Where there is personality, there is discord. Did you not just use the singular pronoun, ‘my’? Not developing a personality, are you? One said, guiltily, Who? Us? One said. One said, Then we are agreed? 6 One, who seemed to have been thinking about something, said, Just one moment. One said, Besides, sometimes he wonders about his job. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people? One said, Got a crush on them, sort of thing? One said, in a voice that would have been even chillier if it was not already at absolute zero, No. One said, He has worked inefficiently? One said, No. Where you get personality, you get irregularities. It said this with a certain satisfaction. Can it be done? One said, It will have to be done. They just changed reality so that they had spoken. They were in conversation without speaking. They might be numbered among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosycheeked about them. Exactly what they were can’t be described in normal language.
Three grey figures floated just above it. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you’d be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away. But it is in fact exactly the opposite of a clock, and the biggest hand goes around just once. And, indeed, in the sky there is a clock, and the ticking of freshly minted seconds flows out from it. There is a ticking, such as might be made by a clock. There’s an ox roast afterwards, and it’s generally considered a nice day out for all the family. There, the men dance on the first day of spring, backwards and forwards, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping. It’s a small village high in the Ramtop Mountains, where the big and simple secret is handed down across the generations. And even there, only in one place have they got it right. Except on the Discworld, which is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which travel through space on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the world turtle. It is danced innocently by raggedy-bearded young mathematicians to an inexpert accordion rendering of “Mrs Widgery’s Lodger” and ruthlessly by such as the Ninja Morris Men of New Ankh, who can do strange and terrible things with a simple handkerchief and a bell. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep. It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it’s springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. REAPER MAN By Terry Pratchett The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.
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