Terry Pratchett - Unseen Academicals

‘What is a Megapode, anyway?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, helping himself to the port.

‘A type of bird, I believe,’ said the Archchancellor, waving a hand towards the drinks trolley. ‘After me.’

‘The original Megapode was found in the under-butler’s pantry,’ said the Master of The Traditions. ‘It escaped in the middle of dinner and caused what my predecessor eleven hundred years ago called… ’ he referred to the book, ‘“a veritable heyhoe-rumbelow as all the Fellows pursued it through the college buildings with much mirth and good spirits”.’

‘Why?’ said the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications, deftly snatching the decanter full of good spirits as it went past.

‘Oh, you can’t have a Megapode running around loose, Doctor Hix,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anyone’ll tell you that.’

‘No, I meant why do we do it again every hundred years?’ said the head of the Department of Post-Mortem Communications [3] Strictly speaking, Dr Hix, spelled with an X, was the son of Mr and Mrs Hicks, but a man who wears a black robe with nasty symbols on it and has a skull ring would be mad, or let us say even madder, to pass up the chance to have an X in his name. .

The Senior Wrangler turned his face away and murmured, ‘Oh, good gods… ’

‘It’s a tradition,’ the Chair of Indefinite Studies explained, rolling a cigarette. ‘We have to have traditions.’

‘They’re traditional,’ said Ridcully. He beckoned to one of the servants. ‘And I don’t mind saying that this one has made me somewhat peckish. Can you fetch the cheeseboards one to five, please? And, um, some of that cold roast beef, some ham, a few biscuits and, of course, the pickle carts.’ He looked up. ‘Anyone want to add anything?’

‘I could toy fitfully with a little fruit,’ said the Professor of Recondite Phenomena. ‘How about you, Librarian?’

‘Ook,’ growled the figure hogging the fire.

‘Yes, of course,’ said the Archchancellor. He waved a hand at the hovering waiter. ‘The fruit trolley as well. See to it, please, Downbody. And… perhaps that new girl could bring it up? She ought to get used to the Uncommon Room.’

It was as if he had just spoken a magic spell. The room, its ceiling hazy with blue smoke, was suddenly awash with a sort of heavy, curiously preoccupied silence mostly due to dreamy speculation, but in a few rare cases owing to distant memory.

The new girl… At the mere thought, elderly hearts beat dangerously.

Very seldom did beauty intrude into the daily life of UU, which was as masculine as the smell of old socks and pipe smoke and, given the faculty’s general laxness when it came to knocking out their pipes, the smell of smoking socks as well. Mrs Whitlow, the housekeeper, she of the clanking chatelaine and huge creaking corset that caused the Chair of Indefinite Studies to swoon when he heard it, generally took great care to select staff who, while being female, were not excessively so, and tended to be industrious, clean in their habits, rosy cheeked and, in short, the kind of ladies who are never too far from gingham and an apple pie. This suited the wizards, who liked to be not far away from an apple pie themselves, although they could take gingham or leave it alone.

Why, then, had the housekeeper employed Juliet? What could she have been thinking of? The girl had come into the place like a new world in a solar system, and the balance of the heavens was subtly wobbling. And, indeed, as she advanced, so was Juliet.

By custom and practice, wizards were celibate, in theory because women were distracting and bad for the magical organs, but after a week of Juliet’s presence many of the faculty were subject to (mostly) unfamiliar longings and strange dreams, and were finding things rather hard, but you couldn’t really put your finger on it: what she had went beyond beauty. It was a sort of distillation of beauty that travelled around with her, uncoiling itself into the surrounding ether. When she walked past, the wizards felt the urge to write poetry and buy flowers.

‘You may be interested to know, gentlemen,’ said the new Master of The Traditions, ‘that tonight’s was the longest chase ever recorded in the history of the tradition. I suggest we owe a vote of thanks to tonight’s Megapode… ’

He realized the statement had plummeted on to deaf ears. ‘Er, gentlemen?’ he said.

He looked up. The wizards were staring, in a soulful sort of way, at whatever was going on inside their heads.

‘Gentlemen?’ he said again, and this time there was a collective sigh as they woke up from their sudden attack of daydreaming.

‘What say?’ said the Archchancellor.

‘I was just remarking that tonight’s Megapode was undoubtedly the finest on record, Archchancellor. It was Rincewind. The official Megapode headdress suited him very well, all things considered. I think he’s gone for a lie down.’

‘What? Oh, that. Well, yes. Indeed. Well done, that man,’ said Ridcully, and the wizards commenced that slow handclapping and table-thumping which is the mark of appreciation amongst men of a certain age, class and girth, accompanied by cries of ‘Ver’, ver’ well done, that man!’ and ‘Jolly good!’ But eyes stayed firmly fixed on the doorway, and ears strained for the rattle of the trolley, which would herald the arrival of the new girl and, of course, one hundred and seven types of cheese, and more than seventy different varieties of pickles, chutneys and other tracklements. The new girl might be the very paradigm of beauty, but UU was not the place for a man who could forget his cheeses.

Well, she was a distraction at least, Ponder thought as he snapped the book shut, and the university needed a few of them right now. It had been tricky since the Dean had left, very tricky indeed. Whoever heard of a man resigning from UU? It was something that simply did not happen! Sometimes people left in disgrace, in a box or, in a few cases, in bits, but there was no tradition of resigning at all. Tenure at Unseen University was for life, and often a long way beyond.

The office of Master of The Traditions had fallen inevitably on Ponder Stibbons, who tended to get all the jobs that required someone who thought that things should happen on time and that numbers should add up.

Regrettably, when he’d gone to check on things with the previous Master of The Traditions, who, everyone agreed, had not been seen around and about lately, he’d found that the man had been dead for two hundred years. This wasn’t a wholly unusual circumstance. Ponder, after years at Unseen, still didn’t know the full size of the faculty. How could you keep track of them in a place like this these days, where hundreds of studies all shared one window, but only on the outside, or rooms drifted away from their doorways during the night, travelled intangibly through the slumbering halls and ended up docking quite elsewhere?

A wizard could do what he liked in his own study, and in the old days that had largely meant smoking anything he fancied and farting hugely without apologizing. These days it meant building out into a congruent set of dimensions. Even the Archchancellor was doing it, which made it hard for Ponder to protest: he had half a mile of trout stream in his bathroom, and claimed that messin’ about in his study was what kept a wizard out of mischief. And, as everyone knew, it did. It generally got him into trouble instead.

Ponder had let that go, because he now saw it as his mission in life to stoke the fires that kept Mustrum Ridcully bubbling and made the university a happy place. As a dog reflects the mood of its owner, so a university reflects its Archchancellor. All he could do now, as the university’s sole self-confessed entirely sensible person, was to steer things as best he could, keep away from squalls involving the person previously known as the Dean, and find ways of keeping the Archchancellor too occupied to get under Ponder’s feet.