The Science of Discworld II

by Terry Pratchett

  Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.

  Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

  Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.

  Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

  Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

  Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

  The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

  No-one ever said elves are nice.

  Elves are bad.

  For most purposes (though, admittedly, not when dealing with elves) it doesn’t greatly matter if the traditional tales make no real sense. Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy make no immediate sense (on Roundworld, but see Hogfather for their Discworld significance). Mind you, it’s clear why children are happy to believe in such generosity. The most important role of the tribal Make-a-Human kit is to provide the tribe with its own collective identity, making it possible for it to act as a unit. Tradition is good for such purposes; sense is optional. All religions are strong on tradition, but many are weak on sense, at least if you take their stories literally. Nevertheless, religion is absolutely central to most cultures’ Make-a-Human kit.

  The growth of human civilisation is a story of the assembly of ever-larger units, knitted together by some version of that Make-a-Human kit. At first, children were taught what they must do to be accepted as members of the family group. Then they were taught what they must do to be accepted as members of the tribe. (Believing apparently ridiculous things was a very effective test: the naïve outsider would all too readily betray a lack of belief, or would simply have no idea what the appropriate belief was. Is it permitted to pluck a chicken before dark on Wednesday? The tribe knew, the outsider did not, and since any reasonable person would guess ‘yes’, the tribal priesthood could go a long way by making the accepted answer ‘no’.) After that, the same kind of thing happened for the local baron’s serfs, for the village, the town, the city and the nation. We spread the net of True Human Beings.

  Once units of any size have acquired their own identity, they can function as units, and in particular they can combine forces to make a bigger unit. The resulting structure is hierarchical: the chains of command reflect the breakdown into sub-units and sub-sub-units. Individual people, or individual sub-units, can be expelled from the hierarchy, or otherwise punished, if they stray outside accepted (or enforced) cultural norms. This is a very effective way for a small group of people (barbarian) to maintain control over a much larger group (tribal). It works, and because of that we still labour under its restrictions, many of which are undesirable. We have invented techniques like democracy to try to mitigate the undesirable effects, but these techniques bring new problems. A dictatorship can generally take action more rapidly than a democracy, for example. It’s harder to argue.

  The path from ape to human is not just one of evolutionary pressures producing more and more effective brains; not just a tale of the evolution of intelligence. Without intelligence, we could never have got started on that path, but intelligence alone was not enough. We had to find a way to share our intelligence with others, and to store useful ideas and tricks for the benefit of the whole group, or at least, those in a position to make use of it. That’s where extelligence comes into play. Extelligence is what really gave those apes the springboard that would launch them into sentience, civilisation, technology, and all the other things that make humans unique on this planet. Extelligence amplifies the individual’s ability to do good – or evil. It even creates new forms of good and evil, such as, respectively, cooperation and war.

  Extelligence operates by putting ever more sophisticated stories into the Make-a-Human-Being kit. It pulled us up by our own bootstraps: we could climb from tribal to barbarian to civilised.

  Shakespeare shows us doing it. His period was not a rebirth of Hellenistic Greece or Imperial Rome. Instead, it was the culmination of the barbarian ideas of conquest, honour and aristocracy, codified in the principles of chivalry, meeting its match in the written principles of a tribal peasantry, and disseminated by printing. This kind of sociological confrontation produced many events in which the two cultures meet head on.

  This was exemplified by the Warwickshire enclosure uprisings. In Warwickshire, the aristocracy carved up land into small parcels, and the peasantry got very upset because the aristocracy didn’t give any heed to what kind of land was in each parcel. All the aristocrats knew about peasant farming was a simplistic calculation: this much land will suffice for that many peasants. The peasants knew what was actually involved in growing food, so that the only thing you could do with a small piece of woodland, for instance, was to chop down all the trees to make room to grow some food.

  Today’s bean-counting managerial style in many businesses, and all British public services, is exactly the same. This kind of confrontation between the barbarian attitudes of the nobility and the tribal ones of the peasantry is precisely portrayed in many of Shakespeare’s plays, as an illustration of low-life, with its folk wisdom as comic relief and pathos, set against the lofty ideals of the ruling classes – leading so often to tragedy.

  But also to high comedy. Think of Theseus, Duke of Athens, on the one hand, and Bottom on the other, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  1 On his first visit to England in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi was asked ‘What do you think of modern civilisation?’ He is said to have replied ‘That would be a good idea.’

  2 A time measurement we developed in The Science of Discworld as a ‘human’ way of measuring large amounts of time. It’s 50 years, a ‘typical’ age gap between grandparent and grandchild. Most of the really interesting bits of human development have taken place in the last 150 Grandfathers. Remember – objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.

  3 Most of them being Grandfather bacteria, you appreciate. That’s the trouble with metaphors.

  4 Though they’re monkeys, not apes.

  5 It helps considerably to steal privilege from other species; for instance, all that food material in plant seeds, tubers and bulbs.

  6 It happens all the time on Discworld!

  7 But we eat sheep, too.

  NINE

  THE ELVISH QUEEN

  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. 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, too. None of it had ever had what the elves considered to be potential. But this time …

  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.

  ‘Charge!’ cried Archchancellor Ridcully.

  The wizards, all bar Rincewind, charged. He peered around from behind a tree.

  The elf song, a creative dissonance of tones that went straight into the back of the brain, ceased abruptly.

  Thin figures spun around. Almond eyes glowed in triangular faces.

  People who knew the wizards only as the world’s most avid diners would have been quite surprised at their turn of speed. Besides, while it may take a little while for a wizard to reach maximum acceleration, he’s then very hard to stop. And he carries such a cargo of aggression; the stratagems of the Uncommon Room at UU are guaranteed to give any wizard a maximum load of virulence just itching for a target.

  The Dean hit first, striking an elf a blow with his staff. A horseshoe had been wired to the
end. The elf screamed and twisted back, clutching at its shoulder.

  There were many elves but they hadn’t been expecting an attack. And iron was so powerful. A handful of flung nails had the effect of buckshot. Some tried to fight back, but the dread of iron was too strong.

  The prudent and the survivors took to their skinny heels, while the dead evaporated.

  The attack took less than thirty seconds. Rincewind watched it from behind his tree. He was not being cowardly, he reasoned. This was a job for specialists, and could safely be left to the senior wizards. If, later on, there was a problem involving slood dynamics or fretwork, or someone needed to misunderstand some magic, he would be happy to step forward.

  There was a rustling behind him.

  Something was there. What it was changed as he turned and stared.

  The first talent of the elves was their singing. It could turn other creatures into potential slaves. The second talent was their ability to change not their shape but how their shape was perceived. For a moment Rincewind caught sight of a slim, spare figure glaring at him and then, in one blurred moment, it became a woman. A queen, in a red dress and a rage.

  ‘Wizards?’ she said. ‘Here? Why? How? Tell me!’

  A gold crown glittered in her dark hair and murder gleamed in her eyes as she advanced on Rincewind, who backed up against his tree.

  ‘This is not your world!’ the elf queen hissed.

  ‘You’d be amazed,’ said Rincewind. ‘Now!’

  The queen’s brow wrinkled. ‘Now?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, I said now,’ Rincewind said, grinning desperately. ‘Now was the word I said, in fact. Now!’

  For a moment the queen looked puzzled. And then she somersaulted backwards in a high arc, just as the Luggage’s lid snapped shut where she had been. She landed behind it, hissed at Rincewind, and vanished into the night.

  Rincewind glared at the box. ‘Why did you wait? Did I tell you to wait?’ he demanded. ‘You just like to stand right behind people and wait for them to find out, right?’

  He looked around. There was no sign of any more elves. In the middle distance the Dean, having run out of enemies, was attacking a tree.

  Then Rincewind looked up. Along the branches, clinging to one another and staring down at him in wide-eyed amazement, were dozens of what looked, in the moonlight, like rather small and worried monkeys.

  ‘Good evening!’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about us, we’re just passing through …’

  ‘Now this is where it all gets complicated,’ said a voice behind him. It was a familiar one, being his own. ‘I’ve only got a few seconds before the loop closes, so here’s what you have to do. When you go back to Dee’s time … hold your breath.’

  ‘Are you me?’ said Rincewind, peering into the gloom.

  ‘Yes. And I’m telling you to hold your breath. Would I lie to me?’

  There was an inrush of air as the other Rincewind disappeared and, down in the clearing, Ridcully bellowed Rincewind’s name.

  Rincewind stopped looking around and hurried down to the other wizards, who were looking immensely pleased with themselves.

  ‘Ah, Rincewind, I thought you wouldn’t want to be left behind,’ said the Archchancellor, grinning nastily. ‘Got any, did you?’

  ‘The queen, in fact,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Really? I’m impressed!’

  ‘But she – it got away.’

  ‘They’ve all gone,’ said Ponder. ‘I saw a blue flash on that hill up there. They’ve gone back to their world.’

  ‘D’you think they’ll come back?’ said Ridcully.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if they do, sir. Hex will spot them and we can always get there in time.’

  Ridcully cracked his knuckles. ‘Good. Capital exercise. Much better than magicking paint at one another. Builds grit and team interdependency. Someone go and stop the Dean attacking that rock, will you? He does rather get carried away.’

  A faint white ring appeared on the grass, wide enough to hold the wizards.

  ‘Ah, the ride back,’ said the Archchancellor, as the excited Dean was hustled towards the rest of the group. ‘Time to—’

  The wizards were suddenly in empty air. They fell. All but one of them were not holding their breath before they hit the river.

  Wizards do, however, have good floating capabilities and a tendency to bob up and down. And the river was in any case rather like a slowly moving swamp. Floating logs and mud banks choked it. Here and there, mud banks had become sufficiently established to sprout a crop of trees. By degrees, and with much arguing about where dry land actually began – it was not very obvious – they splashed their way to the shore. The sun was hot overhead, and clouds of mosquitoes shimmered among the trees.

  ‘Hex has brought us back to the wrong time,’ said Ridcully, wringing out his robe.

  ‘I don’t think he’d do that, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder, meekly.

  ‘The wrong place, then. This is not a city, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  Ponder looked around in bewilderment. The landscape around them was not exactly land and not exactly river. Ducks were quacking, somewhere. There were blue hills in the distance.

  ‘On the upside,’ said Rincewind, extracting frogs from a pocket, ‘everything smells better.’

  ‘This is a swamp, Rincewind.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘And I can see smoke,’ said Ridcully.

  There was a thin grey column in the middle distance.

  Reaching it took a lot longer than the mere distance suggested. Land and water were contesting every step of the way. But, eventually, and with only one sprain and a number of bites, the wizards reached some thick bushes and peered into the clearing beyond.

  There were some houses, but that was stretching the term. They were little more than piles of branches with reed roofs.

  ‘They could be savages,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  ‘Or perhaps someone sent them all out into the country to forge a dynamic team spirit,’ said the Dean, who had been badly bitten.

  ‘Savages would be too much to hope for,’ said Rincewind, watching the huts carefully.

  ‘You want to find savages?’ said Ridcully.

  Rincewind sighed. ‘I am the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, sir. In an unknown situation, always hope for savages. They tend to be quite polite and hospitable provided you don’t make any sudden moves or eat the wrong sort of animal.’

  ‘Wrong sort of animal?’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Taboo, sir. They tend to be related. Or something.’

  ‘That sounds rather … sophisticated,’ said Ponder suspiciously.

  ‘Savages often are,’ said Rincewind. ‘It’s the civilised people that give you trouble. They always want to drag you off somewhere and ask you unsophisticated questions. Edged weapons are often involved. Trust me on this. But these aren’t savages, sir.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Savages build better huts,’ said Rincewind firmly. ‘These are edge people.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of edge people!’ said Ridcully.

  ‘I made it up,’ said Rincewind. ‘I run into them occasionally. People that live right on the edge, sir. Out on rocks. In the worst kind of desert. No tribe or clan. That takes too much effort. Of course, so does beating up strangers, so they’re the best kind of people to meet.’

  Ridcully looked around at the swamp. ‘But there’s waterfowl everywhere,’ he said. ‘Birds. Eggs. Lots of fish, I’ll be bound. Beavers. Animals that come down to drink. I could eat myself greasy to the eyebrows here. This is good country.’

  ‘Hold on, one of them’s coming out,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  A stooping figure had emerged from a hut. It straightened up, and stared around. Huge nostrils flared.

  ‘Oh my, look what just fell out of the ugly tree,’ said the Dean. ‘Is it a troll?’

  ‘He’s certainly a bit rugged,’ said Ridcully. ‘And why is he
wearing boards?’

  ‘I think he’s just not very good at tanning hides,’ said Rincewind.

  The enormous shaggy head turned towards the wizards. The nostrils flared again.

  ‘He smelled us,’ said Rincewind, and started to turn. A hand grabbed the back of his robe.

  ‘This is not a good time to run away, Professor,’ said Ridcully, lifting him off the ground in one hand. ‘We know you’re good at languages. You get on with people. You have been chosen to be our ambassador. Do not scream.’

  ‘Besides, the thing looks like cruel and unusual geography,’ said the Dean, as Rincewind was thrust out of the bushes.

  The big man watched him, but made no attempt to attack.

  ‘Go on!’ hissed the bushes. ‘We need to find out when we are!’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Rincewind, eyeing the giant cautiously. ‘And he’s going to tell me, is he? He’s got a calendar, has he?’

  He advanced carefully, hands up to show that he didn’t have a weapon. Rincewind was a great believer in not being armed. It made you a target.

  The man had obviously seen him. But he didn’t seem very excited about it. He watched Rincewind as someone might watch a passing cloud.

  ‘Er … hello,’ said Rincewind, stopping just out of range. ‘Me big fella Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography belong Unseen University, you … oh dear, you haven’t even discovered washing, have you? Either that or it’s the clothes belong you. Still, no obvious weapons. Er …’

  The man took a few steps forward and tugged the hat off Rincewind’s head in one quick movement.

  ‘Hey—!’

  What was visible of the big face broke into a grin. The man turned the hat this way and that. Sunlight sparkled off the word ‘Wizzard’ in cheap sequins.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Rincewind. ‘Pretty glitter. Well, that’s a start …’

  TEN

  BLIND MAN WITH LANTERN

  THE WIZARDS ARE NOW BEGINNING to understand that, while you can eliminate evil by eliminating extelligence, the result can be about as interesting as watching daytime television. Their plan to stop the elves interfering with human evolution has worked, but they don’t like the result. It is bland and unintelligent. It has no spark of creativity.