The Last Continent

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!'