The Science of Discworld III - Darwin's Watch

25. THE ENTANGLED BANK

IT WAS MIDNIGHT IN THE museum's Central Hall when the wizards appeared. There were a few lights on; just enough to see the skeletons.

`Is this a temple of some kind?' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, patting his pockets for his tobacco pouch and a packet of Wizlas. `One of the weirder ones, perhaps?'

+++ Indeed +++ boomed the voice of Hex from the middle air.

+++ In all the universes of the The Ology, it was the Temple of the Ascent of Man. Here, it is not +++

`Very impressive,' muttered the Dean. `But why don't we just show him the big snowball? He'd be pretty pleased to know it was because of him humans got away.'

`We've scared the poor chap enough, that's why!' snapped Ridcully. `He'll understand this. Hex says they started building when Darwin was alive. Stuffed animals, bones ... it's the kind of thing he knows. Now stand back and give the chap some air, will you?'

They stepped away from the chair on which Charles Darwin had been transported, wreathed in the blue light. Ridcully snapped his fingers.

Darwin opened his eyes, and groaned.

`It never ends!'

`No, we're sending you back, sir,' said Ridcully. `That is, you'll soon wake up. But we thought there is something you should see first.'

`I've seen enough!'

`Not quite enough. Lights, gentlemen, please,' said Ridcully, straightening up.

Light is the easiest magic to do. A glow rose in the hall.

`The Museum of Natural History, Mr Darwin,' said Ridcully, standing back. `It opened after your death at a venerable age. It's your future. I believe there is a statue to you here somewhere. Place of honour, no doubt. Please listen. I would like you to know that because of you, humanity turned out to be fit enough to survive.'

Darwin stared around at the hall, and then looked askance at the wizards.

`The phrase "survival of the fittest" was not-' he began.

`Survival of the luckiest in this case, I fear,' said Ridcully. `You are familiar with the idea of natural catastrophes throughout history, Mr Darwin?'

`Indeed! One only has to examine-'

`But you will not have known that they wiped intelligent life from the face of the globe,' said Ridcully, sombrely. `Sit down again, sir ...'

They told him about the crab-like civilisation, and the octopus-like civilisation and the lizard-like civilisation. They told him about the snowball[63].

Darwin, Ponder thought, bore up well. He didn't scream or try to run away. What he did do was, in a way, worse: he asked questions, in a slow, solemn voice, and then asked more questions.

Strangely, he kept away from ones like `how do you know this?' and `how can you be so sure?'. He looked like a man anxious to avoid certain answers.

For his part, Mustrum Ridcully very nearly told the whole truth on several occasions.

At last Darwin said, `I think I see,' in a tone of finality.

`I'm sorry we had to-' Ridcully began, but Darwin held up a hand.

'I do know the truth of all this,' he said.

`You do?' said Ridcully. `Really?'

`Indeed, a few years ago there was a rather popular novel published. A Christmas Carol. Did you read it?'

Ponder looked down at the hitherto blank piece of paper on his clipboard. Hex had been told to be quiet; Charles Darwin was probably not in the right frame of mind for booming voices from the sky. But Hex was resourceful.

`By Charles Dickens?' said Ponder, trying not to look as though he was reading the writing that had suddenly filled the page. `The story of the redemption of a misanthrope via ghostly intervention?'

`Quite so,' said Darwin, still speaking in the careful, wooden voice. `It is clear to me that something similar is happening to me. You are not ghosts, of course, but aspects of my own mind. I was resting on a bank near my home. I had been wrestling at length with some of the perturbing implications of my work. It was a warm day. I fell asleep, and you, and that ... god ... and all this, are a kind of .. . pantomime in the theatre of my brain as my thinking resolves itself.'

The wizards looked at one another. The Dean shrugged.

Ridcully grinned. `Hold on to that thought, sir.'

`And I feel sure that when I awake I will have reached a resolve,' said Darwin, a man firmly nailing his thoughts in order. `And, I fervently trust I will have forgotten the means by which I did so. I certainly would not wish to recall the wheeled elephant. Or the poor crabs. And as for the dirigible whale ...'

`You want to forget?' said Ridcully.

`Oh, yes!'

`Since that is your clear request, I have no doubt it will be the case,' said Ridcully, glancing questioningly at Ponder. Ponder glanced at the clipboard and nodded. It was a direct request, after all. Ridcully was, Ponder noted, quite clever under all that shouting.

Apparently relieved at this, Darwin looked around the hall again.

"`I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls", indeed,' he said.

The words `Reference to a popular song written by Michael W. Balfe, manager of the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1841' floated across Ponder's clipboard.

`I don't recognise some of these very impressive skeletons,' Darwin went on. `But that is Robert Owen's Diplodocus carnegii, clearly ...' He turned sharply.

`Humanity survives, you say?' he said. `It rode out to the stars on tamed comets?'

`Something like that, Mr Darwin,' said Ridcully. `And it flourishes?'

`We don't know. But it survives better that it would under a mile of ice, I suspect.'

`It has a chance to survive,' said Darwin.

`Exactly.'

`Even so ... to trust your future to some frail craft speeding through the unknown void, prey to unthinkable dangers ...'

`That was what the dinosaurs did,' said Ridcully. `And the crabs. And all the rest of them.'

`I beg your pardon?'

`I meant that this world is a pretty frail craft, if you take the long view.'

`Ha. Nevertheless, some vestige of life surely survives every catastrophe,' said Darwin, as if following a train of thought. `Deep under the sea, perhaps. In seeds and spores ...'

`And is that how it should be?' said Ridcully. `New thinkin' creatures arisin' and being forever smashed down? If evolution didn't stop at the edge of the sea, why should it stop at the edge of the air? The beach was once an unknown void. Surely the evidence that mankind has risen thus far may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future?'

Ponder looked down at his clipboard. Hex had written: he is quoting Darwin.

`An interesting thought, sir,' said Darwin, and managed a smile. `And now, I think, I really should like to awaken.'

Ridcully snapped his fingers.

`We can get rid of those memories, can't we?' he said, as the blue glow enveloped Darwin yet again.

`Oh yes,' said Ponder. `He's asked us to, so it's ethically correct.

Well done, sir. Hex can see to it.'

`Well then,' said Ridcully, rubbing his hands. `Send him back, Hex.

With perhaps just a tiny recollection. A souvenir, as it were.' Darwin vanished. 'Job done, gentlemen,' said the Archchancellor.

`All that remains now is to get back for-'

`We ought to make sure there are no more Auditors left on Roundworld, sir,' said Ponder.

`On that subject-' Rincewind began, but Ridcully waved him away. `That at least can wait,' he said. `We've established the time line, it's nice and stable, and we can-'

`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.