The Science of Discworld II

werewolves and vampires have their roots in rare human medical conditions. Now try angels and unicorns …

TWENTY-THREE
PARAGON OF ANIMALS
    T HE WIZARDS WENT BACK TO D EE’S HOUSE in sombre mood, and spent the rest of the week sitting around and getting on one another’s nerves. In ways they couldn’t quite articulate, they’d been upset by the story.
    â€˜Science is dangerous,’ said Ridcully at last. ‘We’ll leave it alone.’
    â€˜I think it’s like with wizards,’ said the Dean, relieved to be having a conversation again. ‘You need to have more than one of them, otherwise they get funny ideas.’
    â€˜True, old friend,’ said Ridcully, probably for the first time in his life. ‘So … science is not for us. We’ll rely on common sense to see us through.’
    â€˜That’s right,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Who cares about trotting horses anyway? If they fall over they’ve only got themselves to blame.’
    â€˜As a basis for our discussion,’ said Ridcully, ‘let us agree on what we have discovered so far, shall we?’
    â€˜Yes. It’s that whatever we do, the elves always win,’ said the Dean.
    â€˜Er … I know this may sound stupid …’ Rincewind began.
    â€˜Yes. It probably will,’ said the Dean. ‘You haven’t been doing very much since we got back, have you?’
    â€˜Well, not really,’ said Rincewind. ‘Just walking around, you know. Looking at things.’
    â€˜Exactly! You haven’t read a single book, am I correct? What good is walking around?’
    â€˜Well, you get exercise,’ said Rincewind. ‘And you notice things. Yesterday the Librarian and I went to the theatre …’
    They’d got the cheapest ticket, but the Librarian paid for two bags of nuts.
    They’d found, once they had settled into this period, that there was no point in trying to disguise the Librarian too heavily. With a jerkin, a big floppy hood and a false beard he looked, on the whole, an improvement on most of the people in the cheap seats, the cheap seats in this case being so cheap they consisted, in fact, of standing up. The cheap feets, in fact.
    The play had been called The Hunchback King , by Arthur J. Nightingale. It hadn’t been very good. In fact, Rincewind had never seen a worse-written play. The Librarian had amused himself throughout by surreptitiously bouncing nuts off the king’s fake hump. But people had watched it in rapt fascination, especially the scene where the king was addressing his nobles and uttered the memorable line: ‘Now is the December of our discontent – I want whichever bastard is doing that to stop right now !’
    A bad play but a good audience, Rincewind mused after they had been thrown out. Oh, the play was a vast improvement on anything the Shell Midden Folk could have dreamed up, which would have to be called ‘If We’d Invented Paint We Could Watch It Dry’, but the lines sounded wrong and the whole thing was laboured and had no flow. Nevertheless, the faces of the watchers had been locked on the stage.
    On a thought, Rincewind had put a hand over one eye and, concentrating fearfully, surveyed the theatre. The one available eye watered considerably but had revealed, up in the expensive seats, several elves.
    They liked plays, too. Obviously. They wanted people to be imaginative. They’d given people so much imagination that it was constantly hungry. It would even consume the plays of Mr Nightingale.
    Imagination created monsters. It made you afraid of the dark, but not of the dark’s real dangers. It peopled the night with terrors of its own.
    So, therefore …
    Rincewind had an idea.
    â€˜I think we should stop trying to influence the philosophers and scholars,’ he said. ‘People with minds like that believe all sort of things all the time. You can’t stop them. And science is just too weird . I keep thinking of that poor man—’
    â€˜Yes, yes, yes, we’ve been through all this,’ said Ridcully wearily. ‘Get to the point , Rincewind. What have you got to say that’s new?’
    â€˜We could try teaching people art,’ said Rincewind.
    â€˜Art?’ said the Dean. ‘Art’s for slackers! That’d make things worse! ’
    â€˜Painting and sculpture and theatre,’ Rincewind went on. ‘I