Terry Pratchett - Discworld 27 - The Last Hero

VIP免费

2024-11-29 0 0 421.83KB 96 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Last Hero

Terry Pratchett

The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants

perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That’s the advantage of space. It’s big

enough to hold, practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.

People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an

elephant more than, two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human

brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the

blood. It believes mere size is amazing.

There’s nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are

quite astonishing. But the fact that there’s a big turtle is far less amazing than the

fact that there is a turtle anywhere.

The reason for the story was a mix of many things. There was humanity’s desire

to do forbidden deeds merely because they were forbidden. There was its desire

to find new horizons and kill the people who live beyond them. There were die

mysterious scrolls. There was the cucumber. But mostly there was the knowledge

that one day, quite soon, it would be all over.

“Ah. well, life goes on,” people say when someone dies. But from the point of

view of the person who has just died, it doesn’t. It’s the universe that goes on.

Just as die deceased was getting the hang of everything it’s all whisked away, by

illness or accident or, in one case, a cucumber. Why this has to be is one of the

imponderables of life, in the face of which people either start to pray ... or become

really, really angry.

The beginning of the story happened tens of thousands of years ago, on a wild

and stormy night, when a speck of flame came down the mountain at the centre of

the world. It moved in dodges and jerks, as if the unseen person carrying it was

sliding and falling from rock to rock. At one point the line became a streak of

sparks, ending in a snowdrift at the bottom of a crevasse. But a hand thrust up

through the snow held the smoking embers of the torch, and the wind, driven by

the anger of the gods, and with a sense of humour of its own, whipped the flame

back into life ... And, after that, it never died.

The end of the story began high above the world, but got lower and lower as it

circled down towards the ancient and modern city of Ankh-Morpork, where, it was

said, anything could be bought and sold - and if they didn’t have what you wanted

they could steal it for you.

Some of them could even dream it...

The creature now seeking out a particular building below was a trained Pointless

Albatross and, by the standards of the world, was not particularly unusual.*

(*Compared to, say, the Republican Bees, who committeed rather than swarmed

and tended to stay in the hive a lot.) It was, though, pointless. It spent its entire

life in a series of lazy journeys between the Rim and the Hub, and where was the

point in that?

This one was more or less tame. Its beady mad eye spotted where, for reasons

entirely beyond its comprehension, anchovies could be found. And someone

would remove this uncomfortable cylinder from its leg. It seemed a pretty good

deal to the albatross and from this it can be deduced that these albatrosses are, if

not completely pointless, at least rather dumb.

Not at all like humans, therefore.

Flight has been been said to be one of the great dreams of Mankind. In fact it

merely harks back to Man’s ancestors, whose greatest dream was of falling off the

branch. In any case, other great dreams of Mankind have included the one about

being chased by huge boots with teeth. And no one says that one has to make

sense.

Three busy hours later Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, was stand-

ing in the main hall of Unseen University, and he was impressed. The wizards,

once they understood the urgency of a problem, and then had lunch, and argued

about the pudding, could actually work quite fast.

Their method of finding a solution, as far as the Patrician could see, was by

creative hubbub. If the question was, What is the best spell for turning a book of

poetry into a frog?”, then the one tiling they would not do was look in any book

with a title like Major Amphibian Spells in a Literary Environment: A Comparison.

That would, somehow, be cheating. They would argue about it instead, standing

around a blackboard, seizing the chalk from one another and rubbing out bits of

what the current chalk-holder was writing before he’d finished the other end of

the sentence. Somehow, though, it all seemed to work.

Now something stood in the centre of the hall. It looked, to the arts-educated

Patrician, like a big magnifying glass surrounded by rubbish.

“Technically, my lord, an omniscope can see anywhere.” said Arch chancellor

Ridcully, who was technically the head of All Known Wizardry.*(*That is, all those

wizards who knew Archchancellor Ridcully, and were prepared to be led.)

“Really? Remarkable.”

“Anywhere and any time.” Ridcully went on, apparently not impressed himself.

“How extremely useful.”

“Yes, everyone says that,” said Ridcully, kicking the floor morosely. “The trouble

is, because the blasted thing can see everywhere, it’s practically impossible to get

it to see anywhere. At least, anywhere worth seeing. And you’d be amazed at how

many places there are in the universe. And times, too.”

“Twenty past one, for example.” said the Patrician.

“Among others, indeed. Would you care to have a look, my lord?” Lord Vetinari

advanced cautiously and peered into the big round glass. He frowned. “All I can

see is what’s on the other side of it,” he said.

“All, that’s because it’s set to here and now, sir.” said a young wizard who was

still adjusting the device.

“Oh, I see? said the Patrician. “We have these at the palace, in fact. We call

them win-dows?

“Well, if I do this? said the wizard, and did something to the rim of the glass, “it

looks the other way.” Lord Vetinari looked into his own face. “And these we call

mir-rors? he said, as if explaining to a child.

“I think not, sir.” said the wizard. “It takes a moment to realise what you’re

seeing. It helps if you hold up your hand - -”

Lord Vetinari gave him a severe look, but essayed a little wave. “Oh. How

curious. What is your name, young man?”

“Ponder Stibbons. sir. The new Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, sir. You see,

sir. the trick isn’t to build an omniscope because, after all, that’s just a

development of the old-fashioned crystal ball. It’s to get it to see what you want.

It’s like tuning a string, and if—”

“Sorry, what applied magic?” said the Patrician.

“Inadvisably, sir.” said Ponder smoothly, as if hoping that he could avoid the

problem by driving straight through it. “Anyway ... I think we can get it to the right

area, sir. The power drain is considerable: we may have to sacrifice another

gerbil.”

The wizards began to gather around the device.

“Can you see into the future?” said Lord Vetinari.

“In theory yes, sir,” said Ponder. “But that would be highly ... well, inadvisable,

you see, because initial studies indicate that the fact of observation would

collapse the waveform in phase space.”

Not a muscle moved on the Patrician’s face.

“Pardon me, I’m a little out of date on faculty staff.” he said. Are you the one who

has to take the dried frog pills?”

“No, sir. That’s the Bursar, sir,” said Ponder. “He has to have them because he’s

insane, sir.”

“Ah,” said Lord Vetinari. and now he did have an expression. It was that of a

man resolutely refraining from saying what was on his mind.

“What Mr.Stibbons means, my lord,” said the Archchancellor, “is that there are

billions and billions of futures that, er, sort of exist, d’yer see? They’re all... the

possible shapes of the future. But apparently the first one you actually look at is

the one that becomes the future. It might not be one you’d like. Apparently it’s all

to do with the Uncertainty Principle.”

“And that is ... ?”

“I’m not sure. Mr.Stibbons is the one who knows about that sort of thing.”

An orangutan ambled past, carrying an extremely large number of books under

each arm. Lord Vetinari looked at the hoses that snaked from the omniscope and

out through the open door and across the lawn to ... what was it? ... the High

Energy Magic building?

He remembered the old days, when wizards had been gaunt and edgy and full

of guile. They wouldn’t have allowed an Uncertainty Principle to exist for any

length of time; if you weren’t certain, they’d say, what were you doing wrong?

What you were uncertain of could kill you.

The omniscope flickered and showed a snowfield, with black mountains in the

distance. The wizard called Ponder Stibbons appeared to be very pleased with

this.

I thought you said you could find him with this thing?” said Vetinari to the

Archchancellor.

Ponder Stibbons looked up. “Do we have something that he has owned? Some

personal item he has left lying around?” he said. “We could put it in the morphic

resonator, connect that up to the omniscope and it’ll home in on him like a shot.”

“Whatever happened to the magic circles and dribbly candles?” said Lord

Vetinari.

“Oh, they’re for when we’re not in a hurry, sir.” said Ponder.

“Cohen the Barbarian is not known for leaving things lying around. I fear,” said

the Patrician. “Bodies, perhaps. All we know is that he is heading for Cori Celesti.”

“The mountain at the Hub of the world, sir? Why?”

“I was hoping you would tell me, Mr.Stibbons. That’s why I’m here?

The Librarian ambled past again, with another load of books. Another response

of the wizards, when faced with a new and unique situation, was to look through

their libraries to see if it had ever happened before. This was, Lord Vetinari

reflected, a good survival trait. It meant that in times of danger you spent the day

sitting very quietly in a building with very thick walls.

He looked again at the piece of paper in his hand. Why were people so stupid?

One sentence caught his eye: “He says the last hero ought to return what the first

hero stole.”

And, of course, everyone knew what the first hero stole.

The gods play games with the fate of men. Not complex ones, obviously,

because gods lack patience.

Cheating is part of the rules. And gods play hard. To lose all believers is, for a

god, the end. But a believer who survives the game gains honour and extra belief.

Who wins with the most believers, lives.

Believers can include other gods, of course. Gods believe in belief.

There were always many games going on in Dunmanifestin, the abode of die

gods on Cori Celesti. It looked, from outside, like a crowded city.*(*Few religions

are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of

Revelation (ch. XXI, v.l6) gives it as a cube 12,000 furlongs on a side. This is

somewhat less than 500,000,000.000,000,000,000 cubic feet. Even allowing that

the Heavenly Host and other essential services take up at least two thirds of this

spate, this leaves about one million cubic feet of space for each human

occupant-assuming that every creature that could be called ‘human’ is allowed in,

and that the human race eventually totals a thousand times the number of

humans alive up until now. This is such a generous amount of space that it

suggests that room has also been provided for some alien races or - a happy

thought - that pets are allowed.) Not all gods lived there, many of them being

bound to a particular country or in the case of the smaller ones, even one tree.

But it was a Good Address. It was where you hung your metaphysical equivalent

of the shiny brass plate, like those small discreet buildings in the smarter areas of

major cities which nevertheless appear to house one hundred and fifty lawyers

and accountants, presumably on some sort of shelving.

The city’s domestic appearance was because, while people are influenced by

gods, so gods are influenced by people.

Most gods were people-shaped: people don’t have much imagination, on the

whole. Even Offler the Crocodile God was only crocodile-headed. Ask people to

imagine an annual god and they will, basically, come up with the idea of someone

in a really bad mask. Men have been much better at inventing demons, which is

why there are so many.

Above the wheel of die world, the gods played on. They sometimes forgot what

happened if you let a pawn get all the way up the board.

It took a little longer for the rumour to spread around the city, but in twos and

threes the leaders of the great Guilds hurried into the University.

Then the ambassadors picked up the news. Around the city the big semaphore

towers faltered in their endless task of exporting market prices to the world, sent

the signal to clear the line for high-priority emergency traffic, and then clack’d the

little packets of doom to chancelleries and castles across the continent.

They were in code, of course. If you have news about the end of the world, you

don’t want everyone to know.

Lord Vetinari stared along the table. A lot had been happening in the past few

hours.

“If I may recap, then, ladies and gentlemen.” he said, as the hubbub died away,

“according to the authorities in Hunghung, the capital of the Agatean Empire, the

Emperor Ghengiz Cohen, formerly known to the world as Cohen the Barbarian, is

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheLastHeroTerryPratchettTheplacewherethestoryhappenedwasaworldonthebackoffourelephantsperchedontheshellofagiantturtle.That’stheadvantageofspace.It’sbigenoughtohold,practicallyanything,andso,eventually,itdoes.Peoplethinkthatitisstrangetohaveaturtletenthousandmileslongandanelephantmorethan,twothousan...

展开>> 收起<<

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 27 - The Last Hero.pdf

共96页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 27 - The Last Hero

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: