The Science of Discworld II

behind him as he sped along the path by the river.
    â€˜Best not to wait for a curtain call, I thought,’ Ridcully panted.
    â€˜Did you see me … wallop the Queen with a horseshoe?’ wheezed the Dean.
    â€˜Yes … pity it was an actor,’ said Ridcully. “The other one was the elf. Still, not a complete waste of a horseshoe.’
    â€˜But we certainly showed them, eh?’ said the Dean.
    â€˜The history is completed,’ said the voice of Hex, from Ponder’s bouncing pocket. ‘Elves will be viewed as fairies and such they will become. Over the course of several centuries belief in them will dwindle as they are moved into the realm of art and literature, which is where the remnant of them will subsequently exist. They will become a subject suitable for the amusement of children. Their influence will be severely curtailed but will never die away completely.’
    â€˜ Never ?’ panted Ponder, who was getting winded.
    â€˜There will always be some influence. Minds on this world are extremely susceptible.’
    â€˜Yes, but we’ve pushed imagination to the next stage,’ puffed Ponder. ‘People can imagine that the things they imagine are imaginary. Elves are little fairies. Monsters get pushed off the map. You can’t fear the unseen when you can see it.’
    â€˜There will be new kinds of monsters,’ said Hex, from Ponder’s pocket. ‘Humans are very inventive in that respect.’
    â€˜Heads … on … spikes,’ said Rincewind, who liked to save his breath for running.
    â€˜Many heads,’ said Hex.
    â€˜There’s always heads on spikes somewhere,’ said Ridcully.
    â€˜The Shell Midden People didn’t have heads on spikes,’ said Rincewind.
    â€˜Yes, but they didn’t even have spikes,’ said Ridcully.
    â€˜You know,’ wheezed Ponder, ‘we could have just told Hex to move us directly to the opening into L-space …
    They landed on the wooden floor, still running.
    â€˜Can we teach him to do that on Discworld?’ said Rincewind, after they’d picked themselves up from the heap by the wall.
    â€˜No! Otherwise what use would you be?’ said Ridcully. ‘Come on, let’s go …’
    Ponder hesitated by the L-space portal. It was filled with dull, greyish light, and a distant view of mountains and plains of books.
    â€˜There’s still elves here,’ he said. ‘They’re persistent. They might find some way to—’
    â€˜Will you come on?’ snapped Ridcully. ‘We can’t fight every battle.’
    â€˜Something could still go wrong, though.’
    â€˜Whose fault will that be now? No, come on !’
    Ponder looked around, gave a little shrug, and stepped into the hole.
    After a moment a hairy red arm came through and pulled more books through the hole, piling them up until it was a wall of books.
    Brilliant light, so strong that it lanced out between the pages, flashed for a while somewhere in the heap.
    Then it went dark. After a moment, a book slipped out of the pile, and it collapsed, the books tumbling to the floor, and there was nothing left but a bare wall.
    And, of course, a banana.

THIRTY TWO
MAY CONTAIN NUTS
    W E ARE THE STORYTELLING APE , and we are incredibly good at it.
    As soon as we are old enough to want to understand what is happening around us, we begin to live in a world of stories. We think in narrative. We do it so automatically that we don’t think we do it. And we have told ourselves stories vast enough to live in.
    In the sky above us, patterns older than our planet and unimaginably far away have been fashioned in gods and monsters. But there are bigger stories down below. We live in a network of stories that range from ‘how we got here’ to ‘natural justice’ to ‘real life’.
    Ah, yes … ‘real life’. Death, who acts as a kind of Greek chorus in the Discworld books, is impressed by some aspects of humanity. One is that we have evolved to tell ourselves interesting and useful little lies about monsters and gods and tooth fairies, as a kind of prelude to creating really big lies, like ‘Truth’ and Justice’.
    There is no justice. As Death remarks in Hogfather , you could grind the universe into powder and not find one atom of justice. We created it, and while we acknowledge this fact, nevertheless there is a sense in which we feel it’s