The statue looked like porcelain. It had been painted quite realistically. One Sun Mirror seemed an ordinary sort of man. You would not have pointed him out in a crowd as Emperor material. But this man, with his little round hat and little round shield and little round men on little round ponies, had glued together a thousand warring factions into one great Empire, often using their own blood to do it.
Rincewind looked closer. Of course, it was just an impression, but around the set of the mouth and the look of the eyes there was an expression he’d last seen on the face of Ghenghiz Cohen.
It was the expression of someone who was absolutely and totally unafraid of anything.
The little boat headed towards the far side of the lake.
One of the globes flickered a little and then faded to red. It winked out. Another followed it.
He had to get out.
There was something else, though. At the foot of the statue, lying as if they’d just been dropped there, were a helmet, a pair of gauntlets, and two heavy-looking boots.
Rincewind picked up the helmet. It didn’t look very strong, but it did look quite light. Normally he didn’t bother with protective clothing, reasoning that the best defence against threatening danger was to be on another continent, but right now the idea of armour had its attractions.
He removed his hat, put the helmet on, pulled down the visor, and then wedged the hat on top of the helmet.
There was a flicker in front of his eyes and Rincewind was staring at the back of his own head. It was a grainy picture, and it was in shades of green rather than proper colours,{36} but it was definitely the back of his own head he was looking at. People had told him what it looked like.
He raised the visor and blinked.
The pool was still in front of him.
He lowered the visor.
There he was, about fifty feet away, with this helmet on his head.
He waved a hand up and down.
The figure in the visor waved a hand up and down.
He turned around and faced himself. Yep. That was him.
Okay, he thought. A magic helmet. It lets you see yourself a long way away. Great. You can have fun watching yourself fall into holes you can’t see because they’re right up close.
He turned around again, raised the visor and inspected the gloves. They seemed as light as the helmet but quite clumsy. You could hold a sword, but not much else.
He tried one on. Immediately, with a faint sizzling noise, a row of little pictures lit up on the wide cuff. They showed soldiers. Soldiers digging, soldiers fighting, soldiers climbing …{37}
Ah. So … magic armour. Perfectly normal magic armour. It had never been very popular in Ankh-Morpork. Of course, it was light. You could make it as thin as cloth. But it tended to lose its magic without warning. Many an ancient lord’s last words had been, ‘You can’t kill me because I’ve got magic aaargh.’
Rincewind looked at the boots, with suspicious recollection of the trouble there had been with the University’s prototype Seven League boots. Footwear which tried to make you take steps twenty-one miles long imposed unfortunate groinal strains; they’d got the things off the student just in time, but he’d still had to wear a special device for several months, and ate standing up.
All right, but even old magic armour would be useful now. It wasn’t as if it weighed much, and the mud of Hunghung hadn’t improved what was left of his own boots. He put his feet into them.
He thought: Well, so what is supposed to happen now?
He straightened up.
And behind him, with the sound of seven thousand flower pots smashing together, the lightning still crackling over them, the Red Army came to attention.
Hex had grown a bit during the night. Adrian Turnipseed, who had been on duty to feed the mice and rewind the clockwork and clean out the dead ants, had sworn that he’d done nothing else and that no one had come in.
But now, where there had been the big clumsy arrangement of blocks so that the results could be read, was a quill pen in the middle of a network of pulleys and levers.
‘Watch,’ said Adrian, nervously tapping out a very simple problem. ‘It’s come up with this after doing all those spells at suppertime …’
The ants scuttled. The clockwork spun. The springs and levers jerked so sharply that Ponder took a step back.
The quill pen wobbled over to an inkwell, dipped, returned to the sheet of paper Adrian had put under the levers, and began to write.
‘It blots a bit,’ he said, in a helpless tone of voice. ‘What’s happening?’
Ponder had been thinking further about this. The latest conclusions hadn’t been comforting.
‘Well … we know that books containing magic become a little bit … sapient …’ he began. ‘And we’ve made a machine for …’
‘You mean it’s alive?’
‘Come on, let’s not get all occult about this,’ said Ponder, trying to sound jovial. ‘We’re wizards, after all.’
‘Listen, you know that long problem in thaumic fields you wanted me to put in?’
‘Yes. Well?’
‘It gave me the answer at midnight,’ said Adrian, his face pale.
‘Good.’
‘Yes, good, except that I didn’t actually give it the problem until half past one, Ponder.’
‘You’re telling me you got the answer before you asked the question?’
‘Yes!’
‘Why did you ask the question, then?’
‘I thought about it, and I thought maybe I had to. I mean, it couldn’t have known what the answer was going to be if I didn’t give it the problem, yes?’
‘Good point. Er. You waited ninety minutes, though.’
Adrian looked at his pointy boots.
‘I … was hiding in the privy. Well, Redo from Start could—’
‘All right, all right. Go and have something to eat.’
‘Are we meddling with things we don’t understand, Ponder?’
Ponder looked up at the gnomic bulk of the machine. It didn’t seem threatening, merely … other.
He thought: meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever, to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you can give it a twist.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have given you a name. We didn’t think about that. It was a joke. But we should have remembered that names are important. A thing with a name is a bit more than a thing.
‘Off you go, Adrian,’ he said firmly.
He sat down and carefully typed:
Hello.
Things whirred.
The quill wrote:
+++?????? +++ Hello +++ Redo From Start +++
Far above, a butterfly — its wings an undistinguished yellow, with black markings — fluttered through an open window.
Ponder began the calculations for the transfer between Hunghung and Ankh-Morpork.
The butterfly alighted for a moment on the maze of glass pipes. When it rose again, it left behind a very small blob of nectar.
Ponder typed carefully, far below.
A small but significant ant, one of the scurrying thousands, emerged from a break in the tube and spent a few seconds sucking at the sweet liquid before going back to work.
After a while, Hex gave an answer. Apart from one small but significant point, it was entirely correct.
Rincewind turned around.
With an echoing chorus of creaks and groans, the Red Army turned around too.