Moving Pictures (5 page)

He’s probably warding off the Evil Eye, Victor thought. He looks like a wizard, with all those symbols on his dress.

“Amazing!” said the man, squinting through his fingers.

“Just turn your head slightly, will you? Great! Pity about the nose, but I expect we can do something about that.”

He stepped forward and tried to put his arm around Victor’s shoulders. “It’s lucky for you,” he said, “that you met me.”

“It is?” said Victor, who had been thinking it was the other way around.

“You’re just the type I’m looking for,” said the man.

“Sorry,” said Victor. “I thought you were being robbed.”

“He was after this,” said the man, patting the package under his arm. It rang like a gong. “Wouldn’t have done him any good, though.”

“Not worth anything?” said Victor.

“Priceless.”

“That’s all right then,” said Victor.

The man gave up trying to reach across both of Victor’s shoulders, which were quite broad, and settled for just one of them.

“But a lot of people would be disappointed,” he said.

“Now, look. You stand well. Good profile. Listen, lad, how would you like to be in moving pictures?”

“Er,” said Victor. “No. I don’t think so.”

The man gaped at him.

“You did hear what I said, didn’t you?” he said. “Moving pictures?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone wants to be in moving pictures!”

“No, thanks,” said Victor, politely. “I’m sure it’s a worthwhile job, but moving pictures doesn’t sound very interesting to me.”

“I’m talking about
moving pictures
!”

“Yes,” said Victor mildly. “I heard you.”

The man shook his head. “Well,” he said, “you’ve made my day. First time in weeks I’ve met someone who isn’t desperate to get into moving pictures. I thought everyone wanted to get into moving pictures. I thought as soon as I saw you: he’ll be expecting a job in moving pictures for this night’s work.”

“Thanks all the same,” said Victor. “But I don’t think I’d take to it.”

“Well, I owe you something.” The little man fumbled in a pocket and produced a card. Victor took it. It read:

Thomas Silverfish

Interesting and Instructive Kinematography

1, Holy Wood

“That’s if ever you change your mind,” he said. “Everyone in Holy Wood knows me.”

Victor stared at the card. “Thank you,” he said vaguely. “Er. Are you a wizard?”

Silverfish glared at him.

“Whatever made you think that?” he snapped.

“You’re wearing a dress with magic symbols—”

“
Magic symbols?
Look closely, boy! These are certainly not the credulous symbols of a ridiculous and outmoded belief system! These are the badges of an enlightened craft whose clear, new dawn is just…er, dawning! Magic symbols!” he finished, in tones of withering scorn. “And it’s a robe, not a dress,” he added.

Victor peered at the collection of stars and crescent moons and things. The badges of an enlightened craft whose new dawn was just dawning looked just like the credulous symbols of a ridiculous and outmoded belief system to him, but this was probably not the time to say so.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Couldn’t see them clearly.”

“I’m an alchemist,” said Silverfish, only slightly mollified.

“Oh, lead into gold, that sort of thing,” said Victor.

“Not lead, lad.
Light
. It doesn’t work with lead.
Light
into gold…”

“Really?” said Victor politely, as Silverfish started to set up a tripod in the middle of the plaza.

A small crowd was collecting. A small crowd collected very easily in Ankh-Morpork. As a city, it had some of the most accomplished spectators in the universe. They’d watch anything, especially if there was any possibility of anyone getting hurt in an amusing way.

“Why don’t you stay for the show?” said Silverfish, and hurried off.

An alchemist. Well, everyone knew that alchemists were a little bit mad, thought Victor. It was perfectly normal.

Who’d want to spend their time moving pictures? Most of them looked all right where they were.

“Sausages inna bun! Get them while they’re hot!” bellowed a voice by his ear. He turned.

“Oh, hallo, Mr. Dibbler,” he said.

“Evening, lad. Want to get a nice hot sausage down you?”

Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat
anything
.

“Special rate for students,” Dibbler whispered conspiratorially. “Fifteen pence, and that’s cutting my own throat.” He flapped the frying pan lid strategically, raising a cloud of steam.

The piquant scent of fried onions did its wicked work.

“Just one, then,” Victor said warily.

Dibbler flicked a sausage out of the pan and snatched it into a bun with the expertise of a frog snapping a mayfly.

“You won’t live to regret it,” he said cheerfully,

Victor nibbled a bit of onion. That was safe enough.

“What’s all this?” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the flapping screen.

“Some kind of entertainment,” said Dibbler. “Hot sausages! They’re lovely!” He lowered his voice again to its normal conspiratorial hiss.

“All the rage in the other cities, I hear,” he added. “Some sort of moving pictures. They’ve been trying to get it right before coming to Ankh-Morpork.”

They watched Silverfish and a couple of associates fumble technically with the box on the tripod. White light suddenly appeared at a circular orifice on the front of it, and illuminated the screen. There was a half-hearted cheer from the crowd.

“Oh,” said Victor. “I
see
. Is that all? It’s just plain old shadow play. That’s all it is. My uncle used to do it to amuse me. You know? You kind of move your hands in front of the light and the shadows make a kind of silhouettey picture.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Dibbler uncertainly. “Like ‘Big Elephant,’ or ‘Bald Eagle.’ My grandad used to do that sort of stuff.”

“Mainly my uncle did ‘Deformed Rabbit,’” said Victor.

“He wasn’t very good at it, you see. It used to get pretty embarrassing. We’d all sit around desperately guessing things like ‘Surprised Hedgehog’ or ‘Rabid Stoat’ and he’d go off to bed in a sulk because we hadn’t guessed he was really doing ‘Lord Henry Skipps and His Men beating the Trolls at the Battle of Pseudopolis.’ I can’t see what’s so special about shadows on a screen.”

“From what I hear it’s not like that,” said Dibbler. “I sold one of the men a Jumbo Sausage Special earlier on, and he said it’s all down to showing pictures very fast. Sticking lots of pictures together and showing them one after another. Very, very fast, he said.”

“Not too fast,” said Victor severely. “You wouldn’t be able to see them go past if they were too fast.”

“He said that’s the whole secret, not seeing ’em go past,” said Dibbler. “You have to see ’em all at once, or something.”

“They’d all be blurred,” said Victor. “Didn’t you ask him about that?”

“Er, no,” said Dibbler. “Point of fact, he had to rush off just then. Said he felt a bit odd.”

Victor looked thoughtfully at the remnant of his sausage in a bun and, as he did so, he was aware of being stared at in his turn.

He looked down. There was a dog sitting by his feet.

It was small, bow-legged and wiry, and basically gray but with patches of brown, white and black in outlying areas, and it was staring.

It was certainly the most penetrating stare Victor had ever seen. It wasn’t menacing or fawning. It was just very slow and very thorough, as though the dog was memorizing details so that it could give a full description to the authorities later on.

When it was sure it had his full attention, it transferred its gaze to the sausage.

Feeling wretched at being so cruel to a poor dumb animal, Victor flicked the sausage downward. The dog caught and swallowed it in one economical movement.

More people were drifting into the plaza now. Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler had wandered off and was doing a busy trade with those late-night revelers who were too drunk to prevent optimism triumphing over experience; anyone who bought a meal at one a.m. after a night’s reveling was probably going to be riotously ill anyway, so they might as well have something to show for it.

Victor was gradually surrounded by a large crowd. It didn’t consist solely of humans. He recognized, a few feet away, the big rangy shape of Detritus, an ancient troll well known to all the students as someone who found employment anywhere people needed to be thrown very hard out of places for money. The troll noticed him, and tried to wink. This involved closing both eyes, because Detritus wasn’t good at complicated things. It was widely believed that, if Detritus could be taught to read and write sufficiently to sit down and do an intelligence test, he’d prove to be slightly less intelligent than the chair.

Silverfish picked up a megaphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you are privileged tonight to witness a turning point in the history of the Century of—” he lowered the megaphone and Victor heard him whisper urgently to one of his assistants, “What century is this? Is it?” and then raised the megaphone again and continued in the original plummily optimistic tones “—Century of the Fruitbat! No less than the birth of Moving Pictures! Pictures that move without magic!”

He waited for the applause. There wasn’t any. The crowd just watched him. You needed to do more than end your sentences with exclamation marks to get a around of applause from an Ankh-Morpork crowd.

Slightly dispirited, he went on, “Seeing is Believing, they say! But, ladies and gentlemen, you will not believe the Evidence of Your Own Eyes! What you are about to witness is a Triumph of Natural Science! A Marvel of the Age! A Discovery of World, nay, dare I say, Universe-Shaking Proportions!—”

“’S got to be better than that bloody sausage, anyway,” said a quiet voice by Victor’s knee.

“—Harnessing Natural Mechanisms to create Illusion! Illusion, Ladies and Gentlemen, without recourse to Magic!—”

Victor let his gaze slide downward. There was nothing down there but the little dog, industriously scratching itself. It looked up slowly, and said “Woof?”

“—Potential for Learning! The Arts! History! I thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!”

There was another hopeful break for applause.

Someone at the front of the crowd said, “That’s right. We ain’t.”

“Yeah,” said the woman next to him. “When’re you goin’ to stop goin’ on like that and get on with the shadow play?”

“That’s right,” snapped a second woman. “Do ‘Deformed Rabbit.’ My kids always love that one.”

Victor looked away for a while, to lull the dog’s suspicions, and then turned and glared hard at it.

It was amiably watching the crowd, and apparently taking no notice of him.

Victor poked an exploratory finger in his ear. It must have been a trick of an echo, or something. It wasn’t that the dog had gone “woof!,” although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe
never
went “woof!,” they had complicated barks like “whuuugh!” and “hwhoouf!” No, it was that it hadn’t in fact
barked
at all. It had
said
“woof.”

He shook his head, and looked back as Silverfish climbed down from the screen and motioned to one of his assistants to start turning a handle at the side of the box. There was a grinding noise that rose to a steady clicking. Vague shadows danced across the screen, and then…

One of the last things Victor remembered was a voice beside his knee saying, “Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said ‘miaow.’”

Holy Wood dreams
…

And now it was now eight hours later.

A horribly overhung Ponder Stibbons looked guiltily at the empty desk beside him. It was unlike Victor to miss exams. He always said he enjoyed the challenge.

“Get ready to turn over your papers,” said the invigilator at the end of the hall. The sixty chests of sixty prospective wizards tightened with dark, unbearable tension. Ponder fumbled anxiously with his lucky pen.

The wizard on the dais turned over the hourglass. “You may begin,” he said.

Several of the more smug students turned over their papers by snapping their fingers. Ponder hated them instantly.

He reached for his lucky inkwell, missed completely in his nervousness, and then knocked it over. A small black flood rolled over his question paper.

Panic and shame washed over him nearly as thoroughly. He mopped the ink up with the hem of his robe, spreading it smoothly over the desk. His lucky dried frog had been washed away.

Hot with embarrassment, dripping black ink, he looked up in supplication at the presiding wizard and then cast his eyes imploringly at the empty desk beside him.

The wizard nodded. Ponder gratefully sidled across the aisle, waited until his heart had stopped thumping and then, very carefully, turned over the paper on the desk.

After ten seconds, and against all reason, he turned it over again just in case there had been a mistake and the rest of the questions had somehow been on the top side after all.

Around him there was the intense silence of fifty-nine minds creaking with sustained effort.

Ponder turned the paper over again.

Perhaps it was some mistake. No…there was the University seal and the signature of the Archchancellor and everything. So perhaps it was some sort of special test. Perhaps they were watching him now to see what he’d do…

He peered around furtively. The other students seemed to be working hard. Perhaps it
was
a mistake after all. Yes. The more he came to think about it, the more logical it seemed. The Archchancellor had probably signed the papers and then, when the clerks had been copying them out, one of them had got as far as the all-important first question and then maybe had been called away or something, and no one had noticed, and it’d got put on Victor’s desk, but now he wasn’t here and Ponder had got it which meant, he decided, in a sudden rush of piety, that the gods must have
wanted
him to get it. After all, it wasn’t his fault if some sort of error gave him a paper like this. It was probably sacrilegious or something to ignore the opportunity.