Making Money (26 page)

The Men reached the bottom of the steps. Without a word they all looked at Mr. Shady, except for Mr. Shady, who looked at Moist.

“The sheds stay, right?” he said.

“You’re giving in?” said Mr. Bent, aghast. “After hundreds of years?”

“Well,” said Mr. Shady, “me and the boys had a bit of a talk and, well, at a time like this, a man’s got to think of his shed. And the outworkers will be all right, right?”

“Mr. Shady, I’d go to the barricades for the elim,” said Moist.

“And we talked to some of the lads from the Post Office last night and they said we could trust Mr. Lipwig’s word ’cos he’s as straight as a corkscrew.”

“A corkscrew?” said Bent, shocked.

“Yeah, we asked about that, too,” said Shady. “And they said he acts curly but that’s okay ’cos he damn well gets the corks out!”

Mr. Bent’s expression went blank. “Oh,” he said. “This is clearly some kind of judgment-clouding joke, which I do not understand. If you will excuse me, I have a great deal of work to attend to.”

His feet rising and falling, as though he was walking on an invisible staircase, Mr. Bent departed in jerky haste.

“Very well, gentlemen, thank you for your helpful attitude,” said Moist, watching the retreating figure, “and for my part I will get those uniforms ordered this afternoon.”

“You’re a fast mover, Master,” said Mr. Shady.

“Stand still and your mistakes catch up with you!” said Moist. They laughed, because he’d said it, but the face of Cribbins rose up in his mind and, quite unconsciously, he put his hand in his pocket and touched the blackjack. He’d have to learn how to use it now, because a weapon you held and didn’t know how to use belonged to your enemy.

He’d bought it—why? Because it was like the lock picks, a token to prove, if only to himself, that he hadn’t given in, not all the way, that a part of him was still free. It was like the other ready-made identities, the escape plans, the caches of money and clothes. They told him that any day he could leave all this, melt into the crowd, say good-bye to the paperwork and the timetable and the endless, endless wanting.

They told him that he could give it up anytime he liked. Any hour, any minute, any second. And because he could, he didn’t…every hour, every minute, every second. There had to be a reason why.

“Mr. Lipwig! Mr. Lipwig!”

A young clerk dodged and weaved through the busyness of the Mint, and stopped in front of Moist, panting.

“Mr. Lipwig, there’s a lady in the hall to see you and we’ve thanked her for not smoking three times and she’s still doing it!”

The image of the wretched Cribbins vanished, and was replaced with a much better one.

Ah, yes. That reason.

M
ISS
A
DORA
B
ELLE
Dearheart, known to Moist as Spike, was standing in the middle of the banking hall. Moist just headed for the smoke.

“Hello, you,” she said, and that was that. “Can you take me away from all this?” She gestured with her nonsmoking hand. Staff had meaningfully surrounded her with tall brass ashtrays, full of white sand.

Moist shifted a couple of them, and let her out.

“How was—” he began, but she interrupted.

“We can talk on the way.”

“Where are we going?” Moist asked hopefully.

“Unseen University,” said Adora Belle, heading for the door. She had a large woven bag on her shoulder. It was apparently stuffed with straw.

“Not lunch then?” said Moist.

“Lunch can wait. This is important.”

“Oh.”

I
T WAS LUNCHTIME
at Unseen University, where every meal is important. It was hard to find a time when some meal or other was not in progress there. The library was unusually empty, and Adora Belle walked up to the nearest wizard who did not seem gainfully employed and demanded: “I want to see the Cabinet of Curiosity right away!”

“I don’t think we have anything like that,” said the wizard. “Who’s it by?”

“Please don’t lie. My name is Adora Belle Dearheart, so as you can imagine I’ve got a pretty short temper. My father brought me with him when you people asked him to come and look at the Cabinet, about twenty years ago. You wanted to find out how the doors worked. Someone must remember. It was in a big room. A very big room. And it had lots and lots of drawers. And the funny thing about them was—”

The wizard raised his hands quickly, as if to ward off further words. “Can you wait just one minute?” he suggested.

They waited for five. Occasionally, a pointy-hatted head peered around a bookshelf to look at them, and ducked away if it thought it’d been spotted.

Adora Belle lit a fresh cigarette. Moist pointed to a sign which said
IF YOU ARE SMOKING, THANK YOU FOR BEING BEATEN ABOUT THE HEAD
.

“That’s just for show,” said Adora Belle, expelling a stream of blue smoke. “All wizards smoke like chimneys.”

“Not in here, I notice,” said Moist, “and possibly this is because of all the highly inflammable books? It might be a good idea to—”

He felt the swish of the air and got a whiff of rain forest as something heavy swung overhead and disappeared upward into the gloom, now trailing a stream of blue smoke.

“Hey, someone took my—” Adora Belle began, but Moist pushed her out of the way as the thing swung back again and a banana knocked his hat off.

“They are a bit more definite about things here,” he said, picking up his hat. “If it’s any comfort, the Librarian probably intended to hit me. He can be quite gallant.”

“Ah, you’re Mr. Lipwig, I recognize the suit!” said an elderly wizard, who clearly hoped he was appearing as if by magic but, in fact, had appeared as if by stepping out from behind a bookcase. “I know I am the Chair of Indefinite Studies here, for my sins. And you, ahaha, by a process of elimination, will be Miss Dearheart, who remembers the Cabinet of Curiosity?” The Chair of Indefinite Studies stepped closer and looked conspiratorial. He lowered his voice. “I wonder if I can persuade you to forget about it?”

“Not a chance,” said Adora Belle.

“We like to think of it as one of our better-kept secrets, you see…”

“Good. I’ll help you keep it,” said Adora Belle.

“Nothing I could say could change your mind?”

“I don’t know,” said Adora Belle. “Abracadabra, maybe? Got your spell book?” Moist was impressed at that. She could be s…spiky.

“Oh…that type of lady,” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies wearily. “Modern. Oh well, I suppose you’d better come with me, then.”

“What’s this all about please?” hissed Moist, as they followed the wizard.

“I need something translated,” said Adora Belle, “in a hurry.”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Oh yes. Lots. But I need something translated in a hurry.”

“And this cabinet thing can help?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? ‘Perhaps’ could wait until after lunch, couldn’t it? If it was ‘definitely,’ now, I could have seen the point—”

“Oh dear, I’m afraid I’m lost again, and through no fault of my own, I might add,” grumbled the Chair of Indefinite Studies. “I’m afraid, they keep changing the parameters and they do leak so, I don’t know, what with one thing and another you can’t call your door your own these days…”

“What were your sins?” said Moist, giving up on Adora Belle.

“Pardon? Oh dear, what is that stain on the ceiling? Probably best not to know…”

“What were the sins you committed in order to become the Chair of Indefinite Studies?” Moist persisted.

“Oh, I just tend to say that for something to say,” said the wizard, opening a door and slamming it again quickly. “But right now I’m inclined to think I must have committed a few, and they must have been whoppers. It’s just unbearable at the moment, of course. They’re saying that everything in the whole wretched universe is technically indefinable, but what am I supposed to do about it? And of course this damn Cabinet is playing havoc with the place again; I thought we’d seen the last of it fifteen years ago…Oh, yes, mind the squid, we’re a bit puzzled about that, actually…ah, here’s the right door,” the Chair sniffed, “and it’s twenty-five feet away from where it ought to be. What did I tell you…”

The door opened and then it was just a matter of knowing where to start. Moist opted for letting his jaw drop, which was clean and simple.

The room was bigger than it ought to be. No room ought to be more than a mile across, especially when outside in the corridor, which looked quite ordinary if you ignored the giant squid, it appeared to have perfectly normal rooms on either side of it. It shouldn’t have a ceiling so high that you couldn’t see it, either. It simply should not fit.

“It’s quite easy to do this, actually,” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, as they stared. “At least, so they tell me,” he added wistfully. “Apparently, if you shrink time you can expand space.”

“How do they do that?” Moist asked, staring at the…structure that was the Cabinet of Curiosity.

“I’m proud to say I haven’t got the faintest idea,” said the Chair. “Frankly, I’m afraid I got rather lost round about the time we stopped using dribbly candles. I know it’s technically my department but I find it best just to let them get on with it. They do insist on trying to explain things, which of course does not help…”

Moist, if he’d had any mental picture at all, was expecting a cabinet. After all, that’s what it was called, yes?

But what filled most of the impossible room was a tree, in the general shape of a venerable spreading oak. It was a tree in winter; there were no leaves. And then, when the mind had found a familiar, friendly simile, it had to come to terms with the fact that the tree was made of filing cabinets. They appeared to be wooden ones, but this didn’t help much.

High up in what had to be called the branches, wizards on broomsticks were engaged in who-knew-what. They looked like insects.

“It is a bit of a shock when you see it for the first time, isn’t it,” said a friendly voice.

Moist looked around at a young wizard, at least by the standards of wizards, who had round spectacles, a clipboard, and the shiny sort of expression that says: I probably know more than you can possibly imagine, but I am still reasonably happy to talk even to people like you.

“You’re Ponder Stibbons, right?” said Moist. “The only one who does any work in the university?”

Other wizards turned their heads at this, and Ponder went red.

“That’s quite untrue! I just pull my weight, like any other member of the faculty,” he said, but a slight tone to his voice suggested that perhaps the other faculty members had far too much weight and not enough pull. “I am in charge of the Cabinet Project, for my sins.”

“Why? What did you do?” said Moist, at sea in a world of sin. “Something worse?”

“Er…volunteered to take it over,” said Ponder. “And I have to say we have learned more in the last six months than in the past twenty-five years. The Cabinet is a truly amazing artifact.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In the attic, tucked behind a collection of stuffed frogs. We think people gave up trying to make it work years ago. Of course, that was back in the dribbly-candle era,” said Ponder, earning a snort from the Chair of Indefinite Studies. “Modern techno-mancy is somewhat more useful.”

“All right, then,” said Moist, “what does it do?”

“We don’t know.”

“How does it work?”

“We don’t know.”

“Where did it come from?”

“We don’t know.”

“Well, that seems to be all,” said Moist sarcastically. “Oh no, one last one: what is it? And let me tell you, I’m agog.”

“That may be the wrong sort of question to ask,” said Ponder, shaking his head. “Technically it appears to be a classic Bag of Holding but with n mouths, where n is the number of items in an eleven-dimensional universe, which are not currently alive, not pink, and can fit in a cubical drawer 14.14 inches on a side, divided by P.”

“What’s P?”

“That may be the wrong sort of question.”

“When I was a little girl, it was just a magic box,” Adora Belle broke in, in a dreamy voice. “It was in a much smaller room and when it unfolded a few times there was a box with a golem’s foot in it.”

“Ah, yes, in the third iteration,” said Ponder. “They couldn’t get much further than that in those days. Now, of course, we’ve got controlled recursion and aim-driven folding that effectively reduces collateral boxing to 0.13 percent, a twelvefold improvement in the last year alone!”

“That’s great!” said Moist, feeling that it was the least he could do.

“Does Miss Dearheart want to see the item again?” said Ponder, lowering his voice.

Adora Belle still had a faraway look in her eyes.

“I think so,” said Moist. “She’s very big on golems.”

“We were about to fold up for today in any case,” said Ponder. “It won’t hurt to pick up the Foot on the way.”

He took a large megaphone from a bench and held it to his lips.

“THE CABINET CLOSES IN THREE MINUTES, GENTLEMEN. ALL RESEARCHERS INSIDE THE SAFETY AREA NOW, PLEASE. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!”

“Be there or be square?” said Moist, as Ponder lowered the megaphone.

“Oh, a couple of years ago someone ignored the warning and, um, when the Cabinet folded up, he temporarily became a curiosity.”

“You mean he ended up inside a fourteen-inch cube?” said Moist, horrified.

“Mostly. Look, we really would be very happy if you didn’t tell anyone about the Cabinet, thank you. We know how to use it, we think, but it might not be the way it was intended to be used. We don’t know what it’s for, as you put it, or who built it or even if they are completely the wrong questions to ask. Nothing in it is bigger than about fourteen inches square, but we don’t know why this is, or who it is who decides they are curious, or why, and we certainly don’t know why it contains nothing pink. It’s all very embarrassing. I’m sure you can keep a secret, Mr. Lipwig?”