Last Continent (23 page)

Suddenly he ran across the crowded cave towards a huge pair of doors at the far end, and flung them open.

‘I'm sorry, but I just have to do one,' said the god. ‘They calm me down, you know.'

Ponder caught up. The cave beyond the doors was bigger than this one, and brilliantly lit. The air was full of small, bright things, hovering in their millions like beads on invisible strings.

‘Beetles?' said Ponder.

‘There's nothing like a beetle when you're feeling depressed!' said the god. He'd stopped by a large metal desk and was feverishly opening
drawers and pulling out boxes. ‘Can you pass me that box of antennae? It's just on the shelf there. Oh yes, you can't beat a beetle when you're feeling down. Sometimes I think it's what it's all about, you know.'

‘What
all
?' said Ponder.

The god swept an arm in an expansive gesture. ‘Everything,' he said cheerfully. ‘The whole thing. Trees, grass, flowers . . . What did you think it was all for?'

‘Well, I didn't think it was for beetles,' said Ponder. ‘What about, well, what about the elephant, for a start?'

The god already had a half-finished beetle in one hand. It was green.

‘Dung,' he said triumphantly. No head, when screwed on to a body, ought to make a sound like a cork being pushed into a bottle, but the beetle's did in the hands of the god.

‘What?' said Ponder. ‘That's rather a lot of trouble to go to just for dung, isn't it?'

‘That's ecology for you, I'm afraid,' said the god.

‘No, no, that can't be right, surely?' said Ponder. ‘What about the higher lifeforms?'

‘Higher?' said the god. ‘You mean like . . . birds?'

‘No, I mean like—' Ponder hesitated. The god had seemed remarkably incurious about the wizards, possibly because of their lack of resemblance to beetles, but he could see a certain amount of theological unpleasantness ahead.

‘Like . . . apes,' he said.

‘Apes? Oh, very amusing, certainly, and
obviously the beetles have to have something to entertain them, but . . .' The god looked at him, and a celestial penny seemed to drop. ‘Oh dear, you don't think
they're
the purpose of the whole business, do you?'

‘I'd rather assumed—'

‘Dear me, the purpose of the whole business, you see, is in fact to
be
the whole business. Although,' he sniffed, ‘if we can do it all with beetles I shan't complain.'

‘But surely the purpose of— I mean, wouldn't it be nice if you ended up with some creature that started to
think
about the universe—?'

‘Good gravy, I don't want anything poking around!' said the god testily. ‘There's enough patches and stitches in it as it is without some clever devil trying to find more, I can assure you. No, the gods on the mainland have got
that
right at least. Intelligence is like legs – too many and you trip yourself up. Six is about the right number, in my view.'

‘But surely, ultimately, one creature might—'

The god let go of his latest creation. It whirred up and along the rows and rows of beetles and slotted itself in between two that were almost, but not exactly, quite like it.

‘Worked that one out, have you?' he said. ‘Well, of course you're right. I can see you have quite an efficient brain— Damn.'

There was a little sparkle in the air and a bird appeared alongside the god. It was clearly alive but entirely stationary, hanging in frozen flight. A flickering blue glow hovered around it.

The god sighed, reached into a pocket and pulled out the most complex-looking tool Ponder had ever seen. The bits that you could see suggested that there were other, even stranger bits that you couldn't and that this was probably just as well.

‘However,' he said, slicing the bird's beak off, the blue glow simply closing over the hole, ‘if I'm going to get any serious work done I'm really going to have to find some way of organizing the whole business. All I'm faced with these days is bills.'

‘Yes, it must be quite expens—'

‘Big bills, short bills, bills for winkling insects out of bark, bills for cracking nuts, bills for eating fruit,' the god went on. ‘They're supposed to do their own evolving. I mean, that's the whole point. I shouldn't have to be running around
all
the time.' The god waved his hand in the air and a sort of display stand of beaks appeared beside him. He selected one that, to Ponder, hardly looked any different from the one he'd removed, and used the tool to attach it to the hanging bird. The blue glow covered it for a moment, and then the bird vanished. In the moment that it disappeared, Ponder thought he saw its wings begin to move.

And in that moment he knew that, despite the apparent beetle fixation,
here
was where he'd always wanted to be, at the cutting edge of the envelope in the fast lane of the state of the art.

He'd become a wizard because he'd thought that wizards knew how the universe worked, and
Unseen University had turned out to be stifling.

Take that business with the tame lightning. It had demonstrably
worked
. He made the Bursar's hair stand on end and sparks crackle out of his fingers, and that was by using only
one
cat and a couple of amber rods. His perfectly reasonable plan to use several thousand cats tied to a huge wheel that would rotate against hundreds of rods had been vetoed on the ridiculous grounds that it would be too noisy. His carefully worked out scheme to split the thaum, and thus provide endless supplies of cheap clean magic, had been quite unfairly sat upon because it was felt that it might make the place untidy. And that was even after he had presented figures to prove that the chances of the process completely destroying the entire world were no greater than being knocked down while crossing the street, and it wasn't his fault he said this just before the six-cart pile-up outside the University.

Here
was a chance to do something that made sense. Besides, he thought he could see where the god was going wrong.

‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘but do you need an assistant?'

‘Frankly, the whole thing is getting out of hand,' said the god, who was a wizard-class non-listener. ‘It's really getting to the point where I need an—'

‘I say, this is a pretty amazing place!'

Ponder rolled his eyes. You could say that for wizards. When they walked into a place that was pretty amazing, they'd
tell
you. Loudly.

‘Ah,' said the god, turning around, ‘this is the rest of your . . . swarm, isn't it?'

‘I'd better go and stop them,' said Ponder as the wizards fanned out like small boys in an amusement arcade, ready to press anything in case there was a free game left. ‘They poke things and then say, “What does this do?”'

‘Don't they ask what things do
before
they poke them?'

‘No, they say you'll never find out if you don't give them a poke,' said Ponder darkly.

‘Then why do they ask?'

‘They just do. And they bite things and then say, “I wonder if this is poisonous,” with their mouths full. And you know the really annoying thing? It never is.'

‘How odd. Laughing in the face of danger is not a survival strategy,' said the god.

‘Oh, they don't laugh,' said Ponder gloomily. ‘They say things like, “You call
that
dangerous? It's not a patch on the kind of danger you used to get when we were lads, eh, Senior Wrangler, what what? Remember when old ‘Windows' McPlunder . . .”' He shrugged.

‘When old “Windows” McPlunder what?' said the god.

‘I don't know! Sometimes I think they make up the names! Dean, I really don't think you should do that!'

The Dean turned away from the shark, whose teeth he'd been examining.

‘Why not, Stibbons?' he said. Behind him, the jaw snapped shut.

Only the Archchancellor's legs were visible in the exploded elephant. There were muffled noises from inside the whale; they sounded very much like the Lecturer in Recent Runes saying, ‘Look at what happens when I twist this bit . . . See, that purple bit wobbles.'

‘Amazin' piece of work,' said Ridcully, emerging from the elephant. ‘Very good wheels. You paint these bits before assembly, do you?'

‘It's not a kit, sir,' said Ponder, taking a kidney out of his hands and wedging it back in. ‘It's a real elephant under construction!'

‘Oh.'

‘Being
made
, sir,' said Ponder, since Ridcully didn't seem to have got the message. ‘Which is not
usual
.'

‘Ah. How are they normally made, then?'

‘By other elephants, sir.'

‘Oh, yes . . .'

‘Really? Are they?' said the god. ‘How? Those trunks are pretty nimble, even if I say so myself, but not really very good for delicate work.'

‘Oh, not made like that, sir, obviously. By . . . you know . . . sex . . .' said Ponder, feeling a blush start.

‘Sex?'

Then Ponder thought: Mono Island. Oh
dear
. . .

‘Er . . . males and females . . .' he ventured.

‘What are they, then?' said the god. The wizards paused.

‘Do go on, Mister Stibbons,' said the Archchancellor. ‘We're all ears. Especially the elephant.'

‘Well . . .' Ponder knew he was going red. ‘Er
. . . well, how do you get flowers and things at the moment?'

‘I make them,' said the god. ‘And then I keep an eye on them and see how they function and then when they wear out I make an improved version based on experimental results.' He frowned. ‘Although the plants seem to be acting very oddly these days. What's the point of these seeds they keep making? I try to discourage it but they don't seem to listen.'

‘I think . . . er . . . they're trying to invent sex, sir,' said Ponder. ‘Er . . . sex is how you can . . . they can . . . creatures can . . . they can make the next . . . creatures.'

‘You mean . . . elephants can make more elephants?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘My word! Really?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘How do they go about that? Calibrating the ear-waggling is particularly time-consuming. Do they use special tools?'

Ponder saw that the Dean was staring straight up at the ceiling, while the other wizards were also finding something apparently fascinating to look at that meant they could avoid one another's gaze.

‘Um, in a way,' said Ponder. He knew that a sticky patch lay ahead and decided to give up. ‘But really I don't know much about—'

‘And workshops, presumably,' said the god. He took a book from his pocket and a pencil from behind his ear. ‘Do you mind if I make notes?'

‘They . . . er . . . the female . . .' Ponder tried.

‘Female,' said the god obediently, writing this down.

‘Well, she . . . one popular way . . . she . . . sort of makes the next one . . . inside her.'

The god stopped writing. ‘Now I
know
that's not right,' he said. ‘You can't make an elephant inside an elephant—'

‘Er . . . a smaller version . . .'

‘Ah, once again I have to point out the flaw. After a few such constructions you'd end up with an elephant the size of a rabbit.'

‘Er, it gets bigger later . . .'

‘Really? How?'

‘It sort of . . . builds itself . . . er . . . from the inside . . .'

‘And the other one, the one that is not the, uh, female? What is its part in all this? Is your colleague ill?'

The Senior Wrangler hammered the Dean hard on the back.

‘It's all right,' squeaked the Dean, ‘. . . often have . . . these . . . coughing fits . . .'

The god scribbled industriously for a few seconds, and then stopped and chewed the end of his pencil thoughtfully.

‘And all this, er, this
sex
is done by unskilled labour?' he said.

‘Oh, yes.'

‘No quality control of any description?'

‘Er, no.'

‘How does
your
species go about it?' said the god. He looked questioningly at Ponder.

‘It . . . er . . . we . . . er . . .' Ponder stuttered.

‘We avoid it,' said Ridcully. ‘Nasty cough you've got there, Dean.'

‘Really?' said the god. ‘That's very interesting. What do you do instead? Split down the middle? That works beautifully for amoebas, but giraffes find it extremely difficult, I do know that.'

‘What? No, we concentrate on higher things,' said Ridcully. ‘And take cold baths, healthy morning runs, that sort of thing.'

‘My goodness, I'd better make a note of that,' said the god, patting his robe. ‘How does the process work, exactly? Do the females accompany you? These higher things . . . How high, precisely? This is a
very
interesting concept. Presumably extra orifices are required?'

‘What? Pardon?' said Ponder.

‘Getting creatures to make themselves, eh? I thought this whole seed business was just high spirits but, yes, I can see that it would save a lot of work, a
lot
of work. Of course, there'd have to be some extra effort at the design stage, certainly, but afterwards I suppose it'd practically run itself . . .' The god's hand blurred as he wrote, and he went on, ‘Hmm, drives and imperatives, they're going to be vital . . . er . . . How does it work with, say, trees?'

‘You just need Ponder's uncle and a paintbrush,' said the Senior Wrangler.

‘Sir!' said Ponder hotly.

The god gave them both a look of intelligent bewilderment, like a man who had just heard a joke told in a completely foreign language and isn't sure if the speaker has got to the punchline yet. Then he shrugged.

‘The only thing I think I don't quite understand', he said, ‘is why any creature would want to spend time on all this . . .' he peered at his notes, ‘this
sex
, when they could be enjoying themselves . . . Oh dear, your associate seems to be choking this time, I'm afraid . . .'