The Last Continent

'But is lying on your side in a mud hole with your wheels spinning a very important niche?' said Ponder.

The god looked at him, and then stared glumly at the half-completed elephant.

'Perhaps if I made the tyres bigger?' he said, hopefully yet in a hopeless voice.

'I don't think so,' said Ponder.

'Oh, you're probably right.' The little god's hands twitched. 'I don't know, I do try to diversify, but sometimes it's so difficult...'

Suddenly he ran across the crowded cave towards a huge pair of doors at the far end, and flung them open.

'I'm sorry, but I just have to do one,' said the god. 'They calm me down, you know.'

Ponder caught up. The cave beyond the doors was bigger than this one, and brilliantly lit. The air was full of small, bright things, hovering in their millions like beads on invisible strings.

'Beetles?' said Ponder.

There's nothing like a beetle when you're feeling depressed!' said the god. He'd stopped by a large metal desk and was feverishly opening drawers and pulling out boxes. 'Can you pass me that box of antennae? It's just on the shelf there. Oh yes, you can't beat a beetle when you're feeling down. Sometimes I think it's what it's all about, you know.'

'What all?' said Ponder.

The god swept an arm in an expansive gesture. 'Everything,' he said cheerfully. 'The whole thing. Trees, grass, flowers... What did you think it was all for?'

'Well, I didn't think it was for beetles,' said Ponder. 'What about, well, what about the elephant, for a start?'

The god already had a half-finished beetle in one hand. It was green.

'Dung,' he said triumphantly. No head, when screwed on to a body, ought to make a sound like a cork being pushed into a bottle, but the beetle's did in the hands of the god.

'What?' said Ponder. That's rather a lot of trouble to go to just for dung, isn't it?'

'That's ecology for you, I'm afraid,' said the god.

'No, no, that can't be right, surely?' said Ponder. 'What about the higher lifeforms?'

'Higher?' said the god. 'You mean like... birds?'

'No, I mean like—' Ponder hesitated. The god had seemed remarkably incurious about the wizards, possibly because of their lack of resemblance to beetles, but he could see a certain amount of theological unpleasantness ahead.

'Like... apes,' he said.

'Apes? Oh, very amusing, certainly, and obviously the beetles have to have something to entertain them, but...' The god looked at him, and a celestial penny seemed to drop. 'Oh dear, you don't think they're the purpose of the whole business, do you?'

'I'd rather assumed—'

'Dear me, the purpose of the whole business, you see, is in fact to be the whole business. Although,' he sniffed, 'if we can do it all with beetles I shan't complain.'

'But surely the purpose of— I mean, wouldn't it be nice if you ended up with some creature that started to think about the universe—?'

'Good gravy, I don't want anything poking around!' said the god testily. 'There's enough patches and stitches in it as it is without some dever devil trying to find more, I can assure you. No, the gods on the mainland have got that right at least. Intelligence is like legs – too many and you trip yourself up. Six is about the right number, in my view.'

'But surely, ultimately, one creature might—'

The god let go of his latest creation. It whirred up and along the rows and rows of beetles and slotted itself in between two that were almost, but not exactly, quite like it.

'Worked that one out, have you?' he said. 'Well, of course you're right. I can see you have quite an efficient brain— Damn.'

There was a little sparkle in the air and a bird appeared alongside the god. It was clearly alive but entirely stationary, hanging in frozen flight. A flickering blue glow hovered around it.

The god sighed, reached into a pocket and pulled out the most complex-looking tool Ponder had ever seen. The bits that you could see suggested that there were other, even stranger bits that you couldn't and that this was probably just as well.

'However,' he said, slicing the bird's beak off, the blue glow simply closing over the hole, 'if I'm going to get any serious work done I'm really going to have to find some way of organizing the whole business. All I'm faced with these days is bills.'

'Yes, it must be quite expens—'

'Big bills, short bills, bills for winkling insects out of bark, bills for cracking nuts, bills for eating fruit,' the god went on. 'They're supposed to do their own evolving. I mean, that's the whole point. I shouldn't have to be running around all the time.' The god waved his hand in the air and a sort of display stand of beaks appeared beside him. He selected one that, to Ponder, hardly looked any different from the one he'd removed, and used the tool to attach it to the hanging bird. The blue glow covered it for a moment, and then the bird vanished. In the moment that it disappeared, Ponder thought he saw its wings begin to move.