

	And ... hmm ... you know, I think time travelling affects the memory. Like, your memory subconsciously knows the things you're remembering haven't happened yet, and this upsets it in some way. There's whole bits of history I can't remember. Wish I knew what they were.

	Excuse me a moment. Here's another one. An oldish guy. Quite bright, by the look of him. Why, I bet he can probably write his own name. But, oh, I don't know, he hasn't got the ...

	Hasn't got the ...

	Wish I knew what it was he hasn't got ... charisma. Knew it was there somewhere.

	So. Anyway. Yeah. So there I was, three centuries adrift, and nothing working. Ever seen a time machine? Probably not. The bit you move around is very, very hard to see, unless the light catches it just right. The actual works are back at Base and at the same time in the machine, so you travel in something like a mechanical ghost, something like what's left of a machine when you take all the parts away. An idea of a machine.

	Think of it as a big crystal. That's what it'd look like to you if, as I said, the light was right.

	Woke up in what I suppose I've got to call a bed. Just straw and heather with a blanket made of itches woven together. And there was this girl trying to feed me soup. Don't even try to imagine medieval soup. It's made of all the stuff they wouldn't eat if it was on a plate and believe me, they'd eat stuff you'd hate to put in a hamburger.

	I'd been there, I found out later, for three days. I didn't even know I'd arrived. I'd been wandering around in the woods, half-conscious and dribbling. A side-effect of the travelling. Like I said, normally I just get a migraine, but from what I can remember of that it was jet-lag times one million. If it had been winter I'd have been dead. If there'd been cliffs I would have thrown myself over one. As it was, I'd just walked into a few trees, and that was by accident. At least I'd avoided the wolves and bears. Or maybe they'd avoided me, maybe they think you die if you eat a crazy person.

	Her father was a woodcutter, or a charcoal burner, or one of those things. Never did find out, or perhaps I did and I've forgotten. He used to go out every day with an axe, I remember that. He'd found me and brought me home. I learned afterward he thought I was a nobleman, because of my fine clothes. I was wearing Levi's, that should give you some idea. He had two sons, and they went out every day with axes, too. Never really managed to strike up a conversation with either of them until after the father's accident. Didn't know enough about axes, I suppose.

	But Nimue ... What a girl. She was only ... er ...

	"How old were you, when we met?"

	She wipes her hands on a bit of rag. We'd had to grease the bearings with pig fat.

	"Fifteen," she says. "I think. Listen, there's another hour of water above the mill, but I don't think the gennyrator will last that long. It's shaking right merrily."

	She looks speculatively at the nobles.

	"What a bunch of by-our-Lady jacks," she says.

	"Jocks."

	"Yes. Jocks."

	I shrug. "One of them will be your king," I tell her.

	"Not my king, Mervin. I will never have a king," she says, and grins.

	By which you can tell she's learned a lot in twelve months. Yes, I broke the rules and told her the truth. And why not? I've broken all the rules to save this damn country, and it doesn't look like the universe is turning into this tiny ball .005 Angstroms across. First, I don't think this is our time line. It's all wrong, like I said. I think I was knocked sideways, into some sort of other history. Maybe a history that'll never really exist except in people's heads, because time travel is a fantasy anyway. You hear mathematicians talk about imaginary numbers which are real, so I reckon this is an imaginary place made up of real things. Or something. How should I know? Perhaps enough people believing something makes it real.

	I'd ended up in Albion, although I didn't find out until later. Not Britain, not England. A place very much like them, a place that shares a lot of things with them, a place so close to them that maybe ideas and stories leak across—but a place that is its own place.

	Only something went wrong somewhere. There was someone missing. There should have been a great king. You can fill in his name. He's out there somewhere, in the crowd. It's lucky for him I turned up.

	You want me to describe this world. You want to hear about the jousts, the pennants, the castles. Right. It's got all of that. But everything else has this, like, thin film of mud over it. The difference between the average peasant's hut and a pigsty is that a good farmer will sometimes change the straw in a pigsty. Now, get me right—no one's doing any repressing, as far as I can see. There's no slavery as such, except to tradition, but tradition wields a heavy lash. I mean, maybe democracy isn't perfect, but at least we don't let ourselves be outvoted by the dead.

	And since there's no strong man in charge there's a little would-be king in every valley, and he spends most of his time fighting other would-be kings, so the whole country is in a state of half-hearted war. And everyone goes through life proudly doing things clumsily just because their forefathers did them that way, and no one really enjoys anything, and good fields are filling with weeds ...

	I told Nimue I came from another country, which was true enough.

	I talked to her a lot because she was the only one with any sense around the place. She was small, and skinny, and alert in the same way that a bird is alert. I said I broke the rules to save this country but if I'm honest, I'll have to say I did it all for her. She was the one bright thing in a world of mud, she's nice to have around, she learns quickly, and—well, I've seen what the women here look like by the time they're thirty. That shouldn't happen to anyone.

	She talked and she listened to me while she did the housework, if that's what you can call moving the dirt around until it got lost.

	I told her about the future. Why not? What harm could it do? But she wasn't very impressed. I guess she didn't know enough to be impressed. Men on the moon were all one with the fairies and the saints. But piped water caught her interest, because every day she had to go to a spring with a couple of wooden buckets on a yoke thing round her neck.

	"Every cottage has this?" she said, eyeing me carefully over the top of the broom. Sure.

	"Not just the rich?"

	"The rich have more bathrooms," I said. Then I had to explain about bathrooms.

	"You people could do it," I told her. "You just need to dam a spring up in the hills, and find a—a blacksmith or someone to make some copper pipes. Or lead or iron, at a pinch."

	She looked wistful.

	"My father wouldn't allow it," she said.

	"Surely he'd see the benefits of having water laid on?" I suggested. She shrugged. "Why should he? He doesn't carry it from the spring."

	"Oh."

	But she took to following me around, in what time there was between chores. It's just as I've always said—women have always had a greater stake in technology than have men. We'd still be living in trees, otherwise. Piped water, electric lighting, stoves that you don't need to shove wood into—I reckon that behind half the great inventors of history were their wives, nagging them into finding a cleaner way of doing the chores.

	Nimue trailed me like a spaniel as I tottered around their village, if you could use the term for a collection of huts that looked like something deposited in the last Ice Age, or possibly by a dinosaur with a really serious bowel problem. She even let me into the forest, where I finally found the machine in a thorn thicket. Totally unrepairable. The only hope was that someone might fetch me, if they ever worked out where I was. And I knew they never would, because if they ever did, they'd have been there already. Even if it took them ten years to work it out, they could still come back to the Here and Now. That's the thing about time travel; you've got all the time in the world.

	I was marooned.

	However, we experienced travellers always carry a little something to tide us over the bad times. I'd got a whole box of stuff under the seat. A few small gold ingots (acceptable everywhere, like the very best credit cards). Pepper (worth more than gold for hundreds of years). Aluminum (a rare and precious metal in the days before cheap and plentiful electricity). And seeds. And pencils. Enough drugs to start a store. Don't tell me about herbal remedies—people screamed down the centuries, trying to stop things like dental abscesses with any green junk that happened to be growing in the mud.

	She watched me owlishly while I sorted through the stuff and told her what it all did.

	And the next day her father cut his leg open with his axe. The brothers carried him home. I stitched him up and, with her eyes on me, treated the wound. A week later he was walking around again, instead of being a cripple at best or most likely a gangrenous corpse, and I was a hero. Or, rather, since I didn't have the muscles for a hero, obviously a wizard.

	I was mad to act like that. You're not supposed to meddle. But what the hell. I was marooned. I was never going home. I didn't care. And I could cure, which is almost as powerful as being able to kill. I taught hygiene. I taught them about turnips, and running water, and basic medicine.

	The boss of the valley was a decent enough old knight called Sit Ector. Nimue knew him, which surprised me, but shouldn't have. The old boy was only one step up from his peasants, and seemed to know them all, and wasn't much richer than they were except that history had left him with a crumbling castle and a suit of rusty armour. Nimue went up to the castle one day a week to be a kind of lady's maid for his daughter.

	After I pulled the bad teeth that had been making his life agony, old Ector swore eternal friendship and gave me the run of the place. I met his son Kay, a big hearty lad with the muscles of an ox and possibly the brains of one, and there was this daughter to whom no one seemed to want to introduce me properly, perhaps because she was very attractive in a quiet kind of way. She had one of those stares that seems to be reading the inside of your skull. She and Nimue got along like sisters. Like sisters that get along well, I mean.

	I became a big man in the neighborhood. It's amazing the impression you can make with a handful of medicines, some basic science, and a good line in bull.

	Poor old Merlin had left a hole which I filled like water in a cup. There wasn't a man in the country who wouldn't listen to me.

	And whenever she had a spare moment Nimue followed me, watching like an owl.

	I suppose at the time I had some dream, like the Connecticut Yankee, of single-handedly driving the society into the twentieth century.

	You might as well try pushing the sea with a broom.

	"But they do what you tell them," Nimue said. She was helping me in the lab at the time, I think. I call it the lab, it was just a room in the castle. I was trying to make penicillin.

	"That's exactly it," I told her. "And what good is that? The moment I turn my back, they go back to the same old ways."

	"I thought you told me a dimocracy was where people did what they wanted to do," she said.

	"It's a democracy," I said. "And it's fine for people to do what they want to do, provided they do what's right."

	She bit her lip thoughtfully. "That does not sound sensible."

	"That's how it works."

	"And when we have a, a democracy, every man says who shall be king?"

	"Something like that, yes."

	"And what do the women do?"

	I had to think about that. "Oh, they should have the vote, too," I said. "Eventually. It'll take some time. I don't think Albion is ready for female suffrage."

	"It has female sufferage already," she said, with unusual bitterness. "Suffrage. It means the right to vote." I patted her hand.

	"Anyway," I told her, "you can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people ate so relieved when they get to democracy that they hang onto it."

	"People used to do what the king told them," she said, carefully measuring bread and milk into the shallow bowls. "The high king, I mean. Everyone did what the high king said. Even the lesser kings."

	I'd heard about this high king. In his time, apparently, the land had flowed with so much milk and honey people must have needed waders to get around. I don't go for that kind of thing. I'm a practical man. When people talk about their great past they're usually trying to excuse the mediocre present.

	"Such a person might get things done," I said. "But then they die, and history shows"—or will show, but I couldn't exactly put it like that to her—"that things go back to being even worse when they die. Take it from me."

	"Is that one of those things you call a figure of speech, Mervin?" Sure.

	"There was a child, they say. Hidden somewhere by the king until it was old enough to protect itself."

	"From wicked uncles and so on?"

	"I do not know about uncles. I heard men say that many kings hated the power of Uther Pendragon." She stacked the dishes on the window-sill. I really hadn't got much idea about penicillin, you understand. I was just letting stuff go mouldy, and hoping.

	"Why are you looking at me like that?" she said.

	"Uther Pendragon? From Cornwall?"

	"You knew him?"

	"I—er—I—yes. Heard of him. He had a castle called Tintagel. He was the father of—"

	She was staring at me.

	I tried again. "He was a king here?"

	"Yes!"

	I didn't know what to say to hen I wandered over to the window and looked out. There was nothing much out there but forest. Not cleat forest, like you'd find Tolkien's elves in, but deep, damp forest, all mosses and punk-wood. It was creeping back. Too many little wars, too many people dying, not enough people to plough the fields. And out there, somewhere, was the true king. Waiting for his chance, waiting for—

	Me?

	The king. Not any old king. The king. Arthur. Artos the Bear. Once and Future. Round Table. Age of Chivalry. He never existed. Except here. Maybe.

	Maybe here, in a world you get to in a broken time machine, a world that's not exactly memory and not exactly story ...

	And I was the only one who knew how the legend went. Me. Mervin.

	With his leadership and my, er, experience ... what a team ...

	I looked at her face. Clear as a pond now, but a little worried. She was thinking that old Mervin was going to be ill again.

	I remember I drummed my fingers on the cold windowsill. No central heating in the castle. Winter was coming. It was going to be a bad one, in this ruined country.

	Then I said, "Ooooooh."

	She looked startled.

	"Just practicing," I said, and tried again, "Oooooooooooh, hear me, hear me." Not bad, not bad. "Hear me, o ye men of Albion, hear me. It is I, Mervin, that's with a V, who speaks to you. Let the message go out that a Sign has been sent to end the wars and choose the rightwise King of Albion ... Oooooooooooh-er."

	She was near to panic by this time. A couple of servants were peering around the door. I sent them away.

	"How was it?" I said. "Impressive, eh? Could probably work, yeah?"

	"What is the Sign?" she whispered.

	"Traditionally, a sword in a stone," I said. "Which only the rightful heir can pull out."

	"But how can that be?"

	"I'm not sure. I'll have to think of a way."

	That was months ago.

	The obvious way was some sort of bolt mechanism or something ...

	No, of course I didn't think there was a mystic king out there. I kept telling myself that. But there was a good chance that there was a lad who looked good on a horse and was bright enough to take advice from any wizardly types who happened to be around. Like I said, I'm a practical man.

	Anyway ... what was I saying? Oh, yes. All the mechanical ways of doing it I had to rule out. That left electricity. Strange thing is, it's a lot easier to make a crude electrical generator than a crude steam engine. The only really critical things are the bearings.

	And the copper wire.

	It was Nimue who eventually sorted that one out.

	"I've seen ladies wearing fine jewellry with gold and silver wires in it," she said. "The men who made them must know how to do it with copper."

	And of course she was right. I just wasn't thinking straight. They just pulled thin strips of metal through tough steel plates with little holes in them, gradually bullying it into smaller and smaller thickness. I went to London and found a couple who could do it, and then I got a blacksmith to make up some more drawplates because I didn't want wire in jewelry quantities but in industrial amounts. I'd already got quite a reputation then, and no one asked me what I needed it for. I could have said, "Well, half of it will be for the generator, and the rest will be for the electromagnets in the stone," and what would they have known? I had another smith make me up some soft iron cores and the bearings, and Nimue and I spent hours winding the wire and shellacking every layer.

	The motive power was the easy part. The country was thick with mills. I chose a tide mill, because it's dependable and this one was on an impressive stretch of coast. I know the legend said it was done in London or Winchester or some place, but I had to go where the power was and, anyway, it looked good, there on the shore with the surf pounding on the rocks and everything.

	The stone was the easy bit. There's been a crude concrete technology ever since the Romans. Though I say it myself, I made a quite nice-looking stone around the electromagnets. We got it finished days before the day I'd set for the big contest. We'd put up a big canvas shield around it, although I don't think any of the locals would have come neat it for a fortune.

	Nimue operated the switch while I slid the sword in and out.

	"That means you're king," she said, grinning.

	"Not me. I haven't got what it takes to rule."

	"Why? What does it take?"

	"We'll know when we see it. We're looking for a boy with the air of authority. The kind of lad a war-weary people will follow."

	"And you're sure you'll find him?"

	"If I don't, the universe isn't being run properly."

	She's got this funny way of grinning. Not exactly mocking, but it's always made me feel uneasy.

	"And he'll listen to you?"

	"He'd better. I'm the wizard around here. There's not a man in the country I can't out-think, my girl."

	"I wish I were as clever as you, Mervin," she said, and grinned again. Silly little thing ...

	And now back to the present. Time travel! Your mind wanders. Back to this rocky shore. And the stone and the sword. Hold it ... hold it ... I think ...

	Yes.

	This looks like the one.

	A slight young lad, not swaggering at all, but strolling up to the stone as if he's certain of his fortune. Ragged clothes, but that's not a problem, that's not a problem, we can do something about those later.

	People are moving aside. It's uncanny. You can see Destiny unfolding, like a deck-chair.

	Can't see much under the hood. It's one of those big floppy ones the peasants wear, but he's looking directly at me.

	I wonder if he suspects? I wonder if he's real?

	I wonder where he's been hiding all these years?

	Well, never mind that now. Got to seize the moment. Shift my weight slightly, so my foot comes off the buried switch, cutting the current to the rock.

	Good lord, he's not even making an effort. And up comes the sword, sweet as you like.

	And everyone's cheering, and he's waving the thing in the air, and the sun's coming out and catching it in a way that even I couldn't arrange. Ting.

	And it's done. They'll have to stop squabbling now. They've got their king and no one can argue with it, because they've all seen the miracle. Bright new future, etc., etc.

	And, of course, he'll need some good advice from someone just like me.

	And he throws back his hood, and ... she lets her blonde hair fall out, and the crowd goes ice-quiet.

	We're not talking damsels here. She's smiling like a tiger, and looks as though she could do considerable damage with that sword.

	I think the word I'm looking for is imperious.

	She's daring them to protest, and they can't.

	They've seen the miracle.

	And she doesn't look like the kind of person who needs advice. She looks far too intelligent for my liking. She still looks like I first saw her at Ector's, with that bright stare that sees right into a man's soul. God help the little kings who don't come to heel right now.

	I glance at Nimue. She's smiling an innocent little smile to herself.

	I can't remember. She'd said "child," I can remember that, but did she ever actually say "son"?

	I thought I was controlling the myth, but maybe I was just one of the players.

	I bend down to Nimue's ear.

	"Just out of interest," I say, "what is her name? Didn't catch it the first time."

	"Ursula," she says, still smiling.

	Ah. From the Latin for bear. I might have guessed.

	Oh, well. Nothing for it. I suppose I'd better see if I can find enough decent seasoned timber for a Round Table, although for the life of me I can't guess who's going to sit around it. Not just a lot of thick-headed knights in tin trousers, that's for sure.

	If I hadn't meddled she'd never have had a chance, and what chance does she have anyway? What chance?

	I've looked into her eyes as she stared into mine. I can see the future.

	I wonder how long it's going to be before we discover America?

I like hats, particularly the black wide-brimmed Louisianas which most people think are called fedoras. Coming as I do from a family where the males go bald around 25, I prefer to have more than a thickness of bone between my brain and God.

The article says it all, and got commissioned merely because of a remark I made to a journalist at a party. You'd think there was something funny about hats.

 

A Word About Hats

	I was obviously very upset when my hat was kidnapped. You hear such stories. Was it going to be chained to a radiator? Would I get a photo of it holding a newspaper? Or—terrible thought—would it side with its captors and refuse to leave them? I think that's called the Stockholm Syndrome, although the Swedes aren't hugely famous for hats.

	So I just paid up with a cheque for £75 to the student Rag Day charity, which was the object of the whole exercise. The dreadful drama was over in ten minutes, and I didn't even get an opportunity to speak to the hat on the telephone.

	I got the big black hat back and was, once again, myself.

	I like hats. They give me something to do with my head.

	In my family the men go bald in their twenties, to get it over with. It stops it coming as a nasty shock later in life. But it means that there's nothing there to absorb all those bumps and scratches that the hairy people never even notice. The modern remedy is a baseball cap. A baseball cap? I'd sooner eat worms.

	I spotted the first big black hat in a shop called Billie Jean in Walcot Street, Bath, back in the late '80s. There it was, on a shelf. It was everything I wanted in a hat although, up until that point, I hadn't realised that I did, in fact, want a hat.

	It was black, of course, and wide-brimmed, and quite tough, and flexible enough to hold a decent curve once I'd done a bit of work with a steaming kettle.

	Sometimes you see something and you just have to go for it.

	Since then I must have owned about ten of them, all identical to the inexpert eye. All right, I'll own up: When I was a kid I remember being impressed by John Steed of The Avengers opening a wardrobe door to reveal, disappearing into the distance, apparently endless lines of bowler hats and furled umbrellas. That taught me something. If you're going to be serious about hats you can't have just one.

	Some, after a decent airing, have been donated to charity auctions or used as competition prizes ("Win Terry Pratchett's Hat!") One is the proud possession of my Czech translator. One just died. It was one of the best ones—thin felt that looked like velvet, a perfect fit, and as black as the Ace of Spades. It was like wearing a head glove. Never found another one like it. Took me a year to get it exactly as I wanted it, and two years to wear it out.

	No two hats are alike. Every hat has its own character. All confirmed hat wearers know this. I've got a heavy felt stunt hat, useful if I'm doing a school visit where half the class are probably going to end up trying it on, a quality hat for those select occasions, and some suitably rugged ones for signing tours. A black fedora or Louisiana wouldn't do for Australia, though, where I prefer an Akubra "Territory", the largest hat they do short of a sombrero. If you look closely you can still see where the koala bear pissed on it.

	When I became an officially famous author, the black hat became a kind of trademark. It wasn't on purpose, but photographers liked it. "One with the hat on, please", they'd say. And you always do what the photographer wants, don't you? And so the hat—sorry, the Hat—turned up in PR photos and I was stuck with it. It became me, according to all the photographs.

	For that reason, people assume that I should be wearing it all the time. "Where's your hat?" is the demand when I'm signing in a shop, as if people aren't sure who this little bearded bald guy is unless the Hat confers the official personality. Readers want to be photographed with me at bookshop events, and that's fine and part of the whole business, but I just know that as the camera is elevated they'll give that little gasp of realisation and "with the hat, of course."

	There have been a couple of foiled attempts at hat theft.

	Then there was the hat-stretching. I bought a new hat for a tour last year. It turned out to be on the tight side, and I had foolishly not brought the spare hat. But a wonderful bookshop in the town of St. Neots had once been a gentleman's outfitters and there, on a high shelf, was a Victorian hat-stretching engine. No bookstore should be without one. They kindly racked the hat in front of the crowd while 1 signed the books. I believe that some people thought it was a way of forcing me to sign.

	People ask me if I feel naked without my hat. The answer is no. I feel naked without, say, my trousers, but if you walk down the street without wearing a hat the police take very little interest at all. But, yes ... I've grown very attached to the hat, over the years.

	Aha, people say, it's like some kind of prop, right? A magic mask? You think you become a real person when you put your hat on? You are the hat, right?

	And that just goes to show why people shouldn't go around saying "Aha" and getting their psychology from bad movies. No, I don't become a real person with the hat on. I become an unreal person with the hat on. There's this man who's sold 25 million books and goes on huge and gruelling signing tours and has seen the inside of too many hotel rooms. He's the one under the hat. It's tough under there, and sometimes the hat has to come off.

	The hat's an anti-disguise, one that you remove in order to be unrecognised. It's amazing. It works beautifully. Without the hat I can join the huge fraternity of bald men with glasses, and amble around the place without people looking hard at me and saying, "You're you, aren't you? Here, could you sign this for my wife? She won't believe me when I tell her." It's not that I mind that stuff, but sometimes a man just wants to go out to buy a tube of glue and some spanners.

	Without the hat I can leave home without a pen.

	Without the hat, in fact, I can be myself.

 

 
The Titles That Got Away

	You hold in your hands Once More* With Footnotes.

	It's a good title, and Terry did provide plenty of introductions to all these delightful pieces. (But, to be completely honest about it all, not that many footnotes*(*OK, so we did consider using the introductions as "footnotes", but they looked better above the title. And that makes them headnotes—big deal. Use your imagination! "Once More* With Footnotes" sounds better than "Once More* With Headnotes"—don'cha think?)).

	It took us a long time to decide on the title. Y'see, we were all fooling around at the beginning, and decided a great working title for the book would be "Oh Bugger." That swiftly morphed into "Oh Bugger, by Wossname." We got sorta fixated on it (and it really would have made a great title, right?)

	But Terry said he'd have to live with the title the rest of his life ... so we had to (reluctantly, alas!) let it go.

	And we had to think of other titles. These are some of them:

	Ook!
	At Night, All Worlds Are Flat
		(alternatively, In The Dark, All Worlds Are Flat) 
	Cut Me Own Throat
	Turtles All The Way 
	Witches and Wonders
	Death and What Comes Next and what comes next ...

-

	... but most of these were too "Discworldy" and we didn't want to be misleading ...

-

So we also thought of:

Terry Go Round
Mind the Magic
Fractured Fantasy
With a Head Full of Goblins
Untitled (we were getting pretty worried)
Without the Hat
A Pratchett Miscellany
and/or 
The Pratchett Files
	(these latter two could be attached to any of the above, but could also be OK on their own?)

-

	And then we chose this one, and we're delighted with it ...*( *But we still wish it could have been "Oh Bugger by Wossname") 
	Enjoy.

—Priscilla Olson 
June, 2004

-

The New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) and NESFA Press

	Selected books from NESFA Press:

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	NESFA is an all-volunteer, non-profit organization of science fiction and fantasy fans. Besides publishing, our activities include running Boskone (New England's oldest SF convention) in February each year, producing a semi-monthly newsletter, holding discussion groups relating to the field, and hosting a variety of social events. If you are interested in learning more about us, we'd like to hear from you. Write to our address above!

Acknowledgments

Living in the future is neat: it has taken the labor-intensive act of producing a book out of the specialist realm and put it within reach of anyone with a personal computer, provided that person is crazy enough to brave Titivillus, bane of medieval scribes and the original printer's devil.

Producing a book is still a labor-intensive endeavor, though, and many people have helped with this one: I'd like to thank Terry Pratchett for agreeing to do a Noreascon 4 Guest-of-Honor book and for mining his archives for, and providing introductions to, the material it contains; MCFI, the Noreascon 4 Committee, and NESFA Press for making the book possible and letting me work on it; Omar and Sheila Rayyan for the beautiful cover; Esther Friesner for writing the introduction; Colin, Geri, Claire, Pat, Jan, and everyone else who helped track things down; Priscilla, Mark, Deb, Mike, George, Tony, Sharon, Bob, Paula, and all the other members of NESFA who helped out in various capacities.

—Sheila M. Perry 
June 2004

	Terry Pratchett was born in England in the small town of Beaconsfield, currently being engulfed by London's sprawl, and now lives with his wife Lyn in Wiltshire, close enough to Stonehenge to find it boring. Their daughter Rhianna is a journalist, on the basis that it worked for her dad.

	Since writing was his hobby, he doesn't actually have one now. However, he reads a lot, grows things, and last year achieved a boyhood dream by building an astronomical observatory in his garden. In 1998, he was awarded the OBE in the Queens Birthday Honours List for "services to literature." He suspects, however, that the best service he has done for literature is deny that he writes it.

	Omar & Sheila Rayyan were both born somewhere at some time years later met while they were attending the Rhode Island School of Design as Illustration majors. They moved to the island of Martha's Vineyard soon after graduation and haven't left since because neither of them knows how to sail. Luckily with the advent of the Internet and email they have been able to reconnect somewhat with the outside world. They share their studio with a cat, two budgies, and a selection of fish. To view some of their creations, visit their web site at www.studiorayyan.com.

Dust jacket illustration c 2004 by Omar Rayyan
Dust jacket design by Omar & Sheila Rayyan

Over the years, in addition to his wildly popular Discworld, Johnny Maxwell, and Nome books, Terry Pratchett has also written an assortment of short stories, articles, introductions, and ephemera. These have appeared in books, magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and program books, many of which are now hard to find.

Here in one convenient volume, with introductory notes from Mr. Pratchett, are such elusive pieces as: The Hades Business, Once and Future, The Secret Book of the Dead, Hollywood Chickens, Turntables of the Night, Final Reward, Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting, and more.

 

	"Pratchett's humour is based on solid observation, the ability to view gobbets of the commonplace through the distorting microscope of fantastic comedy, to make the grotesque seem familiar and the familiar grotesque."—Tom Holt in SFX Magazine

	"Pratchett is the funniest parodist working in the field today, period."—The New York Review of Science Fiction

	"Terry Pratchett may still be pegged a comic novelist, but ... in his range of invented characters, his adroit storytelling, and his clear-eyed acceptance of humankind's foibles, he reminds me of no one in English literature so much as Geoffrey Chaucer. No kidding."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

	"Pratchett's humor is international, satirical, devious, knowing, irreverent, unsparing, and, above all, funny."—Kirkus Reviews

	"Like Jonathan Swift, Pratchett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own, and like Swift he is a satirist of enormous talent ... incredibly funny ... compulsively readable."—The Times

	"An enduring, endearing presence in comic literature ... Pratchett's position as a leading comic novelist now seems as permanently assured as that of P. G. Wodehouse."—The Guardian