The Light Fantastic

‘Are you all right?’ said Bethan.

‘I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said.

There was a whirring noise overhead. They looked up.

A big black globe had lowered itself from the darkness of the ceiling. Little red lights flashed on and off on it, and as they stared it spun around and looked at them with a big glass eye. It was menacing, that eye. It seemed to suggest very emphatically that it was watching something distasteful.

‘Hallo?’ said Twoflower.

A head appeared over the edge of the counter. It looked angry.

‘I hope you were intending to pay for that,’ it said nastily. Its expression suggested that it expected Rincewind to say yes, and that it wouldn’t believe him.

‘This?’ said Bethan. ‘I wouldn’t buy this if you threw in a hatful of rubies and —’

‘I’ll buy it. How much?’ said Twoflower urgently, reaching into his pockets. His face fell.

‘Actually, I haven’t got any money,’ he said. ‘It’s in my Luggage, but I —’

There was a snort. The head disappeared from behind the counter, and reappeared from behind a display of toothbrushes.

It belonged to a very small man almost hidden behind a green apron. He seemed very upset.

‘No money?’ he said. ‘You come into my shop —’

‘We didn’t mean to,’ said Twoflower quickly. ‘We didn’t notice it was there.’

‘It wasn’t,’ said Bethan firmly. ‘It’s magical, isn’t it?’

The small shopkeeper hesitated.

‘Yes,’ he reluctantly agreed. ‘A bit.’

‘A bit?’ said Bethan. ‘A bit magical?’

‘Quite a bit, then,’ he conceded, backing away, and, ‘All right,’ he agreed, as Bethan continued to glare at him. ‘It’s magical. I can’t help it. The bloody door hasn’t been and gone again, has it?’

‘Yes, and we’re not happy about that thing in the ceiling.’

He looked up, and frowned. Then he disappeared through a little beaded doorway half-hidden among the merchandise. There was a lot of clanking and whirring, and the black globe disappeared into the shadows. It was replaced by, in succession, a bunch of herbs, a mobile advertising something Twoflower had never heard of but which was apparently a bedtime drink, a suit of armour and a stuffed crocodile with a lifelike expression of extreme pain and surprise.

The shopkeeper reappeared.

‘Better?’ he demanded.

‘It’s an improvement,’ said Twoflower, doubtfully. ‘I liked the herbs best.’

At this point Rincewind groaned. He was about to wake up.

There have been three general theories put forward to explain the phenomenon of the wandering shops or, as they are generically known, tabernae vagantes.

The first postulates that many thousands of years ago there evolved somewhere in the multiverse a race whose single talent was to buy cheap and sell dear. Soon they controlled a vast galactic empire or, as they put it, Emporium, and the more advanced members of the species found a way to equip their very shops with unique propulsion units that could break the dark walls of space itself and open up vast new markets. And long after the orlds of the Emporium perished in the heat death of their particular universe, after one last defiant fire sale, the wandering starshops still ply their trade, eating their way through the pages of spacetime like a worm through a three-volume novel.

The second is that they are the creation of a sympathetic Fate, charged with the role of supplying exactly the right thing at the right time.

The third is that they are simply a very clever way of getting around the various Sunday Closing acts.

All these theories, diverse as they are, have two things in common. They explain the observed facts, and they are completely and utterly wrong.

Rincewind opened his eyes and lay for a moment looking up at the stuffed reptile. It was not the best thing to see when awakening from troubled dreams...

Magic! So that’s what it felt like! No wonder wizards didn’t have much truck with sex!

Rincewind knew what orgasms were, of course, he’d had a few in his time, sometimes even in company, but nothing in his experience even approximated to that tight, hot moment when every nerve in his body streamed with blue-white fire and raw magic had blazed forth from his fingers. It filled you and lifted you and you surfed down the rising, curling wave of elemental force. No wonder wizards fought for power...

And so on. The Spell in his head had been doing it, though, not Rincewind. He was really beginning to hate that Spell. He was sure that if it hadn’t frightened away all the other spells he’d tried to learn he could have been a decent wizard in his own right. ‘

Somewhere in Rincewind’s battered soul the worm of rebellion flashed a fang.

Right, he thought. You’re going back into the Octavo, first chance I get.

He sat up.

‘Where the hell is this?’ he said, grabbing his head to stop it exploding.

‘A shop,’ said Twoflower mournfully.

‘I hope it sells knives because I think I’d like to cut my head off,’ said Rincewind. Something about the expression of the two opposite him sobered him up.

‘That was a joke,’ he said. ‘Mainly a joke, anyway. Why are we in this shop?’