'Sorry,' said Rincewind. 'We just sort of found it and sort of picked it sort of up.'
'But it speaks!' gasped Dee. 'An ethereal voice!'
'No, it's just from another world that is much bigger than this one and can't be seen,' said Ridcully. 'There's nothing mysterious about it at all.'
With trembling fingers, Dee took the sphere from Rincewind and held it in front of his eyes.
'Speak!' he commanded.
'Permission denied,' said the crystal. 'You do not have the rights to do this.'
'Where did you tell him you came from?' Rincewind whispered Ridcully, as Dee tried to polish the ball with the sleeve of his robe.
'I just said we'd dropped in from another sphere,' said Ridcully. 'After all, this universe is full of spheres. He seemed to be quite happy about that. I didn't mention the Discworld at all, in case it confused him.
Rincewind looked at Dee's shaking hands and the manic glint in his eye.
'I just want to be clear,' he said slowly. 'You appeared in a magic circle, you told him you're from another sphere, he'd just spoken to crystal ball, you've explained to him that magic doesn't work and you don't want to confuse him?'
'Make him any more confused than he is already, you mean,' said the Dean. 'Confusion is the natural state of mind here, believe us. Do you know they think numbers are magical? Doing sums can get you into real trouble in these parts.'
'Well, some numbers are magi—' Ponder began.
'Not here they're not,' said the Archchancellor. 'Here I am, out in the open air, no magical protection and I'm going to say the number that comes after seven. Here it comes: eight. There.
Nothing happened. Eight! Eighteen! Two fat ladies in very tight corsetry, eighty-eight! Oh someone pull Rincewind out from under the table, will you?'
While the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography was having some of it brushed off his robes, Ridcully continued: 'It's a mad world. No narrativium. People makin' up history as they go along. Brilliant men spendin' their time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—'
'Sixteen,' said Ponder.
'Yes, we know that because we can go and look, but here it's just another silly question,' said Ridcully. 'It'd make you cry. The history of this place goes backwards half the time. It's a mess.
A parody of a world.'
'We made it,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'We didn't make it this badly,' said the Dean. 'We've seen the history books here. There were some great civilisations thousands of years ago. There was a place like Ephebe that was really beginning to find things out. The wrong things, mostly, but at least they were making an effort.
Even had a decent pantheon of gods. All gone now. Our chum here and his friends think everything worth knowing has been discovered and forgotten and, frankly, they're not totally wrong.'
'What can we do about it?' said Ponder.
'You can talk to Hex on that thing?'
Yes, sir.'
'Then Hex can do the magic back at UU and we'll find out what the elves did,' said Ridcully.
'Er,' Rincewind began, 'do we have the right to interfere?' They all stared at him.
'I mean, we never did it before,' he went on. 'Remember all those other creatures that evolved here? The intelligent lizards? The intelligent crabs? Those dog things? They all got completely wiped out by ice ages and falling rocks and we never did anything to stop it.'18
They went on staring.
'I mean, elves are just another problem, aren't they?' said Rincewind. Maybe ... maybe they're just another form of big rock? Maybe ... maybe they always turn up when intelligence gets going? And the species is either clever enough to survive them or it ends up buried in the bedrock like all the others? I mean, perhaps it's a kind of, of a test? I mean…
It dawned on Rincewind that he was not carrying the meeting, wizards were glaring at him.
'Are you suggesting that someone somewhere is awarding marks, Rincewind?' said Ponder.
'Well, obviously there is no—'
'Good. Shut up,' said Ridcully. 'Now, lads, let's get back to Mort Lake and get started.'
'Mort Lake?' said Rincewind. 'But that's in Ankh-Morpork!' 'There's one here, too,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, beaming.
'Amazing, isn't it? We never guessed. This world is a cheap parody of our own. As Above, So Below and all that.'
'But without magic,' said Ridcully. 'And with no narrativium. It doesn't know where it's going.'
'But we do, sir,' said Ponder, who had been scribbling in notebook.
'Do we?'
'Yes, sir. Remember? In about a thousand years' time it's going to be hit by a really big rock. I keep looking at the numbers, sir, an that's what it means.'
'But I thought we found there'd been a race that built huge structures to get off the place?' 'That's right, sir.'
'Can a new species turn up in a thousand years?'
'I don't think so, sir.'
'You mean these are the ones that leave?'
'It seems like it, sir,' said Ponder.
The wizards looked at the people in the courtyard. Of course, the presence of beer always greases the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, but even so ...
At a nearby table, one man threw up on another one. There was general applause.
T think,' said Ridcully, summing up the general mood, 'that we are going to be here for some time.'
THE LENS-GRINDER'S PHILOSOPHY
John Dee, who lived from 1527 to 1608, was a court astrologer to Mary Tudor. At one point he was imprisoned for being a magician, but in 1555 they let him out again, presumably for not being one. Then he became an astrologer for Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the occult, both alchemy and astrology. On the other hand, he was also the author of the first English translation of Euclid's Elements, the renowned treatise on geometry. Actually, if you believe the printed word, the book is attributed to Sir Henry Billingsley, but it was common knowledge that Dee did all the work, and he even wrote a long and erudite preface. Which may be why it was common knowledge that Dee did all the work.
To the modern mind, Dee's interests seem contradictory: a mass of superstitious pseudoscience mixed up with some good, solid science and mathematics. But Dee didn't have a modern mind, and he saw no particular contradiction in the combination. In his day, many mathematicians made their living by casting horoscopes. They could do the sums that foretold in which of the twelve 'houses' -the regions of the sky determined by the constellations corresponding to the signs of the Zodiac - a planet would be.
Dee stands at the threshold of modern ways of thinking about causality in the world. We call his time The Renaissance, and the reference is to the rebirth of the philosophy and politics of ancient Athens. But perhaps this view of his times is mistaken, both because Greek society was not then as 'scientific' or 'intellectual' as we've been led to believe, and because there were other cultural currents that attributed to the culture of his times. Our ideas of narrativium may derive from the melding of these ideas into later philosophies, such as of Baruch Spinoza.
Stories encouraged the growth of occultism and mysticism. But they also helped to ease the European world out of medieval superstition into a more rational view of the universe.
Belief in the occult -magic, astrology, divination, witchcraft, alchemy -is common to most human societies. The European tradition occultism, to which Dee belonged, is based on an ancient, secret philosophy; it derives from two main sources, ancient Greek alchemy magic, and Jewish mysticism. Among the Greek sources is the Emeri Tablet, a collection of writings associated with Hermes Trismegist ('thrice master'), which was particularly revered by later alchemists; the Jewish source is the Kabbala, a secret, mystical interpretation of a sacred book, the Torah.
Astrology, of course, is a form of divination based on the stars and the visible planets. It may, perhaps, have contributed to the development of science by supporting people who wanted to observe and understand the heavens. Johannes Kepler, who discovered that planetary orbits are ellipses, made his living as an astrologer. Astrology survives in watered-down form in the horoscope columns of tabloid newspapers. Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer during his time as American President. That stuff certainly hangs around.