Moving pictures

'It's all too much for him,' the Chair complained. 'We never should have brought him.'

'Do you realize we're missing our dinner?' said the Dean.

The wizards fell silent at this. A stout woman edging past Poons' wheelchair suddenly started and looked around suspiciously and saw nothing except a dear old man, obviously fast asleep.

'And it's goose on Tuesdays,' said the Dean.

Poons opened one eye and honked the horn on his wheelchair.

'Tantarabobs! How's your granny off for soap!' he muttered triumphantly.

'See what I mean?' said the Chair. 'He doesn't know what century it is.'

Poons turned a beady black eye on him.

'Old I am, mm, and daft I may be,' he said, 'but I ain't goin' to be hungry.' He rummaged around in the unspeakable depths of the wheelchair and produced a greasy black bag. It jingled. 'I saw a young lady up the front a-selling of special moving-picture food,' he said.

'You mean you had money all the time?' said the Dean. 'And you never told us?'

'You never asked,' said Poons.

The wizards stared hungrily at the bag.

'They be having buttered banged grains and sausages in buns and chocolate things with things on and things,' said Poons. He gave them a toothless and crafty look. 'You can have some too, if you like,' he added graciously.

The Dean ticked off his purchases. 'Now,' he said, 'that's six Patrician-sized tubs of banged grains with extra butter, eight sausages in a bun, a jumbo cup of fizzy drink, and a bag of chocolate-covered raisins.' He handed over the money.

'Right,' said the Chair, gathering up the containers. 'Er. Do you think we should get something for the others?'

In the picture-throwing room Bezam cursed as he threaded the huge reel of Blown Away into the picture-throwing box.

A few feet away, in a roped-off section of the balcony, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari, was also ill at ease.

They were, he had to admit, a pleasant enough young couple. He just wasn't sure why he was sitting next to them, and why they were so important.

He was used to important people, or at least to people who thought they were important. Wizards became important through high deeds of magic. Thieves became important for daring robberies and so, in a slightly different way, did merchants. Warriors became important through winning battles and staying alive. Assassins became important through skilful inhumations. There were many roads to prominence, but you could see them, you could work them out. They made some sort of sense.

Whereas these two people had merely moved interestingly in front of this new-fangled moving-picture machinery. The rankest actor in the city's theatre was a mufti-skilled master of thespianism by comparison to them, but it wouldn't occur to anyone to line the streets and shout out his name.

The Patrician had never visited the clicks before. As far as he could ascertain, Victor Maraschino was famous for a sort of smouldering look that had middle-aged ladies who should know better swooning in the aisles, and Miss De Syn's forte was acting languidly, slapping faces, and looking fantastic while lying among silken cushions.

While he, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, ruled the city, preserved the city, loved the city, hated the city and had spent a lifetime in the service of the city . . .

And, as the common people had been filing into the stalls, his razor-keen hearing had picked up the conversation of two of them:

'Who's that up there?'

'That's Victor Maraschino and Delores De Syn! Do you know nothing?'