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The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse

It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it’s springtiain The is who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep

It is danced innocently by raggedy-bearded youngof “Mrs Widgery’s Lodger” and ruthlessly by such as the Ninja Morris Men of New Ankh, who can do strange and terrible things with a simple handkerchief and a bell

And it is never danced properly

Except on the Discworld, which is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which travel through space on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the world turtle

And even there, only in one place have they got it right It’s a s and sienerations

There, the , backward and forward, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping People coenerally considered a nice day out for all the family

But that isn’t the secret

The secret is the other dance

And that won’t happen for a while yet

There is a ticking, such as ht be made by a clock And, indeed, in the sky there is a clock, and the ticking of freshly minted seconds flows out from it

At least, it looks like a clock But it is in fact exactly the opposite of a clock, and the biggest hand goes around just once

There is a plain under a diht re ay, and if you did see it frolad that you were, in fact, a long ay

Three gray figures floated just above it Exactly what they were can’t be described in norh there was nothing rosy-cheeked about theravity operates and that time stays separate from space Call them auditors Auditors of reality

They were in conversation without speaking They didn’t need to speak They just changed reality so that they had spoken

One said, It has never happened before Can it be done?

One said, It will have to be done There is a personality Personalities come to an end Only forces endure

It said this with a certain satisfaction

One said, Besides…there have been irregularities Where you get personality, you get irregularities Well-known fact