Unseen Academicals

And they bought it. That was the worrying part. They bought it and recommended it to their friends. The city had discovered the Heavy Dollar now. She’d read about it in the paper. There had always been trolls around, doing the heavy lifting and generally being there in the background if not being the actual background itself. But now they were raising families and running businesses, moving on and up and buying things, and that made them people at last. And so you got other people like Mr Stronginthearm, a dwarf, selling beauty products to Miss and Mrs Troll, via ladies like Glenda, a human, because although dwarfs and trolls were officially great chums these days, because of something called the Koom Valley Accord, that sort of thing only meant much to the sort of people who signed treaties. Even the most well-intentioned dwarf would not walk down some of the roads along which Glenda, every week, dragged her nasty, semi-cardboard case, Selling the Dream. It got her out of the house and paid for the little treats. There was money to put away for a rainy day. Mr Stronginthearm had the knack of coming up with new ideas, too. Who would have thought that lady trolls would go for fake-tan lotion? It sold. Everything sold. The Dream sold, and it was shallow and expensive and made her feel cheap. It—

Her ever-straining ears caught the sound of next door’s front door opening very slowly. Ha! Juliet jumped as Glenda suddenly loomed beside her.

‘Off somewhere?’

‘Gonna watch the game, ain’t I?’

Glenda glanced up the street. A figure was disappearing rapidly around the corner. She grinned a grim grin.

‘Oh yes. Good idea. I wasn’t doing anything. Just wait while I fetch my scarf, will you?’ To herself she added, You just keep walking, Johnny!

With a thump that caused pigeons to explode away like a detonating daisy, the Librarian landed on his chosen rooftop.

He liked football. Something about the shouting and the fighting appealed to his ancestral memories. And this was fascinating, because, strictly speaking, his ancestors had been blamelessly engaged for centuries as upstanding corn and feed merchants and, moreover, were allergic to heights.

He sat down on the parapet with his feet over the edge, and his nostrils flared as he snuffed up the scents rising from below.

It is said that the onlooker sees most of the game. But the Librarian could smell as well, and the game, seen from outside, was humanity. Not a day went past without his thanking the magical accident that had moved him a few little genes away from it. Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, ‘The mountain is, and is not.’ They would think, ‘The banana is. I will eat the banana. There is no banana. I want another banana.’

He peeled one now, in a preoccupied way, while watching the evolving tableau below. Not only does said onlooker see most of the game, he might even see more than one game.

This street was indeed a crescent, which would probably have an effect on tactics if the players had any truck with such high-flown concepts.

People were pouring in from either end and also from a couple of alleyways. Mostly they were male-extremely so. The women fell into two categories: those who had been tugged there by the ties of blood or prospective matrimony (after which they could stop pretending that this bloody mess was in any way engrossing), and a number of elderly women of a ‘sweet old lady’ construction, who bawled indiscriminately, in a rising cloud of lavender and peppermint, screams of ‘Get ’im dahn an’ kick ’im inna nuts!’ and similar exhortations.

And there was another smell now, one he’d learned to recognize but could not quite fathom. It was the smell of Nutt. Tangled with it were the smells of tallow, cheap soap and shonky-shop clothing that the ape part of him categorized as belonging to ‘Tin Flinging Man’. He had been just another servant in the maze of the university, but now he was a friend of Nutt, and Nutt was important. He was also wrong. He had no place in the world, but he was in it, and the world was becoming aware of him soon enough.

The Librarian knew all about this sort of thing. There had been no space in the fabric of reality marked ‘simian librarian’ until he’d been dropped into one, and the ripples had made his life a very strange one.