Moving Pictures (16 page)

They sat down in the shade behind the tent.

“I just want you to know,” said Ginger coldly, “that I have never attempted to look languorous in my life.”

“Could be worth a try,” said Victor, absently.

“What?”

“Sorry. Look, something made us act like that. I don’t know how to use a sword. I’ve always just waved it around. What did you feel like?”

“You know how you feel when you hear someone say something and you realize you’ve been daydreaming?”

“It was like your own life fading away and something else filling up the space.”

They considered this in silence.

“Do you think it’s something to do with Holy Wood?” she said.

Victor nodded. Then he threw himself sideways and landed on Gaspode, who had been watching them intently.

“Yelp,” said Gaspode.

“Now
listen
,” Victor hissed into his ear, “No more of these hints. What is it that you noticed about us? Otherwise it’s Detritus for you. With mustard.”

The dog squirmed in his grip.

“Or we could make you wear a muzzle,” said Ginger.

“I ain’t dangerous!” wailed Gaspode, scrabbling with his paws in the sand.

“A talking dog sounds pretty dangerous to me,” said Victor.

“Dreadfully,” said Ginger. “You never know what it might say.”

“See? See?” said Gaspode mournfully. “I knew it’d be nothing but trouble, showin’ I can talk. It shouldn’t happen to a dog.”

“But it’s going to,”
said Victor.

“Oh, all right. All right. For what good it’ll do,” muttered Gaspode.

Victor relaxed. The dog sat up and shook sand off himself.

“You won’t understand it, anyway,” he grumbled. “Another dog would understand, but you won’t. It’s down to species experience, see. Like kissing.
You
know what it’s like, but I don’t. It’s not a canine experience.” He noticed the warning look in Victor’s eyes, and plunged on, “It’s the way you look as if you belong here.” He watched them for a moment. “See? See?” he said. “I
tole
you you wouldn’t understand. It’s—it’s
territory
, see? You got all the signs of bein’ right where you should be. Nearly everyone else here is a stranger, but you aren’t. Er. Like, you mus’ have noticed where some dogs bark at you when you’re new to a place? It’s not jus’ smell, we got this amazin’ sense of displacement. Like, some humans get uncomfortable when they see a picture hung crooked? It’s like that, only worse. It’s kind of like the only place you ought to be now is
here
.” He looked at them again, and then industriously scratched an ear.

“What the hell,” he said. “The trouble is, I can explain it in Dog but you only listen in Human.”

“It sounds a bit mystical to me,” said Ginger.

“You said something about my eyes,” said Victor.

“Yeah, well. Have you looked at your own eyes?” Gaspode nodded at Ginger. “You too, miss.”

“Don’t be daft,” said Victor. “How can we look at our own eyes?”

Gaspode shrugged. “You could look at each other’s,” he suggested.

They automatically turned to face each other.

There was a long drawn-out moment. Gaspode employed it to urinate noisily against a tent peg.

Eventually Victor said, “Wow.”

Ginger said, “Mine, too?”

“Yes. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“You should know.”

“There you are, then,” said Gaspode. “And you look at Dibbler next time you see him. Really
look
, I mean.”

Victor rubbed his eyes, which were beginning to water. “It’s as though Holy Wood has called us here, is doing something to us and has, has—”

“—
branded
us,” said Ginger bitterly. “That’s what it’s done.”

“It, er, it does look quite attractive, actually,” said Victor gallantly. “Gives them a sort of sparkle.”

A shadow fell across the sand.

“Ah, there you are,” said Dibbler. He put his arms around their shoulders as they stood up, and gave them a sort of hug. “You young people, always going off alone together,” he said archly. “Great business. Great business. Very romantic. But we’ve got a click to make, and I’ve got lets of people standing around waiting for you, so let’s do it.”

“See what I mean?” muttered Gaspode, very quietly.

When you knew what you were looking for, you couldn’t miss it.

In the center of both of Dibbler’s eyes was a tiny golden star.

In the heartlands of the great dark continent of Klatch the air was heavy and pregnant with the promise of the coming monsoon.

Bullfrogs croaked in the rushes
¹⁴
by the slow brown river. Crocodiles dozed on the mudflats.

Nature was holding its breath.

A cooing broke out in the pigeon loft of Azhural N’choate, stock dealer. He stopped dozing on the veranda, and went over to see what had caused the excitement.

In the vast pens behind the shack a few threadbare bewilderbeests, marked down for a quick sale, yawning and cudding in the heat, looked up in alarm as N’choate leapt the veranda steps in one bound and tore toward them.

He rounded the zebra pens and homed in on his assistant M’Bu, who was peacefully mucking out the ostriches.

“How many—” he stopped, and began to wheeze.

M’Bu, who was twelve years old, dropped his shovel and patted him heavily on the back.

“How many—” he tried again.

“You been overdoing it again, boss?” said M’Bu in a concerned voice.

“How many elephants we got?”

“I just done them,” said M’Bu. “We got three.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, boss,” said M’Bu, evenly. “It’s
easy
to be sure, with elephants.”

Azhural crouched in the red dust and hurriedly began to scrawl figures with a stick.

“Old Muluccai’s bound to have half a dozen,” he muttered. “And Tazikel’s usually got twenty or so, and then the people on the delta generally have—”

“Someone want elephants, boss?”

“—got fifteen head, he was telling me, plus also there’s a load at the logging camp probably going cheap, call it two dozen—”

“Someone want a
lot
of elephants, boss?”

“—was saying there’s a herd over T’etse way, shouldn’t be a problem, then there’s all the valleys over toward—”

M’Bu leaned on the fence and waited.

“Maybe two hundred, give or take ten,” said Azhural, throwing down the stick. “Nowhere near enough.”

“You can’t give or take ten elephants, boss,” said M’Bu firmly. He knew that counting elephants was a precision job. A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants. Either you had one, or you didn’t.

“Our agent in Klatch has an order for,” Azhural swallowed, “a thousand elephants. A thousand! Immediately! Cash on delivery!”

Azhural let the paper drop to the ground. “To a place called Ankh-Morpork,” he said despondently. He sighed. “It would have been nice,” he said.

M’Bu scratched his head and stared at the hammerhead clouds massing over Mt F’twangi. Soon the dry veldt would boom to the thunder of the rains.

Then he reached down and picked up the stick.

“What’re you doing?” said Azhural.

“Drawing a map, boss,” said M’Bu.

Azhural shook his head. “Not worth it, boy. Three thousand miles to Ankh, I reckon. I let myself get carried away. Too many miles, not enough elephants.”

“We could go across the plains, boss,” said M’Bu. “Lot of elephants on the plains. Send messengers ahead. We could pick up plenty more elephants on the way, no problem. That whole plain just about covered in damn elephants.”

“No, we’d have to go around on the coast,” said the dealer, drawing a long curving line in the sand. “The reason being, there’s the jungle just
here
,” he tapped on the parched ground, “and
here
,” he tapped again, slightly concussing an emerging locust that had optimistically mistaken the first tap for the onset of the rains. “No roads in the jungle.”

M’Bu took the stick and drew a straight line through the jungle.

“Where a thousand elephants want to go, boss, they don’t need no roads.”

Azhural considered this. Then he took the stick and drew a jagged line by the jungle.

“But here’s the Mountains of the Sun,” he said. “Very high. Lots of deep ravines. And no bridges.”

M’Bu took the stick, indicated the jungle, and grinned.

“I know where there’s a lot of prime timber just been uprooted, boss,” he said.

“Yeah? OK, boy, but we’ve still got to get it into the mountains.”

“It just so happen that a t’ousand real strong elephants’ll be goin’ that way, boss.”

M’Bu grinned again. His tribe went in for sharpening their teeth to points.
¹⁵
He handed back the stick.

Azhural’s mouth opened slowly.

“By the seven moons of Nasreem,” he breathed. “We could do it, you know. It’s only, oh, thirteen or fourteen hundred miles that way. Maybe less, even. Yeah. We could really do it.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Y’know, I’ve always wanted to do something big with my life. Something
real
,” said Azhural. “I mean, an ostrich here, a giraffe there…it’s not the sort of thing you get remembered for…” He stared at the purple-gray horizon.

“We
could
do it, couldn’t we?” he said.

“Sure, boss.”

“Right over the mountains!”

“Sure, boss.”

If you looked really hard, you could just see that the purple-gray was topped with white.

“They’re pretty high mountains,” said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.

“Slope go up, slope go down,” said M’Bu gnomically.

“That’s true,” said Azhural. “Like, on
average
, it’s flat all the way.”

He gazed at the mountains again.

“A thousand elephants,” he muttered. “D’you know, boy, when they built the Tomb of King Leonid of Ephebe they used a hundred elephants to cart the stone? And two hundred elephants, history tells us, were employed in the building of the palace of the Rhoxie in Klatch city.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“A thousand elephants,” Azhural repeated. “A thousand elephants. I wonder what they want them for?”

The rest of the day passed in a trance for Victor.

There was more galloping and fighting, and more rearranging of time. Victor still found that hard to understand. Apparently the film could be cut up and then stuck together again later, so that things happened in the right order. And some things didn’t have to happen at all. He saw the artist draw one card which said “In thee Kinges’ Palace, One Houre Latre.”

One hour of Time had been vanished, just like that. Of course, he knew that it hadn’t really been surgically removed from his life. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time in books. And on the stage, too. He’d seen a group of strolling players once, and the performance had leapt magically from “A Battlefield in Tsort” to “The Ephebian Fortresse, That Nighte” with no more than a brief descent of the sackcloth curtain and a lot of muffled bumping and cursing as the scenery was changed.

But this was different. Ten minutes after doing a scene, you’d do another scene that was taking place the day before, somewhere else, because Dibbler had rented the tents for both scenes and didn’t want to have to pay anymore rent than necessary. You just had to try and forget about everything but Now, and that was hard when you were also waiting every moment for that fading sensation…

It didn’t come. Just after another half-hearted fight scene Dibbler announced that it was all finished.

“Aren’t we going to do the ending?” said Ginger.

“You did that this morning,” said Soll.

“Oh.”

There was a chattering noise as the demons were let out of their box and sat swinging their little legs on the edge of the lid and passing a tiny cigarette from hand to hand. The extras queued up for their wages. The camel kicked the Vice-President in Charge of Camels. The handlemen wound the great reels of film out of the boxes and went away to whatever arcane cutting and gluing the handlemen got up to in the hours of darkness. Mrs. Cosmopilite, Vice-President in Charge of Wardrobe, gathered up the costumes and toddled off, possibly to put them back on the beds.

A few acres of scrubby backlot stopped being the rolling dunes of the Great Nef and went back to being scrubby backlot again. Victor felt that much the same thing was happening to him.

In ones and twos, the makers of moving-picture magic departed, laughing and joking and arranging to meet at Borgle’s later on.

Ginger and Victor were left alone in a widening circle of emptiness.

“I felt like this the first time the circus went away,” said Ginger.

“Mr. Dibbler said we were going to do another one tomorrow,” said Victor. “I’m sure he just makes them up as he goes along. Still, we got ten dollars each. Minus what we owe Gaspode,” he added conscientiously. He grinned foolishly at her. “Cheer up,” he said. “You’re doing what you’ve always wanted to do.”

“Don’t be stupid. I didn’t even
know
about moving pictures a couple of months ago. There weren’t any.”

They strolled aimlessly toward the town.

“What
did
you want to be?” he ventured.

She shrugged. “I didn’t know. I just knew I didn’t want to be a milkmaid.”

There had been milkmaids at home. Victor tried to recollect anything about them. “It always looked quite an interesting job to me, milkmaiding,” he said vaguely. “Buttercups, you know. And fresh air.”

“It’s cold and wet and just as you’ve finished the bloody cow kicks the bucket over. Don’t tell me about milking. Or being a shepherdess. Or a goosegirl. I really hated our farm.”

“Oh.”

“And they expected me to marry my cousin when I was fifteen.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Oh, yes. Everyone marries their cousins where I come from.”

“Why?” said Victor.

“I suppose it saves having to worry about what to do on Saturday nights.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t
you
want to be anything?” said Ginger, putting a whole sentence-worth of disdain in a mere three letters.