Imagine ...

... a world that is flat and circular, home to a unique network of living creatures.

Now pan out.

The world is supported on the back of four huge elephants, which is handy when you think about it. Those four elephants, in turn, stand on the back of a turtle so large that words, as they often do, simply fail to describe.

Impossible, you say, but on what grounds? The laws of science? Which can always be refined and are generally more guidelines than rules. This is the wonder and strength of science. Nothing is sacrosanct. Contrary to popular opinion, not all the great explorers are out there naming mountains, which never asked to be named and, besides, the locals did that year's ago. Some of them sit in candlelit rooms, refusing to accept the constraints of the possible, questioning the very fabric of the universe. Exploring with the mind is even more arduous than with the body.

What this means is that a more accurate description of possible is 'what we understand.' Which, by extension, defines impossible as 'what we don't understand.' When it comes to understanding, what people know doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy universe. That makes for a lot of impossible.

So, yes, the Discworld maybe impossible, but only for those who confuse guidelines with rules and inconceivable with impossible. For the explorers, it's just a possible waiting to be discovered.

Question everything, but always remember that whilst scepticism is important it's dangerous in the wrong hands. Asking 'why' is vital but if you don't ask 'why not' you're only seeing half the picture. And always be suspicious of anyone that relies on accepted thought. Who knows whose thought you're accepting?

There is, of course, another definition of impossible - the one people use all the time when confronted by challenge. This definition is generally translated as 'can't be done,' which is the convenient version. The full version is 'can't be done with the resources on offer.' A lot less would get achieved if it weren't for the people who understood the total concept. The secret to making the impossible possible comes down to resourcing - and that usually means them. If you want something done, ask a busy person ...

... or a witch, which is pretty much the same thing.

Now pan in.

Everything is connected. Even the obviously unconnected, if you think large enough and understand the systems of connectedness. You just need the right kind of mind. This fits one job description perfectly. What you really need, naturally, is a librarian.

And what the Librarian needed, other than extra shelve space and a blissful absence of library visitors, of course, was help.

Magrat supposed there had always been some trace of education and learning in Lancre, though the more she thought about some of the locals the smaller that trace became. Some, for example, had never read any chapter on hygiene, and as for effective management of the gene pool... there were hamlets out there where the family tree had no branches and animal husbandry took on a whole different meaning. She had been determined to change that.

The local school was doing its best, and what the children needed right now was good role models. This had led Magrat into the realm of adult education. She was treading the path of many admirable souls before her, most of who had suffered from the same condition she did. The belief that good intentions will surmount any obstacle. The problem is that whenever you deal with people, despite your most fervent wishes, they will continue to behave as people. And, when it boiled down to it, most people were just a series of obstacles stitched together over a lifetime.

Her adult education classes had largely been a dismal failure, except for Mr Scroff, and she was pretty sure the only thing he'd actually learned was that if he stuck through to the end he'd get a cup of tea and a biscuit. Most people weren't that strong. Oh, they thought they were, a biscuit was a powerful temptation in Lancre, but most wilted in the first hour of Magrat's crusade against ignorance. The only reason Mr Scroff has hung in there was because of a persistent hearing problem which, for the first time in his life, he felt grateful for.

There is nothing wrong with passion in your endeavours, but it needs more than that. Every good teacher is part diplomat, part hunter and part Ghengis Ogg*. You need to understand the darkness to overcome it, and to understand it you need to have a streak of it yourself.

* A legendary figure who swept to power out of the Ramtops and at one point ruled the world. At least according to the reliable and unbiased source of Nanny Ogg.

The other thing she, and more than a few others in the education field, had yet to appreciate was that education wasn't the same as learning. At least by her definition of education. This is the fundamental flaw of definitions, they reflect the definer, not the definee. For example, no one attended her classes on the importance of crop rotation because they all claimed to be too busy rearranging their paddocks. The ironclad way to ensure an empty adult education classroom (except for Mr Scroff) was to start by pointing out how ignorant people were and then proceeding to demonstrate that you can have intelligence and an education without displaying a scrap of wisdom.

But it was not all doom and gloom. She'd recently visited Ankh Morpork, where she'd witnessed the emergence of the public library. To a soul attuned to learning it had been a moment of pure wonder. Magrat had caught the disease and taken it home with her. She'd had no problems convincing her husband, King Verence, of the need for a public library. He, too, suffered a similar condition to Magrat when it came to educating the population. The population itself quietly put up with all of this because it kept the king busy and everyone knows that a ruler with time on their hands is a dangerous thing.

And so the first public library in Lancre was constructed. Even this may have proved to be a failure if Magrat hadn't fallen sick with a dreadful bout of the flu. In the end she'd had to spend some time at the coast so the sea air could clear her lungs. She'd had quite specific plans about the educational content of the collection and the rules the library would have to operate under, but during her enforced sojourn something quite remarkable happened. Despite there being a total absence of books people started wandering in and sitting down. Then one day a rather battered copy of Death on the Ankh turned up. No one knew where it had come from but soon it was the talk of the town. It was true that most locals were, to use the high falutin' term, illiterate, but the handful that could read began sharing the tale with those that couldn't and the next thing you knew people were starting to wonder if there might be something to this reading thing after all.

Then another book appeared - The Milkmaid and the Farmer. Suddenly the talk of the town shifted from crime to romance and the value of being able to read rose, as did a few other things.

So it kept happening. The more people read, the more books appeared. Mostly they were the sort that railed against the principles Magrat would have applied in developing the collection. They were educational, but only in the broadest sense. The difference between what was unfolding and her approach was that people were actually borrowing the books. What did go almost unnoticed was that some of the burgeoning content appeared to have a more traditional education bent. Sometimes the quickest way to achieve your goal is to go the longest way, especially when people are involved. The best way to achieve social change is to include society along the way and the most important thing to understand about a public library is the word public. This is not necessarily an easy gig for a librarian bought up on the sanctity of books and the rule of order.

The Librarian was a pragmatist. It had helped that for a considerable part of his life he had been an orangutan. Orangutans have a very down-to-earth (or treetops, to be more accurate) view of survival. If something needed fixing it got fixed and if it had to be broken first before it was fixed then so be it. Breaking things when you have the sort of upper body strength that makes a tiger think twice was also a distinct advantage.

Not only did the Librarian have a deep understanding of the nature of public libraries, he was also an adept at using L-Space. Just as the world is connected, so are all libraries through the mysterious medium of L-Space. A librarian with this understanding and a willingness to take risks can open up an avenue of great power. Sure, there are dangers. Many an intrepid explorer of L-Space has fallen victim to roving packs of thesauri or walked into the lair of an enraged miscatalogued title, but if you survive the rewards are enormous.

The Librarian, like all good examples of his profession, was a researcher at heart. What he had discovered was that though all libraries were connected getting to many of them was far from easy. He had no problems visiting other university libraries. They were so large they had their own 'gravitational' pull. Sadly, this had been rarely the case for private libraries. Then along came public libraries and, wonder of wonders, they shone like beacons in the L-Space universe, no matter how small. The Librarian's theory was that public libraries weren't just a storehouse for books, they were a belief system in their own right. The public believed in them as something much more. And unlike belief in gods, where all the power lies with the deity, a vital part of this belief was owned by the believer. Even those that tended not to visit libraries still believed in them and in their own right to have access to one. It was a perfect feedback system and that made public libraries major hubs in L-Space.

It also kept the Librarian very busy. Like any apostle he began to spread the good words. If he could establish a public library somewhere it opened a new doorway in L-Space and that opened up even further opportunities. It has been said that a library can take you to new worlds. Never was a truer word spoken. Curiously, he'd also discovered that all you needed to open the doorway was to create a space and call it a public library*. Obviously, books were an important part of a library, but you could sort that out afterwards.

* But not an Information Hub, a Knowledge Store or Ideas Marketplace. These branches of the library tree were destined to wither, as they should. Anybody who thinks otherwise has no understanding of the power of the word 'library' and should definitely avoid a marketing career.

Lancre was proving to be one of his success stories. With a little nudge the public library had been embraced by the locals and gods help anyone who tried to take it away.

Right now though, he needed the library doorway as much as Lancre needed its library.

On her return Magrat found, to her dismay, that the public library was a huge success, but not at all how it should have been. Instead of being a place of thoughtful study, filled with important treatises written by learned academics, it was filled with works that had questionable literary merit ... and with people. Instead of collections labelled Philosophy, Natural Philosophy (called science on other worlds that sacrificed beauty of description for accuracy) and Literary Classics there were sections called Crime, Romance and, horror of horrors, Horror.

'I'm going down there to re-arrange the collection,' she declared on her first day back.

'Do you think that's wise?' observed her husband, Verence, cautiously. Years of kinging had led him to the realisation that if his subjects really liked something taking it away or changing it would not led to a happy outcome. Some royalty still subscribes to the ignore-public-opinion approach, but it's getting harder to find examples of them each year.

'It's for the good of the people,' she declared.

Verence groaned quietly to himself. 'The good of the people' was a phrase to light the bonfires of revolution and rates up there with declarations of cake consumption. Those who pursuit the good of the people invariably had a narrow definition of Good and, for that matter, People.

'Perhaps before we do that we should visit the library together,' he suggested.

Magrat nodded, already lost in the world of reclassification. 'We'll take Esmeralda with us.'

Magrat and Verence were dedicated to good parenting, which largely confounds the process of raising a child. It also takes time and resources. The simple declaration of taking their infant subsequently involved ten minutes of complicated packing of complicated items whose primary purpose was to support the burgeoning commercial field of parenting. It would lead to great debates for future archaeologists when they tried to figure out exactly what function the various devices served. So the wheels of industry keep turning.

The library was dark and, as anybody who has ever visited a library after hours knows, mysterious. Barely had the couple divested themselves of their child-related apparel than it got even more mysterious. It started with a glow above the War Stories collection, which quickly turned to a rattling of the shelves and then, with an inappropriately loud pop, the library was suddenly filled with a lot more orangutan than it had been moments earlier.

'Oh my,' said Verence.

'Ook,' said the Librarian.

'We need Nanny,' said Magrat.

Nanny Ogg had seen a lot of the world, sometimes without leaving the bedroom. Along the way she had become something of an expert in languages. Her technique typically involved speaking loudly, using a style usually reserved for dialogue with children and a total bastardisation of the target language. Knowledge or experience of the language was not generally in evidence. Strangely enough, despite being culturally inappropriate in almost every conceivable way, it seemed to work.

She had been having a nap when the door rattled, dreaming the sort of dreams that kept curly hair growing strong, but she went from asleep to awake in a heartbeat. All witches have this power. One of Nanny's rare skills, the sort that made her who she was, was to take her imagination with her when she awoke.

'Right,' she said, not wasting any time on speculation, 'let's see what the ape has to say for himself.'

Plenty as it turned out. Orangutan is a language limited in vocabulary but rich in nuance. Nanny was comfortable with nuance. Magrat suspected just about everything the older woman said was a double (or possibly single) entendre, though her version of nuance was often much cruder than the listener's version. Even using the word cruder, for example.

'Ok,' she said after a lengthy and animated conversation with the Librarian, which had involved plenty of arm waving and teeth baring. Nobody can wave arms and bare teeth like an orangutan, though Nanny made an admirable effort. 'Here's the problem. The Librarian has heard through the library network, or possibly his own skin, that the forests of Bhangbhangduc are being cleared at a wicked rate. Know anything about the country?'

'It's part of the Agatean Empire, or what the Agatean Empire used to be. I believe it's a Republic now. Though the country, or whatever it is, tends to operate quite independently by all accounts. I believe it's currently being ruled by some sort of noble, but it's quite possibly in name only. I hear there are some powerful syndicates in that part of the world,' replied Verence who was passionately dedicated to global politics, despite the fact that on a global scale Lancre was more of a marble. 'The Biads,' he added with a shudder.

'And it's the home of all wild orangutans,' added Magrat, whose passion was towards the natural order of things, whether these things wanted her passion or not. 'Those forests are also the lungs of the world.'

Nanny and Verence looked at each other. Neither understood what Magrat was referring to or how the world could be described anatomically (except in amusing proportions, of course, at least by Nanny) but what they both knew, with an ironclad certainty, was that the last thing they needed right now was Magrat explaining to them. With a mild feeling of cowardice, they nodded.

'It needs to stop,' continued Nanny, 'But he needs help. He thought about the wizards, and then he thought some more. Then he remembered visiting Lancre and the witches. He figured we might be better at solving the problem than the wizards. He added that the wizards are very good at problems but their skill lies more in creatin' than solvin'. Damn, I wish Granny hadn't the indecency to go and pass away. We need her now. I need her now.'

'Well, I could launch a diplomatic mission ...'

'No time for that,' interrupted Nanny. 'Diplomacy has its place but right now the saws are movin' a lot faster. We need something more cuttin' than a strongly worded letter.'

'Well, what do you suggest?' the king replied in a terse, disgruntled tone. This was wasted on Nanny, who had experienced a lot more grunt in this world than Verence would care or dare to dream of.

'Us,' she replied.

Much to Verence's disappointment it was remarkably easy to arrange things for his extended absence. Most rulers like to consider themselves as indispensable without thinking about how the world had survived before they'd arrived on the scene. History is a sobering reminder of dispensability, which is why so many like to stay drunk on present power.

There had been heated debate regarding the inclusion of Magrat in the party. Verence has taken the firm position that in no way should she be travelling. This meant it took him slightly longer to cave in. Naturally, Esmeralda was included. By the time total submission had occurred Nanny had returned to the library. She hadn't packed anything more than an overnight bag. Nanny had found that the only thing she really needed to take on any journey was her personality. It was amazing what people would give her after a short time in her presence. Nanny possessed many character traits - a sense of shame was not one of them.

They rendezvoused in the library. They could have met, but as Nanny said, a rendezvous sounded a lot more promising. Not, she had to admit to herself, that you should take promises associated with rendezvouses too seriously. They were more of a traditional garnish, part of the game. Nanny had made and heard many promises at rendezvouses over the years and thank the gods none of them had come to pass. The Librarian was there waiting, pacing as only an orangutan can. He Ooked at Nanny and she translated.

'We're heading to the private library of the Gong. He's the ruling noble. It's only possible to travel there because the library is large enough to find. The Librarian says they don't have a public library system. They maybe a republic now but it ain't so long ago they weren't the sort of society that appreciates educated peasants. We need to avoid the Gong and he's not sure about the librarian there either. We'll be met by Lei Ching. She's a cataloguer in the library, but more importantly, she's a commoner. This makes her a nobody, so nobody else will pay her any attention.

'Oh, and Librarian says hold on tight and try not to think about what you've just eaten. You'll probably find out soon enough anyway.'

Nanny grabbed the Librarian's hand and she in turn grabbed Magrat's. Verence completed the primate chain and with an 'Ook' that could have meant anything from Woo Hoo to Oh My God, they stepped forward into the dangerous world of books.