Making Money

side, Moist saw, was a line of drawers. So drawers opened…out of drawers. Of course, Moist thought, in eleven-dimensional space that was the wrong thing to think.
    “It’s a sliding puzzle,” said Adora Belle, “but with lots more directions to slide.”
    “That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way,” said Ponder.
    Adora Belle’s eyes narrowed. She had not had a cigarette in ten minutes.
    The long drawer extruded another drawer at right angles. All along the sides of it were, yes, yet more drawers. One of these extended slowly.
    Moist took a risk and tapped on what appeared to be perfectly ordinary wood. It made a perfectly ordinary noise.
    “Should I worry that I just saw a drawer slide through another drawer?” he said.
    “No,” said Ponder. “The Cabinet is trying to make four-dimensional sense of something that is happening in eleven or, possibly, ten.”
    “Trying? Do you mean it’s alive?”
    “Aha! The right type of question!”
    “I bet you don’t know the answer, though.”
    “You are correct. But you must admit it’s an interesting question not to know the answer to. And, yes, here we have the Foot. Hold and collapse please, Hex.”
    The drawers collapsed back into themselves in a series of crashes, much shorter and less dramatic than before, leaving the Cabinet looking demure and antique and slightly bow-legged. It had little claws as feet, a cabinet-maker’s affectation that always annoyed Moist in a low-grade way. Did they think the things moved around in the night? Or maybe the Cabinet really did.
    And the Cabinet’s doors were open. Nestling inside, and only just fitting, was a golem’s foot, or at least most of one.
    Once, golems were delicate and beautiful. Once, the very best sculptors probably made them to rival the most beautiful of statues, but long since then the fumble-fingered many who could barely make a snake out of clay found that bashing the stuff into the shape of a big, hulking gingerbread man worked just as well.
    This foot was one of the early kind. It was made of a clay like white china, with patterns of tiny raised markings in yellow, black, and red. A little brass plate in front of it was engraved, in Überwaldean: FOOT OF UMNIAN GOLEM, MIDDLE PERIOD.
    “Well, whoever made the Cabinet comes from—”
    “Anyone looking at the labels sees it in their native tongue,” said Ponder wearily. “The markings apparently indicate that it did indeed come from the city of Um, according to the late Professor Flead.”
    “Um?” said Moist. “Um what? They weren’t sure what to call the place?”
    “Just Um,” said Ponder. “Very ancient. About sixty thousand years, I believe. Back in the Clay Age.”
    “The first golem-makers,” said Adora Belle. She unslung the bag and started to rummage in the straw.
    Moist tapped the foot. It seemed eggshell-thin.
    “It’s some sort of ceramic,” said Ponder. “No one knows how they made it. The Umnians even baked boats out of the stuff.”
    “Did they work?”
    “Up to a point,” said Ponder. “Anyway, the city was totally destroyed in the first war with the ice giants. There’s nothing there now. We think that the foot was put in the Cabinet a long time ago.”
    “Or will be dug up some time in the future, perhaps?” said Moist.
    “That could very well be the case,” said Ponder gravely.
    “In which case, won’t that be a bit of a problem? I mean, can it be in the ground and in the cabinet at the same time?”
    “That, Mr. Lipwig, is—”
    “The wrong type of question?”
    “Yes. The box exists in ten or possibly eleven dimensions. Practically anything may be possible.”
    “Why only eleven dimensions?”
    “We don’t know,” said Ponder. “It might be simply that more would be silly.”
    “Can you take the foot out, please?” said Adora Belle, who was now brushing wisps of straw off a long package.
    Ponder nodded, lifted out the relic with great care, and placed it gently on the bench behind them.
    “What would have happened if you had drop—” Moist began.
    “Wrong type of question, Mr. Lipwig!”
    Adora Belle put the bundle down beside the Foot and unwrapped it with care.
    It contained a part of a golem’s arm, two feet long.
    “I knew it! The markings are the same!” she said. “And there’s a lot more on my piece. Can you translate it?”
    “Me? No,” said Ponder. “The arts are not my