Science of Discworld

NO, IT CAN'T DO THAT

ARCHCHANCELLOR RIDCULLY LOOKED AROUND at his colleagues. They'd chosen the long table in the Great Hall for the meeting, since the HEM was getting too crowded.

'All here? Good,' he said. 'Carry on, Mister Stibbons.'

Ponder sifted through his papers.

'I've, er, asked for this meeting,' he said, 'because I'm afraid we're doing things wrong.'

'How can that be?' said the Dean. 'It's our universe!'

'Yes, Dean. And, er, no. It's made up its own rules.'

'No, no, it can't do that,' said the Archchancellor. 'We're intelli­gent creatures. We make the rules. Lumps of rock don't make rules,'

'Not exactly', sir,' said Ponder, employing the phrase in its tradi­tional sense of 'absolutely wrong'. 'There are some rules in the Project.'

'How? Is someone else meddling with it?' the Dean demanded. 'Has a Creator turned up?'

'An interesting thought, sir. I'm not qualified to answer that one. The point I'm trying to make is that if we want to do anything con­structive, we've got to obey the rules.'

The Lecturer in Recent Runes looked down at the table in front of him. It had been laid for lunch.

'I don't see why,' he said. 'This knife and fork don't tell me how to eat.'

'Er ... in fact, sir, they do. In a roundabout way.'

'Are you trying to tell us that the rules are built in?' said Ridcully.

'Yes, sir. Like: big rocks are heavier than small rocks.'

'That's not a rule, man, that's just common sense!'

'Yes, sir It's just that the more I look into the Project, the more I'm not sure any more what common sense is. Sir, if we're going to build a world it has to be a ball. A big ball'

'That's a lot of outmoded religious nonsense, Mister Stibbons.'

'Yes, sir. But in the Project universe, it's real. Some of the ba ... the spheres the students have made are huge.'

'Yes, I've seen them. Showy, to my mind,'

'I was thinking of something smaller, sir. And ... and I'm pretty sure things will stay on it. I've been experimenting.'

'Experimenting?' said the Dean. 'What good does that do?'

The doors were flung open. Turnipseed, Ponder's assistant, hur­ried across to the table in a state of some agitation.

'Mister Stibbons! HEX has found something!'

The wizards turned to stare at him. He shrugged.

'It's gold,' he said.

'The Guild of Alchemists is not going to be happy about this,' said the Senior Wrangler, as the entire faculty clustered around the project. 'You know what they are for demarcation.'

'Fair enough,' said Ridcully, steering the omniscope. 'We'll just give them a few minutes to turn up, otherwise we'll go on as we are, all right?'

'How can we get it out?' said the Dean.

Ponder looked horrified. 'Sir! This is a universe! It is not a piggy-bank! You can't just turn it upside down, stick a knife in the slot and rattle it around!'

'I don't see why not,' said Ridcully, without looking up. 'It's what people do all the time.' He adjusted the focus. 'Personally I'm glad nothing can get out of the thing, though. Call me old fash­ioned, but I don't intend to occupy the same room as a million miles of exploding gas. What happened?'

'HEX says one of the new stars exploded.'

'They're too big to be stars, Ponder, We've been into this.'

'Yes, sir,' Ponder disagreed.

'They've only been around for five minutes.'

'A few days, sir. But millions of years in Project time. People have been dumping rubbish into it, and I think some just drifted in and ... I don't think it was a very well-made st, furnace in the first place.'

The exploding star was shrinking now, but flinging out a great halo of brilliant gases that even lit up one side of the rocky lumps the wizards had been making. Things want to come together and get big, Ponder thought. But when they're big enough, they want to explode. Another law.

'There's lead and copper here, too,' said Ridcully. 'We're in the money now, gentlemen. Except that in this universe there's nothing to spend it on. Even so, it seems we're making progress. You're looking peaky, Mister Stibbons. You ought to get some sleep.'

Progress, thought Ponder. Was that what they were making? But without narrativium, how did anything know?

It was day four. Ponder had been awake all night. He wasn't sure, but he thought he'd probably been awake the previous night, too. He may have nodded off for a while, pillowing his head on the growing pile of screwed-up pieces of paper, with the Project wink­ing and twinkling in front of him. If so, he'd dreamed of nothing.

But he'd decided that Progress was what you made it.

After breakfast, the wizards looked at the ball which currently occupied the centre of the omniscope.

'Um, I used iron to start with,' said Ponder. 'Well, mostly iron. There's quite a lot of it about. Some of the ices are really nasty things, and rock by itself just sits there. See this one here?'

A smaller ball of rock hung in space a little way away.

'Yes, very dull,' said the Senior Wrangler. 'Why's it got holes all over it?'

'I'm afraid that when I was dropping rocks on the ball of iron there were a few that went out of control.'

'Could happen to anyone, Stibbons,' said the Archchancellor generously. 'Did you add gold?'

'Oh yes, sir. And other metals,'

'Gold does give a crust some style, I think. Are these volcanoes?'

'Sort of, sir. They are the, er, acne of young worlds. Only unlike ours, where the rock is melted in the internal magical fields gener­ated in the sub-strata, the magma is kept molten by the heat trapped inside the sphere.'

'Very smoky atmosphere. I can hardly see anything.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well, I don't call it much of a world,' said the Dean, sniffing. 'Practically red hot, smoke belching out everywhere ...'

'The Dean does have a point, young man,' said Ridcully. He was extra kind, just to annoy the Dean. 'It's a brave attempt, but you just seem to have made another ball.'

Ponder coughed. 'I just put this one together for demonstration purposes, sir.' He fiddled with the controls of the omniscope. The scene flickered, and changed. 'Now this,' he said, and there was a twinge of pride in his voice, 'is one I made earlier.'

They stared into the lens.

'Well? Just more smoke,' said the Dean.

'Cloud, sir, in fact,' said Ponder.

'Well, we can all make clouds of gas...'

'Er ... it's water vapour, sir,' said Ponder.

He reached over and adjusted the omniscope.

The room was filled with the roar of the biggest rainstorm of all time.

By lunchtime it was a world of ice.

'And we were doing so well,' said Ridcully.

'I can't think what went wrong,' said Ponder, wringing his hands. 'We were getting seas!'

'Can't we just warm it up?' said the Senior Wrangler.

Ponder sat down on his chair and put his head in his hands.

'Bound to cool a world down, all that rain,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, slowly.

'Very good ... er, rocks,' said the Dean. He patted Ponder on the back.

'Poor chap looks a bit down,' hissed the Senior Wrangler to Ridcully. 'I don't think he's been eating properly.'

'You mean ... not chewing right?'

'No eating enough, Archchancellor.'

The Dean picked up a piece of paper from Ponder's crowded desk.

'I say, look at these,' he said.

On the paper was written, in Ponder's very neat handwriting:

THE RULES

1 Things fall apart, but centres hold.

2 Everything moves in curves.

3 You get balls.

4 Big balls tell space to bend.

5 There are no turtles anywhere.

6 ... It's so depressing.

'Always been a bit of a one for rules, our Ponder,' said the Senior Wrangler.

'Number Six doesn't sound incredibly well formulated,' said Ridcully.

'You don't think he's going a bit bursar, do you?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

'He always thinks everything has to mean something,' said Ridcully, who generally took the view that trying to find any deep meaning to events was like trying to find reflections in a mirror: you always succeeded, but you didn't learn anything new.

'I suppose we could simply heat the thing up,' said the Senior Wrangler.

'A sun should be easy,' said Ridcully 'A big ball of fire should be no problem to a thinking wizard.' He cracked his knuckles. 'Get some of the students to put Mister Stibbons to bed. We'll soon have his little world all warm or my name's not Mustrum Ridcully.'