ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless
Page 20
`Well, a few years ago there was mine that crashed here by
mistake. Then there was, er, Trillian, then the parcel delivery,
and now you, and...'
`Yes, but apart from the usual suspects?'
`Well, er, I think pretty much none, so far as I know. Pretty
quiet round here.'
As if deliberately to prove him wrong, there was a long,
low distant roll of thunder.
Ford leapt to his feet fretfully and started pacing backwards
and forwards in the feeble, painful light of the early dawn which
lay streaked against the sky as if someone had dragged a piece
of liver across it.
`You don't understand how important this is,' he said.
`What? You mean my daughter out there all alone in the
Galaxy? You think I don't...'
`Can we feel sorry for the Galaxy later?' said Ford. `This is
very, very serious indeed. The Guide has been taken over. It's
been bought out.'
Arthur leapt up. `Oh very serious,' he shouted. `Please fill
me in straight away on some corporate publishing politics! I
can't tell you how much it's been on my mind of late!'
`You don't understand! There's a whole new Guide!'
`Oh!' shouted Arthur again. `Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm incoherent
with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find
out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging
about in in some globular cluster I've never heard of. Please,
can we rush to a store that's got it right this very instant?'
Ford narrowed his eyes.
`This is that thing you call sarcasm, isn't it?'
`Do you know,' bellowed Arthur, `I think it is? I really think
it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at
the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a fucking
bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you
consider what fascinating bits of badger-sputumly inconsequential
trivia to assail me with next?'
`Try to rest,' said Ford. `I need to think.'
`Why do you need to think? Can't we just sit and go budum-
budumbudum with our lips for a bit? Couldn't we just dribble
gently and loll a little bit to the left for a few minutes? I can't
stand it, Ford! I can't stand all this thinking and trying to work
things out any more. You may think that I am just standing here
barking...'
`Hadn't occurred to me in fact.'
`...but I mean it! What is the point? We assume that
every time we do anything we know what the consequences
will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This
is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly
cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!'
`Which is exactly my point.'
`Thank you,' said Arthur, sitting down again. `What?'
`Temporal reverse engineering.'
Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from
side to side.
`Is there any humane way,' he moaned, `in which I can prevent
you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?'
`No,' said Ford, `because your daughter is caught up in the
middle of it and it is deadly, deadly serious.'
Thunder rolled in the pause.
`All right,' said Arthur. `Tell me.'
`I leaped out of a high-rise office window.'
This cheered Arthur up.
`Oh!' he said. `Why don't you do it again?'
`I did.'
`Hmmm,' said Arthur, disappointed. `Obviously no good came
of it.'
`The first time I managed to save myself by the most astonish-
ing and - I say this in all modesty - fabulous piece of ingenious
quick-thinking, agility, fancy footwork and self-sacrifice.'
`What was the self-sacrifice?'
`I jettisoned half of a much loved and I think irreplaceable
pair of shoes.'
`Why was that self-sacrifice?'
`Because they were mine!' said Ford crossly.
`I think we have different value systems.'
`Well mine's better.'
`That's according to your... oh never mind. So having saved
yourself very cleverly once you very sensibly went and jumped
again. Please don't tell me why. Just tell me what happened if
you must.'
`I fell straight into the open cockpit of a passing jet towncar
whose pilot had just accidentally pushed the eject button when he
meant only to change tracks on the stereo. Now, even I couldn't
think that that was particularly clever of me.'
`Oh, I don't know,' said Arthur wearily. `I expect you probably
sneaked into his jetcar the previous night and set the pilot's least
favourite track to play or something.'
`No, I didn't,' said Ford.
`Just checking.'
`Though oddly enough, somebody else did. And this is the
nub. You could trace the chain and branches of crucial events
and coincidences back and back. Turned out the new Guide had
done it. That bird.'
`What bird?'
`You haven't seen it?'
`No.'
`Oh. It's a lethal little thing. Looks pretty, talks big, collapses
waveforms selectively at will.'
`What does that mean?'
`Temporal reverse engineering.'
`Oh,' said Arthur. `Oh yes.'
`The question is, who is it really doing it for?'
`I've actually got a sandwich in my pocket,' said Arthur,
delving. `Would you like a bit?'
`Yeah, OK.'
`It's a bit squished and sodden, I'm afraid.'
`Never mind.'
They munched for a bit.
`It's quite good in fact,' said Ford. `What's the meat in it?'
`Perfectly Normal Beast.'
`Not come across that one. So, the question is,' Ford con-
tinued, `who is the bird really doing it for? What's the real game
here?'
`Mmm,' ate Arthur.
`When I found the bird,' continued Ford, `which I did by a
series of coincidences that are interesting in themselves, it put
on the most fantastic multi-dimensional display of pyrotechnics
I've ever seen. It then said that it would put its services at my
disposal in my universe. I said, thanks but no thanks. It said that
it would anyway, whether I liked it or not. I said just try it, and
it said it would and, indeed, already had done. I said we'd see
about that and it said that we would. That's when I decided to
pack the thing up and get it out of there. So I sent it to you for
safety.'
`Oh yes? Whose?'
`Never you mind. Then, what with one thing and another,
I thought it prudent to jump out of the window again, being
fresh out of other options at the time. Luckily for me the jetcar
was there otherwise I would have had to fall back on ingenious
quick-thinking, agility, maybe another shoe or, failing all else,
the ground. But it meant that, whether I liked it or not, the
Guide was, well, working for me, and that was deeply worrying.'
`Why?'
`Because if you've got the Guide you think that you are the
one it's working for. Everything went swimmingly smoothly for
me from then on, up to the very moment that I come up against
the t
otty with the rock, then, bang, I'm history. I'm out of the
loop.'
`Are you referring to my daughter?'
`As politely as I can. She's the next one in the chain who will
think that everything is going fabulously for her. She can beat
whoever she likes around the head with bits of the landscape,
everything will just swim for her until she's done whatever she's
supposed to do and then it will be all up for her too. It's reverse
temporal engineering, and clearly nobody understood what was
being unleashed!'
`Like me for instance.'
`What? Oh, wake up, Arthur. Look, let me try it again.
The new Guide came out of the research labs. It made use
of this new technology of Unfiltered Perception. Do you know
what that means?'
`Look, I've been making sandwiches for Bob's sake!'
`Who's Bob?'
`Never mind. Just carry on.'
`Unfiltered Perception means it perceives everything. Got
that? I don't perceive everything. You don't perceive everything.
We have filters. The new Guide doesn't have any sense filters. It
perceives everything. It wasn't a complicated technological idea.
It was just a question of leaving a bit out. Got it?'
`Why don't I just say that I've got it, and then you can
carry on regardless.'
`Right. Now because the bird can perceive every possible
Universe. it is present in every possible universe. Yes?'
`Y... e... e... s. Ish.'
`So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and account-
ing departments say, oh that sounds good, doesn't that mean
we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite
number of times? Don't squint at me like that, Arthur, this is
how accountants think!'
`That's quite clever, isn't it?'
`No! It is fantastically stupid. Look. The machine's only a
little Guide. It's got some quite clever cybertechnology in it,
but because it has Unfiltered Perception, any smallest move it
makes has the power of a virus. It can propagate throughout
space, time and a million other dimensions. Anything can be
focused anywhere in any of the universes that you and I move in.
Its power is recursive. Think of a computer program. Somewhere,
there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions
calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an
infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse?
Where's the final ``end if''? Is any of this making sense? Arthur?'
`Sorry, I was nodding off for a moment. Something about
the Universe, yes?'
`Something about the Universe, yes,' said Ford, wearily. He
sat down again.
`All right,' he said. `Think about this. You know who I think
I saw at the Guide offices? Vogons. Ah. I see I've said a word
you understand at last.'
Arthur leapt to his feet.
`That noise,' he said.
`What noise?'
`The thunder.'
`what about it?'
`It isn't thunder. It's the spring migration of the Perfectly
Normal Beasts. It's started.'
`What are these animals you keep on about?'
`I don't keep on about them. I just put bits of them in
sandwiches.'
`Why are they called Perfectly Normal Beasts?'
Arthur told him.
It wasn't often that Arthur had the pleasure of seeing Ford's
eyes open wide with astonishment.
19
It was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of.
He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the
small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and
when at last they reached the margin of the plains they pulled
themselves up into the branches of a large tree to get a better
view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the
Galaxy has to offer.
The great thunderous herd of thousand upon thousand of
Perfectly Normal Beasts was sweeping in magnificent array across
the Anhondo Plain. In the early pale light of the morning, as the
great animals charged through the fine steam of the sweat of
their bodies mingled with the muddy mist churned up by their
pounding hooves, their appearance seemed a little unreal and
ghostly anyway, but what was heart-stopping about them was
where they came from and where they went to, which appeared
to be, simply, nowhere.
They formed a solid, charging phalanx roughly a hundred yards
wide and half a mile long. The phalanx never moved, except that
it exhibited a slight gradual drift sideways and backwards for the
eight or nine days that it regularly appeared for. But though the
phalanx stayed more or less constant, the great beasts of which
it was composed charged steadily at upwards of twenty miles an
hour, appearing suddenly from thin air at one end of the plain,
and disappearing equally abruptly at the other end.
No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they
went. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it
was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Old Thrashbarg had said
on one occasion that some times if you received an answer, the
question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately
said that this was the only properly wise thing they'd ever heard
Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put
it down to chance.
The noise of the pounding of the hooves was so intense
that it was hard to hear anything else above it.
`What did you say?' shouted Arthur.
`I said,' shouted Ford, `this looks like it might be some
kind of evidence of dimensional drift.'
`Which is what?' shouted Arthur back.
`Well, a lot of people are beginning to worry that space/time
is showing signs of cracking up with everything that's happening
to it. There are quite a lot of worlds where you can see how the
landmasses have cracked up and moved around just from the
weirdly long or meandering routes that migrating animals take.
This might be something like that. We live in twisted times. Still,
in the absence of a decent spaceport...'
Arthur looked at him in a kind of frozen way.
`What do you mean?' he said.
`What do you mean, what do I mean?' shouted Ford. `You
know perfectly well what I mean. We're going to ride our way
out of here.'
`Are you seriously suggesting we try to ride a Perfectly Normal
Beast?'
`Yeah. See where it goes to.'
`We'll be killed! No,' said Arthur, suddenly. `We won't be
killed. At least I won't. Ford, have you ever heard of a planet
called Stavromula Beta?'
Ford frowned. `Don't think so,' he said. He pulled out his
own battered old copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
and accessed it. `Any funny spelling?' he said.
`Don't know. I've only ever heard it said, and that was
by someone who had a mouthful of other people's teeth. You
remember I told you about Agrajag?'
Ford thought for a moment. `You mean the guy who was
convinced
you were getting him killed over and over again?'
`Yes. One of the places he claimed I'd got him killed was
Stavromula Beta. Someone tries to shoot me, it seems. I duck
and Agrajag, or at least, one of his many reincarnations, gets hit.
It seems that this has definitely happened at some point in time
so, I suppose, I can't get killed at least until after I've ducked
on Stavromula Beta. Only no one's ever heard of it.'
`Hmm.' Ford tried a few other searches of the Hitch Hiker's
Guide, but drew a blank.
`Nothing,' he said.
`I was just... no, I've never heard of it,' said Ford finally.
He wondered why it was ringing a very, very faint bell, though.
`OK,' said Arthur. `I've seen the way the Lamuellan hunters
trap Perfectly Normal Beasts. If you spear one in the herd it just
gets trampled, so they have to lure them out one at a time for
the kill. It's very like the way a matador works, you know, with
a brightly coloured cape. You get one to charge at you and then