Interesting Times

'I don't know. The Grand Viziers used to send the occasional message, but I gather there has been some turmoil in recent years. It is unsigned, you notice. However, I cannot ignore it.'

'Wizzard, wizzard,' said Ridcully, thoughtfully.

'The pictograms mean "Send Us Instantly The Great",' said Lord Vetinari.

'... wizzard...' said Ridcully to himself, tapping the paper.

The Patrician tossed an anchovy to the albatross, which swallowed it greedily.

'The Empire has a million men under arms,' he said. 'Happily, it suits the rulers to pretend that everywhere outside the Empire is a valueless howling waste peopled only by vampires and ghosts. They usually have no interest whatsoever in our affairs. This is fortunate for us, because they are both cunning, rich and powerful. Frankly, I had hoped they had forgotten about us altogether. And now this. I was hoping to be able to dispatch the wretched person and forget about it.'

'... wizzard,' said Ridcully.

'Perhaps you would like a holiday?' said the Patrician, a hint of hope in his voice.

'Me? No. Can't abide foreign food,' said Ridculy quickly. He repeated, half to himself, 'Wizzard...'

'The word seems to fascinate you,' said Lord Vetinari.

'Seen it spelled like that before,' said Ridcully 'Can't remember where.'

'I'm sure you will remember. And will be in position to send the Great Wizard, however he spelled, to the Empire by teatime.'

Ridcully's jaw dropped.

'Six thousand miles? By magic? Do you know hov hard that is?'

'I cherish my ignorance on the subject,' said Lord Vetinari.

'Besides,' Ridcully went on, 'they're, well... foreign over there. I thought they had enough wizards of their own.'

'I really couldn't say.'

'We don't know why they want this wizard?'

'No. But I'm sure there is someone you could spare. There seems to be such a lot of you down there.'

'I mean, it could be for some terrible foreign purj pose,' said Ridcully. For some reason the face of the Dean waddled across his mind, and he brightened upj 'They might be happy with a great wizard, do you think?' he mused.

'I leave that entirely to you. But by tonight I would like to be able to send back a message saying that the Great Wizzard is duly on his way. And then we can forget about it.'

'Of course, it would be very hard to bring the chap back,' said Ridcully. He thought of the Dean again. 'Practically impossible,' he added, in an inappropriately happy way. 'I expect we'd try for months and months without succeeding. I expect we'd attempt everything with no fuck. Damn it.'

'I can see you are agog to rise to this challenge,' said the Patrician. 'Let me not detain you from rushing back to the University and putting measures in hand.'

'But... "wizzard"...' Ridcully murmured. 'Rings a faint bell, that. Think I've seen it before, somewhere.'

The shark didn't think much. Sharks don't. Their thought processes can largely be represented by '='. You see it = you eat it.

But, as it arrowed through the waters of the lagoon, its tiny brain began to receive little packages of selachian existential dread that could only be called doubts.

It knew it was the biggest shark around. All the challengers had fled, or run up against good old '='.

Yet its body told it that something was coming up fast behind it.

It turned gracefully, and the first thing it saw was hundreds of legs and thousands of toes, a whole pork pie factory of piggy-wiggies.

Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.

The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of a tradition, Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no-one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no-one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the Reader in Woolly Thinking) that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too.

And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The Chair of Indefinite Studies was giving a lecture in room 3B and therefore his presence asleep in front of the fire in the Uncommon Room was a technicality upon which no diplomatic man would comment.

Ridcully kicked him on the shins.

'Ow!'

'Sorry to interrupt, Chair,' said Ridcully, in a very perfunctory way. 'God help me, I need the Council of Wizards. Where is everybody?'