Moving Pictures

‘Right,’ said the Chair, gathering up the containers. ‘Er. Do you think we should get something for the others?’

In the picture-throwing room Bezam cursed as he threaded the huge reel of Blown Away into the picture-throwing box.

A few feet away, in a roped-off section of the balcony, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari, was also ill at ease.

They were, he had to admit, a pleasant enough young couple. He just wasn’t sure why he was sitting next to them, and why they were so important.

He was used to important people, or at least to people who thought they were important. Wizards became important through high deeds of magic. Thieves became important for daring robberies and so, in a slightly different way, did merchants. Warriors became important through winning battles and staying alive. Assassins became important through skilful inhumations. There were many roads to prominence, but you could see them, you could work them out. They made some sort of sense.

Whereas these two people had merely moved interestingly in front of this new-fangled moving-picture machinery. The rankest actor in the city’s theatre was a multi-skilled master of thespianism by comparison to them, but it wouldn’t occur to anyone to line the streets and shout out his name.

The Patrician had never visited the clicks before. As far as he could ascertain, Victor Maraschino was famous for a sort of smouldering look that had middle-aged ladies who should know better swooning in the aisles, and Miss De Syn’s forte was acting languidly, slapping faces, and looking fantastic while lying among silken cushions.

While he, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, ruled the city, preserved the city, loved the city, hated the city and had spent a lifetime in the service of the city …

And, as the common people had been filing into the stalls, his razor-keen hearing had picked up the conversation of two of them: ‘Who’s that up there?’

‘That’s Victor Maraschino and Delores De Syn! Do you know nothing?’

‘I mean the tall guy in black.’

‘Oh, dunno who he is. Just some bigwig, I expect.’

Yes, it was fascinating. You could become famous just for being, well, famous. It occurred to him that this was an extremely dangerous thing and he might probably have to have someone killed one day, although it would be with reluctance.[26] In the meantime, there was a kind of secondary glory that came from being in the company of the truly celebrated, and to his astonishment he was enjoying it. Besides he was also sitting next to Miss De Syn, and the envy of the rest of the audience was so palpable he could taste it, which was more than he could do with the bagful of fluffy white starchy things he’d been given to eat.

On his other side, the horrible Dibbler man was explaining the mechanics of moving pictures in the utterly mistaken belief that the Patrician was listening to a word of it.

There was a sudden roar of applause.

The Patrician leaned sideways to Dibbler.

‘Why are all the lamps being turned down?’ he said.

‘Ah, sir,’ said Dibbler, ‘that is so you can see the pictures better.’

‘Is it? One would imagine it would make the pictures harder to see,’ said the Patrician.

‘It’s not like that with the moving pictures, sir,’ said Dibbler.

‘How very fascinating.’

The Patrician leaned the other way, to Ginger and Victor. To his mild surprise they were looking extremely tense. He’d noticed that as soon as they had walked into the Odium. The boy looked at all the ridiculous ornamentation as if it was something dreadful, and when the girl had stepped into the pit proper he’d heard her gasp.

They looked as though they were in shock.

‘I expect this is all perfectly commonplace to you,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Victor. ‘Not really. We’ve never been in a proper picture pit before.’

‘Except once,’ said Ginger grimly.

‘Yes. Except once.’

‘But, ah, you make moving pictures,’ said the Patrician kindly.

‘Yes, but we never see them. We just see bits of them, when the handlemen are gluing it all together. The only clicks I’ve ever seen were on an old sheet outdoors,’ said Victor.

‘So this is all new to you?’ said the Patrician.

‘Not exactly,’ said Victor, grey-faced.

‘Fascinating,’ said the Patrician, and went back to not listening to Dibbler. He had not got where he was today by bothering how things worked. It was how people worked that intrigued him.

Further along the row Soll leaned across to his uncle and dropped a small coil of film in his lap.

‘This belongs to you,’ he said sweetly.

‘What is it?’ said Dibbler.

‘Well I thought I’d have a quick look at the click before it got shown—’

‘You did?’ said Dibbler.

‘And what did I find, in the middle of the burning city scene, but five minutes showing nothing but a plate of spare ribs in Harga’s Special Peanut Sauce. I know why, of course. I just want to know why this.’