משתמש:Gadial/אודות Mr. Clete

מתוך "Soul Music", של טרי פראצ'ט:

'Can't let you play anywhere without you being members of the Guild,' said Mr Clete.

'But we can't be members of the Guild until we've played,' said Glod.

'That's right,' said Mr Clete cheerfully. 'Hat. Hat. Hat.'

It was a strange laugh, totally mirthless and vaguely birdlike. It was very much like its owner, who was what you would get if you extracted fossilized genetic material from something in amber and then gave it a suit.

Lord Vetinari had encouraged the growth of the Guilds. They were the big wheels on which the clockwork of a well‑regulated city ran. A drop of oil here... a spoke inserted there, of course... and by and large it all worked.

And gave rise, in the same way that compost gives rise to worms, to Mr Clete. He was not, by the standard definitions, a bad man; in the same way a plague‑bearing rat is not, from a dispassionate point of view, a bad animal.

Mr Clete worked hard for the benefit of his fellow men. He devoted his life to it. For there are many things in the world that need doing that people don't want to do and were grateful to Mr Clete for doing for them. Keeping minutes, for example. Making sure the membership roll was quite up to date. Filing. Organizing.

He'd worked hard on behalf of the Thieves' Guild, although he hadn't been a thief, at least in the sense normally meant. Then there'd been a rather more senior vacancy in the Fools' Guild, and Mr Clete was no fool. And finally there had been the secretaryship of the Musicians. Technically, he should have been a musician. So he bought a comb and paper. Since up until that time the Guild had been run by real musicians, and therefore the membership roll was unrolled and hardly anyone had paid any dues lately and the organization owed several thousand dollars to Chrysoprase the troll at punitive interest, he didn't even have to audition.

When Mr Clete had opened the first of the unkempt ledgers and looked at the unorganized mess, he had felt a deep and wonderful feeling. Since then, he'd never looked back. He had spent a long time looking down. And although the Guild had a president and council, it also had Mr Clete, who took the minutes and made sure things ran smoothly and smiled very quietly to himself. It is a strange but reliable fact that whenever men throw off the yoke of tyrants and set out to rule themselves there emerges, like a mushroom after rain, Mr Clete.