Berstädter

Der Schornsteinfeger und die fünf CO₂-Professoren: Heizungsprüfung im Paralleluniversum

Der neue Schornsteinfeger kommt mit der Aura eines Mannes, der schon hunderte Heizungen gesehen hat und zweihundertfünfzig Thermostatventile verachtet. Er trägt diese Mischung aus Arbeitskleidung, Werkzeuggeräuschen und fachlicher Endgültigkeit mit sich herum, die Menschen besitzen, die jederzeit einen Mängelschein mit Folgen ausstellen können. Es gibt in Deutschland vermutlich nur wenige Personen, denen man als Hausbesitzer gleichzeitig so höflich und so ausgeliefert begegnet wie dem Schornsteinfeger.

Er steht also im Keller, betrachtet unsere etwas in die Jahre gekommene Heizungsanlage mit dem professionellem Interesse, mit dem Ärzte Röntgenbilder oder Archäologen feuchte Wände ansehen, und beginnt plötzlich, während irgendwo ein Messgerät piepst, über CO₂ zu sprechen.

Nicht mehr nur technisch. Nicht im Sinne von Abgaswerten. Sondern weltanschaulich.

„Die ganze Geschichte mit dem CO₂“, sagt er, als würde er nun einen seltenen Spezialfehler erklären, „das haben sich ja nur fünf Professoren in Deutschland ausgedacht.“

Fünf Professoren.

Allein diese Zahl steht plötzlich im Raum wie ein vergessenes Möbelstück. Fünf. Nicht vier. Nicht siebenundzwanzigtausend Wissenschaftler weltweit. Nicht der wissenschaftliche Grundstein der heutigen Klimaforschung durch Fourier in den 1820er Jahren. Sondern: Fünf Professoren. Es klingt wie ein geheimer Rat aus einem Fantasyroman. Die Fünf vom CO₂. Vermutlich treffen sie sich nachts in einem schlecht beleuchteten Seminarraum und beschließen, die Menschheit mit Wärmepumpen zu verwirren.

„Von denen“, fährt er fort, „sind heute ja drei gar nicht mehr der Meinung. Die haben das alles widerrufen. Die reisen jetzt rum und halten Vorträge, dass das alles gar nicht stimmt mit diesem CO₂- und Klimawandel-Wahnsinn.“

Ich zögere und versuche herauszufinden, ob ich gerade ein Gespräch führe oder in eine Telegram-Gruppe hineingestolpert bin.

„Einer hält noch dran fest“, sagt er. „Und einer ist verschwunden.“

Verschwunden.

Nicht emeritiert. Nicht verstorben. Nicht in Rente. Verschwunden. Als hätte ihn das CO₂ selbst geholt.

Ich stehe daneben und sage nichts. Nicht, weil ich keine Einwände hätte. Sondern weil der Mann in diesem Moment ein Messgerät in der Hand hält und beruflich befugt ist, mein Heizsystem in eine bürokratische Midlife-Crisis zu schicken.

Man diskutiert erstaunlich ungern energiepolitische Grundsatzfragen mit jemandem, der theoretisch die Macht besitzt, einen Satz zu sagen wie: „Das muss alles neu, da muss jetzt erstmal ein Fachbetrieb ran.“

Das ist ein Satz, der klingt wie ein kleiner Verwaltungsakt, sich aber für mein Bankkonto anfühlt wie eine mittelgroße Naturkatastrophe.

Der Schornsteinfeger ist inzwischen warmgelaufen.

„Der ganze Atommüll Deutschlands“, erklärt er mir Unwissendem, „passt ja unter das Brandenburger Tor.“

Ich weiß spontan nicht, ob das stimmen könnte. Wahrscheinlich ja, volumetrisch irgendwie vielleicht. Man kann mit genügend mathematischer Bosheit fast alles unter das Brandenburger Tor rechnen. Auch mittelgroße Elefantenpopulationen oder den Inhalt deutscher Kellerregale.

Aber die Aussage hat diesen typischen Stammtisch-Turbo: ein konkretes Bild, das sofort Wahrheit simuliert.

Noch bevor ich gedanklich beim Brandenburger Tor angekommen bin und einen nicht zu konfrontativen Satz über die Probleme im Atommülllager Asse formulieren kann, stehen wir bereits in Schleswig-Holstein.

„Habeck hat mit Northvolt 600 Millionen verbrannt. 600 Mio! Die könnten wir wirklich anders gebrauchen. Aber Habeck hat die verbrannt!“

Dann Rotorblätter. Zersägt auf Feldern. Bauern dürfen deshalb nichts mehr anbauen. Die Chinesen bauen jetzt Fusionsreaktoren. Wärmepumpen vernichten Existenzen. Solaranlagen seien praktisch Sondermüll mit Sonnenbrand. Sein Bekannter habe eine Wärmepumpe und habe im letzten Jahr eine Stromrechnung von 12 000 Euro gehabt!

Es ist, als würde jemand gleichzeitig sämtliche Kommentarspalten des deutschsprachigen Facebooks laut vorlesen.

Und ich stehe dazwischen mit meiner sehr akademischen Gegenwart, in der Dinge meistens komplizierter sind als „alles Unfug“.

Ich versuche es vorsichtig mit: „Naja, ich würde das politisch wohl anders bewerten; und in Schleswig-Holstein war ja nicht nur Habeck, sondern auch die CDU-Regierung an der Förderung der Northvolt-Ansiedlung beteiligt …“

Ein Satz wie ein diplomatischer Wattebausch.

Dann sage ich noch etwas über fossile Abhängigkeiten und instabile politische Regimes. Also eigentlich einen geopolitisch ziemlich harmlosen Satz. Etwas, worauf sich vermutlich sogar Außenpolitiker, Bundeswehrstrategen und ein großer Teil der Industrie einigen könnten.

Aber ich formuliere ihn in jener vorsichtigen Tonlage, mit der Menschen Bomben entschärfen oder wilden Tieren Nahrung hinlegen.

Denn während eine Ansicht im Internet ja frei dargestellt werden kann, steht man im echten Leben plötzlich im eigenen Keller und denkt: Bitte stellen Sie keinen Mängelschein aus. Bitte sagen Sie nicht „durchgefallen“.

Es ist ein interessantes Gefühl, gleichzeitig zu wissen, dass der Mensch mir gegenüber gerade Sachen sagt, die ich fachlich auf gar keinen Fall stehen lassen möchte - aber trotzdem sozial von diesem Mann abhängig zu sein, der gerade erklärt, einer der fünf CO₂-Professoren sei verschwunden.

Vielleicht ist das überhaupt das Wesen moderner Technikgesellschaften: Man lebt in hochkomplexen Systemen voller Wissenschaft, Infrastruktur und globaler Lieferketten - und am Ende entscheidet die emotionale Stabilität eines einzelnen Menschen mit Leiter, Messgerät und der asymmetrischen Macht über das Kehrbuch darüber, ob man entspannt ins Wochenende geht.

Als der Schornsteinfeger später wieder verschwindet, bleibt dieser leichte Nachhall zurück, den absurde Gespräche manchmal erzeugen. Wie nach einem Traum, in dem jemand sehr überzeugend Unsinn erzählt.

Ich werde mir jetzt einen neuen Schornsteinfeger suchen müssen, diesen hier möchte ich auf gar keinen Fall noch einmal in meinem Haus haben, und ich möchte auch nicht, dass er noch einmal Geld von mir bekommt*. Obwohl es ja bequem sein könnte: Er liebt ganz offenbar Gasheizungen. Wird also vielleicht mit Mängelscheinen etwas nachsichtiger sein. Und in unserem Haus ist aus baulichen Gründen der Einbau einer Wärmepumpe leider sehr kompliziert. 

Das heißt, ich würde natürlich schon gerne eine Wärmepumpe einbauen lassen, lieber vorgestern als morgen! Aber Abstandsregeln und eingeschränkte Altbaudämmung und Rohrquerschnitte und Kosten und ausgebuchte Handwerksbetriebe und ach, also, mit anderen Worten: Ich bin froh, wenn die alte Gasheizung noch vielleicht wenige Jahre läuft und ich noch etwas Zeit habe, bevor es ernst wird mit der Umstellung auf eine Wärmepumpe.

Im Keller riecht es noch ein wenig nach Heizung, Metall und dieser eigentümlichen Mischung aus Realität und Parallelwirklichkeit, die seit einigen Jahren offenbar vermehrt durch viele deutsche Räume zieht.

Offenlegung: Dieser Text wurde mit Hilfe von ChatGPT sprachlich etwas überarbeitet.

Nachtrag / Korrektur*: Ich dachte, ich könne mir seit der Liberalisierung des Schornsteinfegerwesens von 2013 selbst einen neuen Schornsteinfeger suchen. Das ist aber leider nur ungefähr zur Hälfte richtig, und an der entscheidenden Stelle ist es sogar falsch: 

Zwar kann ich bestimmte Arbeiten von einem anderen Schornsteinfeger erledigen lassen. Auf den regelmäßigen Besuch dieses speziellen bevollmächtigten Bezirksschornsteinfegers, die „Feuerstättenschau“, bin ich dennoch angewiesen. Er führt das Kehrbuch und nimmt staatlich übertragene Aufgaben wahr.

Dass mein Schornsteinfeger an eine Geschichte mit fünf CO₂-Professoren glaubt, von denen drei „widerrufen“ hätten und einer „verschwunden“ sei, wäre an sich vielleicht nur eine kuriose Begegnung des Alltags. Wirklich interessant wird diese dadurch, dass genau dieser Mann staatlich mit der Hoheit über mein Kehrbuch ausgestattet ist.

Mit anderen Worten: Der Markt ist frei. Die Macht bleibt konzentriert.

The more superficial a thought, the more quickly the masses understand it. Because they grasp it, they also accept it as true. If it even aligns with their passions, then it is elevated to the "only" truth.

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

You are greatly missed by all your readers and we would love to know what you would have had to say on todays world. GNU!

"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence."

A crescent Earth sets behind the Moon.

On April 6, 2026, the Artemis II astronauts flew around the Moon, observing the far side – which we never see on Earth thanks to tidal locking – with their own eyes and with cameras.

See more of the Moon:

top 20 legends of superflarrow characters (as voted by my followers)

#20 felicity smoak 

Wrong.

In a surface kind of way, yes, but an essential part of the Lovable Rogue is in never having to face consequences, and Going Postal starts with Lipwig being hanged for his crimes of embezzling, forgery, theft, confidence trickstery and various others. And that’s only the beginning.

Let me preface this with the fact that I love Moist as a character, and boy am I aware that he goes through character development, but he is by no means a good person at the start of the book, or even necessarily by the end. He’s definitely still a criminal in both cases, by the end it just happens that Vetinari is holding onto his leash and that Moist has made a moral decision.

He feels completely justified in committing the crimes he does, because everyone is dishonest, right? Anyway they’re all trying to trick him! And he never faces any consequences, because he’s always on the run to escape them, whether he’s aware of it or not, and so he believe that there aren’t any consequences - because he’s not there when they occur. After all, he’s mostly fooling other crooks, so it’s not like good and/or honest people ever feel the repercussions.

Except then he meets an angel. Or, as it turns out, several angels. While being possessed by the Letters/Spirit of the Post, he apparently says that ‘angel is just an old word for messenger,’ and I think I know Pratchett well enough by now so I can say that isn’t in there by coincidence. After all, the book is full of messengers and the delivery of messages (in the form of the old postmen, golems, various others) and many characters are referred to as being angels numerous times (notably Stanley, Vetinari and Adora Belle Dearheart) and enough parallels are drawn between Adora and the golems, particularly Anghammarad and Mr. Pump) that the two words should be taken to mean pretty much the same in thing the context. 

Vetinari remarks that you only ever get one angel, but maybe it arrives in a dozen or more people. Except these are far from being particularly nice ones - what they all do, in their own way, is to force Moist to recognize that all his actions have consequences. They very nearly march up in a line and say, ‘Look, son, you’ve messed up really bad, okay? I mean, just look at what you’ve caused, LOOK at it! What, you didn’t know it was there? Buddy, do you think that means it don’t exist?’

“Do you understand what I’m saying?“ shouted Moist. “You can’t just go around killing people!” “Why Not? You Do.” The golem lowered his arm. “What?” snapped Moist. “I do not! Who told you that?” “I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People,” said the golem calmly. “I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!” “No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”

…Holy shit, Pratchett is not messing around. Because yeah, the Lovable Rogue is a fun character to read about. But does that mean he isn’t immoral as hell? Nope.

All throughout the first half or so of the book, Moist is convinced that he’s gonna turn around and trick everyone, up to and including Vetinari himself. He thinks pretty nasty and derogatory thoughts about the people around him such as Stanley, or Mr. Groat, or Mr. Pump, clearly blaming them for being stuck working for Vetinari when he thought his troubles would be over once he was hanged, even as he puts on his conman face and charms all of them (except Pump and probably Adora), because it benefits him and because he thinks he’s smarter than them and because it’s fun. But he never quite gets away with anything any more. He thinks he’ll win against the Brotherhood of Postmen, but he gets pretty banged up doing it. He makes plans to have Mr. Pump killed smashed up* or use his day off to escape, but when he has the chance he’s busy with Adora, along with the small matter of the Post Office being in cinders. It’s a clear contrast with how he later thinks about how he actually likes the printers working at Teemer & Spools, or the Smoking Gnu, simply because they’re decent people good at their jobs.

*Because even though he’s never killed anyone, he doesn’t think of golems as people.

Then along comes Adora, and it turns out he, personally, messed up her life by defrauding the bank she worked at, further adding to her family’s struggle when the Grand Trunk gets stolen and her brother is murdered. And when he challenges Reacher Gilt and the clacks companies, the Post Office gets burned down, the piles of letters destroyed, Mr. Groat is left seriously injured and the golem Anghammarad dead - it’s other people who suffer, not him.

Hello, Moist. Meet Consequences. They’ve been trying to catch up with you for a while.

I like to think Moist’s internal narration gets less condescending* at that point, because there is definitely a difference between the Moist who went out to eat with Adora and the Moist who still tries to keep the Post Office running in a blackened, burnt shell of a building. When he meets Reacher Gilt for the first time at Le Foie Heureux, he realizes how much better Gilt is compared to him and wishes they weren’t pitted against each other, just so he could learn how to be an even better** conman from him, even while knowing Adora hates him enough to want to kill him and that Gilt pirated the Grand Trunk and is out to destroy the Post Office. But later he thinks to himself:

“I’ll kill you, Mr. Gilt. I’ll kill you in our special way, the way of the weasel and cheat and liar. I’ll take away everything but your life. I’ll take away your money, your reputation and your friends. I’ll spin words around you until you’re cocooned in them. I’ll leave you nothing, not even hope.”

*Pun intended.

**Worse?

Talk about a sharp turnaround. And here Moist acknowledges the similarities between them, even though an easy-to-reach disclaimer could be included such as ‘but I never kill people.’ There has been an ongoing contrast between Havelock Vetinari, Moist von Lipwig, and Reacher Gilt throughout the book, particularly in Vetinari’s and Gilt’s definition of ‘freedom’. Gilt claims that property is the foundation of freedom, and Adora points out that ‘when [he] talks about freedom, he means his, not anyone else’s.’ Meanwhile, Vetinari:

“And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”

And what Vetinari largely does is force consequences upon Moist, and later Gilt - forces them to live with freedom in its entirety, not just the bits they like. The easy answer may be to kill them, but that is not consequences as such, as much as a permanent end to them. And in doing this he forces Moist to face up to everything he has done and how it has hurt people. And being stuck between these two masterful conmen, Moist realizes how short the slippery slope may have been for him to turn into just yet another Gilt: A conman with style, but a bully and a murderer all the same. Which is why he essentially uses all his genius in that field to defeat Gilt, because that’s the only way he can be defeated, not because it’s noble or heroic, but because he’s stuck: He’s been forced to look at all the people he’s defrauded and swindled, and now that he can’t look away he doesn’t want to see it happen to them again. He may be a bastard of a trickster, but he can chose to not be that bastard.

But Vetinari! You may ask. He manipulates and controls and has people killed all the time. It’s practically his job! Well, yeah. He’s incredibly good at it, he’s LEAGUES ahead of both Moist and Gilt, but the funny thing is that he does it entirely for the benefit of the city. He could be a one-man reign of terror over the entire continent, but as he confides in Unseen Academicals:

“[…] And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

Es hätte so einfach sein können, schon vor Jahren

Ich habe immer noch sehr gern sehr viele Tabs offen. Ich brauche die alle! Während ich diesen Beitrag schreibe, sind es nur 167, also etwas weniger als im März 2024 (234). 2024 schrieb ich:

"Der Framework-Laptop neigt zum Überhitzen, oft stürzen einzelne Browsertabs ab und ein bis zwei Mal täglich beendet sich entweder Firefox oder das ganze Gerät startet neu. Alles nicht schlimm, es geht schnell und ich habe dadurch noch keine Daten verloren."

Von "ein bis zwei Mal täglich" konnte ich in letzter Zeit nur träumen, es war viel öfter. Aber mir ist in der Zwischenzeit auch klarer geworden, dass es nicht am armen Framework-Laptop lag, sondern an Firefox und zu wenig RAM (diese Annahme war immer noch falsch, aber dazu komme ich gleich). Ich habe 16 GB RAM und könnte zwar ganz einfach welches nachrüsten, aber bei meine gelegentlichen Ausflüge in den Framework-Zubehör-Shop sind immer gleich verlaufen : Ich denke "RAM ist doch sicher viel billiger als früher, ich kaufe jetzt einfach mal ganz viel!", ich sehe mir die Preise an, ich denke "ach, dann lieber mehrmals täglich den Browser neu starten". Und das war noch vor der großen RAM-Knappheit.

Ich habe gar nicht mehr nachgesehen, sondern mich stattdessen von der Kagi AI beraten lassen, ob sich nicht doch durch Einstellungen was verbessern lässt. Ein Browser muss ja nicht alles verfügbare RAM an sich reißen, ich erinnere mich an Zeiten, in denen es anders und etwas besser war. Meine Frage endet mit "Is there anything I can do (that isn't 'use fewer tabs' or 'buy more RAM')?"

Im ersten Versuch kommt dabei nichts raus. Ich ändere einige vielversprechend klingende Einstellungen in about:config von Firefox, aber die Absturzfrequenz bleibt gleich. Ich frage noch mal nach:

"I implemented some of your changes but it's as bad as ever. I switch to a tab, the browser tries to load the content and this bogs down the whole laptop so much that I can't even open System Monitor and kill the process. I have to restart the whole laptop."

Und diesmal kommen die Informationen heraus, die mir bisher gefehlt haben:

Firefox versions 119/120+ and especially 132.0-1 have confirmed memory leak issues. Users report Firefox consuming 10+ GB of RAM and freezing entire systems. This affects even users with 32GB of RAM. Mehr RAM kaufen hätte mir also gar nichts genützt. Firefox's automatic tab unloading is disabled by default on Linux warum! WARUM! which explains why your previous changes didn't help. Enable it: Go to about:config Set browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory = true Firefox will unload tabs when memory drops below 400MB

Eine einzige Einstellung! Man muss nur wissen, dass sie existiert und wo! "Unload tabs" bedeutet, dass die Icons besonders RAM-fressender Tabs grau werden und es eine Sekunde länger dauert, wenn ich so ein Tab wieder betrete, weil der Inhalt erst neu geladen werden muss. Das ist jetzt ein paar Tage her, seitdem schnurrt der Browser wieder wie etwas sehr Schnurrendes und ich werde gleich 200 weitere Tabs aufmachen, because I can.

I think this exchange gets overlooked a lot because it happens right before the big climax, but I think it shows the basic principle of the book boiled down to its most essential core. The importants of humanity and view people as people.

"Think logically, will you?" he said. "You're a philosopher, aren't you? Look at the crowd!" Urn looked at the crowd. "Well?" "They don't like it,." Simony turned. "Look, Brutha's going to die anyway. But this way it'll mean something. People don't understand, really understand, about the shape of the universe and all that stuff, but they'll remember what Vorbis did to a man. Right? We can make Brutha's death a symbol for people, don't you see?" Urn stared at the distant figure of Brutha. It was naked, except for a loin-cloth. "A symbol?" he said. His throat was dry. "It has to be." He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they'd left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you'd go mad. "You know," he said, turning to Simony. "Now I know Vorbis is evil. He burned my city. Well, the Tsorteans do it sometimes, and we burn theirs. It's just war. It's all part of history. And he lies and cheats and claws power for himself, and lots of people do that, too. But do you know what's special? Do you know what it is?" "Of course," said Simony. "It's what he's doing to-” "It's what he's done to you." "What?" "He turns other people into copies of himself." Simony's grip was like a vice. "You're saying I'm like him?" "Once you said you'd cut him down," said Urn. "Now you're thinking like him . . . "So we rush them, then?" said Simony. "I'm sure of-maybe four hundred on our side. So I give the signal and a few hundred of us attack thousands of them? And he dies anyway and we die too? What difference does that make?" Urn's face was gray with horror now. "You mean you don't know?" he said. Some of the crowd looked round curiously at him. "You don't know?" he said.

This is such a profoundly important part of the message of small gods, it's what makes Vorbis that monster that he is and what makes Brutha the man that he is.

The thing that Simony cannot understand, and that Vorbis never did is summed up best by granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum

'There's no greys, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, iswhen you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.' 'It's a lot more complicated than that-' 'No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.'

Simony just sees Brutha as a martyr, a tool to strenghten his rebellion and rally around, he's not seeing the person bound on the burning turtle, just how he can use its ashes.

Vorbis always thought like this, in fact he never saw people at all, his mind was never open to a single other person, he was the very embodiment of sin as viewed by granny, he never saw a single person as a person, only ever as a thing.

"So," said Vorbis. "The desert. And at the end of the desert?" JUDGEMENT. "Yes, yes, of course." Vorbis tried to concentrate. He couldn't. He could feel certainty draining away. And he'd always been certain. He hesitated, like a man opening a door to a familiar room and finding nothing there but a bottomless pit. The memories were still there. He could feel them. They had the right shape. It was just that he couldn't remember what they were. There had been a voice . . . . Surely, there had been a voice? But all he could remember was the sound of his own thoughts, bouncing off the inside of his own head. Now he had to cross the desert. What could there be to fear? The desert was what you believed. Vorbis looked inside himself. And went on looking. He sagged to his knees. I CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE BUSY, said Death. "Don't leave me! It's so empty!" Death looked around at the endless desert. He snapped his fingers and a large white horse trotted up. I SEE A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, he said, swinging himself into the saddle. "Where? Where?" HERE. WITH YOU. "I can't see them!" Death gathered up the reins. NEVERTHELESS, he said. His horse trotted forward a few steps. "I don't understand!" screamed Vorbis. Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE? "Yes. Yes, of course." Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

The fact that the desert is empty for him because, even when he was alive he never saw the people infront of him so how could he now? He never listend, never learned, never took in the perspective of anyone else, just had his own thoughts echoing inside him.

Just something I thought was really interesting, when Terry describes Sybils size its almost always to emphasize her power and pressence not just a joke about her being fat. I've seen a few people talk about fatphobia in Terry books and while thats a bigger discussion I think his descriptions of Lady Sybil are a great example of how a character just being "fat" is not an insult to them in any way.

Even shorn of her layers of protective clothing, Lady Sybil Ramkin was still toweringly big. Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armor-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion. When she spoke, every word was like a hearty slap on the back and clanged with the aristocratic self-assurance of the totally well-bred. The vowel sounds alone would have cut teak.

Lady Ramkin drawing herself up haughtily was not a sight to forget, although you could try. It was like watching continental drift in reverse as various sub-continents and islands pulled themselves together to form one massive, angry protowoman.

A furious vision in padded leather, gauntlets, tiara and thirty yards of damp pink tulle leaned down toward him and screamed: “Come on, you bloody idiot!”

“Where’s he off to?” boomed Lady Ramkin, emerging from the mists dragging the horses behind her. They didn’t want to come, their hooves were scraping up sparks, but they were fighting a losing battle.

It had been dragged into the center of the plaza, and Lady Sybil Ramkin had been chained to it. She appeared to be wearing a nightie and huge rubber boots. By the look of her she had been in a fight, and Vimes felt a momentary pang of sympathy for whoever else had been involved.

In fact all of them just paint the picture of a woman who could command armies with her voice and wouldn't bother launching ships with her face since her hands would do just fine.