He gave it an experimental jerk. The floor shook.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘It’s physically impossible.’
‘We’re in the lamp?’ said Conina.
The room trembled again as Nijel tried to look down the spout.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the genie. ‘In fact, don’t think about it if possible.’
He explained – although ‘explained’ is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length – that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it, because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete.
‘In the circumstances it is best not to think about it, yuh?’ said the genie.
‘Like not thinking about pink rhinoceroses,’ said Nijel, {36} and gave an embarrassed laugh as they stared at him.
‘It was a sort of game we had,’ he said. ‘You had to avoid thinking of pink rhinoceroses.’ He coughed. ‘I didn’t say it was a particularly good game.’
He squinted down the spout again.
‘No,’ said Conina, ‘not very.’
‘Uh,’ said the genie. ‘Would anyone like coffee? Some sounds? A quick game of Significant Quest?’[23]
‘Drink?’ said Creosote.
‘White wine?’
‘Foul muck.’
The genie looked shocked.
‘Red is bad for—’ it began.
‘—but any port in a storm,’ said Creosote hurriedly. ‘Or sauterne, even. But no umbrella in it.’ It dawned on the Seriph that this wasn’t the way to talk to the genie. He pulled himself together a bit. ‘No umbrella, by the Five Moons of Nasreem. Or bits of fruit salad or olives or curly straws or ornamental monkeys, I command thee by the Seventeen Siderites of Sarudin.’
‘I’m not an umbrella person,’ said the genie sulkily.
‘It’s pretty sparse in here,’ said Conina. ‘Why don’t you furnish it?’
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Nijel, ‘is, if we’re all in the lamp I’m holding, then the me in the lamp is holding a smaller lamp and in that lamp—’
The genie waved his hands urgently.
‘Don’t talk about it!’ he commanded. ‘Please!’
Nijel’s honest brow wrinkled. ‘Yes, but,’ he said, ‘is there a lot of me, or what?’
‘It’s all cyclic, but stop drawing attention to it, yuh? … Oh, shit.’
There was the subtle, unpleasant sound of the universe suddenly catching on.
It was dark in the tower, a solid core of antique darkness that had been there since the dawn of time and resented the intrusion of the upstart daylight that nipped in around Rincewind.
He felt the air move as the door shut behind him and the dark poured back, filling up the space where the light had been so neatly that you couldn’t have seen the join even if the light had still been there.
The interior of the tower smelled of antiquity, with a slight suspicion of raven droppings.
It took a great deal of courage to stand there in that dark. Rincewind didn’t have that much, but stood there anyway.
Something started to snuffle around his feet, and Rincewind stood very still. The only reason he didn’t move was for fear of treading on something worse.
Then a hand like an old leather glove touched his, very gently, and a voice said: ‘Oook.’
Rincewind looked up.
The dark yielded, just once, to a vivid flash of light. And Rincewind saw.
The whole tower was lined with books. They were squeezed on every step of the rotting spiral staircase that wound up inside. They were piled up on the floor, although something about the way in which they were piled suggested that the word ‘huddled’ would be more appropriate. They had lodged – all right, they had perched – on every crumbling ledge.
They were observing him, in some covert way that had nothing to do with the normal six senses. Books are pretty good at conveying meaning, not necessarily their own personal meanings of course, and Rincewind grasped the fact that they were trying to tell him something.
There was another flash. He realised that it was magic from the sourcerer’s tower, reflected down from the distant hole that led on to the roof.
At least it enabled him to identify Wuffles, who was wheezing at his right foot. That was a bit of a relief. Now if he could just put a name to the soft, repetitive slithering noise near his left ear…
There was a further obliging flash, which found him looking directly into the little yellow eyes of the Patrician, who was clawing patiently at the side of his glass jar. It was a gentle, mindless scrabbling, as if the little lizard wasn’t particularly trying to get out but was just vaguely interested in seeing how long it would take to wear the glass away.
Rincewind looked down at the pear-shaped bulk of the Librarian.
‘There’s thousands of them,’ he whispered, his voice being sucked away and silenced by the massed ranks of books. ‘How did you get them all in here?’
‘Oook oook.’
‘They what?’
‘Oook,’ repeated the Librarian, making vigorous flapping motions with his bald elbows.
‘Fly?’
‘Oook.’
‘Can they do that?’
‘Oook,’ nodded the Librarian.
‘That must have been pretty impressive. I’d like to see that one day.’
‘Oook.’
Not every book had made it. Most of the important grimoires had got out but a seven-volume herbal had lost its index to the flames and many a trilogy was mourning for its lost volume. Quite a few books had scorch marks on their bindings; some had lost their covers, and trailed their stitching unpleasantly on the floor.
A match flared, and pages rippled uneasily around the walls. But it was only the Librarian, who lit a candle and shambled across the floor at the base of a menacing shadow big enough to climb skyscrapers. He had set up a rough table against one wall and it was covered with arcane tools, pots of rare adhesives and a bookbinder’s vice which was already holding a stricken folio. A few weak lines of magic fire crawled across it.
The ape pushed the candlestick into Rincewind’s hand, picked up a scalpel and a pair of tweezers, and bent low over the trembling book. Rincewind went pale.
‘Um,’ he said, ‘er, do you mind if I go away? I faint at the sight of glue.’
The Librarian shook his head and jerked a preoccupied thumb towards a tray of tools.
‘Oook,’ he commanded. Rincewind nodded miserably, and obediently handed him a pair of long-nosed scissors. The wizard winced as a couple of damaged pages were snipped free and dropped to the floor.
‘What are you doing to it?’ he managed.
‘Oook.’
‘An appendectomy? Oh.’
The ape jerked his thumb again, without looking up. Rincewind fished a needle and thread out of the ranks on the tray and handed them over. There was silence broken only by the scritching sound of thread being pulled through paper until the Librarian straightened up and said: ‘Oook.’
Rincewind pulled out his handkerchief and mopped the ape’s brow.
‘Oook.’
‘Don’t mention it. Is it – going to be all right?’
The Librarian nodded. There was also a general almost inaudible sigh of relief from the tier of books above them.
Rincewind sat down. The books were frightened. In fact they were terrified. The presence of the sourcerer made their spines creep, and the pressure of their attention closed in around him like a vice.
23
Very popular among gods, demi-gods, daemons and other supernatural creatures, who feel at home with questions like ‘What is It all About?’ and ‘Where will It all End?’