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There were strange things going on at Unseen University. This was, of course, business as usual for the most part, but there were also new strange things going on that were disturbing the staid and set routine of the senior staff as they went about their days. The main disruption was the flashes of octarine light coming from one of the more seldom visited wings of the campus. When investigated, the light turned out to be coming from metal boxes, which were in the possession of a number of students[1]. Boxes which spoke.
“Stibbons!” Ridcully roared as he barrelled into the High Energy Magic Building. “What in the name of all the gods have you got your lot[2] playing at?”
Ponder looked up myopically from where he was bent over a workbench, looking at one of his research assistant’s blueprints for improvements to Hex, and blinked at the verbal onslaught.
“I beg your pardon, Archchancellor?” he asked.
“Ha! Well, you’d better had beg for it, Stibbons, because you’ve really done it this time,” Ridcully said, still fuming.
It was always a good idea to balance smiling and nodding along with whatever Ridcully said with making sure to avoid agreeing with anything he said too firmly without leaving any flexibility to walk it back if it was taken as an admission of guilt. Ponder, a rather straightforward person who chafed against the labyrinthine rules of social engagement that had to be abided by when dealing with Mustrum Ridcully[3], kept his facial expression carefully stationary as he waited for further information about what it was he was supposed to have really done this time.
“May I ask what this is in reference to, Archchancellor?” he asked, finally, when it became clear that Ridcully was not going to clue him in.
“These mad fool talking boxes!” Ridcully said. “There’s octarine blaring out of every window in the student accommodation wing. Do you really expect me to believe that you have nothing to do with this?”
Ponder expected no such thing, his days of expecting anything approaching reason from his superior long behind him by then. Eventually though, after a lot of back and forth that annoyed both wizards considerably, Ridcully started to accept that it actually was news to Ponder that the students had any mad fool talking boxes that they weren’t sharing with him. This did not temper Ridcully’s feelings on the matter, however.
“If you aren’t involved then I like this whole thing even less!” Ridcully said. “Someone who we don’t know anything about is making magical talking boxes? Whole damn thing smacks of sourcery. Next thing you know there’ll be creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions all over the place and we’ll be up to our eyeballs in unmentionables. And up to our unmentionables in eyeballs, come to that! Whatever’s going on, you figure it out immediately and put a stop to it!”
After he stormed out, Ponder caught sight of his assistant trying to creep out the door on the other side of the room.
“Hang on there, Trevor,” Ponder said, a hint of professorial steel in his voice that he seldom used. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about these talking boxes would you?”
After a short, but very stern conversation[4], Trevor sheepishly took him to a workshop in the Street of Cunning Artificers.
“I really don’t know what you were thinking of,” Ponder said. “I know that a lot of what the older generation[5] gets concerned about is superstitious ignorance, but that doesn’t mean that you should just throw caution to the wind and assume that there are no risks at all in doing whatever you want whenever you want without consulting anyone about it!”
They stopped outside a small shed that had octarine shining through every window and from the sliver of space around the doorframe. There were a number of cats milling around outside, purring happily while they licked the last molecules of fish out of some tins that had been left out for them.
“I take it we’re here,” Ponder said flatly.
“Yes, this is Mr. Macaroni’s workshop,” Trevor replied. “I think that you’ll be very interested in what he’s been up to here, sir, when you understand- I mean, when he explains the- Um. Well, we’re here.”
When they opened the door, a tall man with dark hair was noodling around with a delicate looking tool and some fiddly pieces of equipment with his right hand while absentmindedly petting yet another cat who was making up to him with his left hand.
“Hi, Trev,” the noodler said, without turning around.
Ponder looked over condemningly at Trevor, who flushed bright pink.
“Hello, Liam,” the now salmon-coloured student said. “I, um, I’ve brought my professor here to see your work. The senior staff at the university have been interested to hear about what you’ve been doing with the clacksless.”
Macaroni put his work down and scratched the cat behind the ears before getting up and fixing them with the slightly manic grin of a specialist given an opening to talk about their passion project.
“I’d be delighted,” he said.
“It’s simply remarkable, Archchancellor,” Ponder said with breathless awe.
“I might have known you’d get stars in your bloody eyes over this nonsense,” Ridcully said. “Why didn’t you put a stop to it like I told you?”
“Would you put a stop to an artist creating his masterwork?” Ponder asked and then, realising his mistake, hurried to go on before Ridcully could answer his rhetorical question. “Truly though, it is astonishing. He says that eventually something could be transmitted from one side of the Disc to the other. Imagine! Faster even than the clacks! I would never have thought of this kind of application of octarine radiation. And to think he did it all in a little shed.”
“Yes, I’m sure it’s all jolly fascinating,” Ridcully said impatiently. “Did you ask him how many brothers he has? And how many uncles he has?”
“Well.” Ponder made a face. “As it happens, he is the youngest of eight, but—”
“Pah!” Ridcully said. “Bloody sourcery. What damnably bad luck to have another one on our hands so soon after that last debacle! I never thought I’d have to see it under my watch.”
“No, no!” Ponder said, waving his hands urgently. “There’s not a lick of magic in him, or anyone in his family, and the devices themselves don’t produce magic: they just transmit existing octarine radiation. His family are all whiskey distillers. Pretty well to do, as far as I can tell, but he’s nowhere near next in line to inherit the business, so he’s been working for the clacks part time to pay for night classes with the Guild of Artificers and the rent on his shed.”
“Self-made man, eh?” Ridcully said, stroking his beard. “Striking out on his own?”
“Oh certainly[6],” said Ponder.
“Well, I suppose a distiller’s son is hardly a secret sourceror,” Ridcully said. Ponder then noticed with horror that a delighted expression was crossing his face. He could see the pun coming and was helpless to stop it. “More saucery than sourcery, what?”
“Yes, sir. Very droll,” Ponder said from between gritted teeth.
“They just come to me,” Ridcully said, in his best attempt at a modest tone. “Well, the light is a bit of a nuisance, but it’s not causing too much trouble, so I suppose we can let him at it. It’ll all probably come to nothing anyway and we’ll just have to put up with it for a few months. These novelties seldom catch on, like that fad for moving pictures a while back.”
“The students are very taken with it,” Ponder said. “I believe a good few of the young people who work for the clacks are keen too. And Mr. Macaroni says he gets a lot of stamp-collecting and train-spotting types coming around to visit too who are interested in helping him develop the technology.”
Ridcully gave him a look. “I’ll grant you that it might be a hobby horse for, you know … technically minded folks, but what actually sticks around is stuff that ordinary people take an interest in. And I can hardly imagine how this is going to do that.”
“Perhaps,” Ponder said, diplomatically refraining from commenting on the breadth of his employer’s imagination.
At first, Macaroni’s invention[7] was mostly an object of niche appeal among, as Ridcully had called them, technically minded hobbyists. But that was no impediment to its success, as there were a lot more of such people around than might be imagined at first. Since they didn’t tend to get out a lot, it was easy to overlook them, but even if they only made up about one percent of the population that was still tens of thousands of people in Ankh-Morpork alone. And soon word spread quickly along the clacks lines to yet more quiet, indoorsy people further afield, who were no strangers to ordering specialist equipment from catalogues.
Eventually, word spread from the pork radio[8] enthusiasts to other, less quiet, people who had their own ideas about how best to use the medium. For instance, while live sports commentary was no substitute for being at a match in person, it was head and shoulders above the previous technology of relying on asking some bloke at the pub who’d been there what had happened[9], which it all but replaced overnight.
And that’s just one example. Here are some more:
“Perhaps you could hire someone from the Dysk,” suggested Boddony. “The younger players who aren’t as established are always looking to pick up work here and there, and they’d jump at the chance of a steady gig like this.”
“I just don’t know,” William said, chewing morosely at the end of a pencil. “An actor? It hardly seems very journalistic. Maybe we’ll get better at it with practice.”
“Well.” Sacharissa grimaced. “I do see your meaning, but I think that we don’t exactly have … It. And actors have oodles of It.”
“Is ‘It’ really more important than getting the news from a trusted source?” William asked.
“But zere is no inherent contradiction viz zat,” Otto said. “For example, Mr. Goodmountain is not a journalist, but he sets ze type zat allows us to use ze medium of ze press. Are ve not a trustvorthy source because our printer does not write ze news himself?”
William frowned, but the reasoning did seem sound, even if he didn’t like it.
“Ideally, I would like someone who was able to do both,” he said. “Someone who had ‘It,’ but who wasn’t just reading a script that we wrote for them.”
“I might know a bloke,” said Caslong. “He works at the Dysk, but he’s more of a writer than an actor.”
“Well, if he’s interested then there’s no harm interviewing him,” William said with a sigh. “Let him know we’re looking for Macaroni presenters and he can come around if he likes.”
When Gwallter Hwelsson walked shyly into their offices a few days later, the staff at The Times found him to be an intriguing character. At 3'2" he was short even for a dwarf, and was as baby faced as a person with a full beard could be. When he spoke, he was self-effacing and modest, as was fitting for a young dwarf, still of an age to be apprenticed, in a crowded room among his elders. But once he had the opportunity to read for them, he transformed before their eyes. He was at once confident, decisive, and moving, and spoke with a gravitas that hardly seemed to fit within his diminutive frame.
“And that’s the way it is,” he said, punctuating the final line of the piece that he had prepared for them with a tap of his hand on the sheet of paper that he had barely had to refer to.
He cleared his throat and looked at the floor, once again the shy young dwarf who’d walked in the door.
“I actually did want to get a job here as a writer already, as it happens,” he said, twiddling his thumbs. “Have done for a while. I’ve been working up the nerve to tell dad that I prefer non-fiction to plays. And I do have a lot of performance experience, since I’ve been an understudy for multiple roles every night since I was 15, and it’s part of my job to help the actors rehearse. So, um, I would love to be considered for the opportunity.”
“I don’t know where he’s put it away, but he’s got It,” Gunilla said in an aside to William, who nodded mutely.
Nanny Ogg fiddled with the dial of the colander[10], which had been packed in among her various plush armchairs and end tables without anything needing to be taken out of the living room through sheer bloody-minded defiance of the rules of physics and a conviction that she could ‘make it fit.’
She was used to hosting scores of the extended Ogg family, and anyone else in Lancre village who cared to stop by to listen to something with her, but this afternoon most of the people squeezed into every available inch of her living room were witches, each offering their own commentary and advice[11] as Nanny tried to tune into the right station.
“-nd we will now be joined by Ms Agnes Nitt, a celebrated soprano—”
“Oh, um, actually, I have a tessitura from about E3 to G#7, so I don’t really fall neatly within the traditional categorisation of voice types. But I will be singing a piece written for coloratura sopranos today.”
“Good girl,” Nanny Ogg said, patting the top of the radio.
Agnes’ singing career had taken off dramatically since widespread adoption of the Macaroni. Uncharitable people back home said that she had the figure for it, but this was a rather back to front way of looking at things. Agnes had always had an unparalleled voice, but now everyone who heard it sat up and listened instead of deciding whether she was worth listening to based on her dress size before she’d had a chance to open her mouth.
Nanny picked Greebo up, who had been wailing in protest of her paying more attention to the Macaroni than him, and shushed everyone so that they could listen.
The Duchess had a Macaroni, and even the last few holdouts who didn’t drink for religious reasons[12] flocked to the pub to listen to it, from the gardening shows, to the sports games, to the news, to the music channels, to the radio plays[13].
But as well as the big colander behind the bar, Paul had his own pork radio upstairs that Polly frequently commandeered to talk to Igorina, who had taken to the technology like lightning to a rod. Jackrum had a pork radio licence too, and she caught up with him on and off, trading stories about his grandchildren for ones about her nephews and nieces.
And sometimes …
“You don’t need to be so formal with the call sign and everything. We’re the only ones who ever use this frequency; I know it’s you,” Mal said, from somewhere near the border with Überwald.
“Someone else could use this frequency though. Forgive me if I don’t want you jumping in headfirst whispering sweet nothings to some dumb kid who’s just got a radio from a catalogue and is looking for a QSO to talk to,” Polly replied.
“You’re the only dumb kid for me, Ozzer,” Mal said fondly.
“Be still my beating heart,” Polly said.
She was slightly annoyed with herself that her heart had, actually, squeezed a little in her chest at the sentiment, but Mal didn’t need to know about that.
“What are you wearing?” Mal said, interrupting her train of thought.
“A jumper,” Polly said flatly. “And my brown trousers. You know the ones; they don’t show the beer stains as much.”
“You’re an inveterate tease, Perks,” Mal replied.
“You’ll just have to come home and tell me off properly for it,” Polly said, smiling.
“It’s really not my fault,” Moist told the goddess who had manifested in his kitchen. “Honestly. I wasn’t even the first one who called them colanders, it had definitely already caught on by the time I called them that in that interview I did on the AMBC with Hwelsson, which I only had to do because apparently I’m in charge of the bloody broadcasting regulatory body, since Spike doesn’t want to deal with it, and, well … you know how these things go, it was just a case of one thing leading to another. But, yes, I might have, um, popularised it. A bit. But it probably would have gotten legs without me.”
“Have you any idea how many cats there are at my temple now?” Anoia asked him.
“You’re welcome for the step up in accommodations,” Moist muttered under his breath. “It wasn’t so very long ago that you didn’t have your own temple.”
“I can’t go in it without sneezing!” Anoia said. “Ever since I became the goddess of radio, the blasted creatures have become sacred animals associated with me, no matter how much they aggravate my asthma.”
“Congratulations, by the way,” Moist said, cautiously. “It’s a big get.”
“Well … thank you. I’ve had to stop smoking, you know?” Anoia said irritably. “Since it’s bad for their stupid respiratory systems.”
Moist, very accustomed to tip-toeing around the nerves of recent ex-smokers[14], nodded and said nothing.
It was almost immediately after the Watch started using Macaronis to communicate with each other on specific frequencies set aside for their use that Watch scanners started being sold all over the city to anyone who wanted to listen in on what they were saying on them. It was completely legal, as it happened, since somehow no one had anticipated this very anticipatable thing happening.
It vexed Vimes, at first, but the more he thought about it the more he thought that demanding that new legislation be drafted banning the Watch scanners could only be the wrong move—which was, if anything, more vexing, because doing the right thing was so much more annoying than being a petty little tyrant who cared more about power than justice.
But … who watched the Watchman? Well, after this, anyone could. Everyone could. On balance, that was better than him taking sole responsibility for keeping the institution of policing on the straight and narrow and hoping he never slipped.
Even if Fred Colon really did need to stop all but giving step-by-step instructions on how to break the law and advising the people they were investigating on all their leads on them over open airwaves.
[1]The sudden intrusion of an awareness that a gaggle of pimply Youths lived among them was also something of a rude awakening to many of the staff, who had been keeping up their end of a gentleman’s agreement between the faculty and student body to avoid so much as thinking about each other as much as possible. The Youths making themselves so obvious was, it was felt, just not cricket.[return to text]
[2]Ponder Stibbons was among the few wizards on the UU staff who actually interacted with the students, so naturally he was personally responsible for anything untoward that they got up to.[return to text]
[3]Ridcully himself being perhaps the most straightforward man ever born, to the extent that everyone else had to weave out of his way along more circuitous routes as he marched inexorably forward.[return to text]
[4]‘Conversation’ in the sense that Ponder monologued at him for ten minutes while Trevor said “Yes, sir” and “Of course, sir” at appropriate intervals. No witch becomes her mentor. That is her tragedy. But every wizard becomes his, and that is his tragedy.[return to text]
[5]Ponder, by now in his mid thirties, still fancied himself something of a boy wonder-cum-daring iconoclast shaking up the stuffy institutional status quo.[return to text]
[6]That was, as self-made as being able to fund your entrepreneurship with your entire salary, because your other expenses were all covered by your trust fund and living rent-free in your family’s town house can be said to be, but it’s important to frame things in a way that your audience will be receptive to.[return to text]
[7]The device was variously called the Macaroni, the clacksless, the radio, and various other monikers.[return to text]
[8]Pork being short for Ankh-Morpork, naturally.[return to text]
[9]This system had been riddled with pitfalls, such as how much the bloke at the pub could remember, how good of a communicator he was, how many pints you’d have to buy him to get him to tell you about the match, and how badly said pints would impair the first two variables at play.[return to text]
[10]So called because it caught the ‘Macaroni’ waves from the air.[return to text]
[11]None of them owned a radio, but that was no reason not to have an expert opinion on how to work one.[return to text]
[12]It was unclear if alcohol had ever been an abomination, but many had taken the view that surely it was only a matter of time before a more explicit ban was handed down from above, so they might as well get ahead of the curve and be early adopters.[return to text]
[13]The Arbalists was a particular favourite, even though it disappointingly turned out to have fewer crossbows in it than anticipated.[return to text]
[14]Adora Belle had also given up again recently, for what was either the 27th or 28th time, and had been taking the loss of her favourite vice hard. Although maybe not as hard as some of the furniture had been.[return to text]