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'Pardon me, the slime—'
'Distinctly rubbery, I thought—'
There was a pause. Then a voice said carefully, 'Anyway, whatever it was, we remember it distinctly.'
'Quite so.'
'Exactly.'
'And our task is to see that nothing dreadful happens to it, Rincewind.'
Rincewind squinted into the blackness. 'Would you kindly explain what you're talking about?'
There was a papery sigh. 'So much for metaphor,' said one of the voices. 'Look, it is very important you safeguard the Spell in your head and bring it back to us at the right time, you understand, so that when the moment is precisely right we can be said. Do you understand?'
Rincewind thought: we can be said!
And it dawned on him what the tracery was, ahead of him. It was writing on a page, seen from underneath.
'I'm in the Octavo?' he said.
'In certain metaphysical respects,' said one of the voices in offhand tones. It came closer. He could feel the dry rustling right in front of his nose . . .
He ran away.
The single red dot glowed in its patch of darkness. Trymon, still wearing the ceremonial robes from his inauguration as head of the Order, couldn't rid himself of the feeling that it had grown slightly while he watched. He turned away from the window with a shudder.
'Well?' he said.
'It's a star,' said the Professor of Astrology, 'I think.'
'You think?'
The astrologer winced. They were standing in Unseen University's observatory, and the tiny ruby pinpoint on the horizon wasn't glaring at him any worse than his new master.
'Well, you see, the point is that we've always believed stars to be pretty much the same as our sun —'
'You mean balls of fire about a mile across?'
'Yes. But this new one is, well—big.'
'Bigger than the sun?' said Trymon. He'd always considered a mile-wide ball of fire quite impressive, although he disapproved of stars on principle. They made the sky look untidy.
'A lot bigger,' said the astrologer slowly.
'Bigger than Great A'Tuin's head, perhaps?'
The astrologer looked wretched.
'Bigger than Great A'Tuin and the Disc together,' he said. 'We've checked,' he added hurriedly, 'and we're quite sure.'
That is big,' agreed Trymon. The word “huge” comes to mind.'
'Massive,' agreed the astrologer hurriedly.
'Hmm.'
Trymon paced the broad mosaic floor of the observatory, which was inlaid with the signs of the Disc zodiac. There were sixty-four of them, from Wezen the Double-headed Kangaroo to Gahoolie, the Vase of Tulips (a constellation of great religious significance whose meaning, alas, was now lost).
