Truth

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘That is him!’

  ‘It’s a trick … isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll be damned!’

  ‘If it is him, so are we all!’

  The hubbub died away. And then, very calmly, someone began to talk.

  ‘Good. Good. Take him away, gentlemen. Make him comfortable in the cellar.’

  There were footsteps. A door opened and closed.

  A more querulous voice said, ‘We could simply replace—’

  ‘No, we could not. I understand that our guest is, fortunately, a man of rather low intelligence.’ There was this about the first speaker’s voice. It spoke as if disagreeing was not simply unthinkable but impossible. It was used to being in the company of listeners.

  ‘But he looks the spit and image—’

  ‘Yes. Astonishing, isn’t it? Let us not overcomplicate matters, though. We are a bodyguard of lies, gentlemen. We are all that stands between the city and oblivion, so let us make this one chance work. Vetinari may be quite willing to see humans become a minority in their greatest city, but frankly his death by assassination would be … unfortunate. It would cause turmoil, and turmoil is hard to steer. And we all know that there are people who take too much of an interest. No. There is a third way. A gentle slide from one condition to another.’

  ‘And what will happen to our new friend?’

  ‘Oh, our employees are known to be men of resource, gentlemen. I’m sure they know how to deal with a man whose face no longer fits, eh?’

  There was laughter.

  * * *

  Things were a little fraught in Unseen University. The wizards were scuttling from building to building, glancing at the sky.

  The problem, of course, was the frogs. Not rains of frogs, which were uncommon now in Ankh-Morpork, but specifically foreign treefrogs from the humid jungles of Klatch. They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted.

  Very occasionally a frog was removed from the vivarium and put into a rather smaller jar where it briefly became a very happy frog indeed, and then went to sleep and woke up in that great big jungle in the sky.

  And thus the University got the active ingredient which it made up into pills and fed to the Bursar, to keep him sane. At least, apparently sane, because nothing was that simple at good old UU. In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.1

  This had worked well. There had been a few false starts. For several hours, at one point, he had hallucinated that he was a bookcase. But now he was permanently hallucinating that he was a bursar, and that almost made up for the small side-effect that also led him to hallucinate that he could fly.

  Of course, many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and this has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the street below. When a wizard hallucinates that he can fly, things are different.

  ‘Bursaar! You come down here right this minute!’ Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully barked through his megaphone. ‘You know what I said about goin’ higher than the walls!’

  The Bursar floated gently down towards the lawn. ‘You wanted me, Archchancellor?’

  Ridcully waved a piece of paper at him. ‘You were tellin’ me the other day we were spendin’ a ton of money with the engravers, weren’t you?’ he barked.

  The Bursar got his mind up to something approaching the correct speed. ‘I was?’ he said.

  ‘Breakin’ the budget, you said. Remember it distinctly.’

  A few cogs meshed in the jittery gearbox of the Bursar’s brain. ‘Oh. Yes. Yes. Very true,’ he said. Another gear clonked into place. ‘A fortune every year, I’m afraid. The Guild of Engravers—’

  ‘Chap here says,’ the Archchancellor glanced at the sheet, ‘he can do us ten copies of a thousand words each for a dollar. Is that cheap?’

  ‘I think, uh, there must be a mis-carving there, Archchancellor,’ said the Bursar, finally managing to get his voice into the smooth and soothing tones he found best in dealing with Ridcully. ‘That sum would not keep him in boxwood.’

  ‘Says here’ – rustle – ‘down to ten-point size,’ said Ridcully.

  The Bursar lost control for a moment. ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, Archchancellor. I mean, that can’t be right. Even if anyone could consistently carve that fine, the wood would crumble after a couple of impressions.’

  ‘Know about this sort of thing, do you?’

  ‘Well, my great-uncle was an engraver, Archchancellor. And the print bill is a major drain, as you know. I think I can say with some justification that I have been able to keep the Guild down to a very—’

  ‘Don’t they invite you to their annual blow-out?’

  ‘Well, as a major customer of course the University is invited to their official dinner and as the designated officer I naturally see it as part of my duties to—’

  ‘Fifteen courses, I heard.’

  ‘—and of course there is our policy of maintaining a friendly relationship with the other Gui—’

  ‘Not including the nuts and coffee.’

  The Bursar hesitated. The Archchancellor tended to combine wooden-headed stupidity with distressing insight.

  ‘The problem, Archchancellor,’ he tried, ‘is that we have always been very much against using movable type printing for magic purposes because—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know all about that,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘But there’s all the other stuff, more of it every day … forms and charts and gods know what. You know I’ve always wanted a paperless office—’

  ‘Yes, Archchancellor, that’s why you hide it all in cupboards and throw it out of the window at night.’

  ‘Clean desk, clean mind,’ said the Archchancellor. He thrust the leaflet into the Bursar’s hand.

  ‘Just you trot down there, why don’t you, and see if it’s just a lot of hot air. But walk, please.’

  William felt drawn back to the sheds behind the Bucket the next day. Apart from anything else, he had nothing to do and he didn’t like being useless.

  There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.

  The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!

  And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.

  William was one of the glassless. And this was odd, because he’d been born into a family that not only had a very large glass indeed but could afford to have people discreetly standing around with bottles to keep it filled up.

  It was self-imposed glasslessness, and it had started at a fairly early age when he’d been sent away to school.

  William’s brother Rupert, being the elder, had gone to the Assassins’ School in Ankh-Morpork, widely regarded as being the best school in the world for the full-glass class. William, as a less-important son, had been sent to Hugglestones, a boarding school so bleak and spartan that only the upper glasses would dream of sending the
ir sons there.

  Hugglestones was a granite building on a rain-soaked moor, and its stated purpose was to make men from boys. The policy employed involved a certain amount of wastage, and consisted in William’s recollection at least of very simple and violent games in the healthy outdoor sleet. The small, slow, fat or merely unpopular were mown down, as nature intended, but natural selection operates in many ways and William found that he had a certain capacity for survival. A good way to survive on the playing fields of Hugglestones was to run very fast and shout a lot while inexplicably always being a long way from the ball. This had earned him, oddly enough, a reputation for being keen, and keenness was highly prized at Hugglestones, if only because actual achievement was so rare. The staff at Hugglestones believed that in sufficient quantities ‘being keen’ could take the place of lesser attributes like intelligence, foresight and training.

  He had been truly keen on anything involving words. At Hugglestones this had not counted for a great deal, since most of its graduates never expected to have to do much more with a pen than sign their names (a feat which most of them could manage after three or four years), but it had meant long mornings peacefully reading anything that took his fancy while around him the hulking front-row forwards who would one day be at least the deputy-leaders of the land learned how to hold a pen without crushing it.

  William left with a good report, which tended to be the case with pupils that most of the teachers could only vaguely remember. Afterwards, his father had faced the problem of what to do with him.

  He was the younger son, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level. But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.

  Going into land management was just about acceptable, but it seemed to William that land managed itself pretty well, on the whole. He was all in favour of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window.

  A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn’t know.

  He enjoyed reading and writing. He liked words. Words didn’t shout or make loud noises, which pretty much defined the rest of his family. They didn’t involve getting muddy in the freezing cold. They didn’t hunt inoffensive animals, either. They did what he told them to. So, he’d said, he wanted to write.

  His father had erupted. In his personal world a scribe was only one step higher than a teacher. Good gods, man, they didn’t even ride a horse! So there had been Words.

  As a result, William had gone off to Ankh-Morpork, the usual destination for the lost and the aimless. There he’d made words his living, in a quiet sort of way, and considered that he’d got off easily compared to brother Rupert, who was big and good natured and a Hugglestones natural apart from the accident of birth.

  And then there had been the war against Klatch …

  It was an insignificant war, which was over before it started, the kind of war that both sides pretended hadn’t really happened, but one of the things that did happen in the few confused days of wretched turmoil was the death of Rupert de Worde. He had died for his beliefs; chief among them was the very Hugglestonian one that bravery could replace armour, and that Klatchians would turn and run if you shouted loud enough.

  William’s father, during their last meeting, had gone on at some length about the proud and noble traditions of the de Wordes. These had mostly involved unpleasant deaths, preferably of foreigners, but somehow, William gathered, the de Wordes had always considered that it was a decent second prize to die themselves. A de Worde was always to the fore when the city called. That was why they existed. Wasn’t the family motto Le Mot Juste? The Right Word In The Right Place, said Lord de Worde. He simply could not understand why William did not want to embrace this fine tradition and he dealt with it, in the manner of his kind, by not dealing with it.

  And now a great frigid silence had descended between the de Wordes that made the winter chill seem like a sauna.

  In this gloomy frame of mind it was positively cheering to wander into the print room to find the Bursar arguing the theory of words with Goodmountain.

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ said the Bursar. ‘Yes, indeed, figuratively a word is made up of individual letters but they have only a,’ he waved his long fingers gracefully, ‘theoretical existence, if I may put it that way. They are, as it were, words partis in potentia, and it is, I am afraid, unsophisticated in the extreme to imagine that they have any real existence unis et separato. Indeed, the very concept of letters having their own physical existence is, philosophically, extremely worrying. Indeed, it would be like noses and fingers running around the world all by themselves—’

  That’s three ‘indeeds’, thought William, who noticed things like that. Three indeeds used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break.

  ‘We got whole boxes of letters,’ said Goodmountain flatly. ‘We can make any words you want.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, you see,’ said the Bursar. ‘Supposing the metal remembers the words it has printed? At least engravers melt down their plates, and the cleansing effect of fire will—’

  ‘’scuse me, your reverence,’ said Goodmountain. One of the dwarfs had tapped him gently on the shoulder and handed him a square of paper. He passed it up to the Bursar.

  ‘Young Caslong here thought you might like this as a souvenir,’ he said. ‘He took it down directly from the case and pulled it off on the stone. He’s very quick like that.’

  The Bursar tried to look the young dwarf sternly up and down, although this was a pretty pointless intimidatory tactic to use on dwarfs since they had very little up to look down from.

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘How very …’ His eyes scanned the paper.

  And then bulged.

  ‘But these are … when I said … I only just said … How did you know I was going to say … I mean, my actual words …’ he stuttered.

  ‘Of course they’re not properly justified,’ said Goodmountain.

  ‘Now just a moment—’ the Bursar began.

  William left them to it. The stone he could work out – even the engravers used a big flat stone as a workbench. And he’d seen dwarfs pulling paper sheets off the metal letters, so that made sense, too. And what the Bursar said had been unjustified. It wasn’t as if metal had a soul.

  He looked over the head of a dwarf who was busily assembling letters in a little metal hod, the stubby fingers darting from box to box in the big tray of type in front of him. Capital letters all in the top, small letters all in the bottom. It was even possible to get an idea of what the dwarf was assembling, just by watching the movements of his hands across the tray.

  ‘M-a-k-e-$-$-$-I-n-n-Y-o-u-r-e-S-p-a-r-e-T-y-m—’ he murmured.

  A certainty formed. He glanced down at the sheets of grubby paper beside the tray.

  They were covered with the dense spiky handwriting that identified its owner as an anal-retentive with a poor grip.

  There were no flies on C.M.O.T. Dibbler. He would have charged them rent.

  With barely a conscious thought, William pulled out his notebook, licked his pencil and wrote, very carefully, in his private shorthand:

  ‘Amzg scenes hv ocrd in the Ct with the Openg o t Prntg Engn at the Sgn o t Bucket by G. Goodmountain, Dwf, which hs causd mch intereƒt amng all prts inc. chfs of commerƒe.’

  He paused. The conversation at the other end of the room was definitely taking a more conciliatory turn.

  ‘How much a thousand?’ said the Bursar.

  ‘Even cheaper for bulk rates,’ said Goodmountain. ‘Small runs no problem.’

  The Bursar’s face had that warm glaze of someone who deals in numbers and can see one huge and inconvenient number getting smaller in the very near future, and in those circumstances philosophy doesn’t stand much of a chance. And what was visible of Goodmount
ain’s face had the cheerful scowl of someone who’s worked out how to turn lead into still more gold.

  ‘Well, of course, a contract of this size would have to be ratified by the Archchancellor himself,’ said the Bursar, ‘but I can assure you that he listens very carefully to everything I say.’

  ‘I’m sure he does, your lordship,’ said Goodmountain cheerfully.

  ‘Uh, by the way,’ said the Bursar, ‘do you people have an Annual Dinner?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Definitely,’ said the dwarf.

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘When would you like it?’

  William scribbled: ‘Mch businƒs sms likly wth a Certain Educational Body in t Ct,’ and then, because he had a truly honest nature, he added, ‘we hear.’

  Well, that was pretty good going. He’d got one letter away only this morning and already he had an important note for the next—

  —except, of course, the customers weren’t expecting another one for almost a month. He had a certain feeling that by then no one would be very interested. On the other hand, if he didn’t tell them about it, someone would be bound to complain. There had been all that trouble with the rain of dogs in Treacle Mine Road last year, and it wasn’t as if that had even happened.

  But even if he got the dwarfs to make the type really big, one item of gossip wasn’t going to go very far.

  Blast.

  He’d have to scuttle around a bit and find some more.

  On an impulse he wandered over to the departing Bursar.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said.

  The Bursar, who was feeling in a very cheerful mood, raised an eyebrow in a good-humoured way.

  ‘Hmm?’ he said. ‘It’s Mr de Worde, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I—’

  ‘I’m afraid we do all our own writing down at the University,’ said the Bursar.

  ‘I wonder if I could just ask you what you think of Mr Goodmountain’s new printing engine, sir?’ said William.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Er … Because I’d quite like to know? And I’d like to write it down for my news letter. You know? Views of a leading member of Ankh-Morpork’s thaumaturgical establishment?’