Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent

His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled ‘Me, who does the telling’ and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled ‘Everyone else’.

Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly.

And it would have continued to do so if he hadn’t suddenly started to see the point in preparing career development packages and, worst of all, job descriptions.

As the Lecturer in Recent Runes put it: ‘He called me in and asked me what I did, exactly. Have you ever heard of such a thing? What sort of question is that? This is a university !’

‘He asked me whether I had any personal worries,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘I don’t see why I have to stand for that sort of thing.’

‘And did you see that sign on his desk?’ the Dean had said.

‘You mean the one that says, “The Buck Starts Here”?’

‘No, the other one. The one which says, “When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.”’

‘And that means …?’

‘I don’t think it’s supposed to mean anything. I think it’s just supposed to be .’

‘Be what?’

‘Pro-active, I think. It’s a word he’s using a lot.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well … in favour of activity, I suppose.’

‘Really? Dangerous. In my experience, inactivity sees you through.’

Altogether, it was not a happy university at the moment, and mealtimes were the worst. Ponder tended to be isolated at one end of the High Table as the unwilling architect of this sudden tendency on the part of the Archchancellor to try to Weld Them Into A Lean Mean Team. The wizards had no intention of being lean, but were getting as mean as anything.

On top of that, Ridcully’s sudden interest in taking an interest meant that Ponder had to explain something about his own current project, and one aspect of Ridcully that had not changed was his horrible habit of, Ponder suspected, deliberately misunderstanding things.

Ponder had long been struck by the fact that the Librarian, an ape — at least generally an ape, although this evening he seemed to have settled on being a small table set with a red-furred tea service — was, well, so human shaped. In fact, so many things were pretty much the same shape. Nearly everything you met was really a sort of complicated tube with two eyes and four arms or legs or wings. Oh, or they were fish. Or insects. All right, spiders as well. And a few odd things like starfish and whelks. But still there was a remarkably unimaginative range of designs. Where were the six-armed, six-eyed monkeys pinwheeling through the jungle canopy?

Oh, yes, octopussies too, but that was the point, they were really only a kind of underwater spider …

Ponder had poked around among the University’s more or less abandoned Museum of Quite Unusual Things, and noticed something rather odd. Whoever had designed the skeletons of creatures had even less imagination than whoever had done the outsides. At least the outside-designer had tried a few novelties in the spots, wool and stripes department, but the bone-builder had generally just put a skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further along, stuck on some arms and legs and had the rest of the day off. Some ribcages were longer, some legs were shorter, some hands became wings, but they all seemed to be based on one design, one size stretched or shrunk to fit all.

Not to his very great surprise, Ponder seemed to be the only one around who found this at all interesting. He’d point out to people that fish were amazingly fish-shaped, and they’d look at him as if he’d gone mad.

Palaeontology and archaeology and other skulduggery were not subjects that interested wizards. Things are buried for a reason, they considered. There’s no point in wondering what it was. Don’t go digging things up in case they won’t let you bury them again.

The most coherent theory was one he recalled from his nurse when he was small. Monkeys, she’d averred, were bad little boys who hadn’t come in when called, and seals were bad little boys who’d lazed around on the beach instead of attending to their lessons. She hadn’t said that birds were bad little boys who’d gone too close to the cliff edge, and in any case jellyfish would be more likely, but Ponder couldn’t help thinking that, harmlessly insane though the woman had been, she might have had just the glimmerings of a point …

He was spending most nights now watching Hex trawl the invisible writings for any hints. In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers.

Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, when Hex appeared to be sulking, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything.

And it might have surprised Ponder to learn that the senior wizards had come to approve of Hex, despite all the comments on the lines of ‘In my day we used to do our own thinking.’ Wizardry was traditionally competitive, and, while UU was currently going through an extended period of peace and quiet, with none of the informal murders that had once made it such a terminally exciting place, a senior wizard always distrusted a young man who was going places since traditionally his route might be via your jugular.

Therefore there’s something comforting in knowing that some of the best brains in the University, who a generation ago would be coming up with some really exciting plans involving trick floorboards and exploding wallpaper, were spending all night in the High Energy Magic Building, trying to teach Hex to sing ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’, {8} 8 ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’ is one of Groucho Marx’ most famous songs, originally performed in the 1939 Marx Brothers movie At the Circus . Kermit the Frog did a great cover of ‘Lydia’ on the Connie Stevens episode of The Muppet Show . Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia? Lydia The Tattooed Lady. She has eyes that folks adore so, And a torso even more so. Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia, Oh Lydia The Queen of Tattoo. On her back is the Battle of Waterloo. Beside it, The Wreck of the Hesperus, too. And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue, You can learn a lot from Lydia! Teaching artifical intelligences to sing songs, recite poetry, or tell jokes is a well-established science fiction theme, with probably the most famous example being HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey reverting back to his ‘childhood’ and singing ‘Daisy’ for Bowman. Possibly, that scene might not have been quite as poignant had HAL sung ‘Lydia’, instead… exulting at getting a machine to do after six hours’ work something that any human off the street would do for tuppence, then sending out for banana-and-sushi pizza and falling asleep at the keyboard. Their seniors called it technomancy, and slept a little easier in their beds in the knowledge that Ponder and his students weren’t sleeping in theirs .

Ponder must have nodded off, because he was awakened just before 2 a.m. by a scream and realized he was face down in half of his supper. He pulled a piece of banana-flavoured mackerel off his cheek, left Hex quietly clicking through its routine and followed the noises.

The commotion led him to the hall in front of the big doors leading to the Library. The Bursar was lying on the floor, being fanned with the Senior Wrangler’s hat.