Soul Music

richer by one fifty-pence coin.
    Susan hated that sort of thing. She knew that mentally unstable people told children about the Tooth Fairy, but that was no reason for one to exist. It suggested woolly thinking. She disliked woolly thinking, which in any case was a major misdemeanor under the regime of Miss Butts.
    It was not, otherwise, a particularly bad one. Miss Eulalie Butts and her colleague Miss Delcross had founded the College on the astonishing idea that, since gels had nothing much to do until someone married them, they may as well occupy themselves by learning things.
    There were plenty of schools in the world, but they were all run either by the various churches or by the Guilds. Miss Butts objected to churches on logical grounds and deplored the fact that the only Guilds that considered girls worth educating were the Thieves and the Seamstresses. But it was a big and dangerous world out there, and a gel could do worse than face it with a sound knowledge of geometry and astronomy under her bodice. For Miss Butts sincerely believed that there were no basic differences between boys and gels.
    At least, none worth talking about.
    None that Miss Butts would talk about, anyway.
    And, therefore, she believed in encouraging logical thought and a healthy inquiring mind among the nascent young women in her care, a course of action which is, as far as wisdom is concerned, on a par with going alligator hunting in a cardboard boat during the sinking season.
    For example, when she lectured to the school, pointed chin trembling, on the perils to be found outside in the town, three hundred healthy inquiring minds decided that 1) they should be sampled at the earliest opportunity, and logical thought wondered 2) exactly how Miss Butts knew about them. And the high, spike-topped walls around the college grounds looked simple enough to anyone with a fresh mind full of trigonometry and a body honed by healthy fencing, calisthenics, and cold baths. Miss Butts could make peril seem really interesting .
    Anyway, that was the incident of the midnight visitor. After a while, Susan considered that she must have imagined it. That was the only logical explanation. And Susan was good at those.

    Everyone, they say, is looking for something.
    Imp was looking for somewhere to go.
    The farm cart that had brought him the last stretch of the way was rumbling off across the fields.
    He looked at the signpost. One arm pointed to Quirm, the other to Ankh-Morpork. He knew just enough to know that Ankh-Morpork was a big city, but built on loam, and, therefore, of no interest to the druids in his family. He had three Ankh-Morpork dollars and some change. It probably wasn’t very much in Ankh-Morpork.
    He didn’t know anything about Quirm, except that it was on the coast. The road to Quirm didn’t look very worn, while the one to Ankh-Morpork was heavily rutted.
    It’d be sensible to go to Quirm to get the feel of city life. It’d be sensible to learn a bit about how city people thought before heading for Ankh-Morpork, which they said was the largest city in the world. It’d be sensible to get some kind of job in Quirm and raise a bit of extra cash. It’d be sensible to learn to walk before he started to run.
    Common sense told Imp all these things, so he marched off firmly toward Ankh-Morpork.

    As far as looks were concerned, Susan had always put people in mind of a dandelion on the point of telling the time. The College dressed its gels in a loose navy blue woolen smock that stretched from neck to just above the ankle—practical, healthy, and as attractive as a plank. The waistline was somewhere around knee level. Susan was beginning to fill it out, however, in accordance with the ancient rules hesitantly and erratically alluded to by Miss Delcross in Biology and Hygiene. Gels left her class with the vague feeling that they were supposed to marry a rabbit. (Susan had left with the feeling that the cardboard skeleton on the hook in the corner looked like someone she’d known…)
    It was her hair that made people stop and turn to watch her. It was pure white, except for a black streak. School regulations required that it be in two plaits, but it had an uncanny tendency to unravel itself and spring back into its preferred shape, like Medusa’s snakes. *
    And then there was the birthmark, if that’s what it was. It only showed up if she blushed, when three faint pale lines appeared up across her cheek and made it look exactly as