Making Money (27 page)

“You’d be amazed.”

“Oh? Why?”

“That’s the wrong kind of question.”

“You do know something quite important about the Cabinet,” said Adora Belle, apparently waking up. “You know it wasn’t built for or by a girl between the ages of four and, oh, eleven years old.”

“How do we know that?”

“No pink. Trust me. No girl in that age group would leave out pink.”

“Are you sure? That’s wonderful!” said Ponder, making a note on his clipboard. “That’s certainly worth knowing. Let’s get the Foot, then, shall we?”

The broomstick-riding wizards had touched down now. Ponder cleared his throat and picked up the megaphone.
“ALL DOWN? WONDERFUL. HEX—BE SO GOOD AS TO FOLD, PLEASE!”

There was silence for a while, and then a distant clattering noise began to grow, up near the ceiling. It sounded like gods shuffling wooden playing cards that happened to be a mile high.

“Hex is our thinking engine,” said Ponder. “We’d hardly be able to explore the box at all without him.”

The clattering was becoming louder and faster.

“You might find your ears aching,” said Ponder, raising his voice. “Hex tries to control the speed, but it takes finite time for the ventilators to get air back into the room. THE VOLUME OF THE CABINET CHANGES VERY FAST, YOU SEE!”

This was shouted against the thunder of collapsing drawers. They slammed in on themselves far too fast for the human eye to follow as the edifice shrunk and folded and slid and rattled down into house size, shed size, and, finally, in the middle of the huge space, unless it was some kind of time, stood a small polished cabinet, about a foot and a half on a side, standing on four beautifully carved legs.

The Cabinet’s doors clicked shut.

“Slowly unfold to specimen 1,109,” said Ponder, in the ringing silence.

The doors opened. A deep drawer slid out.

It went on sliding.

“Just follow me,” said Ponder, strolling toward the Cabinet. “It’s fairly safe.”

“Er, a drawer about a hundred yards long has just slid out of a box about fourteen inches square,” said Moist, in case he was the only one to notice.

“Yes. That’s what happens,” said Ponder, as the drawer slid back about halfway. Its side, Moist saw, was a line of drawers. So drawers opened…out of drawers. Of course, Moist thought, in eleven-dimensional space that was the wrong thing to think.

“It’s a sliding puzzle,” said Adora Belle, “but with lots more directions to slide.”

“That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way,” said Ponder.

Adora Belle’s eyes narrowed. She had not had a cigarette in ten minutes.

The long drawer extruded another drawer at right angles. All along the sides of it were, yes, yet more drawers. One of these extended slowly.

Moist took a risk and tapped on what appeared to be perfectly ordinary wood. It made a perfectly ordinary noise.

“Should I worry that I just saw a drawer slide through another drawer?” he said.

“No,” said Ponder. “The Cabinet is trying to make four-dimensional sense of something that is happening in eleven or, possibly, ten.”

“Trying? Do you mean it’s alive?”

“Aha! The right type of question!”

“I bet you don’t know the answer, though.”

“You are correct. But you must admit it’s an interesting question not to know the answer to. And, yes, here we have the Foot. Hold and collapse please, Hex.”

The drawers collapsed back into themselves in a series of crashes, much shorter and less dramatic than before, leaving the Cabinet looking demure and antique and slightly bow-legged. It had little claws as feet, a cabinet-maker’s affectation that always annoyed Moist in a low-grade way. Did they think the things moved around in the night? Or maybe the Cabinet really did.

And the Cabinet’s doors were open. Nestling inside, and only just fitting, was a golem’s foot, or at least most of one.

Once, golems were delicate and beautiful. Once, the very best sculptors probably made them to rival the most beautiful of statues, but long since then the fumble-fingered many who could barely make a snake out of clay found that bashing the stuff into the shape of a big, hulking gingerbread man worked just as well.

This foot was one of the early kind. It was made of a clay like white china, with patterns of tiny raised markings in yellow, black, and red. A little brass plate in front of it was engraved, in Überwaldean:
FOOT OF UMNIAN GOLEM
,
MIDDLE PERIOD
.

“Well, whoever made the Cabinet comes from—”

“Anyone looking at the labels sees it in their native tongue,” said Ponder wearily. “The markings apparently indicate that it did indeed come from the city of Um, according to the late Professor Flead.”

“Um?” said Moist. “Um what? They weren’t sure what to call the place?”

“Just Um,” said Ponder. “Very ancient. About sixty thousand years, I believe. Back in the Clay Age.”

“The first golem-makers,” said Adora Belle. She unslung the bag and started to rummage in the straw.

Moist tapped the foot. It seemed eggshell-thin.

“It’s some sort of ceramic,” said Ponder. “No one knows how they made it. The Umnians even baked boats out of the stuff.”

“Did they work?”

“Up to a point,” said Ponder. “Anyway, the city was totally destroyed in the first war with the ice giants. There’s nothing there now. We think that the foot was put in the Cabinet a long time ago.”

“Or will be dug up some time in the future, perhaps?” said Moist.

“That could very well be the case,” said Ponder gravely.

“In which case, won’t that be a bit of a problem? I mean, can it be in the ground and in the cabinet at the same time?”

“That, Mr. Lipwig, is—”

“The wrong type of question?”

“Yes. The box exists in ten or possibly eleven dimensions. Practically anything may be possible.”

“Why only eleven dimensions?”

“We don’t know,” said Ponder. “It might be simply that more would be silly.”

“Can you take the foot out, please?” said Adora Belle, who was now brushing wisps of straw off a long package.

Ponder nodded, lifted out the relic with great care, and placed it gently on the bench behind them.

“What would have happened if you had drop—” Moist began.

“Wrong type of question, Mr. Lipwig!”

Adora Belle put the bundle down beside the Foot and unwrapped it with care.

It contained a part of a golem’s arm, two feet long.

“I knew it! The markings are the same!” she said. “And there’s a lot more on my piece. Can you translate it?”

“Me? No,” said Ponder. “The arts are not my field,” he added, in a way that suggested his was a pretty superior field with much better flowers in it. “You need Professor Flead.”

“You mean the one who’s dead?” said Moist.

“He’s dead at the moment, but I’m sure that in the interests of discretion my colleague Dr. Hicks can arrange for the professor to talk to you after lunch.”

“When he’ll be less dead?” said Moist.

“When Dr. Hicks has had lunch,” said Ponder patiently. “Professor Flead will be pleased to receive visitors, er, especially Miss Dearheart. He is the world expert on Umnian. Every word has hundreds of meanings, I understand.”

“Can I take the Foot?” said Adora Belle.

“No,” said Ponder. “It’s ours.”

“That was the wrong type of answer,” said Adora Belle, picking up the Foot. “On behalf of the Golem Trust, I am acquiring this golem. If you can prove ownership, we will pay you a fair price for it.”

“Would that it were that simple,” said Ponder, politely taking it from her, “but, you see, if a Curiosity is taken away from the Cabinet Room for more than fourteen hours and fourteen seconds, the Cabinet stops working. Last time it took us three months to restart it. But you can drop in at any time to, er, check that we’re not mistreating it.”

Moist laid a hand on Adora Belle’s arm to forestall an Incident.

“She’s very passionate about golems,” he said. “The Trust digs them up all the time.”

“That’s very commendable,” said Stibbons. “I’ll talk to Dr. Hicks. He’s the head of the Department of Postmortem Communications.”

“Postmortem Com…” Moist began. “Isn’t that the same as necroman—”

“I said the Department of Postmortem Communications,” said Ponder very firmly. “I suggest you come back at three o’clock.”

“D
ID ANYTHING ABOUT
that conversation strike you as normal?” said Moist, as they stepped out into the sunlight.

“Actually, I thought it went very well,” said Adora Belle.

“This wasn’t how I imagined your homecoming,” said Moist.

“Why the rush? Is there some problem?”

“Look, we found four golems at the dig,” said Adora Belle.

“That’s…good, yes?” said Moist.

“Yes! And you know how deep they were?”

“I couldn’t guess.”

“Guess!”

“I don’t know!” said Moist, bewildered at suddenly having to play “What’s My Depth?” “Two hundred feet down? That’s more than—”

“Half a mile underground.”

“Impossible! That’s deeper than coal!”

“Keep it down, will you? Look, is there somewhere we can go and talk?”

“How about—the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork? There’s a private dining room.”

“And they’ll let us eat there, will they?”

“Oh yes. The chairman is a great friend of mine,” said Moist.

“He is, is he?”

“He certainly is,” said Moist. “Why, only this morning he licked my face!”

Adora Belle stopped and turned to stare at him. “Really?” she said. “Then it’s just as well I got back when I did.”

The joy of collops
Mr. Bent goes out to lunch
The Dark Fine Arts
Amateur thespians, avoidance of embarrassment by
The Pen of Doom!
Professor Flead gets cozy
Lust comes in many varieties
A hero of banking!
Cribbins’s cup runneth over

T
HE SUN SHONE
through the window of the bank’s dining room onto a scene of perfect pleasure.

“You should sell tickets,” said Adora Belle dreamily, with her chin in her hands. “People who are depressed would come here and go away cured.”

“It’s certainly hard to watch it happening and be sad,” said Moist.

“It’s the enthusiastic way he tries to turn his mouth inside out,” said Adora Belle.

There was a gulp from Mr.

Fusspot as the last of the sticky toffee pudding went down. He then turned the bowl over hopefully, in case there was any more. There never had been, but Mr. Fusspot was not a dog to bow down to the laws of causality.

“So…” said Adora Belle, “a mad old lady—all right, a very astute mad old lady—died and gave you her dog, which sort of wears this bank on its collar, and you’ve told everyone that gold is worth less than potatoes, and you broke a dastardly criminal out of your actual death row, he’s in the cellar designing ‘bank notes’ for you, you’ve upset the nastiest family in the city, people are queuing to join the bank because you make them laugh…what have I missed?”

“I think my secretary is, uh, getting sweet on me. Well, I say secretary, she’s sort of assumed that she is.”

Some fiancées would have burst into tears or shouted. Adora Belle burst out laughing.

“And she’s a golem,” said Moist.

The laughter stopped. “That’s not possible. They don’t work that way. Anyway, why should a golem think he’s female? It’s never happened before.”

“I bet there haven’t been many emancipated golems before. Besides, why should he think he’s male? And she bats her eyelashes at me…well, that’s what she thinks she’s doing, I think. The counter girls are behind this. Look I’m serious. Trouble is, so is she.”

“I’ll have a word with him…or, as you say, her.”

“Good. The other thing is, there’s this man—”

Aimsbury poked his head around the door. He was in love.

“Would you like some more minced collops, miss?” he said, waggling his eyebrows as if to indicate that the joys of minced collops were a secret known only to a few.
*

“You’ve still got more?” said Adora Belle, looking down at her plate. Not even Mr. Fusspot could have cleaned it better, and she’d already cleaned it twice.

“Do you know what they are?” said Moist, who’d settled again for an omelet made by Peggy.

“Do you?”

“No!”

“Nor do I. But my granny used to make them and they are one of my happiest childhood memories, thank you very much. Don’t spoil it.” Adora Belle beamed at the delighted chef. “Yes please, Aimsbury, just a little more then. And could I just say that the flavor could really be brought out by just a touch of gar—”

“Y
OU ARE NOT
eating, Mr. Bent,” said Cosmo. “Perhaps a little of this pheasant?”

The chief cashier looked around nervously, uneasy in this grand house full of art and servants. “I…I want to make it clear that my loyalty to the bank is—”

“—beyond question, Mr. Bent. Of course.” Cosmo pushed a silver tray toward him. “Do eat something. Now you have come all this way.”

“But you are hardly eating at all, Mr. Cosmo. Just bread and water!”

“I find it helps me think. Now, what was it you wanted to—”

“They all like him, Mr. Cosmo! He just talks to people and they like him! And he is really set on dismissing gold. Think of it, sir! Where would we find true worth? He says it’s all about the city but that puts us at the mercy of politicians! It’s trickery again!”

“A little brandy would do you good, I think,” said Cosmo. “And what you say is solid-gold truth, but where is our way forward?”

Bent hesitated. He did not like the Lavish family. They crawled over the bank like ivy, but at least they didn’t try to change things and at least they believed in gold. And they weren’t silly.

Mavolio Bent had a definition of “silly” that most people would have considered a touch on the broad side. Laughter was silly. Theatricals, poetry, and music were silly. Clothes that weren’t gray, black, or at least of undyed cloth were silly. Pictures of things that weren’t real were silly (pictures of things that were real were unnecessary). The ground state of being was silliness, which had to be overcome with every mortal fiber.

Missionaries from the stricter religions would have found in Mavolio Bent an ideal convert, except that religion was extremely silly.

Numbers were not silly. Numbers held everything together. And gold was not silly. The Lavishes believed in counting and in gold. Mr. Lipwig treated numbers as if they were something to play with, and he said gold was just lead on holiday! That was more than silly, it was inappropriate behavior, a scourge that he had torn from his breast after years of struggle.