Moving pictures tds-10

by Terry David John Pratchett

  Soll turned to his uncle, his eyebrows raised.

  'It's . . . it's a heraldic device,' said Dibbler quickly.

  'Crossed spare ribs on a bed of lettuce?' said Soll.

  'Very keen on their food, those old knights?'

  'And I liked the motto,' said Soll. ' "Every (k)night is Gormay Night At Harga's House of Ribs." If we had sound, I wonder what his battle cry would have been?'

  'You're my own flesh and blood,' said Dibbler, shaking his head. 'How can you do this to me?'

  'Because I'm your own flesh and blood,' said Soll.

  Dibbler brightened. Of course, when you looked at it like that, it didn't seem so bad.

  This is Holy Wood. To pass the time quickly, you just film the clock hands moving fast . . .

  In Unseen University, the resograph is already recording seven pubs a minute.

  And, towards the end of the afternoon, they burned Ankh­-Morpork.

  The real city had been burned down many times in its long history - out of revenge, or carelessness, or spite, or even just for the insurance. Most of the big stone buildings that actually made it a city, as opposed simply to a load of hovels all in one place, survived them intact and many people [22] considered that a good fire every hundred years or so was essential to the health of the city since it helped to keep down the rats, roaches, fleas and, of course, people not rich enough to live in stone houses.

  The famous Fire during the Civil War had been noteworthy simply because it was started by both sides at the same rime in order to stop the city falling into enemy hands.

  It had not otherwise, according to the history books, been very impressive. The Ankh had been particularly high that summer, and most of the city had been too damp to burn.

  This time it was a lot better.

  Flames poured into the sky. Because this was Holy Wood, everything burned, because the only difference between the stone buildings and the wooden buildings was what was painted on the canvas. The two-dimensional Unseen University burned. The Patrician's backless palace burned. Even the scale-model Tower of Art gushed flames like a roman candle.

  Dibbler watched it with concern.

  After a while Soll , behind him, said, 'Waiting for something, Uncle?'

  'Hmm? Oh, no. I hope Gaffer's concentrating on the tower, that's all,' said Dibbler. 'Very important symbolic landmark.'

  'It certainly is,' said Soll. 'Very important. So important, in fact, that I sent some lads up it at lunchtime just to make sure it was all OK.'

  'You did?' said Dibbler, guiltily.

  'Yes. And do you know what they found? They found someone had nailed some fireworks to the outside. Lots and lots of fireworks, on fuses. It's a good thing they found them because if the things had gone off it would have ruined the shot and we'd never be able to do it again. And, do you know, they said it looked as though the fireworks would spell out words?' Soll added.

  'What words?'

  'Never crossed my mind to ask them,' said Soll. 'Never crossed my mind.'

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and began to whistle under his breath. After a while he glanced sidelong at his uncle.

  ' "Hottest ribs in town",' he muttered. 'Really!'

  Dibbler looked sulky. 'It would have got a laugh, anyway,' he said.

  'Look, Uncle, this can't go on,' said Soll. 'No more of this commercial messing about, right?'

  'Oh, all right.'

  'Sure?'

  Dibbler nodded. 'I've said all right, haven't I?'

  'I want a bit more than that, Uncle.'

  'I solemnly promise not to do any more meddling in the click,' said Dibbler gravely. 'I'm your uncle. I'm family. Is that good enough for you?'

  'Well. All right.'

  When the fire had died down they raked some of the ashes together for a barbecue at the end-of-shooting party, under the stars.

  The velvet sheet of the night drapes itself over the parrot cage that is Holy Wood, and on warm nights like this there are many people with private business to pursue.

  A young couple, strolling hand in hand across the dunes, were frightened to near insensibility when an enormous troll jumped out at them from behind a rock waving its arms and shouting 'Aaaargh!'

  'Scared you, did I?' said Detritus, hopefully.

  They nodded, white-faced.

  'Well, that's a relief,' said the troll. He patted them on the heads, forcing their feet a little way into the sand. 'Thanks very much. Much obliged. Have a nice night,' he added mournfully.

  He watched them walk off hand in hand, and then burst into tears.

  In the handlemen's shed, C.M.O.T. Dibbler stood watching thoughtfully as Gaffer pasted together the day's footage. The handleman was feeling very gratified; Mr Dibbler had never shown the slightest interest in the actual techniques of film handling before now. This may have explained why he was a little freer than usual with Guild secrets that had been handed down sideways from one generation to the same generation.

  'Why are all the little pictures alike?' said Dibbler, as the handleman wound the film on to its spool. 'Seems to me that's wasting money.'

  'They're not really alike,' said Gaffer. 'Each one's a bit different, see? And so people's eyes see a lot of little slightly different pictures very fast and their eyes think they're watching something move.'

  Dibbler took his cigar out of his mouth. 'You mean it's all a trick?' he said, astonished.

  'Yeah, that's right.' The handleman chuckled and reached for the paste pot.

  Dibbler watched in fascination.

  'I thought it was all a special kind of magic,' he said, a shade disappointed. 'Now you tell me it's just a big Find?the­-Lady game?'

  'Sort of. You see, people don't actually see any one picture. They see a lot of them at once, see what I mean?'

  'Hey, I got lost at see there.'

  'Every picture adds to the general effect. People don't see, sorry, any one picture, they just see the effect caused by a lot of them moving past very quickly.'

  'Do they? That's very interesting,' said Dibbler. 'Very interesting indeed.' He flicked the ash from his cigar towards the demons. One of them caught it and ate it.

  'So what would happen', he said slowly, 'if, say, just one picture in the whole click was different.'

  'Funny you should ask,' said Gaffer. 'It happened the other day when we were patching up Beyond the Valley of the Trolls. One of the apprentices had stuck in just one picture from The Golde Rush and we all went around all morning thinking about gold and not knowing why. It was as if it'd gone straight into our heads without our eyes seeing it. Of course, I took my belt to the lad when we spotted it, but we'd never have found out if I hadn't happened to look at the click slowly.'

  He picked up the paste brush again, squared up a couple of strips of film, and fixed them together. After a while he became aware that it had gone very quiet behind him.

  'You all right, Mr Dibbler?' he said.

  'Hmm? Oh.' Dibbler was deep in thought. 'Just one picture had all that effect?'

  'Oh, yes. Are you all right, Mr Dibbler?'

  'Never felt better, lad,' Dibbler said. 'Never felt better.'

  He rubbed his hands together. 'Let's you and me have a little chat, man to man,' he added. 'Because, you know . . . ' he laid a friendly hand on Gaffer's shoulder, ' . . . I've a feeling that this could be your lucky day.'

  And in another alleyway Gaspode sat muttering to himself.

  'Huh. Stay, he says. Givin' me orders. Jus' so's his girlfriend doesn't have to have a horrid smelly dog in her room. So here's me, man's best friend, sittin' out in the rain. If it was rainin', anyway. Maybe it ain't rainin', but if it was rainin', I'd be soaked by now. Serve him right if I just upped and walked away. I could do it, too. Any time I wanted. I don't have to sit here. I hope no-one's thinkin' I'm sittin' here because I've been told to sit here. I'd like to see the human who could give me orders. I'm sittin' here 'cos I want to. Yeah.'

  Then he whined for a bit and shuffled into th
e shadows, where there was less chance of being seen.

  In the room above, Victor was standing facing the wall. This was humiliating. It had been bad enough bumping into a grinning Mrs Cosmopilite on the stairs. She had given him a big smile and a complicated, elbowintensive gesture that, he felt certain, sweet little old ladies shouldn't know.

  There were clinks and the occasional rustle behind him as Ginger got ready for bed.

  'She's really very nice. She told me yesterday that she had had four husbands,' said Ginger.

  'What did she do with the bones?' said Victor.

  'I'm sure I don't know what you mean,' said Ginger, sniffing. 'All right, you can turn around now. I'm in bed.'

  Victor relaxed, and turned round. Ginger had drawn the covers up to her neck and was holding them there like a besieged garrison manning the barricades.

  'You've got to promise me,' she said, 'that if anything happens, you won't try to take advantage of the situation.'

  Victor sighed. 'I promise.'

  'It's just that I've got a career to think about, you see.'

  'Yes, I see.'

  Victor sat by the lamp and took the book out of his pocket.

  'I'm not trying to be ungrateful or anything like that,' Ginger went on.

  Victor ruffled through the yellowing pages, looking for the place he'd got to. Scores of people had spent their lives by Holy Wood Hill, apparently just to keep a fire alight and chant three times a day. Why?

  'What are you reading?' said Ginger, after a while.

  'It's an old book I found,' said Victor, shortly. 'It's about Holy Wood.'

  'Oh.'

  'I should get some sleep if I were you,' he said, twisting so that he could make out the crabby script in the lamp light.

  He heard her yawn.

  'Did I finish telling you about the dream?' she said.

  'I don't think so,' said Victor, in what he hoped was a politely discouraging voice.

  'It always starts off with this mountain?'

  'Look, you really shouldn't be talking?'

  '-and there are stars around it, you know, in the sky, but one of them comes down and it's not a star at all, it's a woman holding a torch over her head?'

  Victor slowly turned back to the front of the book.

  'Yes?' he said, carefully.

  'And she keeps on trying to tell me something, something I can't make out, about waking something, and then there are a lot of lights and this roar, like a lion or a tiger or something, you know? And then I wake up.'

  Victor's finger idly traced the outline of the mountain under the stars.

  'It's probably just a dream,' he said. 'It probably doesn't mean anything.'

  Of course, Holy Wood Hill wasn't pointed. But perhaps it was once, in the days when there had been a city where now there was a bay. Good grief. Something must have really hated this place.

  'You don't remember anything else about the dream, by any chance?' he asked, with feigned casualness.

  There was no answer. He crept to the bed.

  She was asleep.

  He went back to the chair, which was promising to become annoyingly uncomfortable within half an hour, and turned down the lamp.

  Something in the hill. That was the danger.

  The more immediate danger was that he was going to fall asleep, too.

  He sat in the dark and worried. How did you wake up a sleepwalker, anyway? He recalled vaguely that it was said to be a very dangerous thing to do. There were stories about people dreaming about being executed and then, when someone had touched them on the shoulder to wake them up, their heads had fallen off. How anyone ever knew what a dead person had been dreaming wasn't disclosed. Perhaps the ghost came back afterwards and stood at the end of the bed, complaining.

  The chair creaked alarmingly as he shifted position. Perhaps if he stuck one leg out like this he could rest it on the end of the bed, so that even if he did fall asleep she wouldn't be able to get past without waking him.

  Funny, really. For weeks he'd spent the days sweeping her up in his arms, defending her bravely from whatever it was Morry was dressed up as today, kissing her, and generally riding off into the sunset to live happily, and possibly even ecstatically, ever after. There was probably no-one who'd ever watched one of the clicks who would possibly believe that he'd spend the night sitting in her room on a chair made out of splinters. Even he found it hard to believe, and here he was. You didn't get this sort of thing in clicks. Clicks were all Passione in a Worlde Gone Madde. If this was a click, he certainly wouldn't be sitting around in the dark on a hard chair. He'd be . . . well, he wouldn't be sitting around in the dark on a hard chair, that was for sure.

  The Bursar locked his study door behind him. You had to do that. The Archchancellor thought that knocking on doors was something that happened to other people.

  At least the horrible man seemed to have lost interest in the resograph, or whatever Riktor had called it. The Bursar had had a dreadful day, trying to conduct University business while knowing that the document was hidden in his room.

  He pulled it out from under the carpet, turned up the lamp, and began to read.

  He'd be the first to admit that he wasn't any good at mechanical things. He gave up quickly on the bits about pivots, octiron pendulums, and air being compressed in bellows.

  He homed in again on the paragraph that said: 'If, then, disturbances in the fabric of reality cause ripples to spread out from the epicentre, then the pendulum will tilt, compress the air in the relevant bellows, and cause the ornamental elephant closest to the epicentre to release a small lead ball into a cup. And thus the direction of the disturbance?'

  . . . whumm . . . whumm . . .

  He could hear it even up here. They'd just heaped more sandbags around it. No-one dared move it now. The Bursar tried to concentrate on his reading.

  '-can be estimated by the number and force?'

  . . .whumm . . . whummWHUMMWHUMM.

  The Bursar found himself holding his breath.

  '-of the expelled pellets, which I estimate in serious disturbances?'

  Plib.

  '-may well exceed two pellets?'

  Plib.

  '-expelled several inches?'

  Plib.

  '-during the?'

  Plib.

  '-course?'

  Plib.

  '-of?'

  Plib.

  '-one?'

  Plib.

  '-month,

  Plib.

  Gaspode woke up and quickly hauled himself into what he hoped looked like an alert position.

  Someone was shouting, but politely, as if they wanted to be helped but only if it wouldn't be too much trouble.

  He trotted up the steps. The door was ajar. He pushed it open with his head.

  Victor was lying on his back, tied to a chair. Gaspode sat down and watched him intently, in case he was about to do something interesting.

  'All right, are we?' he said, after a while.

  'Don't just sit there, idiot! Untie these knots,' said Victor.

  'Idiot I may be, but tied up I ain't,' said Gaspode evenly. 'Got the jump on you, did she?'

  'I must have nodded off for a moment,.' said Victor.

  'Long enough for her to get up, rip up a sheet, and tie you to the chair,' said Gaspode.

  'Yes, all right, all right. Can't you gnaw through it, or something?'

  'With these teeth? I could fetch someone, though,' said Gaspode, and grinned.

  'Er, I'm not sure that's a very good?'

  'Don't worry. I'll be right back,' said Gaspode, and padded out.

  'It might be a bit difficult to explain?' Victor called after him, but the dog was down the stairs and ambling along through the maze of backlots and alleys to the rear of Century of the Fruitbat.

  He shuffled up to the high fence. There was the gentle clink of a chain.

  'Laddie?' he whispered hoarsely.

  There was a delighted bark.

  'Good boy Ladd
ie!'

  'Yeah,' said Gaspode. 'Yeah.' He sighed. Had he ever been like that? If he had, thank goodness he hadn't known about it.

  'Me good boy!'

  'Sure, sure. Laddie be quiet,' muttered Gaspode, and squeezed his arthritic body under the fence. Laddie licked his face as he emerged.

  'I'm too old for this sort of stuff,' he muttered, and peered at the kennel.

  'A choke chain,' he said. 'A bloody choke chain. Stop pulling on it, you daft idiot. Back up. Back up. Right.'

  Gaspode shoved a paw into the loop and eased it over Laddie's head.

  'There,' he said. 'If we all knew how to do that, we'd be runnin' the world. Now stop kiddin' around. We need you.'

  Laddie sprang to tongue-lolling attention. If dogs could salute, he would have done.

  Gaspode wriggled under the fence again, and waited. He could hear Laddie's footsteps the other side, but the big dog seemed to be padding away from the fence.

  'No!' hissed Gaspode. 'Follow me!'

  There was a scurry of paws, a swishing noise, and Laddie cleared the high fence and did a four-point landing in front of him.

  Gaspode unpeeled his tongue from the back of his throat.

  'Good boy,' he muttered. 'Good boy.'

  Victor sat up, rubbing his head.

  'I caught myself aright crack when the chair fell backwards,' he said.

  Laddie sat looking expectantly, with the remains of the sheet in his mouth.

  'What's he waiting for?' said Victor.

  'You've got to tell him he's a good boy,' sighed Gaspode.

  'Doesn't he expect some meat or a sweet or something?'

  Gaspode shook his head. 'Jus' tell him what a good boy he is. It's better'n hard currency, for dogs.'

  'Oh? Well, then: good boy, Laddie.'

  Laddie bounced up and down excitedly. Gaspode swore under his breath.

  'Sorry about this,' he said. 'Pathetic, isn't it?'

  'Good boy, find Ginger,' said Victor.

  'Look, I can do that,' said Gaspode desperately, as Laddie started snuffling at the floor. 'We all know where she's headed. You don't have to go and?'