The Science of Discworld II: The Globe

234 Pages·2015·0.91 MB·English

You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong,
Come not near our fairy Queen.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is
but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was - there is no man can tell what.
Methought I was, and methought I had, but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what
methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able
to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.
This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM

I’m nae listenin’ to them! They’ve got warts!
ARTHUR J. NIGHTINGALE THE SHORT COMEDY OF MACBETH

Apology: this book is a true account of events in the life of William Shakespeare, but only for a given
value of ‘true’.
Warning: May Contain Nuts
ONE
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
In the airy, crowded silence of the forest, magic was hunting magic on silent feet.
A wizard may be safely defined as a large ego which comes to a point at the top. That is why wizards
do not blend well. That would mean looking like other people, and wizards do not wish to look like
other people. Wizards aren’t other people.
And therefore, in these thick woods, full of dappled shade, new growth and birdsong, the wizards who
were in theory blending in, in fact blended out. They’d understood the theory of camouflage - at least
they’d nodded when it was being explained - but had then got it wrong.
For example, take this tree. It was short, and it had big gnarly roots. There were interesting holes in it.
The leaves were a brilliant green. Moss hung from its branches. One hairy loop of grey-green moss,
in particular, looked rather like a beard. Which was odd, because a lump in the wood above it looked
rather like a nose. And then there was a blemish in the wood that could have been eyes …
But overall this was definitely a tree. In fact, it was a lot more like a tree than a tree normally is.
Practically no other tree in the forest looked so tree-like as this tree. It projected a sensation of
extreme barkness, it exuded leafidity. Pigeons and squirrels were queuing up to settle in the branches.
There was even an owl. Other trees were just sticks with greenery on compared to the sylvanic
verdanity of this tree …
… which raised a branch, and shot another tree. A spinning orange ball spun through the air and went
splat! on a small oak.
Something happened to the oak. Bits of twig and shadows and bark which had clearly made up an
image of a gnarled old tree now equally clearly became the face of Archchancellor Mustrum
Ridcully, Master of Unseen University (for the extremely magical) and running with orange paint.
‘Gotcha!’ shouted the Dean, causing the owl to leap from his hat. This was lucky for the owl, because
a travelling glob of blue paint removed the hat a moment later.
‘Ahah! Take that, Dean!’ shouted an ancient beech tree behind him as, changing without actually
changing, it became the figure of the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
The Dean spun around, and a blob of orange paint hit him in the chest.
‘Eat permitted colourings!’ yelled an excited wizard.
The Dean glared across the clearing to a crabapple tree which was, now, the Chair of Indefinite
Studies.
‘What? I’m on your side, you damn fool!’ he said.
‘You can’t be! You made such a good target!’
The Dean raised his staff. Instantly, half a dozen orange and blue blobs exploded all over him as other
hidden wizards let loose.
Archchancellor Ridcully wiped paint out of his eyes.
‘All right, you fellows,’ he sighed. ‘Enough’s enough for today. Time for tea, eh?’
It was so hard, he reflected, to get wizards to understand the concept of ‘team spirit’. It simply wasn’t
part of wizardly thinking. A wizard could grasp the idea of, say, wizards versus some other group, but
they lost their grip when it came to the idea of wizards against wizards. Wizard against wizards, yes,
they had no trouble with that.
They’d start out as two teams, but as soon as there was any engagement they’d get all excited and
twitchy and shoot other wizards indiscriminately. If you were a wizard then, deep down, you knew that
every other wizard was your enemy. If their wands had been left unfettered, rather than having been
locked to produce only paint spells - Ridcully had been very careful about that - then this forest would
have been on fire by now.
Still, the fresh air was doing them good. The University was far too stuffy, Ridcully had always
thought. Out here there was sun, and birdsong, and a nice warm breeze-
-a cold breeze. The temperature was plunging.
Ridcully looked down at his staff. Ice crystals were forming on it.
‘Turned a bit nippy all of a sudden, hasn’t it?’ he said, his breath tingling in the frigid air.
And then the world changed.
Rincewind, Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, was cataloguing his rock
collection. This was, these days, the ground state of his being. When he had nothing else to do, he
sorted rocks. His predecessors in the post had spent many years bringing back small examples of
cruel or unusual geography and had never had time to catalogue them, so he saw this as his duty.
Besides, it was wonderfully dull. He felt that there was not enough dullness in the world.
Rincewind was the least senior member of the faculty. Indeed, the Archchancellor had made it clear
that in seniority terms he ranked somewhat lower than the things that went ‘click’ in the woodwork.
He got no salary and had complete insecurity of tenure. On the other hand, he got his laundry done
free, a place at mealtimes and a bucket of coal a day. He also had his own office, no one ever visited
him and he was strictly forbidden from attempting to teach anything to anyone. In academic terms,
therefore, he considered himself pretty lucky.
An additional reason for this was that he was in fact getting seven buckets of coal a day and so much
clean laundry that even his socks were starched. This was because no one else had realised that Blunk,
the coal porter, who was far too surly to read, delivered the buckets strictly according to the titles on
the study doors.
The Dean, therefore, got one bucket. So did the Bursar.
Rincewind got seven because the Archchancellor had found him a useful recipient of all the titles,
chairs and.posts which (because of ancient bequests, covenants and, in one case at least, a curse) the
University was obliged to keep filled. In most instances no one knew what the hell they were for or
wanted anything to do with them, in case some clause somewhere involved students, so they were
given to Rincewind.
Every morning, therefore, Blunk stoically delivered seven buckets to the joint door of the Professor
of Cruel and Unusual Geography, the Chair of Experimental Serendipity, the Reader in Slood
Dynamics, the Fretwork Teacher, the Chair for the Public Misunderstanding of Magic, the Professor
of Virtual Anthropology and the Lecturer in Approximate Accuracy … who usually opened the door
in his underpants - that is to say, opened the door in the wall whilst wearing his underpants - and took
the coal happily, even if it was a sweltering day. At Unseen University you had budgets, and if you
didn’t use up everything you’d been given you wouldn’t get as much next time. If this meant you
roasted all summer in order to be moderately warm during the winter, then that was a small price to
pay for proper fiscal procedures.
On this day, Rincewind carried the buckets inside and tipped the coal on the heap in the corner.
Something behind him went ‘gloink’.
It was a small, subtle and yet curiously intrusive sound, and it accompanied the appearance, on a shelf
above Rincewind’s desk, of a beer bottle where no beer bottle had hitherto been.
He took it down and stared at it. It had recently contained a pint of Winkle’s Old Peculiar. There was
absolutely nothing ethereal about it, except that it was blue. The label was the wrong colour and full
of spelling mistakes but it was mostly there, right down to the warning in tiny, tiny print: May Contain
Nuts.
Now it contained a note.
He removed this with some care, and unrolled it, and read it.
Then he stared at the thing beside the beer bottle. It was a glass globe, about a foot across, and
contained, floating within it, a smaller blue-and-fluffy-white globe.
The smaller globe was a world, and the space inside the globe was infinitely large. The world and
indeed the whole universe of which it was part had been created by the wizards of Unseen University
more or less by accident, and the fact that it had ended up on a shelf in Rincewind’s tiny study was an
accurate indication of how interested they were in it once the initial excitement had worn off.
Rincewind watched the world, sometimes, through an omniscope. It mostly had ice ages, and was less
engrossing than an ant farm. Sometimes he shook it up to see if it would make it interesting, but this
never seemed to have much of an effect.
Now he looked back at the note.
It was extremely puzzling. And the university had someone to deal with things like that.
Ponder Stibbons, like Rincewind, also had a number of jobs. However, instead of aspiring to seven,
he perspired at three. He had long been the Reader in Invisible Writings, had drifted into the new post
as Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and had walked in all innocence into the office of Praelector,
which is a university title meaning ‘person who gets given the nuisance jobs’.
That meant that he was in charge in the absence of the senior members of the faculty. And, currently,
this being the spring break, they were absent. And so were the students. The University was, therefore,
running at near peak efficiency.
Ponder smoothed out the beer-smelling paper and read:
TELL STIBBONS GET HERE AT ONCE. BRING LIBRARIAN. WAS IN FOREST, AM IN ROUND
WORLD. FOOD GOOD, BEER AWFUL. WIZARDS USELESS. ELVES HERE TOO. DIRTY DEEDS
AFOOT.
RIDCULLY
He looked up at the humming, clicking, busy bulk of Hex, the University’s magical thinking engine,
then, with great care, he placed the message on a tray that was part of the machine’s rambling
structure.
A mechanical eyeball about a foot across lowered itself carefully from the ceiling. Ponder didn’t
know how it worked, except that it contained vast amounts of incredibly finely drawn tubing. Hex had
drawn up the plans one night and Ponder had taken them along to the gnome jewellers; he’d long ago
lost track of what Hex was doing. The machine changed almost on a daily basis.
The write-out began to clatter and produced the message:
+++ Elves have entered Roundworld. This is to be expected. +++
‘Expected?’ said Ponder.
+++ Their world is a parasite universe. It needs a host +++
Ponder turned to Rincewind. ‘Do you understand any of this?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Rincewind. ‘But I’ve run into elves.’
‘And?’
‘And then I’ve run away from them. You don’t hang around elves. They’re not my field, unless
they’re doing fretwork. Anyway, there’s nothing on Roundworld at the moment.’
‘I thought you did a report on the various species that kept turning up there?’
‘You read that?’
‘I read all the papers that get circulated,’ said Ponder.
‘You do?’
‘You said that every so often some kind of intelligent life turns up, hangs around for a few million
years, and then dies out because the air freezes or the continents explode or a giant rock smacks into
the sea.’
‘That’s right,’ said Rincewind. ‘Currently the globe is a snowball again.’
‘So what is the faculty doing there now?’
‘Drinking beer, apparently.’
‘When the whole world is frozen?’
‘Perhaps it’s lager.’
‘But they are supposed to be running around in the woods, pulling together, solving problems and
firing paint spells at one another,’ said Ponder.
‘What for?’
‘Didn’t you read the memo he sent out?’
Rincewind shuddered. ‘Oh, I never read those,’ he said.
‘He took everyone off into the woods to build a dynamic team ethos,’ said Ponder. ‘It’s one of the
Archchancellor’s Big Ideas. He says that if the faculty gets to know one another better, they’ll be a
happier, more efficient team.’
‘But they do know one another! They’ve known one another for ages! That’s why they don’t like one
another very much! They won’t stand for being turned into a happy and efficient team!’
‘Especially on a ball of ice,’ said Ponder. ‘They’re supposed to be in woods fifty miles away, not in a
glass globe in your study! There is no way to get into Roundworld without using a considerable
amount of magic, and the Archchancellor has banned me from running the thaumic reactor at
anything like full power.’
Rincewind looked again at the message from the bottle.
‘How did the bottle get out?’ he said.
Hex printed:
+++ I did that. I still maintain a watch on Roundworld. And I have been developing interesting
procedures. It is now quite easy for me to reproduce an artefact in the real world +++
‘Why didn’t you tell us the Archchancellor needed help?’ sighed Ponder.
+++ They were having such fun trying to send the bottle +++
‘Can’t you just bring them out, then?’
+++ Yes +++
‘In that case-‘
‘Hold on,’ said Rincewind, remembering the blue beerbottle and the spelling mistakes. ‘Can you
bring them out alive?
Hex seemed affronted.
+++ Certainly. With a probability of 94.37 per cent +++
‘Not great odds,’ said Ponder, ‘But perhaps-‘
‘Hold on again,’ said Rincewind, still thinking about that bottle. ‘ ‘Humans aren’t bottles. How about
alive, with fully functioning brains and all organs and limbs in the right place?’
Unusually, Hex paused before replying.
+++ There will be unavoidable minor changes +++
‘How minor, exactly.’
+++ I cannot guarantee reacquiring more than one of every 1 organ+++
There was a long, chilly silence from the wizards.
+++ Is this a problem? +++
‘Maybe there’s another way?’ said Rincewind.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The note asks for the Librarian.’
In the heat of the night, magic moved on silent feet.
One horizon was red with the setting sun. This world went around a central star. The elves did not
know this and, if they had done, it would not have bothered them. They never bothered with detail of
that kind. The universe had given rise to life in many strange places, but the elves were not interested
in that, either.
This world had created lots of life. Up until now, none of it had ever had what the elves considered to
be potential. But this time, there was definite promise.
Of course, it had iron, too. The elves hated iron. But this time, the rewards were worth the risk. This
time …
One of them signalled. The prey was close at hand. And now they saw it, clustered in the trees around
a clearing, dark blobs against the sunset.
The elves assembled. And then, at a pitch so strange that it entered the brain without the need to use the
ears, they began to sing.
TWO
THE UMPTY-UMPTH ELEMENT
Discworld runs on magic, Roundworld runs on rules, and even though magic needs rules and some
people think rules are magical, they are quite different things. At least, in the absence of wizardly
interference. This was the main scientific message of our last book, The Science of Discworld. There
we charted the history of the universe from the Big Bang through to the creation of the Earth and the
evolution of a not especially promising species of ape. The story ended with a final fast-forward to
the collapse of the space elevator by which a mysterious race (which could not possibly have been
those apes, who were only interested in sex and mucking about) had escaped from the planet. They
had left the Earth because a planet is altogether too dangerous a place to live, and had headed out into
the galaxy in search of safety and a long-term chance of a decent pint.
The Discworld wizards never found out who the builders of the space elevator on Roundworld were.
We know that they were us, the descendants of those apes, who’d brought sex and mucking about to
high levels of sophistication. The wizards missed that bit, although, to be fair, the Earth had been in
existence for over four billion years, and apes and humans were present only for a tiny percentage of
that time. If the entire history of the universe were compressed to one day, we would have been
present for the final 20 seconds.
Quite a lot of interesting things happened on Roundworld while the wizards were skipping ahead, and
now, in this present book, the wizards are going to find out what those things were. And of course
they’re going to interfere, and inadvertently create the world we live in today, just as their
interference in the Roundworld Project inadvertently created our entire universe. It has to work like
that, doesn’t it? That’s how the story goes.
Seen from outside, as it sits in Rincewind’s office, the entire human universe is a small sphere. Large
quantities of magic went into its manufacture and, paradoxically, into maintaining its most interesting
feature. Which is this: Roundworld is the only place on Discworld where magic does not work. A
strong magical field protects it from the thaumic energies that surge around it. Inside Roundworld,
things don’t happen because people want them to or because they make a good narrative: they happen
because the rules of the universe, the so-called ‘laws of nature’, make them happen.
At least, that was a reasonable way to describe things … until human beings evolved. At that point,
something very strange happened to Roundworld. It began, in various ways, to resemble Discworld.
The apes acquired minds, and their minds started to interfere with the normal running of the universe.
Things started to happen because human minds wanted them to. Suddenly the laws of nature, which up
to that point had been blind, mindless rules, were infused with purpose and intention. Things started to
happen for a reason, and among these things that happened was reasoning itself. Yet this dramatic
change took place without the slightest violation of the same rules that had, up to that point, made the
universe a place without purpose. Which, on the level of the rules, it still is.
This seems like a paradox. The main content of our scientific commentary, interleaved between
successive episodes of a Discworld story, will be to resolve that paradox: how did Mind (capital ‘M’
for ‘metaphysical’) come into being on this planet? How did a Mindless universe make up its own
Mind? How can we reconcile human free will (or its semblance) with the inevitability of natural law?