The Light Fantastic

A ladder banged against the side of the slab and the head of an elderly druid appeared over the edge. He gave the two passengers a puzzled glance, and then looked up at Belafon.

‘About bloody time,’ he said. ‘Seven weeks to Hogswatchnight and it’s gone down on us again.’

‘Hallo, Zakriah,’ said Belafon. What happened this time?’

‘It’s all totally fouled up. Today it predicted sunrise three minutes early. Talk about a klutz, boy, this is it.’

Belafon clambered onto the ladder and disappeared from view. The passengers looked at each other, and then tared down into the vast open space between the inner circle of stones.

‘What shall we do now?’ said Twoflower.

‘We could go to sleep?’ suggested Rincewind.

Twoflower ignored him, and climbed down the ladder.

Around the circle druids were tapping the megaliths with little hammers and listening intently. Several of the huge stones were lying on their sides, and each was surrounded by another crowd of druids who were examining it carefully and arguing amongst themselves. Arcane phrases floated up to where Rincewind sat:

‘It can’t be software incompatibility—the Chant of the Trodden Spiral was designed for concentric rings, idiot...’

‘I say fire it up again and try a simple moon ceremony...’

‘... all right, all right, nothing’s wrong with the stones, it’s just that the universe has gone wrong, right?...’

Through the mists of his exhausted mind Rincewind remembered the horrible star they’d seen in the sky. Something had gone wrong with the universe last night.

How had he come to be back on the Disc?

He had a feeling that the answers were somewhere inside his head. And an even more unpleasant feeling began to dawn on him that something else was watching the scene below—watching it from behind his eyes.

The Spell had crept from its lair deep in the untrodden dirtroads of his mind, and was sitting bold as brass in his forebrain, watching the passing scene and doing the mental equivalent of eating popcorn.

He tried to push it back—and the world vanished...

He was in darkness; a warm, musty darkness, the darkness of the tomb, the velvet blackness of the mummy case. There was a strong smell of old leather and the sourness of ancient paper. The paper rustled.

He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors—and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only to easy to imagine...

‘Rincewind,’ said a voice. Rincewind had never heard a lizard speak, but if one did it would have a voice like that.

‘Um,’ he said. ‘Yes?’

The voice chuckled—a strange sound, rather papery.

‘You ought to say "Where am I?" ‘ it said.

‘Would I like it if I knew?’ said Rincewind. He stared hard at the darkness. Now that he was accustomed to it, he could see something. Something vague, hardly bright enough to be anything at all, just the merest tracery in the air. Something strangely familiar.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re dreaming.’

‘Can I wake up now, please?’

‘No,’ said another voice, as old and dry as the first but still slightly different.

‘We have something very important to tell you,’ said a third voice, if anything more corpse-dry than the others. Rincewind nodded stupidly. In the back of his mind the Spell lurked and peered cautiously over his mental shoulder.

‘You’ve caused us a lot of trouble, young Rincewind,’ the voice went on. ‘All this dropping over the edge of the world with no thought for other people. We had to seriously distort reality, you know.’

‘Gosh.’

‘And now you have a very important task ahead of you.’

‘Oh. Good.’

‘Many years ago we arranged for one of our number to hide in your head, because we could foresee a time coming when you would need to play a very important role.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘You run away a lot,’ said one of the voices. That is good. You are a survivor.’

‘Survivor? I’ve nearly been killed dozens of times!’

‘Exactly.’

‘Oh.’

‘But try not to fall off the Disc again. We really can’t have that.’

‘Who are we, exactly?’ said Rincewind.

There was a rustling in the darkness.

‘In the beginning was the word,’ said a dry voice right ehind him.

‘It was the Egg,’ corrected another voice. ‘I distinctly remember. The Great Egg of the Universe. Slightly rubbery.’

‘You’re both wrong, in fact. I’m sure it was the primordial slime.’

A voice by Rincewind’s knee said: ‘No, that came afterwards. There was firmament first. Lots of firmament. Rather sticky, like candyfloss. Very syrupy, in fact—.’

‘In case anyone’s interested,’ said a crackly voice on Rincewind’s left, ‘you’re all wrong. In the beginning was the Clearing of the Throat—’

‘—then the word—’

‘Pardon me, the slime—’

‘Distinctly rubbery, I thought—’

There was a pause. Then a voice said carefully, ‘Anyway, whatever it was, we remember it distinctly.’

‘Quite so.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And our task is to see that nothing dreadful happens to it, Rincewind.’

Rincewind squinted into the blackness. ‘Would you kindly explain what you’re talking about?’