`Never seen that shade of purple on a leg,' he said. `I told him to look where he was going. You heard me, didn't you?'
`He says he was dropped right on top of the fish,' said Ponder. `I'm afraid Hex is running at the very limit of his power, sir. We're bending an entire timeline. You've got to expect some accidents. A few of the returning wizards are reappearing in the fountain. We just have to accept that it's better than them reappearing inside walls.'
Ridcully surveyed the throng, and said: `Here comes one from the fountain, by the look of it ... '
Rincewind limped in, his face like thunder, water still streaming off him, with something grasped in his hands. Halfway across the hall a fish fell out of his robe, in obedience to the unbreakable laws of humour.
He reached Ponder, and dropped the cannon ball on the floor.
`Do you know how hard it is to shout underwater?' he demanded.
`But I see you were successful, Rincewind,' said Ridcully.
Rincewind looked up. All over the streaming lines, little pointy wizard symbols were appearing and disappearing.
`No one told me it would fight back! It fought back! The cannon tried to load itself.'
'Aha!' said Ridcully. `The enemy is revealed! We're nearly there! If they are breaking the-'
'It was an Auditor,' said Rincewind, flatly. `It was trying to be invisible but I saw it outlined in the fog.'
Ridcully sagged a little. A certain exuberance faded from his face. He said, `Oh, darn,' because an amusing misunderstanding in his youth had led him to believe that this was the worst possible word you could say.
`We've found no evidence of them,' said Ponder Stibbons.
`Here? Did we look? We wouldn't find any anyway, would we?'
said Ridcully. `They'd show up as natural forces.'
`But how could they exist here? All those things work by themselves here!'
`Same way we did?' said Rincewind. `And they'll meddle with anything. You know them. And they really, really hate people ...'
Auditors: personifications of things that have no personality that can be imagined. Wind and rain are animate, and thus have gods. But the personification of gravity, for example, is an Auditor or, rather Auditors. In universes that run on narrativium rather than automatic, they are the means by which the most basic things happen.
Auditors are not only unimaginative, they find it impossible to imagine what imagination is.
They are never found in groups of less than three, at least for long. In ones and twos they quickly develop personality traits that make them different, which to them is fatal. For an Auditor to have an opinion that differs from that of its colleagues is certain ... cessation. But while individual Auditors cannot hold an opinion (because that would make them individual), Auditors as a whole certainly can, and with grim certainty they hold that the multiverse would be a lot better off with no life in it. Life gets in the way, tends to be messy, acts unpredictably and reverses entropy.
Life, they believe, is an unwanted by-product. The multiverse would be more reliable if there wasn't any. Unfortunately, there are rules. Gravity is not allowed to increase a millionfold and laminate all local life forms to the bedrock, highly desirable though that would appear to be. Simply mugging life forms merely walking, flying, swimming or oozing past would attract attention from higher authority, which Auditors dread.
They are weak, not very clever and always afraid. But they can be subtle. And the wonderful thing about intelligent life, they have discovered, is that with some care it can be persuaded to destroy itself.
MANIFEST DESTINY
THE WIZARDS ARE DISCOVERING THAT changing history is not so easy, even when you've got a time machine. The Auditors aren't helping, but history has its own metaphorical Auditor, often called `historical inertia'.
Inertia is the innate tendency of moving objects to continue moving along much the same track, even if you try to divert them; it is a consequence of Newton's laws of motion. Historical inertia has a similar effect but a different cause: changing a single historical event, however important it may appear, may have no significant effect on the social context that directs the path of history.
Imagine we've got a time machine, and go back to the past. Not too far, just to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In our history, the President lived till the following morning, so a tiny deflection of the assassin's bullet could make all the difference. So we arrange a small deflection, and he is hit but recovers, with no noticeable brain damage. He cuts a couple of appointments while he recuperates, and then he goes on to do ... what?
We don't know anything about that new version of history.
Or do we? Of course we do. He doesn't turn into a hippopotamus, for a start, or a Ford Model T Or disappear. He goes on being President Abraham Lincoln, hedged in by all the political expediencies and impossibilities that existed in our version of history and still exist in his.
The counterfactual [1] scenario of a live Lincoln raises many questions. How much do you think being the American President is like driving a car, going where you want to? Or sitting in a train, observing the terrain that others drive you through?
Somewhere in between, no doubt.
Ordinarily, we don't have to think much about counterfactuals, precisely because they are contrary to fact. But mathematicians think about them all the time -'if what I think happens is wrong, what can I deduce that might prove it wrong?' Any consideration of phase spaces automatically gets tangled up in worlds of if. You don't really understand history unless you can take a stab at what might have happened if some major historical event had not occurred. That's a good way to appreciate the significance of that event, for a start.
In that spirit, let's think about that altered `now': the beginning of the West's third millennium of history, but without Lincoln having been assassinated in its past. What would your morning newspaper be called? Would it be different? Would you still be having much the same breakfast ritual, bacon and eggs and a sausage perhaps? What about the World Wars? Hiroshima?
A very large number of stories have been written with this kind of theme: Wilson Tucker's The Lincoln Hunters is set in such an 'alternat(iv)e universe' and tackles the Lincoln question.
Curious things happen in our minds when they are presented with any fictional world. Consider for a moment the London of the late nineteenth century. It did have Jack the Ripper, and we can wonder about the real-world puzzle of who he was. It had Darwin, Huxley and Wallace, too. But it did not have Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Nicholas Nickleby, or Mr Polly. Nevertheless, some of the best
[1] Counterfactuaclass="underline" a more acceptable word for what has for a long time been a very common feature of science fiction, the 'alternate world' or 'worlds of if story (there was a pulp SF magazine in the 1950s called Worlds of If, in fact). 'Counterfactual' is now used when said stories are written by real writers and historians, to save them the indignity of sharing a genre with all those strange sci-fi people.
portrayals of the Victorian world are centred around those characters. Sometimes the fictional portrayals are intended to paint a humorous gloss on the society of the period. The Flintstones put just such a gloss on human prehistory, so much so that in order to think rationally about our evolution we must excise all those images, which is probably an impossible task.
Sherlock Holmes and Mr Polly were Victorians in just the same sense that the tyrannosaur and triceratops in Jurassic Park were dinosaurs. When we envisage Triceratops, we cannot avoid the memory of that warty purple-spotted Jurassic Park skin, as the beast lies on its side, breathing stertorously. And Tyrannosaur, in our mind's eye, is running after the jeep, bobbing its head like a bird. When we envisage late nineteenth-century Baker Street it's very difficult not to see Holmes and Watson (probably in one of their filmic versions) hailing a four-wheeler, off to solve another crime. Our pictures of the past are a mixture of real historical figures and scenarios peopled by fictional entities, and it's difficult to keep them apart, especially as films and TV series acquire better technologies to latch into those spurious pictures in our heads.