Description: Chapter One MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE In the airy, crowded silence of the forest, magic was hunting magic on silent feet. A wizard may be safely defined as a large ego which comes to a point at the top. That is why wizards do not blend well. That would mean looking like other people, and wizards do not wish to look like other people. Wizards aren''t other people. And therefore, in these thick woods, full of dappled shade, new growth and birdsong, the wizards who were in theory blending in, in fact blended out. They''d understood the theory of camouflage - at least they''d nodded when it was being explained - but had then got it wrong. For example, take this tree. It was short, and it had big gnarly roots. There were interesting holes in it. The leaves were a brilliant green. Moss hung from its branches. One hairy loop of grey-green moss, in particular, looked rather like a beard. Which was odd, because a lump in the wood above it looked rather like a nose. And then there was a blemish in the wood that could have been eyes ... But overall this was definitely a tree. In fact, it was a lot more like a tree than a tree normally is. Practically no other tree in the forest looked so tree-like as this tree. It projected a sensation of extreme barkness, it exuded leafidity. Pigeons and squirrels were queuing up to settle in the branches. There was even an owl. Other trees were just sticks with greenery on compared to the sylvanic verdanity of this tree... ... which raised a branch, and shot another tree. A spinning orange ball spun through the air and went splat! on a small oak. Something happened to the oak. Bits of twig and shadows and bark which had clearly made up an image of a gnarled old tree now equally clearly became the face of Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, Master of Unseen University (for the extremely magical) and running with orange paint. ''Gotcha!'' shouted the Dean, causing the owl to leap from his hat. This was lucky for the owl, because a travelling glob of blue paint removed the hat a moment later. ''Ahah! Take that, Dean!'' shouted an ancient beech tree behind him as, changing without actually changing, it became the figure of the Lecturer in Recent Runes. The Dean spun around, and a blob of orange paint hit him in the chest. ''Eat permitted colourings!'' yelled an excited wizard. The Dean glared across the clearing to a crabapple tree which was, now, the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ''What? I''m on your side, you damn fool!'' he said. ''You can''t be! You made such a good target!''* The Dean raised his staff. Instantly, half a dozen orange and blue blobs exploded all over him as other hidden wizards let loose. Archchancellor Ridcully wiped paint out of his eyes. ''All right, you fellows,'' he sighed. ''Enough''s enough for today. Time for tea, eh?'' It was so hard, he reflected, to get wizards to understand the concept of ''team spirit''. It simply wasn''t part of wizardly thinking. A wizard could grasp the idea of, say, wizards versus some other group, but they lost their grip when it came to the idea of wizards against wizards. Wizard against wizards, yes, they had no trouble with that. They''d start out as two teams, but as soon as there was any engagement they''d get all excited and twitchy and shoot other wizards indiscriminately. If you were a wizard then, deep down, you knew that every other wizard was your enemy. If their wands had been left unfettered, rather than having been locked to produce only paint spells - Ridcully had been very careful about that - then this forest would have been on fire by now. Still, the fresh air was doing them good. The University was far too stuffy, Ridcully had always thought. Out here there was sun, and birdsong, and a nice warm breeze-- --a cold breeze. The temperature was plunging. Ridcully looked down at his staff. Ice crystals were forming on it. ''Turned a bit nippy all of a sudden, hasn''t it?'' he said, his breath tingling in the frigid air. And then the world changed. Rincewind, Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, was cataloguing his rock collection. This was, these days, the ground state of his being. When he had nothing else to do, he sorted rocks. His predecessors in the post had spent many years bringing back small examples of cruel or unusual geography and had never had time to catalogue them, so he saw this as his duty. Besides, it was wonderfully dull. He felt that there was not enough dullness in the world. Rincewind was the least senior member of the faculty. Indeed, the Archchancellor had made it clear that in seniority terms he ranked somewhat lower than the things that went ''click'' in the woodwork. He got no salary and had complete insecurity of tenure. On the other hand, he got his laundry done free, a place at mealtimes and a bucket of coal a day. He also had his own office, no one ever visited him and he was strictly forbidden from attempting to teach anything to anyone. In academic terms, therefore, he considered himself pretty lucky. An additional reason for this was that he was in fact getting seven buckets of coal a day and so much clean laundry that even his socks were starched. This was because no one else had realised that Blunk, the coal porter, who was far too surly to read, delivered the buckets strictly according to the titles on the study doors. The Dean, therefore, got one bucket. So did the Bursar. Rincewind got seven because the Archchancellor had found him a useful recipient of all the titles, chairs and posts which (because of ancient bequests, covenants and, in one case at least, a curse) the University was obliged to keep filled. In most instances no one knew what the hell they were for or wanted anything to do with them, in case some clause somewhere involved students, so they were given to Rincewind. Every morning, therefore, Blunk stoically delivered seven buckets to the joint door of the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, the Chair of Experimental Serendipity, the Reader in Slood Dynamics, the Fretwork Teacher,* the Chair for the Public Misunderstanding of Magic, the Professor of Virtual Anthropology and the Lecturer in Approximate Accuracy ... who usually opened the door in his underpants - that is to say, opened the door in the wall whilst wearing his underpants - and took the coal happily, even if it was a sweltering day. At Unseen University you had budgets, and if you didn''t use up everything you''d been given you wouldn''t get as much next time. If this meant you roasted all summer in order to be moderately warm during the winter, then that was a small price to pay for proper fiscal procedures. On this day, Rincewind carried the buckets inside and tipped the coal on the heap in the corner. Something behind him went ''gloink''. It was a small, subtle and yet curiously intrusive sound, and it accompanied the appearance, on a shelf above Rincewind''s desk, of a beer bottle where no beer bottle had hitherto been. He took it down and stared at it. It had recently contained a pint of Winkle''s Old Peculiar. There was absolutely nothing ethereal about it, except that it was blue. The label was the wrong colour and full of spelling mistakes but it was mostly there, right down to the warning in tiny, tiny print: May Contain Nuts.+ Now it contained a note. He removed this with some care, and unrolled it, and read it. Then he stared at the thing beside the beer bottle. It was a glass globe, about a foot across, and contained, floating within it, a smaller blue-and-fluffy-white globe. The smaller globe was a world, and the space inside the globe was infinitely large. The world and indeed the whole universe of which it was part had been created by the wizards of Unseen University more or less by accident, and the fact that it had ended up on a shelf in Rincewind''s tiny study was an accurate indication of how interested they were in it once the initial excitement had worn off. Rincewind watched the world, sometimes, through an omniscope. It mostly had ice ages, and was less engrossing than an ant farm. Sometimes he shook it up to see if it would make it interesting, but this never seemed to have much of an effect. Now he looked back at the note. It was extremely puzzling. And the university had someone to deal with things like that. Ponder Stibbons, like Rincewind, also had a number of jobs. However, instead of aspiring to seven, he perspired at three. He had long been the Reader in Invisible Writings, had drifted into the new post as Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and had walked in all innocence into the office of Praelector, which is a university title meaning ''person who gets given the nuisance jobs''. That meant that he was in charge in the absence of the senior members of the faculty. And, currently, this being the spring break, they were absent. And so were the students. The University was, therefore, running at near peak efficiency. Ponder smoothed out the beer-smelling paper and read: TELL STIB

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