Soul Music

aiming.”
    “Anyway,” said Cliff, “only trolls and damn silly young humans go dere who think it clever to drink in troll bar. You won’t get an audience.”
    Dibbler tapped the side of his nose.
    “You play,” he said. “You’ll get an audience. That’s my job.”
    “The doors aren’t big enough for me to go in!” snapped Glod.
    “They’re huge doors,” said Dibbler.
    “They ain’t big enough for me ’cos if you try to get me in there, you’ll have to drag the street in too, on account of me holding on to it!”
    “No, be sensible—”
    “No!” screamed Glod. “And I’m screaming for all three of us!”
    The guitar whined.
    Buddy swung it around until he could hold it, and played a couple of chords. That seemed to calm it down.
    “I think it…er…likes the idea,” he said.
    “It likes the idea,” said Glod, simmering down a little bit. “Oh, good. Well, do you know what they do to dwarfs who go into the Cavern?”
    “We do need the money, and it’s probably not worse than what the Guild’ll do to us if we play anywhere else,” said Buddy. “And we’ve got to play.”
    They stood looking at one another.
    “What you boys should do now,” said Dibbler, blowing out a smoke ring, “is find somewhere nice and quiet to spend the day. Have a bit of a rest.”
    “Damn right,” said Cliff. “I never expected to carry dese rocks around de whole time—”
    Dibbler raised a finger. “Ah,” he said, “I thought of that, too. You don’t want to waste your talents lugging stuff around, that’s what I told myself. I hired you a helper. Very cheap, only a dollar a day; I’ll take it straight out of your wages so’s you don’t have to bother about it. Meet Asphalt.”
    “Who?” said Buddy.
    “’S me,” said one of the sacks beside Dibbler.
    The sack opened up a bit and turned out not to be a sack at all, but a…a sort of crumpled…a kind of mobile heap of…
    Buddy felt his eyes watering. It looked like a troll, except that it was shorter than a dwarf. It wasn’t smaller than a dwarf—what Asphalt lacked in height he made up in breadth and, while on the subject, also in smell.
    “How come,” said Cliff, “he’s so short?”
    “’N elphant sat on me,” said Asphalt, sulkily.
    Glod blew his nose.
    “Only sat?”
    Asphalt was already wearing a “Band With Rocks In” shirt. It was tight across the chest but reached down to the floor.
    “Asphalt’ll look after you,” said Dibbler. “There isn’t anything he doesn’t know about show business.”
    Asphalt gave them a big grin.
    “You’ll be okay with me,” he said. “I’ve worked with ’em all, I have. Been everywhere, done it all.”
    “We could go to der Fronts,” said Cliff. “No one around dere when de University’s on holiday.”
    “Good. Got things to organize,” said Dibbler. “See you tonight. The Cavern. Seven o’clock.”
    He strode off.
    “You know the funny thing about him?” said Glod.
    “What?”
    “The way he was smoking that sausage. Do you think he knew?”
    Asphalt grabbed Cliff’s bag and slung it easily over his shoulder.
    “Let’s go, boss,” he said.
    “An elephant sat on you?” said Buddy, as they crossed the square.
    “Yup. At the circus,” said Asphalt. “I used to murk ’em arht.”
    “That’s how you got like that?”
    “Nope. Din’t get like this ’til elephants had sat on me t’ree, fo’ times,” said the small flat troll. “Dunno why. I’d be cleanin’ up after ’em, next minute it’d all be dark.”
    “I’d have quit after the first time, me,” said Glod.
    “Nah,” said Asphalt, with a contented smile. “Couldn’t do that. Show business is in me soul.”

    Ponder looked down at the thing they had hammered together.
    “I don’t understand it either,” he said. “But…it looks as though we can trap it in a string, and it makes the string play the music again . It’s like an iconograph for sound.”
    They’d put the wire inside a box, which resonated beautifully. It played the same dozen bars, over and over again.
    “A box of music,” said Ridcully. “My word.”
    “What I’d like to try,” said Ponder, “is getting the musicians to play in front of a lot of strings like this. Perhaps we could trap the music.”
    “What for?” said Ridcully. “What on Disc for?”
    “Well…if you could get music in boxes you wouldn’t need musicians anymore.”
    Ridcully hesitated. There was a lot to be said for the idea. A world