“Ankh-Morpork!” shouted Om.
“First we should take Mr. Didactylos to Ankh-Morpork,” said Brutha. “Then-I’ll come back to Omnia.”
“You can damn well leave me there too!” said Om.
“I’ll soon find some believers in Ankh-Morpork, don’t you worry, they believe anything there!”
“Never seen Ankh-Morpork,” said Didactylos. “Still, we live and learn. That’s what I always say.” He turned to face the soldier. “Kicking and screaming.”
“There’s some exiles in Ankh,” said Simony. “Don’t worry. You’ll be safe there.”
“Amazing!” said Didactylos. “And to think, this morning, I didn’t even know I was in danger.”
He sat back in the boat.
“Life in this world,” he said, “is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, `Go on, do Deformed Rabbit . . . it’s my favorite.’ ”
Vorbis stirred the ashes with his foot.
“No bones,” he said.
The soldiers stood silently. The fluffy gray flakes collapsed and blew a little way in the dawn breeze.
“And the wrong sort of ash,” said Vorbis.
The sergeant opened his mouth to say something.
“Be assured I know that of which I speak,” said Vorbis.
He wandered over to the charred trapdoor, and prodded it with his toe.
“We followed the tunnel,” said the sergeant, in the tones of one who hopes against experience that sounding helpful will avert the wrath to come. “It comes out near the docks.”
“But if you enter it from the docks it does not come out here,” Vorbis mused. The smoking ashes seemed to hold an endless fascination for him.
The sergeant’s brow wrinkled.
“Understand?” said Vorbis. “The Ephebians wouldn’t build a way out that was a way in. The minds that devised the labyrinth would not work like that. There would be . . . valves. Sequences of triggerstones, perhaps. Trips that trip only one way. Whirring blades that come out of unexpected walls.”
` Ah.
“Most intricate and devious, I have no doubt.”
The sergeant ran a dry tongue over his lips. He could not read Vorbis like a book, because there had never been a book like Vorbis. But Vorbis had certain habits of thought that you learned, after a while.
“You wish me to take the squad and follow it up from the docks,” he said hollowly.
“I was just about to suggest it,” said Vorbis.
“Yes, lord.”
Vorbis patted the sergeant on the shoulder.
“But do not worry!” he said cheerfully. “Om will protect the strong in faith.”
“Yes, lord.”
“And the last man can bring me a full report. But first . . . they are not in the city?”
“We have searched it fully, lord.”
“And no one left by the gate? Then they left by sea.”
“All the Ephebian war vessels are accounted for, Lord Vorbis.”
“This bay is lousy with small boats.”
“With nowhere to go but the open sea, sir.”
Vorbis looked out at the Circle Sea. It filled the world from horizon to horizon. Beyond lay the smudge of the Sto plains and the ragged line of the Ramtops, all the way to the towering peaks that the heretics called the Hub but which was, he _ knew,
the Pole, visible around the curve of the world only because of the way light bent in atmosphere, just as it did in water . . . and he saw a smudge of white, curling over the distant ocean.
Vorbis had very good eyesight, from a height.
He picked up a handful of gray ash, which had once been Dykeri’s Principles of Navigation, and let it drift through his fingers.
“Om has sent us a fair wind,” he said. “Let us get down to the docks.”
Hope waved optimistically in the waters of the sergeant’s despair.
“You won’t be wanting us to explore the tunnel, lord?” he said.
“Oh, no. You can do that when we return.”
Urn prodded at the copper globe with a piece of wire while the Unnamed Boat wallowed in the waves.
“Can’t you beat it?” said Simony, who was not up to speed on the difference between machines and people.
“It’s a philosophical engine,” said Urn. “Beating won’t help.”
“But you said machines could be our slaves,” said Simony.
“Not the beating sort,” said Urn. “The nozzles are bunged up with salt. When the water rushes out of the globe it leaves the salt behind.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Water likes to travel light.”
“We’re becalmed! Can you do anything about it?”
“Yes, wait for it to cool down and then clean it out and put some more water in it.”
Simony looked around distractedly.
“But we’re still in sight of the coast!”
“You might be,” said Didactylos. He was sitting in the middle of the boat with his hands crossed on the top of his walking-stick, looking like an old man who doesn’t often get taken out for an airing and is quite enjoying it.
“Don’t worry. No one could see us out here,” said Urn. He prodded at the mechanism. “Anyway, I’m a bit worried about the screw. It was invented to move water along, not move along on water.”
“You mean it’s confused?” said Simony.
“Screwed up,” said Didactylos happily.
Brutha lay in the pointed end, looking down at the water. A small squid siphoned past, just under the surface. He wondered what it was-
-and knew it was the common bottle squid, of the class Cephalopoda, phylum Mollusca, and that it had an internal cartilaginous support instead of a skeleton and a well-developed nervous system and large, image-forming eyes that were quite similar to vertebrate eyes.
The knowledge hung in the forefront of his mind for a moment, and then faded away.
“Om?” Brutha whispered.
“What?”
“What’re you doing?”
“Trying to get some sleep. Tortoises need a lot of sleep, you know.”
Simony and Urn were bent over the philosophical engine. Brutha stared at the globe
-a sphere of radius r, which therefore had a volume V = (4/3)(pi) rrr, and surface area A = 4(pi) rr-
“Oh, my god . . .”
“What now?” said the voice of the tortoise.
Didactylos’s face turned towards Brutha, who was clutching at his head.
“What’s a pi?”
Didactylos reached out a hand and steadied Brutha.
“What’s the matter?” said Om.
“I don’t know! It’s just words! I don’t know what’s in the books! I can’t read!”
“Getting plenty of sleep is vital,” said Om. “It builds a healthy shell.”
Brutha sagged to his knees in the rocking boat. He felt like a householder coming back unexpectedly and finding the old place full of strangers. They were in every room, not menacing, but just filling the space with their thereness.
“The books are leaking!”
“I don’t see how that can happen,” said Didactylos. “You said you just looked at them. You didn’t read them. You don’t know what they mean.”
“They know what they mean!”
“Listen. They’re just books, of the nature of books,” said Didactylos. “They’re not magical. If you could know what books contained just by looking at them, Urn there would be a genius.”
“What’s the matter with him?” said Simony.
“He thinks he knows too much.”
“No! I don’t know anything! Not really know,” said Brutha. “I just remembered that squids have an internal cartilaginous support!”
“I can see that would be a worry,” said Simony. “Huh. Priests? Mad, the lot of them.”
“No! I don’t know what cartilaginous means!”
“Skeletal connective tissue,” said Didactylos. “Think of bony and leathery at the same time.”
Simony snorted. “Well, well,” he said, “we live and learn, just like you said.”
“Some of us even do it the other way round,” said Didactylos.
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“It’s philosophy,” said Didactylos. “And sit down, boy. You’re making the boat rock. We’re overloaded as it is.”
“It’s being buoyed upward by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid,” muttered Brutha, sagging.
“Hmm?”
“Except that I don’t know what buoyed means.”
Urn looked up from the sphere. “We’re ready to start again,” he said. “Just bale some water in here with your helmet, mister.”
“And then we shall go again?”
“Well, we can start getting up steam,” said Urn. He wiped his hands on his toga.
“Y’know,” said Didactylos, “there are different ways of learning things. I’m reminded of the time when old Prince Lasgere of Tsort asked me how he could become learned, especially since he hadn’t got any time for this reading business. I said to him, `There is no royal road to learning, sire,’ and he said to me, `Bloody well build one or I shall have your legs chopped off. Use as many slaves as you like.’ A refreshingly direct approach, I always thought. Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words.”