Interesting Times

And behind him, with the sound of seven thousand flower pots smashing together, the lightning still crackling over them, the Red Army came to attention.

Hex had grown a bit during the night. Adrian Turnip-seed, who had been on duty to feed the mice and rewind the clockwork and clean out the dead ants, had sworn that he'd done nothing else and that no-one had come in.

But now, where there had been the big clumsy arrangement of blocks so that the results could be read, was a quill pen in the middle of a network of pulleys and levers.

'Watch,' said Adrian, nervously tapping out a very simple problem. 'It's come up with this after doing all those spells at suppertime...'

The ants scuttled. The clockwork spun. The springs and levers jerked so sharply that Ponder took a step back.

The quill pen wobbled over to an inkwell, dipped, returned to the sheet of paper Adrian had put under the levers, and began to write.

'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.