The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

hundred miles away, even here at the equator.
    The wizards faded into existence, and looked around them.
    ‘What the
hell
happened here?’ said Ridcully.
    The landscape was a welter of scars and pits. Roads were visible where they had buckled up through the snow, and there were the ruins of what could only have been buildings. But half the horizon was filled with what looked very much like an etiolated version of one of the giant shellfish proposed by the Lecturer in Recent Runes. It must have been several miles across at the base, and extended upwards beyond the limit of vision.
    ‘Did any of you do this?’ said Ridcully accusingly.
    ‘Oh, come
on
,’ said the Dean. ‘We don’t even know what it is.’
    Beyond the tangle of broken roadways the snow blew across deep trenches gouged out of the ground. Desolation reigned.
    Ponder pointed towards the huge pyramid.
    ‘Whatever we’re looking for, it’s in there,’ he said.
    The first thing the wizards noticed was the mournful bleating noise. It came and went in a regular way, on-off, on-off, and seemed to fill the entire structure.
    The wizards wandered onwards, occasionally getting H EX to move them to different places. Nothing, they agreed, made much sense. The building was mostly full of roadways and loading docks, interspersed with massive pillars. It creaked, too, like an old galleon. They could hear the groaning noises, echoing far above. Occasionally, the ground trembled.
    It was clear that important things happened in the centre. There were tubes, hundreds of feet high. The wizards recognized cranes, and failed to recognize huge engines of unknown purpose. Cables thick as a house rose into the darkness above.
    Frost sparkled off everything.
    Still the bleat went on.
    ‘Look,’ said Ponder.
    Red words flashed on and off, high in the air.
    ‘“A-L-A-A-M”,’ the Dean spelled out. ‘I wonder why it’s doing that? They seem to have invented magic, whoever they are. Getting letters to flash like that is quite difficult to do.’
    Ponder disappeared for a moment, and then came back.
    ‘H EX feels that this is a dumb-waiter,’ he said. ‘Er … you know … for lifting things to another level.’
    ‘Going where?’ said Ridcully.
    ‘Er … up, sir. Into that … necklace around the world. H EX has been speaking to the intelligence here. It’s a sort of H EX , sir. And it’s nearly dead.’
    ‘That’s a shame,’ said Ridcully. He sniffed. ‘Where’s everyone gone, then?’
    ‘Er … they made huge … sort of … big metal balls to live in. I know it sounds stupid, sir. But they’ve gone. Because of the ice. And there was a comet, too. Not very big. But it scared everyone. They built the … the beanstalk things, and then they … er … mined metal out of floating rocks, and … they left.’
    ‘Where’ve they gone?’
    ‘The … intelligence isn’t sure. It’s forgotten. It says it’s forgotten a lot.’
    ‘Oh, I
understand
,’ said the Dean, who’d been trying to follow this, ‘Everyone’s climbed up a great big beanstalk?’
    ‘Er … sort of, Dean,’ said Ponder, in his diplomatic voice. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
    ‘Certainly messed the place up before they went,’ said Ridcully.
    Rincewind had been watching a rat scuttle away into the debris, but the words sunk in and exploded in his head.
    ‘Messed up?’ he growled. ‘How?’
    ‘Say again?’ said Ridcully.
    ‘Did you
see
the weather report for this world?’ said Rincewind, waving his hands in the air. ‘Two miles of ice, followed by a light shower of rocks, with outbreaks of choking fog for the next thousand years? There will be widespread vulcanism as half a continent’s worth of magma lets go, followed by a period of mountain building? And that’s
normal
.’
    ‘Yes, well –’
    ‘Oh,
yes
, there are some nice quiet periods, everything settles down, and then – whammo!’
    ‘There’s no need to get so excited –’
    ‘I’ve
been
here!’ said Rincewind. ‘This is how this place
works!
And now, please, you tell me how, I mean
how
, can anything living on this world
possibly
mess it up? I mean, compared to what happens anyway?’ He paused, and gulped air. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you pick the right time, yes, sure, it’s a great world for a holiday, ten thousand years, even a few million if you’re lucky with the weather but, good grief, it’s just not a serious proposition for anything long term. It’s a great place to grow