from
Men at Arms
by
Terry Pratchett

He could think in italics. Such people need watching.

Preferably from a safe distance.

The problem with Destiny, of course, is that she is often not careful where she puts her finger.

A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

“But he doesn’t wear a crown or sit on a throne and he doesn’t tell you it’s right that he should rule,” said Vimes. “I hate the bastard. But he’s honest. Honest like a corkscrew.”

“Even so, a good man as king—”

“Yes? And then what? Royalty pollutes people’s minds, boy. Honest men start bowing and bobbing just because someone’s granddad was a bigger murdering bastard than theirs was. Listen! We probably had good kings, once! But kings breed other kings! And blood tells, and you end up with a bunch of arrogant, murdering bastards!”

He has never, in his entire life, harmed a living creature. He has dissected a few, but only after they were dead,^* and had marvelled at how well they’d been put together considering it had been done by unskilled labor.

^* Because he was an early form of free-thinking scientist, and did not believe that human beings had been created by some sort of divine being. Dissecting people when they were still alive tended to be a priestly preoccupation; they thought mankind had been created by some sort of divine being and wanted to have a closer look at His handiwork.

A great many rulers, good and bad and quite often dead, know what happened; a rare few actually manage, by dint of much effort, to know what’s happening. Lord Vetinari considered both types to lack ambition.

“Lord Eorle is a very old friend.”

“Is he?”

“Well, I’ve known him a long time. I can’t stand the man, actually. But you were making him look foolish.”

“He was making himself look foolish. I was merely helping.”

“Do you think there’s such a thing as a criminal mind?”

Carrot almost audibly tried to work this out.

“What . . . you mean like . . . Mr. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sir?”

“He’s not a criminal.”

“You have eaten one of his pies, sir?”

“I mean . . . yes . . . but . . . he’s just geographically divergent in the financial hemisphere.”

“Sir?”

“I mean he just disagrees with other people about the position of things. Like money. He thinks it should all be in his pocket. No, I meant—” Vimes closed his eyes, and thought about cigar smoke and flowing drink and laconic voices. There were people who’d steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else.

“C. M. O. T. Dibbler’s Genuine Authentic Soggy Mountain Dew,” she read. “He’s going to die! It says, ‘One hundred and fifty percent proof’!”

“Nah, that’s just old Dibbler’s advertising,” said Nobby. “It ain’t got no proof. Just circumstantial evidence.”

Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you’re not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go.

Consider orangutans.

In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they can talk but choose not to do so in case humans put them to work, possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It’s just that they talk in Orangutan. Humans are only capable of listening in Bewilderment.

^* Five more embraced it as a holy weapon and instructed that it be used on all infidels, heretics, gnostics and people who fidgeted during the sermon.

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat.

They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.

So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.