The Last Continent

supposed to be .”
    “Be what?”
    “Pro-active, I think. It’s a word he’s using a lot.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Well…in favor of activity, I suppose.”
    “Really? Dangerous. In my experience, inactivity sees you through.”
    Altogether, it was not a happy university at the moment, and mealtimes were the worst. Ponder tended to be isolated at one end of the High Table as the unwilling architect of this sudden tendency on the part of the Archchancellor to try to Weld Them Into A Lean Mean Team. The wizards had no intention of being lean, but were getting as mean as anything.
    On top of that, Ridcully’s sudden interest in taking an interest meant that Ponder had to explain something about his own current project, and one aspect of Ridcully that had not changed was his horrible habit of, Ponder suspected, deliberately misunderstanding things.
    Ponder had long been struck by the fact that the Librarian, an ape—at least generally an ape, although this evening he seemed to have settled on being a small table set with a red-furred tea service—was, well, so human shaped. In fact, so many things were pretty much the same shape. Nearly everything you met was really a sort of complicated tube with two eyes and four arms or legs or wings. Oh, or they were fish. Or insects. All right, spiders as well. And a few odd things like starfish and whelks. But still there was a remarkably unimaginative range of designs. Where were the six-armed, six-eyed monkeys pinwheeling through the jungle canopy?
    Oh, yes, octopussies too, but that was the point, they were really only a kind of underwater spider…
    Ponder had poked around among the University’s more or less abandoned Museum of Quite Unusual Things, and noticed something rather odd. Whoever had designed the skeletons of creatures had even less imagination than whoever had done the outsides. At least the outside-designer had tried a few novelties in the spots, wool and stripes department, but the bone-builder had generally just put a skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further along, stuck on some arms and legs and had the rest of the day off. Some ribcages were longer, some legs were shorter, some hands became wings, but they all seemed to be based on one design, one size stretched or shrunk to fit all.
    Not to his very great surprise, Ponder seemed to be the only one around who found this at all interesting. He’d point out to people that fish were amazingly fish-shaped, and they’d look at him as if he’d gone mad.
    Paleontology and archaeology and other skulduggery were not subjects that interested wizards. Things are buried for a reason, they considered. There’s no point in wondering what it was. Don’t go digging things up in case they won’t let you bury them again.
    The most coherent theory was one he recalled from his nurse when he was small. Monkeys, she’d averred, were bad little boys who hadn’t come in when called, and seals were bad little boys who’d lazed around on the beach instead of attending to their lessons. She hadn’t said that birds were bad little boys who’d gone too close to the cliff edge, and in any case jellyfish would be more likely, but Ponder couldn’t help thinking that, harmlessly insane though the woman had been, she might have had just the glimmerings of a point…
    He was spending most nights now watching Hex trawl the invisible writings for any hints. In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers.
    Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, when Hex appeared to be sulking, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything.
    And it might have surprised Ponder to learn that the senior wizards had come to approve of Hex, despite all the comments on the lines of “In my day we used to do our own thinking.” Wizardry was traditionally competitive, and, while UU was currently going through an extended period of peace and quiet, with none of the informal murders that had once made it such a terminally exciting place, a senior wizard always distrusted a young man who was going places since traditionally his