Interesting Times

if you had performed any service of great benefit to magic then I’d be happy to let you keep that hat and, of course, something to wear it on.”
    Rincewind looked crestfallen. Ridcully sighed, and had one last try.
    “So,” he said, “since it seems that you haven’t actually passed your exams OR PERFORMED A SERVICE OF GREAT BENEFIT TO MAGIC, then—”
    “I suppose…I could try to perform some great service?” said Rincewind, with the expression of one who knows that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
    “Really? Hmm? Well, that’s definitely a thought,” said Ridcully.
    “What sort of services are they?”
    “Oh, typically you’d be expected to, for the sake of example, go on a quest, or find the answer to some very ancient and important question— What the hell is that thing with all the legs? ”
    Rincewind didn’t even bother to look around. The expression on Ridcully’s face, as it stared over his shoulder, was quite familiar.
    “Ah,” he said, “I think I know that one.”

    Magic isn’t like maths. Like the Discworld itself, it follows common sense rather than logic. And nor is it like cookery. A cake’s a cake. Mix the ingredients up right and cook them at the right temperature and a cake happens. No casserole requires moonbeams. No soufflé ever demanded to be mixed by a virgin.
    Nevertheless, those afflicted with an enquiring turn of mind have often wondered whether there are rules of magic. There are more than five hundred known spells to secure the love of another person, and they range from messing around with fern seed at midnight to doing something rather unpleasant with a rhino horn at an unspecified time, but probably not just after a meal. Was it possible (the enquiring minds enquired) that an analysis of all these spells might reveal some small powerful common denominator, some meta-spell, some simple little equation which would achieve the required end far more simply, and incidentally come as a great relief to all rhinos?
    To answer such questions Hex had been built, although Ponder Stibbons was a bit uneasy about the word “built” in this context. He and a few keen students had put it together, certainly, but…well…sometimes he thought bits of it, strange though this sounded, just turned up .
    For example, he was pretty sure no one had designed the Phase of the Moon Generator, but there it was, clearly a part of the whole thing. They had built the Unreal Time Clock, although no one seemed to have a very clear idea how it worked.
    What he suspected they were dealing with was a specialized case of formative causation, always a risk in a place like Unseen University, where reality was stretched so thin and therefore blown by so many strange breezes. If that was so, then they weren’t exactly designing something. They were just putting physical clothes on an idea that was already there, a shadow of something that had been waiting to exist.
    He’d explained at length to the Faculty that Hex didn’t think . It was obvious that it couldn’t think. Part of it was clockwork. A lot of it was a giant ant farm (the interface, where the ants rode up and down on a little paternoster that turned a significant cogwheel was a little masterpiece, he thought) and the intricately controlled rushing of the ants through their maze of glass tubing was the most important part of the whole thing.
    But a lot of it had just…accumulated, like the aquarium and wind chimes which now seemed to be essential. A mouse had built a nest in the middle of it all and had been allowed to become a fixture, since the thing stopped working when they took it out. Nothing in that assemblage could possibly think, except in fairly limited ways about cheese or sugar. Nevertheless…in the middle of the night, when Hex was working hard, and the tubes rustled with the toiling ants, and things suddenly went “clonk” for no obvious reason, and the aquarium had been lowered on its davits so that the operator would have something to watch during the long hours…nevertheless, then a man might begin to speculate about what a brain was and what thought was and whether things that weren’t alive could think and whether a brain was just a more complicated version of Hex (or, around 4 A.M. , when bits of the clockwork reversed direction suddenly and the mice squeaked, a less complicated version of Hex) and wonder if the whole produced something not apparently inherent in the parts.
    In short,