The Truth (Discworld 25)

A more querulous voice said, 'We could simply replace--'

'No, we could not. I understand that our guest is, fortunately, a man of rather low intelligence.' There was this about the first speaker's voice. It spoke as if disagreeing was not simply unthinkable but impossible. It was used to being in the company of listeners.

'But he looks the spit and image--'

'Yes. Astonishing, isn't it? Let us not overcomplicate matters, though. We are a bodyguard of lies, gentlemen. We are all that stands between the city and oblivion, so let us make this one chance work. Vetinari may be quite willing to see humans become a minority in their greatest city, but frankly his death by assassination would be... unfortunate. It would cause turmoil, and turmoil is hard to steer. And we all know that there are people who take too much of an interest. No. There is a third way. A gentle slide from one condition to another.'

'And what will happen to our new friend?'

'Oh, our employees are known to be men of resource, gentlemen. I'm sure they know how to deal with a man whose face no longer fits, eh?'

There was laughter.

Things were a little fraught in Unseen University. The wizards were scuttling from building to building, glancing at the sky.

The problem, of course, was the frogs. Not rains of frogs, which were uncommon now in Ankh-Morpork, but specifically foreign treefrogs from the humid jungles of Klatch. They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted.

Very occasionally a frog was removed from the vivarium and put into a rather smaller jar where it briefly became a very happy frog indeed, and then went to sleep and woke up in that great big jungle in the sky.

And thus the University got the active ingredient which it made up into pills and fed to the Bursar, to keep him sane. At least, apparently sane, because nothing was that simple at good old UU. In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane*

[* This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.]

This had worked well. There had been a few false starts. For several hours, at one point, he had hallucinated that he was a bookcase. But now he was permanently hallucinating that he was a bursar, and that almost made up for the small side-effect that also led him to hallucinate that he could fly.

Of course, many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and this has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the street below. When a wizard hallucinates that he can fly, things are different.

'Bursaar! You come down here right this minute!' Arch-chancellor Mustrum Ridcully barked through his megaphone. 'You know what I said about goin' higher than the walls!' The Bursar floated gently down towards the lawn. 'You wanted me, Archchancellor?'

Ridcully waved a piece of paper at him. 'You were tellin' me the other day we were spendin' a ton of money with the engravers, weren't you?' he barked.

The Bursar got his mind up to something approaching the correct speed. 'I was?' he said.

'Breakin' the budget, you said. Remember it distinctly.'

A few cogs meshed in the jittery gearbox of the Bursar's brain. 'Oh. Yes. Yes. Very true,' he said. Another gear clonked into place. 'A fortune every year, I'm afraid. The Guild of Engravers--'

'Chap here says,' the Archchancellor glanced at the sheet, 'he can do us ten copies of a thousand words each for a dollar. Is that cheap?'

'I think, uh, there must be a mis-carving there, Archchancellor,' said the Bursar, finally managing to get his voice into the smooth and soothing tones he found best in dealing with Ridcully. That sum would not keep him in boxwood.'

'Says here' - rustle - 'down to ten-point size,' said Ridcully.

The Bursar lost control for a moment. 'Ridiculous!'

'What?'

'Sorry, Archchancellor. I mean, that can't be right. Even if anyone could consistently carve that fine, the wood would crumble after a couple of impressions.'

'Know about this sort of thing, do you?'

'Well, my great-uncle was an engraver, Archchancellor. And the print bill is a major drain, as you know. I think I can say with some justification that I have been able to keep the Guild down to a very--'

'Don't they invite you to their annual blow-out?'

'Well, as a major customer of course the University is invited to their official dinner and as the designated officer I naturally see it as part of my duties to--'

'Fifteen courses, I heard.'