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-
ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Page 15