Small Gods

‘The word LIBRVM outside this building has a chip in the top of the first letter,’ said Brutha. ‘Xeno wrote Reflections, and old Aristocrates wrote Platitudes, and Didactylos thinks Ibid’s Discourses are bloody stupid. There are six hundred paces from the Tyrant’s throne room to the Library. There is a—’

‘He’s got a good memory, you’ve got to grant him that,’ said Didactylos. ‘Show him some more scrolls.’

‘How will we know he’s remembered them?’ Urn demanded, unrolling a scroll of geometrical theorems. ‘He can’t read! And even if he could read, he can’t write!’

‘We shall have to teach him.’

Brutha looked at a scroll full of maps. He shut his eyes. For a moment the jagged outline glowed against the inside of his eyelids, and then he felt them settle into his mind. They were still there somewhere — he could bring them back at any time. Urn unrolled another scroll. Pictures of animals. This one, drawings of plants and lots of writing. This one, just writing. This one, triangles and things. They settled down in his memory. After a while, he wasn’t even aware of the scroll unrolling. He just had to keep looking.

He wondered how much he could remember. But that was stupid. You just remembered everything you saw. A tabletop, or a scroll full of writing. There was as much information in the grain and colouring of the wood as there was in Xeno’s Reflections.

Even so, he was conscious of a certain heaviness of mind, a feeling that if he turned his head sharply then memory would slosh out of his ears.

Urn picked up a scroll at random and unrolled it partway.

‘Describe what an Ambiguous Puzuma looks like,’ he demanded.^{55}

‘Don’t know,’ said Brutha. He blinked.

‘So much for Mr Memory,’ said Urn.

‘He can’t read, boy. That’s not fair,’ said the philosopher.

‘All right. I mean — the fourth picture in the third scroll you saw,’ said Urn.

‘A four-legged creature facing left,’ said Brutha. ‘A large head similar to a cat’s and broad shoulders with the body tapering towards the hindquarters. The body is a pattern of dark and light squares. The ears are very small and laid flat against the head. There are six whiskers. The tail is stubby. Only the hind feet are clawed, three claws on each foot. The fore feet are about the same length as the head and held up against the body. A band of thick hair—’

‘That was fifty scrolls ago,’ said Urn. ‘He saw the whole scroll for a second or two.’

They looked at Brutha. Brutha blinked again.

‘You know everything?’ said Urn.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve got half the Library in your head!’

‘I feel … a … bit …’

The Library of Ephebe was a furnace. The flames burned blue where the melted copper roof dripped on to the shelves.

All libraries, everywhere, are connected by the bookworm holes in space created by the strong space-time distortions found around any large collections of books.

Only a very few librarians learn the secret, and there are inflexible rules about making use of the fact. Because it amounts to time travel, and time travel causes big problems.

But if a library is on fire, and down in the history books as having been on fire …

There was a small pop, utterly unheard among the crackling of the bookshelves, and a figure dropped out of nowhere on to a small patch of unburned floor in the middle of the Library.

It looked ape-like, but it moved in a very purposeful way. Long simian arms beat out the flames, pulled scrolls off the shelves, and stuffed them into a sack. When the sack was full, it knuckled back into the middle of the room … and vanished, with another pop.

This has nothing to do with the story.

Nor does the fact that, some time later, scrolls thought to have been destroyed in the Great Ephebian Library Fire turned up in remarkably good condition in the Library of Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork.

But it’s nice to know, even so.

Brutha awoke with the smell of the sea in his nostrils.

At least it was what people think of as the smell of the sea, which is the stink of antique fish and rotten seaweed.

He was in some sort of shed. Such light as managed to come through its one unglazed window was red, and flickered. One end of the shed was open to the water. The ruddy light showed a few figures clustered around something there.

Brutha gently probed the contents of his memory. Everything seemed to be there, the Library scrolls neatly arranged. The words were as meaningless to him as any other written word, but the pictures were interesting. More interesting than most things in his memory, anyway.

He sat up, carefully.

‘You’re awake, then,’ said the voice of Om, in his head. ‘Feel a bit full, do we? Feel a bit like a stack of shelves? Feel like we’ve got big notices saying “SILENCIOS!” all over the place inside our head? What did you go and do that for?’

‘I … don’t know. It seemed like … the next thing to do. Where are you?’

‘Your soldier friend has got me in his pack. Thanks for looking after me so carefully, by the way.’