A worried look crossed the Dean's face.

'Would that be wise?' he said. Like many people, wizards often have secrets they don't want themselves to know.

Ridcully stood up. 'We know it'll work,' he said, 'because it's already happened to us. Think about it. We must succeed in the end, because we know a species like this gets off the planet.'

'Yes,' said Ponder, slowly, 'and, then again, no.'

'What the hell does that mean?' Ridcully demanded.

'Well ... we've been to a future where it happens, certainly,' said Ponder, twiddling his pencil nervously. 'But there are other futures. The multiplex nature of the universe that allows it to absorb and cushion the effects of apparent paradoxes also means that nothing is certain, even if you know it is.' He tried to avoid Ridcully's stare. 'We went to a future. At the moment, it exists only in our memories. Then, it was real. Now, it may never be. Look, Rincewind was telling me about some play writer he's found, born around about Dee's time but not in this branch of the universe. Yet we know he has an existence, because L-space contains all possible books in all possible histories. Do you see what I mean? Nothing is certain.'

After a while, the Chair of Indefinite Studies said, 'You know, I think I prefer the kind of universal law that says the third son of a king always gets the princess. They make sense.'

'The universe is so big, sir, that it obeys all possible laws,' said Ponder. 'For a given value of

"teapot".'

'Look, if we go back in time and talk to ourselves, why don't we remember it?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

Ponder sighed. 'Because although it has already happened to us, it hasn't yet happened to us.'

'I, er, tried something like that,' said Rincewind. 'While you were having your mussel soup just now I got Hex to send me back in time to warn myself to hold my breath when we landed in the river. It worked.'

'Did you hold your breath?' 'Yes, because I've warned myself.'

'So ... was there any time anywhere where you didn't hold your breath, thus giving yourself a mouthful of river water and causing you to go back to make sure you did?'

'Probably there was, I think, but there isn't now.' 'Oh, I see,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

'You know, it's a good job we're wizards, otherwise this time travel business could really be confusing ...'

'At least we know that Hex can still make contact with us,' said Ponder. 'I'll ask him to move us back again.' The Librarian watched them go. A moment later, the rest of everywhere went with them.

FOURTEEN

The Ugs have no real stories, hence no sense of their place in time. They have no conception of the future, and therefore no wish to change it.

We know that there are other futures ... As Ponder Stibbons remarks, we live in a multiplex universe. We look at the past and we see times and places where things could have been different, and we wonder whether we could have ended up in a different present. By analogy, we look at the present and imagine many different futures. And we wonder which of them will happen, and what we can do now to affect the choice.

We could be wrong. Maybe the fatalist view, 'it is written', is right. Maybe we are all automata, working out the deterministic future of a clockwork universe. Or maybe the Quantum philosophers are right, and all possible futures (and pasts) coexist. Or maybe everything that exists is just one point in a multiplex phase space of universes, a single card dealt from Fate's deck.

How did we acquire this sense of ourselves as beings who exist in time? Who remember their past, and use it to try (usually unsuccessfully) to control their future?

It all goes back a long, long way.

Watch a proto-human watching a zebra watching a lioness. The three mammalian brains are doing very different things. The herbivore brain has seen the lioness, is barely conscious (we guess, watch some horses in a field) of the whole 360 degrees of his environment, and has marked some things, like that tuft of grass over there, that female over there who could just be in heat, that male who's giving her the right signals, the three bushes that could have a surprise behind them .. the lioness moves, she suddenly gets priority, but not totally because there are other considerations. Another lioness could well be behind those bushes, and I'd better move up on that nice grass before Nigella does ... Looking at that grass makes me think of the taste of that long grass ... THE LIONESS IS MOVING.

The lioness is thinking: that's a nice zebra stallion, won't go for him he's too strong (memory of a previous eye injury from a zebra kick) but if I get him running, Dora behind those bushes can probably jump on the young female over there who is trying to attract the male, then I can run after it with her ...

There is probably no more of a plan than that in the zebra's brain but it does foresee a little bit of the future and plug memories into present planning. If I stand up now ...

The human is looking at the lioness and the zebra. Even if it's a Homo erectus, we bet it had stories in its head: that lioness will run out, the zebra will startle, the other lioness will go for ...

ah, that young female. Then I can run out there and get in front of the young male; I see myself running at him and hitting him with this stone. Homo sapiens may well have done better from the beginning; his brain was bigger and probably better. He may, from the beginning, have had room for several alternative, thought about 'or' scenarios and probably the 'and' one which goes

'and I will be a big hunter and meet interesting women'. 'If' probably came along later, perhaps with cave paintings, but making predictions put our ancestors way ahead of their predators and their prey.

There has been a variety of suggestions about why our brains suddenly grew to nearly double their previous size, from the need to keep the faces of our social group in mind while gossiping about them, to the need to compete with other hunter-gatherers, to the competitive nature of language and its structuring of the brain so that lying could be successful for the li-ar, but then the li-ee got better at detecting lies. Such escalations all have an attraction to them. They make good stories, ones that we can easily imagine, filling in the background just as we do with hearing sentences or enjoying pictures. That doesn't make them true, of course, just as our attraction to the supposed seashore phase of our history doesn't make 'aquatic apes' true either.

The stories serve as placeholders for whatever the real pressures were: the meta-explanation of why our brain growth took off is that competitive advantage was to be won by All Of The Above routes, and many more.

Perhaps the human viewer of that wildlife scene is a cameraman for a natural history TV series.

Even a mere 15 years ago, he would have had an Arriflex (or if he was paying for it himself, perhaps just a Bolex H16) 16mm film camera with a very precious 800 feet (260 metres) of film loaded, and perhaps another dozen film packs in his rucksack (800 feet gives about 40 minutes of filming: if you're very good, or very lucky, five minutes of useful stuff). Now he has a video camera that would have seemed miraculous then, which can reuse and reuse a length of tape until it's full of five-minute sequences, end to end. All the things he wished for, then, are in the apparatus in his hand now: it stays in focus, it compensates for a bit of wobble, it goes down to unbelievably low light levels (for those of us who grew up with photographic film) and it zooms over a range much wider than we ever had before.

It's magic, in fact.

And in his head are a dozen alternative scenarios for the lions and zebras, which he'll flick to instantly as the animals act to constrain their futures. He's actually thinking about other things altogether, letting the experienced professional part of his brain do the work while he daydreams