The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett [6]
“Oh.” He thought for a bit. Then he tried, “I suppose you wouldn’t happen to know the way out of the forest, possibly, by any chance?”
“No. I don’t get about much,” said the tree.
“Fairly boring life, I imagine,” said Rincewind.
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been anything else,” said the tree.
Rincewind looked at it closely. It seemed pretty much like every other tree he’d seen.
“Are you magical?” he said.
“No one’s ever said,” said the tree, “I suppose so.”
Rincewind thought: I can’t be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I’d be mad, and I’m not mad, so trees can’t talk.
“Goodbye,” he said firmly.
“Hey, don’t go,” the tree began, and then realized the hopelessness of it all. It watched him stagger off through the bushes, and settled down to feeling the sun on its leaves, the slurp and gurgle of the water in its roots, and the very ebb and flow of its sap in response to the natural tug of the sun and moon. Boring, it thought. What a strange thing to say. Trees can be bored, of course, beetles do it all the time, but I don’t think that was what he was trying to mean. And: can you actually be anything else?
In fact Rincewind never spoke to this particular tree again, but from that brief conversation it spun the basis of the first tree religion which, in time, swept the forests of the world. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree, and led a clean, decent and upstanding life, could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.
A few miles away Twoflower was also getting over his surprise at finding himself back on the Disc. He was sitting on the hull of the Potent Voyager as it gurgled gradually under the dark waters of a large lake, surrounded by trees.
Strangely enough, he was not particularly worried. Twoflower was a tourist, the first of the species to evolve on the Disc, and fundamental to his very existence was the rock-hard belief that nothing bad could really happen to him because he was not involved; he also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.
On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind’s amazement it all seemed to work and the little man’s total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.
Merely being faced with drowning stood no chance. Twoflower was quite certain that in a well-organized society people would not be allowed to go around getting drowned.
He was a little bothered, though, about where his Luggage had got to. But he comforted himself with the knowledge that it was made of sapient pearwood, and ought to be intelligent enough to look after itself…
In yet another part of the forest a young shaman was undergoing a very essential part of his training. He had eaten of the sacred toadstool, he had smoked the holy rhizome, he had carefully powdered up and inserted into various orifices the mystic mushroom and now, sitting cross-legged under a pine tree, he was concentrating firstly on making contact with the strange and wonderful secrets at the heart of Being but mainly on stopping the top of his head from unscrewing and floating away.
Blue four-sided triangles pinwheeled across his vision. Occasionally he smiled knowingly at nothing very much and said things like “Wow” and “Urgh.”
There was a movement in the air and what he later described as “like, a sort of explosion only backward, you know?,” and suddenly where there had only been nothing there was a large, battered, wooden chest.
It landed heavily on the leafmold, extended dozens of little legs, and turned around ponderously to look at the shaman. That is to say, it had no face, but even through the mycological haze he was horribly aware that it was looking at him. And not a nice look, either. It