Eric

waited. After a while his skeletal fingers began to drum on the handle of his scythe.
    Darkness lapped around him. There wasn’t even any infinity anymore.
    He attempted to whistle a few snatches of unpopular songs between his teeth, but the sound was simply sucked into nothingness.
    Forever was over. All the sands had fallen. The great race between entropy and energy had been run, and the favorite had been the winner after all.
    Perhaps he ought to sharpen the blade again?
    No.
    Not much point, really.
    Great roils of absolutely nothing stretched into what would have been called the distance, if there had been a space-time reference frame to give words like “distance” any sensible meaning anymore.
    There didn’t seem to be much to do .
    P ERHAPS IT’S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY , he thought.
    Death turned to go but, just as he did so, he heard the faintest of noises. It was to sound what one photon is to light, so weak and feeble that it would have passed entirely unheard in the din of an operating universe.
    It was a tiny piece of matter, popping into existence.
    Death stalked over to the point of arrival and watched carefully.
    It was a paperclip. *
    Well, it was a start.
    There was another pop, which left a small white shirt-button spinning gently in the vacuum.
    Death relaxed a little. Of course, it was going to take some time. There was going to be an interlude before all this got complicated enough to produce gas clouds, galaxies, planets and continents, let alone tiny corkscrew-shaped things wiggling around in slimy pools and wondering whether evolution was worth all the bother of growing fins and legs and things. But it indicated the start of an unstoppable trend.
    All he had to do was be patient, and he was good at that. Pretty soon there’d be living creatures, developing like mad, running and laughing in the new sunlight. Growing tired. Growing old.
    Death sat back. He could wait.
    Whenever they needed him, he’d be there.

    The Universe came into being.
    Any created-again cosmogonist will tell you that all the interesting stuff happened in the first couple of minutes, when nothingness bunched together to form space and time and lots of really tiny black holes appeared and so on. After that, they say, it became just a matter of, well, matter. It was basically all over bar the microwave radiation.
    Seen from close by, though, it had a certain gaudy attraction.
    The little man sniffed.
    “Too showy,” he said. “You don’t need all that noise. It could just as easily have been a Big Hiss, or a bit of music.”
    “Could it?” said Rincewind.
    “Yeah, and it looked pretty iffy around the two picosecond mark. Definitely a bit of ropey fillingin. But that’s how it goes these days. No craftsmanship. When I was a lad it took days to make a universe. You could take a bit of pride in it. Now they just throw it together and it’s back on the lorry and away. And, you know what?”
    “No?” said Rincewind weakly.
    “They pinches stuff off the site. They finds someone nearby who wants to expand their universe a bit, next thing you know they’ve had it away with a bunch of firmament and flogged it for an extension somewhere.”
    Rincewind stared at him.
    “Who are you?”
    The man took the pencil from behind his ear and looked reflectively at the space around Rincewind. “I makes things,” he said.
    “What sort of things?”
    “What sort of things would you like?”
    “You’re the Creator ?”
    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 specialize 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 subcontracting, 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