The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

Lord Vetinari stood at his window watching the semaphore tower on the other side of the river. All eight of the big shutters facing him were blinking furiously - black, white, white, black, white...

Information was flying into the air. Twenty miles behind him, on another tower in Sto Lat someone was looking through a telescope and shouting out numbers.

How quickly the future comes upon us, he thought.

He always suspected the poetic description of Time like an ever-rolling stream. Time, in his experience, moved more like rocks... sliding, pressing, building up force underground and then, with one jerk that shakes the crockery, a whole field of turnips mysteriously slips sideways by six feet.

Semaphore had been around for centuries, and everyone knew that knowledge had a value, and everyone knew that exporting goods was a way of making money. And then, suddenly, someone realized how much money you could make by exporting to Genua by tomorrow things known in Ankh-Morpork today. And some bright young man in the Street of Cunning Artificers had been unusually cunning.

Knowledge, information, power, words... flying through the air, invisible...

And suddenly the world was tap-dancing on quicksand.

In that case, the prize went to the best dancer.

Lord Vetinari turned away, took some papers from a desk drawer, walked to a wall, touched a certain area, and stepped quickly through the hidden door that noiselessly swung open.

Beyond was a corridor, lit by borrowed light from high windows and paved with small flagstones. He walked forward, hesitated, said "No, this is Tuesday," and moved his descending foot so that it landed on a stone that in every respect appeared to be exactly the same as its fellows.

Anyone overhearing his progress along the passages and stairs might have caught muttered phrases on the lines of "The moon is waxing..." and "Yes, it is before noon." A really keen listener would have heard the faint whirring and ticking inside the walls.

A really keen and paranoid listener would have reflected that anything Lord Vetinari said aloud even while he was alone might not be totally worth believing. Not, certainly, if your life depended on it.

Eventually he reached a door, which he unlocked.

There was a large attic room beyond, suddenly airy and bright and cheerful with sunlight from the windows in the roof. It seemed to be a cross between a workshop and a storeroom. Several bird skeletons hung from the ceiling and there were a few other bones on the worktables, along with coils of wire and metal springs and tubes of paint and more tools, many of them probably unique, than you normally saw in any one place. Only a narrow bed, wedged between a thing like a loom with wings and a large bronze statue, suggested that someone actually lived here. They were clearly someone who was obsessively interested in everything.

What interested Lord Vetinari right now was the device. all by itself on a table in the middle of the room. It looked like a collection of copper balls balanced on one another. Steam was hissing gently from a few rivets, and occasionally the device went blup

"Your lordship!"

Vetinari looked around. A hand was waving desperately at him from behind an upturned bench.

And something made him look up, as well. The ceiling above him was crusted with some brownish substance, which hung from it like stalactites.

Blup

With quite surprising speed the Patrician was behind the bench. Leonard of Quirm smiled at him from underneath his home-made protective helmet.

"I do apologize," he said. "I"m afraid I wasn"t expecting anyone to come in. I"m sure it will work this time, however."

Blup

"What is it?" said Vetinari.

Blup

"I"m not quite sure, but I hope it"s a - "

And then it was, suddenly, too noisy to talk.

Leonard of Quirm never dreamed that he was a prisoner. If anything, he was grateful to Vetinari for giving him this airy work space, and regular meals, and laundry, and protecting him from those people who for some reason always wanted to take his perfectly innocent inventions, designed for the betterment of mankind, and use them for despicable purposes. It was amazing how many of them there were - both the people and the inventions. It was as if all the genius of a civilization had funnelled into one head which was, therefore, in a constant state of highly inventive spin. Vetinari often speculated upon the fate of mankind should Leonard keep his mind on one thing for more than an hour or so.

The rushing noise died away. Blup.

Leonard peered cautiously over the bench and smiled broadly. "Ali! Happily, we appear to have achieved coffee," he said.

"Coffee?"