Going Postal (36 page)
“Will it knock out a tower?” said Moist.
“Should we be telling him about this?” said Sane Alex.
“Have you ever met
anyone
else that Killer had a good word for?” said Undecided Adrian. “In theory, it could knock out
every
tower, Mr. Moist.”
“Are you insane as well as mad?” said Sane Alex. “He’s
government
!”
“Every tower on the Trunk?” said Moist.
“Yep. In one go,” said Mad Al. “It’s pretty crude.”
“
Really every
tower?” said Moist again.
“Maybe not
every
tower, if they catch on,” Mad Al admitted, as if less than wholesale destruction was something to be mildly ashamed of. “But plenty. Even if they cheat and carry it to the next tower on horseback. We call it…
the Woodpecker
.”
“The woodpecker?”
“No, not like that. You need, sort of, more of a pause for effect, like…
the Woodpecker
.”
“
…The Woodpecker
,” said Moist, more slowly.
“You’ve got it. But we can’t get it onto the Trunk. They’re on to us.”
“Supposing
I
could get it onto the Trunk?” said Moist, staring at the lights. The towers themselves were quite invisible now.
“You? What do you know about clacks codes?” said Undecided Adrian.
“I treasure my ignorance,” said Moist. “But I know about people. You think about being cunning with codes. I just think about what people see…”
They listened. They argued. They resorted to mathematics, while words sailed through the night above them.
And Sane Alex said: “All right, all right. Technically it could work, but the Trunk people would have to be stupid to let it happen.”
“But they’ll be thinking about codes,” said Moist. “And I’m good at making people stupid. It’s my job.”
“I thought your job was postmaster,” said Undecided Adrian.
“Oh, yes. Then it’s my vocation.”
The Smoking Gnu looked at one another.
“It’s a totally mad idea,” said Mad Al, grinning.
“I’m glad you like it,” said Moist.
T
HERE ARE TIMES
when you just have to miss a night’s sleep. But Ankh-Morpork never slept; the city never did more than doze, and would wake up around three
A.M.
for a glass of water.
You could buy
anything
in the middle of the night. Timber? No problem. Moist wondered whether there were vampire carpenters, quietly making vampire chairs. Canvas? There was bound to be someone in a city who’d wake up in the wee small hours for a wee and think,
What I could really do with right now is one thousand square yards of medium-grade canvas!
and, down by the docks, there were chandlers open to deal with the rush.
There was a steady drizzle when they left for the tower. Moist drove the cart, with the others sitting on the load behind him and bickering over trigonometry. Moist tried not to listen; he got lost when math started to get silly.
Killing the Grand Trunk…Oh, the towers would be left standing, but it would take months to repair them all. It’d bring the company down. No one would get hurt, the Gnu said. They meant the men in the towers.
The Trunk had become a monster, eating people. Bringing it down was a beguiling idea. The Gnu were full of ideas for what could replace it—faster, cheaper, easier, streamlined, using imps specially bred for the job…
But something irked Moist. Gilt had been right, damn him. If you wanted to get a message five hundred miles very, very fast, the Trunk was the way to do it. If you wanted to wrap it in a ribbon, you needed the Post Office.
He liked the Gnu. They thought in a refreshingly different way; whatever curse hung around the stones of the old tower surely couldn’t affect minds like theirs, because they were inoculated against madness by being a little bit crazy all the time. The clacks signalers, all along the Trunk, were…a different kind of people. They didn’t just
do
their job, they lived it.
But Moist kept thinking of all the
bad
things that could happen without the semaphore. Oh, they used to happen before the semaphore, of course, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.
He’d left them sawing and hammering in the stone tower, and headed back to the city, deep in thought.
In which we learn the theory of baize-space
• Devious Collabone • The Grand Trunk burns
• So sharp you’ll cut yourself • Finding Miss Dearheart
• Igor moveth on • A Theory of Disguise
• “Let this moment never end” • A brush with the Trunk
• The big sail unfurls • The message is received
M
USTRUM RIDCULLY
, Archchancellor of Unseen University, leveled his cue and took careful aim.
The white ball hit a red ball, which rolled gently into a pocket. This was harder than it looked, because more than half of the snooker table served as the Archchancellor’s filing system,
*
and, indeed, to get to the hole the ball had to pass
through
several piles of paperwork, a tankard, a skull with a dribbly candle on it, and a lot of pipe ash. It did so.
“Well done, Mr. Stibbons,” said Ridcully.
“I call it baize-space,” said Ponder Stibbons proudly.
Every organization needs at least one person who knows what’s going on and why it’s happening and who’s doing it, and at UU this role was filled by Stibbons, who often wished it wasn’t. Right now he was present in his position as head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, and his long-term purpose was to see that his department’s budget went through on the nod. To this end, therefore, a bundle of thick pipes led from under the heavy old billiard table, out through a hole in the wall and across the lawn, and into the High Energy Magic building, where—he sighed—this little trick was taking up forty percent of the rune-time of Hex, the university’s thinking engine.
“Good name,” said Ridcully, lining up another shot.
“As in
phase
space?” said Ponder hopefully. “When a ball is just about to encounter an obstacle that is not another ball, you see, Hex moves it into a theoretical parallel dimension where there is unoccupied flat surface, and maintains speed and drag until it can be brought back to this one. It really is a most difficult and intricate piece of unreal-time spell-casting—”
“Yes, yes, very good,” said Ridcully. “Was there something else, Mr. Stibbons?”
Ponder looked at his clipboard. “There’s a polite letter from Lord Vetinari asking on behalf of the city whether the university might consider including in its intake, oh, twenty-five percent of less able students, sir?”
Ridcully potted the black through a heap of university directives.
“Can’t have a bunch of grocers and butchers telling a university how to run itself, Stibbons!” he said firmly, lining up on a red. “Thank them for their interest and tell them we’ll continue to take one hundred percent of complete and utter dullards, as usual. Take ’em in dull, turn ’em out sparklin’, that’s always been the UU way! Anythin’ else?”
“Just this message for the big race tonight, Archchancellor.”
“Oh, yes, that thing. What should I do, Mr. Stibbons? I hear there’s heavy betting on the Post Office.”
“Yes, Archchancellor. People say the gods are on the side of Mr. Lipwig.”
“Are
they
betting?” said Ridcully, watching with satisfaction as the ball rematerialized on the other side of a neglected ham sandwich.
“I don’t think so, sir. He can’t possibly win.”
“Was he the fella who rescued the cat?”
“That was him, sir, yes,” said Ponder.
“Good chap. What do we think of the Grand Trunk? Bunch of bean-crushers, I heard. Been killin’ people on those towers of theirs. Man in the pub told me he heard the ghosts of dead signalers haunt the Trunk. I’ll try for the pink.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that, sir. I think it’s an urban myth,” said Ponder.
“They travel from one end of the Trunk to the other, he said. Not a bad way to spend eternity, mark you. There’s some splendid scenery up in the mountains.”
The Archchancellor paused, and his big face screwed up in thought.
“Haruspex’s Directory of Varying Dimensions,” he said at last.
“Pardon, Archchancellor?”
“That’s the message,” said Ridcully. “No one said it had to be a letter, eh?” He waved a hand over the tip of the cue, which grew a powdering of fresh chalk. “Give them each a copy of the new edition. Send ’em to our man in Genua…what’s his name, thingummy, got a funny name…show him the old Alma Pater is thinkin’ of him.”
“That’s Devious H. Collabone, sir. He’s studying Oyster Communications in a Low Intensity Magical Field for his B. Thau.”
“Good gods,
can
they communicate?” said Ridcully.
“Apparently, Archchancellor, although thus far they’re refusing to talk to him.”
“Why’d we send him all the way out there?”
“Devious Collabone, Archchancellor?” Ponder prompted. “Remember? With the terrible halitosis?”
“Oh, you mean
Dragonbreath
Collabone?” said Ridcully, as realization dawned. “The one who could blow a hole in a silver plate?”
“Yes, Archchancellor,” said Ponder patiently. Mustrum Ridcully always liked to triangulate in on new information from several positions. “You said that out in the swamps no one would notice? If you remember, we allowed him to take a small omniscope.”
“Did we? Far-thinking of us. Call him up right now and tell him what’s going on, will you?”
“Yes, Archchancellor. In fact, I’ll leave it a few hours, because it’s still nighttime in Genua.”
“That’s only their opinion,” said Ridcully, sighting again. “Do it now, man.”
F
IRE FROM THE SKY
…
Everyone knew that the top half of the towers rocked as the messages flew along the Trunk. One day, someone was going to do something about it. And all old signalers knew that if the connecting rod operating the shutters on the down-line was pushed up to open them
on the same blink
as the connecting rod on the up-line was pulled down to close the shutters on the other side of the tower, the tower lurched. It was being pushed from one side and pulled from the other, which would have roughly the same effect as a column of marching soldiers could have on a bridge. That wasn’t too much of a problem, unless it happened again and again so that the rocking would build up to a dangerous level. But how often would that happen?
Every time the Woodpecker arrived at your tower, that was how often. And it was like an illness that could only attack the weak and sick. It wouldn’t have attacked the old Trunk, because the old Trunk was too full of tower captains who’d shut down instantly and strip the offending message out of the drum, secure in the knowledge that their actions would be judged by superiors who knew how a tower worked and would have done the same thing themselves.
It
would
work against the new Trunk, because there weren’t enough of those captains now. You did what you were told or you didn’t get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn’t your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn’t your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared.
That
was how much they didn’t care.
And today you’d been told to shift code as fast as possible, and
you
didn’t want to be the one accused of slowing the system down, so you watched the next tower in line until your eyes watered and you hit keys like a man tap-dancing on hot rocks.
One after another, the towers failed. Some burned when the shutter boxes broke free and smashed on the cabin roofs, spilling blazing oil. There was no hope of fighting fire in a wooden box sixty feet up in the air; you slid down the suicide line and legged it to a safe distance to watch the show.
Fourteen towers were burning before someone took their hands off the keys. And then what? You’d been given orders. There were to be no—repeat, no—messages on the Trunk while this message was being sent. What did you do next?
Moist awoke, the Grand Trunk burning in his head.
The Smoking Gnu wanted to break it down and pick up the pieces, and he could see why. But it wouldn’t work. Somewhere on the line there was going to be one inconvenient engineer who’d risk his job to send a message ahead saying, “It’s a killer, shift it slowly,” and that would be that. Oh, it might take a day or two to get the thing to Genua, but they had weeks to work with. And someone else, too, would be smart enough to compare the message with what had been sent by the first tower. Gilt would wriggle out of it—no, he’d storm out of it. The message had been tampered with, he’d say, and he’d be right. There had to be another solution.
The Gnu were on to something, though. Changing the message was the answer, if only he could do it the right way.
Moist awoke. He was at his desk, and someone had put a pillow under his head.
When was the last time he’d slept in a decent bed? Oh, yes, the night Mr. Pump had caught him. He’d spent a couple of hours in a rented bed that had a mattress that didn’t actually move and wasn’t full of rocks. Bliss.
His immediate past life scampered before his eyes. He groaned.
“Good Morning, Mr. Lipvig,” said Mr. Pump from the corner. “Your Razor Is Sharp, The Kettle Is Hot, And I Am Sure A Cup Of Tea Is On The Way.”
“What time is it?”
“Noon, Mr. Lipvig. You Did Not Get In Until Dawn,” the golem added reproachfully.
Moist groaned again. Six hours to the race. And then so many pigeons would come home to roost it’d be like an eclipse.
“There Is Much Excitement,” said the golem, as Moist shaved. “It Has Been Agreed That The Starting Line Will Be In Sator Square—”
Moist stared at his reflection, barely listening. He always raised the stakes, automatically. Never promise to do the possible. Anyone could do the possible. You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible
was
possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it
had
been impossible.
But he’d gone too far this time. Oh, it’d be no great shame to admit that a coach and horses couldn’t travel at a thousand miles an hour, but Gilt would strut about it and the Post Office would remain just a little, old-fashioned thing, behind the times, small, unable to compete. Gilt would find some way to hold on to the Grand Trunk, cutting even more corners, killing people out of greed—
“Are You All Right, Mr. Lipvig?” said the golem behind him.
Moist stared into his own eyes, and what flickered in the depths.
Oh, boy
.
“You Have Cut Yourself, Mr. Lipvig,” said Mr. Pump. “Mr. Lipvig?”
Shame I missed my throat
, Moist thought. But that was a secondary thought, edging past the big dark one now unfolding in the mirror.
Look into the abyss and you’ll see something growing, reaching toward the light. It whispered: Do this. This will work. Trust me.
Oh, boy. It’s a plan that
will
work
, Moist thought.
It’s simple and deadly, like a razor. But it’d need an unprincipled man to even think about it
.
No problem there, then
.
I’ll kill you, Mr. Gilt. I’ll kill you in our special way, the way of the weasel and cheat and liar. I’ll take away everything
but
your life. I’ll take away your money, your reputation, and your friends. I’ll spin words around you until you’re cocooned in them. I’ll leave you nothing, not even hope…
He carefully finished shaving, and wiped the remnant of the foam off his chin. There was not, in truth, that much blood.
“I think I could do with a hearty breakfast, Mr. Pump,” he said. “And then I have a few things to do. In the meantime, can you please find me a broomstick? A proper birch besom? And then paint some stars on the handle?”
T
HE MAKESHIFT
counters were crowded when Moist came down, but the bustle stopped when he entered the hall. Then a cheer went up. He nodded and waved, and was immediately surrounded by people waving envelopes. He did his best to sign them all.
“A lot o’ extra mail for Genua, sir!” Mr. Groat exulted, pushing his way through the crowd. “Never seen a day like it, never!”
“Jolly good, well done,” Moist murmured.
“And the mail for the gods has gone right up, too!” Groat continued.
“Pleased to hear it. Mr. Groat,” said Moist.
“We’ve got the first Sto Lat stamps, sir!” said Stanley, waving a couple of sheets above his head. “The early sheets are
covered
in flaws, sir!”
“I’m very happy for you,” said Moist. “But I’ve got to go and prepare a few things.”
“Aha, yes!” said Mr. Groat, winking. “‘A few things,’ eh? Just as you say, sir. Stand aside, please, postmaster coming through!”
Groat more or less pushed customers out of the way as Moist, trying to avoid the people who wanted him to kiss babies or were trying to grab a scrap of his suit for luck, made it out into the fresh air.
Then he kept to the back streets, and found a place that did a very reasonable double sausage, egg, bacon, and fried slice, in the hope that food could replace sleep.
It was all getting out of hand. People were putting out bunting and setting up stalls in Sator Square. The huge floating crowd that was the street population of Ankh-Morpork ebbed and flowed around the city, and tonight it would contract to form a mob in the square, and could be sold things.
Finally he plucked up his courage and headed for the Golem Trust. It was closed. A bit more graffiti had been added to the strata that now covered the boarded-up window. It was just above knee-level and said, in crayon,
Golms are Made of poo.
It was good to see the fine old traditions of idiot bigotry being handed down in a no-good-at-all kind of way.
Dolly Sisters
, he thought wildly,
staying with an aunt. Did she ever mention the aunt’s name?