Interesting Times

Ponder was just a little bit worried.
    He sat down at the keyboard. It was almost as big as the rest of Hex, to allow for the necessary levers and armatures. The various keys allowed little boards with holes in them to drop briefly into slots, forcing the ants into new paths.
    It took him some time to compose the problem, but at last he braced one foot on the structure and tugged on the Enter lever.
    The ants scurried on new paths. The clockwork started to move. A small mechanism which Ponder would be prepared to swear had not been there yesterday, but which looked like a device for measuring wind speed, began to spin.
    After several minutes a number of blocks with occult symbols on them dropped into the output hopper.
    “Thank you,” said Ponder, and then felt extremely silly for saying so.
    There was a tension to the thing, a feeling of mute straining and striving towards some distant and incomprehensible goal. As a wizard, it was something that Ponder had only before encountered in acorns: a tiny soundless voice which said, yes, I am but a small, green, simple object—but I dream about forests.
    Only the other day Adrian Turnipseed had typed in “Why?” to see what happened. Some of the students had forecast that Hex would go mad trying to work it out; Ponder had expected Hex to produce the message ?????, which it did with depressing frequency.
    Instead, after some unusual activity among the ants, it had laboriously produced: “Because.”
    With everyone else watching from behind a hastily overturned desk, Turnipseed had volunteered: “Why anything?”
    The reply had finally turned up: “Because Everything. ????? Eternal Domain Error. +++++ Redo From Start +++++.”
    No one knew who Redo From Start was, or why he was sending messages. But there were no more funny questions. No one wanted to risk getting answers.
    It was shortly afterwards that the thing like a broken umbrella with herrings on it appeared just behind the thing like a beachball that went “parp” every fourteen minutes.
    Of course, books of magic developed a certain… personality , derived from all that power in their pages. That’s why it was unwise to go into the Library without a stick. And now Ponder had helped build an engine for studying magic. Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer, too.
    He was beginning to suspect that Hex was redesigning itself.
    And he’d just said “Thank you.” To a thing that looked like it had been made by a glassblower with hiccups.
    He looked at the spell it had produced, hastily wrote it down and hurried out.
    Hex clicked to itself in the now empty room. The thing that went “parp” went parp. The Unreal Time Clock ticked sideways.
    There was a rattle in the output slot.
    “Dont mention it. ++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.”

    It was five minutes later.
    “Fascinatin’,” said Ridcully. “Sapient pearwood, eh?” He knelt down in an effort to see underneath.
    The Luggage backed away. It was used to terror, horror, fear, and panic. It had seldom encountered interest before.
    The Archchancellor stood up and brushed himself off.
    “Ah,” he said, as a dwarfish figure approached. “Here’s the gardener with the stepladder. The Dean’s in the chandelier, Modo.”
    “I’m quite happy up here, I assure you,” said a voice from the ceiling regions. “Perhaps someone would be kind enough to pass me up my tea?”
    “And I was amazed the Senior Wrangler could ever fit in the sideboard,” said Ridcully. “It’s amazin’ how a man can fold himself up.”
    “I was just—just inspecting the silverware,” said a voice from the depths of a drawer.
    The Luggage opened its lid. Several wizards jumped back hurriedly.
    Ridcully examined the shark teeth stuck here and there in the woodwork.
    “Kills sharks, you say?” he said.
    “Oh, yes,” said Rincewind. “Sometimes it drags them ashore and jumps up and down on them.”
    Ridcully was impressed. Sapient pearwood was very rare in the countries between the Ramtops and the Circle Sea. There were probably no living trees left. A few wizards were lucky enough to have inherited staffs made out of it.
    Economy of emotion was one of Ridcully’s strong points. He had been impressed. He had been fascinated. He’d even, when the thing had landed in the middle of the wizards and caused the Dean’s remarkable feat of vertical