Eric

The little man looked very embarrassed. “Not the. Not the. Just a. I don’t contract for the big stuff, the stars, the gas giants, the pulsars and so on. I just specialise in what you might call the bespoke trade.” He gave them a look of defiant pride. “I do all my own trees, you know,” he confided. “Craftsmanship. Takes years to learn how to make a tree. Even the conifers.”

“Oh,” said Rincewind.

“I don’t get someone in to finish them off. No sub-contracting, that’s my motto. The buggers always keep you hanging about while they’re installing stars or something for someone else.” The little man sighed. “You know, people think it must all be very easy, creating. They think you just have to move on the face of the waters and wave your hands a bit. It’s not like that at all.”

“It isn’t?”

The little man scratched his nose again. “You soon run out of ideas for snowflakes, for example.”

“Oh.”

“You start thinking it’d be a doddle to sneak in a few identical ones.”

“You do?”

“You thinks to yourself, ‘There’s a billion trillion squillion of them, no-one’s going to notice’. But that’s where professionalism comes in, sort of thing.”

“It does?”

“Some people”—and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past—“think it’s enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run. A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there’s just a girl on the counter who says she don’t know where the boss is. I think people appreciate the personal touch, don’t you?”

“Ah,” said Rincewind. “So … when people get struck by lightning … er … it’s not just because of all that stuff about electrical discharges and high points and everything … er … you actually mean it?”

“Oh, not me. I don’t run the things. It’s a big enough job just building ‘em, you can’t expect me to operate them as well. There’s a load of other universes, you know,” he added, a slight note of accusation in his voice. “Got a list of jobs as long as your arm.”

He reached underneath him and produced a large, leatherbound book, which he had apparently been sitting on. It opened with a creak.

Rincewind felt a tugging at his robe.

“Look,” said Eric. “This isn’t really … Him, is it?”

“He says it is,” said Rincewind.

“What are we doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

The creator glared at him. “A little quiet there, please,” he said.

“But listen,” hissed Eric, “if he really is the creator of the world, that sandwich is a religious relic!”

“Gosh,” said Rincewind weakly. He hadn’t eaten for ages. He wondered what the penalty was for eating a venerated object. It was probably severe.

“You could put it in a temple somewhere and millions of people would come to look at it.”

Rincewind cautiously levered up the top slice of bread.

“It’s got no mayonnaise in it,” he said. “Will that still count?”

The creator cleared his throat, and began to read aloud.

Astfgl surfed across the entropy slope, an angry red spark against the swirls of interspace. He was so angry now that the last vestiges of self-control were slipping away; his jaunty cap with its stylish hornlets had become a mere wisp of crimson dangling from the tip of one of the great coiled ramshorns that framed his skull.

With a rather sensuous ripping noise the red silk across his back tore open and his wings unfolded.

They are conventionally represented as leathery, but leather wouldn’t survive more than a few seconds in that environment. Besides, it doesn’t fold up very well.

These wings were made of magnetism and shaped space, and spread out until they were a faint curtain against the incandescent firmament and they beat as slowly and inexorably as the rise of civilisations.

They still looked batlike, but that was just for the sake of tradition.

Somewhere around the 29th millennium he was overtaken, quite without noticing, by something small and oblong and probably even angrier than he was.

***

Eight spells go to make up the world. Rincewind knew that well enough. He knew that the book which contained them was the Octavo, because it still existed in the library of Unseen University — currently inside a welded iron box at the bottom of a specially-dug shaft, where its magical radiations could be kept under control.

Rincewind had wondered how it had all started. He’d imagined a sort of explosion in reverse, with interstellar gases roaring together to form Great A’Tuin, or at least a roll of thunder or something.

Instead there was a faint, musical twang, and where the Discworld hadn’t been, there the Discworld was, as if it had been hiding somewhere the whole time.

He also realised that the feeling of falling he had so recently learned to live with was one he was probably going to die with, too. As the world appeared beneath him it brought this aeon’s special offer — gravity, available in a choice of strengths from your nearest massive planetary body.

He said, as so often happens on these occasions, “Aargh.”