Sourcery

all over him. No one can tell him anything about defrauding widows and imprisoning impressionable young men in alleged jewel caves. When it comes to dirty work he probably wrote the book or, more probably, stole it from someone else.
    He wore a turban with a pointy hat sticking out of it. He had a long thin mustache, of course.
    “Ah, Abrim,” said Creosote.
    “Highness?”
    “My Grand Vizier,” said the Seriph.
    —thought so—, said Rincewind to himself.
    “These people, why did we have them brought here?”
    The vizier twirled his mustache, probably foreclosing another dozen mortgages.
    “The hat, highness,” he said. “The hat, if you remember.”
    “Ah, yes. Fascinating. Where did we put it?”
    “Hold on,” said Rincewind urgently. “This hat…it wouldn’t be a sort of battered pointy one, with lots of stuff on it? Sort of lace and stuff, and, and—” he hesitated—“no one’s tried to put it on, have they?”
    “It specifically warned us not to,” said Creosote, “so Abrim got a slave to try it on, of course. He said it gave him a headache.”
    “It also told us that you would shortly be arriving,” said the vizier, bowing slightly at Rincewind, “and therefore I—that is to say, the Seriph felt that you might be able to tell us more about this wonderful artifact?”
    There is a tone of voice known as interrogative, and the vizier was using it; a slight edge to his words suggested that, if he didn’t learn more about the hat very quickly, he had various activities in mind in which further words like “red hot” and “knives” would appear. Of course, all Grand Viziers talk like that all the time. There’s probably a school somewhere.
    “Gosh, I’m glad you’ve found it,” said Rincewind, “That hat is gngngnh—”
    “I beg your pardon?” said Abrim, signalling a couple of lurking guards to step forward. “I missed the bit after the young lady—” he bowed at Conina—“elbowed you in the ear.”
    “I think,” said Conina, politely but firmly, “you better take us to see it.”
    Five minutes later, from its resting place on a table in the Seriph’s treasury, the hat said, At last. What kept you?

    It is at a time like this, with Rincewind and Conina probably about to be the victims of a murderous attack, and Coin about to address the assembled cowering wizards on the subject of treachery, and the Disc about to fall under a magical dictatorship, that it is worth mentioning the subject of poetry and inspiration.
    For example, the Seriph, in his bijou wildernessette, has just riffled back through his pages of verse to revise the lines which begin:
“ Get up! For morning in the cup of day ,
Has dropped the spoon that scares the stars away .”
    —and he has sighed, because the white-hot lines searing across his imagination never seem to come out exactly as he wants them.
    It is, in fact, impossible that they ever will.
    Sadly, this sort of thing happens all the time.
    It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There’s a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slopping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer’s head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist’s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. *
    This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn’t. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
    Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.
    For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
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