Mort - barrier

“You were expecting the dome thing, weren’t you?” said Mort urgently. “What will happen when it closes in?”

The wizard sat down heavily on the remains of a bacon sandwich.

“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to watch. But not from inside, I’m afraid. What I think will happen is that the last week will never have existed.”

“She’ll suddenly die?”

“You don’t quite understand. She will have been dead for a week. All this—” he waved his hands vaguely in the air—“will not have happened. The assassin will have done his job. You will have done yours. History will have healed itself. Everything will be all right. From History’s point of view, that is. There really isn’t any other.”

Mort stared out of the narrow window. He could see across the courtyard into the glowing streets outside, where a picture of the princess smiled at the sky.

“Tell me about the pictures,” he said. “That looks like some sort of wizard thing.”

“I’m not sure if it’s working. You see, people were beginning to get upset and they didn’t know why, and that made it worse. Their minds were in one reality and their bodies were in another. Very unpleasant. They couldn’t get used to the idea that she was still alive. I thought the pictures might be a good idea but, you know, people just don’t see what their mind tells them isn’t there.”

“I could have told you that,” said Mort bitterly.

“I had the town criers out during the daytime,” Cutwell continued. “I thought that if people could come to believe in her, then this new reality could become the real one.”

“Mmmph?” said Mort. He turned away from the window. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you see—I reckoned that if enough people believed in her, they could change reality. It works for gods. If people stop believing in a god, he dies. If a lot of them believe in him, he grows stronger.”

***

Mort p112-113