Interesting Times

acceleration, been slightly aghast. But he hadn’t been frightened, because he didn’t have the imagination.
    “My goodness,” said a wizard.
    The Archchancellor looked up.
    “Yes, Bursar?”
    “It’s this book the Dean loaned me, Mustrum. It’s about apes.”
    “Really.”
    “It’s most fascinating,” said the Bursar, who was on the median part of his mental cycle and therefore vaguely on the right planet even if insulated from it by five miles of mental cotton wool. “It’s true what he said. It says here that an adult male orang-utan doesn’t grow the large flamboyant cheek pads unless he’s the dominant male.”
    “And that’s fascinating, is it?”
    “Well, yes, because he hasn’t got ’em. I wonder why? He certainly dominates the Library, I should think.”
    “Ah, yes,” said the Senior Wrangler, “but he knows he’s a wizard, too. So it’s not as though he dominates the whole University.”
    One by one, as the thought sank in, they grinned at the Archchancellor.
    “Don’t you look at my cheeks like that!” said Ridcully. “I don’t dominate anybody!”
    “I was only—”
    “So you can all shut up or there will be big trouble!”
    “You should read it,” said the Bursar, still happily living in the valley of the dried frogs. “It’s amazing what you can learn.”
    “What? Like…how to show your bottom to people?” said the Dean, from on high.
    “No, Dean. That’s baboons,” said the Senior Wrangler.
    “I beg your pardon, I think you’ll find it’s gibbons,” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
    “No, gibbons are the ones that hoot. It’s baboons if you want to see bottoms.”
    “Well, he’s never shown me one,” said the Archchancellor.
    “Hah, well, he wouldn’t, would he?” said a voice from the chandelier. “Not with you being dominant male and everything.”
    “Two Chairs, you come down here this minute!”
    “I seem to be entangled, Mustrum. A candle is giving me some difficulty.”
    “Hah!”
    Rincewind shook his head and wandered away. There had certainly been some changes around the place since he had been there and, if it came to it, he didn’t know how long ago that had been…
    He’d never asked for an exciting life. What he really liked, what he sought on every occasion, was boredom. The trouble was that boredom tended to explode in your face. Just when he thought he’d found it he’d be suddenly involved in what he supposed other people—thoughtless, feckless people—would call an adventure. And he’d be forced to visit many strange lands and meet exotic and colorful people, although not for very long because usually he’d be running. He’d seen the creation of the universe, although not from a good seat, and had visited Hell and the afterlife. He’d been captured, imprisoned, rescued, lost, and marooned. Sometimes it had all happened on the same day.
    Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it was something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep, and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.
    The root problem, Rincewind had come to believe, was that he suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future, something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where the good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. It was as if he always got the indigestion before the meal and felt so dreadful that he never actually managed to eat anything.
    Somewhere in the world, he reasoned, there was someone who was on the other end of the seesaw, a kind of mirror Rincewind whose life was a succession of wonderful events. He hoped to meet him one day, preferably while holding some sort of weapon.
    Now people were babbling about sending him to the Counterweight Continent. He’d heard that life was dull there. And Rincewind really craved dullness.
    He’d really liked that island. He’d enjoyed Coconut Surprise. You cracked it open and, hey, there was coconut inside. That was the kind of surprise he liked.
    He pushed open a door.
    The place inside had been his room. It was a mess. There was a large and battered wardrobe, and that was about the end of it as far as proper furniture was concerned unless you wanted to broaden the term to include a wicker chair with no bottom and three legs and a mattress so full of the life that inhabits mattresses that it