Mostly Harmless (10 page)

“So does everybody. That’s why this place is like a ghost town.” He spat into the dust.

“No, I mean, that sounded like someone I knew.”

“Princess Hooli? If I had to stand around saying hello to everybody who’s known Princess Hooli, I’d need a new set of lungs.”

“Not the Princess,” said Arthur. “The reporter. Her name’s Trillian. I don’t know where she got the Astra from.
She’s from the same planet as me. I wondered where she’d got to.”

“Oh, she’s all over the continuum these days. We can’t get the tri-d TV stations out here of course, thank the Great Green Arkleseizure, but you hear her on the radio, gallivanting here and there through space-time. She wants to settle down and find herself a steady era, that young lady does. It’ll all end in tears. Probably already has.” He swung with his hammer and hit his thumb rather hard. He started to speak in tongues.

The village of oracles wasn’t much better.

He had been told that when looking for a good oracle it was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to, but he was shut. There was a sign by the entrance saying, “I just don’t know anymore. Try next door →, but that’s just a suggestion, not formal oracular advice.”

“Next door” was a cave a few hundred yards away and Arthur walked toward it. Smoke and steam were rising from, respectively, a small fire and a battered tin pot that was hanging over it. There was also a very nasty smell coming from the pot. At least, Arthur thought it was coming from the pot. The distended bladders of some of the local goatlike things were hanging from a propped-up line drying in the sun, and the smell could have been coming from them. There was also, a worryingly small distance away, a pile of discarded bodies of the local goatlike things and the smell could have been coming from them.

But the smell could just as easily have been coming from
the old lady who was busy beating flies away from the pile of bodies. It was a hopeless task because each of the flies was about the size of a winged bottle top and all she had was a table tennis bat. Also she seemed half-blind. Every now and then, by chance, her wild thrashing would connect with one of the flies with a richly satisfying thunk, and the fly would hurtle through the air and smack itself open against the rock face a few yards from the entrance to her cave.

She gave every impression, by her demeanor, that these were the moments she lived for.

Arthur watched this exotic performance for a while from a polite distance, and then at last tried giving a gentle cough to attract her attention. The gentle cough, courteously meant, unfortunately involved first inhaling rather more of the local atmosphere than he had so far been doing and, as a result, he erupted into a fit of raucous expectoration and collapsed against the rock face, choking and streaming with tears. He struggled for breath, but each new breath made things worse. He vomited, half-choked again, rolled over his vomit, kept rolling for a few yards and eventually made it up on to his hands and knees and crawled, panting, into slightly fresher air.

“Excuse me,” he said. He got some breath back. “I really am most dreadfully sorry. I feel a complete idiot and …” He gestured helplessly toward the small pile of his own vomit lying spread around the entrance to her cave.

“What can I say?” he said. “What can I possibly say?”

This at least had gained her attention. She looked around at him suspiciously, but, being half-blind, had difficulty finding him in the blurred and rocky landscape.

He waved, helpfully. “Hello!” he called.

At last she spotted him, grunted to herself and turned back to whacking flies.

It was horribly apparent from the way that currents of air moved when she did, that the major source of the smell was in fact her. The drying bladders, the festering bodies and the noxious potage may all have been making valiant contributions to the atmosphere, but the major olfactory presence was the woman herself.

She got another good thwack at a fly. It smacked against the rock and dribbled its insides down it in what she clearly regarded, if she could see that far, as a satisfactory manner.

Unsteadily, Arthur got to his feet and brushed himself down with a fistful of dried grass. He didn’t know what else to do by way of announcing himself. He had half a mind just to wander off again, but felt awkward about leaving a pile of his vomit in front of the entrance to the woman’s home. He wondered what to do about it. He started to pluck up more handfuls of the scrubby dried grass that was to be found here and there. He was worried, though, that if he ventured nearer to the vomit he might simply add to it rather than clear it up.

Just as he was debating with himself as to what the right course of action was, he began to realize that she was at last saying something to him.

“I beg your pardon?” he called out.

“I said, can I help you?” she said, in a thin, scratchy voice that he could only just hear.

“Er, I came to ask your advice,” he called back, feeling a bit ridiculous.

She turned to peer at him, myopically, then turned back, swiped at a fly and missed.

“What about?” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I said, what about?” she almost screeched.

“Well,” said Arthur. “Just sort of general advice, really. It said in the brochure —”

“Ha! Brochure!” spat the old woman. She seemed to be waving her bat more or less at random now.

Arthur fished the crumpled-up brochure from his pocket. He wasn’t quite certain why. He had already read it and she, he expected, wouldn’t want to. He unfolded it anyway in order to have something to frown thoughtfully at for a moment or two. The copy in the brochure twittered on about the ancient mystical arts of the seers and sages of Hawalius, and wildly overrepresented the level of accommodation available in Hawalion. Arthur still carried a copy of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
with him but found, when he consulted it, that the entries were becoming more abstruse and paranoid and had lots of
x
s and
j
s and
{
s in them. Something was wrong somewhere. Whether it was in his own personal unit, or whether it was something or someone going terribly amiss, or perhaps just hallucinating, at the heart of the
Guide
organization itself, he didn’t know. But one way or another he was even less inclined to trust it than usual, which meant that he trusted it not one bit, and mostly used it for eating his sandwiches off of when he was sitting on a rock staring at something.

The woman had turned and was walking slowly toward him
now. Arthur tried, without making it too obvious, to judge the wind direction, and bobbed about a bit as she approached.

“Advice,” she said. “Advice, eh?”

“Er, yes,” said Arthur. “Yes. That is —”

He frowned again at the brochure, as if to be certain that he hadn’t misread it and stupidly turned up on the wrong planet or something. The brochure said, “The friendly local inhabitants will be glad to share with you the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients. Peer with them into the swirling mysteries of past and future time!” There were some coupons as well, but Arthur had been far too embarrassed actually to cut them out or try to present them to anybody.

“Advice, eh?” said the old woman again. “Just sort of general advice, you say. On what? What to do with your life, that sort of thing?”

“Yes,” said Arthur. “That sort of thing. Bit of a problem I sometimes find if I’m being perfectly honest.” He was trying desperately, with tiny darting movements, to stay upwind of her. She surprised him by suddenly turning sharply away from him and heading off toward her cave.

“You’ll have to help me with the photocopier, then,” she said.

“What?” said Arthur.

“The photocopier,” she repeated, patiently. “You’ll have to help me drag it out. It’s solar-powered. I have to keep it in the cave, though, so the birds don’t shit on it.”

“I see,” said Arthur.

“I’d take a few deep breaths if I were you,” muttered the old woman, as she stomped into the gloom of the cave mouth.

Arthur did as she advised. He almost hyperventilated in fact. When he felt he was ready, he held his breath and followed her in.

The photocopier was a big old thing on a rickety trolley. It stood just inside the dim shadows of the cave. The wheels were stuck obstinately in different directions and the ground was rough and stony.

“Go ahead and take a breath outside,” said the old woman. Arthur was going red in the face trying to help her move the thing.

He nodded in relief. If she wasn’t going to be embarrassed about it, then neither, he was determined, would he. He stepped outside and took a few breaths, then came back in to do more heaving and pushing. He had to do this quite a few times till at last the machine was outside.

The sun beat down on it. The old woman disappeared back into her cave again and brought with her some mottled metal panels, which she connected to the machine to collect the sun’s energy.

She squinted up into the sky. The sun was quite bright, but the day was hazy and vague.

“It’ll take a while,” she said.

Arthur said he was happy to wait.

The old woman shrugged and stomped across to the fire. Above it, the contents of the tin can were bubbling away. She poked about at them with a stick.

“You won’t be wanting any lunch?” she inquired of Arthur.

“I’ve eaten, thanks,” said Arthur. “No, really. I’ve eaten.”

“I’m sure you have,” said the old lady. She stirred with the
stick. After a few minutes she fished a lump of something out, blew on it to cool it a little and then put it in her mouth.

She chewed on it thoughtfully for a bit.

Then she hobbled slowly across to the pile of dead goatlike things. She spat the lump out onto the pile. She hobbled slowly back to the can. She tried to unhook it from the sort of tripodlike thing that it was hanging from.

“Can I help you?” said Arthur, jumping up politely. He hurried over.

Together they disengaged the tin from the tripod and carried it awkwardly down the slight slope that led downward from her cave and toward a line of scrubby and gnarled trees, which marked the edge of a steep but quite shallow gully, from which a whole new range of offensive smells was emanating.

“Ready?” said the old lady.

“Yes …” said Arthur, though he didn’t know for what.

“One,” said the old lady.

“Two,” she said.

“Three,” she added.

Arthur realized just in time what she intended. Together they tossed the contents of the tin into the gully.

After an hour or two of uncommunicative silence, the old woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves of paper and fed them through the machine.

She handed the copies to Arthur.

“This is, er, this is your advice then, is it?” said Arthur, leafing through them uncertainly.

“No,” said the old lady. “It’s the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you’ll see that I’ve underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They’re all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I’ve taken, then maybe you won’t finish up at the end of your life” — she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout — “in a smelly old cave like this!”

She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve, stomped off to her pile of dead goatlike things and started to set about the flies with vim and vigor.

The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely high poles. They were so high that it wasn’t possible to tell, from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.

Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped right off to the nearest bar & grill, where you also could buy a range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up lucrative therapy centers on some of the more affluent worlds in the Northwest ripple of the Galaxy,
where the living was easier by a factor of about 17 million, and the chocolate was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of the clients who came to their therapy centers knew about it all too well.

At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around him, but it didn’t worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically, he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta,
⁴
and had therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude toward extreme personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough behind him.

He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which turned downward through the air and was rather small by the time it was stopped by the ground.

About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone among the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn, seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making him scowl.

“Excuse me,” said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he couldn’t hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.