ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Read online

  hurrying through.

  So everything was going well was it? Everything was working

  out as if the most extraordinary luck was on his side? Well, he'd

  see about that.

  In a spirit of scientific enquiry he hurled himself out of

  the window again.

  15

  The first month, getting to know each other, was a little difficult.

  The second month, trying to come to terms with what they'd

  got to know about each other in the first month, was much easier.

  The third month, when the box arrived, was very tricky indeed.

  At the beginning, it was a problem even trying to explain

  what a month was. This had been a pleasantly simple matter

  for Arthur, here on Lamuella. The days were just a little over

  twenty-five hours long, which basically meant an extra hour in

  bed every single day and, of course, having regularly to reset his

  watch, which Arthur rather enjoyed doing.

  He also felt at home with the number of suns and moons

  which Lamuella had - one of each - as opposed to some of

  the planets he'd fetched up on from time to time which had

  had ridiculous numbers of them.

  The planet orbited its single sun every three hundred days,

  which was a good number because it meant the year didn't drag

  by. The moon orbited Lamuella just over nine times a year,

  which meant that a month was a little over thirty days, which

  was absolutely perfect because it gave you a little more time to

  get things done in. It was not merely reassuringly like Earth, it

  was actually rather an improvement.

  Random, on the other hand, thought she was trapped in a

  recurring nightmare. She would have crying fits and think the

  moon was out to get her. Every night it was there, and then,

  when it went, the sun came out and followed her. Over and over

  again.

  Trillian had warned Arthur that Random might have some

  difficulty in adjusting to a more regular lifestyle than she had

  been used to up till now, but Arthur hadn't been ready for

  actual howling at the moon.

  He hadn't been ready for any of this of course.

  His daughter?

  His daughter? He and Trillian had never even - had they?

  He was absolutely convinced he would have remembered. What

  about Zaphod?

  `Not the same species, Arthur,' Trillian had answered. `When

  I decided I wanted a child they ran all sorts of genetic tests on

  me and could find only one match anywhere. It was only later

  that it dawned on me. I double checked and I was right. They

  don't usually like to tell you, but I insisted.'

  `You mean you went to a DNA bank?' Arthur had asked,

  pop-eyed.

  `Yes. But she wasn't quite as random as her name suggests,

  because, of course, you were the only homo sapiens donor. I

  must say, though, it seems you were quite a frequent flyer.'

  Arthur had stared wide-eyed at the unhappy looking girl who

  was slouching awkwardly in the door-frame looking at him.

  `But when... how long...?'

  `You mean, what age is she?'

  `Yes.'

  `The wrong one.'

  `What do you mean?'

  `I mean that I haven't any idea.'

  `What?'

  `Well, in my time line I think it's about ten years since I had

  her, but she's obviously quite a lot older than that. I spend my

  life going backwards and forwards in time, you see. The job. I

  used to take her with me when I could, but it just wasn't always

  possible. Then I used to put her into day care time zones, but

  you just can't get reliable time tracking now. You leave them

  there in the morning, you've simply no idea how old they'll be

  in the evening. You complain till you're blue in the face but it

  doesn't get you anywhere. I left her at one of the places for a

  few hours once, and when I came back she'd passed puberty.

  I've done all I can, Arthur, it's over to you. I've got a war to

  cover.'

  The ten seconds that passed after Trillian left were about the

  longest of Arthur Dent's life. Time, we know, is relative. You

  can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it

  at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged

  mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged

  twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on

  how far you travelled.

  This will come to you as a profound personal shock, particularly

  if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister. The seconds

  that you have been absent for will not have been sufficient time to

  prepare you for the shock of new and strangely distended family

  relationships when you return.

  Ten seconds' silence was not enough time for Arthur to

  reassemble his whole view of himself and his life in a way that

  suddenly included an entire new daughter of whose merest exist-

  ence he had had not the slightest inkling of a suspicion when he

  had woken that morning. Deep, emotional family ties cannot be

  constructed in ten seconds, however far and fast you travel away

  from them, and Arthur could only feel helpless, bewildered and

  numb as he looked at the girl standing in his doorway, staring at

  his floor.

  He supposed that there was no point in pretending not to

  be hopeless.

  He walked over and he hugged her.

  `I don't love you,' he said. `I'm sorry. I don't even know

  you yet. But give me a few minutes.'

  {it

  We live in strange times.

  We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our

  own. The people with whom we populate our universes are

  the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our

  own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity

  of infinite recursion and say things like, `Oh, hi Ed! Nice tan.

  How's Carol?' involves a great deal of filtering skill for which

  all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in

  order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the

  chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your

  kid a break, OK?

  begin{flushright}

  Extract from Practical Parenting in a Fractally

  end{flushright} begin{flushright}

  Demented Universe

  end{flushright} }

  `What's this?'

  Arthur had almost given up. That is to say, he was not

  going to give up. He was absolutely not going to give up.

  Not now. Not ever. But if he had been the sort of person who

  was going to give up, this was probably the time he would have

  done it.

  Not content with being surly, bad-tempered, wanting to go

  and play in the paleozoic era, not seeing why they had to have

  the gravity on the whole time and shouting at the sun to stop

  following her, Random had also used his carving knife to dig up

  stones to throw at the pikka birds for looking at her like that.

  Arthur didn't even know if Lamuella had had a paleozoic

  era. According to Old Thrashbarg the planet had been found

  fully-formed in the navel of a giant earwig at four-thirty one

&n
bsp; Vroonday afternoon, and although Arthur, as a seasoned galactic

  traveller with good `O' level passes in Physics and Geography,

  had fairly serious doubts about this, it was rather a waste of time

  trying to argue with Old Thrashbarg and there had never been

  much point before.

  He sighed as he sat nursing the chipped and bent knife. He

  was going to love her if it killed him, or her, or both. It wasn't

  easy being a father. He knew that no one had ever said it was

  going to be easy, but that wasn't the point because he'd never

  asked about being one in the first place.

  He was doing his best. Every moment that he could wrest

  away from making sandwiches he was spending with her, talking

  to her, walking with her, sitting on the hill with her watching the

  sun go down over he valley in which the village nestled, trying

  to find out about her life, trying to explain to her about his. It

  was a tricky business. The common ground between them, apart

  from the fact that they had almost identical genes, was about the

  size of a pebble. Or rather, it was about the size of Trillian and

  of her they had slightly differing views.

  `What's this?'

  He suddenly realised she had been talking to him and he

  hadn't noticed. Or rather he had not recognized her voice.

  Instead of the usual tone of voice in which she spoke to him,

  which was bitter and truculent, she was just asking him a simple

  question.

  He looked round in surprise.

  She was sitting there on a stool in the corner of the hut in

  that rather hunched way she had, knees together, feet splayed

  out, with her dark hair hanging down over her face as she looked

  at something she had cradled in her hands.

  Arthur went over to her, a little nervously.

  Her mood swings were very unpredictable but so far they'd

  all been between different types of bad ones. Outbreaks of bitter

  recrimination would give way without warning to abject self-pity

  and then long bouts of sullen despair which were punctuated with

  sudden acts of mindless violence against inanimate objects and

  demands to go to electric clubs.

  Not only were there no electric clubs on Lamuella, there

  were no clubs at all and, in fact, no electricity. There was a

  forge and a bakery, a few carts and a well, but those were the

  high water mark of Lamuellan technology, and a fair number of

  Random's unquenchable rages were directed against the sheer

  incomprehensible backwardness of the place.

  She could pick up Sub-Etha TV on a small Flex-O-Panel

  which had been surgically implanted in her wrist, but that didn't

  cheer her up at all because it was full of news of insanely exciting

  things happening in every other part of the Galaxy than here.

  It would also give her frequent news of her mother, who had

  dumped her to go off and cover some war which now seemed

  not to have happened, or at least to have gone all wrong in some

  way because of the absence of any proper intelligence gathering.

  It also gave her access to lots of great adventure shows featuring

  all sorts of fantastically expensive spaceships crashing into each

  other.

  The villagers were absolutely hypnotised by all these wonderful

  magic images flashing over her wrist. They had only ever seen

  one spaceship crash, and it had been so frightening, violent and

  shocking and had caused so much horrible devastation, fire and

  death that, stupidly, they had never realised it was entertainment.

  Old Thrashbarg had been so astonished by it that he had

  instantly seen Random as an emissary from Bob, but had fairly

  soon afterwards decided that in fact she had been sent as a test

  of his faith, if not of his patience. He was also alarmed at the

  number of spaceship crashes he had to start incorporating into

  his holy stories if he was to hold the attention of the villagers,

  and not have them rushing off to peer at Random's wrist all the

  time.

  At the moment she was not peering at her wrist. Her wrist

  was turned off. Arthur squatted down quietly beside her to see

  what she was looking at.

  It was his watch. He had taken it off when he'd gone to

  shower under the local waterfall, and Random had found it

  and was trying to work it out.

  `It's just a watch,' he said. `It's to tell the time.'

  `I know that,' she said. `But you keep on fiddling with it,

  and it still doesn't tell the right time. Or even anything like

  it.'

  She brought up the display on her wrist panel, which auto-

  matically produced a readout of local time. Her wrist panel had

  quietly got on with the business of measuring the local gravity

  and orbital momentum, and had noticed where the sun was and

  tracked its movement in the sky, all within the first few minutes

  of Random's arrival. It had then quickly picked up clues from its

  environment as to what the local unit conventions were and reset

  itself appropriately. It did this sort of thing continually, which was

  particularly valuable if you did a lot of travelling in time as well

  as space.

  Random frowned at her father's watch, which didn't do any

  of this.

  Arthur was very fond of it. It was a better one than he

  would ever have afforded himself. He had been given it on

  his twenty-second birthday by a rich and guilt-ridden godfather

  who had forgotten every single birthday he had had up till then,

  and also his name. It had the day, the date, the phases of the

  moon; it had `To Albert on his twenty-first birthday' and the

  wrong date engraved on the battered and scratched surface of

  its back in letters that were still just about visible.

  The watch had been through a considerahle amount of stuff

  in the last few years, most of which would fall well outside the

  warranty. He didn't suppose, of course, that the warranty had

  especially mentioned that the watch was guaranteed to be accu-

  rate only within the very particular gravitational and magnetic

  fields of the Earth, and so long as the day was twenty-four hours

  long and the planet didn't explode and so on. These were such

  basic assumptions that even the lawyers would have missed them.

  Luckily his watch was a wind-up one, or at least, a self-winder.

  Nowhere else in the Galaxy would he have found batteries of pre-

  cisely the dimensions and power specifications that were perfectly

  standard on Earth.

  `So what are all these numbers?' asked Random.

  Arthur took it from her.

  `These numbers round the edge mark the hours. In the little

  window on the right it says THU, which means Thursday, and

  the number is 14, which means it's the fourteenth day of the

  month of MAY which is what it says in this window over here.

  `And this sort of crescent-shaped window at the top tells you

  about the phases of the moon. In other words it tells you how

  much of the moon is lit up at night by the sun, which depends

  on the relative positions of the Sun and the Moon and, well...

  the Earth.'

 
`The Earth,' said Random.

  `Yes.'

  `And that's where you came from, and where Mum came from.'

  `Yes.'

  Random took the watch back from him and looked at it

  again, clearly baffled by something. Then she held it up to

  her ear and listened in puzzlement.

  `What's that noise?'

  `It's ticking. That's the mechanism that drives the watch. It's

  called clockwork. It's all kind of interlocking cogs and springs

  that work to turn the hands round at exactly the right speed to

  mark the hours and minutes and days and so on.'

  Random carried on peering at it.

  `There's something puzzling you,' said Arthur. `What is it?'

  `Yes,' said Random, at last. `Why's it all in hardware?'

  Arthur suggested they went for a walk. He felt there were

  things they should discuss, and for once Random seemed, if

  not precisely amenable and willing, then at least not growling.

  From Random's point of view this was also all very weird. It

  wasn't that she wanted to be difficult, as such, it was just that

  she didn't know how or what else to be.

  Who was this guy? What was this life she was supposed to

  lead? What was this world she was supposed to lead it in? And

  what was this universe that kept coming at her through her eyes

  and ears? What was it for? What did it want?

  She'd been born in a spaceship that had been going from

  somewhere to somewhere else, and when it had got to some-