The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [28]
“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 multidimensional 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 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 enlightenment. 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