Jingo - Terry Pratchett [31]
“I’m afraid the automatical tea engine went wrong,” he said. “I shall have to make it by hand.”
“So kind,” said Lord Vetinari.
He sat down amidst the easels and, while Leonard busied himself at the fireplace, leafed through the latest sketches. Leonard sketched as automatically as other people scratched; genius—a certain kind of genius—fell off him like dandruff.
There was a picture of a man drawing, the lines catching the figure so accurately it appeared to stand out of the paper. And around it, because Leonard never wasted white space, were other sketches, scattered aimlessly. A thumb. A bowl of flowers. A device, apparently, for sharpening pencils by water power…
Vetinari found what he was looking for in the bottom left-hand corner, sandwiched between a sketch for a new type of screw and a tool for opening oysters. It, or something very much like it, was always there somewhere.
One of the things that made Leonard such a rare prize, and kept him under such secure lock and key, was that he really didn’t see any difference between the thumb and the roses and the pencil-sharpener and this.
“Ah, the self-portrait,” said Leonard, returning with two cups.
“Yes, indeed,” said Vetinari. “But my eye was drawn to this little sketch here. The war machine…”
“Oh, that? A mere nothing. Have you ever noticed the way in which the dew on roses—”
“This bit here…what is it for?” said Vetinari, pointing persistently.
“Oh, that? That’s just the throwing arm for the balls of molten sulfur,” said Leonard, picking up a plate of small cakes. “I calculate that one should get a range of almost half a mile, if one detaches the endless belt from the driving wheels and uses the oxen to wind the windlass.”
“Really?” said Vetinari, taking in the carefully numbered parts. “And it could be built?”
“What? Oh, yes. Macaroon? In theory.”
“In theory?”
“No one would ever actually do it. Raining unquenchable fire down upon fellow humans? Hah!” Leonard sprayed macaroon crumbs. “You’d never find an artisan to build it, or a soldier who would pull the lever…That’s part 3(b) on the plan, just here, look…”
“Ah, yes,” said Vetinari. “Anyway,” he added, “I imagine these huge power arms here couldn’t possibly be operated without them breaking…”
“Seasoned ash and yew, laminated and held together by special steel bolts,” said Leonard promptly. “I made a few calculations, just there below the sketch of light on a raindrop. As an intellectual exercise, obviously.”
Vetinari ran his eye along several lines of Leonard’s spidery mirror-writing.
“Oh, yes,” he said glumly. He put the paper aside.
“Have I told you that the Klatchian situation is intensely political? Prince Cadram is trying to do a great deal very fast. He needs to consolidate his position. He is depending on support that is somewhat volatile. There are many plotting against him, I understand.”
“Really? Well, this is the sort of thing people do,” said Leonard. “Incidentally, I’ve recently been examining cobwebs and, I know this will interest you, their strength in relation to their weight is much greater even than our best steel wire. Isn’t that fascinating?”
“What kind of weapon do you intend to make out of them?” said the Patrician.
“Sorry?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking aloud.”
“And you haven’t touched your tea,” said Leonard.
Vetinari looked around the room. It was full of…things. Tubes and odd paper kites and things that looked like the skeletons of ancient beasts. One of Leonard’s saving graces, in a very real sense from Vetinari’s point of view, was his strange attention span. It wasn’t that he soon got bored with things. He didn’t seem to get bored with anything. But since he was interested in everything in the universe all the time the end result tended to be that an experimental device for disemboweling people at a distance then became a string-weaving machine and ended up as an instrument for ascertaining the specific gravity of cheese.
He was as easily distracted as a kitten.