Unseen Academicals

a vital line of cosmic defence in this establishment here with a staff of exactly one? And he’s dead!’
    ‘You mean Charlie? I remember old Charlie, keen worker nevertheless,’ said Ridcully.
    ‘Yes, but I have to keep rewiring him all the time,’ sighed Hix. ‘I do try to keep you abreast of things in my monthly reports. I hope you read them…?’
    ‘Tell me, Doctor Hix,’ said Ponder, ‘did you experience anything unusual when that young lady was speaking so eloquently?’
    ‘Well, yes, I had a pleasant moment of happy recollection about my father.’
    ‘So did we all, I am sure,’ said Ponder. There was sombre nodding around the table. ‘I never knew my father. I was brought up by my aunts. I had déjà vu without the original vu. ’
    ‘And it wasn’t magic?’ suggested the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    ‘No. Religion, I suspect,’ said Ridcully. ‘A god invoked, that sort of thing.’
    ‘Not invoked, Mustrum,’ said Dr Hix. ‘Summoned by bloodshed!’
    ‘Oh, I hope not,’ said Ridcully, getting to his feet. ‘I would like to try a little experiment this afternoon, gentlemen. We will not talk about football, we will not speculate about football, we will not worry about football—’
    ‘You are going to make us play it, aren’t you?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes glumly.
    ‘Yes,’ said Ridcully, more than somewhat miffed at the spoiling of a perfectly good peroration. ‘Just a little kick-about to help us get some hands-on experience of the game as it is played.’
    ‘Er. Strictly, under the new rules, by which I mean the ancient rules we are taking as our model, hands-on experience means no hands,’ said Ponder.
    ‘Well pointed out, that man. Put the word out, will you? Football practice on the lawn after lunch!’

    One thing you had to remember when dealing with dwarfs was that while they shared the same world as you did, metaphorically they thought about it as if it were upside down. Only the richest and most influential of dwarfs lived in the deepest caverns. For a dwarf, a penthouse in the centre of the city would be some kind of slum. Dwarfs liked it dark and cool.
    It didn’t stop there. A dwarf on the up and up was really on his uppers, and upper-class dwarfs were lower class. A dwarf who was rich, healthy and had respect and his own rat farm justifiably felt at rock bottom and was held in low esteem. When you talked to dwarfs, you turned your mind upside down. The city, too. Of course, when you dug down in Ankh-Morpork you just found more Ankh-Morpork. Thousands of years of it, ready to be dug out and shored up and walled in with the shiny dwarf brick.
    It was Lord Vetinari’s ‘Grand Undertaking’. The city’s walls corseted it like a fetishist’s happiest dream. Gravity offered only a limited supply of up, but the deep loam of the plain had a limitless supply of down.
    Glenda was surprised, therefore, to find Shatta right at the surface in the Maul, alongside the really posh dress shops that were for human ladies. That made sense, however; if you were going to make a scandalous profit selling clothes, it made sense to camouflage yourself amongst other shops doing the same thing. She wasn’t sure about the name, but apparently shatta meant ‘a wonderful surprise’ in Dwarfish, and if you started to laugh about that sort of thing then you would never have time to pause for breath.
    She approached the door with the apprehension of one who is certain that the moment she sets foot inside she will be charged five dollars a minute for breathing and then be held upside down and have all her wealth removed with a hook.
    And it was, indeed, classy. But it was dwarf classy. That meant an awful lot of chain mail, and enough weaponry to take over a city-but if you paid attention, you realized it was female chain mail and weaponry. That was how things were happening, apparently. Dwarf women had got fed up with looking like dwarf men all the time and were metaphorically melting down their breastplates in order to make something a little lighter and with adjustable straps.
    Juliet had explained this on the way down, although, of course, Juliet did not use the word ‘metaphorically’, it being several syllables beyond her range. There were battle-axes and war hammers, but all with that certain feminine touch: one war axe, apparently capable of cleaving a backbone lengthwise, was beautifully engraved with flowers. It was another world, and as she stood just inside the