Reaper Man

they’d met. What do you tell them? Do you let them sort it out for themselves?”
    “Oook,” said the Librarian, instantly.
    “It’s tempting.”
    “Oook.”
    “Mrs. Cake wouldn’t like it, though.”
    “Eeek oook.”
    “You’re right. You could have put it a little less coarsely, but you’re right. Everyone has to sort things out for themselves.”
    He sighed, and turned the page. His eyes widened.
    “The city of Kahn Li,” he said. “Ever heard of it? What’s this book? ‘Stripfettle’s Believe-It-Or-Not Grimoire.’ Says here…‘little carts…none knew from where they came…of such great use, men were employed to herd them and bring them into the city…of a sudden, like unto a rush of creatures…men followed them and behold, there was a new city outside the walls, a city as of merchants’ booths wherein the carts ran’…”
    He turned the page.
    “It seems to say…”
    I still haven’t understood it properly, he told himself. One-Man-Bucket thinks we’re talking about the breeding of cities. But that doesn’t feel right.
    A city is alive. Supposing you were a great slow giant, like a Counting Pine, and looked down at a city? You’d see buildings grow; you’d see attackers driven off; you’d see fires put out. You’d see the city was alive but you wouldn’t see people, because they’d move too fast. The life of a city, the thing that drives it, isn’t some sort of mysterious force. The life of a city is people.
    He turned the pages absently, not really looking…
    So we have the cities—big, sedentary creatures, growing from one spot and hardly moving at all for thousands of years. They breed by sending out people to colonize new land. They themselves just lie there. They’re alive, but only in the same way that a jellyfish is alive. Or a fairly bright vegetable. After all, we call Ankh-Morpork the Big Wahooni…
    And where you get big slow living things, you get small fast things that eat them…
    Windle Poons felt the brain cells firing. Connections were made. Thought gushed along new channels. Had he ever really thought properly when he was alive? He doubted it. He’d just been a lot of complicated reactions attached to a lot of nerve endings, with everything from idle rumination about the next meal to random, distracting memories getting between him and real thought.
    It’d grow inside the city, where it’s warm and protected. And then it’d break out, outside the city, and build…something, not a real city, a false city…that pulls the people, the life, out of the host…
    The word we’re looking for here is predator .

    The Dean stared at his staff in disbelief. He gave it a shake, and aimed it again.
    This time the sound would be spelled pfwt .
    He looked up. A curling wave of trolleys, rooftop high, was poised to fall on him.
    “Oh… shucks ,” he said, and folded his arms over his head.
    Someone grabbed the back of his robe and pulled him away as the trolleys crashed down.
    “Come on ,” said Ridcully. “If we run we can keep ahead of ’em.”
    “I’m out of magic! I’m out of magic!” moaned the Dean.
    “You’ll be out of a lot more if you don’t hurry,” said the Archchancellor.
    Trying to keep together, bumping into one another, the wizards staggered ahead of the trolleys. Streams of them were surging out of the city and across the fields.
    “Know what this reminds me of?” said Ridcully, as they fought their way through.
    “Do tell,” muttered the Senior Wrangler.
    “Salmon run,” said the Archchancellor.
    “What?”
    “Not in the Ankh, of course,” said Ridcully. “I don’t reckon a salmon could get upstream in our river—”
    “Unless it walked,” said the Senior Wrangler.
    “—but I’ve seen ’em thick as milk in some rivers,” said Ridcully. “Fightin’ to get ahead. The whole river just a mass of silver.”
    “Fine, fine,” said the Senior Wrangler. “What’d they do that for?”
    “Well…it’s all to do with breeding.”
    “Disgusting. And to think we have to drink water,” said the Senior Wrangler.
    “Right, we’re in the open now, this is where we outflank ’em,” said Ridcully. “We’ll just aim for a clear space and—”
    “I don’t think so,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    Every direction was filled with an advancing, grinding, fighting wall of trolleys.
    “They’re coming to get us! They’re coming to get us!” wailed the Bursar. The Dean snatched his staff.
    “Hey, that’s