The Turtle Moves! (15 page)

And witches can be handled.

Or so they think. Planning has its limits. Agnes Nitt, the youngest of Lancre's four witches, turns out to have unsuspected depths. Granny Weatherwax, who they recognized as by far the most dangerous, is even a little more clever than they realized. Queen Magrat comes out of retirement to protect her daughter.

As for Nanny Ogg—well, they did a fairly solid job of handling her witcheries, but they weren't quite so thorough with her role as head of the Ogg family.

Nor did they count on a phoenix turning up in Lancre, or the pictsies
¹¹²
known as the Nac Mac Feegle, or the growing dissatisfaction of Igor, their traditional and tradition-loving servant, with their newfangled ideas.

All of those play a part, along with an Omnian priest by the name of Mightily Oats,
¹¹³
King Verence himself, and assorted others, but it's mostly the witches who settle things.

In
The Last Continent
, we got a lot of events and inventions that didn't particularly fit anywhere or lead to anything; in
Carpe Jugulum
, we have just as much innovation
¹¹⁴
and just as much happening, but it
does
all fit in and go somewhere. We'll be seeing more of Uberwald, more about vampires, more of the Nac Mac Feegle, and more of Igor and his family (all of whom seem to be named Igor) in later books. In this story, we see Magrat and Agnes maturing and Nanny and Granny developing. We see Granny discussing religion at some length with Oats, and summing up her beliefs on right and wrong thusly: “And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things.” While it's always dangerous to assume that any character is speaking for his or her author, that summation seems to match Mr. Pratchett's beliefs pretty closely, going by everything in the series so far.

Mightily Oats, as shown here, is an interesting character. He's a follower of the Omnian Church, but the humane version that the Prophet Brutha left behind after the events of
Small Gods
, rather than the ferocious and militant church that preceded him.

A lesser writer than Mr. Pratchett might have presented the latter-day Omnian faith as an unalloyed improvement on the old, but Pratchett is better and truer than that. Instead he gives us an Omnian church that's undergone hundreds of schisms, and an Omnian priest in the midst of an extended crisis of faith—Brutha's reforms made it acceptable to question, which made it possible to doubt. The unity and strength of the old, dangerous, bloodthirsty Omnian church has been lost. Oats is a man hag-ridden by doubt.

Granny Weatherwax is not one to be troubled by doubts, and there's a very powerful scene where she tells Oats why he should be glad she doesn't believe in his god.

And then there are the Nac Mac Feegle, the little red-haired, blue-tattooed
men with their barely comprehensible Scots dialect and their penchant for fighting and theft. The first impression is that they're a cross between Smurfs and soccer hooligans, but they're more than that. Right from this first appearance, it's established that they live underground in matriarchal clans, with dozens of males serving a witch-mother called a kelda,
¹¹⁵
who is absolutely nothing like Smurfette. They have a social structure that makes sense, in its own bizarre way. They'll be back in the Tiffany Aching stories, several volumes later.

There's also the phoenix—or phoenices;
¹¹⁶
it's clear that, mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, the Disc has more than one phoenix. While it has a role to play in the story, its part doesn't seem entirely essential, and we don't really learn all that much about it, except that it's an actual bird and a bane of vampires.

As for the vampires themselves, these are the vampires of low-budget horror films, not of Rumanian folklore. Like the Hammer Studios version of Dracula, they're relatively easy to kill, but they don't
stay
dead. They dress in evening clothes, have gothic names like Lacrimosa and Morbidia, and have extensive hypnotic and shape-shifting abilities. The Magpyrs are rebels in that they would rather not have cobwebs and dust everywhere, and prefer doors that don't creak, much to Igor's chagrin. They
do
drink wine. They have rebelled against the foolish old stories, and, they think, triumphed.

But they're still vampires—bloodsucking, undead monsters. It takes all the witches can do to remove them from Lancre, once and for all.

They do succeed in the end, though. Of course.

The next novel in the regular series will take us back to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and we won't see the witches of Lancre again except as supporting characters in the Tiffany Aching stories. First, though, we have a curiosity—it's a story of Rincewind and the faculty of Unseen University, but not exactly a novel. . . .

I
F YOU'RE AN AMERICAN, you may well not have known this book existed; now that you do, you may well be asking, “
What
science? The Discworld doesn't
have
any science!”

And you'd be more or less right. As the authors explain right up front, “Discworld does not run on scientific lines.” It runs on the power of story.

What this book does is intersperse a new Discworld story with essays on science—not some contrived Discworld science, but the science of our own world. A world which, it seems, the wizards of Unseen University accidentally created in a squash court, and sent Rincewind to investigate.

The story of the wizards creating and investigating Roundworld, as they call it, alternates chapters with actual science and history of science. Ian Stewart is a professor of mathematics at Warwick University, and Jack Cohen is a professor of biology there. They know their stuff, and write well, so the science chapters are good reading, and tie in well to the story.

The authors provide a sort of compact history of the universe, covering cosmology, astronomy, physics, and chemistry, but as you might expect, given their specialties, the science in the three volumes of this sub-series, especially the latter two, is heavy on biology, particularly evolutionary biology—and if you've been reading Discworld stories for
long, it shouldn't surprise you that Mr. Pratchett chose a biologist as one of his collaborators. Evolution, in one form or another, has long been a recurring element in the series. We've met a god of evolution, we've seen discussions of how natural selection has operated in producing the current faculty of Unseen University and the Disc's remarkable crop of barbarian heroes, and we've had comments on the evolutionary value of tortoises learning to fly, on the survival value of stupidity in vampires, on the reproductive strategies of the phoenix, and on any number of similar subjects. Yes, evolution on the Disc is distorted by the intense magical field and the author's sense of humor, but it's obviously a topic near and dear to Mr. Pratchett's heart.

So perhaps it's not surprising—though it's undoubtedly frustrating for American fans who haven't bought
The Science of Discworld
through
Amazon.co.uk
or the like—that it's in a supposed science book that much is revealed about the nature of Discworld. It's here that such vital elements as chelonium,
¹¹⁷
deitium,
¹¹⁸
and narrativium
¹¹⁹
are explained, as the wizards try to figure out how a universe can operate without them .
¹²⁰
It's here that the law “As above, so below” is presented, explaining why there are so many links between Roundworld and Discworld—the reality leakage is inherent in the system.

The basic story here is that Ponder Stibbons, the faculty member of Unseen University who's too bright for his own good, has devised a thaumic reactor—that is to say, a magical device that breaks down the elementary particles of magic to produce energy. He's built it in the university's squash court.

He's also misjudged a few things, and in an attempt to bleed off excess magic, he and the other wizards (with the aid of Hex
¹²¹
) create a universe. Like many magical things, it's much larger on the inside than on the outside, so that even though its exterior is only a foot in diameter, the interior is our own full-sized universe.

The wizards find this new universe fascinating in its complete lack of
magic, and watch it develop over a few billion years of its internal time—which is conveniently only a matter of days for Unseen University. With the aid of Hex and the omniscope, they're able to study it closely, and even to project themselves into it.

Poor Rincewind is named Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography
¹²²
and sent in as their scout, but he doesn't have it all to himself; eventually most of the familiar faces on the faculty take a look around. They find it baffling that a reality lacking in basic elements like narrativium can develop life, and equally baffling that once that life exists, it doesn't immediately produce wizard-level intelligence. They watch various promising species, hoping they'll evolve into something that can hold interesting conversations, and are repeatedly disappointed as trilobites and dinosaurs and assorted mammals all fail to oblige them.

No one happens to be watching when certain apes finally get the hang of this “intelligence” thing.

I won't give away the ending, but there is one, and a pretty satisfactory one at that. The thaumic reactor is eventually shut down, and the universe tucked safely away on a shelf.

And Rincewind, who was so unsatisfying as the protagonist of
The Last Continent
, is a much better character here than he has been in some time, displaying intelligence and compassion as well as his usual cowardice. It works.

All in all, it's a shame that the book has no American edition. It was a bestseller in Britain, and deservedly so. Where most of the other spin-offs unavailable on the western shores of the Atlantic—such as the
Discworld (Reformed) Vampyre's Diary
, or the Mapp
Death's Domain
—are merely entertaining trivia, the science volumes are real Discworld stories, quite possibly novel-length even without the science chapters.

Not to mention having lots of good popular science.

At the end, though, we leave Rincewind in his place at Unseen University, with Roundworld's universe on its shelf, until
The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
, which we'll consider in Chapter 35.

For now, though, it's time to see what Samuel Vimes and the Watch are up to.

B
Y THIS POINT IN THE WATCH SERIES, Samuel Vimes and company have Ankh-Morpork fairly well sorted out,
¹²³
but Mr. Pratchett clearly isn't done with the character. There's obviously more to be said about Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch.

The only reasonable thing to do, then, is to send Vimes somewhere else. Accordingly, Lord Vetinari appoints him ambassador to Uberwald, to represent the city at the coronation of the Low King.

Up to this point, we haven't been told much about the dwarfs' system of government; now we learn that they have an elected Low King, who is crowned on the Scone of Stone
¹²⁴
—a sixteen-pound chunk of dwarf bread dating back some fifteen hundred years—in their largest city, which is underneath Uberwald. Ankh-Morpork is eager to get trading concessions from the Low King, so the Patrician wants a good showing at the coronation.

One would hardly think that sending a notorious anti-monarchist cop would be an appropriate representative in such circumstances, but Lord Vetinari has a complex mind, and there are complications that he thinks Vimes can simplify.

The casual reader might wonder what the politics of dwarfs and werewolves have to do with elephants. Well, first off, the title almost certainly originated simply as a pun on
The Fifth Element
—the Bruce Willis SF movie was in theaters right about the time this novel was starting to gestate.
¹²⁵
Secondly, the Disc rests upon the backs of four elephants. Legend has it there was once a fifth,
¹²⁶
but it slipped off Great A'tuin's shell, orbited around, and smacked fatally into the Disc in what later became Uberwald. The impact was responsible for much of the mountainous terrain in the area, and the elephant's buried remains have provided the dwarfs with gigantic fat mines.

Those trade concessions Lord Vetinari is hoping for are for some of that fat.

Since this is a Vimes story, there are crimes to be solved and criminals to be apprehended, and class issues to be dealt with. Vimes is sent to Uberwald not as Commander of the City Watch, but as Duke of Ankh-Morpork.
¹²⁷

He hates that.

Someone has robbed a museum in Ankh-Morpork, and a tradesman has been murdered, but Sir Samuel must leave that to others as he sets out for Uberwald with his wife and a few selected escorts.

That leaves Carrot Ironfoundersson in charge of the Watch—but then he, for reasons of his own, also leaves the city, bound for Uberwald.

That leaves Fred Colon as Acting Captain. Yes, Fred Colon.

This is, of course, a disaster, though that's incidental to the main story. It does make for some very entertaining scenes, some of them curiously reminiscent of
The Caine Mutiny
.

Our primary narrative, though, follows Vimes to the Uberwald town of Bonk, where he unravels a conspiracy between a clan of werewolves and certain disgruntled dwarfs. We learn a great deal more about Angua's family, about dwarf society, and about Igor—and Igor, and Igor, and all their clan. Vampires make only a rather small (though significant) appearance; perhaps Mr. Pratchett wanted to avoid repeating too much from
Carpe Jugulum
.