Interesting Times d-17

by Terry Pratchett

  "The word seems to fascinate you," said Lord Vetinari.

  "Seen it spelled like that before," said Ridcully "Can't remember where."

  "I'm sure you will remember. And will be in position to send the Great Wizard, however he spelled, to the Empire by teatime."

  Ridcully's jaw dropped.

  "Six thousand miles? By magic? Do you know how hard that is?"

  "I cherish my ignorance on the subject," said Lord Vetinari.

  "Besides," Ridcully went on, "they're, well… foreign over there. I thought they had enough wizards of their own."

  "I really couldn't say."

  "We don't know why they want this wizard?"

  "No. But I'm sure there is someone you could spare. There seems to be such a lot of you down there."

  "I mean, it could be for some terrible foreign purpose," said Ridcully. For some reason the face of the Dean waddled across his mind, and he brightened up. "They might be happy with a great wizard, do you think?" he mused.

  "I leave that entirely to you. But by tonight I would like to be able to send back a message saying that the Great Wizzard is duly on his way. And then we can forget about it."

  "Of course, it would be very hard to bring the chap back," said Ridcully. He thought of the Dean again. "Practically impossible," he added, in an inappropriately happy way. "I expect we'd try for months and months without succeeding. I expect we'd attempt everything with no luck. Damn it."

  "I can see you are agog to rise to this challenge," said the Patrician. "Let me not detain you from rushing back to the University and putting measures in hand."

  "But… 'wizzard'…" Ridcully murmured. "Rings a faint bell, that. Think I've seen it before, somewhere."

  The shark didn't think much. Sharks don't. Their thought processes can largely be represented by '='. You see it = you eat it.

  But, as it arrowed through the waters of the lagoon, its tiny brain began to receive little packages of selachian existential dread that could only be called doubts.

  It knew it was the biggest shark around. All the challengers had fled, or run up against good old '='.

  Yet its body told it that something was coming up fast behind it.

  It turned gracefully, and the first thing it saw was hundreds of legs and thousands of toes, a whole pork pie factory of piggy-wiggies.

  Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.

  The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of a tradition, Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no-one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no-one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the Reader in Woolly Thinking[4]) that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too.

  And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. The Chair of Indefinite Studies was giving a lecture in room 3B and therefore his presence asleep in front of the fire in the Uncommon Room was a technicality upon which no diplomatic man would comment.

  Ridcully kicked him on the shins.

  "Ow!"

  "Sorry to interrupt, Chair," said Ridcully, in a very perfunctory way. "God help me, I need the Council of Wizards. Where is everybody?"

  The Chair of Indefinite Studies rubbed his leg. "I know the Lecturer in Recent Runes is giving a lecture in 3B,"[5] he said. "But I don't know where he is. You know, that really hurt—"

  "Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes," said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.[6]

  Nothing in nature had that many feet. True, some things had that many legs — damp, wriggling things that live under rocks — but those weren't legs with feet, they were just legs that ended without ceremony.

  Something brighter than the shark might have been wary. But '=' swung treacherously into play and shot it forward.

  That was its first mistake.

  In these circumstances, one mistake = oblivion.

  Ridcully was waiting impatiently when, one by one, the senior wizards filed in from serious lecturing in room 3B. Senior wizards needed a lot of lecturing in order to digest their food.

  "Everyone here?" he said. "Right. Sit down. Listen carefully. Now… Vetinari hasn't had an albatross. It hasn't come all the way from the Counterweight Continent, and there isn't a strange message that we've got to obey, apparently. Follow me so far?"

  The senior wizards exchanged glances.

  "I think we may be a shade unclear on the detail," said the Dean.

  "I was using diplomatic language."

  "Could you, perhaps, try to be a little more indiscreet?"

  "We've got to send a wizard to the Counterweight Continent," said Ridcully. "And we've got to do it by teatime. Someone's asked for a Great Wizard and it seems we've got to send one. Only they spell it Wizzard—"

  "Oook?"

  "Yes, Librarian?"

  Unseen University's Librarian, who had been dozing with his head on the table, was suddenly sitting bolt upright. Then he pushed back his chair and, arms waving wildly for balance, left the room at a bow-legged run.

  "Probably remembered an overdue book," said the Dean. He lowered his voice. "Am I alone in thinking, by the way, that it doesn't add to the status of this University to have an ape on the faculty?"

  "Yes," said Ridcully flatly. "You are. We've got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that. Only the other day the head of the Thieves' Guild was asking me if we could turn their librarian into an ape and, besides, he's the only one of you buggers who stays awake more'n an hour a day. Anyway—"

  "Well, I find it embarrassing," said the Dean. "Also, he's not a proper orang-utan. I've been reading a book. It says a dominant male should have huge cheek pads. Has he got huge cheek pads? I don't think so. And—"

  "Shut up, Dean," said Ridcully, "or I won't let you go to the Counterweight Continent."

  "I don't see what raising a perfectly valid — What?"

  "They're asking for the Great Wizzard," said Ridcully. "And I immediately thought of you." As the only man I know who can sit on two chairs at the same time, he added silently.

  "The Empire?" squeaked the Dean. "Me? But they hate foreigners!"

  "So do you. You should get on famously."

  "It's six thousand miles!" said the Dean, trying a new tack. "Everyone knows you can't get that far by magic."

  "Er. As a matter of fact you can, I think," said a voice from the other end of the table.

  They all looked at Ponder Stibbons, the youngest and most depressingly keen member of the faculty He was holding a complicated mechanism of sliding wooden bars and peering at the other wizards over the top of it.

  "Er. Shouldn't be too much of a problem," he added. "People used to think it was, but I'm pretty sure it's all a matter of energy absorption and attention to relative velocities."

  The statement was followed with the kind of mystified and suspicious silence that generally succeeded one of his remarks.

  "Relative velocities," said Ridcully.

  "Yes, Archchancellor." Ponder looked down at his prototype slide rule and waited. He knew that Ridcully would feel it necessary to add a comment at this point in order to demonstrate that he'd grasped something.
/>
  "My mother could move like lightning when—"

  "I mean how fast things are going when compared to other things," Ponder said quickly, but not quite quickly enough. "We should be able to work it out quite easily. Er. On Hex."

  "Oh, no," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. "Not that. That's meddling with things you don't understand."

  "Well we are wizards," said Ridcully. "We're supposed to meddle with things we don't understand. If we hung around waitin' till we understood things we'd never get anything done."

  "Look, I don't mind summoning some demon and asking it," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "That's normal. But building some mechanical contrivance to do your thinking for you, that's… against Nature. Besides," he added in slightly less foreboding tones, "last time you did a big problem on it the wretched thing broke and we had ants all over the place."

  "We've sorted that out," said Ponder. "We—"

  "I must admit there was a ram's skull in the middle of it last time I looked," said Ridcully.

  "We had to add that to do occult transformations," said Ponder, "but—"

  "And cogwheels and springs," the Archchancellor went on.

  "Well, the ants aren't very good at differential analysis, so—"

  "And that strange wobbly thing with the cuckoo?"

  "The unreal time clock," said Ponder. "Yes, we think that's essential for working out—"

  "Anyway, it's all quite immaterial, because I certainly have no intention of going anywhere," said the Dean. "Send a student, if you must. We've got a lot spare ones."

  "Good so be would you if, duff plum of helping second A," said the Bursar.

  The table fell silent.

  "Anyone understand that?" said Ridcully.

  The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity some time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was often quite coherent, although not by normal human standards.

  "Um, he's going through yesterday again," said the Senior Wrangler. "Backwards, this time."

  "We should send the Bursar," said the Dean firmly.

  "Certainly not! You probably can't get dried frog pills there—"

  "Oook!"

  The Librarian re-entered the study at a bandy-legged run, waving something in the air.

  It was red, or at least had at some time been red. It might well once have been a pointy hat, but the point had crumpled and most of the brim was burned away. A word had been embroidered on it in sequins. Many had been burned off, but:

  WIZZARD

  … could just be made out as pale letters on the scorched cloth.

  "I knew I'd seen it before," said Ridcully. "On a shelf in the Library, right?"

  "Oook."

  The Archchancellor inspected the remnant.

  "Wizzard?" he said. "What kind of sad, hopeless person needs to write WIZZARD on their hat?"

  A few bubbles broke the surface of the sea, causing the raft to rock a little. After a while, a couple of pieces of shark skin floated up.

  Rincewind sighed and put down his fishing rod. The rest of the shark would be dragged ashore later, he knew it. He couldn't imagine why. It wasn't as if they were good eating. They tasted like old boots soaked in urine.

  He picked up a makeshift oar and set out for the beach.

  It wasn't a bad little island. Storms seemed to pass it by. So did ships. But there were coconuts, and breadfruit, and some sort of wild fig. Even his experiments in alcohol had been quite successful, although he hadn't been able to walk properly for two days. The lagoon provided prawns and shrimps and oysters and crabs and lobsters, and in the deep green water out beyond the reef big silver fish fought each other for the privilege of biting a piece of bent wire on the end of a bit of string. After six months on the island, in fact, there was only one thing Rincewind lacked. He'd never really thought about it before. Now he thought about it — or, more correctly, them — all the time.

  It was odd. He'd hardly ever thought about them in Ankh-Morpork, because they were there if ever he wanted them. Now they weren't, and he craved.

  His raft bumped the white sand at about the same moment as a large canoe rounded the reef and entered the lagoon.

  Ridcully was sitting at his desk now, surrounded by his senior wizards. They were trying to tell him things, despite the known danger of trying to tell Ridcully things, which was that he picked up the facts he liked and let the others take a running jump.

  "So," he said, "not a kind of cheese."

  "No, Archchancellor," said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. "Rincewind is a kind of wizard."

  "Was," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  "Not a cheese," said Ridcully, unwilling to let go of a fact.

  "No."

  "Sounds a sort of name you'd associate with cheese, I mean, a pound of Mature Rincewind, it rolls off the tongue…"

  "Godsdammit, Rincewind is not a cheese!" shouted the Dean, his temper briefly cracking. "Rincewind is not a yoghurt or any kind of sour milk derivative! Rincewind is a bloody nuisance! A complete and utter disgrace to wizardry! A fool! A failure! Anyway, he hasn't been seen here since that… unpleasantness with the Sourcerer, years ago."

  "Really?" said Ridcully, with a certain kind of nasty politeness. "A lot of wizards behaved very badly then, I understand."

  "Yes indeed," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, scowling at the Dean, who bridled.

  "I don't know anything about that, Runes. I wasn't Dean at the time."

  "No, but you were very senior."

  "Perhaps, but it just so happens that at the time I was visiting my aunt, for your information."

  "They nearly blew up the whole city!"

  "She lives in Quirm."

  "And Quirm was heavily involved, as I recall."

  "—near Quirm. Near Quirm. Not all that near, actually. Quite a way along the coast—"

  "Hah!"

  "Anyway, you seem to be very well informed, eh, Runes?" said the Dean.

  "I — What? — I — was studying hard at the time. Hardly knew what was going on—"

  "Half the University was blown down!" The Dean remembered himself and added, "That is, so I heard. Later. After getting back from my aunt's."

  "Yes, but I've got a very thick door—"

  "And I happen to know the Senior Wrangler was here, because—"

  "—with that heavy green baize stuff you can hardly hear any—"

  "Nap my for time it's think I."

  "Will you all shut up right now this minute!"

  Ridcully glared at his faculty with the clear, innocent glare of someone who was blessed at birth with no imagination whatsoever, and who had genuinely been hundreds of miles away during the University's recent embarrassing history.

  "Right," he said, when they had quietened down. "This Rincewind. Bit of an idiot, yes? You talk, Dean. Everyone else will shut up."

  The Dean looked uncertain.

  "Well, er… I mean, it makes no sense, Archchancellor. He couldn't even do proper magic. What good would he be to anyone? Besides… where Rincewind went" — he lowered his voice — "trouble followed behind."

  Ridcully noticed that the wizards drew a little closer together.

  "Sounds all right to me," he said. "Best place for trouble behind. You certainly don't want it in front."

  "You don't understand, Archchancellor," said the Dean. "It followed behind on hundreds of little legs."

  The Archchancellor's smile stayed where it was while the rest of his face went solid behind it.

  "You been on the Bursar's pills, Dean?"

  "I assure you, Mustrum—"

  "Then don't talk rubbish."

  "Very well, Archchancellor. But you do realize, don't you, that it might take years to find him?"

  "Er," said Ponder, "if we can work out his thaumic signature, I think Hex could probably do it in a day…"

  The Dean glared.

  "That's not magic!" he
snapped. "That's just… engineering!"

  Rincewind trudged through the shallows and used a sharp rock to hack the top off a coconut that had been cooling in a convenient shady rock pool. He put it to his lips.

  A shadow fell across him.

  It said, "Er, hello?"

  It was possible, if you kept on talking at the Archchancellor for long enough, that some facts might squeeze through.

  "So what you're tellin' me," said Ridcully, eventually, "is that this Rincewind fella has been chased by just about every army in the world, has been bounced around life like a pea on a drum, and probably is the one wizard who knows anything about the Agatean Empire on account of once being friends with," he glanced at his notes, "'a strange little man in glasse' who came from there and gave him this funny thing with the legs you all keep alluding to. And he can speak the lingo. Am I right so far?"

  "Exactly, Archchancellor. Call me an idiot if you like," said the Dean, "but why would anyone want him?"

  Ridcully looked down at his notes again. "You've decided to go, then?" he said.

  "No, of course not—"

  "What I don't think you've spotted here, Dean," he said, breaking into a determinedly cheery grin, "is what I might call the common denominator. Chap stays alive. Talented. Find him. And bring him here. Wherever he is. Poor chap could be facing something dreadful."

  The coconut stayed where it was, but Rincewind's eyes swivelled madly from side to side.

  Three figures stepped into his line of vision. They were obviously female. They were abundantly female. They were not wearing a great deal of clothing and seemed to be altogether too fresh-from-the-haidressers for people who have just been paddling a large war canoe, but this is often the case with beautiful Amazonian warriors.

  A thin trickle of coconut milk began to dribble off the end of Rincewind's beard.

  The leading woman brushed aside her long blonde hair and gave him a bright smile.

  "I know this sounds a little unlikely," she said, "but I and my sisters here represent a hitherto undiscovered tribe whose menfolk were recently destroyed in a deadly but short-lived and highly specific plague. Now we have been searching these islands for a man to enable us to carry on our line."