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– a celebration of –

Fifty Years of Pratchett

© 2023 Duleigh Lawrence-Townshend. All rights reserved. The author asserts the right to be identified as the author of this story for all portions not previously copyrighted by Terry Pratchett. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a review or commentary. If you see this story on any website other than Literotica.com, it has been copied without the author’s permission.

Fifty years ago, a young British journalist published his first book, The Carpet People and the world was never the same; it became flat, round, and smelled of turtles. Ten years later in 1981 I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club {how geeky is that?} and they sent me the new work of a little known (on this side of The Pond) British author named Terry Pratchett. The book, Strata, still has an honored location in my library, PTerry, as he was known in the infancy of the internet, a strange and mysterious realm named usenet, taught me several things in that book – people can build planets and sometimes they come out flat, Death is a cool dude, and The Broken Drum is an awesome pub {you can’t beat it}.

Two years later it was followed by The Colour of Magic, and I was hooked. I out-geeked the other geeks at the weekly Dungeons they’re actually carrying the entire world on their shoulders. They wouldn’t know a metaphor if one played Begin the Beguine using their trunk as a clarinet. The entire world and all who live there is their burden. Ten thousand miles in diameter the discworld rests on their backs, around the circumference of the disk is the eternal waterfall that is the Rimfall. At the center of the discworld is the hub, a mountain that stands ten miles in height, the name of the peak is Cori Celesti, which at the top is the palace complex named Dunmanifestin, the home of the Disc’s many gods. Most of them are completely mad.

As impressive or as unimaginable as the turtle/elephant/discworld is, what is really impressive is what follows. Behind A’Tuin trails eight newly hatched space turtles, each one carrying four infant world elephant calves bearing up a small prehistoric discworld on their shoulders. Each proto-discworld is full of volcanoes, lava and early dinosaurs. Each tiny disc world was showing signs of growing their own hub mountain and soon their tiny hub mountains will begin to spawn their very own mad little gods. In some corners of the multiverse, it’s the gods that create the planets, here it’s the other way around.

Swimming through space in trail behind their mother, the baby star turtles are entirely cute and would look right at home in a plastic dish resting under a plastic palm tree, but soon they must head out on their own into the multiverse.

______________________________________________

Date: Third of Ick, Year of the Willing Locust

Time: 23:35 (two hours, twenty five minutes before midnight)

Location: Unseen University, Ankh-Morpork

It was a dark and stormy night because that’s when the very best stories begin. Footsteps clattered through the dark and damp streets of Ankh-Morpork, the “Queen City” of the Discworld. {It’s called the “Queen porno City” because the nearest queen, Queen Arschluk of Sto Helit, had been dead for weeks and they now smell the same.} Several blocks turnwise of the river Ankh, the footsteps hurried to the Fire Brigade where foundlings are traditionally found. Sadly, the producer of those footsteps arrived at the destination and found that the Fire Brigade had burned to the ground. A despondent shadow carrying a basket looked sadly upon the charred remains of the local fire department, only Ankh-Morpork would hire an alchemist to lead the fire brigade. Someone actually thought it was a good idea to place the fire brigade under the leadership of a man whose chosen field of science is based on explosions, flames, and rancid smoke.

The storm began to pelt the city with rain and hail stones. In true Ankh-morepork fashion, the hail stones were actual stones, what self-respecting storm would waste a good piece of ice on Ankh-Morpork? And worst of all, this was one of those storms, the kind that rattled down from the Ramtop Mountains after absorbing as much magical energy as possible and now the thunder and lightning were completely out of sync and were hitting the city in random order with no relation to each other. The traveler that was viewing the remains of the Fire Brigade was suddenly assaulted by an ear-splitting roll of thunder so loud it almost knocked her over.

Once the noisy assault was over the traveler noticed the ramshackle collection of walls, windows, towers, and roofs that could only be the Unseen University, the preeminent school of wizardry on the Discworld. Another clue was that the gargoyles on the roof were all holding umbrellas. She stepped up to the only door in the wall surrounding the university campus that she saw, it was shielded from the downpour by a dilapidated portico that threatened to collapse, or at least sit down and have a cuppa and a smoke. A sudden, prolonged flash of lightning illuminated a sign {the lightning flash in question was the one that caused the blast of thunder earlier, as mentioned, the thunder and lightning were now hitting in random order} The sign read:

Libraree Drop Offf

Pleze Leeve Bookz and Ryng Bell.

The traveler placed an oilskin covered basket on the step and pulled the cord then dashed away. The sounds of her receding footsteps could still be heard when the library door opened and a long, hairy arm extended. The equally hairy hand at the end of the arm wrapped around the basket handle, lifted the basket, and drew it in. The door closed and moments later the sound of a baby crying could be heard along with a startled voice that asked the universal question, “Ook?”

֎

The head librarian of the Unseen University was an orangutan. That’s not to say that he was particularly ugly or to say that he held beliefs that would get him labeled as an ape in more advanced worlds, he was an orange haired, long armed, super strong orangutan. He was accidentally transformed from an ordinary wizard with a taste for thaumaturgical bibliothecography to an orangutan with a taste for thaumaturgical bibliothecography when one of the eight great spells was accidentally set off in the library and he was changed from a bookish professor to a bookish great ape. Ever since then, the Librarian bedava porno had resisted all efforts to reverse the spell. Having near superhuman strength, arms that were almost two yards long, and prehensile feet gave the Librarian a body that was designed for Library Sciences. All mentioned bodily features of the orangutan came in handy when wrestling aggressive tomes and combative grimoire into their assigned shelves.

For many months the Librarian and his foundling daughter lived in harmony, he found several books on child rearing in the Speculative Fiction section and applied their lessons and they seemed to work. Feeding the infant was easy; he could get anything he wanted from the university kitchen, however, his first major hurdle was what to do with the waste produced? This child could turn four fluid ounces of goat’s milk into 12 ounces of… other things. How to deal with this… The Librarian sat watching the infant sleep as he pondered the situation with a banana. For the Librarian all problems could be solved within the space of time it takes to eat one banana. If the problem isn’t solved within that period of time, it wasn’t his problem to deal with in the first place. As he finished the fruit {botanically it’s a berry but that’s someone else’s problem}, the solution to his quandary came in a flash. He grabbed one of the sleeping infant’s diapers and swung off through the stacks.

Mrs. Witlow, head housekeeper of the Unseen University, was enjoying a steaming cuppa when the Librarian strolled into her office wearing a diaper. “Oh, Doctor Worblehat, it is good to see that you have finally chosen to wear clothing.” The Librarian would normally have been taken aback that she knew his actual name {Dr. Horace Worblehat, LCC {PhD in Library Causality and Collision}} because even in human form he was rarely addressed as that.

“Ook.”

“You need more clothing? We can certainly arrange that. Whatsay a nice waist coat and…”

“Ook.”

“No waist coat. That’s fine, but we could craft a nice set of trousers and a shirt…”

“Eeek!”

“Just the nappies? If you insist…”

Shortly the Librarian headed back to the library with several dozen diapers and was plotting a method of obtaining clothing for the child. He was nearly caught one afternoon in the dining hall during third lunch.

“I say, Librarian! Why the taste for goats’ milk so suddenly?”

“Ook.”

“You don’t say,” said the Archchancellor of the University, Mustrum Ridcully. “Then why stopper the bottle with the finger from a rubber glove?”

“Ook.”

“Really! I never would have considered that! Good show, carry on.”

The Librarian knuckled his way back to the library, he got away with it this time, but the Archchancellor was on to him. He had to do something with the baby before the Archchancellor realized that something was amiss. He worked hard at keeping the child a secret, but she was growing fast and soon she was clinging on to his fur with her fingers and toes as he inventoried the books. She learned to climb before she learned to walk, but it was getting dangerous. Professor Rincewind, his former assistant and now the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography stumbled across the child who was clinging to a bookshelf one afternoon. “What is this?” he asked, pointing at the Librarian’s foster daughter with a trembling finger; brazzers the professor who traveled the entire discworld and survived everything was terrified of the child.

“Ook.”

“A gargoyle larva?”

“Ook.”

“I suppose everyone has to start somewhere.” The answer satisfied Rincewind, and luckily, he’s not curious enough to research the maturation cycles of domestic gargoyles, but he may say something to someone who is. This could be a problem.

The Librarian gave the baby a banana and sat down with a banana of his own to ponder the situation. He looked sadly at Ook, which is what he named the baby {yes, everyone knows that Ook is a boy’s name and the child is most definitely a girl but she didn’t seem to mind}, he’s got to do something. When he reached the end of the banana, the potential solution struck – L-Space!

The theory behind L-Space is simple, yet it is often overlooked by mundane users of libraries. The theory states that in large quantities books warp space and time around them. The principle of L-Space revolves around the universal law that ‘Knowledge is Power’. Books contain knowledge, therefore:

BOOKS = KNOWLEDGE and KNOWLEDGE = POWER therefore BOOKS = POWER

Power is best described in the following equation:

POWER = (FORCE X DISTANCE ÷ TIME)

The power generated by large quantities of magical and mundane books create portals into L-Space that can be accessed using innate powers of Librarianship that are taught by the Librarians of Time and Space to those deemed worthy across the multiverse. This means that all bookstores are infinite in extent; libraries are gateways into literary hyperspace. In other words, “a good bookshop is just a genteel blackhole that knows how to read.”

Collections of ordinary books can distort space provided that the collection is sufficiently large enough. Anyone who has been in an old-fashioned secondhand bookshop can testify to the otherworldly feeling one gets the deeper back into the endless rows of shelves they go. If they notice, as they browse, they find that the books will be printed in a different language, with an odd alphabet using something that can only loosely be considered ink. These lucky folk have traveled through L-Space, and the wonders they would have seen had they continued out the other side! But they probably wouldn’t have found what they were looking for, secondhand bookshops are notorious for that.

Because L-Space links every library, it is possible to reach any one of these libraries throughout space, time and the multiverse. One can read any book ever written, any book that will ever be written at some point, and books that were planned for writing that were not written, as well as any book that could possibly be written if the idea hit someone who could write.

In order to travel through time personally, to see libraries under different skies, one needs the rules. The Librarians of Time and Space {Membership is limited to librarians who have reached the level of Master Librarian, Senior Master Librarian, or Chief Master Librarian} have developed three simple rules to ensure abuse of L-Space is kept to a minimum:

– Silence

– Books must be returned by the last date stamped

– Do not interfere with the nature of causality

Librarians of Time and Space are also taught how to deal with the dangers of navigating L-Space, such as the “harmless” kickstool crabs, large and heavy wandering thesauri, the .303 Bookworm, and the dreaded cliches, which must be avoided at all costs.

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