The Last Continent

it’s facing the wrong way!”
    “Take it easy, mate!” said Crocodile Dongo, looking concerned.
    Rincewind shuddered. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s the heat and the flies getting to me. It must be.”
    Dongo poured him another beer. “Ah well, beer’s good for the heat,” he said. “Can’t do anythin’ about the bloody flies, though.”
    Rincewind started to nod, and stopped. He removed his hat and looked at it critically. Then he waved a hand up and down in front of his face, temporarily dislodging a few flies. Finally, he looked thoughtfully at a row of bottles.
    “Got any string?” he said.
    After a few experiments, and some mild concussion, Dongo advanced the opinion that it’d be better with just the corks.

    The Luggage was lost. Usually, it could find its way anywhere in time and space, but trying to do that now was like a man trying to keep his footing on two moving walkways heading in opposite directions, and it simply couldn’t cope. It knew it had been stuck underground for a long time, but it also knew that it had been stuck underground for about five minutes.
    The Luggage had no brain as such, even though an outsider might well get the impression that it could think. What it did do was react, in quite complex ways, to its environment. Usually this involved finding something to kick, as is the case with most sapient creatures.
    Currently it was ambling along a dusty track. Occasionally its lid would snap at flies, but without much enthusiasm. Its opal coating glowed in the sunlight.
    “Oaaw! Isn’t that pretty ! Fetch it here, you two!”
    It paid no attention to the brightly colored cart that stopped a little way along the track. It was possibly aware at some level that people had got out and were staring at it, but it didn’t resist when they appeared to reach a decision and lifted it on to the cart. It didn’t know where it had to go, and since it also didn’t know where this cart was going perhaps it would take it there.
    It waited a decent while after it had been put down, and then took in its surroundings. It had been stacked up by a lot of other boxes and suitcases, which was comforting. After five minutes spent being underground for millions of years the Luggage felt that it was due some quality time.
    And it didn’t even resist when someone opened its lid and filled it up with shoes. Quite large shoes, the Luggage noticed, and many of them with interesting heels and inventive ways with silk and sequins. They were clearly ladies’ shoes. That was good, the Luggage thought (or emoted, or reacted). Ladies tended to lead quieter lives.
    The purple cart rumbled off. Painted crudely on the back were the words: Petunia, The Desert Princess.

    Rincewind looked hard at the shears that the head shearer was waving. They looked sharp.
    “You know what we do to people who go back on a bet round here?” said Daggy, the gang boss.
    “Er…but I was drunk.”
    “So were we. So what?”
    Rincewind looked out across the sheep pens. He knew what sheep were, of course, and had come into contact with them on many occasions, although normally in the company of mixed vegetables. He’d even had a toy stuffed lamb as a child. But there is something hugely unlovable about sheep, a kind of mad, eyerolling brainlessness smelling of damp wool and panic. Many religions extol the virtues of the meek, but Rincewind had never trusted them. The meek could turn very nasty at times.
    On the other hand…they were covered in wool, and the shears looked pretty keen. How hard could it be? His radar told him that trying and failing was probably a lot less of a crime than not trying at all.
    “Can I have a trial run?” he said.
    A sheep was dragged out of the pens and flung down in front of him.
    Rincewind gave Daggy what he hoped was the smile of one craftsman to another, but smiling at Daggy was like throwing meringues against a cliff.
    “Er, can I have a chair and a towel and two mirrors and a comb?” he said.
    Daggy’s look of intense suspicion deepened. “What’s this? What d’you want all that for?”
    “Got to do it properly, haven’t I?”

    Away out of sight at the back of the shearing shed, on the sun-bleached boards, the outline of a kangaroo began to form. And then, the white lines drifting across the wood like wisps of cloud across a clear sky, it began to change shape …

    Rincewind hadn’t had a proper haircut in a long time, but he knew how it was done.
    “So…have you