‘They were able to mess around with Mr Darwin’s voyage!’
‘By doing lots of small and rather stupid things at great effort, sir. They don’t react well to adversity. They get petulant. From what Professor Rincewind tells us, many hundreds of them have to combine to perform even a simple physical action.’
He stood back and indicated some items laid out on a dining table.
‘There is some evidence that Auditors, being embodiments of physical laws, find it hard to deal with nonsensical or contradictory instructions. Therefore, I have prepared these.’
He flourished something that looked like a table-tennis bat. On it were printed the words: ‘Do Not Read This Sign.’
‘That works, does it?’ said the Dean, doubtfully.
‘It’s said to put their minds into a fugue state, Dean. They feel confused and alone, and evaporate instantly. Being alone means having a sense of self, and any Auditor that develops an individuality is said to die instantly.’
‘And the catapult bows?’ What are they for?’ said the Archchancellor, slapping the Dean’s hand off one of them.
‘In addition, it is possible that a collective of Auditors with sufficient presence in the material world may develop crude physical senses, and so I have adapted some catapult bows to fire a mixture of intense, er, stimuli. Old references suggest chilli, essence of Wahoonie or Blissberry blossoms, but modern thinking inclines to Higgs & Meakins Luxury Assortment.’
‘Chocolate?’ said Ridcully.
‘They don’t like it, sir.’
‘But those things can live in empty space and inside stars, man!’
‘Where chocolate is significantly absent, sir,’ said Ponder, patiently. ‘They keep away from it. Also, it comes handily packed. They particularly don’t like the Strawberry Whirl.’
Ridcully picked up a bow, pointed it at a wizard, and fired. There was a distant ‘ow!’
‘Hmm. Spreads nicely on impact,’ he said. ‘Well done, Mr Stibbons. I’m impressed. You are in charge.’
The Dean bridled at this. ‘I protest! I am the Dean, when all is said and done!’
‘Oh, all right, Dean, you can come! But, and I want to make myself absolutely clear, you are not to point anything at anything unless I give you a clear instruction, understood?’
‘Yes, Mustrum,’ said the Dean meekly.
‘Furthermore, you will not, at any point, wave your weapon in the air and shout “choc and load”. Is that clear? I say that because I can practically see the silly words forming in your head!’
‘That’s a vile calumny!’ the Dean shouted.
‘I hope so. Stibbons, wait here with the proctors and see no harm comes to Mr Darwin. Hex, you know where to send us. Invisibly, if you please!’
While Charles Darwin was sitting in a blue haze in Unseen University, a slightly younger Charles Darwin was staring out at the rain, noting idly that the rain sounded a little like whispering.
A drawback of invisibility is that no one can see you; it is in fact the main drawback if there is a group of you –
‘– that was my foot!’
‘Who is that?’
‘Look where you ’re going!’
‘And what help will that be?’
‘Keep it down, you fellows! He’ll hear you!’
At which point, the wall in the corner dissolved and brilliant light shone through. Beetles of all sizes and colours poured into the study in a shimmering torrent.
A figure that the wizards recognised stepped though the hole and looked around him with an air of amiable bewilderment. He had a slightly lopsided circlet of leaves on his head, and glowed with the light of deity.
‘Mr Darwin?’ he said, as the figure in the corner turned and stared. ‘I understand you are studying evolution and are currently perplexed?’
‘Look behind him!’ Ridcully whispered.
The unseen wizards stared into the flickering hole. There was sand, and sea in the distance, a suggestion of moving shadows …
‘After me,’ Ridcully hissed, as an astonished Darwin dropped to his knees. ‘Let’s get them …’
The wizards poured through the camiloop, while behind them an elderly voice said: ‘Of course, selection is, ahaha, anything but natural. Take, for example, a species of parasitic wasp …’
The sand boiled. Sometimes handfuls of it fountained into the air. One invisible person can move with stealth and speed. Half a dozen invisible people are an accident waiting to happen again and again.
‘This is not being our finest hour,’ said the voice of Ridcully. ‘Every time I start to stand up someone else treads on me! Can’t Hex sort this out?’
‘We’re back in the real world,’ said the invisible Dean. ‘Hex’s power isn’t so strong here. It’ll take him some time to find us. Would you mind getting off my leg. Thank you so very much.’
‘That’s not me, I’m over here. I don’t see why it’s a problem. We were in another world, after all!’
‘Roundworld is right inside the High Energy Magic Building,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘We’re thousands of miles way, I suspect. Could I possibly suggest we all endeavour to crawl away in different directions? If you, Dean, head for that little bush with the red flowers, and Rincewind – where’s Rincewind?’
‘Here,’ said a muffled voice from under the sand.
‘Sorry … you head for that rock there …’
By degrees, with only the occasional curse, the wizards were able to get to their unseen feet.
‘This is Mono Island, I recognise that mountain,’ said Ridcully. ‘Look out for—’
‘Why didn’t we just bop him on the head?’ said the Dean. ‘Just a tap on the noggin? Then we could have dragged him back here, end of problem.’
‘But it’s quantum,’ said Rincewind. ‘We have to deal with what’s happened. If we stop it happening before it happens, the other things we’ve …’ he hesitated. ‘Look, it’s quantum. Believe me, I’d prefer it the other way.’
‘Anyway, you can’t just bop gods on the head,’ said Ridcully, now a faint outline against the distant ocean. ‘It doesn’t usually work and it causes talk. The other gods would be bound to hear about it, too.’
‘So? None of them like him. They exiled him here after he invented the hermit elephant!’ said the Dean, who was also fading into view.
‘It’s the look of the thing,’ said Ridcully. ‘They don’t want to encourage deicide. Besides, look up there …’
‘Oh dear,’ said Rincewind. ‘Auditors …’
A grey cloud was rolling down the mountain. As it neared, it contracted upon itself, growing darker.
‘They’ve learned things,’ said Ridcully. ‘They’ve never done that before. Oh, well … Rincewind, first line of defence, if you please. And hurry!’
Rincewind, who’d always operated on the assumption that if you carried a weapon you were giving the enemy something extra to hit you with, held up a placard. It read: GO AWAY.
‘Stibbons says it should work,’ said Ridcully, uncertainly.
The Auditors drew closer, merging until, now, only half a dozen were left. They were dark, and full of menace.
‘Ah, they probably aren’t the reading sort, then,’ said Ridcully. ‘Gentlemen, it’s chocolate time …’
It had to be said that the most of the wizards were not natural aimers. A spell went where you wanted it to go. You just had to wave in the general direction. They’d never learned to be serious about pointing.
Some shots went home. When several hit an Auditor it let out a thin scream and began to break up into its component robes, which then evaporated. But one, slightly large than the others, zigged and zagged through the tumbling chocolates. Auditors did learn here … and the wizards were running out of chocolate.
‘Hold it,’ said the Dean, pointing his bow.
The shape stopped.
‘Ah,’ said the Dean, happily. ‘Ha, I expect you are wondering, eh, I expect you are wondering, indeed, if I
have any chocolate left? And as a matter of fact I’m no—’
‘No,’ said the Auditor, drifting forward.
‘What? Pardon?’
‘I am not wondering if you have any chocolate left,’ said the dark apparition. ‘You have none left. The Higgs & Meakins Luxury Assortment comprises two each of: Walnut Whips, Strawberry Whirls, Caramel Bars, Violet Creams, Coffee Creams, Cherry Whips and Walnut Clusters and one each of Almond Delight, Vanilla Cup, Peach Cream, Coffee Fondue and Lemon Extravaganza.’
The Dean smiled the smile of a man whose Hogswatches had come all at once. He raised the bow.
‘Then be so kind as to say good day to the Nougat Surprise!’
There was a twang. The sweet flew. For a moment the Auditor wavered, and the wizards held their breath. Then, with the slightest of whimpers, it faded into nothing.
‘Everyone forgets the Nougat Surprise,’ said the Dean, turning to the other wizards. ‘I suppose it’s because it’s so irredeemably awful.’
There was nothing but the sound of the sea for a few seconds. Then:
‘Er … well done, Dean,’ said Ridcully.
‘Thank you, Archchancellor.’
‘A little too showy, nevertheless. I mean, you didn’t have to chat to the thing.’
‘I wasn’t in fact sure if I had used the nougat,’ said the Dean, still smiling. Quite an effort would be needed to wipe that smile away, Ridcully knew, and so he gave up.
‘Good show, all the same,’ he mumbled, and then raised his voice. ‘If you can hear me, Hex … back to the Great Hall, please.’
Nothing happened. An important part of transferring matter across the world is the moving of an equivalent mass the other way. This can take a while.
Then an oak table, three chairs and two spoons crashed into the beach. A moment later, the wizards vanished.
1 The University’s proctors were known as lobsters because they went very red when hot and had a grip that was extremely hard to shake off. They were generally ex-army sergeants, had depths of cynicism unplumbable by any line, and were fuelled by beer.
TWENTY-TWO
FORGET THE FACTS
… IT’S THEORIES THAT MATTER.
Discworld does not have science as such. But it does have a variety of systems of causality, ranging from human intentions (‘I’ll just go out for a drink in the Mended Drum’) to magical spells to a generalised narrativium that keeps local and general history close to the lines of ‘story’. Roundworld does have science, but it’s difficult to discover the extent to which it determines, modifies, affects people’s actions – technology does, of course, but does science? Science does affect what we do, what we think, but it doesn’t change what we do and think because so much of our basic knowledge is simply accepted scientific ‘fact’.
Well, actually not ‘fact’, but theory.
We search for theories because they organise facts. We do this, according to The Science of Discworld II, because we are really Pan narrans, the storytelling ape, not Homo sapiens, the wise man. We invent our own stories to help ourselves to live. For this reason we are not reliable when we collect ‘facts’ for scientific purposes. Even the best scientists, and certainly the paid help and the student employees, are so full of what they want to find that there’s no way that what they do find can relate to the real world more than to their own prejudices, biases, and wishes. However, we were all told at school that ‘science’s facts are reliable’, but that its theories – and even more so its working hypotheses – are and were constantly subject to criticism, and therefore to change. It was explained to us that Newton had been supplanted by Einstein, Lamarck by Darwin, Freud by Skinner … So we were told that theories were constantly being supplanted, but that the observations on which they were based were reliable.
This is the reverse of the truth.
No teacher pointed out that many, perhaps most, of the basic assumptions of our intellectual world were scientific theories that had survived criticism … from the place of Earth and Sol in the Milky Way galaxy to the fertilisation theory of human conception to subatomic physics producing atom bombs … to Ohm’s Law and the electrical energy grid, to medical tricks like the germ theory of disease, all the way to X-rays and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), not to mention chemical theories that reliably gave us nylon, polythene and detergents. These theories go unnoticed because they have become defaults, so completely accepted as ‘true’ that we fail to paint them with emotional tags, and simply, build them into our intellectual toolkit. Even though no teacher pointed out that they were scientific successes, they constitute much of the (regrettably but unavoidably) uninspiring parts of school science.
On these foundation beliefs we hang such glittering flesh as visits to Mars, new fertility techniques like ICSI, fusion power, new bactericides for kitchen surfaces – and for a minority of the more imaginative children, the wide and wonderful worlds of science fiction.
The theories of science, then, particularly the totally accepted ones like sperm-egg conception, polythene, and Earth-orbits-Sun, are good reliable science. They are continually tested against the real world when babies are conceived in fertility clinics, when people do the washing-up, or when astronauts circle the Earth in sunlight and shadow. An enormous mass of Roundworld science is built into our everyday world, and it’s mostly reliable.
But there is also a whole mass of science that is incomprehensible to nearly everybody, which pretends that it’s The Answer for all kinds of technical or philosophical issues, and which supports experts. Quantum theory is the classic case, relativity is a touch more accessible, but subatomic physics and most of medicine, aeronautics and automobile engineering, soil chemistry and biology, statistics, and the higher reaches of economics, are all subjects that nearly everybody is content to leave to the experts. Mathematics has a strange position, similar but with its own peculiar stance akin to revealed religion – mostly because it has been presented from school onwards as an arcane craft whose practitioners are the only humans with access to Platonic truths.
Then there are the quasi1-sciences like astrology, homeopathy, reflexology, and iridology, which simply can’t work. They should be sharply distinguished from odd, often ancient practices like acupuncture, osteopathy and herbal treatments, which work sufficiently often but have a theoretical base that is poorly worked out in scientific terms. Many people are attracted by their homespun mix of myth and mysticism (which are all the more impressive because the treatment sometimes works), and feel that a modern scientific investigation would somehow spoil them. It would certainly poke some holes in the traditional rationalisations, but in all likelihood it would make the treatments even better. Whereas the quasi-sciences would be (indeed, already have been, not that everyone’s noticed) demolished.
To end that list, we add evolutionary biology, a very well-established set of models founded in the fossil record, chromosomes, and DNA, which explains similarities and differences among today’s living creatures much more elegantly and effectively than its creationist or intelligent-design rivals. Nevertheless, a very large proportion of people – especially Christians in the American Mid-West, Muslims in fanatically Islamic cultures, and fundamentalist believers in general – deny that humans evolved. To them, their own brand of authority trumps the scientific evidence, or their ‘common sense’ renders the whole concept laughable. ‘I ain’t kin to no ape!’ was the explanation given by a young schoolgirl at one of Jack’s Life on Other Planets lectures, when the teacher asked her why she didn’t believe in evolution.
There is a general human propensity, of which much use is made in the Discworld books, to set up accepted, unexamined mental backgrounds. Mostly these result from the Make-a-Human-Being kits that each human culture inflicts on its members as they grow up through childhood and adolescence. Each of us is the result of a learning process, only a tiny fraction of which is overt ‘education’ by professional teachers. The kit includes nursery rhymes, songs, stories, the personificatio
n of nursery animals (sly foxes, wise owls, industrious litter-collecting Wombles) and human roles from fabulous postman and princess up to crime-fighting Batman and Superman. All these have their place in the unexamined basis of our day-to-day thoughts and actions. A possible explanation for Princess Diana’s undeniable popularity with the British public – indeed the world – is that she, unlike ‘real’ royalty, had imbibed the popular impression of What Princesses Do as distinct from the authentically royal version. So she did what we had all learned that real princesses do, she looked and behaved like an icon, not like genuine royalty.
Sophisticated human beings, citizens like us – and indeed like tribesmen and barbarians2 in today’s world, nearly all of whom have heard of Superman, Tarzan, Ronald MacDonald – all have this hotchpotch of images, models, phobias, inspirations and villains. Our day-to-day experience gives us a self whose memory-train is a succession of scenes, thoughts, experiences, and passions, all painted à la Damasio with emotional tags that say ‘Great!’, ‘Do This Again When I Can!’ or ‘Avoid At All Costs!’ when we recall them. But these sit upon a great mass of mostly unexamined structural human material, that labels us as Western Twentieth-Century Biologist or Ghetto Rabbi or Roman Centurion or Seventeenth-Century French Courtesan, or, for most people most of the time, Exploited Peasant.
Each of those roles has a different set of emotional labels for money, for priests, for sex, for nakedness, for death, and for birth. Most people, until quite recently, underpinned that unexamined set of beliefs with a theist (personal, humanlike) God or gods, or a deist (Something Up There with Extraordinary Powers) god-structure, so the emotional tags on important memories have been strongly God-flavoured. When we remember them they may be sins, atonements, redemptions or trials. They may be mitzvahs (blessings) or revenges or charities. Religions, in bringing us into our cultures via their Make-a-Christian or Make-a-Maya kit, put different-strength labels on, for example, human sacrifice, so that it has a whole host of associations in adult life. Our adult prejudices, and our scientific theories, go in on top of this crazy mishmash of historical errors, badly understood schooling, mathematics and statistics that barely make sense to us, God-stories of causality and ethics, and educational lies-to-children that permit the teacher to disengage his brain in response to children’s questions.
Science of Discworld III Page 29
