The Last Continent (Discworld 22)

'What makes you think that?'

'Think what? Speak up, you . . . hwee . . . man . . .' Something exploded somewhere behind Ponder's eyeballs and lifted him off the ground. For a moment he felt he had jumped into icy water. The blood flowed back to his hands. 'Well done, lad,' said Ridcully. 'Your hair's going brown again, too.'

'Ow . . .' Ponder slumped to his knees. 'It was like wearing a lead suit! I never want to go through that again!'

'Suicide's your best bet, then,' said Ridcully. 'Is this going to happen again?'

'Probably. At least once, anyway.' Ponder got to his feet with a steely look in his eyes. 'Then let's find whoever's building this place and ask them to send us home,' he growled. 'They might not want to listen,' said Ridcully. 'Deities can be touchy.' Ponder shook his sleeves to leave his hands free. For a wizard, this was equivalent to checking the functioning of a pump-action shotgun.

'Then we'll insist,' he said. 'Really, Stibbons? What about protection of the magical ecology?' Ponder turned on him a look that would have opened a strongroom. Ridcully was in his seventies and spry even for wizards, who tended to live well into their second century if they survived their first fifty years. Ponder wasn't sure how old he'd been, but he'd definitely thought he could hear a blade being sharpened. It was one thing to know you were on a journey, and quite, quite another to see your destination on the horizon. 'It can get stuffed,' he said.[22] 'Well thought out, Mister Stibbons! I can see we'll make a wizard of you yet. Ah, the Dean's . . . oh . . .' The Dean's clothes billowed up but did not, as it were, inflate to their old size. The hat in particular was big enough to rock on the Dean's ears, which were redder and stuck out more than Ponder remembered. Ridcully raised the hat. 'Push off, granddad,' said the Dean. 'Ah,' said the Archchancellor. Thirteen years old, I'd say. Which explains a lot. Well, Dean, help us with the others, will you?'

'Why should I?' The adolescent Dean cracked his knuckles. 'Hah! I'm young again and soon you'll be dead! I've got my whole life ahead of me!'

'Firstly, you'll spend it here, and secondly, Dean, you think it's going to be jolly good fun being the Dean in a thirteen-year-old body, don't you, but within a minute or two you'll start forgetting it all, you see? The old temporal gland can't allow you to remember being fourteen when you're not even thirteen yet, you follow me? You'd know this stuff, Dean, if you weren't forgetting. You'll have to go through it all over again. Dean . . . ah . . .' The brain has far less control over the body than the body does over the brain. And adolescence is not a good time. Nor is old age, for that matter, but at least the spots have cleared up, some of the more troublesome glands have settled down and you're allowed to take a nap in the afternoons and twinkle at young women. In any case, the Dean's body hadn't experienced too much old age yet, whereas every junior spot, ache and twinge was firmly embossed on the morphic memory. Once, it decided, was enough. The Dean expanded. Ponder noticed that his head in particular swelled up to fit his ears. The Dean rubbed his spot-free face. 'Five minutes wouldn't have been bad,' he complained. 'What was that all about?'

'Temporal uncertainty,' said Ridcully. 'You've seen it before, didn't you realize? What were you thinking of?'

'Sex.'

'Oh, yes, of course . . . silly of me, really.' Ridcully looked along the deserted beach. 'Mister Stibbons thinks we can—' he began. 'Ye gods! There are people here!' A young woman was walking towards them. Swaying, anyway. 'My word,' said the Dean. 'I suppose this isn't Slakki, by any chance?'

'I thought they wore grass skirts . . .' said Ridcully. 'What's she wearing, Stibbons?'

'A sarong.'

'Looks right enough to me, haha,' said the Dean. 'Certainly makes a man wish he was fifty years younger,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. 'Five minutes younger would do for me,' said the Dean. 'Incidentally, did any of you notice that rather clever inadvertent joke just then? Stibbons said it was “a sarong” and I—'

'What's that she's carrying?' said Ridcully. '—no, listen, you see, I misheard him, in fact, and I—'

'Looks like . . . coconuts . . .' said Ponder, shading his eyes. 'This is a bit more like it,' said the Senior Wrangler. '—because actually I thought he said, “It's wrong,” you see—'

'Certainly a coconut,' said Ridcully. 'I'm not complaining, of course, but aren't these sultry maids generally black-haired? Red doesn't seem very typical.'

'—so I said—'

'I suppose you'd get coconuts here?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'They float, don't they?'

'—and, listen, when Stibbons said “sarong”, I thought he—'

'Something familiar about her,' Ridcully mused. 'Did you see that nut in the Museum of Quite Unusual Things?' said the Senior Wrangler. 'Called the coco-de-mer and . . .' he permitted himself '. . . ha, very curious shape, you know, you'll never guess who it used to put me in mind of . . .'

'It can't be Mrs Whitlow, can it?' said Ponder. 'As a matter of fact, I must admit that it—'

'Well, I thought it was mildly amusing, anyway,' said the Dean.

'It is Mrs Whitlow,' said Ridcully. 'More of a nut, really, but—' It dawned on the Senior Wrangler that the sky was a different colour on his personal planet. He turned around, looked, said, 'Mwaaa . . .' and fell gently to the sand. 'Ai don't quate know what's happened to Mister Librarian,' said Mrs Whitlow, in a voice that made the Senior Wrangler twitch even in his swoon. The coconut opened its eyes. It looked as if it had just seen something truly horrific, but this is a normal expression for baby orang-utans and in any case it was looking at the Dean. 'Eek!' it said. Ridcully coughed. 'Well, at least he's the right shape,' he said. 'And, er, you, Mrs Whitlow? How do you feel?'

'Mwaa . . .' said the Senior Wrangler. 'Very well indeed, thank you,' said Mrs Whitlow. This country agrees with me. I don't know whether it was the swim, but Ai haven't felt quate so buoyant in years. But Ai looked around and there was this dear little ape just sitting there.'

'Ponder, would you mind just throwing the Senior Wrangler in the sea for a moment?' said Ridcully. 'Nowhere too deep. Don't worry if it steams.' He took Mrs Whitlow's spare hand. 'I don't want to worry you, dear Mrs Whitlow,' he said, 'but I think something is shortly going to come as a big shock to you. First of all, and please don't misunderstand me, it might be a good idea to loosen your clothing.' He swallowed. 'Slightly.' The Bursar had experienced some changes of age as he wandered through the wet but barren land, but to a man capable of being a vase of flowers for an entire afternoon this was barely a mild distraction. What had caught his eye was a fire. It was burning bits of driftwood, and the flames were edged with blue from the salt. Close to it was a sack made of some sort of animal skins. The damp earth beside the Bursar stirred and a tree erupted, growing so fast that the rain steamed off the unfolding leaves. This did not surprise him. Few things did. Besides, he'd never seen a tree growing before, so he did not know how fast it was supposed to go. Then several more trees exploded around him. One grew so fast that it went all the way from sapling to half-rotten trunk in a few seconds.

And it seemed to the Bursar that there were other people here. He couldn't see them or hear them, but something in his bones sensed them. However, the Bursar was also quite accustomed to the presence of people who couldn't be seen or heard by anyone else, and had spent many a pleasant hour in conversation with historical figures and, sometimes, the wall. All in all the Bursar was, depending on your outlook, the most or least suitable person to encounter deity on a first-hand basis. An old man walked around a rock and was halfway to the fire before he noticed the wizard. Like Rincewind, the Bursar had no room in his head for racism. As a skin colour black came as quite a relief compared to some of the colours he'd seen, although he'd never seen anyone quite so black as the man now staring at him. At least, the Bursar assumed he was staring. The eyes were so deep set that he couldn't be sure. The Bursar, who had been properly brought up. said, 'Hooray, there's a rosebush?' The old man gave him a rather puzzled nod. He walked over to the dead tree and pulled off a branch, which he pushed into the fire. Then he sat down and watched it as though watching wood char was the most engrossing thing in the world. The Bursar sat down on a rock and waited. If the game was patience, then two could play at it. The old man kept glancing up at him. The Bursar kept smiling. Once or twice he gave the man a little wave. Finally the burning branch was pulled out of the fire. The old man picked up the leather sack in his other hand and walked off among the rocks. The Bursar followed him. There was an overhang here under a small cliff, shielding a stretch of vertical rock from the rain. It was the kind of tempting surface that would, in Ankh-Morpork, have already been covered so thickly with so many posters, signs and graffiti that if you'd removed the wall the general accretion would still have stood up. Someone had drawn a tree. It was the simplest drawing of a tree the Bursar had ever seen since he'd been old enough to read books that weren't mainly pictures, but it was also in some strange way the most accurate. It was simple because something complex had been rolled up small; as if someone had drawn trees, and started with the normal green cloud on a stick, and refined it, and refined it some more, and looked for the little twists in a line that said tree and refined those until there was just one line that said TREE. And now when you looked at it you could hear the wind in the branches. The old man reached down beside him and took up a flat stone with some white paste on it. He drew another line on the rock, slightly like a flattened V, and smeared it with mud. The Bursar burst out laughing as the wings emerged from the painting and whirred past him.

And again he was aware of a strange effect in the air. It reminded him of . . . yes . . . old 'Rubber' Houser, that was his name, dead now, of course, but remembered by many of his contemporaries as the inventor of the Graphical Device. The Bursar had joined the University when likely wizards started their training early, somewhere after the point where they learned to walk but before they started to push over girls in the playground. The writing of lines in detention class was a familiar punishment and the Bursar, like everyone else, toyed with the usual practice of tying several pens to a ruler in a group attempt to write lines in threes. But Houser, a reflective sort of boy, had scrounged some bits of wood and stripped a mattress of its springs and devised the four-, sixteen- and eventually the thirty-two-line writing machine. It had got so popular that boys were actually breaking rules in order to have a go on it, at threepence a time to use it and a penny to help wind it up. Of course, more time was spent setting it up than was ever saved by using it, but this is the case in many similar fields and is a sign of Progress. The experiments tragically came to an end when someone opened a door at the wrong moment and the entire pent-up force of Houser's experimental prototype 256-line machine propelled him backwards out of a fourth-floor window. Except for the absence of screams, the hand tracing its infinitely simple lines on the rock brought back memories of Houser. There was a sense of something small being done that was making something happen that was huge. He sat and watched. It was, he remembered later whenever he was in a state to remember anything, one of the happiest times of his life. When Rincewind lifted his head a watchman's helmet was spinning gently on the ground. To his amazement the men themselves were still there, although they were lying around in various attitudes of unconsciousness or at least, if they had sense, feigned unconsciousness. The Luggage had a cat's tendency to lose interest in things that didn't fight back even after you'd kicked them a few times. Shoes littered the ground, too. The Luggage was limping around in a circle. Rincewind sighed, and stood up. Take the shoes off. They don't suit you,' he said. The Luggage stood still for a moment, and then the rest of the shoes clattered against the wall. 'And the dress. What would those nice ladies think if they saw you dressing up like this?' The Luggage shrugged off the few sequinned tatters that remained. 'Turn around, I want to see your handles. No, I said turn around. Turn around properly, please. Ah, I thought so . . . I said turn around. Those earrings . . . they don't do anything for you at all, you know.' He leaned closer. Is that a stud? Have you had your lid pierced?'

The Luggage backed away. Its manner indicated very clearly that while it might give in on the shoes, the dress and even the earrings, the battle over the stud would go to the finish. 'Well . . . all right. Now give me my clean underwear, you could make shelves out of the stuff I'm wearing.' The Luggage opened its lid. 'Good, now I— Is that my underwear? Would I be seen dead in something like that? Yes, as a matter of fact I suspect I would. My underwear, please. It's got my name inside, although I must admit I can't quite remember why I thought that was necessary.' The lid shut. The lid opened. 'Thank you.' It was no use wondering how it was done, or for that matter why the laundry returned freshly ironed. The watchmen were still very wisely remaining unconscious, but out of habit Rincewind went behind a stack of old boxes to change. He was the sort of person who'd go behind a tree to change if he was on a desert island all alone. 'You noticed something odd about this alley?' he said, over the top of the boxes. 'There're no drainpipes. There're no gutters. They've never heard of rain here. I suppose you are the Luggage, aren't you, and not some kangaroo in disguise? Why am I asking? Ye gods, these feel good. Right, let's go—' The Luggage opened its lid again, and a young woman looked up at Rincewind. 'Who are—? Oh, you're the blind man,' she said. 'I beg your pardon?'

'Sorry . . . Darleen said you must be blind. Well, actually she said you must be bloody blind. Can you give me a hand out?' It dawned on Rincewind that the girl clambering out of the Luggage was Neilette, the third member of Letitia's crew and the one who'd seemed quite plain compared to the others and certainly a lot less . . . well, noisy wasn't quite the word. Probably the word was 'expansive'. They filled the space around them to capacity. Take Darleen, a lady he'd last seen holding a man daintily by the collar so that she could punch him in the face. When she walked into a room, there'd be no one in it unaware that she had done so. Neilette was just . . . ordinary. She brushed some dirt off her dress, and sighed. 'I could see there was going to be another fight so I hid in Trunkie,' she said. 'Trunkie, eh?' said Rincewind. The Luggage had the decency to look embarrassed.