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'Ah, so you're an astronomer?' said Twoflower.
'Oh no,' said Belafon, as the rock drifted gently around the curve of a mountain, I'm a computer hardware consultant.'
'What's a computer hardware?'
'Well, this is,' said the druid, tapping the rock with a sandalled foot.'Part of one, anyway. It's a replacement. I'm delivering it. They're having trouble with the big circles up on the Vortex Plains. So they say, anyway; I wished I had a bronze tore for every user who didn't read the manual.' He shrugged.
'What use is it, then, exactly?' asked Rincewind. Anything to keep his mind off the drop below.
'You can use it to – to tell you what time of year it is,' said Belafon.
'Ah. You mean if it's covered in snow then it must be winter?'
'Yes. I mean no. I mean, supposing you wanted to know when a particular star is going to rise —'
'Why?' said Twoflower, radiating polite interest.
'Well, maybe you want to know when to plant your crops,' said Belafon, sweating a little, 'or maybe—'
'I'll lend you my almanac, if you like,' said Twoflower.
'Almanac?'
'It's a book that tells you what day it is,' said Rincewind wearily. 'It'd be right up your leyline.'
Belafon stiffened. 'Book?' he said. 'Like, with paper?'
'Yes.'
That doesn't sound very reliable to me,' said the druid nastily. 'How can a book know what day it is? Paper can't count.'
He stamped off to the front of the rock, causing it to wallow alarmingly. Rincewind swallowed hard and beckoned Twoflower closer.
'Have you ever heard of culture shock?' he hissed.
'What's that?'
'It's what happens when people spend five hundred years trying to get a stone circle to work properly and then someone comes up with a little book with a page for every day and little chatty bits saying things like “Now is a good time to plant broad beans” and “Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead,” and do you know what the most important thing to remember about culture shock.' Rincewind paused for breath, and moved his lips silently trying to remember where the sentence had got to, 'is?' he concluded.
'What?'
'Don't give it to a man flying a thousand ton rock.'
'Has it gone?'
Trymon peered cautiously over the battlements of the Tower of Art, the great spire of crumbling masonry that loomed over Unseen University. The cluster of students nd instructors of magic, far below, nodded.
'Are you sure?'
The bursar cupped his hands and shouted.
'It broke down the hubward door and escaped an hour ago, sir,' he yelled.
'Wrong,' said Trymon. 'It left, we escaped. Well, I'll be getting down, then. Did it get anyone?'
The bursar swallowed. He was not a wizard, but a kind, good-natured man who should not have had to see the things he had witnessed in the past hour. Of course, it wasn't unknown for small demons, coloured lights and various half-materialised imaginings to wander around the campus, but there had been something about the implacable onslaught of the Luggage that had unnerved him. Trying to stop it would have been like trying to wrestle a glacier.
It – it swallowed the Dean of Liberal Studies, sir,' he shouted.
