It took him some time to compose the problem, but at last he braced one foot on the structure and tugged on the Enter lever.
The ants scurried on new paths. The clockwork started to move. A small mechanism which Ponder would be prepared to swear had not been there yesterday, but which looked like a device for measuring wind speed, began to spin.
After several minutes a number of blocks with occult symbols on them dropped into the output hopper.
‘Thank you,’ said Ponder, and then felt extremely silly for saying so.
There was a tension to the thing, a feeling of mute straining and striving towards some distant and incomprehensible goal. As a wizard, it was something that Ponder had only before encountered in acorns: a tiny soundless voice which said, yes, I am but a small, green, simple object — but I dream about forests.
Only the other day Adrian Turnipseed had typed in ‘Why?’ to see what happened. Some of the students had forecast that Hex would go mad trying to work it out; Ponder had expected Hex to produce the message????? which it did with depressing frequency.
Instead, after some unusual activity among the ants, it had laboriously produced: ‘Because.’
With everyone else watching from behind a hastily overturned desk, Turnipseed had volunteered: ‘Why anything?’
The reply had finally turned up: ‘Because Everything.????? Eternal Domain Error. +++++ Redo From Start +++++.’{12}
No one knew who Redo From Start was, or why he was sending messages. But there were no more funny questions. No one wanted to risk getting answers.
It was shortly afterwards that the thing like a broken umbrella with herrings on it appeared just behind the thing like a beachball that went ‘parp’ every fourteen minutes.
Of course, books of magic developed a certain … personality, derived from all that power in their pages. That’s why it was unwise to go into the Library without a stick. And now Ponder had helped build an engine for studying magic. Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer too.
He was beginning to suspect that Hex was redesigning itself.
And he’d just said ‘Thank you’. To a thing that looked like it had been made by a glassblower with hiccups.
He looked at the spell it had produced, hastily wrote it down and hurried out.
Hex clicked to itself in the now empty room. The thing that went ‘parp’ went parp. The Unreal Time Clock ticked sideways.{13}
There was a rattle in the output slot.
‘Don’t mention it. ++?????++ Out of Cheese Error.{14} Redo From Start.’
It was five minutes later.
‘Fascinatin’,’ said Ridcully. ‘Sapient pearwood, eh?’ He knelt down in an effort to see underneath.
The Luggage backed away. It was used to terror, horror, fear and panic. It had seldom encountered interest before.
The Archchancellor stood up and brushed himself off.
‘Ah,’ he said, as a dwarfish figure approached. ‘Here’s the gardener with the stepladder. The Dean’s in the chandelier, Modo.’
‘I’m quite happy up here, I assure you,’ said a voice from the ceiling regions. ‘Perhaps someone would be kind enough to pass me up my tea?’
‘And I was amazed the Senior Wrangler could ever fit in the sideboard,’ said Ridcully. ‘It’s amazin’ how a man can fold himself up.’
‘I was just — just inspecting the silverware,’ said a voice from the depths of a drawer.
The Luggage opened its lid. Several wizards jumped back hurriedly.
Ridcully examined the shark teeth stuck here and there in the woodwork.
‘Kills sharks, you say?’ he said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Rincewind. ‘Sometimes it drags them ashore and jumps up and down on them.’
Ridcully was impressed. Sapient pearwood was very rare in the countries between the Ramtops and the Circle Sea. There were probably no living trees left. A few wizards were lucky enough to have inherited staffs made out of it.
Economy of emotion was one of Ridcully’s strong points. He had been impressed. He had been fascinated. He’d even, when the thing had landed in the middle of the wizards and caused the Dean’s remarkable feat of vertical acceleration, been slightly aghast. But he hadn’t been frightened, because he didn’t have the imagination.
‘My goodness,’ said a wizard.
The Archchancellor looked up.
‘Yes, Bursar?’
‘It’s this book the Dean loaned me, Mustrum. It’s about apes.’
‘Really.’
‘It’s most fascinating,’ said the Bursar, who was on the median part of his mental cycle and therefore vaguely on the right planet even if insulated from it by five miles of mental cotton wool. ‘It’s true what he said. It says here that an adult male orang-utan doesn’t grow the large flamboyant cheek pads unless he’s the dominant male.’
‘And that’s fascinating, is it?’
‘Well, yes, because he hasn’t got ’em. I wonder why? He certainly dominates the Library, I should think.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the Senior Wrangler, ‘but he knows he’s a wizard, too. So it’s not as though he dominates the whole University.’
One by one, as the thought sank in, they grinned at the Archchancellor.
‘Don’t you look at my cheeks like that!’ said Ridcully. ‘I don’t dominate anybody!’
‘I was only—’
‘So you can all shut up or there will be big trouble!’
‘You should read it,’ said the Bursar, still happily living in the valley of the dried frogs.{15} ‘It’s amazing what you can learn.’
‘What? Like … how to show your bottom to people?’ said the Dean, from on high.
‘No, Dean. That’s baboons,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
‘I beg your pardon, I think you’ll find it’s gibbons,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
‘No, gibbons are the ones that hoot. It’s baboons if you want to see bottoms.’
‘Well, he’s never shown me one,’ said the Archchancellor.
‘Hah, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ said a voice from the chandelier. ‘Not with you being dominant male and everything.’
‘Two Chairs, you come down here this minute!’
‘I seem to be entangled, Mustrum. A candle is giving me some difficulty.’
‘Hah!’
Rincewind shook his head and wandered away. There had certainly been some changes around the place since he had been there and, if it came to it, he didn’t know how long ago that had been …
He’d never asked for an exciting life. What he really liked, what he sought on every occasion, was boredom. The trouble was that boredom tended to explode in your face. Just when he thought he’d found it he’d be suddenly involved in what he supposed other people — thoughtless, feckless people — would call an adventure. And he’d be forced to visit many strange lands and meet exotic and colourful people, although not for very long because usually he’d be running. He’d seen the creation of the universe, although not from a good seat, and had visited Hell and the afterlife. He’d been captured, imprisoned, rescued, lost and marooned. Sometimes it had all happened on the same day.
Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it was something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.
The root problem, Rincewind had come to believe, was that he suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future, something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where the good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. It was as if he always got the indigestion before the meal and felt so dreadful that he never actually managed to eat anything.