Terry Pratchett: Good Omens

She sailed off down the polished corridor. Sister Mary, wheeling her bassinet, entered the delivery room.

Mrs. Young was more than woozy. She was fast asleep, with the look of determined self‑satisfaction of someone who knows that other peo­ple are going to have to do the running around for once. Baby A was asleep beside her, weighed and nametagged. Sister Mary, who had been brought up to be helpful, removed the nametag, copied it out, and Attachéd the duplicate to the baby in her care.

The babies looked similar, both being small, blotchy, and looking sort of, though not really, like Winston Churchill.

Now, thought Sister Mary, I could do with a nice cup of tea.

Most of the members of the convent were old‑fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie‑dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer peoplea new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights. And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else. Besides, Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea. She hoped someone would come soon; she'd done the important bit, now she wanted her tea.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamen­tally people.

There was a knock at the door. She opened it.

"Has it happened yet?" asked Mr. Young. "I'm the father. The husband. Whatever. Both."

Sister Mary had expected the American Cultural Attaché to look like Blake Carrington or J. R. Ewing. Mr. Young didn't look like any American she'd ever seen on television, except possibly for the avuncular sheriff in the better class of murder mystery. [4]He was something of a disappointment. She didn't think much of his cardigan, either.

She swallowed her disappointment. "Oooh, yes," she said. "Con­gratulations. Your lady wife's asleep, poor pet."

Mr. Young looked over her shoulder. "Twins?" he said. He reached for his pipe. He stopped reaching for his pipe. He reached for it again. "Twins? No one said anything about twins."

"Oh, not" said Sister Mary hurriedly. "This one's yours. The other one's . . . er . . . someone else's. Just looking after him till Sister Grace gets back. No," she reiterated, pointing to the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Dark­ness, "this one's definitely yours. From the top of his head to the tips of his hoofywoofies‑which he hasn't got," she added hastily.

Mr. Young peered down.

"Ah, yes," he said doubtfully. "He looks like my side of the family. All, er, present and correct, is he?"

"Oh, yes," said Sister Mary. "He's a very normal child," she added. "Very, very normal."

There was a pause. They stared at the sleeping baby.

"You don't have much of an accent," said Sister Mary. "Have you been over here long?"

"About ten years," said Mr. Young, mildly puzzled. "The job moved, you see, and I had to move with it."

"It must be a very exciting job, I've always thought," said Sister Mary. Mr. Young looked gratified. Not everyone appreciated the more stimulating aspects of cost accountancy.

"I expect it was very different where you were before," Sister Mary went on.

"I suppose so," said Mr. Young, who'd never really thought about it. Luton, as far as he could remember, was pretty much like Tadfield. The same sort of hedges between your house and the railway station. The same sort of people.

"Taller buildings, for one thing," said Sister Mary, desperately.

Mr. Young stared at her. The only one he could think of was the Alliance and Leicester offices.

"And I expect you go to a lot of garden parties," said the nun.

Ah. He was on firmer ground here. Deirdre was very keen on that sort of thing.

"Lots," he said, with feeling. "Deirdre makes jam for them, you know. And I normally have to help with the White Elephant."

This was an aspect of Buckingham Palace society that had never occurred to Sister Mary, although the pachyderm fitted right in.

"I expect they're the tribute," she said. "I read where these foreign potentates give her all sorts of things."

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm a big fan of the Royal Family, you know."

"Oh, so am I," said Mr. Young, leaping gratefully onto this new ice floe in the bewildering stream of consciousness. Yes, you knew where you were with the Royals. The proper ones, of course, who pulled their weight in the hand‑waving and bridge‑opening department. Not the ones who went to discos all night long and were sick all over the paparazzi. [5]

"That's nice," said Sister Mary. "I thought you people weren't too keen on them, what with revoluting and throwing all those tea‑sets into the river."

She chattered on, encouraged by the Order's instruction that mem­bers should always say what was on their minds. Mr. Young was out of his depth, and too tired now to worry about it very much. The religious life probably made people a little odd. He wished Mrs. Young would wake up. Then one of the words in Sister Mary's wittering struck a hopeful chord in his mind.

"Would there be any possibility of me possibly being able to have a cup of tea, perhaps?" he ventured.

"Oh my," said Sister Mary, her hand flying to her mouth, "what­ever am I thinking of?"

Mr. Young made no comment.

"I'll see to it right away," she said. "Are you sure you don't want coffee, though? There's one of those vendible machines on the next floor."

"Tea, please," said Mr. Young.

"My word, you really have gone native, haven't you," said Sister Mary gaily, as she bustled out.

Mr. Young, left alone with one sleeping wife and two sleeping ba­bies, sagged onto a chair. Yes, it must be all that getting up early and kneeling and so on. Good people, of course, but not entirely compost mentis. He'd seen a Ken Russell film once. There had been nuns in it. There didn't seem to be any of that sort of thing going on, but no smoke without fire and so on . . .

He sighed.

It was then that Baby A awoke, and settled down to a really good wail.

Mr. Young hadn't had to quiet a screaming baby for years. He'd never been much good at it to start with. He'd always respected Sir Win­ston Churchill, and patting small versions of him on the bottom had al­ways seemed ungracious.

"Welcome to the world," he said wearily. "You get used to it after a while."

The baby shut its mouth and glared at him as if he were a recalci­trant general.

Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it. They were the sort you only ever get at the bottom of certain teatime assort­ments. Mr. Young's was the same pink as a surgical appliance, and had a snowman picked out on it in white icing.

"I don't expect you normally have these," she said. "They're what you call cookies. We call them biscults."

Mr. Young had just opened his mouth to explain that, yes, so did he, and so did people even in Luton, when another nun rushed in, breath­less.

She looked at Sister Mary, realized that Mr. Young had never seen the inside of a pentagram, and confined herself to pointing at Baby A and winking.