Chapter 1

The head librarian of the Unseen University was an orangutan. That’s not to say that he was particularly ugly or to say that he held beliefs that would get him labeled as an ape in more advanced worlds. He was an orange haired, long armed, super strong orangutan. He was accidentally transformed from an ordinary wizard with a taste for thaumaturgical bibliothecography to an orangutan with a taste for thaumaturgical bibliothecography when one of the eight great spells was accidentally set off in the library and he was changed from a bookish professor to a bookish great ape. Ever since then, the Librarian had resisted all efforts to reverse the spell. Having near superhuman strength, arms that were almost two yards long, and prehensile feet gave the Librarian a body that was designed for Library Sciences. All mentioned bodily features of the orangutan came in handy when wrestling aggressive tomes and combative grimoire into their assigned shelves.

For many months, the Librarian and his foundling daughter lived in harmony. He found several books on child rearing in the Speculative Fiction section and applied their lessons and they seemed to work. Feeding the infant was easy; he could get anything he wanted from the university kitchen; however, his first major hurdle was what to do with the waste produced? This child could turn four fluid ounces of goat’s milk into 12 ounces of... other things. How to deal with this ... The Librarian sat watching the infant sleep as he pondered the situation with a banana. For the Librarian, all problems could be solved within the space of time it takes to eat one banana. If the problem isn’t solved within that period of time, it wasn’t his problem to deal with in the first place. As he finished the fruit (botanically it’s a berry, but that’s someone else’s problem), the solution to his quandary came in a flash. He grabbed one of the sleeping infant’s diapers and swung off through the stacks.

Mrs. Witlow, head housekeeper of the Unseen University, was enjoying a steaming cuppa when the Librarian strolled into her office wearing a diaper. “Oh, Doctor Worblehat, it is good to see that you have finally chosen to wear clothing.” The Librarian would normally have been taken aback that she knew his actual name (Dr. Horace Worblehat, LCC (PhD in Library Causality and Collision)) because even in human form he was rarely addressed as that.

“Ook.”

“You need more clothing? We can certainly arrange that. Whatsay a nice waist coat and...”

“Ook.”

“No waist coat. That’s fine, but we could craft a pleasant set of trousers and a shirt...”

“Eek!”

“Just the nappies? If you insist...”

Shortly, the Librarian headed back to the library with several dozen diapers and was plotting a method of obtaining clothing for the child. He was nearly caught one afternoon in the dining hall during third lunch.

“I say, Librarian! Why the taste for goats’ milk so suddenly?”

“Ook.”

“You don’t say,” said the Archchancellor of the University, Mustrum Ridcully. “Then why stopper the bottle with the finger from a rubber glove?”

“Ook.”

“Really! I never would have considered that! Good show, carry on.”

The Librarian knuckled his way back to the library. He got away with it this time, but the Archchancellor was on to him. He had to do something with the baby before the Archchancellor realized that something was amiss. He worked hard at keeping the child a secret, but she was growing fast and soon she was clinging on to his fur with her fingers and toes as he inventoried the books. She learned to climb before she learned to walk, but it was getting dangerous. Professor Rincewind, his former assistant and now the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, stumbled across the child who was clinging to a bookshelf one afternoon. “What is this?” he asked, pointing at the Librarian’s foster daughter with a trembling finger; the professor who traveled the entire discworld and survived everything was terrified of the child.