Interesting Times

'It blots a bit,' he said, in a helpless tone of voice. 'What's happening?'

Ponder had been thinking further about this. The latest conclusions hadn't been comforting.

'Well… we know that books containing magic become a little bit… sapient…' he began. 'And we've made a machine for…'

'You mean it's alive?'

'Come on, let's not get all occult about this,' said Ponder, trying to sound jovial. 'We're wizards, after all.'

'Listen, you know that long problem in thaumic fields you wanted me to put in?'

'Yes. Well?'

'It gave me the answer at midnight,' said Adrian, his face pale.

'Good.'

'Yes, good, except that I didn't actually give it the problem until half past one, Ponder.'

'You're telling me you got the answer before you asked the question?'

'Yes!'

'Why did you ask the question, then?'

'I thought about it, and I thought maybe I had to. I mean, it couldn't have known what the answer was going to be if I didn't give it the problem, yes?'

'Good point. Er. You waited ninety minutes, though.'

Adrian looked at his pointy boots.

'I… was hiding in the privy. Well, Redo from Start could—'

'All right, all right. Go and have something to eat.'

'Are we meddling with things we don't understand, Ponder?'

Ponder looked up at the gnomic bulk of the machine. It didn't seem threatening, merely… other.

He thought: meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever, to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you can give it a twist.

Perhaps we shouldn't have given you a name. We didn't think about that. It was a joke. But we should have remembered that names are important. A thing with a name is a bit more than a thing.

'Off you go, Adrian,' he said firmly.

He sat down and carefully typed:

Hello.

Things whirred.

The quill wrote:

+ + +?????? + + + Hello + + + Redo From Start + + +

Far above, a butterfly — its wings an undistinguished yellow, with black markings — fluttered through an open window.

Ponder began the calculations for the transfer between Hunghung and Ankh-Morpork.

The butterfly alighted for a moment on the maze of glass pipes. When it rose again, it left behind a very small blob of nectar.

Ponder typed carefully, far below.

A small but significant ant, one of the scurrying thousands, emerged from a break in the tube and spent a few seconds sucking at the sweet liquid before going back to work.

After a while, Hex gave an answer. Apart from one small but significant point, it was entirely correct.

Rincewind turned around.

With an echoing chorus of creaks and groans, the Red Army turned around too.

And it was red. It was the same colour, Rincewind realized, as the soil.

He'd bumped into a few statues in the darkness. He hadn't realized that there were this many. They stretched, rank on rank, into the distant shadows.

Experimentally, he turned around. Behind him, there was another chorus of stampings.

After a few false starts he found that the only way to end up facing them was to take off the boots, turn, and put the boots on again.

He lowered the visor for a moment, and saw himself lowering the visor for a moment.

He stuck up an arm. They stuck out their arms. He jumped up and down. They jumped up and down, with a crash that made the globes swing. Lightning sizzled from their boots.

He felt a sudden hysterical urge to laugh.

He touched his nose. They touched their noses. He made, with terrible glee, the traditional gesture for the dismissal of demons. Seven thousand terracotta middle fingers stabbed towards the ceiling.

He tried to calm down.

The word his mind had been groping for finally surfaced, and it was golem.

There were one or two of them, even in Ankh-Morpork. You were bound to get them in any area where you had wizards or priests of an experimental turn of mind. They were usually just figures made out of clay and animated with some suitable spell or prayer. They pottered about doing simple odd jobs, but they were not very fashionable these days. The problem was not putting them to work but stopping them from working; if you set a golem to digging the garden and then forgot about it, you'd come back to find it'd planted a row of beans 1500 miles long.

Rincewind looked down at one of the gloves.

He cautiously touched the little picture of a fighting soldier.

The sound of seven thousand swords being simultaneously unsheathed was like the tearing of a thick sheet of steel. Seven thousand points were pointed right at Rincewind.

He took a step back. So did the army.

He was in a place with thousands of artificial soldiers wearing swords. The fact that he appeared to have control of them was no great comfort. He'd theoretically had control of Rincewind for the whole of his life, and look what had happened to him.

He looked at the little pictures again. One of them showed a soldier with two heads. When he touched it, the army turned about smartly. Ah.

Now to get out of here…

The Horde watched the bustle among Lord Hong's men. Objects were being dragged to the front line.

'They don't look like archers to me,' said Boy Willie.

'Those things are Barking Dogs,' said Cohen. 'I should know. Seen 'em before. They're like a barrel full of fireworks, and when the fireworks are lit a big stone comes rushing out of the other end.'

'Why?'

'Well, would you hang around if someone had just lit a firework by your arse?'

'Here, Teach, he said 'arse',' complained Truckle. 'Look, on my bit of paper here it says you mustn't say —'

'We've got shields, haven't we?' said Mr Saveloy. 'I'm sure if we keep close together and put the shields over our heads we'll be as right as rain.'

'The stone's about a foot across and going very fast and it's red hot.'

'Not shields, then?'

'No,' said Cohen. 'Truckle, you push Hamish—'

'We won't get fifty yards, Ghenghiz,' said Caleb.

'Better fifty yards now than six feet in a minute, yes?' said Cohen.

'Bravo!' said Mr Saveloy.

'Whut?'

Lord Hong watched them. He saw the Horde hang their shields around the wheelchair to form a crude travelling wall, and saw the wheels begin to turn.