The Science of Discworld II

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘As a basis for our discussion,’ said Ridcully, ‘let us agree on what we have discovered so far, shall we?’

  ‘Yes. It’s that whatever we do, the elves always win,’ said the Dean.

  ‘Er … I know this may sound stupid …’ Rincewind began.

  ‘Yes. It probably will,’ said the Dean. ‘You haven’t been doing very much since we got back, have you?’

  ‘Well, not really,’ said Rincewind. ‘Just walking around, you know. Looking at things.’

  ‘Exactly! You haven’t read a single book, am I correct? What good is walking around?’

  ‘Well, you get exercise,’ said Rincewind. ‘And you notice things. Yesterday the Librarian and I went to the theatre …’

  They’d got the cheapest ticket, but the Librarian paid for two bags of nuts.

  They’d found, once they had settled into this period, that there was no point in trying to disguise the Librarian too heavily. With a jerkin, a big floppy hood and a false beard he looked, on the whole, an improvement on most of the people in the cheap seats, the cheap seats in this case being so cheap they consisted, in fact, of standing up. The cheap feets, in fact.

  The play had been called The Hunchback King, by Arthur J. Nightingale. It hadn’t been very good. In fact, Rincewind had never seen a worse-written play. The Librarian had amused himself throughout by surreptitiously bouncing nuts off the king’s fake hump. But people had watched it in rapt fascination, especially the scene where the king was addressing his nobles and uttered the memorable line: ‘Now is the December of our discontent – I want whichever bastard is doing that to stop right now!’

  A bad play but a good audience, Rincewind mused after they had been thrown out. Oh, the play was a vast improvement on anything the Shell Midden Folk could have dreamed up, which would have to be called ‘If We’d Invented Paint We Could Watch It Dry’, but the lines sounded wrong and the whole thing was laboured and had no flow. Nevertheless, the faces of the watchers had been locked on the stage.

  On a thought, Rincewind had put a hand over one eye and, concentrating fearfully, surveyed the theatre. The one available eye watered considerably but had revealed, up in the expensive seats, several elves.

  They liked plays, too. Obviously. They wanted people to be imaginative. They’d given people so much imagination that it was constantly hungry. It would even consume the plays of Mr Nightingale.

  Imagination created monsters. It made you afraid of the dark, but not of the dark’s real dangers. It peopled the night with terrors of its own.

  So, therefore …

  Rincewind had an idea.

  ‘I think we should stop trying to influence the philosophers and scholars,’ he said. ‘People with minds like that believe all sort of things all the time. You can’t stop them. And science is just too weird. I keep thinking of that poor man—’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, we’ve been through all this,’ said Ridcully wearily. ‘Get to the point, Rincewind. What have you got to say that’s new?’

  ‘We could try teaching people art,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Art?’ said the Dean. ‘Art’s for slackers! That’d make things worse!’

  ‘Painting and sculpture and theatre,’ Rincewind went on. ‘I don’t think we should try to stop what the elves began. I think we ought to encourage it as much as possible. Help the people here to get really good at imagining things. They’re not quite there yet.’

  ‘But that’s just what the elves want, man!’ snapped Ridcully.

  ‘Yes!’ said Rincewind, almost drunk with the novelty of having an idea that didn’t include running away. ‘Let’s help the elves! Let’s help them to destroy themselves.’

  The wizards sat in silence. Then Ridcully said: ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘At the theatre I saw lots of people who wanted to believe that the world is different from the reality they see around them,’ said Rincewind. ‘We could—’ He sought a way into Ridcully’s famously hard-to-open mind. ‘Well, you know the Bursar?’ he said.

  ‘A gentlemen of whose existence I am aware on a daily basis,’ said Ridcully gravely. ‘And I’m only glad that this time we’ve left him with his aunt.’

  ‘And you remember how we cured his insanity?’

  ‘We didn’t cure it,’ said Ridcully. ‘We just doctored his medicine so that he permanently hallucinates that he is sane.’

  ‘Exactly! You use the disease as the cure, sir! We made him more insane, so now he’s sane again. Mostly. Apart from the bouts of weightlessness, and, er, that business with the—’

  ‘Yes, yes, all right,’ said Ridcully. ‘But I’m still waiting for the point of this.’

  ‘Are you talking about fighting like those monks up near the Hub?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Skinny little chaps who can throw big men through the air?’

  ‘Something like that, sir,’ said Rincewind.

  Ridcully prodded Ponder Stibbons.

  ‘Did I miss a bit of conversation there?’ he said.

  ‘I think Rincewind means that if we take the elves’ work even further it’ll somehow end up defeating them,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Could that work?’

  ‘Archchancellor, I can’t think of anything better,’ said Ponder. ‘Belief doesn’t have the same power on this world as it does on ours, but it is still pretty strong. Even so, the elves are here. They are a fixture.’

  ‘But we know they … sort of feed on people,’ said Rincewind. ‘We want them to go away. Um … and I’ve got a plan.’

  ‘You have a plan,’ said Ridcully, in a hollow voice. ‘Does anyone else have a plan? Anyone? Anyone? Someone?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘The play I saw was awful,’ said Rincewind. ‘These people might be a lot more creative than the Shell Midden People, but they’ve still got a long way to go. My plan … well, I want us to move this world into the path of history that contains someone called William Shakespeare. And absolutely does not contain Arthur J. Nightingale.’

  ‘Who’s Shakespeare?’ said Ponder.

  ‘The man,’ said Rincewind, ‘who wrote this.’ He pushed a battered manuscript across the table. ‘Read it out from where I’ve marked it, will you?’

  Ponder adjusted his spectacles, and cleared his throat.

  ‘What a piece of work is, er, this is awful handwriting …’

  ‘Let me,’ said Ridcully, taking the pages. ‘You don’t have the voice for this sort of thing, Stibbons.’ He glared at the paper, and then: ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason … how infinite in faculty … in form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals …’

  He stopped.

  ‘And this man lives here?’ he said.

  ‘Potentially,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘This man stood knee deep in muck in a city with heads on spikes and wrote this?’

  Rincewind beamed. ‘Yes! In his world, he is probably the most influential playwright in the history of the species! Despite requiring a lot of tactful editing by most directors, because he had his bad days just like everyone else!’

  ‘By “his world” you mean—?’

  ‘Alternate worlds,’ muttered Ponder, who was sulking. He’d once played the part of Third Goblin in a school play and felt that he had rather a good speaking voice.

  ‘You mean he should be here but ain’t?’ Ridcully demanded.

  ‘I think he should be here but can’t be,’ said Rincewind. ‘Look, these aren’t the Shell Midden people, it’s true, but artistically they’re pretty low down the scale. Their theatre is awful, they haven’t got any decent artists, they can’t carve a decent statue – this world isn’t what it should be.’

  ‘And?’ said Ponder, still smarting.

  Rincewind signalled to the Librarian, who ambled around the table handing out small, green, cloth-bound books.

  ‘This is another play he will write …
is … writing … wrote … will have written,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll agree that it could be very important …’

  The wizards read it. They read it again. They had a huge argument, but there was nothing unusual about that.

  ‘It’s an astonishin’ play, in the circumstances,’ said Ridcully, eventually. ‘And some of it is a bit familiar!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rincewind. ‘And I think that’s because he’ll write it after listening to you. We need him to. This is a man who can tell the audience, tell the audience that they’re watching a bunch of actors on a tiny stage and then make them see a huge battle, right there in front of their eyes.’

  ‘Did I miss that bit?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, leafing hurriedly through the pages.

  ‘That’s in another play, Runes,’ said Ridcully. ‘Do try to keep up. Well, Rincewind? Let’s assume, shall we, that we’re going along with your plan? We have to make sure this man exists here and writes this play in this world, do we? Why?’

  ‘Can I leave that to Stage Two, sir? It will become obvious, I hope, but you never know if there are elves listening.’

  The wizards were automatically impressed by the idea that this was a two-stage plan, but Ridcully persisted: ‘I put it to you, Rincewind, that this is exactly the kind of play elves would want him to write.’

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s because they’re stupid. Not like you, sir.’

  ‘We have Hex’s computational power,’ said Ponder. ‘It should be possible to make sure he turns up in this world, I think.’

  ‘Um … yes,’ said Rincewind. ‘But first we have to make the world the kind he can turn up in. This may take a bit of work. Some travelling may be involved. Back in time … for thousands of years …’

  Firelight glowed off the cave walls. The wizards sat on one side of the fire, on the big rock ledge overlooking the scrubland. The Stinky Cave People sat on the other.

  The cave people watched the wizards with something like awe, but only because they’d never seen people eat like that. It was Ridcully who’d suggested that people bearing huge amounts of food are welcome practically anywhere, but the other wizards considered that this was just an excuse for him to make a crude but serviceable bow and go and happily slaughter quite a lot of wildlife.

  The wildlife was mostly leftovers now. The wizards moaned about the lack of onions, salt, pepper, garlic and, in Rincewind’s case, potatoes, but there was certainly no lack of meat.

  They’d spent two weeks doing this, in caves across the continent. They were getting used to it, although bowel movements were becoming a problem.

  Rincewind, however, was sitting some way from the fire with Burnt Stick Man.

  Being good at languages was, here, not such an important skill as simply making yourself understood. But Burnt Stick Man was a quick study, and Rincewind already had several weeks of practice. While the dialogue took place in inflections and emphasis based upon the syllable ‘grunt’ aided by gestures, the translation went like this:

  ‘Okay, so you’ve mastered the idea of charcoal, but may I draw your attention to these pigments I have here? They’re Whiiite, very simple, Redddd, like blood, and Yell-low, like, er, egg yolks. Cluck cluck aaargh cackle? And this fourth colour is some sickly brown ochre I found which we’ll call for the moment “baby poo”.’

  ‘With you so far, Pointy Hat Man.’ This was conveyed by an enthusiastic nod.

  ‘So here’s the big tip. Not many people know this,’ said Rincewind. ‘You take your animals, right, which you’ve already been trying to draw, well done, but you what we call “colour” them. You have to work hard on this bit. A chewed piece of wood will be your friend here. See how by a careful mixture of tints I’m giving it a certain, oh, je ne sais quoi?’

  ‘Hey, that looks like a real buffalo! Scary stuff!’

  ‘It gets better. May I have the charcoal? Thank you. What’s this?’

  Rincewind carefully drew another figure.

  ‘Man with big [expressive gesture]?’ said Burnt Stick Man.

  ‘What? Oh. Sorry, I got that wrong … I mean this …’

  ‘Man with spear! Hey, he’s throwing it at the buffalo!’

  Rincewind smiled. There had been a few false starts over the last couple of weeks, but Burnt Stick Man had exactly the right sort of mind. He was impressively simple, and people with truly simple minds were very rare.

  ‘I knew there was something intelligent about you the moment I saw you,’ he lied. ‘Maybe it was the way your brow ridge came around the corner only two seconds before the rest of you did.’ Burnt Stick Man beamed. Rincewind went on: ‘And the question you’ve got to ask yourself now is: how real is this picture, really? And where was the picture before I drew it? What is going to happen now it’s on the wall?’

  The wizards watched from the circle of firelight.

  ‘Why’s the man poking at the picture?’ said the Dean.

  ‘I think he’s learnin’ about the power of symbols,’ said Ridcully. ‘Hey, if anyone doesn’t want any more ribs I’ll finish ’em.’

  ‘No barbecue sauce,’ moaned the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘How long before there’s an agricultural revolution?’

  ‘Could be a hundred thousand years, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘Perhaps a lot more.’ The Lecturer in Recent Runes groaned and put his head in his hands.

  Rincewind came and sat down. The rest of Burnt Stick Man’s clan, greasy to the eyebrows with free food, watched him cautiously.

  ‘That seemed to go well,’ he said. ‘He’s definitely working out the link between pictures in his head and real life. Any potatoes yet?’

  ‘Not for thousands of years,’ groaned the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  ‘Damn. I mean, here’s meat. There should be potatoes. How hard is that for a world to understand? Vegetables are less complicated than meat!’ He sighed, and then stared.

  Burnt Stick Man, who had been staring motionless at the drawing for a while, ambled to another rock wall and picked up a spear. He squinted at the buffalo drawing, which did indeed seem to move as the firelight flickered, paused, and then hurled the spear at it and ducked behind a rock.

  ‘Gentlemen, we’ve found our genius and we’re on our way,’ said Rincewind. ‘Ponder, can Hex move some buffaloes to right outside this cave at dawn tomorrow?’

  ‘That shouldn’t be hard, yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Rincewind looked around. ‘And there’s quite a few tall trees here, too. Which is just as well.’

  It was dawn, and the tree was full of wizards.

  The ground below was full of buffalo. Hex had moved an entire herd, which was now more or less penned in amongst the rocks and trees.

  And, on the rocky ledge in front of the bewildered, panicking creatures, Burnt Stick Man and the other hunters stared down in disbelief.

  But only for a moment. They had spears, after all. They got two of the creatures before the rest thundered away. And, afterwards, people were certainly showing Burnt Stick Man a bit of respect.

  ‘All right, I think I see what you’re getting at,’ said Ridcully, as the wizards very carefully climbed down.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ said the Dean. ‘You’re teaching them basic magic. And that doesn’t work here!’

  ‘They think it does,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘But that was only because we helped them! What’re they going to do tomorrow when he does another painting and no buffaloes turn up?’

  ‘They’ll think it’s experimental error,’ said Rincewind. ‘Because it’s so sensible, isn’t it? You draw a magic picture, and the real thing turns up! It’s so sensible that they’ll take a lot of convincing that it doesn’t work. Besides …’

  ‘Besides what?’ said Ponder.

  ‘Oh, I was thinking that if Burnt Stick Man is really sensible he’ll keep an eye on the movements of the local animals and make sure he paints his pictures at the right time.’

  Some more weeks went by. There were lots of men like Burnt Stick Man.

 
; And even Red Hands Man …

  ‘… so,’ said Rincewind, as he sat by the river, squeezing the clay, ‘it’s quite easy to make other things out of it than snakes.’

  ‘Snakes are easy,’ said Red Hands Man, stained with ochre to the armpits.

  ‘And there’s lots of snakes around here, is there?’ said Rincewind. It looked like prime snake country.

  ‘Lots of them.’

  ‘Ever wondered why? You play around rolling snakes out of clay, and snakes turn up?’

  ‘I’m making the snakes?’ said Red Hands Man. ‘How can that be? I was only doing it because of the enjoyable tactile sensations!’

  ‘It’s an intriguing thought, isn’t it?’ said Rincewind. ‘But it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone else.’

  Red Hands Man stared at his hands as if examining two lethal instruments. He seemed a little less bright than Burnt Stick Man.

  ‘Ever thought about making something else?’ said Rincewind. ‘Something more edible?’

  ‘Fish are good to eat,’ Red Hands Man conceded.

  ‘Why not try making a clay fish?’ said Rincewind, with a sincere smile.

  Next morning, it rained trout.

  In the afternoon a very happy Red Hands Man, now hailed as the saviour of the clan that lived among the reeds, made a model of a big fat woman out of clay.

  The wizards discussed the moral implications of allowing Hex to rain enormous women over a wide area. The debate took a long time, with many pauses for inward reflection, but at last the Dean was voted down. It was agreed that if you gave a man a fat woman, he’d just have a fat woman for a day, but if you helped a man become a very important man because he had the secret of buffaloes or fish, he could get himself as many fat women as he wanted.

  Next morning they went forward a thousand years in time. There was hardly an unadorned cave on the continent, and quite a lot of fat women.

  They went further …

  In a forest clearing, a man was making a god out of wood. Either it wasn’t a very good carving, or it was a good carving but an ugly god.

  The wizards watched.

  And the Queen of the Elves appeared, with a couple of elves in attendance. They were male or, at least, appeared male. The queen was angry.