Moving Pictures (23 page)

“Yes, Uncle,” said Soll dispiritedly. “I’ll go and see if I can find some more carpenters, then, shall I?”

“Right.” Soll flashed Victor a look of terrified astonishment as he scurried away. Dibbler started haranguing a group of handlemen. Instructions spouted out of the man like water from a fountain.

“I reckon no one’s goin’ to Ankh-Morpork this morning, then,” said a voice by Victor’s knee.

“He’s certainly very, er, ambitious today,” said Victor.

“Not like himself at all.”

Gaspode scratched an ear. “There was sunnink I got to tell you. What was it, now? Oh, yeah. I remember. Your girlfriend is an agent of demonic powers. That night we saw her on the hill she was prob’ly on her way to commune with evil. What d’you fink of that, eh?”

He grinned. He was rather proud of the way he’d introduced the subject.

“That’s nice,” said Victor abstractedly. Dibbler was certainly acting even stranger than usual. Even stranger than usual for Holy Wood, even…

“Yeah,” said Gaspode, slightly annoyed at this reception.

“A-cavortin’ at night with eldritchly occult Intelligences from the Other Side, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Good,” said Victor. You didn’t normally burn things in Holy Wood. You saved them and painted on the other side. Despite himself, he began to get interested.

“—a cast of thousands,” Dibbler was saying. “I don’t care where you get them from, we’ll hire everyone in Holy Wood if we have to, right? And I want—”

“A-helpin’ them in their evil attempts to take over the whole world, if I’m any judge,” said Gaspode.

“Does she?” said Victor. Dibbler was talking to a couple of apprentice alchemists now. What was that. A
twenty
-reeler? But no one had ever dreamed of going above five!

“Yeah, a-diggin’ away to rouse them from their ancient slumber to reek havoc, style of fing,” said Gaspode. “Prob’ly aided by cats, you mark my—”

“Look, just shut up a minute, will you?” said Victor, irritably. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying.”

“Well, ’scuse
me
. I was jus’ tryin’ to save the world,” muttered Gaspode. “If
gharstely
creatures from Before the Dawna Time starts wavin’ at you from under your bed, jus’ you don’t come complainin’ to me.”

“What
are
you going on about?” said Victor.

“Oh, nothin’. Nothin’.”

Dibbler looked up, caught sight of Victor’s craning face, and waved at it.

“You, lad! Come here! Have I got a part for you!”

“Have you?” said Victor, pushing his way through the crowd.

“That’s what I said!”

“No, you asked if—” Victor began, and gave up.

“And where’s Miss Ginger, may I ask?” said Dibbler.

“Late again?”

“…prob’ly sleepin’in…”
grumbled a sullen and totally ignored voice from down below in the sea of legs,

“…prob’ly takes it out of you, messin’ with the occult…”

“Soll, send someone to fetch her here—”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“…wot can you expect, huh, people who like cats’re capable of anythin’, you can’t trust ’em…”

“And find someone to transcribe the bed.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“…but do they listen! Not them. Bet if I had a glossy coat an’ ran aroun’ yappin’ they’d listen all right…”

Dibbler opened his mouth to speak, and then frowned and raised a hand.

“Where’s that muttering coming from?” he said.

“…prob’ly saved the whole world for ’em, by rights I’d get a statchoo put up to me nose but no, oh no, not for you Mr. Gaspode, on account of you not bein’ the right kinda person, so…”

The whine stopped. The crowd shuffled aside, revealing a small bow-legged gray dog, which looked up impassively at Dibbler.

“Bark?” it said, innocently.

Events always moved fast in Holy Wood, but the work on
Blown Away
sped forward like a comet. The other Fruitbat clicks were halted. So were most of the others in the town, because Dibbler was hiring actors and handlemen at twice what anyone else would pay.

And a sort of Ankh-Morpork rose among the dunes. It would have been cheaper, Soll complained, to have risked the wrath of the wizards, sneaked some filming in Ankh-Morpork itself, and then slipped someone a fistful of dollars to put a match to the place.

Dibbler disagreed.

“Apart from anything else,” he declared, “it wouldn’t look right.”

“But it’s the real Ankh-Morpork, Uncle,” said Soll. “It’s got to look
exactly
right. How can it not look right?”

“Ankh-Morpork doesn’t look all that genuine, you know,” said Dibbler thoughtfully.

“Of course it’s bloody genuine!” snapped Soll, the bonds of kinship stretching to snapping point. “It’s really there! It’s really itself! You can’t make it any more genuine! It’s as genuine as it can get!”

Dibbler took his cigar out of his mouth.

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “You’ll see.”

Ginger turned up around lunchtime, looking so pale that even Dibbler didn’t shout at her. She kept glaring at Gaspode, who tried to stay out of her way.

Dibbler was preoccupied, anyway. He was in his office, explaining The Plot.

It was basically quite simple, running on the familiar lines of Boy Meets Girl, Girl Meets Another Boy, Boy Loses Girl, except that on this occasion there was a civil war in the middle of it…

The origins of the Ankh-Morpork Civil War (8:32 p.m., Grune 3,432—10:45 a.m., Grune 4,432) have always been a subject of heated debate among historians. There are two main theories: 1. The common people, having been heavily taxed by a particularly stupid and unpleasant king, decided that enough was enough and that it was time to do away with the outmoded concept of monarchy and replace it with, as it turned out, a series of despotic overlords who still taxed heavily but at least had the decency not to pretend the gods had given them the right to do it, which made everyone feel a bit better OR 2. One of the players in a game of Cripple Mr. Onion in a tavern had accused another of palming more than the usual number of aces, and knives had been drawn, and then someone had hit someone with a bench, and then someone else had stabbed someone, and arrows started to fly, and someone had swung on the chandelier, and a carelessly-hurled axe had hit someone in the street, and then the Watch had been called in, and someone had set fire to the place, and someone had hit a lot of people with a table, and then everyone lost their tempers and commenced to start fighting.

Anyway, it all caused a civil war, which is something every mature civilization needs to have had…
²⁰

“The way I see it,” said Dibbler, “there’s this high-born girl living all by herself in this big house, right, and her young man goes off to fight for the rebels, you see, and she meets this other guy, and there’s the chemistry between them—”

“They blow up?” said Victor.

“He means they fall in love,” said Ginger coldly.

“That sort of thing,” nodded Dibbler. “Eyes meeting across a crowded room. And she’s all alone in the world except for the servants and, let’s see, yeah, perhaps her pet dog—”

“This’ll be Laddie?” said Ginger.

“Right. And of course she’s going to do everything she can to preserve the family mine, so she’s kind of flirting with ’em both, the men, not the dog, and then one of them gets killed in the war and the other one throws her over but it’s all OK because she’s tough at heart.” He sat back. “What d’you think?” he said.

The people sitting around the room looked uneasily at one another.

There was a fidgety silence.

“It sounds great, Uncle,” said Soll, who wasn’t looking for any more problems today.

“Technically very challenging,” said Gaffer.

There was a chorus of relieved assent from the rest of the team.

“I don’t know,” said Victor slowly.

Everyone else’s eyes turned on him in the same way that spectators at the lion pit watch the first condemned criminal to be pushed out through the iron gate. He went on: “I mean, is that all? It doesn’t sound, well, very complicated for such a long click. People sort of falling in love while a civil war is going on in the background…I don’t see how you can make much of a picture out of that.”

There was another troubled silence. A couple of people near Victor moved away. Dibbler was staring at him.

Victor could hear, coming from under his chair, an almost inaudible little voice.

“…
oh
, of course,
there’s always a part for Laddie…wot’s he got that I haven’t got, that’s wot I’d like to
…”

Dibbler was still staring fixedly at Victor.

Then he said, “You’re right. You’re right. Victor’s right. Why didn’t anyone else spot it?”

“That’s just what I was thinking, Uncle,” said Soll hurriedly. “We need to flesh it out a bit.”

Dibbler waved his cigar vaguely. “We can think up some more stuff as we go, no problem. Like…like…how about a chariot race? People always like a chariot race. It’s gripping. Will he fall out, will the wheels come off? Yeah. A chariot race.”

“I’ve, er, been reading a bit about the Civil War,” said Soll cautiously, “and I don’t think there’s any mention of—”

“Of there
not
being chariot races, am I right?” said Dibbler, in soapy tones containing the razor blade of menace. Soll sagged.

“Since you put it like that, Uncle,” he said, “you’re right.”

“And…” Dibbler stared reflectively, “…we could try…a great big shark?” Even Dibbler sounded slightly surprised at his own suggestion.

Soll looked hopefully at Victor.

“I’m almost certain sharks didn’t fight in the Civil War,” said Victor.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure people would have noticed,” said Victor.

“They’d have got trampled by the elephants,” muttered Soll.

“Yeah,” said Dibbler, sadly. “It was just a thought. Don’t know why I said it, really.”

He stared at nothing for a while, and then shook his head briskly.

A shark, Victor thought. All the little golden fishes of your own thoughts are swimming away happily, and then the water
moves
and this great shark of a thought comes in from outside. As if someone’s doing our thinking for us.

“You just don’t know how to behave,” Victor told Gaspode, when they were alone. “I could hear you grumbling under the chair the whole time.”

“I might not know how to behave, but at least I don’t go mooning around over some girl who’s letting dretful Creatures of the Night into the world,” said Gaspode.

“I should hope not,” said Victor, and then, “What do you mean?”

“Aha!
Now
he listens! Your girlfriend—”

“She’s not my girlfriend!”

“
Would-be
girlfriend,” said Gaspode, “is goin’ out every night and tryin’ to open that door in the hill. She tried it again last night, after you’d gone. I saw her. I
stopped
her,” he added, defiantly. “Not that I expect any credit, of course. There’s some dretful in there, an’ she’s lettin’ it out. No wonder she’s always late and tired in the mornings, what with spendin’ the whole night diggin’.”

“How do you know they’re dreadful?” said Victor weakly.

“Put it like this,” said Gaspode. “If something’s shoved in a cave under a hill behind great big doors, it’s not ’cos people want it to come out every night to wash the dishes, is it? ’Corse,” he added charitably, “I’m not sayin’ she
knows
she’s doing it. Prob’ly they’ve got a grip of her weak an’ feeble cat-lovin’ female mind and are twisting it to their evil will.”

“You do talk a lot of crap sometimes,” said Victor, but he didn’t sound very convincing even to himself.

“Ask her, then,” said the dog, smugly.

“I will!”

“Right!”

Exactly how, though? thought Victor, as they trudged out into the sunshine. Excuse me, miss, my dog says that you…no. I say, Ginger, I understand that you’re going out and…no. Hey, Ginj, how come my dog saw…no.

Perhaps he should just start up a conversation and wait until it got around naturally to monstrosities from Beyond the Void.

But it would have to wait, because of the row that was going on.

It was over the third major part in
Blown Away
. Victor was of course the dashing but dangerous hero, Ginger was the only possible choice for the female lead, but the second male role—the dull but dutiful one—was causing trouble.

Victor had never seen anyone stamp their foot in anger before. He’d always thought it was something they did only in books. But Ginger was doing it.

“Because I’d look an idiot, that’s why!” she was saying.

Soll, who was by now feeling like a lightning rod on a stormy day, waved his hand frantically.

“But he’s ideal for the role!” he said. “It calls for a solid character—”

“Solid? Of course he’s solid! He’s made of
stone!
” shouted Ginger. “He might have a suit of chain mail and a false mustache but he’s still a troll!”

Rock, looming monolithically over the pair of them, cleared his throat noisily.

“Excuse me,” he said, “I hope we’re not going to get elementalist about this?”

Now it was Ginger’s turn to wave her hands. “I
like
trolls,” she said. “As trolls, that is. But you can’t seriously mean me to do a romantic scene with a, a, a cliff face.”

“Now look here,” said Rock, his voice winding up like a pitcher’s arm. “What you’re saying is, is OK for trolls to be shown bashing people with clubs, is not OK to show trolls have finer feelings like squashy humans?”

“She’s not saying that at all,” said Soll desperately. “She’s not—”

“If you cut me, do I not bleed?” said Rock.

“No, you don’t,” said Soll, “but—”

“Ah, yes, but I
would
. If I had blood, I’d bleed all over the place.”

“And another thing,” said a dwarf, prodding Soll in the knee. “It says in the script that she owns a mine full of happy, laughing, singing dwarfs, right?”

“Oh, yes,” said Soll, putting the troll problem on one side.

“What about it?”