Moving Pictures (10 page)

“It’s only one reel,” muttered Silverfish testily.

“Shoot some more this afternoon!” crowed Dibbler, his eyes revolving. “You just need more fights and monsters!”

“And there’s certainly no elephants,” snapped Silverfish.

Rock put up a craggy arm.

“Yes?” demanded Silverfish.

“If you’ve got some gray paint an’ stuff to make the ears out of, I’m sure me an’ Morry could—”

“
No one’s
ever done a three-reeler,” said Gaffer reflectively. “Could be really tricky. I mean, it’d be nearly ten minutes long.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose if I was to make the spools bigger—”

Silverfish knew he was cornered.

“Now
look here
,” he began.

Victor stared down at the girl. Everyone else was ignoring them.

“Er,” he said, “I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced?”

“You didn’t seem to let that stop you,” she said.

“I wouldn’t normally do something like that. I must have been…ill. Or something.”

“Oh, good. And that makes me feel a lot better, does it?”

“Shall we sit in the shade? It’s very hot out here.”

“Your eyes went all…smouldery.”

“Did they?”

“They looked really odd.”

“I
felt
really odd.”

“I know. It’s this place. It gets to you. D’you know,” she said, sitting down on the sand, “there’s all kind of rules for the imps and things, they mustn’t be worn out, what kind of food they get, stuff like that. No one cares about us, though. Even the trolls get better treatment.”

“It’s the way they go around being seven foot tall and weighing 1,000 pounds all the time, I expect,” said Victor.

“My name’s Theda Withel, but my friends call me Ginger,” she said.

“My name’s Victor Tugelbend. Er. But my friends call me Victor,” said Victor.

“This is your first click, is it?”

“How can you tell?”

“You looked as though you were enjoying it.”

“Well, it’s better than working, isn’t it?”

“You wait until you’ve been in it as long as I have,” she said bitterly.

“How long’s that?”

“Nearly since the start. Five weeks.”

“Gosh. It’s all happened so
fast
.”

“It’s the best thing that’s
ever
happened,” said Ginger flatly.

“I suppose so…er, are we allowed to go and eat?” said Victor.

“No. They’ll be shouting for us again any minute,” said Ginger.

Victor nodded. He had, on the whole, got through life quite happily by doing what he pleased in a firm yet easygoing sort of way, and he didn’t see why he should stop that even in Holy Wood.

“Then they’ll have to shout,” he said. “I want something to eat and a cool drink. Maybe I’ve just caught a bit too much sun.”

Ginger looked uncertain. “Well, there’s the commissary, but—”

“Good. You can show me the way.”

“They fire people just like that—”

“What, before the third reel?”

“They say ‘There’s plenty more people who’re dying to break into moving pictures,’ you see—”

“Good. That means they’ll have all afternoon to find two of them who look just like us.” He strolled past Morry, who was also trying to keep in the shade of a rock.

“If anyone wants us,” he said, “we’ll be having some lunch.”

“What, right now?” said the troll.

“Yes,” said Victor firmly, and strode on.

Behind him he could see Dibbler and Silverfish locked in heated discussion, with occasional interruptions from the handleman, who spoke in the leisurely tones of one who knows he’s going to get paid six dollars today regardless.

“—we’ll call it an epic. People will talk about it for ages.”

“Yes, they’ll say we went bankrupt!”

“Look, I know where I can get some colored woodcuts done at practically cost—”

“—I was finking, maybe if I got some string and tied the moving picture box onto wheels, so it can be moved around—”

“People’ll say, that Silverfish, there’s a moving-picture-smith with the guts to give the people what they want, they’ll say. A man to roll back the wossname of the medium—”

“—maybe if I was to make a sort of pole and swivel arrangement, we could bring the picture box right up close to—”

“What? You think they’ll say that?”

“Trust me, Tommy.”

“Well…all right. All right. But no elephants. I want to make that absolutely clear. No elephants.”

“Looks weird to me,” said the Archchancellor. “Looks like a bunch of pottery elephants. Thought you said it was a machine?”

“More…more of a
device
,” said the Bursar uncertainly. He gave it a prod. Several of the pottery elephants wobbled.

“Riktor the Tinkerer built it, I think. It was before my time.”

It looked like a large, ornate pot, almost as high as a man of large pot height. Around its rim eight pottery elephants hung from little bronze chains; one of them swung backward and forward at the Bursar’s touch.

The Archchancellor peered down inside.

“It’s all levers and bellows,” he said, distastefully.

The Bursar turned to the University housekeeper.

“Well, now, Mrs. Whitlow,” he said, “what exactly happened?”

Mrs. Whitlow, huge, pink and becorseted, patted her ginger wig and nudged the tiny maid who was hovering beside her like a tugboat.

“Tell his lordship, Ksandra,” she ordered.

Ksandra looked as though she was regretting the whole thing.

“Well, sir, please, sir, I was dusting, you see—”

“She hwas dusting,” said Mrs. Whitlow, helpfully. When Mrs. Whitlow was in the grip of acute class consciousness she could create aitches where nature never intended them to be.

“—and then it started me’king a noise—”

“Hit made hay hnoise,” said Mrs. Whitlow. “So she come and told me, your lordship, h’as hper my instructions.”

“What kind of noise, Ksandra?” said the Bursar, as kindly as he could.

“Please, sir, sort of—” she screwed up her eyes,

“‘whumm…whumm…whumm…whumm…whummwhumm
whumm
WHUMM
WHUMM
—plib,’ sir.”

“Plib,” said the Bursar, solemnly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Hplib,” echoed Mrs. Whitlow.

“That was when it spat at me, sir,” said Ksandra.

“Hexpectorated,”
corrected Mrs. Whitlow.

“Apparently one of the elephants spat out a little lead pellet, Master,” said the Bursar. “That was the, er, the ‘plib.’”

“Did it, bigods,” said the Archchancellor. “Can’t have pots going around gobbin’ all over people.”

Mrs. Whitlow twitched.

“What’d it go and do that for?” Ridcully added.

“I really couldn’t say, Master. I thought perhaps you’d know. I believe Riktor was a lecturer here when you were a student. Mrs. Whitlow is very concerned,” he added, in tones that made it clear that when Mrs. Whitlow was concerned about something it would be an unwise Archchancellor who ignored her, “about staff being magically interfered with.”

The Archchancellor tapped the pot with his knuckles. “What, old ‘Numbers’ Riktor? Same fella?”

“Apparently, Archchancellor.”

“Total madman. Thought you could measure everythin’. Not just lengths and weights and that kind of stuff, but everythin’. ‘If it exists,’ he said, ‘you ought to be able to measure it.’” Ridcully’s eyes misted with memory. “Made all kinds of weird widgets. Reckoned you could measure truth and beauty and dreams and stuff. So this is one of old Riktor’s toys, is it? Wonder what it measured?”

“Ay think,” said Mrs. Whitlow, “that it should be put haway somewhere out of ’arm’s way, if it’s hall the hsame to you.”

“Yes, yes, yes, of course,” said the Bursar hurriedly. Staff were hard to keep at Unseen University.

“Get rid of it,” said the Archchancellor.

The Bursar was horrified. “Oh, no, sir,” he said. “We
never
throw things out. Besides, it is probably quite valuable.”

“Hmm,” said Ridcully. “Valuable?”

“Possibly an important historical artifact, Master.”

“Shove it in my study, then. I said the place needs bright’nin’ up. It’ll be one of them conversation pieces, right? Got to go now. Got to see a man about trainin’ a gryphon. Good day, ladies—”

“Er, Archchancellor, I wonder if you could just sign—” the Bursar began, but to a closing door.

No one asked Ksandra which of the pottery elephants had spat the ball, and the direction wouldn’t have meant anything to them anyway.

That afternoon a couple of porters moved the universe’s only working resograph
⁵
into the Archchancellor’s study.

No one had found a way to add sound to moving pictures, but there was a sound that was particularly associated with Holy Wood. It was the sound of nails being hammered.

Holy Wood had gone critical. New houses, new streets, new
neighborhoods
, appeared overnight. And, in those areas where the hastily-educated alchemical apprentices were not yet fully alongside the trickier stages of making octo-cellulose, disappeared even faster. Not that it made a lot of difference. Barely would the smoke have cleared before someone was hammering again.

And Holy Wood grew by fission. All you needed was a steady-handed, non-smoking lad who could read alchemical signs, a handleman, a sackful of demons and lots of sunshine. Oh, and some people. But there were plenty of those. If you couldn’t breed demons or mix chemicals or turn a handle rhythmically, you could always hold horses or wait on tables and look interesting while you hoped. Or, if all else failed, hammer nails. Building after rickety building skirted the ancient hill, their thin planks already curling and bleaching in the pitiless sun, but there was already a pressing need for more.

Because Holy Wood was calling. More people arrived every day. They didn’t come to be ostlers, or tavern wenches, or short-order carpenters. They came to make movies.

And they didn’t know why.

As Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler knew in his heart, wherever two or more people are gathered together, someone will be trying to sell them a suspicious sausage in a bun.

Now that Dibbler was in fact engaged elsewhere, others had arisen to fulfil that function.

One such was Nodar Borgle the Klatchian, whose huge echoing shed wasn’t so much a restaurant as a feeding factory. Great steaming tureens occupied one end. The rest of it was tables, and around the tables were—

Victor was astonished.

—there were trolls, humans and dwarfs. And a few gnomes. And perhaps even a few elves, the most elusive of Discworld races. And lots of other things, which Victor had to hope were trolls dressed up, because if they weren’t, everyone was going to be in a lot of trouble. And they were all eating, and the amazing thing was that they were not eating one another.

“You take a plate and you queue up and then you pay for it,” said Ginger. “It’s called self-serf.”

“You pay for it before you eat it? What happens if it’s dreadful?”

Ginger nodded grimly. “That’s why.”

Victor shrugged, and leaned down to the dwarf behind the lunch counter. “I’d like—”

“It’s stoo,” said the dwarf.

“What kind of stew?”

“There ain’t more’n one kind. That’s why it’s stoo,” the dwarf snapped. “Stoo’s stoo.”

“What I meant was, what’s in it?” said Victor.

“If you need to ask, you’re not hungry enough,” said Ginger. “Two stews, Fruntkin.”

Victor stared at the gray-brown stuff that was dribbled onto his plate. Strange lumps, carried to the surface by mysterious convection currents, bobbed for a moment, and then sank back down, hopefully forever.

Borgle belonged to the Dibbler school of cuisine.

“It’s stoo or nuffin, boy.” The cook leered. “Half a dollar. Cheap at half the price.”

Victor handed over the money with reluctance, and looked around for Ginger.

“Over here,” said Ginger, sitting down at one of the long tables. “Hi, Thunderfoot. Hi, Breccia, how’s it goin’? This is Vic. New boy. Hi, Sniddin, didn’t see you there.”

Victor found himself wedged between Ginger and a mountain troll in what looked like chain mail, but it turned out to be just Holy Wood chain mail, which was inexpertly knitted string painted silver.

Ginger started talking animatedly to a four-inch-high gnome and a dwarf in one half of a bear outfit, leaving Victor feeling a little isolated.

The troll nodded at him, and then grimaced at its plate.

“Dey call dis pumice,” he said. “Dey never even bother to cut der lava off. And you can’t even taste der sand.”

Victor stared at the troll’s plate.

“I didn’t know trolls ate rock,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Why not?”

“Aren’t you made of it?”

“Yeah. But you’re made a meat, an’ what do
you
eat?”

Victor looked at his own plate. “Good question,” he said.

“Vic’s doing a click for Silverfish,” said Ginger, turning around. “It looks like they’re going to make it a three-reeler.”

There was a general murmur of interest.

Victor carefully laid something yellow and wobbly on the side of his plate.

“Tell me,” he said thoughtfully, “while you’ve been filming, have any of you had a…heard a sort of…felt that you were…” He hesitated. They were all looking at him. “I mean, did you ever feel something was acting through you? I can’t think of any other way to put it.”

His fellow diners relaxed.

“Dat’s just Holy Wood,” said the troll. “It gets to you. It’s all dis creativity sloshin’ about.”

“That was a pretty bad attack you had, though,” said Ginger.

“Happens all the time,” said the dwarf reflectively. “It’s just Holy Wood. Last week, me and the lads were working on
Tales of the Dwarfes
and suddenly we all started singing. Just like that. Just like this song came into our heads, all at once. What d’you think of that?”

“What song?” said Ginger.

“Search me. We just call it the ‘Hiho’ song. That’s all it was. Hihohiho. Hihohiho.”

“Sound like every other dwarf song I ever did hear,” rumbled the troll.

It was past two o’clock when they got back to the moving-picture-making place. The handleman had the back off the picture box and was scraping at its floor with a small shovel.