Sourcery by Terry Pratchett
THERE ARE PLACES WHERE EVEN MAGIC MAY NOT GO. (S)
NOTHING IS FINAL. NOTHING IS ABSOLUTE. EXCEPT ME, OF COURSE. (S)
‘I meant,’ said Iplsore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?’
Death thought about it.
‘CATS,’ he said eventually, ‘CATS ARE NICE.’ (S)
YOU’RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said.
That’s what being alive is all about. (S)
When it comes to glittering objects, wizards have all the taste and self-control of a deranged magpie. (S)
… senior wizards tended to look upon actual magic as a bit beneath them. They tended to prefer administration, which was safer and nearly as much fun, and also big dinners. (S)
A magical accident in the Library, which as has already been indicated is not a place for your average rubber-stamp-and-Dewey-decimal employment, had some time ago turned the Librarian into an orang-utan. He had since resisted all efforts to turn him back. He liked the handy long arms, the prehensile toes and the right to scratch himself in public, but most of all he liked the way all the big questions of existence had suddenly resolved themselves into a vague interest in where his next banana was coming from. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the despair and nobility of the human condition. It was just that as far as he was concerned you could stuff it. (S)
There was a lot of beer about. Here and there red-faced wizards were happily singing ancient drinking songs which involved a lot of knee-slapping and cries of ‘Ho!’ The only possible excuse for this sort of thing is that wizards are celibate, and have to find their amusement where they can. (S)
…to say that wizards are healthily competitive by nature is like saying that piranhas are naturally a little peckish. (S)
It takes more than a bit of magic and someone being blown to smoke in front of him to put a wizard off his food. (S)
In some parts of the city curiosity didn’t just kill the cat, it threw it in the river with lead weights tied to its feet. (S)
… ‘to call his understanding of magic theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice.’ (S)
The vermine is a small black and white relative of the lemming, found in the cold Hublandish regions. Its skin is rare and highly valued, especially by the vermine itself; the selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it. (S)
The reason that wizards didn’t rule the Disc was quite simple. Hand any two wizards a piece of rope and they would instinctively pull in opposite directions. (S)
It may be quite tough at the top, and it is probably even tougher at the bottom, but halfway up it’s so tough you could use it for horseshoes. By then all the no-hopers, the lazy, the silly and the downright unlucky have been weeded out, the field’s cleared, and every wizard stands alone and surrounded by mortal enemies on every side. (S)
Spelter thought: patronage. He’d heard the term used, though never within the University, and he knew it meant getting those above you to give you a leg up. Of course, no wizard would normally dream of giving a colleague a leg up unless it was in order to catch them on the hop. (S)
This was the type of thief that could steal the initiative, the moment and the words right out of your mouth. (S)
‘Sorry. I don’t know why, but the prospect of certain death in unknown lands at the claws of exotic monsters isn’t for me. I’ve tried it, and couldn’t get the hang of it. Each to their own, that’s what I say, and I was cut out for boredom.’ (S)
The subject of wizards and sex is a complicated one, but as has already been indicated it does, in essence, boil down to this: when it comes to wine, women and song, wizards are allowed to get drunk and croon as much as they like. (S)
‘Quick, you must come with me,’ she said. ‘You’re in great danger!’
‘Why?’
‘Because I will kill you if you don’t.’ (S)
‘Why are they chasing you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Oh, come on! There must be a reason!’
‘Oh, there’s plenty of reasons. I just don’t know which one.’ (S)
The Patrician’s personal guard was not known for its responsive approach to community policing, preferring to cut bits off instead. Among the things they took a dim view of was, well, basically, people being in the same universe. (S)
‘You’re safe now.’
‘What, you mean I’m all alone with a female homicidal maniac?’ said Rincewind. ‘Fine.’ (S)
He opened his eyes. The girl was wearing a demure white lace dress with fetching puffed sleeves. He opened his mouth. He realised with absolute clarity that up until now the trouble he had been in was simple, modest and nothing he couldn’t talk his way out of given a decent chance or, failing that, a running start. (S)
Down these mean streets a man must go, he thought. And along some of them he will break into a run. (S)
The Troll’s Head was a cesspit of a different colour. Its customers, if they reformed, tidied themselves up and generally improved their image out of all recognition might, just might, aspire to be considered the utter dregs of humanity. And in the Shades, a dreg is a dreg. (S)
‘Rincewind, I’ve known you for an hour and I’m astonished you’ve lived even that long!’
‘Yes, but I have, haven’t I? I’ve got a sort of talent for it. Ask anyone. I’m an addict.’
‘Addicted to what?’
‘Life. I got hooked on it at an early age and I don’t want to give it up...’ (S)
Rincewind sagged. ‘Why me?’ he moaned.
For the good of the University. For the honour of wizardry. For the sake of the world. For your heart’s desire. And I’ll freeze you alive if you don’t.
Rincewind breathed a sigh almost of relief. He wasn’t good on bribes, or cajolery, or appeals to his better nature. But threats, now, threats were familiar. He knew where he stood with threats. (S)
The study of genetics on the Disc had failed at an early stage, when wizards tried the experimental crossing of such well known subjects as fruit flies and sweet peas. Unfortunately they didn’t quite grasp the fundamentals, and the resultant offspring - a sort of green bean thing that buzzed - led a short sad life before being eaten by a passing spider. (S)
‘And is he a fair and just ruler?’
Carding thought about it. The Patrician’s spy network was said to be superb. ‘I would say,’ he said carefully, ‘that he is unfair and unjust, but scrupulously even-handed. He is unfair and unjust to everyone, without fear or favour’. (S)
Just by looking at him you could tell he was the sort of man you’d expect to keep a white cat, and caress it idly while sentencing people to death in a piranha tank; and you’d hazard for good measure that he probably collected rare thin porcelain, turning it over and over in his blue-white fingers while distant screams echoed from the depths of the dungeons. You wouldn’t put it past him to use the word ‘exquisite’ and have thin lips. He looked the kind of person who, when they blink, you mark it off on the calendar.
Practically none of this was in fact the case…. (S)
He wasn’t any good at magic, but he’d had a hundred per cent success at staying alive up to now and didn’t want to spoil the record. All he needed to do was to learn how to swim in the time it took to dive into the sea. It was worth a try. (S)
‘This is a robe,’ said Rincewind quickly. ‘And you’d better watch out, because I’m a wizard.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Lay a finger on me, and you’ll make me wish you hadn’t. I warn you.’ (S)
It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting. (S)
It was said that everything in Ankh-Morpork was for sale except for the beer and the women, both of which one merely hired. (S)
No-one knows why smoking boots always remain, no matter how big the explosion. It seems to be just one of those things. (S)
Spiked iron balls, broadswords and large heavy sticks with nails in were generally considered pretty fearsome weapons, but they were nothing at all compared to twenty years suddenly applied with considerable force to the back of the head. (S)
Of course, Ankh-Morpork’s citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure in any case. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed. (S)
‘My father always said that death is but a sleep,’ said Conina.
‘Yes, the hat told me that,’ said Rincewind, as they turned down a narrow, crowded street between white adobe walls. ‘But the way I see it, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning.’ (S)
What he wanted was a couple of cool beers, a cold bath and a change of clothing; it probably wouldn’t make him feel better, but it would at least make feeling awful more enjoyable. (S)
The Hashishim, who derived their name from the vast quantities of hashish they consumed, were unique among vicious killers in being both deadly and, at the same time, inclined to giggle, groove to interesting patterns of light and shade on their terrible knife blades and, in extreme cases, fall over. (S)
He had the look of someone who could think his way through a corkscrew without bending… (S)
Life can be very difficult subatomic particle in a great big universe. (S)
It would be mistaken to say the Luggage was nowhere to be seen. It was somewhere to be seen, it was just that the place wasn’t anywhere near Rincewind. (S)
Abrim laughed. It’s wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it. (S)
In a truly magical universe everything has its opposite. For example, there’s anti-light. That’s not the same as darkness, because darkness is merely the absence of light. Anti-light is what you get if you pass through darkness and out the other side. On the same basis, a state of knurdness isn’t like sobriety. By comparison, sobriety is like having a bath in cotton wool. Knurdness strips away all illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. Then after they’ve screamed a bit, they make sure they never get knurd again. (S)
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met. (S)
The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn’t do. (S)
… Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind would never quite forget to the end of his life. ‘Erm,’ he said, ‘excuse me...’ (S)
‘Talent just defines what you do,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t define what you are. Deep down, I mean. When you know what you are, you can do anything.’ (S)
In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find… (S)
‘…Death walks abroad,’ said Nijel.
‘Abroad I don’t mind, said Rincewind. ‘They’re all foreigners. It’s Death walking around here I’m not looking forward to.’ (S)
‘If we get a chance,’ whispered Rincewind to Nijel, ‘we run, right?’
‘Where to?’
‘From,’ said Rincewind, ‘the important word is from.’ (S)
‘I get vertigo just listening to tall stories.’ (S)
‘I’m not going to ride on a magic carpet!’ he hissed. ‘I’m afraid of grounds!’
‘You mean heights,’ said Conina. ‘And stop being silly.’
‘I know what I mean! It’s the grounds that kill you.’ (S)
‘I’ve often wondered what being poor was like.’
‘You’re going to get a huge opportunity to find out.’
‘Will I need training?’
‘It comes naturally,’ said Rincewind. ‘You pick it up as you go along.’ (S)
Many people who had got to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner’s canary and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained. (S)
… the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt. (S)
‘Poor I don’t mind,’ said the Seriph. ‘It’s sobriety that is giving me difficulties.’ (S)
Wizards don’t like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like ‘cl’. (S)
The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Lyn Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher*, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.
*He always argued that he was. (S)
He explained – although ‘explained’ is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length – that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it, because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete. (S)
A wizard never had friends, at least not friends who were wizards. It needed a different word. Ah yes, that was it. Enemies. But a very different class of enemies. Gentlemen. (S)
The trouble with gods was that if they didn’t like something they didn’t just drop hints … (S)
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,’ said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. ‘Been completely at a loss my whole life.’ He hesitated. ‘I think it’s called being human …’ (S)
The Librarian spun around on his bottom a few times, a sure sign of deep thought. (S)
Silence gradually reclaimed the Library. Silence drifted around the remains of a hat, heavily battered and frayed and charred around the edges, that had been placed with some ceremony in a niche in the wall. No matter how far a wizard goes, he will always come back for his hat.
Silence filled the University in the same way that air fills a hole. Night spread across the Disk like plum jam, or possibly blackberry preserve.
But there would be a morning. There would always be another morning. (S)
NOTHING IS FINAL. NOTHING IS ABSOLUTE. EXCEPT ME, OF COURSE. (S)
‘I meant,’ said Iplsore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?’
Death thought about it.
‘CATS,’ he said eventually, ‘CATS ARE NICE.’ (S)
YOU’RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said.
That’s what being alive is all about. (S)
When it comes to glittering objects, wizards have all the taste and self-control of a deranged magpie. (S)
… senior wizards tended to look upon actual magic as a bit beneath them. They tended to prefer administration, which was safer and nearly as much fun, and also big dinners. (S)
A magical accident in the Library, which as has already been indicated is not a place for your average rubber-stamp-and-Dewey-decimal employment, had some time ago turned the Librarian into an orang-utan. He had since resisted all efforts to turn him back. He liked the handy long arms, the prehensile toes and the right to scratch himself in public, but most of all he liked the way all the big questions of existence had suddenly resolved themselves into a vague interest in where his next banana was coming from. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the despair and nobility of the human condition. It was just that as far as he was concerned you could stuff it. (S)
There was a lot of beer about. Here and there red-faced wizards were happily singing ancient drinking songs which involved a lot of knee-slapping and cries of ‘Ho!’ The only possible excuse for this sort of thing is that wizards are celibate, and have to find their amusement where they can. (S)
…to say that wizards are healthily competitive by nature is like saying that piranhas are naturally a little peckish. (S)
It takes more than a bit of magic and someone being blown to smoke in front of him to put a wizard off his food. (S)
In some parts of the city curiosity didn’t just kill the cat, it threw it in the river with lead weights tied to its feet. (S)
… ‘to call his understanding of magic theory abysmal is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice.’ (S)
The vermine is a small black and white relative of the lemming, found in the cold Hublandish regions. Its skin is rare and highly valued, especially by the vermine itself; the selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it. (S)
The reason that wizards didn’t rule the Disc was quite simple. Hand any two wizards a piece of rope and they would instinctively pull in opposite directions. (S)
It may be quite tough at the top, and it is probably even tougher at the bottom, but halfway up it’s so tough you could use it for horseshoes. By then all the no-hopers, the lazy, the silly and the downright unlucky have been weeded out, the field’s cleared, and every wizard stands alone and surrounded by mortal enemies on every side. (S)
Spelter thought: patronage. He’d heard the term used, though never within the University, and he knew it meant getting those above you to give you a leg up. Of course, no wizard would normally dream of giving a colleague a leg up unless it was in order to catch them on the hop. (S)
This was the type of thief that could steal the initiative, the moment and the words right out of your mouth. (S)
‘Sorry. I don’t know why, but the prospect of certain death in unknown lands at the claws of exotic monsters isn’t for me. I’ve tried it, and couldn’t get the hang of it. Each to their own, that’s what I say, and I was cut out for boredom.’ (S)
The subject of wizards and sex is a complicated one, but as has already been indicated it does, in essence, boil down to this: when it comes to wine, women and song, wizards are allowed to get drunk and croon as much as they like. (S)
‘Quick, you must come with me,’ she said. ‘You’re in great danger!’
‘Why?’
‘Because I will kill you if you don’t.’ (S)
‘Why are they chasing you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Oh, come on! There must be a reason!’
‘Oh, there’s plenty of reasons. I just don’t know which one.’ (S)
The Patrician’s personal guard was not known for its responsive approach to community policing, preferring to cut bits off instead. Among the things they took a dim view of was, well, basically, people being in the same universe. (S)
‘You’re safe now.’
‘What, you mean I’m all alone with a female homicidal maniac?’ said Rincewind. ‘Fine.’ (S)
He opened his eyes. The girl was wearing a demure white lace dress with fetching puffed sleeves. He opened his mouth. He realised with absolute clarity that up until now the trouble he had been in was simple, modest and nothing he couldn’t talk his way out of given a decent chance or, failing that, a running start. (S)
Down these mean streets a man must go, he thought. And along some of them he will break into a run. (S)
The Troll’s Head was a cesspit of a different colour. Its customers, if they reformed, tidied themselves up and generally improved their image out of all recognition might, just might, aspire to be considered the utter dregs of humanity. And in the Shades, a dreg is a dreg. (S)
‘Rincewind, I’ve known you for an hour and I’m astonished you’ve lived even that long!’
‘Yes, but I have, haven’t I? I’ve got a sort of talent for it. Ask anyone. I’m an addict.’
‘Addicted to what?’
‘Life. I got hooked on it at an early age and I don’t want to give it up...’ (S)
Rincewind sagged. ‘Why me?’ he moaned.
For the good of the University. For the honour of wizardry. For the sake of the world. For your heart’s desire. And I’ll freeze you alive if you don’t.
Rincewind breathed a sigh almost of relief. He wasn’t good on bribes, or cajolery, or appeals to his better nature. But threats, now, threats were familiar. He knew where he stood with threats. (S)
The study of genetics on the Disc had failed at an early stage, when wizards tried the experimental crossing of such well known subjects as fruit flies and sweet peas. Unfortunately they didn’t quite grasp the fundamentals, and the resultant offspring - a sort of green bean thing that buzzed - led a short sad life before being eaten by a passing spider. (S)
‘And is he a fair and just ruler?’
Carding thought about it. The Patrician’s spy network was said to be superb. ‘I would say,’ he said carefully, ‘that he is unfair and unjust, but scrupulously even-handed. He is unfair and unjust to everyone, without fear or favour’. (S)
Just by looking at him you could tell he was the sort of man you’d expect to keep a white cat, and caress it idly while sentencing people to death in a piranha tank; and you’d hazard for good measure that he probably collected rare thin porcelain, turning it over and over in his blue-white fingers while distant screams echoed from the depths of the dungeons. You wouldn’t put it past him to use the word ‘exquisite’ and have thin lips. He looked the kind of person who, when they blink, you mark it off on the calendar.
Practically none of this was in fact the case…. (S)
He wasn’t any good at magic, but he’d had a hundred per cent success at staying alive up to now and didn’t want to spoil the record. All he needed to do was to learn how to swim in the time it took to dive into the sea. It was worth a try. (S)
‘This is a robe,’ said Rincewind quickly. ‘And you’d better watch out, because I’m a wizard.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Lay a finger on me, and you’ll make me wish you hadn’t. I warn you.’ (S)
It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting. (S)
It was said that everything in Ankh-Morpork was for sale except for the beer and the women, both of which one merely hired. (S)
No-one knows why smoking boots always remain, no matter how big the explosion. It seems to be just one of those things. (S)
Spiked iron balls, broadswords and large heavy sticks with nails in were generally considered pretty fearsome weapons, but they were nothing at all compared to twenty years suddenly applied with considerable force to the back of the head. (S)
Of course, Ankh-Morpork’s citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure in any case. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed. (S)
‘My father always said that death is but a sleep,’ said Conina.
‘Yes, the hat told me that,’ said Rincewind, as they turned down a narrow, crowded street between white adobe walls. ‘But the way I see it, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning.’ (S)
What he wanted was a couple of cool beers, a cold bath and a change of clothing; it probably wouldn’t make him feel better, but it would at least make feeling awful more enjoyable. (S)
The Hashishim, who derived their name from the vast quantities of hashish they consumed, were unique among vicious killers in being both deadly and, at the same time, inclined to giggle, groove to interesting patterns of light and shade on their terrible knife blades and, in extreme cases, fall over. (S)
He had the look of someone who could think his way through a corkscrew without bending… (S)
Life can be very difficult subatomic particle in a great big universe. (S)
It would be mistaken to say the Luggage was nowhere to be seen. It was somewhere to be seen, it was just that the place wasn’t anywhere near Rincewind. (S)
Abrim laughed. It’s wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it. (S)
In a truly magical universe everything has its opposite. For example, there’s anti-light. That’s not the same as darkness, because darkness is merely the absence of light. Anti-light is what you get if you pass through darkness and out the other side. On the same basis, a state of knurdness isn’t like sobriety. By comparison, sobriety is like having a bath in cotton wool. Knurdness strips away all illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. Then after they’ve screamed a bit, they make sure they never get knurd again. (S)
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met. (S)
The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn’t do. (S)
… Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind would never quite forget to the end of his life. ‘Erm,’ he said, ‘excuse me...’ (S)
‘Talent just defines what you do,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t define what you are. Deep down, I mean. When you know what you are, you can do anything.’ (S)
In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find… (S)
‘…Death walks abroad,’ said Nijel.
‘Abroad I don’t mind, said Rincewind. ‘They’re all foreigners. It’s Death walking around here I’m not looking forward to.’ (S)
‘If we get a chance,’ whispered Rincewind to Nijel, ‘we run, right?’
‘Where to?’
‘From,’ said Rincewind, ‘the important word is from.’ (S)
‘I get vertigo just listening to tall stories.’ (S)
‘I’m not going to ride on a magic carpet!’ he hissed. ‘I’m afraid of grounds!’
‘You mean heights,’ said Conina. ‘And stop being silly.’
‘I know what I mean! It’s the grounds that kill you.’ (S)
‘I’ve often wondered what being poor was like.’
‘You’re going to get a huge opportunity to find out.’
‘Will I need training?’
‘It comes naturally,’ said Rincewind. ‘You pick it up as you go along.’ (S)
Many people who had got to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner’s canary and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained. (S)
… the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt. (S)
‘Poor I don’t mind,’ said the Seriph. ‘It’s sobriety that is giving me difficulties.’ (S)
Wizards don’t like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like ‘cl’. (S)
The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Lyn Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher*, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.
*He always argued that he was. (S)
He explained – although ‘explained’ is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length – that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it, because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete. (S)
A wizard never had friends, at least not friends who were wizards. It needed a different word. Ah yes, that was it. Enemies. But a very different class of enemies. Gentlemen. (S)
The trouble with gods was that if they didn’t like something they didn’t just drop hints … (S)
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,’ said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. ‘Been completely at a loss my whole life.’ He hesitated. ‘I think it’s called being human …’ (S)
The Librarian spun around on his bottom a few times, a sure sign of deep thought. (S)
Silence gradually reclaimed the Library. Silence drifted around the remains of a hat, heavily battered and frayed and charred around the edges, that had been placed with some ceremony in a niche in the wall. No matter how far a wizard goes, he will always come back for his hat.
Silence filled the University in the same way that air fills a hole. Night spread across the Disk like plum jam, or possibly blackberry preserve.
But there would be a morning. There would always be another morning. (S)
