Interesting Times

Immediately, with a faint sizzling noise, a row of little pictures lit up on the wide cuff. They showed soldiers. Soldiers digging, soldiers fighting, soldiers climbing…
    Ah. So… magic armor. Perfectly normal magic armor. It had never been very popular in Ankh-Morpork. Of course, it was light. You could make it as thin as cloth. But it tended to lose its magic without warning. Many an ancient lord’s last words had been, “You can’t kill me because I’ve got magic aaargh.”
    Rincewind looked at the boots, with suspicious recollection of the trouble there had been with the University’s prototype Seven League Boots. Footwear which tried to make you take steps twenty-one miles long imposed unfortunate groinal strains; they’d got the things off the student just in time, but he’d still had to wear a special device for several months, and ate standing up.
    All right, but even old magic armor would be useful now. It wasn’t as if it weighed much, and the mud of Hunghung hadn’t improved what was left of his own boots. He put his feet into them.
    He thought: Well, so what is supposed to happen now?
    He straightened up.
    And behind him, with the sound of seven thousand flower pots smashing together, the lightning still crackling over them, the Red Army came to attention.

    Hex had grown a bit during the night. Adrian Turnipseed, who had been on duty to feed the mice and rewind the clockwork and clean out the dead ants, had sworn that he’d done nothing else and that no one had come in.
    But now, where there had been the big clumsy arrangement of blocks so that the results could be read, was a quill pen in the middle of a network of pulleys and levers.
    “Watch,” said Adrian, nervously tapping out a very simple problem. “It’s come up with this after doing all those spells at suppertime…”
    The ants scuttled. The clockwork spun. The springs and levers jerked so sharply that Ponder took a step back.
    The quill pen wobbled over to an inkwell, dipped, returned to the sheet of paper Adrian had put under the levers, and began to write.
    “It blots a bit,” he said, in a helpless tone of voice. “What’s happening? ”
    Ponder had been thinking further about this. The latest conclusions hadn’t been comforting.
    “Well…we know that books containing magic become a little bit…sapient…” he began. “And we’ve made a machine for…”
    “You mean it’s alive? ”
    “Come on, let’s not get all occult about this,” said Ponder, trying to sound jovial. “We’re wizards, after all.”
    “Listen, you know that long problem in thaumic fields you wanted me to put in?”
    “Yes. Well?”
    “It gave me the answer at midnight,” said Adrian, his face pale.
    “Good.”
    “Yes, good, except that I didn’t actually give it the problem until half past one, Ponder.”
    “You’re telling me you got the answer before you asked the question?”
    “Yes!”
    “Why did you ask the question, then?”
    “I thought about it, and I thought maybe I had to. I mean, it couldn’t have known what the answer was going to be if I didn’t give it the problem, yes?”
    “Good point. Er. You waited ninety minutes, though.”
    Adrian looked at his pointy boots.
    “I…was hiding in the privy. Well, Redo from Start could—”
    “All right, all right. Go and have something to eat.”
    “Are we meddling with things we don’t understand, Ponder?”
    Ponder looked up at the gnomic bulk of the machine. It didn’t seem threatening, merely… other .
    He thought: meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever, to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you can give it a twist.
    Perhaps we shouldn’t have given you a name. We didn’t think about that. It was a joke. But we should have remembered that names are important. A thing with a name is a bit more than a thing.
    “Off you go, Adrian,” he said firmly.
    He sat down and carefully typed:
    Hello.
    Things whirred.
    The quill wrote:
    +++ ?????? +++ Hello +++ Redo From Start +++
    Far above, a butterfly—its wings an undistinguished yellow, with black markings—fluttered through an open window.
    Ponder began the calculations for the transfer between Hunghung and Ankh-Morpork.
    The butterfly alighted for a moment on the maze of glass pipes. When it rose again, it left behind a very small blob of