The Truth

dark light, the picture really does not lie. Dark light reveals zer truth to the dark eyes of zer mind…” He paused, and sighed. “Ah, vunce again no ominous roll of thunder, vot a vaste. But at least you could look apprehensively at the shadows.”
    All heads turned towards the shadows, in the corner of the room and under the roof. They were simply shadows, haunted by nothing more than dust and spiders.
    “But there’s just dust and—” Sacharissa began.
    Otto held up a hand.
    “Dear lady…I have told you. Philosophically, the truth can be vot is metaphorically there…”
    William stared at the picture again.
    “I had hoped that I could use filters and so on to cut down zer, er, unvanted effects,” said Otto behind him. “But alas—”
    “This is getting worse and worse,” said Sacharissa. “It gives me the humorous vegetables.”
    Goodmountain shook his head. “This is unholy stuff,” he said. “No more meddling with it, understand?”
    “I didn’t think dwarfs were religious,” said William.
    “We’re not,” said Goodmountain. “But we know unholy when we see it, and I’m looking at it right now, I’m telling you. I don’t want any more of these, these…prints of darkness!”
    William grimaced. It shows the truth, he thought. But how do we know the truth when we see it? The Ephebian philosophers think that a hare can never outrun a tortoise, and they can prove it. Is that the truth? I heard a wizard say that everything is made of little numbers, whizzing around so fast that they become stuff . Is that true? I think a lot of things that have been happening over the last few days are not what they seem, and I don’t know why I think that, but I think it’s not the truth…
    “Yes, no more of this stuff, Otto,” he said.
    “Damn right,” said Goodmountain.
    “Let’s just try to get back to normal and get a paper out, shall we?”
    “You mean normal where mad priests start to collect dogs, or normal where vampires mess around with evil shadows?” said Gowdie.
    “I mean like normal before that,” said William.

“Oh, I see . You mean like back in the old days,” said Gowdie.
    After a while, though, silence settled on the pressroom, although there was an occasional sniff from the desk opposite.
    William wrote a story about the fire. That was easy. Then he tried to write a coherent account of the recent events, but found he couldn’t get beyond the first word. He’d written “The.” It was a reliable word, the definite article. The trouble was, all the things he was definite about were bad.
    He’d expected that to…what? Inform people? Yes. Annoy people? Well, some people, at least. What he hadn’t expected was that it wouldn’t make any difference. The paper came out, and it didn’t matter.
    People just seemed to accept things. What was the point of writing another story of the Vetinari business? Well, of course, it had a lot of dogs in it, and there was always a lot of human interest in a story about animals.
    “What did you expect?” said Sacharissa, as if she was reading his thoughts. “Did you think people would be marching in the streets? Vetinari isn’t a very nice man, from what I hear. People say he probably deserves to be locked up.”
    “Are you saying people aren’t interested in the truth?”
    “Listen, what’s true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week. Look at Mr. Ron and his friends. What’s the truth mean to them? They live under a bridge!”
    She held up a piece of lined paper, crammed edge to edge with the careful looped handwriting of someone for whom holding a pen was not a familiar activity.
    “This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society,” she said. “They’re just ordinary people who breed canaries and things as a hobby. Their chairman lives next door to me, which is why he gave me this. This stuff is important to him! My goodness, but it’s dull. It’s all about Best of Breed and some changes in the rules about parrots which they argued about for two hours. But the people who were arguing were people who mostly spend their day mincing meat or sawing wood and basically leading little lives that are controlled by other people, do you see? They’ve got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren’t lumped in with parrots. It’s not their fault. It’s just how things are. Why are you sitting there with your mouth