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The deacon had drunk water from Brutha’s cupped hands. But there was a switched-off quality about him. He walked, he drank, he breathed. Or something did. His body did. The dark eyes opened, but appeared to be looking at nothing that Brutha could see. There was no sense that anyone was looking out through them. Brutha was certain that if he walked away, Vorbis would sit on the cracked flagstones until he very gently fell over. Vorbis’ body was present, but the whereabouts of his mind was probably not locatable on any normal atlas.
It was just that, here and now and suddenly, Brutha felt so alone that even Vorbis was good company.
“Why do you bother with him? He’s had thousands of people killed!”
“Yes, but perhaps he thought you wanted it.”
“I never said I wanted that.”
“You didn’t care,” said Brutha.
“But I—”
“Shut up!”
Om’s mouth opened in astonishment.
“You could have helped people,” said Brutha. “But all you did was stamp around and roar and try to make people afraid. Like…like a man hitting a donkey with a stick. But people like Vorbis made the stick so good, that’s all the donkey ends up believing in.”
“That could use some work, as a parable,” said Om sourly.
“This is real life I’m talking about!”
“It’s not my fault if people misuse the—”
“It is! It has to be! If you muck up people’s minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do is all your fault!”
Brutha glared at the tortoise, and then stamped off toward the pile of rubble that dominated one end of the ruined temple. He rummaged around in it.
“What are you looking for?”
“We’ll need to carry water,” said Brutha.
“There won’t be anything,” said Om. “People just left. The land ran out and so did the people. They took everything with them. Why bother to look?”
Brutha ignored him. There was something under the rocks and sand.
“Why worry about Vorbis?” Om whined. “In a hundred years’ time, he’ll be dead anyway. We’ll all be dead.”
Brutha tugged at the piece of curved pottery. It came away, and turned out to be about two-thirds of a wide bowl, broken right across. It had been almost as wide as Brutha’s outstretched arms, but had been too broken for anyone to loot.
It was useful for nothing. But it had once been useful for something. There were embossed figures around its rim. Brutha peered at them, for want of something to distract himself, while Om’s voice droned on in his head.
The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god). In the center of the bowl was a larger figure, obviously important, some kind of god they were doing it for…
“What?” he said.
“I said, in a hundred years’ time we’ll all be dead.”
Brutha stared at the figures around the bowl. No one knew who their god was, and they were gone. Lions slept in the holy places and—
—Chilopoda aridius, the common desert centipede, his memory resident library supplied—
—scuttled beneath the altar.
“Yes,” said Brutha. “We will.”
He raised the bowl over his head, and turned. Om ducked into his shell.
“But here—” Brutha gritted his teeth as he staggered under the weight. “And now—”
He threw the bowl. It landed against the altar. Fragments of ancient pottery fountained up, and clattered down again. The echoes boomed around the temple.
“—we are alive!”
Goodbye, Sir Terry Pratchett, 1948-2015
Thing of Things 
Ave atque vale.
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“I ain’t been vampired. You’ve been Weatherwaxed.”
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No! Argh.
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hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
hurts
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;_;
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I’m literally crying right now.
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Such a beautiful man. I’m glad that his suffering is over, and that he remained himself until the end.
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“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.”
-Terry Pratchett, “Reaper Man”
The sun goes down upon the Ankh,
And slowly, softly fades –
Across the Drum; the Royal Bank;
The River-Gate; the Shades.
A stony circle’s closed to elves;
And here, where lines are blurred,
Between the stacks of books on shelves,
A quiet ‘Ook’ is heard.
A copper steps the city-street
On paths he’s often passed;
The final march; the final beat;
The time to rest at last.
He gives his badge a final shine,
And sadly shakes his head –
While Granny lies beneath a sign
That says: ‘I aten’t dead.’
The Luggage shifts in sleep and dreams;
It’s now. The time’s at hand.
For where it’s always night, it seems,
A timer clears of sand.
And so it is that Death arrives,
When all the time has gone…
But dreams endure, and hope survives,
And Discworld carries on.
Source
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First Banks, now Pratchett. The irrational part of my brain wonders if I shouldn’t just stop loving any authors, in hopes that the universe stops filling out its hit list with them.
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If this is brilliant British sci-fi/fantasy authors taken from us too early, then it would be first Adams, I think.
Which is kind of ironic, from a biblical perspective, especially as all 3 were more or less atheists.
I AM COMING FOR YOU NEXT, GAIMAN.
(I hope not)
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Banks and Adams were explicit, open, declared atheists, so the biblical perspective is neither here nor there.
Not sure about Terry Pratchett, though.
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@kalvarnsen his most famous quote on the subject was:
“There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.”
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It’s selfish, and I feel bad, but my first thought is always for myself – sadness that there are not going to be any more books, especially with Patrick O’Brian, George MacDonald Frasier, and now Pratchett.
I think all my favorite quotes and moments are from Thief of Time, but it’s such an interwoven piece that I don’t know that I can pick any one line.
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“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
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