Last Continent

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘No. It’s the painting underneath I’m talking about, mister.’

  Rincewind looked closer. There were fainter lines there, which you’d think were just flaws in the rock if you weren’t looking. Rincewind squinted. Other lines seemed to fit . . . Yes, someone had painted figures . . . They were . . .

  He blew away some sand.

  Yes, they were . . .

  . . . curiously familiar . . .

  ‘Yes,’ said Scrappy, his voice apparently coming from a distance. ‘Look a bit like you, don’t they . . . ?’

  ‘But they’re—’ he began. He straightened up. ‘How long have these paintings been here?’

  ‘Well, lessee,’ said the kangaroo. ‘Out of the sun and the weather, nothing to disturb ’em . . . Twenty thousand years?’

  ‘That’s not right!’

  ‘Nah, true, prob’ly thirty thousand, in a nice sheltered spot like this.’

  ‘But these are . . . That’s my . . .’

  ‘O’ course, when I say thirty thousand years,’ said the kangaroo, ‘I mean it depends how you look at it. Even them hand paintings on the top’ve been there five thousand years, see. And those faint ones . . . Oh, yes, got to be pretty old, tens of thousands of years, except—’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘They weren’t here last week, mate.’

  ‘You’re saying they’ve been here for ages . . . but not for very long?’

  ‘See? I knew you was clever.’

  ‘And now you’re going to tell me what the hell you’re talking about?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Excuse me, I’ll just find something to eat.’

  Rincewind lifted up a rock. There were a couple of jam sandwiches underneath.

  The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame.

  ‘It really was very clear!’ shouted Ridcully, waving his hand frantically in the air at the place where the window had been. ‘And I put a sign on it!’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve got a “Do Not Disturb” sign nailed to your study door,’ said the Senior Wrangler, ‘and you still expect Mrs Whitlow to bring you your tea in the mornings!’

  ‘Gentlemen, please!’ said Ponder Stibbons. ‘We’ve got to sort some things out right now!’

  ‘Yes indeed!’ roared the Dean. ‘And it was his fault! The sign wasn’t large enough!’

  ‘I mean we have to—’

  ‘There are ladies present!’ snapped the Senior Wrangler.

  ‘Lady.’ Mrs Whitlow uttered the word carefully and with deliberation, like a gambler putting down a winning hand. She stood primly watching them. Her expression said: I’m not worried, because with all these wizards around nothing bad can happen.

  The wizards adjusted their attitudes.

  ‘Ai do apologize if Ai’ve done something wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, not, not wrong,’ said Ridcully quickly. ‘Not exactly wrong. As such.’

  ‘Anyone could have done it,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘I could hardly read the lettering myself.’

  ‘And, taking the broad view, it’s certainly better to be stuck out here in the fresh air and sunshine than in that stuffy study,’ Ridcully went on.

  ‘That’s quite a broad view, sir,’ said Ponder doubtfully.

  ‘And we’ll be back home in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,’ said Ridcully, beaming.

  ‘Unfortunately, this doesn’t look a very agricultural sort of—’ Ponder began.

  ‘Figure of speech, Mister Stibbons, figure of speech.’

  ‘The sun’s going down, sir,’ Ponder persisted. ‘Which means it’ll be night time soon.’

  Ridcully looked nervously at Mrs Whitlow, and then at the sun.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ said Mrs Whitlow.

  ‘Oh, good heavens, no!’ said Ridcully hastily.

  ‘Ai notice the little hole in the wall doesn’t seem to have come back,’ said Mrs Whitlow.

  ‘We, er—’

  ‘It’s a little prank, is it?’ the housekeeper went on. ‘Ai’m sure you gentlemen will have your fun, and no mistake.’

  ‘Yes, that’s—’

  ‘But Ai should be grateful if you would send me back now, Archchancellor. We’re doing the laundry this afternoon, and Ai’m afraid we’re having a lot of trouble with the Dean’s sheets.’

  The Dean suddenly knew how a mosquito feels in the beam of a searchlight.

  ‘We’ll sort this out directly, never fear, Mrs Whitlow,’ said Ridcully, not taking his eyes off the wretched Dean. ‘In the meantime, why don’t you take a seat and enjoy the rather wonderful sheets, I mean sunshine?’

  There was a clack as the deckchair folded itself up. Then it sneezed.

  ‘Ah, back with us again, Librarian,’ Ridcully went on, as the orang-utan sprawled in the sand. ‘Help him up, please, Mister Stibbons. A word to the rest of you, please. If you’ll excuse us a moment, Mrs Whitlow? Faculty meeting . . .’

  The wizards went into a huddle.

  ‘It was tomato sauce, all right?’ said the Dean hurriedly. ‘I just happened to be having a snack in bed and you know how that stuff stains!’

  ‘I’m sure we’re not at all interested in the state of your sheets, Dean,’ said Ridcully.

  ‘No, indeed,’ said the Senior Wrangler brightly.

  ‘Not us,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, slapping the Dean on the back.

  ‘We have to get back,’ said Ridcully. ‘We can’t spend the night alone with Mrs Whitlow. It wouldn’t be decent.’

  ‘I don’t see why anyone should make a fuss about a bit of tomato sauce. I at least cleaned all the beans off—’

  ‘Well, we’re not actually alone, are we? Not as such,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘I mean, there’s seven of us, not including the Librarian.’

  ‘Yes, but we’re all alone together,’ said Ridcully urgently. ‘There could be Talk.’

  ‘What about?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, who sometimes lagged behind.

  ‘You know,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Seven men and one woman . . . It doesn’t bear thinking about . . .’

  ‘Well, I for one will certainly veto any suggestion about ordering another six women,’ said the Chair firmly.

  ‘Perhaps the hole will open again?’ said the Senior Wrangler.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Ridcully. ‘Ponder says that our coming through probably altered the thaumostatic balance. What do you think, Dean?’

  ‘Just tomato sauce,’ said the Dean. ‘It could have happened to anyone.’

  ‘I meant about our being marooned on this island,’ said Ridcully. ‘Any ideas, anyone? We must tackle this as a team.’

  ‘What shall we tell Mrs Whitlow?’ whispered the Senior Wrangler. ‘She thinks this is a prank.’

  ‘Senior Wrangler, we are elderly, wise and experienced wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘Students are prankers.’

  ‘Pranksters, possibly,’ mumbled Ponder Stibbons.

  ‘Whatever. We do not indulge in pranks.’

  ‘With us it’s a fully fledged gold-embossed cock-up or nothing,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  ‘I don’t see why people are making such a fuss about a bit of tomato sauce that hardly even shows up,’ muttered the Dean.

  ‘No one brought any suitable spells?’ said Ridcully.

  ‘At four in the morning? For the beach?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then we shall have to fall back on our own resources. There’s bound to be a ship along sooner or later. The point is, gentlemen,’ he added, ‘that we are the product of a university education. I’m quite sure primitive people have no difficulties surviving in a place like this, and think of all the things we have that our rude forefathers lacked.’

  ‘Mrs Whitlow, for a start,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

  ‘She w
ouldn’t put up with rudeness of any sort,’ the Senior Wrangler agreed.

  ‘Do you know anything about boats, Dean? I believe you got a Brown for rowing when you were slimmer,’ said Ridcully. ‘Please note that this question did not raise the matter of sheets in any way.’

  ‘Well, indeed, boat-building is not a difficult task,’ said the Dean, surfacing. ‘Even primitive people can build boats, and we are civilized men, after all.’

  ‘Then you’re head of the Boat-Building Committee,’ said Ridcully. ‘Senior Wrangler can help you. The rest of you fellows had better see if there’s any fresh water. And food. Knock down a few coconuts. That sort of thing.’

  ‘And what will you do, Archchancellor?’ said the Senior Wrangler nastily.

  ‘I shall be the Protein Acquisition Committee,’ said Ridcully, waving his fishing rod.

  ‘You going to stand here and fish again? What good’s that going to do?’

  ‘It might result in a fish dinner, Senior Wrangler.’

  ‘Has anyone got any tobacco?’ said the Dean. ‘I’m dying for a smoke.’

  The wizards went off about their tasks, complaining and blaming one another.

  And just inside the forest, in the leafy debris, roots unfolded and a number of very small plants began to grow like hell . . .

  ‘This is the last continent,’ said Scrappy. ‘It was . . . put together last, and . . . differently.’

  ‘Looks pretty old to me,’ said Rincewind. ‘Ancient. Those hills look as old as the hills.’

  ‘They were made thirty thousand years old,’ said the kangaroo.

  ‘Come on! They look millions of years old!’

  ‘Yep. Thirty thousand years ago they were made a million years ago. Time here is,’ the kangaroo shrugged, ‘not the same. It was . . . glued together differently, right?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Rincewind. ‘I’m a man sitting here listening to a kangaroo. I’m not arguing.’

  ‘I’m trying to find words you might understand,’ said the kangaroo reproachfully.

  ‘Good, keep going, you’ll get there. Want a jam sandwich? It’s gooseberry.’

  ‘No. Strictly herbivore, mate. Listen—’

  ‘Unusual, gooseberry jam. I mean, you don’t often see it. Raspberry and strawberry, yes, even blackcurrant. I shouldn’t think more than one jar of jam in a hundred is gooseberry. Sorry, do go on.’

  ‘You’re taking this seriously, are you?’

  ‘Am I smiling?’

  ‘Have you ever noticed how time goes slower in big spaces?’

  The sandwich stopped halfway to Rincewind’s mouth. ‘Actually, that is true. But it only seems slower.’

  ‘So? When this place was made there wasn’t much space and time left over to work with, see? He had to bodge them together to make them work harder. Time happens to space and space happens to time—’

  ‘You know, I think there could be plum in it, too?’ said Rincewind, with his mouth full. ‘And maybe some rhubarb. You’d be amazed how often they do that sort of thing. You know, stuff cheaper fruit in. I met this man in an inn once, he worked for a jam-maker in Ankh-Morpork, and he said they put in any old rubbish and some red dye, and I said what about the raspberry pips, and he said they make them out of wood. Wood! He said they’d got a machine for stamping ’em out. Can you believe that?’

  ‘Will you stop talking about jam and be sensible for a moment!’

  Rincewind lowered the sandwich. ‘Good grief, I hope not,’ he said. ‘I’m sitting in a cave in a country where everything bites you and it never rains and I’m talking, no offence, to a herbivore that smells of a carpet in a house where there are a lot of excitable puppies, and I’ve suddenly got this talent for finding jam sandwiches and inexplicable fairy cakes in unexpected places, and I’ve been shown something very odd in a picture on some old cave wall, and suddenly said kangaroo tells me time and space are all wrong and wants me to be sensible? What, when you get right down to it, is in it for me?’

  ‘Look, this place wasn’t finished, right? It wasn’t fitted in . . . turned around . . .’ The kangaroo looked at Rincewind as if reading his mind, which was the case. ‘You know like with a jigsaw puzzle? The last piece is the right shape but you have to turn it round to fit? Right? Now think of the piece as a bloody big continent that’s got to be turned around through about nine dimensions and you’re home and . . .’

  ‘Dry?’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Bloody right!’

  ‘Er . . . I know this may seem like a foolish question,’ said Rincewind, trying to dislodge a gooseberry pip from a tooth cavity, ‘but why me?’

  ‘It’s your fault. You arrived here and suddenly things had always been wrong.’

  Rincewind looked back towards the wall. The earth trembled again.

  ‘Can you hop that past me again?’ he said.

  ‘Something went wrong in the past.’

  The kangaroo looked at Rincewind’s blank, jam-smeared expression, and tried again.

  ‘Your arrival caused a wrong note,’ it ventured.

  ‘What in?’

  The creature waved a paw vaguely.

  ‘All this,’ it said. ‘You could call it a bloody multi-dimensional knuckle of localized phase space, or maybe you could just call it the song.’

  Rincewind shrugged. ‘I don’t mind putting my hand up to killing a few spiders,’ he said. ‘But it was me or them. I mean some of those come at you at head height—’

  ‘You changed history.’

  ‘Oh, come on, a few spiders don’t make that much difference, some of them were using their webs as trampolines, it was a case of “boing” and next moment—’

  ‘No, not history from now on, history that’s already happened,’ said the kangaroo.

  ‘I’ve changed things that already happened long ago?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘By arriving here I changed what’s already happened?’

  ‘Yep. Look, time isn’t as straightforward as you think—’

  ‘I never thought it was,’ said Rincewind. ‘And I’ve been round it a few times . . .’

  The kangaroo waved a paw expansively. ‘It’s not just that things in the future can affect things in the past,’ he said. ‘Things that didn’t happen but might have happened can . . . affect things that really happened. Even things that happened and shouldn’t have happened and were removed still have, oh, call ’em shadows in time, things left over which interfere with what’s going on. Between you and me,’ it went on, waggling its ears, ‘it’s all just held together by spit now. No one’s ever got round to tidying it up. I’m always amazed when tomorrow follows today, and that’s the truth.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Rincewind. ‘Oh, me too.’

  ‘Still, no worries, eh?’

  ‘I think I’ll lay off the jam,’ said Rincewind. He put the sandwich down. ‘Why me?’

  The kangaroo scratched its nose. ‘’s got to be someone,’ it said.

  ‘And what’m I supposed to do?’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Wind it into the world.’

  ‘There’s a key?’

  ‘Might be. Depends.’

  Rincewind turned and looked at the rock pictures again, the pictures that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago and then suddenly had always been there.

  Figures holding long sticks. Figures in long robes. The artist had done a pretty good job of drawing something quite unfamiliar. And in case there was any doubt, you only had to look at what was on their heads.

  ‘Yeah. We call them The Pointy-Heads,’ said the kangaroo.

  ‘He’s started catching fish,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘That means he’ll come over all smug and start asking what plans we’ve got for making a boat at any minute, you know what he’s like.’

  The Dean looked at some sketches he’d made on a rock.

  ‘How hard can it be to build a boat?’ he said.

  ‘People with bones in their noses build boats. And we are the end product of thousands of years of e
nlightenment. Building a boat is not beyond men like us, Senior Wrangler.’

  ‘Quite, Dean.’

  ‘All we have to do is search this island until we find a book with a title like Practical Boat-building for Beginners.’

  ‘Exactly. It’ll be plain sailing after that, Dean. Ahaha.’

  He glanced up, and swallowed hard. Mrs Whitlow was sitting on a log in the shade, fanning herself with a large leaf.

  The sight stirred things in the Senior Wrangler. He was not at all sure what they were, but little details like the way something creaked when she moved twanged bits of the Senior Wrangler as well.

  ‘You all right, Senior Wrangler? You look as if the heat is getting to you.’

  ‘Just a little . . . warm, Dean.’

  The Dean looked past him as he loosened his collar. ‘Well, they haven’t been long,’ he said.

  The other wizards were walking down the beach. One advantage of a long wizarding robe is that it can be held like an apron, and the Chair of Indefinite Studies was bulging at the front even more than usual.

  ‘Found anything to eat?’ said the Senior Wrangler.

  ‘Er . . . yes.’

  ‘Fruit and nuts, I suppose,’ grumbled the Dean.

  ‘Er . . . yes, and then again, no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Um . . . it’s rather odd . . .’

  The Chair of Indefinite Studies let his burden spill out on to the sand. There were coconuts, other nuts of various sizes, and assorted hairy or knobbly vegetable things.

  ‘All rather primitive,’ said the Dean. ‘And probably poisonous.’

  ‘Well, the Bursar’s been eating things like there’s no tomorrow,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. The Bursar burped happily.

  ‘That doesn’t mean there will be,’ said the Dean. ‘What’s up with you fellows? You keep looking at one another.’

  ‘Er . . . we’ve tasted a few things too, Dean,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  ‘Ah, I see the gatherers have returned!’ roared Ridcully happily, walking towards them. He waved three fish on a string. ‘Anything resembling potatoes in there, chaps?’