Unseen Academicals

‘The candle that never goes out has failed to go out three times since I’ve been Candle Knave, lad,’ he said. ‘It’s a record!’

‘An enviable achievement, sir.’

‘Damn right! And that’s even with all the strangeness there’s been happening lately.’

‘Really, sir?’ said Nutt. ‘Have stranger than usual things been happening?’

‘Young … man, stranger than usual things happen all the time.’

‘One of the scullery boys told me that all the toilets on the Tesseractical floor turned into sheep yesterday,’ said Nutt. ‘I should like to see that.’

‘I shouldn’t go further than the sculleries, if I was you,’ said Smeems, quickly. ‘And don’t worry about what the gentlemen do. They are the finest minds in the world, let me tell you. If you was to ask ’em…’He paused, trying to think of something really difficult, like, ‘What is 864 times 316 …?’

‘273,024,’ said Nutt, not quite under his breath.

‘What?’ said Smeems, derailed.

‘Just thinking aloud, master,’ said Nutt.

‘Oh. Right. Er … Well that’s it, see? They’d have an answer for you in a brace of shakes. Finest minds in the world,’ said Smeems, who believed in truth via repetition. ‘Finest minds. Engaged in the business of the universe. Finest minds!’

‘Well, that was fun,’ said Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of the university, throwing himself into a huge armchair in the faculty’s Uncommon Room with such force that it nearly threw him out again. ‘We must do it again some time.’

‘Yes, sir. We will. In one hundred years,’ said the new Master of The Traditions smugly, turning over the pages in his huge book. He reached the crackling leaf headed Hunting the Megapode, wrote down the date and the amount of time it had taken to find the aforesaid Megapode, and signed his name with a flourish: Ponder Stibbons.

‘What is a Megapode, anyway?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, helping himself to the port.

‘A type of bird, I believe,’ said the Archchancellor, waving a hand towards the drinks trolley. ‘After me.’

‘The original Megapode was found in the under-butler’s pantry,’ said the Master of The Traditions. ‘It escaped in the middle of dinner and caused what my predecessor eleven hundred years ago called …’ he referred to the book, ‘ “a veritable heyhoe-rumbelow as all the Fellows pursued it through the college buildings with much mirth and good spirits”.’

‘Why?’ said the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications, deftly snatching the decanter full of good spirits as it went past.

‘Oh, you can’t have a Megapode running around loose, Doctor Hix,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anyone’ll tell you that.’

‘No, I meant why do we do it again every hundred years?’ said the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications.[3]

The Senior Wrangler turned his face away and murmured, ‘Oh, good gods …’

‘It’s a tradition,’ the Chair of Indefinite Studies explained, rolling a cigarette. ‘We have to have traditions.’

‘They’re traditional,’ said Ridcully. He beckoned to one of the servants. ‘And I don’t mind saying that this one has made me somewhat peckish. Can you fetch the cheeseboards one to five, please? And, um, some of that cold roast beef, some ham, a few biscuits and, of course, the pickle carts.’ He looked up. ‘Anyone want to add anything?’

‘I could toy fitfully with a little fruit,’ said the Professor of Recondite Phenomena. ‘How about you, Librarian?’

‘Ook,’ growled the figure hogging the fire.

‘Yes, of course,’ said the Archchancellor. He waved a hand at the hovering waiter. ‘The fruit trolley as well. See to it, please, Downbody. And … perhaps that new girl could bring it up? She ought to get used to the Uncommon Room.’

It was as if he had just spoken a magic spell. The room, its ceiling hazy with blue smoke, was suddenly awash with a sort of heavy, curiously preoccupied silence mostly due to dreamy speculation, but in a few rare cases owing to distant memory.

The new girl … At the mere thought, elderly hearts beat dangerously.

Very seldom did beauty intrude into the daily life of UU, which was as masculine as the smell of old socks and pipe smoke and, given the faculty’s general laxness when it came to knocking out their pipes, the smell of smoking socks as well. Mrs Whitlow, the housekeeper, she of the clanking chatelaine and huge creaking corset that caused the Chair of Indefinite Studies to swoon when he heard it, generally took great care to select staff who, while being female, were not excessively so, and tended to be industrious, clean in their habits, rosy cheeked and, in short, the kind of ladies who are never too far from gingham and an apple pie. This suited the wizards, who liked to be not far away from an apple pie themselves, although they could take gingham or leave it alone.

Why, then, had the housekeeper employed Juliet? What could she have been thinking of? The girl had come into the place like a new world in a solar system, and the balance of the heavens was subtly wobbling. And, indeed, as she advanced, so was Juliet.