Unseen Academicals

by Terry Pratchett

  Off in the distance was one last cry: ‘The Megapode is catched!’ But around the Emperor silence listened with its mouth open.

  ‘You are mistaken, Nutts,’ said Smeems slowly. ‘I think you will find that one of the gentlemen must have dropped them.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that’s certainly what must have happened, sir. I must learn not to jump to conclusions.’

  Once again, the Candle Knave had that off-balance feeling. ‘Well, then, we will say no more about it,’ was all he managed.

  ‘What was it that happened just then, sir?’ said Nutt.

  ‘Oh, that? That was all part of one of the gentlemen’s magically essential magical activities, lad. It was vital to the proper running of the world, I’ll be bound, oh yes. Could be they was setting the stars in their courses, even. It’s one of them things we have to do, you know,’ he added, carefully insinuating himself into the company of wizardry.

  ‘Only it looked like a skinny man with a big wooden duck strapped to his head.’

  ‘Ah, well, it may have looked like that, come to think of it, but that was because that’s how it looks to people like us, what are not gifted with the ocular sight.’

  ‘You mean it was some sort of metaphor?’

  Smeems handled this quite well in the circumstances, which included being so deeply at sea with that sentence that barnacles would be attracted to his underwear. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It could be a meta for something that didn’t look so stupid.’

  ‘Exactly, master.’

  Smeems looked down at the boy. It’s not his fault, he thought, he can’t help what he is. An uncharacteristic moment of warmth overtook him.

  ‘You’re a bright lad,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be head dribbler one day.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Nutt, ‘but if you don’t mind I was rather hoping for something a bit more in the fresh air, so to speak.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Smeems, ‘that could be a bit . . . tricky, as you might say.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I know.’

  ‘It’s just that there’s a lot of— well, look, it’s not me, it’s . . . it’s . . . well, you know. It’s people. You know what people are like.’

  ‘Yes. I know what people are like.’

  Looks like a scarecrow, talks posh like one of the gentlemen, Smeems thought. Bright as a button, grubby as a turd. He felt moved to pat the little . . . fellow on his curiously spherical head, but desisted.

  ‘Best if you stay down in the vats,’ he said. ‘It’s nice and warm, you’ve got your own bedroll, and it’s all snug and safe, eh?’

  To his relief the boy was silent as they walked down the passages, but then Nutt said, in a thoughtful tone of voice, ‘I was just wondering, sir . . . How often has the candle that never goes out . . . not gone out?’

  Smeems bit back the stinging retort. For some reason he knew it could only build up trouble in the long run.

  ‘The candle that never goes out has failed to go out three times since I’ve been Candle Knave, lad,’ he said. ‘It’s a record!’

  ‘An enviable achievement, sir.’

  ‘Damn right! And that’s even with all the strangeness there’s been happening lately.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ said Nutt. ‘Have stranger than usual things been happening?’

  ‘Young . . . man, stranger than usual things happen all the time.’

  ‘One of the scullery boys told me that all the toilets on the Tesseractical floor turned into sheep yesterday,’ said Nutt. ‘I should like to see that.’

  ‘I shouldn’t go further than the sculleries, if I was you,’ said Smeems, quickly. ‘And don’t worry about what the gentlemen do. They are the finest minds in the world, let me tell you. If you was to ask ’em...’He paused, trying to think of something really difficult, like, ‘What is 864 times 316 . . .?’

  ‘273,024,’ said Nutt, not quite under his breath.

  ‘What?’ said Smeems, derailed.

  ‘Just thinking aloud, master,’ said Nutt.

  ‘Oh. Right. Er . . . Well that’s it, see? They’d have an answer for you in a brace of shakes. Finest minds in the world,’ said Smeems, who believed in truth via repetition. ‘Finest minds. Engaged in the business of the universe. Finest minds!’

  ‘Well, that was fun,’ said Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of the university, throwing himself into a huge armchair in the faculty’s Uncommon Room with such force that it nearly threw him out again. ‘We must do it again some time.’

  ‘Yes, sir. We will. In one hundred years,’ said the new Master of The Traditions smugly, turning over the pages in his huge book. He reached the crackling leaf headed Hunting the Megapode, wrote down the date and the amount of time it had taken to find the aforesaid Megapode, and signed his name with a flourish: Ponder Stibbons.

  ‘What is a Megapode, anyway?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, helping himself to the port.

  ‘A type of bird, I believe,’ said the Archchancellor, waving a hand towards the drinks trolley. ‘After me.’

  ‘The original Megapode was found in the under-butler’s pantry,’ said the Master of The Traditions. ‘It escaped in the middle of dinner and caused what my predecessor eleven hundred years ago called . . .’ he referred to the book, ‘ “a veritable heyhoe-rumbelow as all the Fellows pursued it through the college buildings with much mirth and good spirits”.’

  ‘Why?’ said the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications, deftly snatching the decanter full of good spirits as it went past.

  ‘Oh, you can’t have a Megapode running around loose, Doctor Hix,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anyone’ll tell you that.’

  ‘No, I meant why do we do it again every hundred years?’ said the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications.4

  The Senior Wrangler turned his face away and murmured, ‘Oh, good gods . . .’

  ‘It’s a tradition,’ the Chair of Indefinite Studies explained, rolling a cigarette. ‘We have to have traditions.’

  ‘They’re traditional,’ said Ridcully. He beckoned to one of the servants. ‘And I don’t mind saying that this one has made me somewhat peckish. Can you fetch the cheeseboards one to five, please? And, um, some of that cold roast beef, some ham, a few biscuits and, of course, the pickle carts.’ He looked up. ‘Anyone want to add anything?’

  ‘I could toy fitfully with a little fruit,’ said the Professor of Recondite Phenomena. ‘How about you, Librarian?’

  ‘Ook,’ growled the figure hogging the fire.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said the Archchancellor. He waved a hand at the hovering waiter. ‘The fruit trolley as well. See to it, please, Downbody. And . . . perhaps that new girl could bring it up? She ought to get used to the Uncommon Room.’

  It was as if he had just spoken a magic spell. The room, its ceiling hazy with blue smoke, was suddenly awash with a sort of heavy, curiously preoccupied silence mostly due to dreamy speculation, but in a few rare cases owing to distant memory.

  The new girl . . . At the mere thought, elderly hearts beat dangerously.

  Very seldom did beauty intrude into the daily life of UU, which was as masculine as the smell of old socks and pipe smoke and, given the faculty’s general laxness when it came to knocking out their pipes, the smell of smoking socks as well. Mrs Whitlow, the housekeeper, she of the clanking chatelaine and huge creaking corset that caused the Chair of Indefinite Studies to swoon when he heard it, generally took great care to select staff who, while being female, were not excessively so, and tended to be industrious, clean in their habits, rosy cheeked and, in short, the kind of ladies who are never too far from gingham and an apple pie. This suited the wizards, who liked to be not far away from an apple pie themselves, although they could take gingham or leave it alone.

  Why, then, had the housekeeper employed Juliet? What could she have been thinking of? The girl had come into the place like a new world in a solar system, and the balance of the heavens was subtly wobbling. And, indeed, as s
he advanced, so was Juliet.

  By custom and practice, wizards were celibate, in theory because women were distracting and bad for the magical organs, but after a week of Juliet’s presence many of the faculty were subject to (mostly) unfamiliar longings and strange dreams, and were finding things rather hard, but you couldn’t really put your finger on it: what she had went beyond beauty. It was a sort of distillation of beauty that travelled around with her, uncoiling itself into the surrounding ether. When she walked past, the wizards felt the urge to write poetry and buy flowers.

  ‘You may be interested to know, gentlemen,’ said the new Master of The Traditions, ‘that tonight’s was the longest chase ever recorded in the history of the tradition. I suggest we owe a vote of thanks to tonight’s Megapode . . .’

  He realized the statement had plummeted on to deaf ears. ‘Er, gentlemen?’ he said.

  He looked up. The wizards were staring, in a soulful sort of way, at whatever was going on inside their heads.

  ‘Gentlemen?’ he said again, and this time there was a collective sigh as they woke up from their sudden attack of daydreaming.

  ‘What say?’ said the Archchancellor.

  ‘I was just remarking that tonight’s Megapode was undoubtedly the finest on record, Archchancellor. It was Rincewind. The official Megapode headdress suited him very well, all things considered. I think he’s gone for a lie down.’

  ‘What? Oh, that. Well, yes. Indeed. Well done, that man,’ said Ridcully, and the wizards commenced that slow handclapping and table-thumping which is the mark of appreciation amongst men of a certain age, class and girth, accompanied by cries of ‘Ver’, ver’ well done, that man!’ and ‘Jolly good!’ But eyes stayed firmly fixed on the doorway, and ears strained for the rattle of the trolley, which would herald the arrival of the new girl and, of course, one hundred and seven types of cheese, and more than seventy different varieties of pickles, chutneys and other tracklements. The new girl might be the very paradigm of beauty, but UU was not the place for a man who could forget his cheeses.

  Well, she was a distraction at least, Ponder thought as he snapped the book shut, and the university needed a few of them right now. It had been tricky since the Dean had left, very tricky indeed. Whoever heard of a man resigning from UU? It was something that simply did not happen! Sometimes people left in disgrace, in a box or, in a few cases, in bits, but there was no tradition of resigning at all. Tenure at Unseen University was for life, and often a long way beyond.

  The office of Master of The Traditions had fallen inevitably on Ponder Stibbons, who tended to get all the jobs that required someone who thought that things should happen on time and that numbers should add up.

  Regrettably, when he’d gone to check on things with the previous Master of The Traditions, who, everyone agreed, had not been seen around and about lately, he’d found that the man had been dead for two hundred years. This wasn’t a wholly unusual circumstance. Ponder, after years at Unseen, still didn’t know the full size of the faculty. How could you keep track of them in a place like this these days, where hundreds of studies all shared one window, but only on the outside, or rooms drifted away from their doorways during the night, travelled intangibly through the slumbering halls and ended up docking quite elsewhere?

  A wizard could do what he liked in his own study, and in the old days that had largely meant smoking anything he fancied and farting hugely without apologizing. These days it meant building out into a congruent set of dimensions. Even the Archchancellor was doing it, which made it hard for Ponder to protest: he had half a mile of trout stream in his bathroom, and claimed that messin’ about in his study was what kept a wizard out of mischief. And, as everyone knew, it did. It generally got him into trouble instead.

  Ponder had let that go, because he now saw it as his mission in life to stoke the fires that kept Mustrum Ridcully bubbling and made the university a happy place. As a dog reflects the mood of its owner, so a university reflects its Archchancellor. All he could do now, as the university’s sole self-confessed entirely sensible person, was to steer things as best he could, keep away from squalls involving the person previously known as the Dean, and find ways of keeping the Archchancellor too occupied to get under Ponder’s feet.

  Ponder was about to put the Book of Traditions away when the heavy pages flopped over.

  ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘Oh, those old book bindings get very stiff,’ said Ridcully. ‘They have a life of their own, sometimes.’

  ‘Has anyone heard of Professor H. F. Pullunder, or Doctor Erratamus?’

  The faculty stopped watching the door and looked at one another.

  ‘Ring a bell, anyone?’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Not a tinkle,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, cheerfully.

  The Archchancellor turned to his left. ‘What about you, Dean? You know all the old—’

  Ponder groaned. The rest of the wizards shut their eyes and braced themselves. This might be bad.

  Ridcully stared down at two empty chairs, with the imprint of a buttock in each one. One or two of the faculty pulled their hats down over their faces. It had been two weeks now, and it had not got any better.

  He took a deep breath and roared: ‘Traitor!’ – which was a terrible thing to say to two dimples in leather.

  The Chair of Indefinite Studies gave Ponder Stibbons a nudge, indicating that he was the chosen sacrifice for today, again.

  Again.

  ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us!’ said Ridcully, to the universe in general.

  Ponder cleared his throat. He’d really hoped the Megapode hunt would take the Archchancellor’s mind off the subject, but Ridcully’s mind kept on swinging back to the absent Dean the way a tongue plunges back to the site of a missing tooth.

  ‘Er, in point of fact, I believe his remuneration is at least—’ he began, but in Ridcully’s current mood no answer would be the right one.

  ‘Remuneration? Since when did a wizard work for wages? We are pure academics, Mister Stibbons! We do not care for mere money!’

  Unfortunately, Ponder was a clear logical thinker who, in times of mental confusion, fell back on reason and honesty, which, when dealing with an angry Archchancellor, were, to use the proper academic term, unhelpful. And he neglected to think strategically, always a mistake when talking to fellow academics, and as a result made the mistake of employing, as at this point, common sense.

  ‘That’s because we never actually pay for anything very much,’ he said, ‘and if anyone needs any petty cash they just help themselves from the big jar—’

  ‘We are part of the very fabric of the university, Mister Stibbons! We take only what we require! We do not seek wealth! And most certainly we do not accept a “post of vital importance which includes an attractive package of remuneration”, whatever the hells that means, “and other benefits including a generous pension”! A pension, mark you! When ever has a wizard retired?’

  ‘Well. Doctor Earwig—’ Ponder began, unable to stop himself.

  ‘He left to get married!’ snapped Ridcully. ‘That’s not retirin’, that’s the same as dyin’.’

  ‘What about Doctor Housemartin?’ Ponder went on.

  The Lecturer in Recent Runes kicked him on the ankle, but Ponder merely said, ‘Ouch!’ and continued. ‘He left with a bad case of work-related frogs, sir!’

  ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get off the pot,’ muttered Ridcully. Things were subsiding a bit now, and the pointy hats were tentatively raised. The Archchancellor’s little moments only lasted a few minutes. This would have been more comforting were it not for the fact that at approximately five-minute intervals something suddenly reminded him of what he considered to be the Dean’s totally treasonable activity, to wit, applying for and getting a job at another university via a common advertisement in a newspaper. That was not how a prince of magic behaved. He didn’t sit in front of a panel of drapers, greengrocers and bootmakers (wonderful people though they may
be, salt of the earth, no doubt, but even so . . .) to be judged and assessed like some champion terrier (had his teeth counted, no doubt!). He’d let down the entire brotherhood of wizardry, that’s what he’d done—

  There was a squeaking of wheels out in the corridor, and every wizard stiffened in anticipation. The door swung open and the first overloaded trolley was pushed in.

  There was a series of sighs as every eye focused on the maid who was pushing it, and then some rather louder sighs when they realized that she was not, as it were, the intended.

  She wasn’t ugly. She might be called homely, perhaps, but it was quite a nice home, clean and decent and with roses round the door and a welcome on the mat and an apple pie in the oven. But the thoughts of the wizards were, astonishingly, not on food at this point, although some of them were still a bit hazy as to why not.

  She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her.5

  The faculty was crestfallen, but it brightened up considerably as the caravan of trolleys wound its way into the room. There was nothing like a 3 a.m. snack to raise the spirits, everyone knew that.

  Well, Ponder thought, at least we’ve got through the evening without anything breaking. Better than Tuesday, at least.

  It is a well-known fact in any organization that, if you want a job done, you should give it to someone who is already very busy. It has been the cause of a number of homicides, and in one case the death of a senior director from having his head shut repeatedly in quite a small filing cabinet.

  In UU, Ponder Stibbons was that busy man. He had come to enjoy it. For one thing, most of the jobs he was asked to do did not need doing, and most of the senior wizards did not care if they were not done, provided they were not not done by themselves. Besides, Ponder was very good at thinking up efficient little systems to save time, and was, in particular, very proud of his system for writing the minutes of meetings, which he had devised with the help of Hex, the university’s increasingly useful thinking engine. A detailed analysis of past minutes, coupled with Hex’s enormous predictive abilities, meant that for a simple range of easily accessible givens, such as the agenda (which Ponder controlled in any case), the committee members, the time since breakfast, the time to dinner, and so on, in most cases the minutes could be written beforehand.