Interesting Times

any—”
    “Nap my for time it’s think I.”
    “ Will you all shut up right now this minute! ”
    Ridcully glared at his faculty with the clear, innocent glare of someone who was blessed at birth with no imagination whatsoever, and who had genuinely been hundreds of miles away during the University’s recent embarrassing history.
    “Right,” he said, when they had quietened down. “This Rincewind. Bit of an idiot, yes? You talk, Dean. Everyone else will shut up.”
    The Dean looked uncertain.
    “Well, er…I mean, it makes no sense, Archchancellor. He couldn’t even do proper magic. What good would he be to anyone? Besides…where Rincewind went”—he lowered his voice—“ trouble followed behind .”
    Ridcully noticed that the wizards drew a little closer together.
    “Sounds all right to me,” he said. “Best place for trouble, behind. You certainly don’t want it in front.”
    “You don’t understand, Archchancellor,” said the Dean. “It followed behind on hundreds of little legs.”
    The Archchancellor’s smile stayed where it was while the rest of his face went solid behind it.
    “You been on the Bursar’s pills, Dean?”
    “I assure you, Mustrum—”
    “Then don’t talk rubbish.”
    “Very well , Archchancellor. But you do realize, don’t you, that it might take years to find him?”
    “Er,” said Ponder, “if we can work out his thaumic signature, I think Hex could probably do it in a day…”
    The Dean glared.
    “That’s not magic!” he snapped. “That’s just…engineering!”

    Rincewind trudged through the shallows and used a sharp rock to hack the top off a coconut that had been cooling in a convenient shady rock pool. He put it to his lips.
    A shadow fell across him.
    It said, “Er, hello?”

    It was possible, if you kept on talking at the Archchancellor for long enough, that some facts might squeeze through.
    “So what you’re tellin ’ me,” said Ridcully, eventually, “is that this Rincewind fella has been chased by just about every army in the world, has been bounced around life like a pea on a drum, and probably is the one wizard who knows anything about the Agatean Empire on account of once being friends with,” he glanced at his notes, “‘a strange little man in glasses’ who came from there and gave him this funny thing with the legs you all keep alluding to. And he can speak the lingo. Am I right so far?”
    “Exactly, Archchancellor. Call me an idiot if you like,” said the Dean, “but why would anyone want him?”
    Ridcully looked down at his notes again. “ You’ve decided to go, then?” he said.
    “No, of course not—”
    “What I don’t think you’ve spotted here, Dean,” he said, breaking into a determinedly cheery grin, “is what I might call the common denominator. Chap stays alive. Talented. Find him. And bring him here. Wherever he is. Poor chap could be facing something dreadful .”

    The coconut stayed where it was, but Rincewind’s eyes swivelled madly from side to side.
    Three figures stepped into his line of vision. They were obviously female. They were abundantly female. They were not wearing a great deal of clothing and seemed to be altogether too fresh-from-the-hairdressers for people who have just been paddling a large war canoe, but this is often the case with beautiful Amazonian warriors.
    A thin trickle of coconut milk began to dribble off the end of Rincewind’s beard.
    The leading woman brushed aside her long blonde hair and gave him a bright smile.
    “I know this sounds a little unlikely,” she said, “but I and my sisters here represent a hitherto undiscovered tribe whose menfolk were recently destroyed in a deadly but short-lived and highly specific plague. Now we have been searching these islands for a man to enable us to carry on our line.”
    “ How much do you think he weighs? ”
    Rincewind’s eyebrows raised. The woman looked down shyly.
    “You may be wondering why we are all blonde and white-skinned when everyone else in the islands around here is dark,” she said. “It just seems to be one of those genetic things.”
    “ About 120, 125 pounds. Put another pound or two of junk on the heap. Er. Can you detect…you know…IT? ”
    “ This is all going to go wrong, Mr. Stibbons, I just know it .”
    “ He’s only six hundred miles away and we know where we are, and he’s on the right half of the Disc. Anyway, I’ve worked this out on Hex so nothing can possibly go wrong .”
    “