Eric (Discworld #9) 8

“Lots?” said Eric. “I thought there was only one.”

“Oh, no. There's masses of them,” said the creator, beginning to fade away. “That's quantum mechanics for you, see. You don't do it once and have done. No, they keep on branching off. Multiple choice they call it, it's like painting the - painting the - painting something very big that you have to keep on painting, sort of thing. It's all very well saying you just have to change one little detail, but which one, that's the real bugger. Well, nice to have met you. If you need any extra work, you know, an extra moon or something - ”

“Hey!”

The creator reappeared, his eyebrows raised in polite surprise.

“What happens now?” said Rincewind.

“Now? Well, I imagine there'll be some gods along soon. They don't wait long to move in, you know. Like flies around a - flies around a - like flies. They tend to be a bit highspirited to start with, but they soon settle down. I suppose they take care of all the people, ekcetra.” The creator leaned forward. “I've never been good at doing people. Never seem to get the arms and legs right.” He vanished.

They waited.

“I think he's really gone this time,” said Eric, after a while. “What a nice man.”

“You certainly understand a lot more about why the world is like it is after talking to him,” said Rincewind.

“What're quantum mechanics?”

“I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.”

Rincewind looked at the egg and cress sandwich, still in his hand. There was still no mayonnaise in it, and the bread was soggy, but it would be thousands of years before there was another one. There had to be the dawn of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the evolution of the breadknife from its primitive flint ancestry, the development of dairy technology - and, if there was any desire to make a proper job of it, the cultivation of olive trees, pepper plants, salt pans, vinegar fermentation processes and the techniques of elementary food chemistry - before the world would see another on like it. It was unique, a little white triangle full of anachronisms, lost and all alone in an unfriendly world,

He bit it anyway. It wasn't very nice.

“What I don't understand,” said Eric, “is why we are here.”

“I take it that isn't a philosophical question,” said Rincewind, “I take it you mean: why are we here at the dawn of creation on this beach which has hardly been used?”

“Yes. That's what I meant.”

Rincewind sat down on a rock and sighed. “I think it's pretty obvious, isn't it?” he said. “You wanted to live forever.”

“I didn't say anything about travelling in time,” said Eric. “I was very clear about it so there'd be no tricks.”

“There isn't a trick. The wish is trying to be helpful. I mean, it's pretty obvious when you think about it. `Forever` means the entire span of space and time. Forever. For Ever. See?”

“You mean you have to sort of start at Square One?” “Precisely.” “But that's no good! It's going to be years before there's anyone else around!” “Centuries,” corrected Rincewind gloomily. "Millennia. Iains. And then there's going to

be all kinds of wars and monsters and stuff. Most of history is pretty appalling, when

you look hard at it. Or even not very hard.“ ”But what I meant was, I just wanted to go on living for ever from now,“ said Eric frantically. ”I mean, from then. I mean, look at this place. No girls. No people. Nothing to do on Saturday nights..."

“It won't even have any Saturday nights for thousands of years,” said Rincewind. “Just nights.” “You must take me back at once,” said Eric. “I order it. Avaunt!” “You say that one more time and I will give you a thick ear,” said Rincewind. “But all you have to do is snap your fingers!” “It won't work. You've had your three wishes. Sorry.”

“What shall I do?” “Well, if you see anything crawl out of the sea and try to breathe, you could try telling it not to bother.”

“You think this is funny, don't you?” “It is rather amusing, since you mention it,” said Rincewind, his face expressionless. “The joke's going to be wearing pretty thin over the years, then,” said Eric.

“What?”

“Well, you're not going to go anywhere, are you? You'll have to stay with me.”

“Nonsense, I'll - ” Rincewind looked around desperately. I'll what? He thought.

The waves rolled peacefully up the beach, not very strongly at the moment because they were still feeling their way. The first high tide was coming in, cautiously. There was no tideline, no streaky line of old seaweed and shells to give it some idea of what was expected of it. The air had the clean, fresh smell of air that has yet to know the effusions of a forest floor or the ins and outs of a ruminant's digestive system.

Rincewind had grown up in Ankh-Morpork. He liked air that had been around a bit, had got to know people, had been lived in.

“We've got to get back,” he said urgently.

“That's what I've been saying,” said Eric, with strained patience.

Rincewind took another bite of the sandwich. He'd looked death in the face many times, or more precisely Death had looked him in the back of his rapidly-retreating head many times, and suddenly the prospect of living forever didn't appeal. There were of course great questions he might learn the answer to, such as how life evolved and all the rest of it, but looked at as a way of spending all your spare time for the next infinity it wasn't a patch on a quiet evening strolling through the streets of Ankh.

Still, he'd acquired an ancestor. That was something. Not everyone had an ancestor. What would his ancestor have done in a situation like this?

He wouldn't have been here.

Well, yes, of course, but apart from that, he would have - he would have used his fine military mind to consider the tools available, that's what he would have done.

He had: item, one half-eaten egg and cress sandwich. No help there. He threw it away.

He had: item, himself. He drew a tick in the sand. He wasn't certain what use he could be, but he could come back to that later.

He had: item, Eric. Thirteen-year-old demonologist and acne attack ground zero.

That seemed to be about it.

He stared at the clean, fresh sand for a while, doodling in it.

Then he said, quietly: “Eric. Come here a moment...”

The waves were a lot stronger now. They had really got the hang of the tide thing, and were venturing a little ebb and flow.

Astfgl materialised in a puff of blue smoke.

“Aha!” he said, but this fell rather flat because there was no-one to hear it.

He looked down. There were footprints in the sand. Hundreds of them. They ran backwards and forwards, as if something had been frantically searching, and then vanished.

He leaned nearer. It was hard to make out, what with all the footprints and the effects of the wind and the tide, but just on the edge of the encroaching surf were the unmistakable signs of a magic circle.

Astfgl said a swearword that fused the sand around him into glass, and vanished.

The tide got on with things. Further down the beach the last surge poured into a hollow in the rocks, and the new sun beamed down on the soaking remains of a half-eaten egg and cress sandwich. Tidal action turned it over. Thousands of bacteria suddenly found themselves in the midst of a taste explosion, and started to breed like mad.

If only there had been some mayonnaise, life might have turned out a whole lot different. More piquant, and perhaps with a little extra cream in it.

Travelling by magic always had major drawbacks. There was the feeling that your stomach was lagging behind. And your mind filled up with terror because the destination was always a little uncertain. It wasn't that you could come out anywhere. “Anywhere” represented a very restricted range of choices compared to the kind of places magic could transport you to. The actual travelling was easy. It was achieving a destination which, for example, allowed you to survive in all four dimensions at once that took the real effort.

In fact the scope for error was so huge it seemed something of an anti-climax to emerge in a fairly ordinary, sandy-floored cavern.

It contained, on the far wall, a door.

There was a forbidding door. It looked as though its designer had studied all the cell doors he could find and had then gone away and produced a version for, as it were, full visual orchestra. It was more of a portal. Some ancient and probably fearful warning was etched over its crumbling arch, but it was destined to remain unread because over it someone else had pasted a bright red-and-white notice which read: “You Don't Have To Be `Damned` To Work Here, But It Helps!!!”

Rincewind squinted up at the notice.

“Of course I can read it,” he said. “I just don't happen to believe it.”

“Multiple exclamation marks,” he went on, shaking his head, “are a sure sign of a diseased mind.”

He looked behind him. The glowing outlines of Eric's magic circle faded and winked out.

“I'm not being picky, you understand,” he said. “It's just that I thought you said you could get us back to Ankh. This isn't Ankh. I can tell by the little details, like the flickering red shadows and the distant screaming. In Ankh the screaming is usually much closer,” he added.

“I think I did very well to get it to work at all,” said Eric, bridling. “You're not supposed to be able to run magic circles in reverse. In theory it means you stay in the circle and reality moves around you. I think I did very well. You see,” he added, his voice suddenly vibrating with enthusiasm, “if you rewrite the source codex and, this is the difficult bit, you route it through a high-level - ”

“Yes, yes, very clever, what will you people think of next,” said Rincewind. “The only thing is, we're, I think it's quite possible that we're in Hell.”

“Oh?”

Eric's lack of reaction made Rincewind curious.

“You know,” he added. “The place with all the demons in it?”

“Oh?”

“Not a good place to be, it's generally felt,” said Rincewind.

Rincewind thought about this. He wasn't, when you got right down to it, quite sure what it was that demons did to you. But he did know what humans did to you, and after a lifetime in Ankh-Morpork this place could turn out to be an improvement. Warmer, at any rate.

He looked at the door-knocker. It was black and horrible, but that didn't matter because it was also tied up so that it couldn't be used. Beside it, with all the signs of being installed recently by someone who didn't know what they were doing and didn't want to do it, was a button set into the splintered woodwork. Rincewind gave it an experimental prod.

The sound it produced might once have been a popular tune, possibly even one written by a skilled composer to whom had been vouchsafed, for a brief ecstatic moment, the music of the spheres. Now, however, it just went bing-BONG-ding-DONG.

And it would be a lazy use of language to say that the thing that answered the door was a nightmare. Nightmares are usually rather daft things and it's very hard to explain to a listener what was so dreadful about your socks coming alive or giant carrots jumping out of hedgerows. This thing was the kind of terrifying thing that could only be created by someone sitting down and thinking horrible thoughts very clearly. It had more tentacles than legs, but fewer arms than heads.