Mostly Harmless (3 page)

“I can wait for you in the bar, if you need a few minutes,” said Gail Andrews. “But I would like to talk to you, and I’m leaving the city tonight.”

She seemed to be slightly anxious about something rather than aggrieved or irate.

“Okay,” said Tricia. “Give me ten minutes.”

She went up to her room. Apart from anything else, she had so little faith in the ability of the guy on the message desk at reception to deal with anything so complicated as a message that she wanted to be doubly certain that there wasn’t a note under the door. It wouldn’t be the first time that messages at the desk and messages under the door had been completely at odds with each other.

There wasn’t one.

The message light on the phone was flashing, though.

She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.

“You have a message from Gary Andress,” said the operator.

“Yes?” said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. “What does it say.”

“Not hippy,” said the operator.

“Not
what
?” said Tricia.

“
Hippy
. What it says. Guy says he’s not a hippy. I guess he wanted you to know that. You want the number?”

As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realized that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already had.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Are there any other messages for me?”

“Room number?”

Tricia couldn’t work out why the operator should suddenly ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it to her anyway.

“Name?”

“McMillan, Tricia McMillan.” Tricia spelled it, patiently.

“Not Mr. MacManus?”

“No.”

“No more messages for you.” Click.

Tricia sighed and dialed again. This time she gave her name and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speaking less than ten seconds ago.

“I’m going to be in the bar,” Tricia explained. “In the bar. If a phone call comes through for me, please would you put it through to me in the bar?”

“Name?”

They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear as it possibly could be.

She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup with the speed of a professional and, looking at her bed with a sigh, left the room again.

She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.

No. Not really.

She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she could fool herself she could fool anybody.

She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews. Okay, she had given her a hard time. Sorry, but that’s the game we’re all in — that sort of thing. Ms. Andrews had agreed to do the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure was free publicity. But there’s no such thing as a free launch. No, she edited that line out again.

What had happened was this:

Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital anomalies in the outer planets, and now they’d found it and they were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer’s parrot — there was some tediously heartwarming story attached to this — and that was all very wonderful and lovely.

Tricia had followed the story with, for various reasons, considerable interest.

Then, while she had been casting around for a good excuse to go to New York at her TV company’s expense, she had
happened to notice a press release about Gail Andrews and her new book,
You and Your Planets
.

Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the moment you mentioned President Hudson, Cool Whip and the amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgical strikes — the official term had in fact been “Damascectomy,” meaning the “taking out” of Damascus), everyone remembered who you meant.

Tricia saw an angle here which she quickly sold to her producer.

Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn’t must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.

That must throw a few calculations out, mustn’t it?

What about all those star charts and planetary motions and so on? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising? Wouldn’t the whole of astrology have to be rethought? Wouldn’t now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis? If we’d known about Rupert three years ago, might President Hudson have been eating the chocolate flavor on Thursday rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort of thing.

Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off
by talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.

To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was, for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase of her life, a first-class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in astrophysics.

As she was getting into the elevator, Tricia, slightly preoccupied, realized she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it was and there wasn’t anything she particularly needed in it. She let the door close behind her.

Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had taught her anything it was this:
Never
go back for your bag.

As the elevator went down she stared at the ceiling in a rather intent way. Anyone who didn’t know Tricia McMillan better would have said that that was exactly the way people sometimes stared upward when they were trying to hold back tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera mounted up in the corner. She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later, and went up to the reception desk again.

“Now, I’m going to write this out,” she said, “because I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper, then her room number, then
IN THE BAR
and gave it to the receptionist, who looked at it.

“That’s in case there’s a message for me. Okay?”

The receptionist continued to look at it.

“You want me to see if she’s in her room?” he said.

Two minutes later, Tricia swiveled into the bar seat next to Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.

“You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit up at the bar rather than demurely at a table,” she said.

This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise.

“Vodka?” said Gail.

“Yes,” said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself from asking, How did you know? but Gail answered anyway.

“I asked the barman,” she said, with a kindly smile.

The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly across the glossy mahogany.

“Thank you,” said Tricia, stirring it sharply.

She didn’t know quite what to make out of all this sudden niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People in New York were not nice to each other without reason.

“Ms. Andrews,” she said, firmly, “I’m sorry that you’re not happy. I know you probably feel I was a bit rough with you this morning, but astrology is, after all, just popular entertainment, which is fine. It’s part of showbiz and it’s a part that you have done well out of and good luck to you. It’s fun. It’s
not a science though, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for one. I think that’s something we both managed to demonstrate very successfully together this morning, while at the same time generating some popular entertainment, which is what we both do for a living. I’m sorry if you have a problem with that.”

“I’m perfectly happy,” said Gail Andrews.

“Oh,” said Tricia, not quite certain what to make of this. “It said in your message that you were not happy.”

“No,” said Gail Andrews. “I said in my message that I thought
you
were not happy, and I was just wondering why.”

Tricia felt as if she had been kicked in the back of the head. She blinked.

“
What
?” she said quietly.

“To do with the stars. You seemed very angry and unhappy about something to do with stars and planets when we were having our discussion, and it’s been bothering me, which is why I came to see if you were all right.”

Tricia stared at her. “Ms. Andrews —” she started, and then realized that the way she had said it sounded exactly angry and unhappy and rather undermined the protest she had been trying to make.

“Please call me Gail, if that’s okay.”

Tricia just looked bewildered.

“
I
know that astrology isn’t a science,” said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or — what’s that strange thing you British play?”

“Er, cricket? Self-loathing?”

“Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there.
They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.

“So when you got so, I don’t know, so emotionally
focused
on stars and planets this morning, I began to think, she’s not angry about astrology, she really is angry and unhappy about actual stars and planets. People usually only get that unhappy and angry when they’ve lost something. That’s all I could think and I couldn’t make any more sense of it than that. So I came to see if you were okay.”

Tricia was stunned.

One part of her brain had already got started on all sorts of stuff. It was busy constructing all sorts of rebuttals to do with how ridiculous newspaper horoscopes were and the sort of statistical tricks they played on people. But gradually it
petered out, because it realized that the rest of her brain wasn’t listening. She had been completely stunned.

She had just been told, by a total stranger, something she’d kept completely secret for seventeen years.

She turned to look at Gail.

“I …”

She stopped.

A tiny security camera up behind the bar had turned to follow her movement. This completely flummoxed her. Most people would not have noticed it. It was not designed to be noticed. It was not designed to suggest that nowadays even an expensive and elegant hotel in New York couldn’t be sure that its clientele wasn’t suddenly going to pull a gun or not wear a tie. But carefully hidden though it was behind the vodka, it couldn’t deceive the finely honed instinct of a TV anchor person, which was to know exactly when a camera was turning to look at her.

“Is something wrong?” asked Gail.

“No, I … I have to say that you’ve rather astonished me,” said Tricia. She decided to ignore the security TV camera. It was just her imagination playing tricks with her because she had television so much on her mind today. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. A traffic-monitoring camera, she was convinced, had swung around to follow her as she walked past it, and a security camera in Bloomingdale’s had seemed to make a particular point of watching her trying on hats. She was obviously going dotty. She had even imagined that a bird in Central Park had been peering at her rather intently.

She decided to put it out of her mind and took a sip of her vodka. Someone was walking around the bar asking people if they were Mr. MacManus.

“Okay,” she said, suddenly blurting it out. “I don’t know how you worked it out, but …”

“I didn’t work it out, as you put it. I just listened to what you were saying.”

“What I lost, I think, was a whole other life.”

“Everybody does that. Every moment of every day. Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don’t notice. Some we do. Sounds like you noticed one.”

“Oh yes, I noticed,” said Tricia. “All right. Here it is. It’s very simple. Many years ago I met a guy at a party. He said he was from another planet and did I want to go along with him. I said, yes, okay. It was that kind of party. I said to him to wait while I went to get my bag and then I’d be happy to go off to another planet with him. He said I wouldn’t need my bag. I said he obviously came from a very backward planet or he’d know that a woman always needed to take her bag with her. He got a bit impatient, but I wasn’t going to be a complete pushover just because he said he was from another planet.

“I went upstairs. Took me a while to find my bag, and then there was someone else in the bathroom. Came down and he was gone.”

Tricia paused.