The Truth

by Terry Pratchett

  “And these are your reasons, my lord?”

  “Do you think I have others?” said Lord Vetinari. “My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.”

  Hughnon reflected that “entirely transparent” meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all.

  Lord Vetinari shuffled through a file of paper. “However, the Guild of Engravers has put its rates up three times in the past year.”

  “Ah. I see,” said Hughnon.

  “A civilization runs on words, Your Reverence. Civilization is words. Which, on the whole, should not be too expensive. The world turns, Your Reverence, and we must spin with it.” He smiled. “Once upon a time nations fought like great grunting beasts in a swamp. Ankh-Morpork ruled a large part of that swamp because it had the best claws. But today gold has taken the place of steel and, my goodness, the Ankh-Morpork dollar seems to be the currency of choice. Tomorrow…perhaps the weaponry will be just words. The most words, the quickest words, the last words. Look out of the window. Tell me what you see.”

  “Fog,” said the High Priest.

  Vetinari sighed. Sometimes the weather had no sense of narrative convenience.

  “If it was a fine day,” he said sharply, “you would see the big semaphore tower on the other side of the river. Words flying out and back from every corner of the continent. Not long ago it would take me the better part of a month to exchange letters with our ambassador in Genua. Now I can have a reply tomorrow. Certain things become easier, but this makes them harder in other ways. We have to change the way we think. We have to move with the times. Have you heard of c-commerce?”

  “Certainly. The merchant ships are always—”

  “I mean that you may now send a clacks all the way to Genua to order a…a pint of shrimps, if you like. Is that not a notable thing?”

  “They would be pretty high when they got here, my lord!”

  “Certainly. That was just an example. But now think of a prawn as merely an assemblage of information!” said Lord Vetinari, his eyes sparkling.

  “Are you suggesting that prawns could travel by semaphore?” said the High Priest. “I suppose that you might be able to flick them from—”

  “I was endeavoring to point up the fact that information is also bought and sold,” said Lord Vetinari. “And also that what was once considered impossible is now quite easily achieved. Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works.”

  He walked over to a table on which was spread out a map of the world. It was a workman’s map; this is to say, it was a map used by someone who needed to refer to it a lot. It was covered with notes and markers.

  “We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,” he said. “We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.”

  He gestured towards the busy map.

  “A thousand years ago we thought the world was a bowl,” he said. “Five hundred years ago we knew it was a globe. Today we know it is flat and round and carried through space on the back of a turtle.” He turned and gave the High Priest another smile. “Don’t you wonder what shape it will turn out to be tomorrow?”

  But a family trait of all the Ridcullys was not to let go of a thread until you’ve unraveled the whole garment.

  “Besides, they have these little pincer things, you know, and would probably hang on like—”

  “What do?”

  “Prawns. They’d hang on to—”

  “You are taking me rather too literally, Your Reverence,” said Vetinari sharply.

  “Oh.”

  “I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat.”

  “It’ll end in trouble, my lord,” said Ridcully. He’d found it a good general comment in practically any debate. Besides, it was so often true.

  Lord Vetinari sighed. “In my experience, practically everything does,” he said. “That is the nature of things. All we can do is sing as we go.”

  He stood up. “However, I will pay a personal visit to the dwarfs in question.” He reached out to ring a bell on his desk, stopped, and with a smile at the priest moved his hand instead to a brass-and-leather tube that had hung from two brass hooks. The mouthpiece was in the shape of a dragon.

  He whistled into it, and then said:

  “Mr. Drumknott? My coach, please.”

  “Is it me,” said Ridcully, giving the newfangled speaking tube a nervous glance, “or is there a terrible smell in here?”

  Lord Vetinari gave him a quizzical look and glanced down.

  There was a basket just underneath his desk. In it was what appeared to be, at first glance and certainly at first smell, a dead dog. It lay with all four legs in the air. Only the occasional gentle expulsion of wind suggested that some living process was going on.

  “It’s his teeth,” he said coldly. The dog Wuffles turned over and regarded the priest with one baleful black eye.

  “He’s doing very well for a dog of his age,” said Hughnon, in a desperate attempt to climb a suddenly tilting slope. “How old would he be now?”

  “Sixteen,” said the Patrician. “That’s over a hundred in dog years.”

  Wuffles dragged himself into a sitting position and growled, releasing a gust of stale odors from the depths of his basket.

  “He’s very healthy,” said Hughnon, while trying not to breathe. “For his age, I mean. I expect you get used to the smell.”

  “What smell?” said Lord Vetinari.

  “Ah. Yes. Indeed,” said Hughnon.

  As Lord Vetinari’s coach rattled off through the slush towards Gleam Street it may have surprised its occupant to know that, in a cellar quite nearby, someone looking very much like him was chained to the wall.

  It was quite a long chain, giving him access to a table and chair, a bed, and a hole in the floor.

  Currently, he was at the table. On the other side of it was Mr. Pin. Mr. Tulip was leaning menacingly against the wall. It would be clear to any experienced person that what was going on here was “good cop, bad cop” with the peculiar drawback that there were no cops. There was just an apparently endless supply of Mr. Tulip.

  “So…Charlie,” said Mr. Pin, “how about it?”

  “It’s not illegal, is it?” said the man addressed as Charlie.

  Mr. Pin spread his hands. “What’s legality, Charlie? Just words on paper. But you won’t be doing anything wrong.”

  Charlie nodded uncertainly.

  “But ten thousand dollars doesn’t sound like the kind of money you get for doing something right,” he said. “Not for just saying a few words.”

  “Mr. Tulip here once got even more money than that for saying just a few words, Charlie,” said Mr. Pin soothingly.

  “Yeah, I said, ‘Give me all the —ing cash or the girl gets it,’” said Mr. Tulip.

  “Was that right?” said Charlie, who seemed to Mr. Pin to have a highly developed death wish.

  “Absolutely right for that occasion, yes,” he said.

  “Yes, but it’s not often people make money like that,” said the suicidal Charlie. His eyes kept straying to the monstrous bulk of Mr. Tulip, who was holding a paper bag in one hand and, in the other hand, a spoon. He was using the spoon to ferry a fine white powder to his nose, his mouth, and once, Charlie would have sworn, his ear.

  “Well, you are a special man, Charlie,” said Mr. Pin. “And afterwards you will have to stay out of sight for a long time.”

  “Yeah,” said Mr. Tulip, in a spray of powder. There was a sudden strong smell of mothballs.

  “All right, but why did you have to kidnap me, then? One minute I was lockin
g up for the night, next minute—bang! And you’ve got me chained up.”

  Mr. Pin decided to change tack. Charlie was arguing too much for a man in the same room as Mr. Tulip, especially a Mr. Tulip who was halfway through a bag of powdered mothballs. He gave him a big friendly smile.

  “There’s no point in dwelling on the past, my friend,” he said. “This is business. All we want is a few days of your time, and then you end up with a fortune and—and I believe this is important, Charlie—a lifetime in which to spend it.”

  Charlie was turning out to be very stupid indeed.

  “But how do you know I won’t tell someone?” he insisted.

  Mr. Pin sighed. “We trust you, Charlie.”

  The man had run a clothes shop in Pseudopolis. Small shopkeepers had to be smart, didn’t they? They were usually sharp as knives when it came to making just the right amount of wrong change. So much for physiognomy, thought Mr. Pin. This man could pass for the Patrician even in a good light, but while by all accounts Lord Vetinari would have already worked out all the nasty ways the future could go, Charlie was actually entertaining the idea that he was going to come out of this alive and might even outsmart Mr. Pin. He was actually trying to be cunning! He was sitting a few feet away from Mr. Tulip, a man trying to snort crushed moth repellent, and he was trying guile. You almost had to admire the man.

  “I’ll need to be back by Friday,” said Charlie. “It’ll all be over by Friday, will it?”

  The shed that was now leased by the dwarfs had in the course of its rickety life been a forge and a laundry and a dozen other enterprises, and had last been used as a rocking horse factory by someone who had thought something was the Next Big Thing when it was by then one day away from becoming the Last Big Thing. Stacks of half-finished rocking horses that Mr. Cheese had been unable to sell for the back rent still filled one wall all the way to the tin roof. There was a shelf of corroding paint tins. Brushes had fossilized in their jars.

  The press occupied the center of the floor, with several dwarfs at work. William had seen presses. The engravers used them. This one had an organic quality, though. The dwarfs spent as much time changing the press as they did using it. Extra rollers appeared, endless belts were threaded into the works. The press grew by the hour.

  Goodmountain was working in front of several of the large sloped boxes, each one of which divided into several dozen compartments.

  William watched the dwarf’s hand fly over the little boxes of leaden letters.

  “Why’s there a bigger box for the E’s?”

  “’Cos that’s the letter we use most of.”

  “Is that why it’s in the middle of the box?”

  “Right. E’s then T’s then A’s…”

  “I mean, people would expect to see A in the middle.”

  “We put E.”

  “But you’ve got more N’s than U’s. And U is a vowel.”

  “People use more N’s than you think.”

  On the other side of the room, Caslong’s stubby dwarf fingers danced across his own boxes of letters.

  “You can almost read what he’s working on—” William began.

  Goodmountain glanced up. His eyes narrowed for a moment.

  “‘…Make…more…money…inn…youre…Spare…Time…’” he said. “Sounds like Mr. Dibbler has been back.”

  William stared down at the box of letters again. Of course, a quill pen potentially contained anything you wrote with it. He could understand that. But it did so in a clearly theoretical way, a safe way. Whereas these dull gray blocks looked threatening. He could understand why they worried people. Put us together in the right way, they seemed to say, and we can be anything you want. We could even be something you don’t want. We can spell anything. We can certainly spell trouble.

  The ban on movable type wasn’t exactly a law. But he knew the engravers didn’t like it, because they had the world operating just as they wanted it, thank you very much. And Lord Vetinari was said not to like it, because too many words only upset people. And the wizards and the priests didn’t like it because words were important.

  An engraved page was an engraved page, complete and unique. But if you took the leaden letters that had previously been used to set the words of a god, and then used them to set a cookery book, what did that do to the holy wisdom? For that matter, what would it do to the pie? As for printing a book of spells, and then using the same type for a book of navigation—well, the voyage might go anywhere.

  On cue, because history likes neatness, he heard the sound of a carriage drawing up in the street outside. A few moments later Lord Vetinari stepped inside and stood leaning heavily on his stick and surveying the room with mild interest.

  “Why…Lord de Worde,” he said, looking surprised. “I had no idea that you were involved in this enterprise…”

  William colored as he hurried over to the city’s supreme ruler. “It’s Mister de Worde, my lord.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course. Indeed.” Lord Vetinari’s gaze traversed the inky room, paused a moment on the pile of madly smiling rocking horses, and then took in the toiling dwarfs. “Yes. Of course. And are you in charge?”

  “No one is, my lord,” said William. “But Mr. Goodmountain over there seems to do most of the talking.”

  “So what exactly is your purpose here?”

  “Er…” William paused, which he knew was never a good tactic with the Patrician. “Frankly, sir, it’s warm, my office is freezing, and…well, it’s fascinating. Look, I know it’s not really—”

  Lord Vetinari nodded and raised a hand.

  “Be so good as to ask Mr. Goodmountain to come over here, will you?”

  William tried to whisper a few instructions into Gunilla’s ear as he hustled him over to the tall figure of the Patrician.

  “Ah, good,” said the Patrician. “Now, I would just like to ask one or two questions, if I may?”

  Goodmountain nodded.

  “Firstly, is Mr. Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler involved in this enterprise in any significant managerial capacity?”

  “What?” said William. He hadn’t been expecting this.

  “Shifty fellow, sells sausages—”

  “Oh, him. No. Just the dwarfs.”

  “I see. And is this building built on a crack in space-time?”

  “What?” said Gunilla.

  The Patrician sighed.

  “When one has been ruler of this city as long as I have,” he said, “one gets to know with a sad certainty that whenever some well-meaning soul begins a novel enterprise they always, with some kind of uncanny foresight, site it at the point where it will do maximum harm to the fabric of reality. There was that Holy Wood moving picture fiasco a few years ago, yes? And that Music with Rocks business not long after, we never got to the bottom of that. And of course the wizards seem to break into the Dungeon Dimensions so often they might as well install a revolving door. And I’m sure I don’t have to remind you what happened when the late Mr. Hong chose to open his Three Jolly Luck Take-Away Fish Bar in Dagon Street during the lunar eclipse. Yes? You see, gentlemen, it would be nice to think that someone, somewhere in this city, is engaged in some simple enterprise that is not going to end up causing tentacled monsters and dread apparitions to stalk the streets eating people. So…”

  “What?” said Goodmountain.

  “We haven’t noticed any cracks,” said William.

  “Ah, but possibly on this very site a strange cult once engaged in eldritch rites, the very essence of which permeated the neighborhood, and which seeks only the rite, ahaha, circumstances to once again arise and walk around eating people?”

  “What?” said Gunilla. He looked helplessly at William, who could only add:

  “They made rocking horses here.”

  “Really? I’ve always thought there was something slightly sinister about rocking horses,” said Lord Vetinari, but he looked subtly disappointed. Then he brightened up. He pointed to the big stone on which the type was arranged.<
br />
  “Aha,” he said. “Innocently taken from the overgrown ruins of a megalithic stone circle, this stone is redolent with the blood of thousands, I have no doubt, who will emerge to seek revenge, you may depend upon it.”

  “It was cut specially for me by my brother,” said Gunilla. “And I don’t have to take that kind of talk, mister. Who do you think you are, coming in here and talking daft like that?”

  William stepped forward at a healthy fraction of the speed of terror.

  “I wonder if I might just take Mr. Goodmountain aside and explain one or two things to him?” he said quickly.

  The Patrician’s bright, enquiring smile did not so much as flicker.

  “What a good idea,” he said, as William frog-marched the dwarf to a corner. “He will be sure to thank you for it later.”

  Lord Vetinari stood leaning on his stick and looking at the press with an air of benevolent interest, while behind him William de Worde explained the political realities of Ankh-Morpork, especially those relating to sudden death. With gestures.

  After thirty seconds of this, Goodmountain came back and stood foursquare in front of the Patrician, with his thumbs in his belt.

  “I speak as I find, me,” he said. “Always have done, always will—”

  “And what is it that you call a spade?” said Lord Vetinari.

  “What? Never use spades,” said the glowering dwarf. “Farmers use spades. But I call a shovel a shovel.”

  “Yes, I thought you would,” said Lord Vetinari.

  “Young William here says you’re a ruthless despot who doesn’t like printing. But I say you’re a fair-minded man who won’t stand in the way of an honest dwarf making a bit of a living, am I right?”

  Once again, Lord Vetinari’s smile remained in place.

  “Mr. de Worde, a moment, please…”

  The Patrician put his arm companionably around his shoulders and walked William gently away from the watching dwarfs.

  “I only said that some people call you—” William began.

  “Now, sir,” said the Patrician, waving this away, “I think I might just be persuaded, against all experience, that we have here a little endeavor that might just be pursued without filling my streets with inconvenient occult rubbish. It is hard to imagine such a thing in Ankh-Morpork, but I could just about accept it as a possibility. And it so happens that I feel the question of ‘printing’ is one that might, with care, be reopened.”