Going Postal (7 page)

So he’d taken to renting out the old pigeon loft. Where was the harm in that? All the pigeons had joined their feral brethren years ago, and a decent shed was not to be sneezed at in this city, even if it did whiff a bit. There was an outside fire escape and everything. It was a little palace, compared to most lodgings.

Besides, these lads didn’t mind the smell, they said. They were pigeon-fanciers. Groat wasn’t sure what that entailed, except that they had to use a little clacks tower to fancy them properly. But they paid up, that was the important thing.

He skirted the big rainwater tank for the defunct elevator and sidled around the rooftops to the shed, where he knocked politely.

“It’s me, lads. Just come about the rent,” he said.

The door was opened and he heard a snatch of conversation: “—the linkages won’t stand it for more than thirty seconds—”

“Oh, Mr. Groat, come on in,” said the man who opened the door. This was Mr. Carlton, the one with the beard a dwarf would be proud of—no,
two
dwarfs would be proud of. He seemed more sensible than the other two, although this was not hard.

Groat removed his hat.

“Come about the rent, sir,” he repeated, peering around the man. “Got a bit o’ news, too. Just thought I’d better mention, lads, we’ve got a new postmaster,” said Groat. “If you could be a bit careful for a while? A nod’s as good as a wink, eh?”

“How long’s this one going to last, then?” said a man who was sitting on the floor, working on a big metal drum full of what, to Mr. Groat, appeared to be very complicated clockwork. “You’ll push him off the roof by Saturday, right?”

“Now, now, Mr. Winton, there’s no call to make fun of me like that,” said Groat nervously. “Once he’s been here a few weeks and got settled in, I’ll kind of…
hint
that you’re here, all right? Pigeons getting on okay, are they?” He peered around the loft. Only one pigeon was visible, hunched up high in a corner.

“They’re out for exercise right now,” said Winton.

“Ah, right, that’d be it, then,” said Groat.

“Anyway, we’re a bit more interested in woodpeckers at the moment,” said Winton, pulling a bent metal bar out of the drum. “See, Alex? I told you, it’s bent. And two gears are stripped bare…”

“Woodpeckers?” said Groat.

There was a certain lowering of the temperature, as if he’d said the wrong thing.

“That’s right, woodpeckers,” said a third voice.

“Woodpeckers, Mr. Emery?” The third pigeon-fancier made Groat nervous. It was the way his eyes were always on the move, like he was trying to see everything all at once. And he was always holding a tube with smoke coming out of it, or another piece of machinery. They all seemed very interested in tubes and cogwheels, if it came to that. Oddly enough, Groat had never seen them holding a pigeon. He didn’t know how pigeons were fancied, but he’d assumed that it had to be close up.

“Yes, woodpeckers,” said the man, while the tube in his hand changed color from red to blue. “Because”—and here he appeared to stop and think for a moment—“we’re seeing if they can be taught to…oh, yes, tap out the message when they get there, see? Much better than messenger pigeons.”

“Why?” said Groat.

Mr. Emery stared at the whole world for a moment. “Because…they can deliver messages in the dark?” he said.

“Well done,” murmured the man dismantling the drum.

“Ah, could be a lifesaver, I can see that,” said Groat. “Can’t see it beating the clacks, though!”

“That’s what we want to find out,” said Winton.

“But we’d be very grateful if you didn’t tell anyone about this,” said Carlton quickly. “Here’s your three dollars, Mr. Groat. We wouldn’t want other people stealing our idea, you see.”

“Lips are sealed, lads,” said Groat. “Don’t you worry about it. You can rely on Groat.”

Carlton was holding the door open.

“We know we can. Good-bye, Mr. Groat.”

Groat heard the door shut behind him as he walked back across the roof. Inside the shed, there seemed to be an argument starting; he heard someone say, “What did you have to go and tell him that for?”

That was a bit hurtful, someone thinking that he couldn’t be trusted. And, as he eased his way down the long ladder, Groat wondered if he ought to have pointed out that woodpeckers wouldn’t fly in the dark. It was amazing that bright lads like them hadn’t spotted this flaw. They were, he thought, a bit gullible.

A
HUNDRED FEET DOWN
and a quarter of a mile away as the woodpecker flies during daylight, Moist followed the path of destiny.

Currently, it was leading him through a neighborhood that was on the downside of whatever curve you hoped you’d bought your property on the upside of. Graffiti and garbage were everywhere here. They were everywhere in the city, if it came to that, but elsewhere the garbage was better quality, and the graffiti was close to being correctly spelled. The whole area was waiting for something to happen, like a really bad fire.

And then he saw it. It was one of those hopeless little shopfronts that house enterprises with a lifetime measured in days, like Giant Clearance Sale!!! of socks with two heels each, tights with three legs, and shirts with one sleeve, four feet long. The window was boarded over, but just visible behind the graffiti above it were the words
THE GOLEM TRUST
.

Moist pushed open the door. Glass crunched under his feet.

A voice said, “Hands where I can see them, mister!”

He raised his hands cautiously, while peering into the gloom. There was definitely a crossbow being wielded by a dim figure. Such light as had managed to get around the boards glinted off the tip of the bolt.

“Oh,” said the voice in the dark, as if mildly annoyed that there was no excuse to shoot anybody. “All right, then. We had visitors last night.”

“The window?” said Moist.

“It happens about once a month. I was just sweeping it up.” There was the scratch of a match, and a lamp was lit. “They don’t generally attack the golems themselves, not now there’s free ones around. But glass doesn’t fight back.”

The lamp was turned up, revealing a tall young woman in a tight, gray woolen dress, with coal-black hair plastered down and forced into a tight bun at the back so that she looked like a peg doll. There was a slight redness to her eyes that suggested she had been crying.

“You’re lucky to have caught me,” she said. “I’d only come in to make sure nothing’s been taken. Are you here to sell or to hire? You can put your hands down now,” she added, placing the crossbow under the counter.

“Sell or hire?” said Moist, lowering his hands with care.

“A golem,” she said in a talking-to-the-hard-of-thinking voice. “We are the Go-lem Trust. We buy or hire go-lems. Do you want to sell a go-lem or hire a go-lem?”

“Nei-ther,” said Moist. “I’ve got a go-lem. I mean, one is working for me.”

“Really? Where?” said the woman. “And we can probably speed up a little, I think.”

“At the Post Office.”

“Oh, Pump 19,” said the woman. “He said it was government service.”

“We call him
Mister
Pump,” said Moist primly.

“Really? And do you get a wonderful, warm, charitable feeling when you do?”

“Pardon? What?” said Moist, bewildered. He wasn’t sure if she was managing the trick of laughing at him behind her frown.

The woman sighed. “Sorry, I’m a bit snappish this morning. A brick landing on your desk does this to you. Let’s just say they don’t see the world in the same way as we do, okay? They’ve got feelings, in their own way, but they’re not like ours. Anyway…how can I help you, Mr….?”

“Von Lipwig,” said Moist, and added, “
Moist
von Lipwig,” to get the worst over with. But the woman didn’t even smile.

“Lipwig, small town in Near Uberwald,” she said, picking up a brick from the broken glass and debris on her desk, regarding it critically, and then turning to the ancient filing cabinet behind her and filing it under B. “Chief export: its famous dogs, of course. Second most important export: its beer, except during the two weeks of Sektoberfest, when it exports…secondhand beer, probably?”

“I don’t know, we left when I was a kid,” said Moist. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a funny name.”

“Try Adora Belle Dearheart sometime,” said the woman.

“Ah. That’s
not
a funny name,” said Moist.

“Quite,” said Adora Belle Dearheart. “I now have no sense of humor whatsoever. Well, now that we’ve been appropriately human toward one another, what exactly
was
it you wanted?”

“Look, Vetinari has sort of lumbered me with Mr.—with Pump 19 as an…an assistant, but I don’t know how to treat”—Moist sought in the woman’s eyes for some clue as to the politically correct term, and plumped for—“him.”

“Huh? Just treat him normally.”

“You mean normally for a human being, or normally for a pottery man filled with fire?”

To Moist’s astonishment, Adora Belle Dearheart took a pack of cigarettes out of a desk drawer and lit one. She mistook his expression and proffered the pack.

“No, thanks,” he said, waving it away. Apart from the occasional old lady with a pipe, he’d never seen a woman smoke before. It was…strangely attractive, especially since, as it turned out, she smoked a cigarette as if she had a grudge against it, sucking the smoke down and blowing it out almost immediately.

“You’re getting hung up about it all, right?” she said. When Ms. Dearheart wasn’t smoking, she held the cigarette at shoulder height, the elbow of her left arm cupped in her right hand. There was a definite feel about Adora Belle Dearheart that a lid was only barely holding down an entire womanful of anger.

“Yes! I mean—” Moist began.

“Hah! It’s just like the Campaign for Equal Heights and all that patronizing stuff they spout about dwarfs and why we shouldn’t use terms like ‘small talk’ and ‘feeling small.’ Golems don’t have any of our baggage about ‘who am I, why am I here,’ okay? Because they
know
. They were made to be tools, to be property, to work. Work is what they do. In a way, it’s what they
are
. End of existential angst.”

Ms. Dearheart inhaled and then blew out the smoke in one nervous movement. “And then stupid people go around calling them ‘persons of clay’ and ‘Mr. Spanner’ and so on, which they find rather strange. They
understand
about free will. They also understand that they don’t have it. Mind you, once a golem
owns
himself, it’s a different matter.”

“Own? How does property own itself?” said Moist. “You said they were—”

“They save up and
buy
themselves, of course! Freehold is the only path to freedom they’ll accept. Actually, what happens is that the free golems support the Trust, the Trust buys golems whenever it can, and the new golems then buy themselves from the Trust at cost. It’s working well. The free golems earn 24-8 and there’s more and more of them. They don’t eat, sleep, wear clothes, or understand the concept of leisure. The occasional tube of ceramic cement doesn’t cost much. They’re buying more golems every month now, and paying my wages and the iniquitous rent the landlord of this dump is charging because he knows he’s renting to golems. They never complain, you know. They pay whatever’s asked. They’re so
patient
it could drive you nuts.”

Tube of ceramic cement
, thought Moist. He tried to fix that thought in case it came in useful, but some mental processes were fully occupied with the growing realization of how well some women could look in a severely plain dress.

“Surely they can’t be damaged, can they?” he managed.

“Certainly they can! A sledgehammer on the right spot would really mess one up. Owned golems will just stand there and take it. But the Trust golems are allowed to defend themselves, and when someone weighing a ton snatches a hammer out of your hand you have to let go
really
quickly.”

“I think Mr. Pump is allowed to hit people,” said Moist.

“Quite possibly. A lot of the frees are against that, but others say a tool can’t be blamed for the use to which it’s put,” said Ms. Dearheart. “They debate it a lot. For days and days.”

No rings on her fingers, Moist noted. What kind of attractive girl works for a bunch of clay men?

“This is all
fascinating
,” he said. “Where can I find out more?”

“We do a pamphlet,” said almost-certainly-Miss Dearheart, pulling open a drawer and flipping a thin booklet onto the desk. “It’s five pence.”

The title on the cover was
Common Clay
.

Moist put down a dollar. “Keep the change,” he said.

“No!” said Miss Dearheart, fumbling for coins in the drawer. “Didn’t you read what it said over the door?”

“Yes. It said ‘SmasH The Barstuds,’” said Moist.

Miss Dearheart put a hand to her forehead wearily. “Oh, yes. The painter hasn’t been yet. But underneath that…look, it’s on the back of the pamphlet…”

, Moist read, or at least looked at.

“It’s one of their own languages,” she said. “It’s all a bit…mystic. Said to be spoken by angels. It translates as ‘By Our Own Hand, Or None.’ They’re fiercely independent. You’ve no idea.”