The Science of Discworld II

by Terry Pratchett

  Narrativium has entered our Make-a-Human kit. It makes a different kind of mind from the tribal one, which is all ‘do this because we’ve always done it that way and it works’ and ‘don’t do that because it’s taboo, evil and we’ll kill you if you do’. And it also differs from the barbarian mind: ‘That way lies honour, booty, much wealth and many children (if I can only get a djinn, or a dgun); I would not demean myself, dishonour these hands, with menial work.’ In contrast, the civilised child learns to repeat the task, to work with the grain of the universe.

  The reader of tales that have been moulded and informed by narrativium is prepared to do whatever an understanding of the task requires. Perhaps, in the universe of the story, qualifying for princesses’ hands in marriage isn’t the preoccupation of the average middle-class, but the attitude of the third prince will serve him well down the mine, in the Stock Exchange, in the Wild West (according to Hollywood, a great purveyor of narrativium), or as father and baron. We say ‘he’ because ‘she’ has a more difficult time: narrativium has not been mined and modelled for girls, and the way the feminist myths are shaping it does not seem to address the same questions as the old boy-oriented models. But we can put that right if we realise that narrativium trains by constraint.

  Discworld, although technically a world run on fairy tale rules, derives much of its power and success from the fact that they are consistently challenged and subverted, most directly by the witch Granny Weatherwax, who cynically uses them or defies them as she sees fit. She roundly objects to girls being forced by the all-devouring ‘story’ to marry a handsome prince solely on the basis of their shoe size; she believes that stories are there to be challenged. But she herself is part of a larger story, and they follow rules, too. In a sense, she’s always trying to saw off the branch she’s sitting on. And her stories derive their power from the fact that we have been programmed from an early age to believe in the monsters that she is battling.

  1 Isn’t ‘Bombastus’ a lovely name? Well-chosen, too.

  2 Readers who have not met this felicitous phrase, for reasons of youth or geography, should be told that the three Rs are Reading, Riting and Rithmetic. What this tells us about the educational establishment is unclear, but it could be a joke. The three Rs, not the educational establishment, that is. Though, come to think of it …

  3 Hidden knowledge at that time was spectacularly practical knowledge, exemplified by the Guild secrets and especially by the Freemasons. It was dressed up in ritual, because it was mostly passed on verbally and not written down.

  4 Carers even encourage or berate the child: ‘What’s the magic word? You forgot the magic word!’

  5 Years ago, Jack wrote a book called The Privileged Ape about just this tendency. What he wanted to call it – and should have, but the publisher got cold feet – was The Ape That Got What It Wanted. (When it gets it, of course, it no longer wants it.)

  6 A system of mystic beliefs based on the Jewish Kabbala.

  SEVEN

  CARGO CULT MAGIC

  THE PHRASE THAT KEPT OCCURRING to Rincewind was cargo cult.

  He’d run across it – he encountered most things by running across them – on isolated islands out on the big oceans.

  Say that, once, a lost ship arrived, and while taking on food and water it handed out a few goodies to the helpful locals, like steel knives, arrowheads and fish-hooks.1 And then it sailed away, and after a while the steel wore out and the arrowheads got lost.

  What was needed was another ship. But not many ships came to these lonely islands. What was needed was a ship attractor. Some sort of decoy. And it didn’t much matter if it was made out of bamboo and palm leaves, so long as it looked like a ship. Ships would be bound to be attracted to another ship, or else how did you get small boats?

  As with many human activities, it made perfect sense, for certain values of ‘sense’.

  Discworld magic was all about controlling the vast oceans of magic that poured though the world. All the Roundworld magicians could do was to build something like bamboo decoys on the shores of the big, cold, spinning universe, which pleaded: please let the magic come.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ he said to Ponder, who was drawing a big circle on the floor, to Dee’s fascination. ‘They believe they live in our world. With the turtle and everything!’

  ‘Yes, and that’s strange because the rules here are quite easy to spot,’ said Ponder. ‘Things tend to become balls, and balls tend to move in circles. Once you work that out, everything else falls into place. In a curved movement, of course.’

  He went back to chalking the circle.

  The wizards had been staying in Dee’s house. He seemed quite happy about this, in a mildly bemused way, like a peasant who had suddenly been visited by a family of unexpected relatives from the big city who were doing incomprehensible things but were rich and interesting.

  The trouble was, Rincewind thought, that the wizards were explaining to Dee that magic didn’t work while, at the same time, doing magic. A crystal ball was giving instructions. An ape was knuckling in and out of, for want of a better word, fresh air, and wandering around Dee’s library making excited ‘ook’ noises and assembling the books to make a proper entrance in L-space. And the wizards themselves, as was their wont, prodded at things and argued at cross-purposes.

  And Hex had tracked down the elves. It made no sense, but their descent on Roundworld had plunged through time and come to rest millions of years in the past.

  Now the wizards had to get there. As Ponder explained, sometimes resorting to hand gestures for the hard of comprehension, this wasn’t difficult. Time and space in the round universe were entirely subordinate. The wizards, being made of higher-order stuff, could quite easily be moved around within it by magic from the real world. There were additional, complex reasons, mostly quite hard to spell.

  The wizards didn’t understand almost all this, but they did like the idea of being high-order stuff.

  ‘But there was nothing back there,’ said the Dean, watching Ponder work on the circle. ‘There wasn’t even anyone you could call people, Hex says.’

  ‘There were monkeys,’ said Rincewind. ‘Things like monkeys, anyway.’ He had his own thoughts on this score, although the accepted wisdom on Discworld was that monkeys were the descendants of people who had given up trying.2

  ‘Oh, the monkeys,’ snapped Ridcully. ‘I remember them. Completely useless. If you couldn’t eat it or have sex with it, they just didn’t want to know. They just mucked about.’

  ‘I think this was even before that,’ said Ponder. He stood up and brushed chalk dust off his robe. ‘Hex thinks that the elves did something to … something. Something that became humans.’

  ‘Interfered with them?’ said the Dean.

  ‘Yes, sir. We know they can affect people’s minds when they sing—’

  ‘You said became humans?’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I really don’t want to have that argument all over again, sir. On Roundworld, things become other things. At least, some of some things become other things. I’m not saying that happens on Discworld, sir, but Hex is quite certain that it happens here. Can we just pretend for a moment, sir, that this is true?’

  ‘For the sake of argument?’

  ‘Well, for the sake of not having an argument, sir, really,’ said Ponder. Mustrum Ridcully on the subject of evolution could go on for far too long.

  ‘All right, then,’ said the Archchancellor with some reluctance.

  ‘And we know, sir, that elves can really affect the minds of lesser creatures …’

  Rincewind let the words go over his head. He didn’t need to be told this. He’d spent far more time in the field – and the ditch, the forest, hiding in the reeds, staggering across deserts – and had run into and away from elves a couple of times. They didn’t like all the things that Rincewind thought made life worthwhile, like cities and cookery and not being hit over the head with rocks on a regular basis. He’d
never been certain if they actually ate anything, other than for amusement; they acted as if what they really consumed was other creatures’ fear.

  They must have loved humanity when they found it. Humanity was very creative, when it came to being frightened. It was good at filling the future full of dread.

  And then it had gone and spoiled everything by using that wonderful, fear-generating mind for thinking up things to take the fear away – like calendars, locks, candles and stories. Stories in particular. Stories were where the monsters died.

  While the wizards argued, Rincewind went to see what the Librarian was doing. The ape, shorn of his dress but still wearing his ruff to conform to local clothing standards, was as happy as, well, as happy as a librarian among books. Dee was quite a collector. Most of the books were about magic or numbers or magic and numbers. They weren’t very magical, though. The pages didn’t even turn by themselves.

  The crystal sphere had been placed on a shelf, so that Hex could watch.

  ‘The Archchancellor wants us all to go back and stop the elves,’ said Rincewind, sitting down on a stack of tides. ‘He thinks we can ambush them before they do anything. Me, I don’t think it’s going to work.’

  ‘Ook?’ said the Librarian, sniffing a bestiary and laying it aside.

  ‘Because things generally don’t, that’s why. Best laid plans, and all that. And these aren’t best laid plans, anyway. “Let’s get back there and beat the devils to death with big iron bars” is not, in my opinion, a best laid plan. What’s funny?’

  The Librarian’s shoulders were shaking. He passed a book across to Rincewind, who read the passage that had been pointed out by a black fingernail.

  He stopped reading, and stared at the Librarian.

  It was uplifting. Oh, it was uplifting. Rincewind hadn’t read anything like it. But …

  He’d spent the day in this city. There were dog fights and bear pits and that wasn’t the worst of it. He’d seen the heads on spikes over the gates. Of course, Ankh-Morpork had been bad, but Ankh-Morpork had thousands of years of experience of being a big city and had become, well, sophisticated in its sins. This place was half farmyard.

  The man who wrote this woke up every morning in a city that burned people alive and had still written this.

  ‘—what a piece of work is a man … how noble in reason … how infinite in faculty … in form, in moving, how express and admirable …’

  The Librarian was almost sobbing with laughter.

  ‘Nothing to laugh at, it’s a perfectly valid point of view,’ said Rincewind. He shuffled the pages.

  ‘Who wrote this?’ he said.

  ‘According to the flows of L-space, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived,’ said Hex, from the shelf.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘His own spelling is inconsistent,’ said Hex, ‘but the consensus is that his name was William Shakespeare.’

  ‘Does he exist on this world?’

  ‘Yes. In one of the many alternate histories.’

  ‘So not actually here, then?’

  ‘No. The leading playwright in this city is Arthur J. Nightingale.’

  ‘Is he any good?’

  ‘He is the best they have. Objectively, he is dreadful. His play King Rufus III is widely considered the worst play ever written.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Rincewind!’ bellowed the Archchancellor.

  The wizards were gathering in the circle. They had tied horseshoes and bits of iron to their staffs and had the look of high-order men prepared to kick low-order ass. Rincewind tucked the pages in his robe, picked up Hex and hurried over.

  ‘I’ll just—’ he began.

  ‘You’re coming, too. No arguing. And the Luggage,’ snapped Ridcully.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Otherwise we might have a talk about seven buckets of coal,’ the Archchancellor went on.

  He knew about the buckets. Rincewind swallowed.

  ‘Leave Hex behind with the Librarian, will you?’ said Ponder. ‘He can keep an eye on Dr Dee.’

  ‘Isn’t Hex coming?’ said Rincewind, alarmed at the prospect of losing the only entity at UU that seemed to have a grasp on things.

  ‘There will be no suitable avatars,’ said Hex.

  ‘He means no magic mirrors, no crystal balls,’ said Ponder. ‘Nothing that people expect to be magical. No people at all, where we’re going. Put Hex down. We’ll be back instantly, in any case. Ready, Hex?’

  For a moment the circle glowed, and the wizards vanished.

  Dr Dee turned to the Librarian.

  ‘It works!’ he said. ‘The Great Seal works! Now I can—’

  He vanished. And the floor vanished. And the house vanished. And the city vanished. And the Librarian landed in the swamp.

  1 And new diseases, although it was quite hard to make bamboo models of these.

  2 The Librarian, on the other knuckly hand, held the view that humans were apes who had given up trying. They were the ones who simply couldn’t cut the mustard when it came to living in harmony with their environment, maintaining a workable social structure and, above all, sleeping while holding on.

  EIGHT

  PLANET OF THE APES

  ‘WHAT A PIECE OF WORK is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!’

  But you wouldn’t want to watch him eat, close up …

  William Shakespeare was another key figure in the transition from medieval mysticism to post-Renaissance rationalism. We were going to mention him, but we had to wait for him to turn up in Roundworld.

  Shakespeare’s plays are a cornerstone of our present Western civilisation.1 They led us from a confrontation between aristocratic barbarism and tradition-bound tribalism into real civilisation as we know it. And yet … he seems to be a contradiction: uplifting sentiments in a barbarous age. That’s because he was standing at a pivotal point in history. The elves have been seeking something that will become human, and will interfere with Roundworld to make sure they get it. Humans are superstitious. But the human condition can also create a Shakespeare. Though not in this version of history.

  The elves aren’t the only Discworld inhabitants that have interfered with Roundworld: the wizards have tried some ‘uplift’ of their own, in the sense of David Brin, and using the techniques of Arthur C. Clarke. Near the end of The Science of Discworld, the apes of Roundworld are sitting in their cave, watching a manifestation from another dimension, an enigmatic black rectangular slab … The Dean of Unseen University taps on it with his pointer, to attract attention, and chalks the letters R-O-C-K. ‘Rock. Can anyone tell me what you do with it?’ But all the apes are interested in is S-E-X.

  The next time the wizards look at Roundworld, the space elevator is collapsing. The planet’s inhabitants are heading out into the universe on vast ships made from the cores of comets.

  Something very dramatic has happened between the apes and the space elevator. What was it? The wizards have no idea. They doubt very much it could have had much to do with those apes, who were very much The Wrong Stuff.

  In the first volume of The Science of Discworld, we explored no further. We left a gap. It was a tiny part of the historical record on the geological timescales that governed everything up to the ape, but rather a big gap in terms of changes to the planet. But now even the wizards are aware that the apes, unpromising material as they may have been, did in fact evolve into the creatures that built the space elevator and fled from a very dangerous planet in search of, as Rincewind would put it, a place where you are not hit on the head with rocks on a regular basis. And, apparently, a key step in their evolution was elvish interference.

  How did it actually happen on Roundworld? Here, the whole process took a mere five million years. One hundred thousand Grandfathers2 ago, we and the chimpanzees shared a distant ancestor. The chimpanzeelike ancestor of Man was
also the Manlike ancestor of the chimpanzee. To us, it would have looked astonishingly like a chimpanzee – but to a chimpanzee, it would have looked astonishingly like a human.

  DNA analysis shows, beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt, that our closest living relatives are chimpanzees: the ordinary (‘robust’) chimpanzee Pan troglodytes and the more slender (‘gracile’) bonobo Pan paniscus, often politically incorrectly called the pygmy chimpanzee. Our genomes have 98 per cent in common with both, leading Jared Diamond to refer to humans as ‘the third chimpanzee’ in a book of the same tide.

  The same DNA evidence indicates that we and today’s chimpanzees parted company, specieswise, those five million years (100,000 Grandfathers) ago. That figure is debatable, but it can’t be very far wrong. The gorillas split off a little earlier. The earliest fossils of our ‘hominid’ ancestors are found in Africa, but there are numerous later fossilised hominids from other parts of the world such as China and Java. The oldest known are two species of Australopithecus, each about 4–4.5 million years old. The Australopithecines had a good run: they hung around until about 1–1.5 million years ago, at which point they gave way to genus Homo: Homo rudolfensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and finally us, Homo sapiens. And somehow another Australopithecine inserted itself into the middle of those Homos. In fact the more hominid fossils we find, the more complicated our conjectured ancestry becomes, and it now looks as if many different hominid species coexisted on the plains of Africa for most of the past five million years.

  Today’s chimpanzees are quite bright, probably a lot brighter than the apes that the Dean tried to teach spelling to. Some remarkable experiments have shown that chimps can understand a simple version of language, presented to them as symbolic shapes. They can even form simple concepts and make abstract associations, all within a linguistic frame. They can’t build a space elevator, and they never will unless they evolve considerably and avoid being killed for ‘bush meat’.