Unseen Academicals

Ah yes, the tall, thin girls, Glenda thought.

‘Why in the world would you want to get in, anyway?’ Molly said. ‘It’s a lot of running around and not much pay, when all’s said and done. I mean, we get some decent leftovers after a big affair, but what’s that to you? Everyone knows that you’re the leftover queen!’ She paused, too awkwardly. ‘I mean, we all know you’re really good at making wonderful food with always a little something left over,’ she gabbled. ‘That’s all I meant!’

‘I didn’t think you meant anything else,’ said Glenda, keeping her voice level. But she raised it again to add, as Molly scurried off: ‘I can pay back the favour right now! You’ve got two floury handprints on your arse!’

The glare that came back was a small victory, but you have to take what you can get.

Still, that strange interlude, which she was sure she would regret, had taken up a lot of time. She had to get the Night Kitchen organized.

When the door had closed behind the rather forthright maid, Ridcully nodded meaningfully at Ponder. ‘All right, Mister Stibbons. You were glancing at your thaumometer the whole time I was talking to her. Out with it.’

‘Some kind of entanglement,’ said Ponder.

‘And there was me thinking that Vetinari was behind the business with the urn,’ said Ridcully gloomily. ‘I should have realized he’s never that unsubtle.’

‘Oh, I assumed it was going to be something like that right at the start,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

‘Indeed,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘It crossed my mind as soon as I saw it in the paper.’

‘Gentlemen,’ said Ridcully. ‘I am humbled that as soon as I have an idea about what something is, it turns out that you all knew what it was. I am amazed.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Dr Hix, ‘but I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘You are out of touch! You’ve been spending too long underground, sir!’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes sternly.

‘You don’t often let me out, that’s why! And can I remind you that I have to maintain a vital line of cosmic defence in this establishment here with a staff of exactly one? And he’s dead!’

‘You mean Charlie? I remember old Charlie, keen worker nevertheless,’ said Ridcully.

‘Yes, but I have to keep rewiring him all the time,’ sighed Hix. ‘I do try to keep you abreast of things in my monthly reports. I hope you read them… ?’

‘Tell me, Doctor Hix,’ said Ponder, ‘did you experience anything unusual when that young lady was speaking so eloquently?’

‘Well, yes, I had a pleasant moment of happy recollection about my father.’

‘So did we all, I am sure,’ said Ponder. There was sombre nodding around the table. ‘I never knew my father. I was brought up by my aunts. I had déjà vu without the original vu.’

‘And it wasn’t magic?’ suggested the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

‘No. Religion, I suspect,’ said Ridcully. ‘A god invoked, that sort of thing.’

‘Not invoked, Mustrum,’ said Dr Hix. ‘Summoned by bloodshed!’

‘Oh, I hope not,’ said Ridcully, getting to his feet. ‘I would like to try a little experiment this afternoon, gentlemen. We will not talk about football, we will not speculate about football, we will not worry about football—’

‘You are going to make us play it, aren’t you?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes glumly.

‘Yes,’ said Ridcully, more than somewhat miffed at the spoiling of a perfectly good peroration. ‘Just a little kick-about to help us get some hands-on experience of the game as it is played.’

‘Er. Strictly, under the new rules, by which I mean the ancient rules we are taking as our model, hands-on experience means no hands,’ said Ponder.

‘Well pointed out, that man. Put the word out, will you? Football practice on the lawn after lunch!’

One thing you had to remember when dealing with dwarfs was that while they shared the same world as you did, metaphorically they thought about it as if it were upside down. Only the richest and most influential of dwarfs lived in the deepest caverns. For a dwarf, a penthouse in the centre of the city would be some kind of slum. Dwarfs liked it dark and cool.

It didn’t stop there. A dwarf on the up and up was really on his uppers, and upper-class dwarfs were lower class. A dwarf who was rich, healthy and had respect and his own rat farm justifiably felt at rock bottom and was held in low esteem. When you talked to dwarfs, you turned your mind upside down. The city, too. Of course, when you dug down in Ankh-Morpork you just found more Ankh-Morpork. Thousands of years of it, ready to be dug out and shored up and walled in with the shiny dwarf brick.

It was Lord Vetinari’s ‘Grand Undertaking’. The city’s walls corseted it like a fetishist’s happiest dream. Gravity offered only a limited supply of up, but the deep loam of the plain had a limitless supply of down.