Authors: Terry Pratchett
“There isn’t any magic involved,” said Thomas Silverfish, the president of the Guild.
“There’s the imps.”
“That’s not magic. That’s just ordinary occult.”
“Well, there’s the salamanders.”
“Perfectly normal natural history. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Well, all right. But they’ll
call
it magic. You know what they’re like.”
The alchemists nodded gloomily.
“They’re reactionaries,” said Sendivoge, the Guild secretary. “Bloated thaumocrats. And the other Guilds, too. What do they know about the march of progress? What do they care? They could have been doing something like this for years, but did they? Not them! Just
think
how we can make people’s lives so much…well, better. The possibilities are immense.”
“Educational,” said Silverfish.
“Historical,” said Lully.
“And of course there’s entertainment,” said Peavie, the Guild treasurer. He was a small, nervous man. Most alchemists were nervous, in any case; it came from not knowing what the crucible of bubbling stuff they were experimenting with was going to do next.
“Well, yes. Obviously some entertainment,” said Silverfish.
“Some of the great historical dramas,” said Peavie. “Just picture the scene! You get some actors together, they act it just once, and people all over the Disc will be able to see it as many times as they like! A great saving in wages, by the way,” he added.
“But tastefully done,” said Silverfish. “We have a great responsibility to see that nothing is done which is in any way…” his voice trailed off, “…you know…
coarse
.”
“They’ll stop us,” said Lully darkly. “I know those wizards.”
“I’ve been giving that some thought,” said Silverfish.
“The light’s too bad here anyway. We agreed. We need clear skies. And we need to be a long way away. I think I know just the place.”
“You know, I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Peavie.
“A month ago it was just a mad idea. And now it’s all worked! It’s just like magic! Only not magical, if you see what I mean,” he added quickly.
“Not just illusion, but
real
illusion,” said Lully.
“I don’t know if anyone’s thought about this,” said Peavie,
“but this could make us a bit of money. Um?”
“But that isn’t important,” said Silverfish.
“No. No, of course not,” muttered Peavie. He glanced at the others.
“Shall we watch it again?” he said, shyly. “I don’t mind turning the handle. And, and…well, I know I haven’t contributed very much to this project, but I did come up with this, er, this stuff.”
He pulled a very large bag from the pocket of his robe and dropped it on the table. It fell over, and a few fluffy, white misshapen balls rolled out.
The alchemists stared at it.
“What is it?” said Lully.
“Well,” said Peavie, uncomfortably, “what you do is, you take some corn, and you put it in, say, a Number 3 crucible, with some cooking oil, you see, and then you put a plate or something on top of it, and when you heat it up it goes bang, I mean, not
seriously
bang, and when it’s stopped banging you take the plate off and it’s metamorphosed into these, er, things…” He looked at their uncomprehending faces. “You can eat it,” he mumbled apologetically. “If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.”
Silverfish reached out a chemical-stained hand and cautiously selected a fluffy morsel. He chewed it thoughtfully.
“Don’t really know why I did it,” said Peavie, blushing.
“Just sort of had an idea that it was
right
.”
Silverfish went on chewing.
“Tastes like cardboard,” he said, after a while.
“Sorry,” said Peavie, trying to scoop the rest of the heap back into the sack. Silverfish laid a gentle hand on his arm.
“Mind you,” he said, selecting another puffed morsel, “it
does
have a certain something, doesn’t it? They
do
seem right. What did you say it’s called?”
“Hasn’t really got a name,” said Peavie. “I just call it banged grains.”
Silverfish took another one. “Funny how you want to go on eating them,” he said. “Sort of more-ish. Banged grains? Right. Anyway…gentlemen, let us turn the handle one more time.”
Lully started to wind the film back into the unmagical lantern.
“You were saying you knew a place where we could really build up the project and where the wizards wouldn’t bother us?” he said.
Silverfish grabbed a handful of banged grains.
“It’s along the coast a way,” he said. “Nice and sunny and no one ever goes there these days. Nothing there but some wind-blown old forest and a temple and sand dunes.”
“A temple? Gods can get really
pissed
if you—” Peavie began.
“Look,” said Silverfish, “the whole area’s been deserted for centuries. There’s nothing there. No people, no gods, no nothing. Just lots of sunlight and land, waiting for us. It’s our chance, lads. We’re not allowed to make magic, we can’t make gold, we can’t even make a living—so let’s make
moving pictures
. Let’s make
history
!”
The alchemists sat back and looked more cheerful.
“Yeah,” said Lully.
“Oh. Right,” said Peavie.
“Here’s to moving pictures,” said Sendivoge, holding up a handful of banged grains. “How’d you hear about this place?”
“Oh, I—” Silverfish stopped. He looked puzzled. “Don’t know,” he said, eventually. “Can’t…quite remember. Must have heard about it once and forgot it, and then it just popped into my head. You know how these things happen.”
“Yeah,” said Lully. “Like with me and the film. It was like I was
remembering
how to do it. Funny old tricks the mind can play.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“’S’n idea whose time has come, see.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“That must be it.”
A slightly worried silence settled over the table. It was the sound of minds trying to put their mental fingers on something that was bothering them.
The air seemed to glitter.
“What’s this place called?” said Lully, eventually.
“Don’t know what it was called in the old days,” said Silverfish, leaning back and pulling the banged grains toward him. “These days they call it the Holy Wood.”
“Holy Wood,” said Lully. “Sounds…familiar.”
There was another silence while they thought about it.
It was broken by Sendivoge.
“Oh, well,” he said cheerfully, “Holy Wood, here we come.”
“Yeah,” said Silverfish, shaking his head as if to dislodge a disquieting thought. “Funny thing, really. I’ve got this feeling…that we’ve been going there…all this time.”
Several thousand miles under Silverfish, Great A’Tuin the world turtle sculled dreamily on through the starry night.
Reality is a curve.
That’s not the problem. The
problem
is that there isn’t as much as there should be. According to some of the more mystical texts in the stacks of the library of Unseen University—
—the Discworld’s premier college of wizardry and big dinners, whose collection of books is so massive that it distorts Space and Time—
—at least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things.
Outside the boundaries of the universes lie the raw realities, the could-have-beens, the might-bes, the never-weres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas.
Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak
in
.
And reality leaks out.
The effect is like one of those deep-sea geysers of hot water, around which strange submarine creatures find enough warmth and food to make a brief, tiny oasis of existence in an environment where there shouldn’t be any existence at all.
The idea of Holy Wood leaked innocently and joyfully into the Discworld.
And reality leaked out.
And was found. For there are Things outside, whose ability to sniff out tiny frail conglomerations of reality made the thing with the sharks and the trace of blood seem very boring indeed.
They began to gather.
A storm slid in across the sand dunes but, where it reached the low hill, the clouds seemed to curve away. Only a few drops of rain hit the parched soil, and the gale became nothing more than a faint breeze.
It blew sand over the long-dead remains of a fire.
Further down the slope, near a hole that was now big enough for, say, a badger, a small rock dislodged itself and rolled away.
A month went by quickly. It didn’t want to hang around.
The Bursar knocked respectfully at the Archchancellor’s door and then opened it.
A crossbow bolt nailed his hat to the woodwork.
The Archchancellor lowered the bow and glared at him.
“Bloody dangerous thing to do, wasn’t it?” he said. “You could have caused a nasty accident.”
The Bursar hadn’t got where he was today, or rather where he had been ten seconds ago, which was where a calm and self-assured personality was, rather than where he was now, which was on the verge of a mild heart attack, without a tremendous ability to recover from unexpected upsets.
He unpinned his hat from the target chalked on the ancient woodwork.
“No harm done,” he said. No voice could be as calm as that without tremendous effort. “You can barely see the hole. Why, er, are you shooting at the door, Master?”
“Use your common sense, man! It’s dark outside and the damn walls are made of stone. You don’t expect me to shoot at the damn walls?”
“Ah,” said the Bursar. “The door is, er, five hundred years old, you know,” he added, with finely-tuned reproach.
“Looks it,” said the Archchancellor, bluntly. “Damn great black thing. What we need around here, man, is a lot less stone and wood and a bit more jolliness. A few sportin’ prints, yer know. An ornament or two.”
“I shall see to it directly,” lied the Bursar smoothly. He remembered the sheaf of papers under his arm. “In the meantime, Master, perhaps you would care to—”
“Right,” said the Archchancellor, ramming his pointed hat on his head. “Good man. Now, got a sick dragon to see to. Little devil hasn’t touched his tar oil for days.”
“Your signature on one or two of—” the Bursar burbled hurriedly.
“Can’t be havin’ with all that stuff,” said the Archchancellor, waving him away. “Too much damn paper around here as it is. And—” He stared through the Bursar, as if he had just remembered something. “Saw a funny thing this mornin’,” he said. “Saw a monkey in the quad. Bold as brass.”
“Oh, yes,” said the Bursar, cheerfully. “That would be the Librarian.”
“Got a pet, has he?”
“No, you misunderstand me, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar cheerfully. “That
was
the Librarian.”
The Archchancellor stared at him.
The Bursar’s smile began to glaze.
“The Librarian’s a
monkey
?”
It took some time for the Bursar to explain matters clearly, and then the Archchancellor said: “What yer tellin’ me, then, is that this chap got himself turned into a monkey by magic?”
“An accident in the Library, yes. Magical explosion. One minute a human, next minute an orangutan. And you mustn’t call him a monkey, Master. He’s an ape.”
“Same damn difference, surely?”
“Apparently not. He gets very, er, aggressive if you call him a monkey.”
“He doesn’t stick his bottom at people, does he?”
The Bursar closed his eyes and shuddered. “No, Master. You’re thinking of baboons.”
“Ah.” The Archchancellor considered this. “Haven’t got any of them workin’ here, then?”
“No, Master. Just the Librarian, Master.”
“Can’t have it. Can’t have it, yer know. Can’t have damn great hairy things shambling around the place,” said the Archchancellor firmly. “Get rid of him.”
“Good grief, no! He’s the best Librarian we’ve ever had. And tremendous value for money.”
“Why? What d’we pay him?”
“Peanuts,” said the Bursar promptly. “Besides, he’s the only one who knows how the Library actually works.”
“Turn him back, then. No life for a man, bein’ a monkey.”
“
Ape
, Archchancellor. And he seems to prefer it, I’m afraid.”
“How d’yer know?” said the Archchancellor suspiciously.
“Speaks, does he?”
The Bursar hesitated. There was always this trouble with the Librarian. Everyone had got so accustomed to him it was hard to remember a time when the Library was
not
run by a yellow-fanged ape with the strength of three men. If the abnormal goes on long enough it becomes the normal. It was just that, when you came to explain it to a third party, it sounded odd. He coughed nervously.
“He says ‘oook,’ Archchancellor,” he said.
“And what’s that mean?”
“Means ‘no,’ Archchancellor.”
“And how does he say ‘yes,’ then?”
The Bursar had been dreading this. “‘Oook,’ Archchancellor,” he said.
“That was the same oook as the other oook!”
“Oh, no. No. I assure you. There’s a different inflection…I mean, when you get used to…,” the Bursar shrugged. “I suppose we’ve just got into the way of understanding him, Archchancellor.”
“Well, at least he keeps himself fit,” said the Archchancellor nastily. “Not like the rest of you fellows. I went into the Uncommon Room this morning, and it was full of chaps snoring!”
“That would be the senior masters, Master,” said the Bursar. “I would say they are supremely fit, myself.”
“
Fit?
The Dean looks like a man who’s swallered a bed!”
“Ah, but Master,” said the Bursar, smiling indulgently,
“the word ‘fit,’ as I understand it, means ‘appropriate to a purpose,’ and I would say the body of the Dean is supremely appropriate to the purpose of sitting around all day and eating big heavy meals.” The Bursar permitted himself a little smile.
The Archchancellor gave him a look so old-fashioned it might have belonged to an ammonite.