Science of Discworld

THE BLEAT GOES ON

EXTELLIGENCE BLOOMED, faster than HEX could cre­ate extra space in which to apprehend it. It reached the seas and spread out across the conti­nents, left the surface of the world, spun webs across the sky, reached the moon ... and went fur­ther, as intelligence sought things to be intelligent about.

Extelligence learned. Among many other things, it learned to fear.

The HEM filled up again as the wizards returned, unsteadily, from lunch.

'Ah, Rincewind,' said the Archchancellor. 'We're looking for a volunteer to go into the squash court and shut down the reactor, and we've found you. Well done.'

'Is it dangerous?' said Rincewind.

'That depends on how you define dangerous,' said Ridcully.

'Er ... liable to cause pain and an imminent cessation of respira­tion,' suggested Rincewind. 'A high risk of agony, a possible deficit of arms and legs, a terminal shortness of breath...'

Ridcully and Ponder went into a huddle. Rincewind heard them whispering. Then the Archchancellor turned, beaming.

'We've decided to come to a new definition,' he said. 'It is "not as dangerous as many other things". I beg you pardon ...' He leaned over as Ponder whispered urgently in his ear. 'Correction, "not as dangerous as some other things". There. I think that's clear.'

'Well, yes, you mean ... not as dangerous as some of the most dangerous things in the universe?'

'Yes, indeed. And among them, Rincewind, would be your refusal to go.' The Archchancellor walked over to the omniscope. 'Oh, another ice age,' he went on. 'Well, that is a surprise.'

Rincewind glanced at the Librarian, who shrugged. Only a few tens of thousands of years could have passed down there. The apes probably never knew what squashed them.

There was a lengthy rattle from HEX's write-out. Ponder walked over to read it.

'Er ... Archchancellor? HEX says he's found advanced intelli­gence on the planet.'

'Intelligent life? Down there? But the place is a snowball again!'

'Er ... not life, sir. Not exactly.'

'Hang on, what's this?' said the Dean.

There was, thin as a thread, a ring around the world. Spaced at regular distances were tiny dots, like beads, and from them more tiny lines descended towards the surface.

So did the wizards.

Wind howled across the tundra. The ice was only a few hundred miles away, even here at the equator.

The wizards faded into existence, and looked around them.

'What the hell happened here?' said Ridcully.

The landscape was a welter of scars and pits. Roads were visible where they had buckled up through the snow, and there were the ruins of what could only have been buildings. But half the horizon was filled with what looked very much like an etiolated version of one of the giant shellfish proposed by the Lecturer in Recent Runes. It must have been several miles across at the base, and extended upwards beyond the limit of vision.

'Did any of you do this?' said Ridcully accusingly.

'Oh, come on? said the Dean. 'We don't even know what it is.'

Beyond the tangle of broken roadways the snow blew across deep trenches gouged out of the ground. Desolation reigned.

Ponder pointed towards the huge pyramid.

'Whatever we're looking for, it's in there,' he said.

The first thing the wizards noticed was the mournful bleating noise. It came and went in a regular way, on-off, on-off, and seemed to fill the entire structure.

The wizards wandered onwards, occasionally getting HEX to move them to different places. Nothing, they agreed, made much sense. The building was mostly full of roadways and loading docks, interspersed with massive pillars. It creaked, too, like an old galleon. They could hear the groaning noises, echoing far above. Occasionally, the ground trembled.

It was clear that important things happened in the centre. There were tubes, hundreds of feet high. The wizards recognized cranes, and failed to recognize huge engines of unknown purpose. Cables thick as a house rose into the darkness above.

Frost sparkled off everything.

Still the bleat went on.

'Look,' said Ponder.

Red words flashed on and off, high in the air.

'"A-L-A-A-M",' the Dean spelled out. 'I wonder why it's doing that? They seem to have invented magic, whoever they are. Getting letters to flash like that is quite difficult to do.'

Ponder disappeared for a moment, and then came back.

'HEX feels that this is a dumb-waiter,' he said. 'Er ... you know ... for lifting things to another level.'

'Going where?' said Ridcully.

'Er ... up, sir. Into that ... necklace around the world. HEX has been speaking to the intelligence here. It's a sort of HEX, sir. And it's nearly dead.'

'That's a shame,' said Ridcully He sniffed. 'Where's everyone gone, then?'

'Er ... they made huge ... sort of... big metal balls to live in. I know it sounds stupid, sir. But they've gone. Because of the ice. And there was a comet, too. Not very big. But it scared everyone. They built the ... the beanstalk things, and then they ... er ... mined metal out of floating rocks, and ... they left.'

'Where've they gone?'

'The ... intelligence isn't sure. It's forgotten. It says it's forgot­ten a lot.'

'Oh, I understand? said the Dean, who'd been trying to follow this, 'Everyone's climbed up a great big beanstalk?'

'Er ... sort of, Dean,' said Ponder, in his diplomatic voice. 'In a manner of speaking.'

'Certainly messed the place up before they went,' said Ridcully.

Rincewind had been watching a rat scuttle away into the debris, but the words sunk in and exploded in his head.

'Messed up?' he growled. 'How?'

'Say again?' said Ridcully.

'Did you see the weather report for this world?' said Rincewind, waving his hands in the air. 'Two miles of ice, followed by a light shower of rocks, with outbreaks of choking fog for the next thou­sand years? There will be widespread vulcanism as half a continent's worth of magma lets go, followed by a period of moun­tain building? And that's normal.'

'Yes, well...'

'Oh, yes, there are some nice quiet periods, everything settles down, and then, whammo!'

'There's no need to get so excited...'

'I've been here!' said Rincewind. 'This is how this place works! And now, please, you tell me how, I mean how, can anything living on this world possibly mess it up? I mean, compared to what hap­pens anyway?' He paused, and gulped air. 'I mean, don't get me wrong, if you pick the right time, yes, sure, it's a great world for a holiday, ten thousand years, even a few million if you're lucky with the weather but, good grief, it's just not a serious proposition for anything long term. It's a great place to grow up on, but you would­n't want to live here. If any thing's got off, the best of luck to them.'

He waved a finger at the rat, who was watching them suspi­ciously. Underneath them, the ground trembled again.

'See him?' he said. 'We know what's going to happen. In a mil­lion years or so his kids are going to be saying, wow, what a great world the Big Rat made for us. Or it'll be the turn of the jellyfish, or something that's still bobbing around under the sea that we don't even know about yet! There's no future here! No, that's wrong ... I mean there's always a future, but it belongs to someone else. You know what chalk's made of here? Dead animals! The actual rock is made of dead animals! There were some ...'

Even in his overheated state, he paused. It probably wasn't a good idea to remind people about the apes. A vague, suspicious guilt was nudging him.

'There were these creatures,' he said, 'and they were using lime­stone caves. Limestone's made from ancient blobs, I saw it being made, like snow in the water ... and these creatures are living in the bones of their ancestors! Really! This place ... this place is a kalei­doscope. You smash it up, wait a moment, and there's another pretty pattern. And another one. And another o ...'He stopped. And sagged. 'Could I have a glass of water, please?'

'That was a very ... interesting speech,' said Ponder.

'A point of view, certainly,' said Ridcully.

The other wizards had, however, lost interest. They usually did, if the speeches were not given by them.

'Shall I tell you something else?' said Rincewind, a little more calmly. 'This world is an anvil. Everything here is between a rock and a hard place. Every single thing on it is the descendant of crea­tures that have survived everything the world could throw at them. I just hope they never get angry ...'

The Senior Wrangler and the Dean had ambled towards a huge cylinder. The word 'MAETNANS' was painted in large black let­ters on the side.

'Hey, you chaps!' the Dean shouted. 'There's something talking inhere ...'

The inside of the cylinder reminded the wizards of a lighthouse. There was a spiral staircase; shaped cupboards lined the walls. Lights glowed dimly, whole constellations of them. Certainly the builders of this thing had discovered magic.

The 'A-L-A-A-M' word still blinked on and off in the air.

'I wish that wretched thing would stop,' said the Senior Wrangler.

The light vanished. The sound stopped.

'They've probably invented demons,' said the Dean airily. 'Listen ... hello.'

A pleasant female voice said, 'Elevator Unstable.'

'Oh, magic,'said Ridcully flatly. 'Well, we know how to deal with magic. We want to go up in the magic box, voice.'

'Do we?' said Ponder

'Anything better than staying in this gloomy place,' said Ridcully. 'It'd be quite an interestin' experience, too. We'll take one last look the world and then, well ... frankly, that's it.'

'Instability Rising', said the voice. It did not sound worried by the news.

'What did it say?' said the Dean. 'Sounded like name of a place,'

'Very good, very good,' said Ridcully 'Now let's be going shall we?'

The pattern of lights moved. Then the voice said, as if it'd been thinking it over, 'Emerjansi Override.'

The door slid shut. The cylinder jerked. Shortly afterwards, some pleasant music started, and didn't really get on anyone's nerves for several minutes.

The rat watched the thing rise up the cables in the centre of the pyramid.

The ground shook again.

Slowly, the web around the world came apart.

Ice walls had attacked some of the cable moorings on the ground, but instability was already there, working inexorably as it had done for the past few weeks, turning little movements into big movements.

Slowly, one cable broke free from its pyramid, glowing red-hot as it was jerked through the atmosphere, flailing across the sky.

Around the curve of the world, the others danced and groaned...

When the end finally came, it took only a day. The lines folded around the centre of the world, writhing incandescently across hundreds of miles of snow. The necklace tore apart far above. Some bits drifted away. Others spun gently towards the surface, to impact hours later.

A ring of fire burned for a while around the equator.

And then the cold returned.

As the wizards said, it would all be the same in a hundred million years' time. But it would be different tomorrow.

In the deserted High Energy Building, HEX turned the omniscope outwards, homing in on signs of the strange new life.

It found comet cores, strung on cables thousands of miles long. There were dozens of these trains, many millions of miles from the frozen world, accelerating into the abyss between the stars.

Lights twinkled on their surfaces. The extelligence inside appeared to be travelling hopefully.

A yellow cylinder tumbled gently across the darkness. It was empty.