The Light Fantastic

next one is upside down in a tree.
    As always happened at times like this, the Spell rose up in his mind.
    Rincewind had been generally reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers. He probably would have been thrown out of Unseen University anyway—he couldn’t remember spells and smoking made him feel ill—but what had really caused trouble was all that stupid business about sneaking into the room where the Octavo was chained and opening it.
    And what made the trouble even worse was that no one could figure out why all the locks had temporarily become unlocked.
    The spell wasn’t a demanding lodger. It just sat there like an old toad at the bottom of a pond. But whenever Rincewind was feeling really tired or very afraid it tried to get itself said. No one knew what would happen if one of the Eight Great Spells was said by itself, but the general agreement was that the best place from which to watch the effects would be the next universe.
    It was a weird thought to have, lying on a heap of pine needles after just falling off the edge of the world, but Rincewind had a feeling that the spell wanted to keep him alive.
    “Suits me,” he thought.
    He sat up and looked at the trees. Rincewind was a city wizard and, although he was aware that there were various differences among types of tree by which their nearest and dearest could tell them apart, the only thing he knew for certain was that the end without the leaves on fitted into the ground. There were far too many of them, arranged with absolutely no sense of order. The place hadn’t been swept for ages.
    He remembered something about being able to tell where you were by looking at which side of a tree the moss grew on. These trees had moss everywhere, and wooden warts, and scrabbly old branches; if trees were people, these trees would be sitting in rocking chairs.
    Rincewind gave the nearest one a kick. With unerring aim it dropped an acorn on him. He said “Ow.” The tree, in a voice like a very old door swinging open, said, “Serves you right.”
    There was a long silence.
    Then Rincewind said, “Did you say that?”
    “Yes.”
    “And that too?”
    “Yes.”
    “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,