The Science of Discworld II

based on the Jewish Kabbala .

SEVEN
CARGO CULT MAGIC
    T HE PHRASE THAT KEPT OCCURRING to Rincewind was cargo cult .
    He’d run across it – he encountered most things by running across them – on isolated islands out on the big oceans.
    Say that, once, a lost ship arrived, and while taking on food and water it handed out a few goodies to the helpful locals, like steel knives, arrowheads and fish-hooks. 1 And then it sailed away, and after a while the steel wore out and the arrowheads got lost.
    What was needed was another ship. But not many ships came to these lonely islands. What was needed was a ship attractor . Some sort of decoy . And it didn’t much matter if it was made out of bamboo and palm leaves, so long as it looked like a ship. Ships would be bound to be attracted to another ship, or else how did you get small boats?
    As with many human activities, it made perfect sense, for certain values of ‘sense’.
    Discworld magic was all about controlling the vast oceans of magic that poured though the world. All the Roundworld magicians could do was to build something like bamboo decoys on the shores of the big, cold, spinning universe, which pleaded: please let the magic come.
    â€˜It’s terrible,’ he said to Ponder, who was drawing a big circle onthe floor, to Dee’s fascination. ‘They believe they live in our world. With the turtle and everything!’
    â€˜Yes, and that’s strange because the rules here are quite easy to spot,’ said Ponder. ‘Things tend to become balls, and balls tend to move in circles. Once you work that out, everything else falls into place. In a curved movement, of course.’
    He went back to chalking the circle.
    The wizards had been staying in Dee’s house. He seemed quite happy about this, in a mildly bemused way, like a peasant who had suddenly been visited by a family of unexpected relatives from the big city who were doing incomprehensible things but were rich and interesting.
    The trouble was, Rincewind thought, that the wizards were explaining to Dee that magic didn’t work while, at the same time, doing magic. A crystal ball was giving instructions. An ape was knuckling in and out of, for want of a better word, fresh air, and wandering around Dee’s library making excited ‘ook’ noises and assembling the books to make a proper entrance in L-space. And the wizards themselves, as was their wont, prodded at things and argued at cross-purposes.
    And Hex had tracked down the elves. It made no sense, but their descent on Roundworld had plunged through time and come to rest millions of years in the past.
    Now the wizards had to get there. As Ponder explained, sometimes resorting to hand gestures for the hard of comprehension, this wasn’t difficult. Time and space in the round universe were entirely subordinate. The wizards, being made of higher-order stuff, could quite easily be moved around within it by magic from the real world. There were additional, complex reasons, mostly quite hard to spell.
    The wizards didn’t understand almost all this, but they did like the idea of being high-order stuff.
    â€˜But there was nothing back there,’ said the Dean, watching Ponder work on the circle. ‘There wasn’t even anyone you could call people, Hex says.’
    â€˜There were monkeys,’ said Rincewind. ‘Things like monkeys, anyway.’ He had his own thoughts on this score, although the acceptedwisdom on Discworld was that monkeys were the descendants of people who had given up trying. 2
    â€˜Oh, the monkeys ,’ snapped Ridcully. ‘I remember them. Completely useless. If you couldn’t eat it or have sex with it, they just didn’t want to know. They just mucked about.’
    â€˜I think this was even before that,’ said Ponder. He stood up and brushed chalk dust off his robe. ‘Hex thinks that the elves did something to … something. Something that became humans.’
    â€˜Interfered with them?’ said the Dean.
    â€˜Yes, sir. We know they can affect people’s minds when they sing—’
    â€˜You said became humans ?’ said Ridcully.
    â€˜Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I really don’t want to have that argument all over again, sir. On Roundworld, things become other things. At least, some of some things become other things. I’m not saying that happens on Discworld, sir, but Hex is quite certain that it happens here.