Then one of the men whispered: ‘Good on yer, Strewth.’
‘There isn’t enough money in all the world, mate.’
‘Watch out, it might just be a glaze . . .’
‘Still worth a mint. Go on, Strewth . . . get it out.’
They watched like cats as the pick pried loose more and more rock, and found an edge. And another edge.
Now Strewth’s fingers began to shake.
‘Careful, mate . . . there’s a side of it . . .’
The men took a step back as the last of the obscuring earth was knocked away. The thing was oblong, although the bottom edge was a confusion of twisted opal and dirt.
Strewth reversed his pick and laid the wooden handle against the glowing crystal.
‘Strewth, it’s no good,’ he said. ‘I just gots to know . . .’
He tapped the rock.
It echoed.
‘Can’t be hollow, can it?’ said one of the miners. ‘Never heard of that.’
Strewth picked up a crowbar. ‘Right! Let’s—’
There was a faint plink. A large piece of opal broke away near the bottom. It turned out to be no thicker than a plate.
It revealed a couple of toes, which moved very slowly inside their iridescent shell.
‘Oh, strewth,’ said a miner, as they backed further away. ‘It’s alive.’
Ponder knew he should never have let Ridcully look at the invisible writings. Wasn’t it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?
But no matter what precautions you took, sooner or later the boss was bound to come in and poke around and say things like, ‘Is this where you work, then?’ and ‘I thought I sent a memo out about people bringing in potted plants,’ and ‘What d’you call that thing with the keyboard?’
And this had been particularly problematical for Ponder, because reading the invisible writings was a delicate and meticulous job, suited to the kind of temperament that follows Grand Prix Continental Drift and keeps bonsai mountains as a hobby or even drives a Volvo. It needed painstaking care. It needed a mind that could enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles in a dark room. It did not need Mustrum Ridcully.
The hypothesis behind invisible writings was laughably complicated. All books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book ever written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence. Future books exist in potentia, as it were, in the same way that a sufficiently detailed study of a handful of primal ooze will eventually hint at the future existence of prawn crackers.
But the primitive techniques used hitherto, based on ancient spells like Weezencake’s Unreliable Algorithm, had meant that it took years to put together even the ghost of a page of an unwritten book.
It was Ponder’s particular genius that he had found a way around this by considering the phrase, ‘How do you know it’s not possible until you’ve tried?’ And experiments with Hex, the University’s thinking engine, had found that, indeed, many things are not impossible until they have been tried.
Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all.
When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but takes a little while for this to really be the case5 – in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along. Using Hex to remake the attempt in minutely different ways at very high speed had resulted in a high success rate, and he was now assembling whole paragraphs in a matter of hours.
‘It’s like a conjurin’ trick, then,’ Ridcully had said. ‘You’re pullin’ the tablecloth away before all the crockery has time to remember to fall over.’
And Ponder had winced and said, ‘Yes, exactly like that, Archchancellor. Well done.’
And that had led to all the trouble with How to Dynamically Manage People for Dynamic Results in a Caring Empowering Way in Quite a Short Time Dynamically. Ponder didn’t know when this book would be written, or even in which world it might be published, but it was obviously going to be popular because random trawls in the depths of L-space often turned up fragments. Perhaps it wasn’t even just one book.
And the fragments had been on Ponder’s desk when Ridcully had been poking around.
Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.
His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled ‘Me, who does the telling’ and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled ‘Everyone else’.
Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly.
And it would have continued to do so if he hadn’t suddenly started to see the point in preparing career development packages and, worst of all, job descriptions.
As the Lecturer in Recent Runes put it: ‘He called me in and asked me what I did, exactly. Have you ever heard of such a thing? What sort of question is that? This is a university!’
‘He asked me whether I had any personal worries,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘I don’t see why I have to stand for that sort of thing.’
‘And did you see that sign on his desk?’ the Dean had said.
‘You mean the one that says, “The Buck Starts Here”?’
‘No, the other one. The one which says, “When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.”’
‘And that means . . . ?’
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to mean anything. I think it’s just supposed to be.’
‘Be what?’
‘Pro-active, I think. It’s a word he’s using a lot.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well . . . in favour of activity, I suppose.’
‘Really? Dangerous. In my experience, inactivity sees you through.’
Altogether, it was not a happy university at the moment, and mealtimes were the worst. Ponder tended to be isolated at one end of the High Table as the unwilling architect of this sudden tendency on the part of the Archchancellor to try to Weld Them Into A Lean Mean Team. The wizards had no intention of being lean, but were getting as mean as anything.
On top of that, Ridcully’s sudden interest in taking an interest meant that Ponder had to explain something about his own current project, and one aspect of Ridcully that had not changed was his horrible habit of, Ponder suspected, deliberately misunderstanding things.
Ponder had long been struck by the fact that the Librarian, an ape – at least generally an ape, although this evening he seemed to have settled on being a small table set with a red-furred tea service – was, well, so human shaped. In fact, so many things were pretty much the same shape. Nearly everything you met was really a sort of complicated tube with two eyes and four arms or legs or wings. Oh, or they were fish. Or insects. All right, spiders as well. And a few odd things like starfish and whelks. But still there was a remarkably unimaginative range of designs. Where were the six-armed, six-eyed monkeys pinwheeling through the jungle canopy?
Oh, yes, octopussies too, but that was the point, they were really only a kind of underwater spider . . .
Ponder had poked around among the University’s more or less abandoned Museum of Quite Unusual Things, and noticed something rather odd. Whoever had designed the skeletons of creatures had even less imagination than whoever had done the outsides. At least the outside-designer had tried a few novelties in the spots, wool and stripes department, but the bone-builder had generally just put a skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further along,
stuck on some arms and legs and had the rest of the day off. Some ribcages were longer, some legs were shorter, some hands became wings, but they all seemed to be based on one design, one size stretched or shrunk to fit all.
Not to his very great surprise, Ponder seemed to be the only one around who found this at all interesting. He’d point out to people that fish were amazingly fish-shaped, and they’d look at him as if he’d gone mad.
Palaeontology and archaeology and other skulduggery were not subjects that interested wizards. Things are buried for a reason, they considered. There’s no point in wondering what it was. Don’t go digging things up in case they won’t let you bury them again.
The most coherent theory was one he recalled from his nurse when he was small. Monkeys, she’d averred, were bad little boys who hadn’t come in when called, and seals were bad little boys who’d lazed around on the beach instead of attending to their lessons. She hadn’t said that birds were bad little boys who’d gone too close to the cliff edge, and in any case jellyfish would be more likely, but Ponder couldn’t help thinking that, harmlessly insane though the woman had been, she might have had just the glimmerings of a point . . .
He was spending most nights now watching Hex trawl the invisible writings for any hints. In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers.
Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, when Hex appeared to be sulking, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything.
And it might have surprised Ponder to learn that the senior wizards had come to approve of Hex, despite all the comments on the lines of ‘In my day we used to do our own thinking.’ Wizardry was traditionally competitive, and, while UU was currently going through an extended period of peace and quiet, with none of the informal murders that had once made it such a terminally exciting place, a senior wizard always distrusted a young man who was going places since traditionally his route might be via your jugular.
Therefore there’s something comforting in knowing that some of the best brains in the University, who a generation ago would be coming up with some really exciting plans involving trick floorboards and exploding wallpaper, were spending all night in the High Energy Magic Building, trying to teach Hex to sing ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’, exulting at getting a machine to do after six hours’ work something that any human off the street would do for tuppence, then sending out for banana-and-sushi pizza and falling asleep at the keyboard. Their seniors called it technomancy, and slept a little easier in their beds in the knowledge that Ponder and his students weren’t sleeping in theirs.
Ponder must have nodded off, because he was awakened just before 2 a.m. by a scream and realized he was face down in half of his supper. He pulled a piece of banana-flavoured mackerel off his cheek, left Hex quietly clicking through its routine and followed the noises.
The commotion led him to the hall in front of the big doors leading to the Library. The Bursar was lying on the floor, being fanned with the Senior Wrangler’s hat.
‘As far as we can gather, Archchancellor,’ said the Dean, ‘the poor chap couldn’t sleep and came down for a book—’
Ponder looked at the Library doors. A big strip of black and yellow tape had been stuck across them, along with a sign saying: Danger, Do Notte Enter in Any Circumʃtances. It was now hanging off, and the doors were ajar. This was no surprise. Any true wizard, faced with a sign like ‘Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We’re not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,’ would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss was about. This made signs rather a waste of time, but at least it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, ‘We told him not to.’
There was silence from the darkness on the other side of the doorway.
Ridcully extended a finger and pushed one door slightly.
Behind it something made a fluttering noise and the doors were slammed shut. The wizards jumped back.
‘Don’t risk it, Archchancellor!’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘I tried to go in earlier and the whole section of Critical Essays had gone critical!’
Blue light flickered under the doors.
Elsewhere, someone might have said, ‘It’s just books! Books aren’t dangerous!’ But even ordinary books are dangerous, and not only the ones like Make Gelignite the Professional Way. A man sits in some museum somewhere and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven’t even read it are dying because the ones who did haven’t got the joke. Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain calibre.
And the Unseen University Library was a magical library, built on a very thin patch of space-time. There were books on distant shelves that hadn’t been written yet, books that never would be written. At least, not here. It had a circumference of a few hundred yards, but there was no known limit to its radius.
And in a magical library the books leak, and learn from one another . . .
‘They’ve started attacking anyone who goes in,’ moaned the Dean. ‘No one can control them when the Librarian’s not here!’
‘But we’re a university! We have to have a library!’ said Ridcully. ‘It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn’t go into the Library?’
‘Students,’ said the Senior Wrangler morosely.
‘Hah, I remember when I was a student,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Old “Bogeyboy” Swallett took us on an expedition to find the Lost Reading Room. Three weeks we were wandering around. Had to eat our own boots.’
‘Did you find it?’ said the Dean.
‘No, but we found the remains of the previous year’s expedition.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We ate their boots, too.’
From beyond the door came a flapping, as of leather covers.
‘There’s some pretty vicious grimoires in there,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘They can take a man’s arm right off.’
‘Yes, but at least they don’t know about doorhandles,’ said the Dean.
‘They do if there’s a book in there somewhere called Doorknobs for Beginners,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘They read each other.’
The Archchancellor glanced at Ponder. ‘There likely to be a book like that in there, Stibbons?’
‘According to L-space theory, it’s practically certain, sir.’
As one man, the wizards backed away from the doors.
‘We can’t let this nonsense go on,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’ve got to cure the Librarian. It’s a magical illness, so we ought to be able to cook up a magical cure, oughtn’t we?’
‘That would be exceedingly dangerous, Archchancellor,’ said the Dean. ‘His whole system is a mess of conflicting magical influences. There’s no knowing what adding more magic would do. He’s already got a freewheeling temporal gland.6 Any more magic and . . . well, I don’t know what’ll happen.’
‘We’ll find out,’ said Ridcully brusquely. ‘We need to be able to go into the Library. We’d be doing this for the college, Dean. And Unseen University is bigger than one man—’
‘—ape—’
‘—thank you, ape, and we must always remember that “I” is the smallest letter in the alphabet.’
There was another thud from beyond the doors.
‘Actually,’ said the Senior Wrangler, ‘I think you’ll find that, depending on the font, “c” or even “u” are, in fact, even smaller. Well, shorter, anyw—’
‘Of course,’ Ridcully went on, ignoring this as part of the
University’s usual background logic, ‘I suppose I could appoint another librarian . . . got to be a senior chap who knows his way around . . . hmm . . . now let me see, do any names spring to mind? Dean?’
‘All right, all right!’ said the Dean. ‘Have it your own way. As usual.’
‘Er . . . we can’t do it, sir,’ Ponder ventured.
‘Oh?’ said Ridcully. ‘Volunteering for a bit of bookshelf tidying yourself, are you?’
‘I mean we really can’t use magic to change him, sir. There’s a huge problem in the way.’
‘There are no problems, Mister Stibbons, there are only opportunities.’
‘Yes, sir. And the opportunity here is to find out the Librarian’s name.’
There was a buzz of agreement from the other wizards.
‘The lad’s right,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Can’t magic a wizard without knowing his name. Basic rule.’
‘Well, we call him the Librarian,’ said Ridcully. ‘Everyone calls him the Librarian. Won’t that do?’
‘That’s just a job description, sir.’
Ridcully looked at his wizards. ‘One of us must know his name, surely? Good grief, I should hope we at least know our colleagues’ names. Isn’t that so . . .’ He looked at the Dean, hesitated, and then said, ‘Dean?’
‘He’s been an ape for quite a while . . . Archchancellor,’ said the Dean. ‘Most of his original colleagues have . . . passed on. Gone to the great Big Dinner in the Sky. We were going through one of those periods of droit de mortis.7’
‘Yes, but he’s got to be in the records somewhere.’
The wizards thought about the great cliffs of stacked paper that constituted the University’s records.
‘The archivist has never found him,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘Who’s the archivist?’
‘The Librarian, Archchancellor.’
‘Then at least he ought to be in the Year Book for the year he graduated.’
‘It’s a very funny thing,’ said the Dean, ‘but a freak accident appears to have happened to every single copy of the Year Book for that year.’
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