The afternoon dozed on. The grassy bank went back to its buzzing, humming, flowering busyness.
On the forlorn shore, a man appeared, hid two buckets behind a rock, and removed his false nose.
Rincewind scanned the landscape while extracting his hat from inside his shirt.
This was one of the most famous islands in the history of technomancy? It looked, frankly, rather dull.
He'd been expecting forests and streams and a riot of creatures. You couldn't move for vibrant, striving life on Mono Island, home of the God of Evolution. Everything wanted to leave. But this place had a skinflint look. You'd need to be tough to survive here. You'd have to fit in.
He couldn't see any giant tortoises, but there were a couple of large, empty shells.
Rincewind picked up a length of driftwood, baked by the sun into something like stone, and hurried up a narrow path.
Hex was good. The man Rincewind was after was striding ahead of him along the track.
`Mr Lawson, sir!'
The man turned.
`Yes? Are you from the Beagle?'
`Yessir. Heave ho, sir,' said Rincewind. Lawson stared at him. `Why do you wear that hat with "Wizzard" written on it?' Rincewind thought fast. Thank goodness Roundworld had some strange customs.
`Crossing the Line ceremony, sir,' he said. `Took a fancy to it!' `Oh, King Neptune and so forth,' said Lawson, backing away a little. Jolly good. How can I help you?'
'Just wanted to shake you by the hand and say how glad we all are that you're doing such a wonderful job out here, sir,' said Rincewind, pumping the man's unresisting arm vigorously. `We ... that's is very kind of you, Mr - what was that noise?' `Sorry? Shiver my timber, by the way.'
`That ... whistling noise ... ' said Lawson, uncertainly.
`Probably one of the tortoises?' said Rincewind, helpfully.
`They hiss or - wasn't that a thump?' said Lawson. Behind him, a small cloud of dust rose above the bushes.
`Didn't hear one, yo ho,' said Rincewind, still shaking the hand. `Well, don't let me keep you, sir.'
Lawson gave him the look of a man who feels has inadvertently fallen into dribbling company. The hat was clearly preying on his mind.
`Thank you, my man,' he said, pulling his hand away. `Indeed, I must go.'
He headed away at some speed, which increased when he noticed Rincewind following him, and completely failed to notice what was, after all, just another small, rubble-filled hole among many. Rincewind spotted it, though, and after some effort pulled out a small, warm lump.
Something hissed, behind him.
Rincewind had ascertained that the only way a giant tortoise could go as fast as him was by falling over a cliff, and also that they were highly unlikely to savage a man to death. Still, he was ready.
He turned, stick upraised.
Something, a greyish something, something just transparent enough to show the landscape behind it in a dreary light, was hovering a few feet away. It looked like a monk's robe for a very small monk, and minus the monk. The empty hood was more worrying than almost anything that could have filled it. There were no eyes, there was no face, but there was nevertheless a stare, as malignant as razorblade pants.
Other robe-shadows appeared around the shape and began drifting towards it. When they reached it they vanished, and the central shape became darker and, somehow, more present.
Rincewind didn't turn and run. There was no point in trying to run from Auditors; they were certainly faster than anything with legs. But that wasn't the reason. If it was time to run, he'd considered, no other calculations applied. He wouldn't even worry that his escape route was blocked by solid lava; most things could be overcome if you ran at them hard enough. There was, however, another reason. It had pink toes.
`Why meddle?' said the Auditor. The voice sounded windy and uncertain, as if the speaker was having to assemble the words by hand. `Entropy will always triumph.'
`Is it true that you die if you have an emotion?' said Rincewind. The Auditor was quite dark now, which meant that it has assembled enough mass to move something quite heavy, like a human head.
`We do not have emotion,' said the Auditor. `It is a human aberration. In you we detect the physical manifestation recognisable to us as fear.'
`You can't just kill people, you know,' said Rincewind. `That's against the rules.'
`We believe there may be no rules here,' said the Auditor, moving forward.
`Wait, wait, wait!' said Rincewind, trying to back away into solid rock. `You're saying you don't know what fear is, right?'
`We have no requirement to do so,' said the Auditor. `Prepare to cease coherent function.'
`Turn around,' said Rincewind.
And a weakness of the Auditors is that they find a direct command hard to disobey, at least for a second or two. It turned, or, rather, flowed through itself to face the other way.
The lid of the Luggage closed with a `clop' like the sound of a trout taking an unwary mayfly.
I wonder if it found out what fear really is, Rincewind thought. But more grey shapes were distilling out of the air. Now it was time to run.
18. STEAM ENGINE TIME
THERE WAS DARWIN, SITTING ON a bank, watching the bees, the wasps, the flowers ... In the last paragraph of The Origin we find a beautiful and important passage that hints at afternoons of that kind: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Go ahead Paley, make my day.
All that wizardly effort to get him to write The Origin, not The Ology. It mattered to Darwin, of course, and it matters to those who chart the course of history. But, just as we can ask whether Lincoln's assassination really had much effect on subsequent events, so we can ask the same about Darwin's life's work. Would it really have mattered if the wizards had failed?
Metaphorical wizards, you appreciate. Yes, those happy coincidences that got Charles on board the Beagle and kept him there do look a tad suspicious, but wizards?
Let's ask the question in a more respectable way. How radical was Darwin's theory of natural selection, really? Did he have insights that no one before him had considered? Or did he just happen to be the person who caught the public eye, with an idea that had been floating around for some time? How much credit should he be given?
The same can be - and has been - asked of many `revolutionary' scientific concepts. Robert Hooke got the idea of inverse square-law gravity before Newton did. Minkowski, Poincare, and others worked out much of special relativity before Einstein did. Fractals were around, in some form, for at least a century before Benoit Mandelbrot energetically promoted them and they developed into a major branch of applied mathematics. The earliest sniff of chaos theory can be found in Poincare's prize-winning memoir on the stability of the solar system in 1890, probably 75 years before the subject was perceived as `taking off.
How do scientific revolutions get started, and what decides who gets the credit? Is it talent? A flair for publicity? A lottery?
Part of the answer to these questions can be found in Robert Thurston's 1878 study of another important Victorian innovation, which Ponder Stibbons unerringly homed in on in Chapter 3. The book is A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine. The second paragraph says: History illustrates the very important truth: inventions are never, as great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really either an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step in a progression. It is not a creation, but a growth as truly so as is that of the trees in the forest. The same invention is frequently brought out in several countries, and by several individuals, simultaneously.