He stopped, his mouth opening and shutting for a while. `But you certainly are not ... I thought you-'
Ponder was ready for this.
`You know about Olympus, sir?' he said quickly. `What? This is Greece?' said Darwin.
`No, sir, but we've got lots of gods here. This, er, gentleman isn't, as you might put it, the god. He's just a god.'
`Is there a problem?' said the God of Evolution, giving them a worried smile.
`A god?' Darwin demanded.
`One of the nice ones,' said Ponder quickly.
`I like to think so,' said the god, beaming happily. `Look, I need to check on how the whales are doing. Why don't you come up the mountain for tea? I love to have visitors.'
He vanished.
`But the Greek gods were myths!' Darwin burst out, staring at the suddenly empty space.
`I wouldn't know about that, sir,' said Ponder. `Ours aren't. On this world, gods are extremely real.'
`He came through the wall!' said Darwin, pointing angrily at the empty air. `He told me that he was immanent in all things!'
`He tinkers a lot, certainly,' said Ponder. `But only here.' `Tinkers!'
`Shall we take a little walk up Mount Impossible?' said Ponder.
Most of Mount Impossible was hollow. You need a lot of space when you are trying to devise a dirigible whale. `It really should work,' said the God of Evolution, over tea. `Without that heavy blubber and with an inflatable skeleton of which, I must say I am rather proud, it should do well on the routes of migratory birds. Larger maw, of course. Note the cloud-like camouflage, obviously required. Lifting is produced via bacteria in the gut which produce elevating gases. The dorsal sail and the flattened tail give a reasonable degree of steerability. All in all, a good piece of work. My main problem is devising a predator. The sea-air ballistic shark has proved quite unsatisfactory. I don't know if you might have any suggestions, Mr Darwin?'
Ponder looked at Darwin. The poor man, his face grey, was staring up at the two whales who were cruising gently near the roof of the cave.
`I beg your pardon?' he said.
`The god would like to know what could attack this,' Ponder prompted.
`Yes, the grey people said you were very interested in evolution,' said the god.
`The grey people?' said Ponder.
`Oh yes, you know. You see them flying around sometimes. They said someone really wanted to listen to my views. I was so pleased. Lots of people just laugh.'
Darwin looked around the celestial workshop and said: `I cannot see anything to laugh at in an elephant with sails, sir!'
`Exactly! It was the big ears that gave me the clue there,' said the god cheerfully. `Making them bigger was simplicity itself. It can do twenty-five miles an hour across the open veldt in a good wind!'
`Until a wheel bursts,' said Darwin, flatly.
`I'm sure once they get the idea it will all work,' said the god. `You don't think it might be better to let things evolve by themselves?' said Darwin.
`My dear sir, it's so dull,' said the god. `Four legs, two eyes one mouth ... so few are prepared to experiment.'
Once again Darwin looked around the glowing interior of Mount Impossible. Ponder watched him take in the details: the cage of webwinged octo-monkeys that in theory could skim across the canopy for hundreds of yards, the Phaseolus coccineus giganticus that actually bred true, if there was any possible use for a beanstalk that could grow half a mile high ... and everywhere the animals, often in stages of assembly or disassembly but all quite contentedly alive in a little mist of holiness.
`Mr, er, Stibbons, I should like to go ... home now, please,' said Darwin, who had gone pale. `This has all been most ... instructive, but I should like to go home.'
`Oh dear, people are always rushing off,' said the god, sadly. `But still, I hope I have been of help, Mr Darwin?'
`Indeed, I believe you have,' said Darwin, grimly.
The god accompanied them to the mouth of the cave, beetles streaming behind him in a cloud.
`Do call again,' he said, as they wandered off down the track. `I do like to-'
He was interrupted by a noise like all the party balloons in the world being let down at once. It was long and drawn out and full of melancholy.
`Oh no,' said the God of Evolution, hurrying back inside, `not the whales!'
Darwin was silent as they walked to the beach. He was even more silent as they passed the wheeled tortoise, which was limping in circles. The silence was deafening when Ponder summoned Hex. When they appeared in the Great Hall his silence, apart from a brief scream during the actual travelling, was a huge infectious silence that was contagious.
The assembled wizards shuffled their feet. Dark rage radiated off their visitor.
`How did it go, Stibbons?' whispered Ridcully.
'Er, the God of Evolution was his usual self, sir.'
`Was he? Ah, good-'
`I wish, very clearly, to awaken from this nightmare,' said Darwin, abruptly.
The wizards stared at the man, who was quivering with rage. `Very well, sir,' Ridcully said quietly. `We can help you wake up. Excuse us a moment.'
He waved a hand; once again the blue shimmer surrounded their visitor. `Gentlemen, if you please?'
He beckoned to the other senior wizards, who clustered around him.
`We can put him back without him having any memory of anything that happened here, right?' he said. `Mr Stibbons?'
`Yes, Sir. Hex could do it. But as I said, sir, it wouldn't be very ethical to mess around with his mind.'
`Well, I wouldn't like anyone to think we're unethical,' said Ridcully firmly. He glared around. `Anyone object? Good. You see, I've been taking to Hex. I'd like to give him something to remember. We owe him that, at least.'
`Really, sir?' said Ponder. `Won't it make things worse?'
`I'd like him to know why we did all this, even if it's only for a moment!'
`Are you sure that's a good idea, Mustrum?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
The Archchancellor hesitated. `No,' he said. `But it's mine. And we're going to do it.'
A LACK OF SERGEANTS
WHAT WAS IT ABOUT VICTORIAN ENGLAND, and what led up to it, that made it so progressive, inventive and innovative? Why was it so different from Russia, China, and all the other nations that seem to have stagnated during the nineteenth century - accumulating wealth, but lacking a middle class full of engineers, sea captains, clerics, and scientists? We would not expect there to be one simple answer, one trick that Victorian England discovered but other nations did not. That would satisfy the innate human wish for a single thin causal chain, but as we've seen, history doesn't work like that.
Equally, though, it's unsatisfying just to list lots of possible contributory causes - the East India Company ... Harrison's excellent chronometer, which helped to make the British Empire so profitable and made aristocratic families send their younger sons fairly safely out into the Empire, from which they came back wiser and richer ... Quakers and other nonconformist sects, which were tolerated by the Anglican Church ... the Lunar Society's progeny, including the Royal Society and the Linnaean Society ... the College of Apprentices ... Parliament and the pretence of democracy, so that a middle class could rise from the merging of junior aristocrats who came back from the Empire to found pickle factories in Manchester ... artisans who were coming into towns looking for satisfying jobs.
We could make the list ten times longer, though in most cases we wouldn't be sure about genuine causal connections. And even with ten times as many `causes', we would still have to say `all of the above'.
Are such factors a cause of historical differences, or a consequence? That's not a sensible question if you insist on a yes/no answer - very probably the answer should be `both'. A modem analogue would be to ask whether today's space-oriented engineers and scientists are a cause of the success of space films and nailed-down science-fiction stories - or did the early scientifically oriented SF stories, with their sense of wonder at the sheer vastness and mystery of outer space, fire those engineers, when young, with the desire to turn fiction into fact? It must have been both, of course.