Eric

PERHAPS IT'S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY. He thought.

Death turned to go but, just as he did so, he heard the faintest of noises. It was to sound what one photon is to light, so weak and feeble that it would have passed entirely unheard in the din of an operating universe.

It was a tiny piece of matter, popping into existence.

Death stalked over to the point of arrival and watched carefully.

It was a paperclip.

Well, it was a start.

There was another pop, which left a small white shirt-button spinning gently in the vacuum.

Death relaxed a little. Of course, it was going to take some time. There was going to be an interlude before all this got complicated enough to produce gas clouds, galaxies, planets and continents, let alone tiny corkscrew-shaped things wiggling around in slimy pools and wondering whether evolution was worth all the bother of growing fins and legs and things. But it indicated the start of an unstoppable trend.

All he had to do was be patient, and he was good at that. Pretty soon there'd be living creatures, developing like mad, running and laughing in the new sunlight. Growing tired. Growing old.

Death sat back. He could wait.

Whenever they needed him, he'd be there.

The Universe came into being.

Any created-again cosmogonist will tell you that all the interesting stuff happened in the firs couple of minutes, when nothingness bunched together to form space and time and lots of really tiny black holes appeared and so on. After that, they say, it became just a matter of, well, matter. It was basically all over bar the microwave radiation.

Seen from close by, though, it had a certain gaudy attraction.

The little man sniffed.

"Too showy," he said. "You don't need all that noise. It could just as easily have been a Big Hiss, or a bit of music."

"Could it?" said Rincewind.

"Yeah, and it looked pretty iffy around the two picosecond mark. Definitely a bit of ropey filling-in. but that's how it goes these days. No craftsmanship. When I was a lad it took days to make a universe. You could take pride in it. Now they just throw it together and it's back on the lorry and away. And, you know what?"

"No?" said Rincewind weakly.

"They pinches stuff off the site. They finds someone nearby who wants to expand their universe a bit, next thing you know they've had it away with a bunch of firmament and flogged it for an extension somewhere."

Rincewind stared at him.

"Who are you?"

The man took the pencil from behind his ear and looked reflectively at the space around Rincewind. "I makes things," he said.

"What sort of things?"

"What sort of things would you like?"

"You're the Creator?"

The little man looked very embarrassed. "Not the. Not the. Just a. I don't contract for the big stuff, the stars, the gas giants, the pulsars and so on. I just specialise in what you might call the bespoke trade." He gave them a look of defiant pride. "I do all my own trees, you know," he confided. "Craftsmanship. Takes years to learn how to make a tree. Even the conifers."

"Oh," said Rincewind.

"I don't get someone in to finish them off. No sub-contracting, that's my motto. The buggers always keep you hanging about while they're installing stars or something for someone else. "The little man sighed. "You know, people think it must all be very easy, creating. They think you just have to move on the face of the waters and wave your hands a bit. It's not like that at all."

"It isn't?"

The little man scratched his nose again. "You soon run out of ides for snowflakes, for example."

"Oh."

"You start thinking it'd be a doddle to sneak in a few identical ones."

"You do?"

"You think to yourself, ‘There's a billion trillion squillion of them, no-one's going to notice'. But that's where professionalism comes in, sort of thing."

"It does?"

"Some people" - and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past - "think it's enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run. A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there's just a girl on the counter who says she don't know where the boss is. I think people appreciate the personal touch, don't you?"

"Ah," said Rincewind. "So... when people get struck by lightning... er... it's not just because of all that stuff about electrical discharges and high points and everything... er... you actually mean it?"

"Oh, not me. I don't run the things. It's a big enough job just building ‘em, you can't expect me to operate them as well. There's a load of other universes, you know," he added, a slight note of accusation in his voice. "Got a list of jobs as long as your arm."

He reached underneath him and produced a large, leatherbound book, which he had apparently been sitting on. It opened with a creak.

Rincewind felt a tugging at his robe.

"Look," said Eric. "This isn't really... Him, is it?"

"He says it is," said Rincewind.

"What are we doing here?"

"I don't know."