Reaper Man

they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing , of going around saying, “O great table, without whom we are as naught.” Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
    Nevertheless, there is a small chapel off the University’s Great Hall, because while the wizards stand right behind the philosophy as outlined above, you don’t become a successful wizard by getting up gods’ noses even if those noses only exist in an ethereal or metaphorical sense. Because while wizards don’t believe in gods they know for a fact that gods believe in gods.
    And in this chapel lay the body of Windle Poons. The University had instituted twenty-four hours’ lying-in-state ever since the embarrassing affair thirty years previously with the late Prissal “Merry Prankster” Teatar.
    The body of Windle Poons opened its eyes. Two coins jingled onto the stone floor.
    The hands, crossed over the chest, unclenched.
    Windle raised his head. Some idiot had stuck a lily on his stomach.
    His eyes swiveled sideways. There was a candle on either side of his head.
    He raised his head some more.
    There were two more candles down there, too.
    Thank goodness for old Teatar, he thought. Otherwise I’d already be looking at the underside of a rather cheap pine lid.
    Funny thing, he thought. I’m thinking. Clearly.
    Wow.
    Windle lay back, feeling his spirit refilling his body like gleaming molten metal running through a mold. White-hot thoughts seared across the darkness of his brain, fired sluggish neurones into action.
    It was never like this when I was alive.
    But I’m not dead.
    Not alive and not dead.
    Sort of non-alive.
    Or un-dead.
    Oh dear …
    He swung himself upright. Muscles that hadn’t worked properly for seventy or eighty years jerked into overdrive. For the first time in his entire life, he corrected himself, better make that “period of existence,” Windle Poons’ body was entirely under Windle Poons’ control. And Windle Poons’ spirit wasn’t about to take any lip from a bunch of muscles.
    Now the body stood up. The knee joints resisted for a while, but they were no more able to withstand the onslaught of will-power than a sick mosquito can withstand a blowtorch.
    The door to the chapel was locked. However, Windle found that the merest pressure was enough to pull the lock out of the woodwork and leave fingerprints in the metal of the doorhandle.
    “Oh, goodness,” he said.
    He piloted himself out into the corridor. The distant clatter of cutlery and the buzz of voices suggested that one of the University’s four daily meals was in progress.
    He wondered whether you were allowed to eat when you were dead. Probably not, he thought.
    And could he eat, anyway? It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry. It was just that…well, he knew how to think, and walking and moving were just a matter of twitching some fairly obvious nerves, but how exactly did your stomach work?
    It began to dawn on Windle that the human body is not run by the brain, despite the brain’s opinion on the matter. In fact it’s run by dozens of complex automatic systems, all whirring and clicking away with the kind of precision that isn’t noticed until it breaks down.
    He surveyed himself from the control room of his skull. He looked at the silent chemical factory of his liver with the same sinking feeling as a canoe builder might survey the controls of a computerized supertanker. The mysteries of his kidneys awaited Windle’s mastery of renal control. What, when you got right down to it, was a spleen? And how did you make it go?
    His heart sank.
    Or, rather, it didn’t.
    “Oh, gods ,” muttered Windle, and leaned against the wall. How did it work, now? He prodded a few likely-looking nerves. Was it systolic…diastolic…systolic…diastolic…? And then there were the lungs, too…
    Like a conjuror keeping eighteen plates spinning at the same time—like a man trying to program a video recorder from an instruction manual translated from Japanese into Dutch by a Korean rice-husker—like, in fact, a man finding out what total self-control really means, Windle Poons lurched onward.
    The wizards of Unseen University set great store by big, solid meals. A man