（外文电子版资料）03 - Equal Rites.pdf

Equal Rites Terry Pratchett Thanks to Neil Gaiman, who loaned us the last surviving copy of the Liber Paginarum Fulvarum, and a big hallo to all the kids at the H.P. Lovecraft Holiday Fun Club. I would like it to be clearly understood that this book is not wacky. Only dumb redheads in fifties sitcoms are wacky. No, it s not zany, either. Equal Rites his is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesnt pretend to answer all or any of these questions. It may, however, help to explain why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man. Because this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the authors control. They might. However, it is primarily a story about a world. Here it comes now. Watch closely, the special effects are quite expensive. A bass note sounds. It is a deep, vibrating chord that hints that the brass section may break in at any moment wit h a fanfare for the cosmos, because the scene is the blackness of deep space wit h a few stars glittering like the dandruff on the shoulders of God. Then it comes into view overhead, bigger than the biggest, most unpleasantly armed starcruiser in the imagination of a three-ring film-maker: a turtle, ten thousand miles long. It is Great ATuin, one of the rare astrochelonians from a universe where things are less as they are and more like people imagine them to be, and it carries on its meteor-pocked shell four giant elephants who bear on their enormous shoulders the great round wheel of the Discworld. As the viewpoint swings around, the whole of the world can be seen by the light of its tiny orbiting sun. There are continents, archipelagos, seas, deserts, mountai