Books2Bytes - v1.1 - Scan: Bytez - Proof: SuburbanSpaceman - Special thanks: Urn TERRY PRATCHETT - PYRAMIDS A Discworld Novel ISBN 0-552-13461-9 BOOK I The Book of Going Forth Nothing but stars scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadnt bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces. This is the gulf between universes the chill deeps of space that contain nothing but the occasional random molecule a few lost comets and ... ... but a circle of blackness shifts slightly the eye reconsiders perspective and what was apparently the awesome distance of interstellar wossname becomes a world under darkness its stars the lights of what will charitably be called civilisation. For as the world tumbles lazily it is revealed as the Discworld - flat circular and carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of Great Atuin the only turtle ever to feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram a turtle ten thousand miles long dusted with the frost of dead comets meteor-pocked albedo-eyed. No-one knows the reason for all this but it is probably quantum. Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that. Its happening already. The stars below are campfires out in the desert and the lights of remote villages high in the forested mountains. Towns are smeared nebulae cities are vast constellations the great sprawling city of Ankh-Morpork for example glows like a couple of colliding galaxies. But here away from the great centres of population where the Circle Sea meets the desert there is a line of cold blue fire. Flames as chilly as the