tribute: Snuff

2015-12-27 01:46:12 -08:00
parent 5226484bab
commit 67e6029723
2 changed files with 248 additions and 6 deletions
@@ -5265,7 +5265,8 @@ ag-rreeeed arr-angement, ye ken!"
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-%title Snuff (2)
+%title Snuff (16)
 # p. 168 (Harper edition; 'ax' is spelled without the 'e' there...)
 %passage 1
 They were crude weapons, to be sure, but a flint axe hitting your head does
 not need a degree in physics.
@@ -5273,9 +5274,250 @@ not need a degree in physics.
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 %passage 2
-It is a strange thing to find yourself doing something you 
+It is a strange thing to find yourself doing something you have apparently
-have apparently always wanted to do, when in fact up until 
+always wanted to do, when in fact up until that moment you had never known
-that moment you had never known that you always wanted to do it...
+that you always wanted to do it...
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 2 (the subject is goblins)
 %passage 3
 At this point, Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, stopped reading
 and stared at nothing.  After a few seconds, nothing was eclipsed by the
 form of Drumknott, his secretary (who, it must be said, had spent a career
 turning himself as much like nothing as anything).
 Drumknott said, "You look pensive, my lord," to which observation he
 appended a most delicate question mark, which gradually evaporated.
 "Awash with tears, Drumknott, awash with tears."
 Drumknott stopped dusting the impeccably shiny black lacquered desk.
 "Pastor Oats is a very persuasive writer, isn't he, sir...?"
 "Indeed he is, Drumknott, but the basic problem remains and it is this:
 humanity may come to terms with the dwarf, the troll and even the orc,
 terrifying though all these have proved to be at times, and you know why
 this is, Drumknott?"
 The secretary carefully folded the duster he had been using and looked at
 the ceiling.  "I would venture to suggest, my lord, that in their violence
 we recognize ourselves?"
 "Oh, well done, Drumknott, I shall make a cynic of you yet!  Predators
 respect other predators, do they not?  They may perhaps even respect the
 prey:  the lion may lie down with the lamb, even if only the lion is
 likely to get up again, but the lion will not lie down with the rat.
 Vermin, Drumknott, an entire race reduced to vermin!"
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 6
 %passage 4
 Vimes grunted.  "Where there are policemen there's crime, sergeant,
 remember that."
 "Yes, I do, sir, although I think it sounds better with a little reordering
 of the words."
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # pp. 46-47 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph; it's a
 #           long slog for a weak punchline...)
 %passage 5
 "[...]  The third earl, 'Mad' Jack Ramkin, had a brother called
 Woolsthorpe, probably for his sins.  He was something of a scholar and
 would have been sent to the university to become a wizard were it not for
 the fact that his brother let it be known that any male sibling of his who
 took up a profession that involved wearing a dress would be disinherited
 with a cleaver.
 "Nevertheless, young Woolsthorpe persevered in his studies in natural
 philosophy in the way a gentleman should, by digging into any suspicious-
 looking burial mounds he could find in the neighborhood, filling up his
 lizard press with as many rare species as he could collect, and drying
 samples of any flowers he could find before they became extinct.  The
 story runs that, on one warm summer day, he dozed off under an apple tree
 and was awakened when an apple fell on his head.  A lesser man, as his
 biographer put it, would have seen nothing untoward about this, but
 Woolsthorpe surmised that, since apples and practically everything else
 always fell down, then the world would eventually become dangerously
 unbalanced... unless there was another agency involved that natural
 philosophy had yet to discover.  He lost no time in dragging one of the
 footmen to the orchard and ordering him, on the pain of dismissal, to lie
 under the tree until an apple hit him on the head!  The possibility of
 this happening was increased by another footman who had been told by
 Woolsthorpe to shake the tree vigorously until the required apple fell.
 Woolsthorpe was ready to observe this from a distance.
 "Who can imagine his joy when the inevitable apple fell and a second apple
 was seen rising from the tree and disappearing at speed into the vaults of
 heaven, proving the hypothesis that what goes up must come down, provided
 that what goes down must come up, thus safeguarding the equilibrium of the
 Universe.  Regrettably, this only works with apples and, amazingly, only
 the apples on this one tree, /Malus equilibria/!  I hear that someone has
 worked out that the apples at the top of the tree fill with gas and fly up
 when the tree is disturbed so that it can set its seeds some way off.
 Wonderful thing, nature, shame the fruit tastes like dog's business,"
 Willikins added as Young Sam spat some out.  [...]
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 100
 %passage 6
 "Look, Willikins, I don't like to involve you in all this.  It's only a
 hunch, after all."
 Willikins waved this away.  "You wouldn't keep me out of it for a big
 clock, sir, because all this is tickling my fancy as well.  I shall lay
 out a selection of cutting edges for you in your dressing room, sir, and I
 myself will go up to the copse half an hour before you're due to be there,
 with my trusty bow and an assortment of favorite playthings.  It's nearly
 full moon, clear skies, there'll be shadows everywhere, and I'll be
 standing in the darkest one of them."
 Vimes looked at him for a moment and said, "Could I please amend that
 suggestion?  Could you not be there in the second darkest shadow one hour
 before midnight, to see who steps into the darkest shadow?"
 "Ah yes, that's why you command the watch, sir," said Willikins, and to
 Vimes's shock there was a hint of a tear in the man's voice.  "You're
 listening to the street, aren't you, sir, yes?"
 Vimes shrugged.  "No streets here, Willikins."
 Willikins shook his head.  "Once a street boy, always a street boy, sir.
 It comes with us, in the pinch.  Mothers go, fathers go--if we ever knew
 who they were--but the Street, well, the Street looks after us.  In the
 pinch it keeps us alive."
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 116 (passage ends mid-paragraph)
 %passage 7
 Well, we live and learn, Vimes thought, or perhaps more importantly, we
 learn and live.  [...]
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 153
 %passage 8
 In the country, there is always somebody watching you, he thought as they
 sped along.  Well, there was always somebody watching you in the city, too,
 but that was generally in the hope that you might drop dead and they could
 run off with your wallet.  They were never /interested/.  But here he
 thought he could feel many eyes on him.  Maybe they belonged to squirrels
 or badgers, or whatever the damn things were that Vimes heard at night;
 gorillas, possibly.
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # pp. 169-170
 %passage 9
 "Well, sir, it looks as though they're pleased to see us, yes?"
 Feeney's relief and hope should have been bottled and sold to despairing
 people everywhere.  Vimes just nodded, because the ranks were pulling
 apart, leaving a pathway of sorts, at the end of which there was,
 inarguably, a corpse.  It was a mild relief to see that it was a goblin
 corpse, but no corpse is good news, particularly when seen in a grimy low
 light and especially for the corpse.  And yet something inside him exulted
 and cried /Hallelujah!/, because here was a corpse and he was a copper
 and this was a crime and this place was smoky and dirty and full of
 suspicious-looking goblins and here was a /crime/.  His world.  Yes, here
 was /his/ world.
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 211
 %passage 10
 Vimes lay back in the bed, enjoying the wonderful sensation of gradually
 being eaten by the pillows, and said to Sybil, "Do the Rust family have a
 place down here?"
 Too late he reflected that this might be a bad move because she might well
 have told him all about it on one of those occasions when, so unusally for
 a married man, he was not paying much attention to what his wife was
 saying, and therefore he might be the cause of grumpiness in those
 precious, warm minutes before sleep.  All he could see of her right now
 was the very tip of her nose, as the pillows claimed her, but she mumbled,
 drowsily, "Oh, they bought Hangnail Manor ten years or so ago, after the
 Marquis of Fantailer murdered his wife with a pruning knife in the
 pineapple house.  Don't you remember?  You spent weeks searching the city
 for him.  In the end everybody seemed to think he'd gone off to Fourecks
 and disguised himself by not calling himself the Marquis of Fantailer."
 "Oh yes," said Vimes, "and I remember that a lot of his chums were quite
 indignant about the investigation!  They said he'd only done one murder,
 and it was his wife's fault for having the bad taste to die after just one
 little stab!"
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 212 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
 %passage 11
 [...] he had heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns
 drinking champagne.(1)  [...]
 (1) This is, of course, absolutely true.
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 217 (passage starts mid-paragraph and ends mid-paragraph)
 %passage 12
 "[...] and the Summoning Dark is /real/.  It's not all in your head,
 commander:  no matter what you hear, I sometimes hear it too.  Oh dear,
 you of all people must recognize a substition when you're possessed by it?
 It's the opposite of superstition:  it's real even if you don't believe
 in it.  [...]"
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 233
 %passage 13
 Vimes frowned.  He couldn't remember ever going into a church or a temple
 or one of the numerous other places of more or less spirituality for any
 other reason than the occasional requirements of the job.  These days he
 tended to go in for reasons of Sybil, i.e., his wife dragging him along
 so that he could be seen, and, if possible, seen remaining awake.
 No, the world of next worlds, afterlives, and purgatorial destinations
 simply did not fit into his head.  Whether you wanted it or not, you were
 born, you did the best you could, and then, whether you really wanted to
 or not, you died.  They were the only certainties, and so the best thing
 for a copper to do was to get on with the job.  And it was about time
 that Sam Vimes got back to doing his.
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 254 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
 %passage 14
 [...]  And maybe if I distinguish myself I can get a job in the city, so
 that my mum can live in a place where you don't lie awake at night
 listening to the mice fighting the cockroaches--hooray!(1)
 (1) Regrettably, Constable Upshot was overly hopeful:  in Ankh-Morpork the
 mice and cockroaches had decided to forget their differences and gang up
 on the humans.
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 403 (passage starts mid-paragraph)
 %passage 15
 "[...]  And I remember reading somewhere that you would arrest the gods
 for doing it wrong."
 Vimes shook his head.  "I'm sure I never said anything of the sort!  But
 law is order and order is law and it must be the highest thing.  The world
 runs on it, the heavens run on it and without order, lad, one second
 cannot follow another."
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
 # p. 404 (footnote)
 %passage 16
 The sound of the gentle rattle of china cup on china saucer drives away
 all demons, a little-known fact.
  [Snuff, by Terry Pratchett]
 %e passage
@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ wizard mode #wizintrinsic
 reading non-cursed scroll of enchant weapon uncurses welded tin opener
 if hero has no jumping ability but knows the jumping spell, the #jump command
 	will attempt to cast the spell
-additional passages for Raising Steam
+additional tribute passages for Snuff and for Raising Steam
 Platform- and/or Interface-Specific New Features