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Автор Терри Пратчетт
Terry Pratchett
Soul Music
THE HISTORY
This is a story about memory. And this much can be remembered...
... that the Death of the Discworld, for reasons of his own, once rescued a baby girl and took her to his home between the dimensions. He let her grow to become sixteen because he believed that older children were easier to deal with than younger children, and this shows that you can be an immortal anthropomorphic personification and still get things, as it were, dead wrong...
... that he later hired an apprentice called Mortimer, or Mort for short. Between Mort and Ysabell there was an instant dislike and everyone knows what that means in the long term. As a substitute for the Grim Reaper Mort was a spectacular failure, causing problems that led to a wobbling of Reality and a fight between him and Death which Mort lost...
... and that, for reasons of his own, Death spared his life and sent him and Ysabell back into the world.
No‑one knows why Death started to take a practical interest in the human beings he had worked with for so long. It was probably just curiosity. Even the most efficient rat‑catcher will sooner or later take an interest in rats. They might watch rats live and die, and record every detail of rat existence, although they may never themselves actually know what it is like to run the maze.
But if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed, it's even more true that it changes the observer.
Mort and Ysabell got married.
They had a child.
This is also a story about sex and drugs and Music With Rocks In.
Well...
... one out of three ain't bad.
Actually, it's only thirty‑three per cent, but it could be worse.
Where to finish?
A dark, stormy night. A coach, horses gone, plunging through the rickety, useless fence and dropping, tumbling into the gorge below. It doesn't even strike an outcrop of rock before it hits the dried river‑bed far below, and erupts into fragments.
Miss Butts shuffled the paperwork nervously.
Here was one from the girl aged six:
Then the oil from the coach‑lamps ignites and there is a second explosion, out of which rolls ‑ because there are certain conventions, even in tragedy ‑ a burning wheel.
And another paper, a drawing done at age seven. All in black. Miss Butts sniffed. It wasn't as though the gel had only a black crayon. It was a fact that the Quirm College for Young Ladies had quite expensive crayons of all colours.
And then, after the last of the ember spits and crackles, there is silence.
And the watcher.
Who turns, and says to someone in the darkness:
YES. I COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING.
And rides away.
Miss Butts shuffled paper again. She was feeling distracted and nervous, a feeling common to anyone who had much to do with the gel. Paper usually made her feel better. It was more dependable.
