Unseen Academicals

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘Well,’ said Glenda, ‘since you ask . . . No, I really shouldn’t say . . .’

  ‘This is hardly the moment for bashfulness, do you think?’

  ‘Well, it’s about your strip, sir. That means your team colours. Nothing wrong with red and yellow, no one else uses those two, but, well, you want two big U’s on the front, right? Like UU?’ She waved her hands in the air.

  ‘Yes, that is exactly right. After all, it’s what we are.’ Ridcully nodded.

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, I know you gentlemen are bachelors and all, but . . . well, you’ll look like you’ve got bosoms. Honestly.’

  ‘Oh gods, sir, she’s right,’ said Ponder. ‘It will make a rather unfortunate shape . . .’

  ‘What kind of mind would see something like that in a pair of innocent letters?’ the Lecturer in Recent Runes demanded angrily.

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Glenda, ‘but every man watching the football has got one. And they would make up nicknames. They love doing that.’

  ‘I suspect you may be right,’ said Ridcully, ‘but we never had any trouble when I was rowing in the old days.’

  ‘Football followers are rather more robust in their language, sir,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Yes, and in those days we were pretty careless when it came to throwing fireballs, as I recall,’ Ridcully mused. ‘Oh dear, what a shame. I was looking forward to giving the old rag a bit of an airing again. Still, I’m sure we can change the design a little to save embarrassment all round. Thank you once again, Miss Glenda. Bosoms, eh? Narrow escape there, all round. Good day to you.’ He shut the door after the trolley, which Glenda was pushing as if in a race . . .

  Molly, the head maid in the Day Kitchen, was fretting at the end of the corridor beyond. She sagged with relief when Glenda came round the corner, teacups rattling.

  ‘Was it all right? Did anything go wrong? I’ll get into so much trouble if anything went wrong. Tell me nothing went wrong!’

  ‘It was all fine,’ said Glenda. That got her a suspicious look.

  ‘Are you sure? You owe me for this!’

  The laws of favours are amongst the most fundamental in the multiverse. The first law is: nobody asks for just one favour; the second request (after the granting of the first favour), prefaced by ‘and can I be really cheeky . . . ?’ is the asking of the second favour. If the aforesaid second request is not granted, the second law ensures that the need for any gratitude for the first favour is nullified, and in accordance with the third law the favour giver has not done any favours at all, and the favour field collapses.

  But Glenda reckoned she’d won a lot of favours over the years, and was owed a few herself. Besides, she had reason to believe that Molly had been spending the welcome break in dalliance with her boyfriend, who worked in the bakery.

  ‘Can you get me in to the banquet on Wednesday night?’

  ‘Sorry, the butler chooses who gets those jobs,’ said Molly.

  Ah yes, the tall, thin girls, Glenda thought.

  ‘Why in the world would you want to get in, anyway?’ Molly said. ‘It’s a lot of running around and not much pay, when all’s said and done. I mean, we get some decent leftovers after a big affair, but what’s that to you? Everyone knows that you’re the leftover queen!’ She paused, too awkwardly. ‘I mean, we all know you’re really good at making wonderful food with always a little something left over,’ she gabbled. ‘That’s all I meant!’

  ‘I didn’t think you meant anything else,’ said Glenda, keeping her voice level. But she raised it again to add, as Molly scurried off: ‘I can pay back the favour right now! You’ve got two floury handprints on your arse!’

  The glare that came back was a small victory, but you have to take what you can get.

  Still, that strange interlude, which she was sure she would regret, had taken up a lot of time. She had to get the Night Kitchen organized.

  When the door had closed behind the rather forthright maid, Ridcully nodded meaningfully at Ponder. ‘All right, Mister Stibbons. You were glancing at your thaumometer the whole time I was talking to her. Out with it.’

  ‘Some kind of entanglement,’ said Ponder.

  ‘And there was me thinking that Vetinari was behind the business with the urn,’ said Ridcully gloomily. ‘I should have realized he’s never that unsubtle.’

  ‘Oh, I assumed it was going to be something like that right at the start,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘It crossed my mind as soon as I saw it in the paper.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Ridcully. ‘I am humbled that as soon as I have an idea about what something is, it turns out that you all knew what it was. I am amazed.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Dr Hix, ‘but I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You are out of touch! You’ve been spending too long underground, sir!’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes sternly.

  ‘You don’t often let me out, that’s why! And can I remind you that I have to maintain a vital line of cosmic defence in this establishment here with a staff of exactly one? And he’s dead!’

  ‘You mean Charlie? I remember old Charlie, keen worker nevertheless,’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Yes, but I have to keep rewiring him all the time,’ sighed Hix. ‘I do try to keep you abreast of things in my monthly reports. I hope you read them . . .?’

  ‘Tell me, Doctor Hix,’ said Ponder, ‘did you experience anything unusual when that young lady was speaking so eloquently?’

  ‘Well, yes, I had a pleasant moment of happy recollection about my father.’

  ‘So did we all, I am sure,’ said Ponder. There was sombre nodding around the table. ‘I never knew my father. I was brought up by my aunts. I had déjà vu without the original vu.’

  ‘And it wasn’t magic?’ suggested the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  ‘No. Religion, I suspect,’ said Ridcully. ‘A god invoked, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Not invoked, Mustrum,’ said Dr Hix. ‘Summoned by bloodshed!’

  ‘Oh, I hope not,’ said Ridcully, getting to his feet. ‘I would like to try a little experiment this afternoon, gentlemen. We will not talk about football, we will not speculate about football, we will not worry about football—’

  ‘You are going to make us play it, aren’t you?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes glumly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ridcully, more than somewhat miffed at the spoiling of a perfectly good peroration. ‘Just a little kick-about to help us get some hands-on experience of the game as it is played.’

  ‘Er. Strictly, under the new rules, by which I mean the ancient rules we are taking as our model, hands-on experience means no hands,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Well pointed out, that man. Put the word out, will you? Football practice on the lawn after lunch!’

  One thing you had to remember when dealing with dwarfs was that while they shared the same world as you did, metaphorically they thought about it as if it were upside down. Only the richest and most influential of dwarfs lived in the deepest caverns. For a dwarf, a penthouse in the centre of the city would be some kind of slum. Dwarfs liked it dark and cool.

  It didn’t stop there. A dwarf on the up and up was really on his uppers, and upper-class dwarfs were lower class. A dwarf who was rich, healthy and had respect and his own rat farm justifiably felt at rock bottom and was held in low esteem. When you talked to dwarfs, you turned your mind upside down. The city, too. Of course, when you dug down in Ankh-Morpork you just found more Ankh-Morpork. Thousands of years of it, ready to be dug out and shored up and walled in with the shiny dwarf brick.

  It was Lord Vetinari’s ‘Grand Undertaking’. The city’s walls corseted it like a fetishist’s happiest dream. Gravity offered only a limited supply of up, but the deep loam of the plain had a limitless supply of down.

  Glenda was surprised, therefore, to find Shatta right at the surface in the Maul, alongside the really posh dress shops that we
re for human ladies. That made sense, however; if you were going to make a scandalous profit selling clothes, it made sense to camouflage yourself amongst other shops doing the same thing. She wasn’t sure about the name, but apparently shatta meant ‘a wonderful surprise’ in Dwarfish, and if you started to laugh about that sort of thing then you would never have time to pause for breath.

  She approached the door with the apprehension of one who is certain that the moment she sets foot inside she will be charged five dollars a minute for breathing and then be held upside down and have all her wealth removed with a hook.

  And it was, indeed, classy. But it was dwarf classy. That meant an awful lot of chain mail, and enough weaponry to take over a city – but if you paid attention, you realized it was female chain mail and weaponry. That was how things were happening, apparently. Dwarf women had got fed up with looking like dwarf men all the time and were metaphorically melting down their breastplates in order to make something a little lighter and with adjustable straps.

  Juliet had explained this on the way down, although, of course, Juliet did not use the word ‘metaphorically’, it being several syllables beyond her range. There were battle-axes and war hammers, but all with that certain feminine touch: one war axe, apparently capable of cleaving a backbone lengthwise, was beautifully engraved with flowers. It was another world, and as she stood just inside the doorway looking around, Glenda felt relieved that there were other humans in the place. In fact, there were quite a few, and that was surprising. One of them, a young human woman with steel boots six inches high, gravitated towards them as if drawn by a magnet – and given the amount of ferrous metal on her body, a magnet was something she would never pass in a hurry. She was holding a tray of drinks.

  ‘There’s black mead, red mead and white mead,’ she said, and then lowered her voice by a few decibels and three social classes. ‘Actually, the red mead is really sherry and all the dwarf ladies are drinking it. They like not having to quaff.’

  ‘Do we have to pay for this?’ said Glenda nervously.

  ‘It’s free,’ said the girl. She indicated a bowl of small black things on the tray, each one pierced with a cocktail stick, and said slightly hopelessly, ‘And do try the rat fruit.’

  Before Glenda could stop her, Juliet had taken one and was chewing enthusiastically.

  ‘What part of a rat is its fruit?’ asked Glenda. The girl with the tray did not look directly at her.

  ‘Well, you know shepherd’s pie?’ she said.

  ‘I know twelve different recipes,’ said Glenda in a moment of rare smugness. This was actually a lie. She probably knew about four recipes because there was only so much you could do with meat and potatoes, but the glittering metallic grandeur of the place was getting on her nerves and she felt the need to stick up for herself. And then realization dawned. ‘Oh, you mean like traditional shepherd’s pie,’ she said, ‘made with the—’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said the girl, ‘but they’re very popular with the ladies.’

  ‘Don’t have any more, Jools,’ said Glenda quickly.

  ‘It’s quite nice,’ said Juliet. ‘Can’t I have one more?’

  ‘Just one, then,’ said Glenda. ‘That should even up the rat.’ She helped herself to a sherry and the girl, balancing carefully as she managed three different things with two different hands, handed her a glossy brochure.

  Glenda glanced through it and knew her original impression had been right. This place was so expensive they didn’t tell you the price of anything. You could always be sure things were going to be expensive when they didn’t tell you the price. No point in looking through it, it’d suck your wages out through your eyeballs. Free drinks? Oh, yes.

  With nothing else to do, she scanned the rest of the crowd. Everyone, except the growing and, in fact, quite large number of humans, had a beard. All dwarfs had beards. It was part of being a dwarf. Here, though, the beards were a little finer than you usually saw around the city and there had been some experimentation with perms and ponytails. There were mining pickaxes on view, it was true, but carried in expensively tooled bags as if the owner might spot a likely-looking coal seam on the way to the shops and wouldn’t be able to help herself.

  She shared this thought with Juliet, who pointed down at the feet of another well-heeled customer and said, ‘Wot? And spoil those gorgeous boots? They’re Snaky Cleavehelms, they are! Four hundred dollars a pop, an’ you’ve to wait for six months!’

  Glenda couldn’t see the face of the boots’ owner, but she did see the change in her body language. The hint of preening, even from the rear. Well, she thought, I suppose if you’re going to spend all of a working family’s yearly income on a pair of boots it’s nice that someone notices.

  When you watch people, you forget that people are watching you. Glenda was not very tall, which meant that from her point of view dwarfs were not very short. And she realized that they were being approached in a determined kind of way by two dwarfs, one of whom was extremely expansive around the waist and wearing a breastplate so beautifully hammered and ornamented that taking it into battle would be an act of artistic vandalism. He – and you had to remember that all dwarfs were he unless they asserted otherwise – had, when he spoke, a voice that sounded like the darkest and most expensive type of dark chocolate, possibly smoked. And the hand he offered had so many rings on each finger that you had to look with care to realize that he was not wearing a gauntlet. And she was a she, Glenda was sure of it: the chocolate was just too rich and fruity.

  ‘So glad you could come, my dears,’ she said, and the chocolate swirled. ‘I am Madame Sharn. I wondered if you could be of assistance to me? I really would not dream of asking, but I am, as you would put it, between a rock and a hard one.’

  All this was, to Glenda’s annoyance, addressed to Juliet, who was eating rat fruit as if there was no tomorrow, which presumably there had not been for the rat. She giggled.

  ‘She’s with me,’ said Glenda, and, without meaning to, added, ‘Madame?’

  Madame waved another hand and more rings glistened. ‘This salon is technically a mine and that means that under dwarf law I am the king of the mine and in my mine my rules go. And since I am King, I declare that I am Queen,’ she said. ‘Dwarf law bends and creaks but is not broken.’

  ‘Well,’ Glenda began, ‘we— Hey!’

  This was to Madame’s smaller companion, who was actually holding a tape measure up against Juliet. ‘That is Pepe,’ said Madame.

  ‘Well, if he’s going to take liberties like that I hope he’s a woman,’ said Glenda.

  ‘Pepe is . . . Pepe,’ said Madame calmly. ‘And there is no changing him, as it were, or her. Labels are such unhelpful things, I feel.’

  ‘Especially yours, ’cos you don’t put the prices on them,’ said Glenda, out of sheer nervousness.

  ‘Ah yes, you notice these things,’ said Madame, with a wink that disarmed to the point of melting.

  Pepe looked up excitedly at Madame, who went on, ‘I wonder if you, if she . . . if you both would mind joining me backstage? The matter is a little delicate.’

  ‘Ooh, yes,’ said Juliet immediately.

  Out of nowhere, other human girls materialized among the crowd and carefully opened a path towards the back of the enormous room along which Madame progressed as though propelled by invisible forces.

  Glenda felt that the situation had suddenly got away from her, but it had been a good measure of sherry and it whispered to her, ‘Why not let a situation get away from you every once in a while? Or even just once.’ She had no idea what she was expecting behind the gilded door at the far end, but she had not expected smoke and flames and shouting and someone screaming in a corner. The place looked like a foundry on the day they let the clowns in.

  ‘Come on through. Don’t let this disturb you,’ said Madame. ‘It’s always like this at show time. Nerves, you know. Of course, everyone in this business is lowly strung and there is always this problem to begin with
with the micromail. It’s new, you see. According to dwarf law it must be hallmarked on every link and that would not only be sacrilege, but also bloody difficult to do.’ Behind the scenes, it appeared that Madame became a little less chocolatey and a little more earthy.

  ‘Micromail!’ said Juliet, as if she had been shown the gateway to riches.

  ‘You know what it is?’ said Madame.

  ‘She talks about nothing else,’ said Glenda. ‘Talks and talks.’

  ‘Well, of course, it’s wonderful stuff,’ said Madame. ‘Almost as soft as cloth, certainly better than leather—’

  ‘—and it doesn’t chafe,’ said Juliet.

  ‘Which is always a consideration for the more traditional dwarf who will not wear cloth,’ said Madame. ‘Old tribal customs, how they hold us back, always pull us back. We haul ourselves out of the mine, but somehow we always drag a bit of the mine with us. If I had my way, silk would be reclassified as a metal. What is your name, young lady?’

  ‘Juliet,’ said Glenda automatically, and then blushed. That was mumming, pure and simple. It was almost as bad as getting someone to spit on their handkerchief and wiping their face for them. The young lady with the drinks had followed them in and chose this moment to take Glenda’s sherry glass and replace it with a full one.

  ‘Would you mind just walking up and down a moment, Juliet?’ said Madame.

  Glenda wanted to ask why, but since her mouth was full of sherry as an anti-embarrassment remedy, she let that one pass.

  Madame watched Juliet critically, one hand cupping the elbow of the other arm.

  ‘Yes, yes. But I mean slowly, as if you were not in a hurry to get there and didn’t care,’ said Madame. ‘Imagine you’re a bird in the air, a fish in the sea. Wear the world.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Juliet and started again.

  By the time Juliet was halfway across the floor for the second time, Pepe had burst into tears. ‘Where has she been? Where was she trained?’ he, or conceivably she, squeaked while clapping his or her cheeks with both hands. ‘You must hire her at once!’