The Science of Discworld IV

than
joie de vivre
. There was even some applause, sprinkled with little spurts of laughter.
    Marjorie didn’t join in, but watched the wizards carefully. The Archchancellor had told her about the origins of Roundworld, and had seemed, at the time, to be almost apologetic. He had also been very surprised when she laughed.
    It was a strange world, this turtle world, but it didn’t
seem
outlandish when you were on it. As for the religious connotations, she couldn’t help thinking of the day her mother had died, which had been unpleasant, for all that the hospice had been able to do. Her father had taken off his clerical collar and dropped it in a waste basket without saying a word, and she had helped him with such things asprobate and the sundry unpleasant hoops the bereaved must jump through to satisfy the temporal powers. But he had grieved, and for weeks afterwards he would barely talk to her beyond the niceties of please and thank you – those stayed with him, courtesy even where courtesy was not forthcoming, since he was that kind of a man.
    She had spoken to him some months afterwards, worried that after years and years of growing doubt he might have now lost his faith, triggered by the death of his wife so unfairly. She understood that, she understood
him
, though she had never understood his bishop, who in her presence was pernicious, stupid and condescending.
    Right in front of her – yes, she who had read the Bible by the time she was seven and who by the time she was twenty-five had decided that it had by rights to be put on the fantasy and science fiction shelf – he had talked at length, without a
shred
of evidence, about her mother now being ‘in God’s embrace’. He wouldn’t have been alone, either; there were many people who would
insist
that what he said was true when to her it manifestly was not. Yearning for a truth they had already declared was solid and immutable, they demanded –
demanded
– that their brand of fiction should be treated as fact.
    She remembered a dreadful tidal wave that had almost devoured a small country, and she remembered how men and women all over the planet had found their way to the island and scrabbled in the ruins of stricken houses until they heard faint cries from below … The newspapers had called it a miracle; she had gone ballistic, screaming to the world at large:
It wasn’t a bloody miracle!
A miracle would have been the appearance of God and all His angels, coming to the rescue. But it wasn’t, not even close; it had been people – everyday people – helping other people, acknowledging them as people like themselves: a triumph for the commonality of mankind and the knowledge, slewed into our genes, that the person who you helped today might be the person who would pull you out from under a burning car tomorrow.
    Support the clan.
If one man tries to fight a mastodon, he is a dead man; a whole clan fights the mastodon, and everybody gets to eat for a week. And if enough of the clan work together, a couple of surprised former monkeys eventually land on the Moon …
    And yet, as she had grown up and worked, building her career, she could all too easily spot those who thought that being a believer gave them power. She could see the shine on their faces, the determination never to let go – sometimes never even to think again for themselves.
    After all, it had all been done for them already.
    Right from the moment their God created their world in His own image. Which probably wasn’t that of a turtle …
    fn1 Generally speaking, centres of learning are almost always referred to as feminine; rather surprising considering the length of time it took for any woman to get into one of them for a purpose higher than scrubbing the floors. Unseen University, of course, still marches to a different drum; it is a broken drum, but it is
their
drum, and they won’t have it any other way.

EIGHTEEN
----
BYE-BYE BIG BANG?

    Viewed from Discworld, Roundworld is a puzzle. It sits neatly on a shelf in Rincewind’s office, but the wizards know that its outside has to be far smaller than its inside, because Rincewind (among many others) has visited the inside in person. Indeed, the whole of the inside is absolutely gigantic. The wizards have a theory about how this can be. Roundworld runs on mysterious rules, and its shape, size, and even its origin seem to be consequences of those rules. But the rules apply only on the inside. On the outside, magic takes over.
    In