The Light Fantastic

‘Oh no,’ said the shopkeeper, deeply shocked. ‘There’s all kinds of fail-safes built in, after all, there’d be no point in going somewhere with insufficient per capita disposable income. And there’s got to be a suitable wall, of course. Ah, here we are, this is your universe. Very bijou, I always think. A sort of universette...’

Here is the blackness of space, the myriad stars gleaming like diamond dust or, as some people would say, like great balls of exploding hydrogen a very long way off. But then, some people would say anything.

A shadow starts to blot out the distant glitter, and it is blacker than space itself.

From here it also looks a great deal bigger, because space is not really big, it is simply somewhere to be big in. Planets are big, but planets are meant to be big and there is nothing clever about being the right size.

But this shape blotting out the sky like the footfall of God isn’t a planet.

It is a turtle, ten thousand miles long from its crater-pocked head to its armoured tail.

And Great A’Tuin is huge.

Great flippers rise and fall ponderously, warping space into strange shapes. The Discworld slides across the sky like a royal barge. But even Great A’Tuin is struggling now as it leaves the free depths of space and must fight the tormenting pressures of the solar shallows. Magic is weaker here, on the littoral of light. Many more days of his and the Discworld will be stripped away by the pressures of reality.

Great A’Tuin knows this, but Great A’Tuin can recall doing all this before, many thousands of years ago.

The astrochelonian’s eyes, glowing red in the light of the dwarf star, are not focussed on it but at a little patch of space nearby...

‘Yes, but where are we?’ said Twoflower. The shopkeeper, hunched over his table, just shrugged.

‘I don’t think we’re anywhere,’ he said. ‘We’re in a cotangent incongruity, I believe. I could be wrong. The shop generally knows what it’s doing.’

‘You mean you don’t?’

‘I pick a bit up, here and there.’ The shopkeeper blew his nose. ‘Sometimes I land on a world where they understand these things.’ He turned a pair of small, sad eyes on Twoflower. ‘You’ve got a kind face, sir. I don’t mind telling you.’

‘Telling me what?’

‘It’s no life, you know, minding the Shop. Never settling down, always on the move, never closing.’

Why don’t you stop, then?’

‘Ah, that’s it, you see, sir—I can’t. I’m under a curse, I am. A terrible thing.’ He blew his nose again.

‘Cursed to run a shop?’

‘Forever, sir, forever. And never closing! For hundreds of years! There was this sorcerer, you see. I did a terrible thing.’

‘In a shop?’ said Twoflower.

‘Oh, yes. I can’t remember what it was he wanted, but when he asked for it I—I gave one of those sucking-in noises, you know, like whistling only backwards?’ He demonstrated.

Twoflower looked sombre, but he was at heart a kind man and always ready to forgive.

‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘Even so —’

‘That’s not all!’

‘Oh.’

‘I told him there was no demand for it!’

‘After making the sucking noise?’

‘Yes. I probably grinned, too.’

‘Oh, dear. You didn’t call him squire, did you?’

‘I—I may have done.’

‘Um.’

‘There’s more.’

‘Surely not?’

‘Yes, I said I could order it and he could come back next day.’

‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ said Twoflower, who alone of all the people in the multiverse allowed shops to order things for him and didn’t object at all to paying quite large sums of money to reimburse the shopkeeper for the inconvenience of having a bit of stock in his store often for several hours.

‘It was early closing day,’ said the shopkeeper.

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, and I heard him rattling the doorhandle, I had this sign on the door, you know, it said something like "Closed even for the sale of Necromancer cigarettes," anyway, I heard him banging and I laughed.’

‘You laughed?’

‘Yes. Like this. Hnufhnufhnufblort.’

‘Probably not a wise thing to do,’ said Twoflower, shaking his head.

‘I know, I know. My father always said, he said, Do not peddle in the affairs of wizards... Anyway, I heard him shouting something about never closing again, and a lot of words I couldn’t understand, and then the shop—the shop—the shop came alive.’

‘And you’ve wandered like this ever since?’

‘Yes. I suppose one day I might find the sorcerer and perhaps the thing he wanted will be in stock. Until then I must go from place to place —’

‘That was a terrible thing to do,’ said Twoflower.

The shopkeeper wiped his nose on his apron. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Even so, he shouldn’t have cursed you quite so badly,’ Twoflower added.

‘Oh. Yes, well.’ The shopkeeper straightened his apron and made a brave little attempt to pull himself together. ‘Anyway, this isn’t getting you to Ankh-Morpork, is it?’

‘Funny thing is,’ said Twoflower, ‘that I bought my Luggage in a shop like this, once. Another shop, I mean.’

‘Oh yes, there’s several of us,’ said the shopkeeper, turning back to the table, ‘that sorcerer was a very impatient man, I understand.’

‘Endlessly roaming through the universe,’ mused Twoflower.