Unseen Academicals

  All in all, he considered that he was doing his bit in maintaining UU in its self-chosen course of amiable, dynamic stagnation. It was always a rewarding effort, knowing the alternative, to keep things that way.

  But a page that turns itself was, to Ponder, an anomaly. Now, while the sound of the pre-breakfast supper grew around him, he smoothed out the page and read, carefully.

  Glenda would have cheerfully broken a plate over Juliet’s sweet, empty head when the girl finally turned up in the Night Kitchen. At least, she would cheerfully have thought about it, in quite a deliberate way, but there was no point in losing her temper, because its target was not really much good at noticing what other people were thinking. There wasn’t a nasty bone in Juliet’s body, it’s just that she had a great deal of trouble homing in on the idea that someone was trying to be unpleasant to her.

  So Glenda made do with ‘Where have you been? I told Mrs Whitlow you’d gone home ill. Your dad’ll be worried sick! And it looks bad to the other girls.’

  Juliet slumped into a chair, with a movement so graceful that it seemed to sing.

  ‘Went to the football, didn’t I. You know, we were playing those buggers in Dimwell.’

  ‘Until three in the morning?’

  ‘That’s the rules, innit? Play until full time, first dead man or first score.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘When we left it was being decided on head wounds. Anyway, I went with Rotten Johnny, didn’t I.’

  ‘I thought you’d broken up with him.’

  ‘He bought me supper, didn’t ’e.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone. That’s not the sort of thing you should do.’

  ‘Like you know?’ said Juliet, who sometimes thought that questions were answers.

  ‘Just do the washing-up, will you?’ said Glenda. And I’ll have to do it again after you, she thought, as her best friend drifted over to the line of big stone sinks. Juliet didn’t exactly wash dishes, she gave them a light baptism. Wizards weren’t the type of people who noticed yesterday’s dried egg on the plate, but Mrs Whitlow could see it from two rooms away.

  Glenda liked Juliet, she really did, although sometimes she wondered why. Of course, they’d grown up together, but it had always amazed her that Juliet, who was so beautiful that boys went nervous and occasionally fainted as she passed, could be so, well, dumb about everything. In fact it was Glenda who had grown up. She wasn’t sure about Juliet; sometimes it seemed to Glenda that she had done the growing up for both of them.

  ‘Look, you just have to scrub a bit, that’s all,’ she snapped after a few seconds of listless dipping, and took the brush out of Juliet’s perfect hand, and then, as the grease was sent down the drain, she thought: I’ve done it again. Actually, I’ve done it again again. How many times is that? I even used to play with her dolls for her!

  Plate after plate sparkled under Glenda’s hands. Nothing cleans stubborn stains like suppressed anger.

  Rotten Johnny, she thought. Ye gods, he smells of cat wee! He’s the only boy stupid enough to think he’s got a chance. Good grief, she’s got a figure like that and all she ever dates are total knobheads! What would she do without me?

  After this brief excitement, the Night Kitchen settled into its routine and those who had been referred to as ‘the other girls’ got on with their familiar tasks. It has to be said that girlhood for most of them had ended a long time previously, but they were good workers and Glenda was proud of them. Mrs Hedges ran the cheeseboards like a champion. Mildred and Rachel, known officially on the payroll as the vegetable women, were good and reliable, and indeed it was Mildred who had come up with the famous recipe for beetroot and cream cheese sandwiches.

  Everybody knew their job. Everybody did their job. The Night Kitchen was reliable and Glenda liked reliable.

  She had a home to go to and made sure she went to it at least once a day, but the Night Kitchen was where she lived. It was her fortress.

  ***

  Ponder Stibbons stared at the page in front of him. His mind filled up with nasty questions, the biggest and nastiest of which was simply: Is there any way at all in which people can make out that this is my fault? No. Good!

  ‘Er, there is one tradition here that regrettably we don’t appear to have honoured for some considerable time, Archchancellor,’ he said, managing to keep the concern out of his voice.

  ‘Well, does that matter?’ said Ridcully, stretching.

  ‘It is traditional, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder reproachfully. ‘Although I might go so far as to say that not observing it has now, alas, become the tradition.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine, isn’t it?’ said Ridcully. ‘If we can make a tradition of not observing another tradition, then that’s doubly traditional, eh? What’s the problem?’

  ‘It’s Archchancellor Preserved Bigger’s Bequest,’ said the Master of The Traditions. ‘The university does very well out of the Bigger estates. They were a very rich family.’

  ‘Hmm, yes. Name rings a faint bell. Decent of him. So?’

  ‘Er, I would have been happier had my predecessor paid a little more attention to some of the traditions,’ said Ponder, who believed in dripfeeding bad news.

  ‘Well, he was dead.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Perhaps, sir, we should, ahem, start a tradition of checking on the health of the Master of The Traditions?’

  ‘Oh, he was quite healthy,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘Just dead. Quite healthy for a dead man.’

  ‘He was a pile of dust, Archchancellor!’

  ‘That’s not the same as being ill, exactly,’ said Ridcully, who believed in never giving in. ‘Broadly speaking, it’s stable.’

  Ponder said, ‘There is a condition attached to the bequest. It’s in the small print, sir.’

  ‘Oh, I never bother with small print, Stibbons!’

  ‘I do, sir. It says: “. . . and thys shall follow as long as the University shall enter a team in the game of foot-the-ball or Poore Boys’ Funne”.’

  ‘Porree boy’s funny?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Ridiculous or not, Archchancellor, that is the condition of the bequest.’

  ‘But we stopped taking part in that years ago,’ said Ridcully. ‘Mobs in the streets, kicking and punching and yelling . . . and they were the players! Mark you, the spectators were nearly as bad! There were hundreds of men in a team! A game could go on for days! That’s why it was stopped.’

  ‘Actually, it has never been stopped as such, Archchancellor,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘We stopped, yes, and so did the guilds. It was no longer a game for gentlemen.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said the Master of The Traditions, running a finger down the page, ‘such are the terms. There are all sorts of other conditions. Oh, dear. Oh, calamity. Oh, surely not...’

  His lips moved silently as he read on. The room craned as one neck.

  ‘Well, out with it, man!’ roared Ridcully.

  ‘I think I’d like to check a few things,’ said the Master of The Traditions. ‘I would not wish to worry you unduly.’ He glanced down. ‘Oh, hells’ bells!’

  ‘What are you talking about, man?’

  ‘Well, it looks as though— No, it would be unfair to spoil your evening, Archchancellor,’ Ponder protested. ‘I must be reading this wrongly. He surely can’t mean— Oh, good heavens . . .’

  ‘In a nutshell, please, Stibbons,’ growled Ridcully. ‘I believe I am the Archchancellor of this university? I’m sure it says so on my door.’

  ‘Of course, Archchancellor, but it would be quite wrong of me to—’

  ‘I appreciate that you do not wish to spoil my evening, sir,’ said Ridcully. ‘But I would not hesitate to spoil your day tomorrow. With that in mind, what the hells are you talking about?’

  ‘Er, it would appear, Archchancellor, that, er . . . When was the las
t game we took part in, do you know?’

  ‘Anyone?’ said Ridcully to the room in general. A mumbled discussion produced a consensus on the theme of ‘Around twenty years, give or take.’

  ‘Give or take what, exactly?’ said Ponder, who hated this kind of thing.

  ‘Oh, you know. Something of that order. In the general vicinity of, so to speak. Round about then. You know.’

  ‘About?’ said Ponder. ‘Can we be more precise?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if the university hasn’t played in the Poor Boys’ Fun for a period of twenty years or more, the bequest reverts to any surviving relatives of Archchancellor Bigger.’

  ‘But it’s banned, man!’ the Archchancellor insisted.

  ‘Er, not as such. It’s common knowledge that Lord Vetinari doesn’t like it, but I understand that if the games are outside the city centre and confined to the back streets, the Watch turns a blind eye. Since I would imagine that the supporters and players easily outnumber the entire Watch payroll, I suppose it is better than having to turn a broken nose.’

  ‘That’s quite a neat turn of phrase there, Mister Stibbons,’ said Ridcully. ‘I’m quite surprised at you.’

  ‘Thank you, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder. He had in fact got it from a leader in the Times, which the wizards did not like much because it either did not print what they said or printed what they said with embarrassing accuracy.

  Emboldened, he added, ‘I should point out, though, that under UU law, Archchancellor, a ban doesn’t matter. Wizards are not supposed to take notice of such a ban. We are not subject to mundane law.’

  ‘Of course. But nevertheless it is generally convenient to acknowledge the civil power,’ said Ridcully, speaking like a man choosing his words with such care that he was metaphorically taking some of them outside to look at them more closely in daylight.

  The wizards nodded. What they had heard was: ‘Vetinari may have his little foibles, but he’s the sanest man we’ve had on the throne in centuries, he leaves us alone, and you never know what he’s got up his sleeve.’ You couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘All right, Stibbons, what do you suggest?’ said Ridcully. ‘These days you only ever tell me about a problem when you’ve thought up a solution. I respect this, although I find it a bit creepy. Got a way to wriggle us out of this, have you?’

  ‘I suppose so, sir. I thought we might, well, put up a team. It doesn’t say anything about winning, sir. We just have to play, that’s all.’

  It was always beautifully warm in the candle vats. Regrettably, it was also extremely humid and rather noisy in an erratic and unexpected way. This was because the giant pipes of Unseen University’s central heating and hot water system passed overhead, slung from the ceiling on a series of metal straps with a greater or lesser coefficient of linear expansion. That was only the start, however. There were also the huge pipes for balancing the slood differential across the university, the pipe for the anthropic particle flux suppressor, which did not work properly these days, the pipes for the air circulation, which had not worked either since the donkey had been ill, and the very ancient tubes that were all that remained of the ill-fated attempt by a previous archchancellor to operate a university communication system by means of trained marmosets. At certain times of the day all this piping broke into a subterranean symphony of gurgles, twangs, upsetting organic trickling sounds and, occasionally, an inexplicable boinging noise that would reverberate through the cellar levels.

  The general ad hoc nature of the system’s construction was enhanced by the fact that, as an economy measure, the big iron hot water pipes were lagged with old clothing held on by string. Since some of these items had once been wizards’ apparel, and however hard you scrubbed you could never get all of the spells out, there were sporadic showers of multicoloured sparks and the occasional ping-pong ball.

  Despite everything, Nutt felt at home down among the vats. It was worrying; in the high country, people in the street had jeered at him that he’d been made in a vat. Although Brother Oats had told him that this was silly, the gently bubbling tallow called to him. He felt at peace here.

  He ran the vats now. Smeems didn’t know, because he hardly ever troubled to come down here. Trev knew, of course, but since Nutt doing his job for him meant that he could spend more time kicking a tin can around on some bit of wasteground he was happy. The opinion of the other dribblers and dippers didn’t really count; if you worked in the vats it meant that, as far as the job market was concerned, you had been still accelerating when you’d hit the bottom of the barrel and had been drilled into the bedrock. It meant that you no longer had enough charisma to be a beggar. It meant that you were on the run from something, possibly the gods themselves, or the demons inside you. It meant that if you dared to look up you would see, high above you, the dregs of society. Best, then, to stay down here in the warm gloom, with enough to eat and no inconvenient encounters and, Nutt added in his head, no beatings.

  No, the dippers were no problem. He did his best for them when he could. Life itself had beaten them so hard that they had no strength left to beat up anyone else. That was helpful. When people found out that you were a goblin, all you could expect was trouble.

  He remembered what the people in the villages had shouted at him when he was small and the word would be followed by a stone.

  Goblin. It was a word with an ox-train-load of baggage. It didn’t matter what you said or did, or made, the train ran right over you. He’d shown them the things he’d built, and the stones had smashed them while the villagers screamed at him like hunting hawks and shouted more words.

  That had stopped on the day Pastor Oats rode gently into town, if a bunch of hovels and one street of stamped mud could be called a town, and he had brought . . . forgiveness. But on that day, no one had wanted to be forgiven.

  In the darkness, Concrete the troll, who was so gooned out on Slab, Slice, Sleek and Slump, and who would even snort iron filings if Nutt didn’t stop him, whimpered on his mattress.

  Nutt lit a fresh candle and wound up his home-made dribbling aid. It whirred away happily, and made the flame go horizontal. He paid attention to his work. A good dribbler never turned the candle when he dribbled; candles in the wild, as it were, almost never dripped in more than one direction, which was away from the draught. No wonder the wizards liked the ones he made; there was something disconcerting about a candle that appeared to have dribbled in every direction at once. It could put a man off his stroke.6

  He worked fast, and was putting the nineteenth well-dribbled candle in the delivery basket when he heard the clank of a tin can being bowled along the stone floor of the passage.

  ‘Good morning, Mister Trev,’ he said, without looking up. A moment later an empty tin can landed in front of him, on end, with no more ceremony than a jigsaw piece falling into place.

  ‘How did you know it was me, Gobbo?’

  ‘Your leitmotif, Mister Trev. And I’d prefer Nutt, thank you.’

  ‘What’s one o’ them motifs?’ said the voice behind him.

  ‘It is a repeated theme or chord associated with a particular person or place, Mister Trev,’ said Nutt, carefully placing two more warm candles in the basket. ‘I was referring to your love of kicking a tin can about. You seem in good spirits, sir. How went the day?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Did Fortune favour Dimwell last night?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  Nutt pulled back further. It could be dangerous not to fit in, not to be helpful, not to be careful. ‘Did you win, sir?’

  ‘Nah. Another no-score draw. Waste of time, really. But it was only a friendly. Nobody died.’ Trev looked at the full baskets of realistically dribbled candles.

  ‘That’s a shitload you’ve done there, kid,’ he said kindly.

  Nutt hesitated again, and then said, very carefully, ‘Despite the scatological reference, you approve of the large but unspecified number of candles that I have d
ribbled for you?’

  ‘Blimey, what was that all about, Gobbo?’

  Frantically, Nutt sought for an acceptable translation. ‘I done okay?’ he ventured.

  Trev slapped him on the back. ‘Yeah! Good job! Respect! But you gotta learn to speak more proper, you know. You wu’nt last five minutes down our way. You’d probably get a half-brick heaved at yer.’

  ‘That has, I mean ’as been known to . . . ’appen,’ said Nutt, concentrating.

  ‘I never seen why people make such a to-do,’ said Trev generously. ‘So there were all those big battles? So what? It was a long time ago and a long way away, right, an’ it’s not like the trolls and dwarfs weren’t as bad as you lot, ain’t I right? I mean, goblins? What was that all about? You lot jus’ cut throats and nicked stuff, right? That’s practically civilized in some streets round here.’

  Probably, Nutt thought. No one could have been neutral when the Dark War had engulfed Far Uberwald. Maybe there had been true evil there, but apparently the evil was, oddly enough, always on the other side. Perhaps it was contagious. Somehow, in all the confusing histories that had been sung or written, the goblins were down as nasty cowardly little bastards who collected their own earwax and were always on the other side. Alas, when the time came to write their story down, his people hadn’t even had a pencil.

  Smile at people. Like them. Be helpful. Accumulate worth. He liked Trev. He was good at liking people. When you clearly liked people, they were slightly more inclined to like you. Every little helped.

  Trev, though, seemed genuinely unfussed about history, and had recognized that having someone in the vats who not only did not try to eat the tallow but also did most of his work for him and, at that, did it better than he could be bothered to do it himself, was an asset worth protecting. Besides, he was congenially lazy, except when it came to foot-the-ball, and bigotry took too much effort. Trev never made too much effort. Trev went through life on primrose paths.