Interesting Times d-17 Read online

  "Er. I think I may have saved the world a couple of times," said Rincewind. "Does that help?"

  "Did anyone from the University see you do it?"

  "No, I don't think so."

  Ridcully shook his head. "Probably doesn't count, then. It's a shame, because if you had performed any service of great benefit to magic then I'd be happy to let you keep that hat and, of course, something to wear it on.

  Rincewind looked crestfallen. Ridcully sighed, and had one last try.

  "So," he said, "since it seems that you haven't actually passed your exams OR PERFORMED A SERVICE OF GREAT BENEFIT TO MAGIC, then—"

  "I suppose… I could try to perform some great service?" said Rincewind, with the expression of one who knows that the light at the end of the tunnel is an incoming train.

  "Really? Hmm? Well, that's definitely a thought," said Ridcully.

  "What sort of services are they?"

  "Oh, typically you'd be expected to, for the sake of example, go on a quest, or find the answer to some very ancient and important question — What the hell is that thing with all the legs?"

  Rincewind didn't even bother to look round. The expression on Ridcully's face, as it stared over his shoulder, was quite familiar.

  "Ah," he said, "I think I know that one."

  Magic isn't like maths. Like the Discworld itself, it follows common sense rather than logic. And nor is it like cookery. A cake's a cake. Mix the ingredients up right and cook them at the right temperature and a cake happens. No casserole requires moonbeams. No souffle ever demanded to be mixed by a virgin.

  Nevertheless, those afflicted with an enquiring turn of mind have often wondered whether there are rules of magic. There are more than five hundred known spells to secure the love of another person, and they range from messing around with fern seed at midnight to doing something rather unpleasant with a rhino horn at an unspecified time, but probably not just after a meal. Was it possible (the enquiring minds enquired) that an analysis of all these spells might reveal some small powerful common denominator, some meta-spell, some simple little equation which would achieve the required end far more simply, and incidentally come as a great relief to all rhinos?

  To answer such questions Hex had been built, although Ponder Stibbons was a bit uneasy about the word 'built' in this context. He and a few keen students had put it together, certainly, but… well… sometimes he thought bits of it, strange though this sounded, just turned up.

  For example, he was pretty sure no-one had designed the Phase of the Moon Generator, but there it was, clearly a part of the whole thing. They had built the Unreal Time Clock, although no-one seemed to have a very clear idea how it worked.

  What he suspected they were dealing with was a specialized case of formative causation, always a risk in a place like Unseen University, where reality was stretched so thin and therefore blown by so many strange breezes. If that was so, then they weren't exactly designing something. They were just putting physical clothes on an idea that was already there, a shadow of something that had been waiting to exist.

  He'd explained at length to the Faculty that Hex didn't think. It was obvious that it couldn't think. Part of it was clockwork. A lot of it was a giant ant farm (the interface, where the ants rode up and down on a little paternoster that turned a significant cogwheel was a little masterpiece, he thought) and the intricately controlled rushing of the ants through their maze of glass tubing was the most important part of the whole thing.

  But a lot of it had just… accumulated, like the aquarium and wind chimes which now seemed to be essential. A mouse had built a nest in the middle of it all and had been allowed to become a fixture, since the thing stopped working when they took it out. Nothing in that assemblage could possibly think, except in fairly limited ways about cheese or sugar. Nevertheless… in the middle of the night, when Hex was working hard, and the tubes rustled with the toiling ants, and things suddenly went 'clonk' for no obvious reason, and the aquarium had been lowered on its davits so that the operator would have something to watch during the long hours… Nevertheless, then a man might begin to speculate about what a brain was and what thought was and whether things that weren't alive could think and whether a brain was just a more complicated version of Hex (or, around 4 a.m., when bits of the clockwork reversed direction suddenly and the mice squeaked, a less complicated version of Hex) and wonder if the whole produced something not apparently inherent in the parts.

  In short, Ponder was just a little bit worried.

  He sat down at the keyboard. It was almost as big as the rest of Hex, to allow for the necessary levers and armatures. The various keys allowed little boards with holes in them to drop briefly into slots, forcing the ants into new paths.

  It took him some time to compose the problem, but at last he braced one foot on the structure and tugged on the Enter lever.

  The ants scurried on new paths. The clockwork started to move. A small mechanism which Ponder would be prepared to swear had not been there yesterday, but which looked like a device for measuring wind speed, began to spin.

  After several minutes a number of blocks with occult symbols on them dropped into the output hopper.

  "Thank you," said Ponder, and then felt extremely silly for saying so.

  There was a tension to the thing, a feeling of mute straining and striving towards some distant and incomprehensible goal. As a wizard, it was something that Ponder had only before encountered in acorns: a tiny soundless voice which said, yes, I am but a small, green, simple object — but I dream about forests.

  Only the other day Adrian Turnipseed had typed in 'Why?' to see what happened. Some of the students had forecast that Hex would go mad trying to work it out; Ponder had expected Hex to produce the message????? which it did with depressing frequency.

  Instead, after some unusual activity among the ants, it had laboriously produced: 'Because.'

  With everyone else watching from behind a hastily overturned desk, Turnipseed had volunteered: 'Why anything?'

  The reply had finally turned up: 'Because Everything.????? Eternal Domain Error. +++++ Redo From Start +++++.'

  No-one knew who Redo From Start was, or why he was sending messages. But there were no more funny questions. No-one wanted to risk getting answers. It was shortly afterwards that the thing like a broken umbrella with herrings on it appeared just behind the thing like a beachball that went 'parp' every fourteen minutes.

  Of course, books of magic developed a certain… personality, derived from all that power in their pages. That's why it was unwise to go into the Library without a stick. And now Ponder had helped build an engine for studying magic. Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer too.

  He was beginning to suspect that Hex was redesigning itself.

  And he'd just said 'Thank you'. To a thing that looked like it had been made by a glassblower with hiccups.

  He looked at the spell it had produced, hastily wrote it down and hurried out.

  Hex clicked to itself in the now empty room. The thing that went 'parp' went parp. The Unreal Time Clock ticked sideways.

  There was a rattle in the output slot.

  'Don't mention it. ++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.'

  It was five minutes later.

  "Fascinatin'," said Ridcully. "Sapient pearwood, eh?" He knelt down in an effort to see underneath.

  The Luggage backed away. It was used to terror, horror, fear and panic. It had seldom encountered interest before.

  The Archchancellor stood up and brushed himself off.

  "Ah," he said, as a dwarfish figure approached. "Here's the gardener with the stepladder. The Dean's in the chandelier, Modo."

  "I'm quite happy up here, I assure you," said a voice from the ceiling regions. "Perhaps someone would be kind enough to pass me up my tea?"

  "And I was amazed the Senior Wrangler could ever fit in the sideb
oard," said Ridcully. "It's amazin' how a man can fold himself up."

  "I was just — just inspecting the silverware," said a voice from the depths of a drawer.

  The Luggage opened its lid. Several wizards jumped back hurriedly.

  Ridcully examined the shark teeth stuck here and there in the woodwork.

  "Kills sharks, you say?" he said.

  "Oh, yes," said Rincewind. "Sometimes it drags them ashore and jumps up and down on them."

  Ridcully was impressed. Sapient pearwood was very rare in the countries between the Ramtops and the Circle Sea. There were probably no living trees left. A few wizards were lucky enough to have inherited staffs made out of it.

  Economy of emotion was one of Ridcully's strong points. He had been impressed. He had been fascinated. He'd even, when the thing had landed in the middle of the wizards and caused the Dean's remarkable feat of vertical acceleration, been slightly aghast. But he hadn't been frightened, because he didn't have the imagination.

  "My goodness," said a wizard.

  The Archchancellor looked up.

  "Yes, Bursar?"

  "It's this book the Dean loaned me, Mustrum. It's about apes."

  "Really."

  "It's most fascinating," said the Bursar, who was on the median part of his mental cycle and therefore vaguely on the right planet even if insulated from it by five miles of mental cotton wool. "It's true what he said. It says here that an adult male orang-utan doesn't grow the large flamboyant cheek pads unless he's the dominant male."

  "And that's fascinating, is it?"

  "Well, yes, because he hasn't got 'em. I wonder why? He certainly dominates the Library, I should think."

  "Ah, yes," said the Senior Wrangler, "but he knows he's a wizard, too. So it's not as though he dominates the whole University."

  One by one, as the thought sank in, they grinned at the Archchancellor.

  "Don't you look at my cheeks like that!" said Ridcully. "I don't dominate anybody!"

  "I was only—"

  "So you can all shut up or there will be big trouble!"

  "You should read it," said the Bursar, still happily living in the valley of the dried frogs. "It's amazing what you can learn."

  "What? Like… how to show your bottom to people?" said the Dean, from on high.

  "No, Dean. That's baboons," said the Senior Wrangler.

  "I beg your pardon, I think you'll find it's gibbons," said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

  "No, gibbons are the ones that hoot. It's baboons if you want to see bottoms."

  "Well, he's never shown me one," said the Archchancellor.

  "Hah, well, he wouldn't, would he?" said a voice from the chandelier. "Not with you being dominant male and everything."

  "Two Chairs, you come down here this minute!"

  "I seem to be entangled, Mustrum. A candle is giving me some difficulty."

  "Hah!"

  Rincewind shook his head and wandered away. There had certainly been some changes around the place since he had been there and, if it came to it, he didn't know how long ago that had been…

  He'd never asked for an exciting life. What he really liked, what he sought on every occasion, was boredom. The trouble was that boredom tended to explode in your face. Just when he thought he'd found it he'd be suddenly involved in what he supposed other people — thoughtless, feckless people — would call an adventure. And he'd be forced to visit many strange lands and meet exotic and colourful people, although not for very long because usually he'd be running. He'd seen the creation of the universe, although not from a good seat, and had visited Hell and the afterlife. He'd been captured, imprisoned, rescued, lost and marooned. Sometimes it had all happened on the same day.

  Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it was something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.

  The root problem, Rincewind had come to believe, was that he suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future, something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where the good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. It was as if he always got the indigestion before the meal and felt so dreadful that he never actually managed to eat anything.

  Somewhere in the world, he reasoned, there was someone who was on the other end of the see-saw, a kind of mirror Rincewind whose life was a succession of wonderful events. He hoped to meet him one day, preferably while holding some sort of weapon.

  Now people were babbling about sending him to the Counterweight Continent. He'd heard that life was dull there. And Rincewind really craved dullness.

  He'd really liked that island. He'd enjoyed Coconut Surprise. You cracked it open and, hey, there was coconut inside. That was the kind of surprise he liked.

  He pushed open a door.

  The place inside had been his room. It was a mess. There was a large and battered wardrobe, and that was about the end of it as far as proper furniture was concerned unless you wanted to broaden the term to include a wicker chair with no bottom and three legs and a mattress so full of the life that inhabits mattresses that it occasionally moved sluggishly around the floor, bumping into things. The rest of the room was a litter of objects dragged in from the street — old crates, bits of planking, sacks…

  Rincewind felt a lump in his throat. They'd left his room just as it was.

  He opened the wardrobe and rummaged through the moth-haunted darkness within, until his questing hand located—

  — an ear—

  — which was attached to a dwarf.

  "Ow!"

  "What," said Rincewind, "are you doing in my wardrobe?"

  "Wardrobe? Er… Er… Isn't this the Magic Kingdom of Scrumptiousness?" said the dwarf, trying not to look guilty.

  "No, and these shoes you're holding aren't the Golde Jewels of the Queen of the Fairies," said Rincewind, snatching them out of the thief's hands. "And this isn't the Wand of Invisibility and these aren't Giant Grumblenose's Wonderful Socks but this is my boot—"

  "Ow!"

  "And stay out!"

  The dwarf ran for the door and paused, but only briefly, to shout: "I've got a Thieves' Guild card! And you shouldn't hit dwarfs! That's speciesism!"

  "Good," said Rincewind, retrieving items of clothing.

  He found another robe and put it on. Here and there moths had worked their lacemaking skills and most of the red colour had faded to shades of orange and brown, but to his relief it was a proper wizard's robe. It's hard to be an impressive magic-user with bare knees.

  Gentle footsteps pattered to a halt behind him. He turned.

  "Open."

  The Luggage obediently cracked its lid. In theory it should have been full of shark; in fact it was half full of coconuts. Rincewind turfed them out on to the floor and put the rest of the clothes inside.

  "Shut."

  The lid slammed.

  "Now go down to the kitchen and get some potatoes."

  The chest did a complicated, many-legged about-turn and trotted away. Rincewind followed it out and headed towards the Archchancellor's study. Behind him he could hear the wizards still arguing.

  He'd become familiar with the study through long years at Unseen. Generally he was there to answer quite difficult questions, like 'How can anyone get a negative mark in Basic Firemaking?" He'd spent a lot of time staring at the fixtures while people harangued him.

  There had been changes here, too. Gone were the alembics and bubbling flagons that were the traditional props of wizardry; Ridcully's study was dominated by a full-size snooker table, on which he'd piled papers until there was no room for any more and no sign of green felt. Ridcully assumed that anything people had time to write down couldn't be important.

  The stuffed heads of a number of surprised animals stared down at him. From the antlers of one stag hung a pair of corroded bo
ots Ridcuffy had won as a Rowing Brown for the University in his youth.[10]

  There was a large model of the Discworld on four wooden elephants in a corner of the room. Rincewind was familiar with it. Every student was… The Counterweight Continent was a blob. It was a shaped blob; a not very inviting comma shape. Sailors had brought back news of it. They'd said that at one point broke into a pattern of large islands, stretching around the Disc to the even more mysterious island of Bhangbhangduc and the completely mythical continent known only on the charts as 'XXXX'.

  Not that many sailors went near the Counterweight Continent. The Agatean Empire was known to ignore a very small amount of smuggling; presumably Ankh-Morpork had some things it wanted. But there was nothing official; a boat might come back loaded with silk and rare wood and, these days, a few wild-eyed refugees, or it might come back with its captain riveted upside down to the mast, or it might not come back.

  Rincewind had been very nearly everywhere, but the Counterweight Continent was an unknown land, or terror incognita. He couldn't imagine why they'd want any kind of wizard.

  Rincewind sighed. He knew what he should do now.

  He shouldn't even wait for the return of the Luggage from its argosy to the kitchens, from which the sound of yelling and something being repeatedly hit with a large brass preserving pan suggested it was going about his business.

  He should just gather up what he could carry and get the hell out of here. He—

  "Ah, Rincewind," said the Archchancellor, who had an amazingly silent walk for such a large man. "Keen to leave, I see."

  "Yes, indeed," said Rincewind. "Oh, yes. Very much so."

  The Red Army met in secret session. They opened their meeting by singing revolutionary songs and, since disobedience to authority did not come easily to the Agatean character, these had titles like "Steady Progress And Limited Disobedience While Retaining Well-Formulated Good Manners'.

  Then it was time for the news.

  "The Great Wizard will come. We sent the message, at great personal risk.