Soul Music - Terry Pratchett [44]
He’d brought a book down with him. It had taken even him several hours to find it.
The Library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.
For example, the big volume open in front of him contained some of the collected drawings of Leonard of Quirm, skilled artist and certified genius, with a mind that wandered so much it came back with souvenirs.
Leonard’s books were full of sketches—of kittens, of the way water flows, of the wives of influential Ankh-Morporkian merchants whose portraits had provided his means of making a living. But Leonard had been a genius and was deeply sensitive to the wonders of the world, so the margins were full of detailed doodles of whatever was on his mind at that moment—vast waterpowered engines for bringing down city walls on the heads of the enemy, new types of siege guns for pumping flaming oil over the enemy, gunpowder rockets that showered the enemy with burning phosphorus, and other manufactures of the Age of Reason.
And there had been something else. The Librarian had noticed it in passing once before, and had been slightly puzzled by it. It seemed out of place. *
His hairy hand thumbed through the pages. Ah…here it was…
Yes. Oh, YES.
…It spoke to him in the language of the Beat…
The Archchancellor made himself comfortable at his snooker table.
He’d long ago got rid of the official desk. A snooker table was much to be preferred. Things didn’t fall off the edge, there were a number of handy pockets to keep sweets and things in, and when he was bored he could shovel the paperwork off and set up trick shots.** He never bothered to shovel the paperwork back on afterward. In his experience, anything really important never got written down, because by then people were too busy shouting.
He picked up his pen and started to write.
He was composing his memoirs. He’d got as far as the title: Along the Ankh with Bow, Rod, and Staff with a Knob on the End.
“Not many people realize,” he wrote, “that the river Ankh has a large and varied pifcine population—” ***
He flung down the pen and stormed along the corridor into the Dean’s office.
“What the hell’s that?” he shouted.
The Dean jumped.
“It’s, it’s, it’s a guitar, Archchancellor,” said the Dean, walking hurriedly backward as Ridcully approached. “I just bought it.”
“I can see that, I can hear that, what was it you were tryin’ to do?”
“I was practicing, er, riffs,” said the Dean. He waved a badly printed woodcut defensively in Ridcully’s face. The Archchancellor grabbed it.
“‘Blert Wheedown’s Guitar Primer,’” he read. “‘Play your Way to Succefs in Three Easy Lefsons and Eighteen Hard Lefsons.’ Well? I’ve nothin’ against guitars, pleasant airs, a-spying young maidens one morning in May and so on, but that wasn’t playin’. That was just noise. I mean, what was it supposed to be?”
“A lick based on an E pentatonic scale using the major seventh as a passing tone?” said the Dean.
The Archchancellor peered at the open page.
“But this says Lesson One: Fairy Footsteps,” he said.
“Um, um, um, I was getting a bit impatient,” said the Dean.
“You’ve never been musical, Dean,” said Ridcully. “It’s one of your good points. Why the sudden interest—what have you got on your feet?”
The Dean looked down.
“I thought you were a bit taller,” said Ridcully. “You standing on a couple of planks?”
“They’re just thick soles,” said the Dean. “Just…just something the dwarfs invented, I suppose…dunno…found them in my closet…Modo the gardener