Last Continent

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘No, I might have to start running without looking where I’m going. But . . . this rock’s warm. Have you noticed?’

  She touched it. ‘I see what you mean . . .’

  ‘I was just thinking . . . Supposing someone was in a country who shouldn’t be there? What would it do?’

  ‘Oh, the Watch would catch him, I expect.’

  ‘No, no, not the people. What would the land do? I think I need another drink, it made more sense then . . .’

  ‘Okay, here we are, we couldn’t find much, but there’s some whitewash and some red paint and a tin of stuff which might be black paint or it could be tar oil.’ The wizards hurried up. ‘Not much in the way of brushes, though.’

  Rincewind picked up a brush that looked as though it had once been used to whitewash a very rough wall and then to clean the teeth of some large creature, possibly a crocodile.

  He’d never been any good at art, and this is a distinction quite hard to achieve in many education systems. Basic artistic skills and a familiarity with occult calligraphy are part of a wizard’s early training, yet in Rincewind’s fingers chalk broke and pencils shattered. It was probably due to a deep distrust of getting things down on paper when they were doing all right where they were.

  Neilette handed him a tin of Funnelweb. Rincewind drank deeply and then dipped the brush in what might have been black paint and essayed a few upturned Vs on the rock, and some circles under the lines, with three dots in a V and a friendly little curve in each one.

  He took another deep draught of the beer and saw what he was doing wrong. It was no good trying to be strictly true to life here; what he had to go for was an impression.

  He sloshed wildly at the stone, humming madly under his breath.

  ‘Anyone guess what it is yet?’ he said, over his shoulder.

  ‘Looks a bit modern to me,’ said the Dean.

  But Rincewind was into the swing of it now. Any fool could just copy what he saw, except possibly Rincewind, but surely the whole point was to try to paint a picture that moved, that definitely expressed the, the, the—

  Definitely expressed it, anyway. You went the way the paint and the colour wanted you to go.

  ‘You know,’ said Neilette, ‘the way the light falls on it and everything . . . it could be a group of wizards . . .’

  Rincewind half closed his eyes. Perhaps it was the way that the shadows moved, but he had to admit he’d done a really good job. He slapped some more paint on.

  ‘Looks like they’re almost coming out of the stone,’ said someone behind him, but the voice sounded muffled.

  He felt as though he was falling into a hole. He’d had the sensation before, although usually it was when he was falling into a hole. The walls were fuzzy, as though they were streaking past him at a tremendous rate. The ground shook.

  ‘Are we moving?’ he said.

  ‘Feels like it, doesn’t it?’ said Archchancellor Rincewind. ‘But we’re standing still!’

  ‘Moving while standing still,’ muttered Rincewind, and giggled. ‘That’s a good one!’ He squinted happily at the beer can. ‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘I can’t stomach more than a pint or two of the ale we have at home but this stuff is like drinking lemonade! Has anyone got that meat pie—’

  As loudly as a thunderstorm under the bed but as softly as two soufflés colliding, past and present ran into one another.

  They contained a lot of people.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Dean?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re not the Dean!’

  ‘How dare you say that! Who are you!’

  ‘Ook!’

  ‘Stone the cows, there’s a monkey in here!’

  ‘No! No! I didn’t say that! He said that!’

  ‘Archchancellor?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What? How many of you are there?’

  The darkness became a deep purple, shading to violet.

  ‘Will you all stop shouting and listen to me!’

  To Rincewind’s amazement, they did.

  ‘Look, the walls are getting closer! This place is trying not to exist!’

  And, having done his duty to the community, he turned and ran over the shaking rock floor.

  After a couple of seconds the Luggage passed him, which was always a bad sign.

  He heard the voices behind him. Wizards had a hard job accepting the term ‘clear and present danger’. They liked the kind you could argue about. But there is something about a rapidly descending ceiling that intrudes into the awareness of even the most quarrelsome.

  ‘I’ll save you, Mrs Whitlow!’

  ‘Up the tunnel!’

  ‘How fast are those walls closing in, would you say?’

  ‘Shut up and run!’

  Now Rincewind was passed by a large red, furry kangaroo. The Librarian’s erratic morphism, having briefly turned him into a red stalactite as an obviously successful shape for surviving in caves, had finally taken on board the fact that it would make for a terminally lengthy survival in a cave that was rapidly getting smaller, and had flipped into a local morphic field built for speed.

  Man, Luggage and kangaroo piled through the hole into the cellar and ended in a heap against the opposite side.

  There was a rumbling behind them and wizards and women were fired out into the cellar with some speed, several of them landing on Rincewind. Behind the wall, the rock groaned and creaked, expelling these alien things in what, Rincewind thought, was a geological chunder.

  Something flew out of the hole and hit him on the ear, but this was only a minor problem compared to the meat pie, which came out trailing mushy peas and tomato sauce and hit him in the mouth.

  It wasn’t, actually, all that bad.

  The ability to ask questions like ‘Where am I and who is the “I” that is asking?’ is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish.23

  The wizards from Unseen University, being perhaps the intellectual cream or certainly the cerebral yoghurt of their generation, passed through this stage within minutes. Wizards are very adept at certain ideas. One minute you’re arguing over the shape of a duck’s head and the next there are people telling you you’ve been inside a rock for thousands of years because time goes slower on the inside. This presents no great problem for a man who has found his way to the lavatory at Unseen University.24

  There were more important questions as they sat round the table in BU.

  ‘Is there anything to eat?’ said Ridcully.

  ‘It’s the middle of the night, sir.’

  ‘You mean we missed dinner?’

  ‘Thousands of years of dinners, Archchancellor.’

  ‘Really? Better start catching up, then, Mister Stibbons. Still . . . nice little place you’ve got here . . . archchancellor.’

  Ridcully pronounced the word very carefully in order to accentuate the lower case ‘a’.

  Archchancellor Rincewind gave him a fraternal nod. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For a colony, of course. I daresay you do your best.’

  ‘Why, thank you, Mustrum. I’d be happy to show you our tower later on.’

  ‘It does look rather small.’

  ‘So people say.’

  ‘Rincewind, Rincewind . . . name rings a faint bell . . .’ said Ridcully.

  ‘We came looking for Rincewind, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder, patiently.

  ‘Is he? Done well for himself, then. Fresh air made a man of him, I see.’

  ‘No, sir. Ours is the skinny one with the bad beard and the floppy hat, sir. You remember? The one sitting over there.’

  Rincewind raised a hand diffidently. ‘Er. Me,’ he said.

  Ridcully sniffed. ‘Fair enough. What’s that thing you’re playing with, man?’

  Rincewind held up the bullroarer. ‘It came with you out of the cave,’ he said. ‘What were you doing with it?’

  ‘Oh, some toy the Librarian found,’ said Ponder
.

  ‘All sorted out, then,’ said Ridcully. ‘I say, this beer’s good, isn’t it? Very drinkable. Yes, I’m sure there’s a lot we can learn from one another, archchancellor. You from us rather more than us from you, of course. Perhaps we could set up a student exchange, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘You can have six of mine in exchange for a decent lawnmower. Ours has broken.’

  ‘The Arch— the archchancellor is trying to say that getting back might be rather hard, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘Apparently things ought to have changed now we’re here. But they haven’t.’

  ‘Your Rincewind seemed to think that bringing you blokes here would make it rain,’ said Bill. ‘But it hasn’t.’

  . . . whumm . . .

  ‘Oh, do stop playing with that thing, Rincewind,’ said Ridcully. ‘Well . . . Bill, it’s obvious, isn’t it? As more experienced wizards than you, we naturally know plenty of ways of making it rain. No problem there.’

  . . . whumm . . .

  ‘Look, lad, take that thing outside, will you?’

  The Librarian was sitting at the top of the tin tower, with a leaf over his head.

  ‘Something odd, see?’ said Rincewind, dangling the bullroarer from its string. ‘I’ve only got to wiggle my hand a bit and it swings right round.’

  ‘. . . ook . . .’

  The Librarian sneezed.

  ‘. . . awk . . .’

  ‘Er . . . now you’re some sort of large bird . . .’ said Rincewind. ‘You are in a bad way, aren’t you? Still, once I tell them your name . . .’

  The Librarian changed shape and moved fast. There was a very short period of time in which a lot happened.

  ‘Ah,’ said Rincewind calmly when it seemed to be over. ‘Well, let us start with what we know. I can’t see. The reason I can’t see is that my robe is hanging over my eyes. From this I can deduce that I am upside down. You are gripping my ankles. Correction, one ankle, so obviously you are holding me upside down. We are at the top of the tower. This means . . .’

  He fell silent.

  ‘All right, let’s start again,’ he said. ‘Let’s start by me not telling anyone your name.’

  The Librarian let go.

  Rincewind dropped a few inches on to the planks of the tower.

  ‘You know, that was a really mean trick you just did,’ he said.

  ‘Ook.’

  ‘We’ll say no more about it, shall we?’

  Rincewind looked up at the big, empty sky. It ought to be raining. He’d done everything he was supposed to do, hadn’t he? And all that had happened was that the Faculty of UU was down there being condescending about everything. It wasn’t even as if they could do a rainmaking spell. For one of those to work you needed some rain around to start with. In fact, it was prudent to make sure that some heavy-looking clouds were being blown in your direction.

  And if it wasn’t raining then probably those terrible currents they talked about were still around, too.

  It wasn’t a bad country. They were big on hats. They were big on big hats. He could save up and buy a farm on the Never-Never and watch sheep. After all, they fed themselves and they made more sheep. All you had to do was pick the wool off occasionally. The Luggage’d probably settle down to being a sheepdog.

  Except . . . that there wasn’t any more water. No more sheep, no more farms. Mad, and Crocodile Crocodile, the lovely ladies Darleen and Letitia, Remorse and his horses, all those people who’d shown him how to find the things you could eat without throwing up too often . . . all drying up, and blowing away . . .

  Him, too.

  G’DAY.

  ‘Ook?’

  ‘Oh, no . . .’ Rincewind moaned.

  THROAT A BIT PARCHED?

  ‘Look, you’re not supposed to—’

  IT’S ALL RIGHT, I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT DOWN IN THE CITY. THERE’S BEEN A FIGHT OVER THE LAST BOTTLE OF BEER. HOWEVER, LET ME ASSURE YOU OF MY PERSONAL ATTENTION AT ALL TIMES.

  ‘Well, thank you. When it’s time to stop living, I will certainly make Death my number one choice!’

  Death faded.

  ‘The cheek of him, turning up like that! We’re not dead yet,’ shouted Rincewind to the burning sky. ‘There’s lots we could do! If we could get to the Hub we could cut loose a big iceberg and tow it here and that’d give us plenty of water . . . if we could get to the Hub! Where there’s hope there’s life, I’ll have you know! I’ll find a way! Somewhere there’s a way of making rain!’

  Death had gone.

  Rincewind swung the bullroarer menacingly. ‘And don’t come back!’

  ‘Ook!’

  The Librarian gripped Rincewind’s arm, and sniffed the air.

  Then Rincewind caught the smell too.

  Rincewind spoke a fairly primitive language, and it had no word for ‘that smell you get after rain’ other than ‘that smell you get after rain’. Anyone trying to describe the smell would have to flounder among words like moisture, heat, vapour and, with a following wind, exhalation.

  Nevertheless, there was the smell you get after rain. In this burning land, it was like a brief jewel in the air.

  Rincewind whirled the piece of wood again. It made noise out of all proportion to the movement, and there was that smell again.

  He turned it over. It was still just a wooden oval. There weren’t any markings on it.

  He gripped the end of the string and whirled the thing experimentally a few more times.

  ‘Did you notice that when it did this—’ he began.

  It wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t lower his arm.

  ‘Er . . . I think it wants to be spun,’ he said.

  ‘Ook!’

  ‘You think I should?’

  ‘Ook!’

  ‘That’s very helpful. Oooh—’

  The Librarian ducked.

  Rincewind spun. He couldn’t see the wood now because the string was getting longer with each turn. A blur curved through the air some way from the tower, getting further away with each spin.

  The sound of it was a long-drawn-out drone.

  When it was well out over the city it exploded in a thunderclap. But something still whirled on the end of the line, like a tight silver cloud, throwing out a trail of white particles that made a spiral that sped out wider and wider.

  The Librarian was flat on his face with his hands over his head.

  Air roared up the side of the tower, carrying dust, wind, heat and budgerigars. Rincewind’s robe flapped around his chin.

  Letting go was unthinkable. He wasn’t even sure if he could, until it wanted him to.

  Thin as smoke now, the spiral drifted out into the heat haze.

  (. . . and out over the red desert and the unheeding kangaroos, and as the tail of it flew out over the coast and into the wall of storms the warring airs melted peacefully together . . . the clouds stopped their stately spin around the last continent, boiled up in confusion and thunderheads, reversed their direction and began to fall inwards . . .)

  And the string whipped out of Rincewind’s hand, stinging his fingers. The bullroarer flew away, and he didn’t see it fall.

  This may have been because he was still pirouetting, but at last gravity overcame momentum and he fell full length on the boards.

  ‘I think my feet have caught fire,’ he muttered.

  The dead heat hung on the land like a shroud. Clancy the stockman wiped the sweat off his brow very thoroughly, and wrung out the rag into an empty jam tin. The way things were going, he’d be glad of it. Then, carrying the tin with care, he climbed back down the windmill’s ladder.

  ‘The bore’s fine, boss, there’s just no bloody water,’ he said.

  Remorse shook his head. ‘Look at them horses,’ he said. ‘Look at the way they’re lying down, willya? That’s not good. This is it, Clancy. We’ve battled through thick and thin, and this is too thick altogether by half. We may as well cut their poor bloody throats for the meat that’s on ’em—’

 
A gust of wind took his hat off for him, and blew a lash of scent across the wilted mulga bushes. A horse raised his head.

  Clouds were pouring across the sky, rolling and boiling across each other like waves on a beach, so black that in the middle they were blue, lit by occasional flashes.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ said Clancy.

  The horse stood up awkwardly and stumbled to the rusted trough under the windmill.

  Under the clouds, dragging across the land, the air shimmered silver.

  Something hit Remorse’s head.

  He looked down. Something went ‘plut’ in the red dust by his boot, leaving a little crater.

  ‘That is water, Clancy,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody water dropping out of the bloody sky!’

  They stared at one another with their mouths open as, around them, the storm hit and the animals stirred and the red dust turned into mud which spattered them up to their waists.

  This was no ordinary rainstorm. This was The Wet.

  As Clancy said later, the second best bloody thing that happened that day was that they were near high ground.

  The best bloody thing was that, with all the corks on their hats, they were able to find the bloody things later on.

  There’d been debate about having this year’s regatta in Dijabringabeeralong, given the drought. But it was a tradition. A lot of people came into town for it. Besides, the organizers had discussed it long and hard all the previous evening in the bar of the Pastoral Hotel and had concluded that, no worries, she’ll be right.

  There were classes for boats pulled by camels, boats optimistically propelled by sails and, a high spot of the event, skiffs propelled by the simple expedient of the crew cutting the bottoms out, gripping the sides and running like hell. It always got a good laugh.

  It was while two teams were trotting upriver in the semi-final that the spectators noticed the black cloud pouring over Semaphore Hill like boiling jam.

  ‘Bushfire,’ said someone.

  ‘Bushfire’d be white. Come on . . .’

  That was the thing about fire. If you saw one, everyone went to put it out. Fire spread like wildfire.

  But as they turned away there was a scream from the riverbed.

  The teams rounded the bend neck and neck, carrying their boats at a record-breaking speed. They reached the slipway, collided in their efforts to get up it, made it to the top locked together, and collapsed in splinters and screams.