The Light Fantastic

and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.
    On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind’s amazement it all seemed to work and the little man’s total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.
    Merely being faced with drowning stood no chance. Twoflower was quite certain that in a well-organized society people would not be allowed to go around getting drowned.
    He was a little bothered, though, about where his Luggage had got to. But he comforted himself with the knowledge that it was made of sapient pearwood, and ought to be intelligent enough to look after itself…

    In yet another part of the forest a young shaman was undergoing a very essential part of his training. He had eaten of the sacred toadstool, he had smoked the holy rhizome, he had carefully powdered up and inserted into various orifices the mystic mushroom and now, sitting cross-legged under a pine tree, he was concentrating firstly on making contact with the strange and wonderful secrets at the heart of Being but mainly on stopping the top of his head from unscrewing and floating away.
    Blue four-sided triangles pinwheeled across his vision. Occasionally he smiled knowingly at nothing very much and said things like “Wow” and “Urgh.”
    There was a movement in the air and what he later described as “like, a sort of explosion only backward, you know?,” and suddenly where there had only been nothing there was a large, battered, wooden chest.
    It landed heavily on the leafmold, extended dozens of little legs, and turned around ponderously to look at the shaman. That is to say, it had no face, but even through the mycological haze he was horribly aware that it was looking at him. And not a nice look, either. It was amazing how baleful a keyhole and a couple of knotholes could be.
    To his intense relief it gave a sort of wooden shrug, and set off through the trees at a canter.
    With superhuman effort the shaman recalled the correct sequence of movements for standing up and even managed a couple of steps before he looked down and gave up, having run out of legs.
    Rincewind, meanwhile, had found a path. It wound about a good deal, and he would have been happier if it had been cobbled, but following it gave him something to do.
    Several trees tried to strike up a conversation, but Rincewind was nearly certain that this was not normal behavior for trees and ignored them.
    The day lengthened. There was no sound but the murmur of nasty little stinging insects, the occasional crack of a falling branch, and the whispering of the trees discussing religion and the trouble with squirrels. Rincewind began to feel very lonely. He imagined himself living in the woods forever, sleeping on leaves and eating…and eating…whatever there was to eat in woods. Trees, he supposed, and nuts and berries. He would have to…
    “Rincewind!”
    There, coming up the path, was Twoflower—dripping wet, but beaming with delight. The Luggage trotted along behind him (anything made of the wood would follow its owner anywhere and it was often used to make luggage for the grave goods of very rich dead kings who wanted to be sure of starting a new life in the next world with clean underwear).
    Rincewind sighed. Up to now, he’d thought the day couldn’t possibly get worse.

    It began to rain a particularly wet and cold rain. Rincewind and Twoflower sat under a tree and watched it.
    “Rincewind?”
    “Um?”
    “Why are we here?”
    “Well, some say that the Creator of the Universe made the Disc and everything on it, others say that its all a very complicated story involving the testicles of the Sky God and the milk of the Celestial Cow, and some even hold that we’re all just due to the total random accretion of probability particles. But if you mean why are we here as opposed to falling off the Disc, I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s probably all some ghastly mistake.”
    “Oh. Do you think there’s anything to eat in this forest?”
    “Yes,” said the wizard bitterly, “us.”
    “I’ve got some acorns, if you like,” said the tree helpfully.
    They sat in damp silence for some moments.
    “Rincewind, the tree said—”
    “Trees can’t talk,” snapped Rincewind. “It’s very important to remember that.”
    “But you just heard—”
    Rincewind sighed. “Look,” he said. “It’s