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‘Hold on,’ said Rincewind urgently. ‘This hat … it wouldn’t be a sort of battered pointy one, with lots of stuff on it? Sort of lace and stuff, and, and-’ he hesitated-’no-one’s tried to put it on, have they?’
‘It specifically warned us not to,’ said Creosote, ’so Abrim got a slave to try it on, of course. He said it gave him a headache.’
‘It also told us that you would shortly be arriving,’ said the vizier, bowing slightly at Rincewind, ‘and therefore I - that is to say, the Seriph felt that you might be able to tell us more about this wonderful artifact?’
There is a tone of voice known as interrogative, and the vizier was using it; a slight edge to his words suggested that, if he didn’t learn more about the hat very quickly, he had various activities in mind in which further words like ‘red hot’ and ‘knives’ would appear. Of course, all Grand Viziers talk like that all the time. There’s probably a school somewhere.
‘Gosh, I’m glad you’ve found it,’ said Rincewind, ‘That hat is gngngnh-’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Abrim, signalling a couple of lurking guards to step forward. ‘I missed the bit after the young lady-’ he bowed at Conina-’elbowed you in the ear.’
‘I think,’ said Conina, politely but firmly, ‘you’d better take us to see it.’
Five minutes later, from its resting place on a table in the Seriph’s treasury, the hat said, At last. What kept you?
It is at a time like this, with Rincewind and Conina probably about to be the victims of a murderous attack, and Coin about to address the assembled cowering wizards on the subject of treachery, and the Disc about to fall under a magical dictatorship, that it is worth mentioning the subject of poetry and inspiration.
For example, the Seriph, in his bijou wildernessette, has just riffled back through his pages of verse to revise the lines which begin:
‘Get up! For morning in the cup of day,
Has dropped the spoon that scares the stars away’
- and he has sighed, because the white-hot lines searing across his imagination never seem to come out exactly as he wants them.
It is, in fact, impossible that they ever will.
Sadly, this sort of thing happens all the time.
It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There’s a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slopping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer’s head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist’s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the lift, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.[16]
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn’t. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time travelling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of white horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succour and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration therefore fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contribution to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilisations have recognised this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.
And so Creosote, who had dreamt the inspiration for a rather fine poem about life and philosophy and how they both look much better through the bottom of a wine glass, was totally unable to do anything about it because he had as much poetic ability as a hyena.
Why the gods allow this sort of thing to continue is a mystery.
Actually, the flash of inspiration needed to explain it clearly and precisely has taken place, but the creature who received it -a small female bluetit - has never been able to make the position clear, even after some really strenuous coded messages on the tops of milk bottles. By a strange coincidence, a philosopher who had been devoting some sleepless nights to the same mystery woke up that morning with a wonderful new idea for getting peanuts out of bird tables.
Which brings us rather neatly on to the subject of magic.
A long way out in the dark gulfs of interstellar space, one single inspiration particle is clipping along unaware of its destiny, which is just as well, because its destiny is to strike, in a matter of hours, a tiny area of Rincewind’s mind.
It would be a tough destiny even if Rincewind’s creative node was a reasonable size, but the particle’s karma had handed it the problem of hitting a moving target the size of a small raisin over a distance of several hundred lightyears. Life can be very difficult for a little subatomic particle in a great big universe.
If it pulls it off, however, Rincewind will have a serious philosophic idea. If it doesn’t, a nearby brick will have an important insight which it will be totally unequipped to deal with.
The Seriph’s palace, known to legend as the Rhoxie, occupied most of the centre of Al Khali that wasn’t occupied by the wilderness. Most things connected with Creosote were famed in mythology and the arched, domed, many-pillared palace was said to have more rooms than any man had been able to count. Rincewind didn’t know which number he was in.
‘It’s magic, isn’t it?’ said Abrim the vizier.
