Going Postal

was delivered by the dead:
    We who died on the dark towers demand this of you…
    He ought to be ashamed.
    It was one thing to put words in the mouths of the gods; priests did it all the time. But this, this was a step too far. You had to be some kind of bastard to think of something like this.
    He relaxed a bit. A fine, upstanding citizen wouldn’t have stooped so low, but he hadn’t got this job because he was a fine, upstanding citizen. Some tasks needed a good, honest hammer. Others needed a twisty corkscrew.
    With any luck, he could believe that, if he really tried.

    T HERE HAD BEEN a late fall of snow, and the fir trees around Tower 181 were crusted with white under the hard, bright starlight.
    Everyone was up there tonight—Grandad, Roger, Big Steve-oh, Wheezy Halfsides, who was a dwarf and had to sit on a cushion to reach the keyboards, and Princess.
    There had been a few muffled exclamations as the message came through. Now there was silence, except for the sighing of the wind. Princess could see people’s breath in the air. Grandad was drumming his fingers on the woodwork.
    Then Wheezy said: “Was that all real?”
    The breath clouds got denser. People were relaxing, coming back to the real world.
    “You saw the instructions we got,” said Grandad, staring across the dark forests. “Don’t change anything. Send it on, they said. We sent it on. We damn well did send it on!”
    “Who was it from?” said Steve-oh.
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Grandad. “Message comes in, message goes out, message moves on.”
    “Yeah, but was it really from—” Steve-oh began.
    “Bloody hell, Steve-oh, you really don’t know when to shut up , do you?” said Roger.
    “Only I heard about Tower 93, where the guys died and the tower sent a distress signal all by itself,” mumbled Steve-oh. He was fast on the keys, but not knowing when to shut up was only one of his social failings. In a tower, it could get you killed.
    “Dead Man’s Handle,” said Grandad. “You should know that. If there’s no activity for ten minutes when a signature key is slotted, the drum drops the jacquard into the slot and the counterweight falls, and the tower sends the help sign.” He spoke the words as if reading them from a manual.
    “Yeah, but I heard that in Tower 93 the jacquard was wedged and—”
    “I can’t stand this,” muttered Grandad. “Roger, let’s get this tower working again. We’ve got local signals to send, haven’t we?”
    “Sure. And stuff waiting on the drum,” said Roger. “But Gilt said we weren’t to restart until—”
    “Gilt can kiss my—” Grandad began, then remembered the company and finished: “—donkey. You read what went through just now! Do you think that bas—that man is still in charge?”
    Princess looked out from the upstream window.
    “182’s lit up,” she announced.
    “Right! Let’s light up and shift code,” Grandad growled. “That’s what we do! And who’s going to stop us? All those without something to do, get out! We are running !”
    Princess went out onto the little platform, to be out of the way. Underfoot the snow was like icing sugar, in her nostrils the air was like knives.
    When she looked across the mountains, in the direction she’d learned to think of as downstream, she could see that Tower 180 was sending. At that moment, she heard the thump and click of 181’s own shutters opening, dislodging snow. We shift code , she thought, it’s what we do .
    Up on the tower, watching the starlike twinkle of the Trunk in the clear, freezing air, it was being part of the sky.
    And she wondered what Grandad feared more: that dead clacksmen could send messages to the living, or that they couldn’t.

    C OLLABONE FINISHED . Then he produced a handkerchief and rubbed away at whatever the green stuff was that had begun to grow on the glass. This made a squeaking sound.
    He peered nervously through the smear. “Is that all right, sir? I’m not in some sort of trouble, am I?” he asked. “Only at the moment I think I’m close to translating the mating call of the giant clam…”
    “Thank you, Professor Collabone, a good job, well done, that will be all,” said Archchancellor Ridcully coldly. “Unhinge the mechanism, Mr. Stibbons.”
    A look of fervid relief passed across Devious Collabone’s face just before the omniscope went blank.
    “Mr. Pony, you are the chief engineer of the Grand Trunk, are you not?” said Vetinari, before the babble could