Interesting Times

'Don't mention it. ++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. 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 fascnated. 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. '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.