Death looked down at the shape under the fal ing snow. Then he set the lifetimer on
the air and touched it with a finger. A spark flashed across
‘You ain’t real y al owed to do that,’ said Albert, feeling wretched
THE HOGFATHER CAN. THE HOGFATHER GIVES PRESENTS. THERE’S NO
BETTER PRESENT THAN A FUTURE
‘Yeah, but—
ALBERT
‘Al right, master.
Death scooped up the girl and strode to the end of the al ey
The snowflakes fen like angel’s feathers. Death stepped out into the street and
accosted two figures who were tramping through the drifts
TAKE HER SOMEWHERE WARM AND GIVE HER A GOOD DINNER, he
commanded, pushing the bundle into the arms of one of them. AND I MA
WELL BE CHECKING UP LATER
Then he turned and disappeared into the swirling snow
Constable Visit looked down at the little girl in his arms, and then at Corporal Nobbs
‘What’s al this about, corporal?
Nobby pul ed aside the blanket
‘Search me,’ he said. ‘Looks like we’ve been chosen to do a bit of charity.
‘I don’t cal it very charitable, just dumping someone on people like this.
‘Come on, there’l stil be some grub left in the Watchhouse,’ said Nobby. He’d got a
very deep and certain feeling that this was expected of him. He remembered a big man
in a grotto, although he couldn’t quite remember the face. And he couldn’t quite
remember the face of the person who had handed over the girl, so that meant it must
be the same one
Shortly afterwards there was some tinkling music and a very bright light and two
rather affronted angels appeared at the other end of the al ey, but Albert threw
snowbal s at them until they went away
Hex worried Ponder Stibbons. He didn’t know how it worked, but everyone else
assumed that he did. Oh, he had a good idea about some parts, and he was pretty
certain that Hex thought about things by turning them al into numbers and crunching
them (a clothes wringer from the laundry, or CWL, had been plumbed in for this very
purpose), but why did it need a lot of smal religious pictures? And there was the
mouse. It didn’t seem to do much, but whenever they forgot to give it its cheese Hex
stopped working. There were al those ram skul s. The ants wandered over to them
occasional y but they didn’t seem to do anything
What Ponder was worried about was the fear that he was simply engaged in a cargo
cult. He’
read about them. Ignorant16 and credulous17 people, whose island might once have
been visited by some itinerant merchant vessel that traded pearls and coconuts for
such fruits of civilization as glass beads, mirrors, axes and sexual diseases, would
later make big model ships out of bamboo in the hope of once again attracting this
magical cargo. Of course, they were far too ignorant and credulous to know that just
because you built the shape you didn’t get the substance ..
He’d built the shape of Hex and, it occurred to him, he’d built it in a magical university
where the border between the real and ‘not real’ was stretched so thin you could
almost see through it. He got the horrible suspicion that, somehow, they were merely
making solid a sketch that was hidden somewhere in the air
Hex knew what it ought to be
16 Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identicallooking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sagosago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It’s a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago.
17 Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity’s place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.
Al that business about the electricity, for example. Hex had raised the subject one
night, not long after it’d asked for the mouse
Ponder prided himself that he knew pretty much al there was to know about
electricity. But they’d tried rubbing bal oons and glass rods until they’d been able to
stick Adrian onto the ceiling, and it hadn’t had any effect on Hex. Then they’d tried
tying a lot of. cats to a wheel which, when revolved against some beads of amber,
caused any amount of electricity al over the place. The wretched stuff hung around for
days, but there didn’t seem any way of ladling it into Hex and anyway no one could
stand the noise
So far the Archchancel or had vetoed the lightning rod idea
Al this depressed Ponder. He was certain that the world ought to work in a more
efficient way
And now even the things that he thought were going right were going wrong
– He stared glumly at Hex’s quil pen in its tangle of springs and wire
The door was thrown open. Only one person could make a door bang on its hinges
like that. Ponder didn’t even turn round
‘Hel o again, Archchancel or.
‘That thinking engine of yours working?’ said Ridcul y. ‘Only there’s an interesting
little—
‘It’s not working,’ said Ponder
‘It ain’t. What’s this, a half-holiday for Hogswatch?
‘Look’ said Ponder
Hex wrote: +++ Whoops! Here Comes The Cheese! +++MELON MELON MELON
+++ Error At Address: 14, Treacle Mine Road, AnkhMorpork+++ !!!!!
+++Oneoneoneoneoneone +++ Redo From Start ++
‘What’s going on?’ said Ridcul y, as the others pushed in behind them
‘I know it -sounds stupid, Archchancel or, but we think it might have caught
something off the Bursar.
‘Daftness, you mean?
‘That’s ridiculous, boy!’ said the Dean. ‘Idiocy is not a communicable disease.
Ridcul y puffed his pipe
‘I used to think that, too,’ he said. ‘Now Im not so sure. Anyway, you can catch
wisdom, can’t you?
‘No, you can’t,’ snapped the Dean. ‘It’s not like ‘flu, Ridcul y. Wisdom is … wel ,
instil ed.
‘We bring students here and hope they catch wisdom off us, don’t we?’ said Ridcul y
‘Wel , metaphorical y,’ said the Dean
‘And if you hang around with a bunch of idiots you’re bound to become pretty daft
yourself,’ Ridcul y went on
‘I suppose in a manner of speaking .
‘And you’ve only got to talk to the poor old Bursar for five minutes and you think
you’re going a bit potty yourself, am I right?
The wizards nodded glumly. The Bursar’s company, although quite harmless, had a
habit of making one’s brain squeak
‘So Hex here has caught daftness off the Bursar,’ said Ridcul y. ‘Simple. Real
stupidity beats artificial intel igence every time.’ He banged his pipe on the side of
Hex’s listening tube and shouted: ‘FEELING ALL RIGHT, OLD CHAP?
Hex wrote: +++ Hi Mum Is Testing +++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out Of Cheese
Error +++ !!!!! +++ Mr Jel y! Mr Jel y! ++
‘Hex seems perfectly able to work out anything purely to do with numbers but when it
tries anything else it does this,’ said Ponder
‘See? Bursar Disease,’ said Ridcul y. ‘The bee’s knees when it comes to adding up,
the pig’s ear at everything else. Try giving him dried frog pil s?
‘Sorry, sir, but that is a very uninformed suggestion,’ said Ponder. ‘You can’t give
medicine to machines.
‘Don’t see why not,’ said Ridcul y. He banged on the tube again and bel owed,
‘SOON HAVE YOU BACK ON YOUR … your … yes, indeed, old chap! Where’s that
board with al the letter and number buttons, Mr Stibbons? Ah, good.’ He sat down and
typed, with one finger, as slowly as a company chairman
D-R-Y-D-F-R-O-R-G-½-P-I-L-L-
Hex’s pipes jangled
‘That can’t possibly work sir,’ said Ponder
‘It ought to,’ said Ridcul y. ‘If he can get th
idea of being il , he can get the idea of being cured.
He typed: L-O-T-S-O-F-D-R-Y-D-F-R-O-R-C-P- ¼-L-L-
‘Seems to me’ ‘ he said, `that this thing believes what it’s told, right?
‘Wel , it’s true that Hex has, if you want to put it that way, no idea of an untruth.
`Right. Wel , I’ve just told the thing it’s had a lot of dried frog pil s. It’s not going to cal
me a liar, is it?
There was some clickings and whirrings within the structure of Hex
Then it wrote: +++ Good Evening, Archchancel or. I Am Ful y Recovered And