He stamped back to the table and picked up a handful of papers. ‘Look at this stuff! “Darwin bitten by poisonous spider … Darwin savaged by kangaroo … stung by jellyfish … eaten by shark … Beagle found floating, table laid for a meal, this time in a different ocean, still no one on board … Darwin struck by lightning … killed by volcanic activity … Beagle sunk by freak wave” … does anyone expect us to believe this for one minute?’
There was a ringing silence.
‘I can see this is worrying you, Mr Stibbons,’ said Ridcully.
‘Well, yes, I mean, yes, it’s so … wrong! The multiverse is not supposed to change the rules. Anything that’s possible to happen has a universe for it to happen in! I mean, here, yes, the rules can be bent in all kinds of ways, but in Roundworld there’s no one to bend them!’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Rincewind. The other wizards turned, amazed at this revelation.
‘Yes?’ said Ponder.
‘Why not just take it for granted that someone is out to get you?’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s what I do. Don’t bother to work out the fine detail. Look, when you first started to tinker, it was all going to be plain sailing, right? Make a few little adjustments, pinch a fish, and it’d all be OK? But now there are nearly fifteen hundred new reasons—’
With a rattle, Hex’s writing desk started up. The pens wrote:
+++ 3563 reasons now +++
‘They’re breeding!’ said Ridcully.
‘There you are, then,’ said Rincewind, almost cheerfully. ‘Something down there is frightened. It’s so frightened that it’s not even going to let him get on the boat. I mean, he has to take the voyage whatever book he writes, isn’t that right!’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Ponder. Theology of Species gets taken seriously because it’s written by a renowned and respected scientist whose research was meticulous. So was The Origin. Either way, he needs to be on that boat. But the moment we take an interest, the voyage doesn’t happen!’
‘Then if it was me, I’d say that something’s got really worried,’ said Rincewind. ‘They don’t mind if The Ology doesn’t get written in just one universe, but they hate the idea of The Origin being written at all.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Ridcully. ‘The nerve! I am the master of this college, and that –’ he pointed to the little globe ‘– is university property! Now I’m getting angry. We’re going to fight back, Mr Stibbons!’
‘I don’t think you can fight a whole universe, sir!’
‘It’s the prerogative of every life form, Mr Stibbons!’
Gales roared for three weeks. Roundworld time was mutable for the wizards; it only affected them if they wanted it to.
Something or someone didn’t want the Beagle to sail, and they could influence the weather. They could influence anything. But of them, there was still no sign.
The Dean watched the storm in the big omniscope in the HEM.
‘That’s what happened when Darwin gets on board in this universe,’ said Ponder, adjusting the omniscope. ‘If he hadn’t gone, his place is taken by an artist, who produced a famous portfolio as a result. His name was Preserved J. Nightingale. You met his wife.’
‘Preserved?’ said the Dean, watching the dismal gale.
‘Short for Preserved-by-God,’ said Ponder. ‘He was found as a child in the wreckage of a ship. His adopted parents were very religious. And … ah yes … this is the weather they get when he is on board.’
The omniscope flickered.
‘No gale?’ said the Dean, looking at the blue sky.
‘Brisk winds from the north-east. They’re ball-world directions, sir. For the purposes of the voyage, they are ideal. I see you have your “Born to Rune” jacket on, sir.’
‘We’ve got a fight on our hands, Stibbons,’ said the Dean, severely. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve seen the Archchancellor so angry at anyone but me! Have you finished?’
‘Just finishing, sir,’ said Ponder.
The HEM had a deserted look. That was because it had been, by and large, deserted. Thick tubes led out from Hex, across the floor and out over the lawn towards UU’s Great Hall.
The wizards were going to war. It took a lot to make that happen, but you couldn’t let any old universe push you around. Gods, demons and Death were one thing, but mindless matter shouldn’t be allowed to get ideas.
‘Couldn’t we just find a way to bring Darwin back here?’ said the Dean, watching Ponder prod buttons on Hex’s keyboard.
‘Quite probably, sir,’ said Ponder.
‘Well, then, why don’t we just bring him here, explain the situation, and drop him off on his island? We could even give him a copy of his book.’
Ponder shuddered.
‘There are quite a lot of reasons why that course of action might not, with ease, be rescued in any coherent way from the category of the insanely unwise, Dean,’ he said, having worked out that the senior wizards lost interest in any sentence that went on past twenty words. ‘For one thing, he’d know.’
‘We could bop him on the head,’ said the Dean. ‘Or put a ’fluence on him. Yes, that’d be a good idea,’ he said, because it was his. ‘We could sit him in a comfy chair and read out the right book to him. He’d wake up back home and think he’s made it all up.’
‘But he wouldn’t have been there,’ said Ponder. He waved a hand. In the air overhead, a little ball of multicoloured light appeared. It looked like a tangle of glowing strings, or the mating of rainbows.
‘Oh, we could sort that out,’ said the Dean airily. ‘Stick some sand in his boots, a few finch feathers in his pocket … we are wizards, after all.’
‘That would be unethical, Dean,’ said Ridcully.
‘Why? We’re the Good Guys, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, but that rather hinges on doing certain things and not doing others, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘Playing around with people’s heads against their will is almost certainly one of the nots. You should get ready to move quickly, sir.’
‘What are you doing, Stibbons?’
‘I’ve got Hex to cast a thaumatic glyph in conditional Darwin space,’ said Ponder. ‘But to resolve it properly Hex will have to run the thaumic reactor a little higher than usual.’
‘How much higher?’ said the Dean suspiciously.
‘About 200 per cent, sir.’
‘Is that safe?’
‘Absolutely not, sir. Hex, glyphic resolution in twenty seconds. Dean, run! Run, sir!’
From the direction of the Old Squash Court came a sound that had been there all the time, unheeded, and was now growing louder. It was the whum whum of dying thaums, each one yielding up its intrinsic magic …
Wizards have a wonderful turn of speed.
Ponder and the Dean reached the Great Hall in twelve seconds, the Dean slightly in the lead. The ball of rainbows had got there before them, though, and hung high over the black and white flagstones of the floor.
The hall was packed with wizards. Teams had been sent out to the furthest corners of the university, which were pretty far. Space and time had long ago been warped by the ancient magical stones, and there were wizards at UU who had happily occupied nooks and corners for decades or longer, regarding the Great Hall and surrounding buildings as the colonists on some faraway continent might regard the ancient mother country. Distant studies had been broken into and their occupants dragged out or, in some unfortunate cases, swept up. Wizards that Ponder had never seen before were in the throng, blinking in the light of common day.
Panting slightly, Ponder hurried over to Ridcully.
‘You said you wanted a map, sir,’ he said.
‘Yes, Stibbons. Can’t plan a campaign without a map!’
‘Then look up now, sir! Here it comes!’
The air wavered for a moment, and then the mated rainbows gave birth. Frozen streamers of light looped through the hazy air of the hall. They twisted and tangled and curved in ways that suggested more than the everyday four dimensions were in
volved.
‘Looks very pretty,’ said the Archchancellor, blinking. ‘Er …’
‘I thought it would help us sort out further nodalities,’ said Ponder.
‘Ah yes, good idea,’ said Ridcully. ‘No one wants unsorted nodalities.’ The other senior wizards nodded sagely.
‘By which I mean,’ Ponder added, ‘it will show us those points where our intervention will have been going to be was essential, if I can put it that way.’
‘Oh,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘Er … what does the coloured line mean, exactly?’
‘Which one, sir?’
‘All of them, man!’
‘Well, the points of intervention that require a human show up as red circles. Those that can be left to Hex are white. The blue lines represent the author of, ahem, The Ology, the yellow lines is the optimum path for the author of The Origin, and the green line represent slippage between futures. Known thaumic occlusions are purple, but I expect you worked that out already.’
‘What’s that one?’ said the Dean, pointing to a red circle with his staff.
‘We must make certain he doesn’t get off the boat at an island called Tenerife,’ said Ponder. ‘Seasickness again, you see. Quite a few Darwins got off there.’
The tip of the staff moved. ‘And that one?’
‘He must get off the boat at the island of St Jago. He has valuable insights there.’
‘Sees things evolvin’, that kind of thing?’ said Ridcully.
‘No, sir. You can’t see things evolving, even when they’re doing it.’
‘We saw them on Mono Island,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘You could practically hear them!’
‘Yes, sir. But we have a god of evolution. Gods aren’t patient. On Roundworld, evolution takes time. Lots of time. Darwin was raised in the belief that the Roundworld universe was created in six days –’
‘Which is correct, as I have pointed out,’ said the Dean proudly.
‘Yes,’ said Ponder, ‘but I have also pointed out that on the inside it took billions of years. It is vital that Darwin realises that evolution has got lots of time to work in.’
Before the Dean could protest, Ponder turned back to the shining, twisting tangle of light.
‘There is where the mast falls on his head in the port of Buenos Aires,’ he said, pointing. ‘The Beagle was shot at. It was meant to be a blank, fired from a cannon, but for some reason it had been loaded. The British were very upset about it, and issued a stern diplomatic protest by sending a warship to bombard the port to rubble. This one is where Darwin bludgeons himself into unconsciousness with his own bolas in Argentina. This one is where he’s severely injured putting down an insurrection—’
‘He got about a bit for a man who collected flowers and things,’ said Ridcully, with a touch of admiration.
‘Look, I’ve been thinking about all this,’ said the Dean. ‘This “science” is all about the search for truth, yes? Why don’t we just tell them the truth?’
‘You mean tell them that their universe was accidentally started by you, Dean, sticking your hand into some raw firmament created to use up spare power from the thaumic reactor?’ said Ridcully.
‘Put like that it seems a bit unlikely, I admit, but—’
‘No direct contact, Dean, we agreed about that,’ said Ridcully. ‘We just clear his way. What’s that nodality, Stibbons? It’s flashing.’
Ponder looked at where the Archchancellor’s staff was pointing.
‘That’s a tricky one, sir. We will have to ensure that Edward Lawson, a British official in the Galápagos Islands, isn’t struck by a meteorite. It’s a new malignity, Hex says. In a number of histories, it happens a few days before he meets Darwin. Remember, sir? I mentioned it in my yellow folder that was delivered to your office this morning.’ Ponder sighed. ‘He draws Darwin’s attention to some interesting facts.’
‘Ah, I read that one,’ said Ridcully, his happy tone indicating that this was a lucky coincidence. ‘Darwin seemed to be too busy runnin’ around like a monkey in a banana plantation to spot the clues, eh?’
‘It would be true to say that his full theory of natural selection was evolved on mature reflection some time after his voyage, yes,’ said Ponder, carefully answering a slightly different question.
‘And this chap Lawson was important?’
‘Hex believes so, sir. In a way, everyone Darwin met was important. And everything he saw.’
‘And then whoosh, this chap was hit by a rock? I call that suspicious.’
‘Hex does too, sir.’
‘I’ll be jolly glad when we’ve got this Darwin to the damn islands, then,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘We’ll need a holiday after this. Oh well, I’ll address the wizards now. I hope we’ll have enough for—’
‘Er, we haven’t just got to get him to the islands. We’ve got to get him all the way home, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘He’ll be away from home for nearly five years.’
‘Five years?’ said the Dean. ‘I thought visiting the wretched islands was what it was all about!’
‘Yes and then again, in a very real sense, no, Dean,’ said Ponder. ‘It would be more correct to say they later became what it was all about. He was actually there for a little more than a month. It was a very long voyage, sir. They went all around the world. I’m sorry, I hadn’t made that clear. Hex, show the entire timelines, please.’
The display began to recede, drawing from nowhere more and more tangles and loops, as if half a dozen cosmic kittens had been given stars to play with instead of balls of wool. There was a gasp from the throng of wizards.
The tangles were still streaming away overhead when the Dean said: “There’s millions of the wretched things!’
‘No, Dean,’ said Ponder. ‘It looks like that, but there are only 21,309 important nodalities at this point. Hex can deal with almost all of them. They involve quite minute changes at the quantum level.’
The wizards continued to stare upwards as the whorls and loops flashed by and dwindled.
‘Someone really doesn’t want that book,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, his face illuminated by the multi coloured glow.
‘In theory there isn’t a someone in charge,’ said Ponder.
‘But the odds against Darwin writing Origin are getting bigger by the minute!’
‘The odds against anything actually happening are huge, when you come to think about it,’ said Ridcully. ‘Take poker, for example. The odds against four aces are huge, but the odds of having any four cards at all are really big.’
‘Well put, Archchancellor!’ said Ponder. ‘But this is a crooked game.’
Ridcully strode out into the centre of the Great Hall, his face illuminated by the glowing map.
‘Gentlemen!’ he bellowed. ‘Some of you already know what this is about, eh? We’re going to force a history on Roundworld! It’s one that should be there already! Something is trying to kill it, gentlemen. So if someone wants to stop it happening, we want to make it happen all the more! You will be sent into Roundworld with a series of tasks to do! Most of them have been made very simple so that wizards can understand them! Shortly our missions for tomorrow, should you chose to accept them, will be given to you by Mr Stibbons. If you do not choose to accept them, you are free to choose dismissal! We’re starting at dawn! Dinner, Second Dinner, Midnight Snack, Somnambulistic Nibbles and Early Breakfast will be served in the Old Refectory! There will be no Second Breakfast!’
Over a chorus of protest he went on: ‘We are taking this seriously, gentlemen!’
TWELVE
THE WRONG BOOK
OUR FICTIONAL DARWIN HAS A lot more in common with the ‘real’ one – the Darwin of the particular timeline that you inhabit, the one who wrote The Origin and not The Ology – than might at first be apparent. Or plausible. The irresistible force of narrativium induces us to imagine Charles Darwin as an old man with a beard, a stick, and a faint but definite hint of gorilla. And so he was, in his old age. Bu
t as a young man he was vigorous, athletic, and engaged in the kind of exuberant and not always politically correct activities that we expect of young men.
We’ve already learned of the real Darwin’s amazing fortune in getting on board the Beagle and remaining there, culminating in his boundless delight at the geology of the coral island of St Jago. But there are other crucial nodalities, points of intervention, and thaumic occlusions in that version of Roundworld’s historical record, and the wizards are exercising extreme care and attention in the hope of steering history through, past, and around these causal singularities.
For example, the Beagle really did come under fire from a cannon. When the ship tried to enter the harbour at Buenos Aires in 1832, one of the local guard ships fired at it. Darwin was convinced that he heard a cannonball whistle over his head, but it turned out that the shot was a blank, intended as a warning. FitzRoy, muttering angrily about insults to the British flag, sailed on, but was stopped by a quarantine boat: the harbour authorities were worried about cholera. Incensed, FitzRoy loaded all of the cannons on one side of his ship. As he sailed back out of the harbour he aimed them all at the guard ship, informing its crew that if they ever fired at the Beagle again, he would send their ‘rotten hulk’ to the seabed.
Darwin really did learn to throw a bolas, too, on the pampas of Patagonia. He enjoyed hunting rheas, and watching the gauchos bring them down by entangling a bolas in their legs. But when he tried to do the same, all he managed was to trip up his own horse. The Origin might have vanished from history’s timeline then and there, but Darwin survived, with only his pride hurt. The gauchos found the whole thing hugely amusing.
Charles even took part in suppressing an insurrection. When the Beagle reached Montevideo, shortly after the cannonball incident, FitzRoy complained to the local representative of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, who promptly set sail for Buenos Aires in his frigate HMS Druid to secure an apology. No sooner had the warship disappeared from view than there was a rebellion, with black soldiers taking over the town’s central fort. The chief of police asked FitzRoy for help, and he dispatched a squad of fifty sailors, armed to the teeth … with Darwin happily bringing up the rear. The mutineers immediately surrendered, and Darwin expressed disappointment that not a shot had been fired.
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