The Truth

by Terry Pratchett

  “You do?”

  “Yes. So I am minded to allow your friends to proceed with their folly.”

  “Er, they’re not exactly—” William began.

  “Of course, I should add that, in the event of there being any problems of a tentacular nature, you would be held personally responsible.”

  “Me? But I—”

  “Ah. You feel that I am being unfair? Ruthlessly despotic, perhaps?”

  “Well, I, er—”

  “Apart from anything else, the dwarfs are a very hardworking and valuable ethnic grouping in the city,” said the Patrician. “On the whole, I wish to avoid any low-level difficulties at this time, what with the unsettled situation in Uberwald and the whole Muntab question.”

  “Where’s Muntab?” said William.

  “Exactly. How is Lord de Worde, by the way? You should write to him more often, you know.”

  William said nothing.

  “I always think it is a very sad thing when families fall out,” said Lord Vetinari. “There is far too much mutton-headed ill feeling in the world.” He gave William a companionable pat. “I’m sure you will see to it that the printing enterprise stays firmly in the realms of the cult, the canny, and the scrutable. Do I make myself clear?”

  “But I don’t have any control ov—”

  “Hmm?”

  “Yes, Lord Vetinari,” said William.

  “Good. Good!” The Patrician straightened up, turned, and beamed at the dwarfs.

  “Jolly good,” he said. “My word. Lots of little letters, all screwed together. Possibly an idea whose time has come. I may even have an occasional job for you myself.”

  William waved frantically at Gunilla from behind the Patrician’s back.

  “Special rate for government jobs,” the dwarf muttered.

  “Oh, but I wouldn’t dream of paying any less than other customers,” said the Patrician.

  “I wasn’t going to charge you less than—”

  “Well, I’m sure we’ve all been very pleased to see you here, Your Lordship,” said William brightly, swiveling the Patrician in the direction of the door. “We look forward to the pleasure of your custom.”

  “Are you quite sure Mr. Dibbler isn’t involved in this concern?”

  “I think he’s having some things printed, but that’s all,” said William.

  “Astonishing. Astonishing,” said Lord Vetinari, getting into his coach. “I do hope he isn’t ill.”

  Two figures watched his departure from the rooftop opposite.

  One of them said, very, very quietly, “—!”

  The other said, “You have a point of view, Mr. Tulip?”

  “And he’s the man who runs the city?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So where’s his —ing bodyguards?”

  “If we wanted to scrag him, here and now, how useful would, say, four bodyguards be?”

  “As a —ing chocolate kettle, Mr. Pin.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “But I could knock him over from here with a —ing brick!”

  “I gather there are many organizations who hold Views on that, Mr. Tulip. People tell me this dump is thriving. The man at the top has a lot of friends when everything is going well. You would soon run out of bricks.”

  Mr. Tulip looked down at the departing coach.

  “From what I hear he mostly doesn’t do a —ing thing!” he complained.

  “Yeah,” said Mr. Pin smoothly. “One of the hardest things to do properly, in politics.”

  Both Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin brought different things to their partnership, and in this instance what Mr. Pin brought was political savvy. Mr. Tulip respected this, even if he didn’t understand it. He contented himself with muttering, “It’d be simpler to —ing kill him.”

  “Oh, for a —ing simple world,” said Mr. Pin. “Look, lay off the Honk, eh? That stuff’s for trolls. It’s worse than Slab. And they cut it with ground glass.”

  “’s chemical,” said Mr. Tulip sullenly.

  Mr. Pin sighed.

  “Shall I try again?” he said. “Listen carefully. Drugs equals chemicals, but, and please listen to this part, sheesh, chemicals do not equal drugs. Remember all that trouble with the calcium carbonate? When you paid the man five dollars?”

  “Made me feel good,” muttered Mr. Tulip.

  “Calcium carbonate?” said Mr. Pin. “Even for you, I mean…look, you put up your actual nose enough chalk that someone could probably cut your head off and write on a blackboard with your neck.”

  That was the major problem with Mr. Tulip, he thought as they made their way to the ground. It wasn’t that he had a drug habit. He wanted to have a drug habit. What he had was a stupidity habit, which cut in whenever he found anything being sold in little bags, and this had resulted in Mr. Tulip seeking heaven in flour, salt, baking powder, and pickled beef sandwiches. In a street where furtive people were selling Clang, Slip, Chop, Rhino, Skunk, Triplin, Floats, Honk, Double Honk, Gongers, and Slack, Mr. Tulip had an unerring way of finding the man who was retailing curry powder at what worked out as six hundred dollars a pound. It was so —ing embarrassing.

  Currently he was experimenting with the whole range of recreational chemicals available to Ankh-Morpork’s troll population, because at least when dealing with trolls Mr. Tulip had a moderate chance of outsmarting somebody. In theory Slab and Honk shouldn’t have any effect on the human brain, apart from maybe dissolving it. Mr. Tulip was hanging in there. He’d tried normality once, and hadn’t liked it.

  Mr. Pin sighed again. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s feed the geek.”

  In Ankh-Morpork it is very hard to watch without being watched in turn, and the two barely visible heads were indeed under observation.

  They were being watched by a small dog, variously colored but mainly a rusty gray. Occasionally it scratched itself, with a noise like someone trying to shave a wire brush.

  There was a piece of string around its neck. It was attached to another piece of string or, rather, to a length made up of pieces of string inexpertly knotted together.

  The string was being held in the hand of a man. At least, such might be deduced from the fact that it disappeared into the same pocket of the grubby coat as one sleeve, which presumably had an arm in it, and theoretically therefore a hand on the end.

  It was a strange coat. It stretched from the pavement almost to the brim of the hat above it, which was shaped rather like a sugarloaf. There was a suggestion of gray hair around the join. One arm burrowed in the suspicious depths of a pocket and produced a cold sausage.

  “Two men spyin’ on the Patrician,” said the dog. “An interestin’ fing.”

  “Bug’rem,” said the man and broke the sausage into two democratic halves.

  William wrote a short paragraph about Patrician Visits The Bucket and examined his notebook.

  Amazing, really. He’d found no less than a dozen items for his newsletter in only a day. It was astonishing what people would tell you if you asked them.

  Someone had stolen one of the golden fangs of the statue of Offler the Crocodile God; he’d promised Sergeant Colon a drink for telling him that, but in any case had got some way towards payment by appending to his paragraph the phrase: “The Watch Are Mightily in Pursuit of the Wrongdoer, and Are Confident of Apprehenƒion at an Early Juncture.”

  He was not entirely sure about this, although Sergeant Colon had looked very sincere when he said it.

  The nature of truth always bothered William. He had been brought up to tell it or, more correctly, to “own up” and some habits are hard to break if they’ve been beaten in hard enough. And Lord de Worde had inclined to the old proverb that as you bend the twig, so grows the tree. William had not been a particularly flexible twig. Lord de Worde had not, himself, been a violent man. He’d merely employed them. Lord de Worde, as far as William could recall, had no great enthusiasm for anything that involved touching people.

  Anyway, William always told
himself, he was no good at making things up; anything that wasn’t the truth simply unraveled for him. Even little white lies, like “I shall definitely have the money by the end of the week,” always ended in trouble. That was “telling stories,” a sin in the de Worde compendium that was worse than lying; it was trying to make lies interesting. So William de Worde told the truth, out of cosmic self-defense. He’d found a hard truth less hard than an easy lie.

  There had been rather a good fight in the Mended Drum. William was very pleased with that one: “Whereupon Brezock the Barbarian picked up a table and delivered a blow to Moltin the Snatcher, who in his turn seized hold of the Chandeliers and swung thereon, the while crying, ‘Take that, thou B*st*rd that you are!!!’ at which juncture, a ruckus commenced and 5 or 6 people were hurt…”

  He took it all down to the Bucket.

  Gunilla read it with interest; it seemed to take very little time for the dwarfs to set it up in type.

  And it was odd, but……once it was in type, all the letters so neat and regular…

  …it looked more real.

  Boddony, who seemed to be second in command of the print room, squinted at the columns of type over Goodmountain’s shoulder.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “What do you think?” said William.

  “Looks a bit…gray,” said the dwarf. “All the type bunched up. Looks like a book.”

  “Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?” said William. Looks like a book sounded like a good thing.

  “Maybe you want it more sort of spaced out?” said Gunilla.

  William stared at the printed page. An idea crept over him. It seemed to evolve from the page itself.

  “How about,” he said, “if we put a little title on each piece?”

  He picked up a scrap of paper and doodled: 5/6 Hurt in Tavern Brawl.

  Boddony read it solemnly.

  “Yes,” he said eventually. “That looks…suitable.” He passed the paper across the table.

  “What do you call this news sheet?” he said.

  “I don’t,” said William.

  “You’ve got to call it something,” said Boddony. “What do you put at the top?”

  “Generally something like ‘To my Lord The…’” William began. Boddony shook his head.

  “You can’t put that,” he said. “You want something a bit more general. More snappy.”

  “How about ‘Ankh-Morpork Items,’” said William. “Sorry, but I’m not much good at names.”

  Gunilla pulled his little hod out of his apron and selected some letters from one of the cases on the table. He screwed them together, inked them, and rolled a sheet of paper over them.

  William read: Ankh-Morpork tImes.

  “Messed that up a bit. Wasn’t paying attention,” muttered Gunilla, reaching for the type. William stopped him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Er. Leave it as it is…just make it a bigger T and a smaller i.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Gunilla. “All done. All right, lad? How many copies do you want?”

  “Er…twenty? Thirty?”

  “How about a couple of hundred?” Gunilla nodded at the dwarfs, who set to work. “It’s hardly worth going to press for less.”

  “Good grief! I can’t imagine there’s enough people in the city that’d pay five dollars!”

  “All right, charge ’em half a dollar. Then it’ll be a fifty dollars for us and the same for you.”

  “My word, really?”

  William stared at the beaming dwarf.

  “But I’ve still got to sell them,” he said. “It’s not as though they’re cakes in a shop. It’s not like—”

  He sniffed. His eyes began to water.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “We’re going to have another visitor. I know that smell.”

  “What smell?” said the dwarf.

  The door creaked open.

  There was this to be said about the Smell of Foul Ole Ron, an odor so intense that it took on a personality of its own and fully justified the capital letter: after the initial shock the organs of smell just gave up and shut down, as if no more able to comprehend the thing than an oyster can comprehend the ocean. After some minutes in its presence, wax would start to trickle out of people’s ears and their hair would begin to bleach.

  It had developed to such a degree that it now led a semi-independent life of its own, and often went to the theater by itself, or read small volumes of poetry. Ron was outclassed by his smell.

  Foul Ole Ron’s hands were thrust deeply into his pockets, but from one pocket issued a length of string, or rather a great many lengths of string tied into one length. The other was attached to a small dog of the grayish persuasion. It may have been a terrier. It walked with a limp and also in a kind of oblique fashion, as though it was trying to insinuate its way through the world. It walked like a dog who has long ago learned that the world contains more thrown boots than meaty bones. It walked like a dog that was prepared, at any moment, to run.

  It looked up at William with crusted eyes and said: “Woof.”

  William felt that he ought to stand up for mankind.

  “Sorry about the smell,” he said. Then he stared at the dog.

  “What’s this smell you keep on about?” said Gunilla. The rivets on his helmet were beginning to tarnish.

  “It, er, belongs to Mr…. er…Ron,” said William, stillgiving the dog a suspicious look. “People say it’s glandular.”

  He was sure he’d seen the dog before. It was always in the corner of the picture, as it were—ambling through the streets, or just sitting on a corner, watching the world go by.

  “What does he want?” said Gunilla. “D’you think he wants us to print something?”

  “Shouldn’t think so,” said William. “He’s a sort of beggar. Only they won’t let him in the Beggars’ Guild anymore.”

  “He isn’t saying anything.”

  “Well, usually he just stands there until people give him something to go away. Er…you heard of things like the Welcome Wagon, where various neighbors and traders greet newcomers to an area?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, this is the dark side.”

  Foul Ole Ron nodded, and held out a hand. “’S’right, Mister Push. Don’t try the blarney gobble on me, juggins, I told ’em, I ain’t slanging the gentry, bugrit. Millennium hand and shrimp. Dang.”

  “Woof.”

  William glared at the dog again.

  “Growl,” it said.

  Gunilla scratched somewhere in the recesses of his beard.

  “One thing I already noticed about this here town,” he said, “is that people’ll buy practically anything off a man in the street.”

  He picked up a handful of the news sheets, still damp from the press.

  “Can you understand me, mister?” he said.

  “Bugrit.”

  Gunilla nudged William in the ribs. “Does that mean yes or no, d’you think?”

  “Probably yes.”

  “Okay. Well, see here now, if you sell these things at, oh, twenty pence each, you can keep—”

  “Hey, you can’t sell it that cheap,” said William.

  “Why not?”

  “Why? Because…because…because, well, anyone will be able to read it, that’s why!”

  “Good, ’cos that means anyone’ll be able to pay twenty pence,” said Gunilla calmly. “There’s lots more poor folk than rich folk and it’s easier to get money out of ’em.” He grimaced at Foul Ole Ron. “This may seem a strange question,” he said, “but have you got any friends?”

  “I told ’em! I told ’em! Bug’rem!”

  “Probably yes,” said William. “He hangs out with a bunch of…er…unfortunates that live under one of the bridges. Well, not exactly ‘hangs out.’ More ‘droops.’”

  “Well, now,” said Gunilla, waving the copy of the Times at Ron, “you can tell them that if they can sell these to people for twenty pence each, I’ll let you keep one nice shin
y penny.”

  “Yeah? And you can put yer nice shiny penny where the sun don’t shine,” said Ron.

  “Oh, so you—” Gunilla began. William laid a hand on his arm.

  “Sorry, just a minute—What was that you said, Ron?” he said.

  “Bugrit,” said Foul Ole Ron.

  It had sounded like Ron’s voice and it had seemed to come from the general area of Ron’s face, it was just that it had demonstrated a coherence you didn’t often get.

  “You want more than a penny?” said William carefully.

  “Got to be worth five pence a time,” said Ron. More or less.

  For some reason William’s gaze was dragged down to the small gray dog. It returned it amiably and said “Woof?”

  He looked back up again.

  “Are you all right, Foul Ole Ron?” he said.

  “Gottle o’geer, gottle o’geer,” said Ron mysteriously.

  “All right…two pence,” said Gunilla.

  “Four,” Ron seemed to say. “But let’s not mess about, okay? One dollar per thirty?”

  “It’s a deal,” said Goodmountain, who spat on his hand and would have held it out to seal the contract if William hadn’t gripped it urgently.

  “Don’t.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  William sighed. “Have you got any horribly disfiguring diseases?”

  “No!”

  “Do you want some?”

  “Oh.” Gunilla lowered his hand. “You tell your friends to get round here right now, okay?” he said. He turned to William.

  “Trustworthy, are they?”

  “Well…sort of,” said William. “It’s probably not a good idea to leave paint thinners around.”

  Outside, Foul Ole Ron and his dog ambled down the street. And the strange thing was that a conversation was going on, even though there was technically only one person there.

  “See? I told you. You just let me do the talkin’, all right?”