'Oh, so brave?' she said, defaulting to her usual appearance. She turned at a creaking noise behind her. The Luggage had tiptoed up and opened its lid.
'That doesn't frighten me,' she said.
'Really? It frightens me,' said Rincewind. 'Anyway, I'm simply brushing up their acting skills.
Absolutely no problem there, is there? You should love these people. There's dryads, nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, harpies and big giants with one eye, unless that's a joke about sex I haven't fully understood yet. They believe in all of them and none of them exist! Except possibly the one-eyed giant, that one's a bit of a puzzler.'
'We have seen their performances,' said the Queen. 'They are not respectful of their gods.'
'But seeing is believing, isn't it? And you must admit, they've got a lot of gods. Dozens.'
He gave her a friendly smile, while hoping that she was keeping away from the local cities. They had a lot of temples in them, and shrines all over the place, but they also had a number of men who, while taking care to invoke the gods on every occasion, then appeared to expound ideas that didn't seem to have any place for gods in them, except as observers or decoration. But the actors liked playing gods ...
'You're up to something,' said the Queen. 'Everywhere we look, you wizards are teaching people art. Why?'
'Well, it's a rather drab planet,' said Rincewind.
'Everywhere we go, they're telling stories,' said the Queen, still slowly circling. 'They're filling the sky with pictures, too.'
'Oh, the constellations?' said Rincewind. 'They don't change, you know. Not like at home.
Amazing. I tried getting one tribe to name that big one - you know, with what looks like a belt - I thought if they ended up calling it the Bursar, and that group of little stars off to the right became The Dried Frog Pills, it'd be a nice souvenir of our visit—'
'You're frightened of me, aren't you,' said the Queen. 'All you wizards are frightened of women.'
'Not me!' said Rincewind. 'Women are less likely to be armed!'
'Yes you are,' the Queen insisted, moving closer. 'I wonder what your deepest desire is?'
Not to be here right now would be favourite, Rincewind thought.
'I wonder what I could give you,' said the Queen, caressing Rincewind's cheek.
'Everyone knows that anything you get from the elves is gone by morning,' said Rincewind, trembling.
'Yet many things are transient but pleasurable,' said the Queen, moving rather too close. 'What is it you want, Rincewind?'
Rincewind shuddered. There was no way he could lie.
'Potatoes,' he said.
'Tuberous vegetables?' said the Queen, her brows knitting in puzzlement.
'Well, yes. They've got them on one of the other continents, but they're not what I'd call spuds, and Ponder Stibbons says that if we left things as they were then by the time they've been brought over to this continent and bred up a bit it'd be the end of the world. So we thought we ought to ginger up the creativity level a bit.'
'And that's it? That's why all you wizards are doing all this? Just to accelerate the breeding of a vegetable?
'The vegetable, thank you,' said Rincewind. 'And you did ask. The potato, in my opinion, is the crown of the vegetable kingdom. There's roast potatoes, jacket potatoes, boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, curried potatoes—'
'Just for a stupid tuber?'
'— potato soup, potato salad, potato pancakes —'
'All this for something that doesn't even see daylight!'
'—mashed potato, chipped potato, stuffed potato—'
The Queen slapped Rincewind's face. The Luggage bumped into the back of her legs. It wasn't entirely sure what was happening here. There were some things humans did that could be misinterpreted.
'Do you not think I could give you something better than a potato?' she demanded.
Rincewind looked puzzled.
'Are we talking about a sour cream topping with chives?' he said.
Something fell out of Rincewind's robe as he shifted uneasily. The Queen grabbed it.
'What's this?' she said. 'There's writing all over it!'
'It's just a script,' said Rincewind, still thinking about potatoes. 'A sort of story of a play,' he added. 'Nothing important at all. People going mad and getting killed, that sort of thing. And a glowworm.'
'I recognise this script! It's from the future of this world. Why would you carry it around? What is so special? Hah, are there potatoes in it?'
She leafed through the pages, as if she could read.
'This must be important!' she snapped. And vanished.
One solitary page slid down to the ground.
Rincewind bent down and picked it up. Then he shouted hotly at the empty air: 'I suppose a packet of crisps is out of the question?'
LIES TO CHIMPANZEES
A central feature of human extelligence is the ability to infer what is going on in another person's mind, to guess what the world looks like from their point of view. Which is what Rincewind is trying to stop the Queen of the Elves from doing. We can't make such inferences with perfect accuracy; that would be telepathy, which is almost certainly impossible, because each brain is wired up differently and therefore represents the universe in its own special way. But we've evolved to be pretty good at guessing.
This ability to get inside other people's heads has many beneficial consequences. One is that we recognise other people as people, not just automata. We recognise that they have a mind, that to them the universe seems just as real and vivid as it does to us, but that the vivid things they perceive may not be the same as those that we perceive. If intelligent beings are going to get along together without too much friction, it's important to realise that other members of your species have an internal mental universe, which controls their actions in the same way that your own mind controls yours.
When you can put yourself inside another person's mind, stories gain a new dimension. You can identify with a central character, and vicariously experience a different world. This is the appeal of fiction: you can captain a submarine, or spy on the enemy, from the safety and comfort of an armchair.
Drama has the same appeal, too, but now there are real people to identify with; people who play a fictional role. Actors, actresses. And they rely even more on getting inside other people's minds, especially the minds of fictional characters. Macbeth. The Second Witch. Oberon.
Titania. Bottom.
How did this ability arise? As usual, it seems to have come about because of a complicity between the internal signal-processing abilities of the brain and the external pressures of culture.
It arose through an evolutionary arms race, and the main weapon in that race was the lie.
The story starts with the development of language. As the brains of proto-humans evolved, getting larger, there was room in them for more kinds of processing tasks to be carried out.
Primitive grunts and gestures began to be organised into a relatively systematic code, able to represent aspects of the outside world that were important to the creatures concerned. A
complicated concept like 'dog' became associated with a particular sound. Thanks to an agreed cultural convention, anyone who heard that sound responded to it with the mental image of a dog; it wasn't just a funny noise. If you try to listen to someone speaking a language that you know, focusing just on the noises that they are making and trying not to pick up the meaning of their words, you'll find that it's almost impossible. If they speak a language far removed from any that you know, however, their speech comes over as a meaningless gabble. It conveys less to you than a cat's miaow.
In the brain are circuits of nerve cells that have learned to decode gabble into meaning. We've seen that as a child grows, it begins by babbling a random assortment of phonemes, the 'units' of sound that a human mouth and larynx can produce. Gradually the child's brain prunes the list down to those sounds that it hears from its parents and other adults. While it is doing that, the brain is destroying connections between nerve cells that seem to be obsolete. Quite a lot of the early mental development of an infant consists of chopping down a randomly connected, all- purpose brain, and pruning it into a brain that can detect the things that are considered important in the child's culture. If the child is not exposed to much linguistic stimulus in early childhood such as a 'feral' child brought up by animals -then they can't learn a language properly in later life. After about the age of ten, the brain's ability to learn language fades away.