Unseen Academicals (Discworld 37)

'That being settled, then, I must tell you that I have asked the stalwart Mister Frankly Ottomy and Mister Alf Nobbs to join us in this little escapade. Mister Nobbs says that since we are not wearing football favours we should not attract unwanted attention.'

The wizards nodded nervously at the bledlows. They were, of course, merely employees of the university, while the wizards were, well, were the university, weren't they? After all, a university was not just about bricks and mortar, it was about people, specifically wizards. But to a man, the bledlows scared them.

They were all hefty men with a look of having been carved out of bacon. And they were all descendants of, and practically identical to, those men who had chased those wizards¨Cyounger and more limber, and it was amazing how fast you could run with a couple of bledlows behind you¨Cthrough the foggy night-time streets. If caught, said bledlows, who took enormous pleasure in the prosecution of the university's private laws and idiosyncratic rules, would then drag you before the Archchancellor on a charge of Attempting to Become Rascally Drunk. That was preferable to fighting back, when the bledlows were widely believed to take the opportunity for a little class warfare. That was years ago, but even now the unexpected sight of a bledlow caused sullen, shameful terror to flow down the spines of men who had acquired more letters after their names than a game of Scrabble.

Mr Ottomy, recognizing this, leered and touched the brim of his uniform cap. 'Afternoon, gents,' he said. 'Don't you worry about a thing. Me and Alf here will see you right. We'd better get movin', though, they bully off in half an hour.'

The Senior Wrangler would not have been the Senior Wrangler if he did not hate the sound of silence. As they shuffled out of the back door, wincing at the unfamiliar chafing of trouser upon knee, he turned to Mr Nobbs and said, 'Nobbs... that's not a common name. Tell me, Alf, are you by any chance related to the famous Corporal Nobby Nobbs of the Watch?'

Mr Nobbs took it well, Ridcully thought, given the clumsy lack of protocol.

'Nosir!'

'Ah, a distant branch of the name, then... '

'Nosir! Different tree!'

In the greyness of her front room, Glenda looked at the suitcase, and despaired. She'd done her best with brown boot polish, week after week, but it had been bought from a shonky shop and the cardboard under the leather-ish exterior was beginning to show through. Her customers never seemed to notice, but she did, even when it was out of sight.

It was a secret part of a secret life that she lived for an hour or two on her half-day off once a week, and maybe a little longer if today's cold calls worked out.

She looked at her face in the mirror, and said in a voice that was full of jaunt: 'We all know the problem of underarm defoliation. It is so hard, isn't it, to keep the lichens healthy... But,' she flourished a green and blue container with a golden stopper, 'one spray with Verdant Spring will keep those crevices moist and forest fresh all day long... '

She faltered, because it really wasn't her. She couldn't do jaunty. The stuff was a dollar a bottle! Who could afford that? Well, a lot of troll ladies, that's who, but Mr Stronginthearm said it was okay because they had the money, and anyway it did let the moss grow. She'd said all right, but a dollar for a fancy bottle of water with some plant food in it was a bit steep. And he'd said you are Selling the Dream.

And they bought it. That was the worrying part. They bought it and recommended it to their friends. The city had discovered the Heavy Dollar now. She'd read about it in the paper. There had always been trolls around, doing the heavy lifting and generally being there in the background if not being the actual background itself. But now they were raising families and running businesses, moving on and up and buying things, and that made them people at last. And so you got other people like Mr Stronginthearm, a dwarf, selling beauty products to Miss and Mrs Troll, via ladies like Glenda, a human, because although dwarfs and trolls were officially great chums these days, because of something called the Koom Valley Accord, that sort of thing only meant much to the sort of people who signed treaties. Even the most well-intentioned dwarf would not walk down some of the roads along which Glenda, every week, dragged her nasty, semi-cardboard case, Selling the Dream. It got her out of the house and paid for the little treats. There was money to put away for a rainy day. Mr Stronginthearm had the knack of coming up with new ideas, too. Who would have thought that lady trolls would go for fake-tan lotion? It sold. Everything sold. The Dream sold, and it was shallow and expensive and made her feel cheap. It -

Her ever-straining ears caught the sound of next door's front door opening very slowly. Ha! Juliet jumped as Glenda suddenly loomed beside her.

'Off somewhere?'

'Gonna watch the game, ain't I?'

Glenda glanced up the street. A figure was disappearing rapidly around the corner. She grinned a grim grin.

'Oh yes. Good idea. I wasn't doing anything. Just wait while I fetch my scarf, will you?' To herself she added, You just keep walking, Johnny!

With a thump that caused pigeons to explode away like a detonating daisy, the Librarian landed on his chosen rooftop.

He liked football. Something about the shouting and the fighting appealed to his ancestral memories. And this was fascinating, because, strictly speaking, his ancestors had been blamelessly engaged for centuries as upstanding corn and feed merchants and, moreover, were allergic to heights.

He sat down on the parapet with his feet over the edge, and his nostrils flared as he snuffed up the scents rising from below.

It is said that the onlooker sees most of the game. But the Librarian could smell as well, and the game, seen from outside, was humanity. Not a day went past without his thanking the magical accident that had moved him a few little genes away from it. Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, 'The mountain is, and is not.' They would think, 'The banana is. I will eat the banana. There is no banana. I want another banana.'

He peeled one now, in a preoccupied way, while watching the evolving tableau below. Not only does said onlooker see most of the game, he might even see more than one game.

This street was indeed a crescent, which would probably have an effect on tactics if the players had any truck with such high-flown concepts.

People were pouring in from either end and also from a couple of alleyways. Mostly they were male-extremely so. The women fell into two categories: those who had been tugged there by the ties of blood or prospective matrimony (after which they could stop pretending that this bloody mess was in any way engrossing), and a number of elderly women of a 'sweet old lady' construction, who bawled indiscriminately, in a rising cloud of lavender and peppermint, screams of 'Get 'im dahn an' kick 'im inna nuts!' and similar exhortations.

And there was another smell now, one he'd learned to recognize but could not quite fathom. It was the smell of Nutt. Tangled with it were the smells of tallow, cheap soap and shonky-shop clothing that the ape part of him categorized as belonging to 'Tin Flinging Man'. He had been just another servant in the maze of the university, but now he was a friend of Nutt, and Nutt was important. He was also wrong. He had no place in the world, but he was in it, and the world was becoming aware of him soon enough.

The Librarian knew all about this sort of thing. There had been no space in the fabric of reality marked 'simian librarian' until he'd been dropped into one, and the ripples had made his life a very strange one.

Ah, another scent was riding the gentle updraught. It was easy: Screaming Banana Pie Woman. The Librarian liked her. Oh, she had screamed and run away the first time she'd seen him. They all did. But she had come back, and she'd smelled ashamed. She also respected the primacy of words, and, as a primate, so did he. And sometimes she baked him a banana pie, which was a kind act. The Librarian was not very familiar with love, which had always struck him as a bit ethereal and soppy, but kindness, on the other hand, was practical. You knew where you were with kindness, especially if you were holding a pie it had just given you. She was a friend of Nutt, too. Nutt made friends easily for someone who had come from nowhere. Interesting...

The Librarian, despite appearances, liked order. Books about cabbages went on the Brassica shelves, (blit) UUSSFY890¨C9046 (antiblit1.1), although obviously Mr Cauliflower's Big Adventure would be better placed in UUSS J3.2 (>blit) 9, while The Tau of Cabbage would certainly be a candidate for UUSS (blit+) 60-sp55-o9-hl (blit). To anyone familiar with a seven-dimensional library system in blit dimensional space it was as clear as daylight, if you remembered to keep your eye on the blit.