Intelligence without vision¶

Commander Vimes had once asked Vetinari what he actually wanted for Ankh-Morpork. Not the usual answer about stability or prosperity, but what the city could or should become.

Vetinari had looked at him with those cool grey eyes and said, “Become? My dear Commander, the city already is.”

That had been the end of that conversation, and Vimes had left feeling vaguely as if he’d asked the wrong question, though he couldn’t quite work out what the right one might have been.

The thing about Vetinari, thought Drumknott (who did most of the actual thinking about Vetinari, it being imprudent to let the man know you were thinking about him), was that he was possibly the cleverest person in the city. He could solve the Times crossword in eight minutes. He spoke seven languages. He could calculate compound interest in his head and remember the birthdates of every Guild Master’s children.

He used all this intelligence to ensure that tomorrow looked exactly like yesterday, only slightly more so.

“The sanitation system is failing in the Shades,” Drumknott had once reported.

“Then we shall commission a report,” Vetinari replied.

“The Seamstresses are demanding better street lighting for safety.”

“Refer them to the Guild of Lamplighters. I’m sure they can form a joint working group.”

“The Watch reports that thefts are up seventeen percent.”

“Is Sergeant Colon still employed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I fail to see the problem. Consistency, Drumknott. That’s the key.”

The genius of it was that everything worked. The Post Office delivered letters. The Watch arrested criminals (some of them). The Guilds regulated their trades. The Clacks towers clicked away. Money changed hands, goods moved from place to place, and people woke up each morning knowing roughly what to expect.

Except that the Shades were still a cesspit, the wealth gap was now a wealth canyon, and the Grand Trunk Company was burning through employees faster than the Alchemists’ Guild burned through eyebrows. But these were, in Vetinari’s view, features of a functioning city rather than problems requiring solutions.

“Sometimes,” Drumknott dared to say once, “I wonder if we couldn’t do more.”

“More of what?” Vetinari asked, genuinely curious.

Drumknott opened his mouth, then closed it. That was the question, wasn’t it? More of what? Progress implied direction, and direction implied… well, someone deciding where to go. And that sounded dangerously like ideology.

Better to keep the trains running on time, even if the tracks went in circles.

“Never mind, sir,” Drumknott said.

“Quite right,” said Vetinari, returning to his paperwork. There was a proposal here to reduce child labour in the textile mills from fourteen hours per day to twelve. It would need proper consideration. Perhaps a commission. These things took time.

Time was something Vetinari had plenty of. Vision, it turned out, was optional.