The Last Continent

dusted one off with his hat. “There we are, Mrs. Whitlow…”
    The housekeeper frowned. “Ai’m really sure it’s Not Done for the staff to eat with the gentlemen,” she said.
    “Be our guest, Mrs. Whitlow,” said Ridcully.
    “Ai really can’t. It does not Do to get ideas above one’s station,” said Mrs. Whitlow. “Ai would never be able to look you in the face again, sir. Ai hope Ai know my Place.”
    Ridcully looked blank for a moment, and then said quietly: “Faculty meeting, gentlemen?”
    The wizards went into another huddle a little way along the beach.
    “What are we supposed to do about that ?”
    “I think it’s very commendable of her. Her world is Below Stairs, after all.”
    “Yes, very well, but it’s not as if there’re any stairs on this island.”
    “Could we build some?”
    “We can’t let the poor woman sit off by herself somewhere, that is my point.”
    “We spent ages on that table!”
    “And did you notice something about the driftwood, Archchancellor?”
    “Looked like perfectly ordinary wood to me , Stibbons. Branches, treetrunks and whatnot.”
    “That’s the strange thing, sir, because—”
    “It’s very simple, Ridcully. I hope that, as gentlemen, we know how to treat a woman—”
    “ Lady .”
    “Let me just say that was unnecessarily sarcastic, Dean,” said Ridcully. “Very well. If the Prophet Ossory won’t go to the mountain, the mountain must go to the Prophet Ossory. As they say in Klatch.”
    He paused. He knew his wizards.
    “I believe, in fact, that it’s in Omnia that—” Ponder began.
    Ridcully waved a hand. “Something like that, anyway.”
    And that is why Mrs. Whitlow dined alone at the table, while the wizards sat around the fire a little way away, except that very frequently one of them would lumber over to offer her some choice bit of nature’s bounty.
    It was obvious that starvation would not be a problem on this island, although dyspepsia and gout might be.
    Fish was the main course. Frenzied searching had failed to locate a steak bush so far but had found, in addition to numerous more conventional fruits, a pasta bush, a sort of squash that contained something very much like custard and, to Ridcully’s disgust, a pineapple-like plant the fruit of which was, when the husk had been stripped away, a large plum pudding.
    “Obviously it’s not really a plum pudding,” he protested. “We just think it’s like a plum pudding because it tastes exactly like a…plum pudding…” His voice trailed off.
    “It’s got plums and currants in it,” said the Senior Wrangler. “Pass the custard squash, will you?”
    “My point is that we only think they look like currants and plums—”
    “No, we also think they taste like currants and plums,” said the Senior Wrangler. “Look, Archchancellor, there’s no mystery. Obviously wizards have been here before. This is the result of perfectly ordinary magic. Perhaps our lost geographer did a bit of experimenting. Or it’s sorcery, perhaps. Some of the things that got created in the old days, well, a cigarette bush is very small beer by comparison, eh?”
    “Talking of small beer…” said the Dean, waving his hand, “pass me the rum, will you?”
    “Mrs. Whitlow doesn’t approve of strong liquor,” said the Senior Wrangler.
    The Dean glanced at the housekeeper, who was daintily eating a banana, a feat which is quite hard to do.
    He put down the coconut shell. “Well, she…I am…I don’t see…well, damn it all, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
    “Or bad language,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    “I vote we take some of those bees back with us,” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. “Marvelous little creatures. No footling around being content with making boring honey. You just reach up and pick one of these handy little wax containers and bob’s your uncle.”
    “She takes all the peel off slowly before she eats it. Oh, dear…”
    “Are you all right, Senior Wrangler? Is the heat getting to you?”
    “What? Eh? Hmm? Oh, nothing. Yes. Bees. Wonderful things.”
    They glanced up at a couple of the bees, who were busying themselves around a flowering bush in the last of the light. They were leaving little black smoke trails.
    “Shooting around like little rockets,” said the Archchancellor. “Amazing.”
    “I’m still worried about those boots,” said the Senior Wrangler. “You’d think the man had been pulled right out of them.”
    “It’s a tiny