`Er, I don't think they want to wait, sir,' said Rincewind, backing away. Shadows were pouring in to the Central Hall. Over the double stair case, a cloud was forming. It looked like the grey robe of an Auditor, but hugely bigger, and as the wizards watched the greyness dark ened to coal-mine black.
The bloated shape drifted forward, while hundreds more of the empty grey robes continue to merge with it.
`And I think they're a bit angry,' Rincewind added.
Trailing greyness after it, filling the hall from edge to edge, the Auditor bore down on the wizards.
`Hex-' Ponder began.
`Too late,' boomed the Auditor. 'We have control now. No magic, no science, no chocolate. We have to thank you for this place. Never was there a species so determined to destroy itself. In this world, we can win without trying! Do you know the wars you've unleashed upon this toy world? The plagues, the famine, the whole science of death? Are you not ashamed?'
`What's he talking about, Stibbons?' said Ridcully, not taking his eyes off the cloud.
`There are a number of wars in the next couple of hundred years, sir,' said Ponder. `Big ones.'
`Darwin's fault?
'Er, sir.'
`Just "er", Stibbons?'
`"Er" is a very precise term in this context, sir. It means we don't have time for a big debate. But certainly the wars are bigger and more frequent than the ones that took place in the world of The Ology.' `Bad thing, then?' said Ridcully, who liked his philosophy succinct. `Er again, sir, I'm afraid,' said Ponder.
`Care to expand?'
`In short, sir, more people will die in wars, far fewer will die of disease and medical problems of all kinds. And humanity survives the snowball. The first humans left the planet in converted weapons of war, sir.'
`That's monkeys for you, Stibbons,' said Ridcully. He looked up at the cloud of pure Auditor.
`No, we're not ashamed,' he said. `Humans get a chance to go on.' `They won't have earned it!'
`Strange that this concerns you,' said Ridcully.
`Do you know the terrors that will confront them?' the Auditor demanded. `And the terrors that they will bring with them?'
`No, but I doubt if they're worse that the ones they've met already,' said Ridcully. `Anyway, you don't care about them. You just want them to die quietly. Don't you?'
The Auditor shimmered. Ponder wondered how many Auditors had come together to create it. It seemed, now, to be hesitant, unsure It said: `I want ... I ... '
... and exploded into fog which, itself, faded away.
`Not learned quite enough, then,' said Ridcully, and sniffed. `Well, let's send Darwin back and go home, shall we? I'm sure we've missed at least one meal. Where's• Rincewind?'
+++ Hiding in the Minerals Gallery +++ said Hex.
`Impressive. I didn't even see him move. Oh well, I dare say you can pick him up later. Let's go.'
`What did it mean by the terrors they bring with them?' said the Dean.
`Well, they're still monkeys,' said Ridcully. `Still screaming at one another, trailing all that evolution behind them, wherever they go.' `Darwin said something like that, sir. In The Descent of Man,' said Ponder.
`Good chap, Darwin,' said Ridcully. `Would have made a good wizard.'
`Did you know they put his statue in the canteen, sir?' said Ponder, a little shocked.
`Did they? Good idea,' said Ridcully brusquely. `That way, every sensible person sees it. Ready, Hex.'
And the Central Hall was empty again, apart from the fossils.
Charles Darwin awoke. For a moment so brief that a blink ended it, there was a sense of complete disorientation. But then he sat up, feeling unaccountably exhilarated, and looked around at the tangled, busy bank, with its birds and flitting insects, and thought: Yes. That's right. That's how it is.
AFTERTHOUGHT
The Darwin family motto: cave et aude.
Watch, and listen.
Примечания
1
The greatest school of magic on the Discworld. But surely you know this?
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2
The N'tuitiv tribe of Howondaland created the post of Health and Safety Officer even before the post of Witch Doctor, and certainly before taming fire or inventing the spear. They hunt by waiting for animals to drop dead, and eat them raw.
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3
See The Science of Discworld (Ebury Press, 1999, revd 2000).
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4
See The Science of Discworld II (Ebury Press)
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5
So called because it starts from the phenomenon of design and deduces the existence of a cosmic designer.
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6
According to Isaac Asimov, the most practical and dramatic victory of science over religion occurred in the seventeenth century, when churches began to put up lightning conductors.
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7
It is old enough to use the elongated s's parodied in Discworld as is. We have resisted temptation except in this footnote. Though 'manifestation of design' does have a bit of a cachet.
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8
That is to say, the Richard Dawkins of our leg of the famous Trousers of Time, who is, in a very definite way, not in holy orders.
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9
For detailed and thoughtful rebuttals of the main contentions of the intelligent designers, plus some responses, see Matt Young and Taner Edis, Why Intelligent Design Fails (Rutgers University Press, 2004), and William Dembski and Michael Ruse, Debating Design (Cambridge University Press, 2004). And it's only a matter of time before someone writes How Intelligent Is the Designer?
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10
Only the camera obscura, a room with a pinhole in the wall. Paley first wrote about the eye in 1802, whereas genuine photography dates from 1826.
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11
'A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, volume 256 (1994), pp. 53-8.
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12
'They themselves refer to this programme as the 'wedge strategy'.
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13
Phase space, in a given context, is the space of everything that might have happened, not just what did. See The Science of Discworld.
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14
Actually, foot.
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15
Well, let's not exaggerate. You can publish papers on it without risking losing your job. It's certainly better than publishing nothing, which definitely will lose you your job.
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16
Indeed, in the Back to the Future movie sequence, it was a car. A Delorean. Though it did need the assistance of a railway locomotive at one point.
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17
Provided it is fired by someone who has been in the pub since lunchtime.
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18
Actually this is the ambiguous puzuma, which travels at near-lightspeed (which on the Disc is about the speed of sound). If you see a puzuma, it's not there. If you hear it, it's not there either.
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19
As one does. Palaeontologists have just announced that they have found remarkably well-preserved fossils in an East Anglian quarry, showing that giant hippos weighing six or seven tons - roughly twice the weight of modem hippos - wallowed in the rivers of Norfolk 600,000 years ago. It was a warm period sandwiched between two ice ages, probably a few degrees warmer than the present day (you can tell that from insect fossils) and hyenas prowled the banks in search of carrion.
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20
See The Annotated Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott and Ian Stewart (Basic Books, 2002).
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21
Yes, they did - in The Science of Dis
cworld II.
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22
A rare meteorological phenomenon discussed briefly in The Science of Discworld II
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23
This is a mathematician's way of saying that you can put a black hole anywhere you want. (Or, like a gorilla in a Mini, it can go anywhere it wants.)
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24
??? Michael Brooks, `Time Twister', New Scientist, 19 May 2001, 27-9.
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25
Jason Breckenridge, Rob Myers, Amanda Peet, and Cumrun Vafa.
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26
??? See Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Figments of Reality: the origins of the curious mind (Cambridge University Press)
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27
In 1865 FitzRoy did exactly the same. having been turned down for a promotion. Narrativium at work?
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28
Now considered to be thirteen, plus a fourteenth on the Cocos Islands. (Look, people write and complain if we don't point this kind of thing out.)
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29
Literally, 'jointed acorn'
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30
Yes, we know it sounds unlikely, but apparently there are such things.
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31
It was a good job that God had such a fondness for beetles.
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32
Its potential for Librarianship was not widely recognised at that time.
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33
No, not long-haired South American beasts of burden, but Latin for `gaps'.
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34
The term was around in Victorian times, as a phenomenon but not a specific mechanism. Darwin didn't use it in Origin, nor in the later The Descent of Man. However, the final word in Origin is 'evolved'.
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35
To see why, double it: the result now is 2 + 1 + V2 + '/ + y8 + 'A+ ... , which is 2 more than the original sum. What number increases by 2 when you double it? There's only one such number, and it's 2.
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36
If you've never encountered the mathematical joke, here it is. Problem 1: a kettle is hanging on a peg. Describe the sequence of events needed to make a pot of tea. Answer: take the kettle off the peg, put it in the sink, turn on the tap, wait till the kettle fills with water, turn the tap off ... and so on. Problem 2: a kettle is sitting in the sink. Describe the sequence of events needed to make a pot of tea. Answer: not `turn on the tap, wait till the kettle fills with water, turn the tap off ... and so on'. Instead: take the kettle out of the sink and hang it on the peg, then proceed as before. This reduces the problem to one that has already been solved. (Of course the first step puts it back in the sink - that's why it's a joke.)
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37
Yes, traditionally `Indigo' goes here, but that's silly - Indigo is just another shade of blue. You could equally well insert `Turquoise' between Green and Blue. Indigo was just included because seven is more mystical than six. Rewriting history, we find that we have left a place for Octarine, the Discworld's eighth colour. Well, seventh, actually. Septarine, anyone?
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38
This is why, even today when the lustre of `the new mathematics' has all but worn to dust, small children in mathematics classes spend hours drawing squiggly lines between circles containing pictures of cats to circles containing pictures of flowers, busily `matching' the two sets. Neither the children nor their teachers have the foggiest idea why they are doing this. In fact they re doing it because, decades ago, a bunch of demented educators couldn't understand that just because something is logically prior to another, it may not be sensible to teach them in that order. Real mathematicians, who knew that you always put the roof on the house before you dug the foundation trench, looked on in bemused horror.
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39
Briefly: since the bit before the decimal point is a whole number, taking that into account multiplies the answer by aleph-zero. Now aleph-zero x aleph-zeroplex is less than or equal to aleph-zeroplex x aleph-zeroplex, which is (2 x aleph-zeroplex, which is aleph-zeroplex. OK?
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40
The proof isn't hard, but it's sophisticated. If you want to see it, consult a textbook on the foundations of mathematics.
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41
Curiously, it could expand to infinity in a finite time if it accelerated sufficiently rapidly. Expand by one light-year after one minute, by another light-year after half a minute, by another after a quarter of a minute ... do a Zeno, and after two minutes, you have an infinite universe. But it's not expanding that fast, and no one thinks it did so in the past, either.
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42
Actually a more sophisticated gadget called the Poincare dodecahedral space, a slightly weird shape invented more than a century ago to show that topology is not as simple as we'd like it to be. But people understand 'football'.
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43
Derived from a pun: m-bran for `membrane'. Opening up jokes about no-branes and p-branes. Oh well.
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44
Counterfactual: a more acceptable word for what has for a long time been a very common feature of science fiction, the 'alternate world' or 'worlds of if story (there was a pulp SF magazine in the 1950s called Worlds of If, in fact). 'Counterfactual' is now used when said stories are written by real writers and historians, to save them the indignity of sharing a genre with all those strange sci-fi people.
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45
Well, there might be ...
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46
See The Science of Discworld.
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47
What would have happened - if Darwin had gone back in time and killed his own grandfather?
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48
They made exceptions for manifestly `unimportant' but very diverse sets of alleles like blood groups, but in those cases it didn't seem to matter much which kind you had.
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49
That's very important for a few species. Zebra-fish eggs in the wild must hatch in just under 72 hours, because they're laid just before dawn and must hide before the third dawn when predators could see them.
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50
Sorry about the proliferation of barnyard metaphors.
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51
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.
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