‘Battery,’ said the bird again and suddenly reality cracked and fell to pieces like a shattered mirror. The beach disappeared, the waves froze, crackled and evaporated. The last thing to go was the Rich Tea.
‘Bugger,’ muttered the old man as the final crumbs dissipated on his fingertips, then he sat back on a cushion in the room of sky that suddenly surrounded him. Someone would be coming soon, he was sure of it. From the dim caverns of his old memories, the names Ford and Prefect emerged like grey bats to associate themselves with the impending disaster.
Whenever the Universe fell apart, Ford Prefect was never far behind. Him and that accursed book of his. What was it called? Oh, yes. The Pitchforker’s Pride is a Fallacy.
That, or something very close to it.
The old man knew exactly what Ford Prefect would say.
Look on the bright side, old mate. At least you’re not lying down in front of a bulldozer, eh? At least we’re not being flushed out of a Vogon airlock. A room of sky is not too shabby, as it happens. It could be worse, a lot worse.
‘It will be a lot worse,’ said the old man with gloomy certainty. In his experience, things generally got worse, and on the rare occasion when things actually seemed to get better, it was only as a dramatic prelude to a cataclysmic worsening.
Oh, this room of sky seemed harmless enough, but what terrors lurked beyond its rippling walls? None that were not terrible, of that the old man was sure.
He poked a finger into one of the wall’s yielding surfaces and was reminded of tapioca pudding, which almost made the old man smile until he remembered that he had hated tapioca ever since a bullying head boy had filled his slippers with the stuff back in Eaton House Prep.
‘Blisters Smyth, you sneaky shit,’ he whispered.
His fingertip left a momentary hole in the clouds and through it the old man caught a glimpse of a double-height sash window beyond and, outside the window, could that be a death ray?
The old man rather feared that it was.
All this time, he thought. All this time and nothing has happened.
Ford Prefect was living the dream, providing the dream included residence in one of Han Wavel’s ultra-luxury, five-supergiant-rated, naturally eroded hedonistic resorts, filling one’s waking hours with permanent damage amounts of exotic cocktails and liaisons with exotic females of various species.
And the best bit: the expense of this whole self-indulgent and possibly life-shortening package would be taken care of by his Dine-O-Charge card, which had no credit limit thanks to a little creative computer tinkering on his last visit to The Hitchhiker’s Guide offices.
If a younger Ford Prefect had been handed a blank page and asked, in his own time, to write a short paragraph detailing his dearest wishes for his own future, the only word he might have amended in the above was the adverb ‘possibly’. Probably.
The resorts of Han Wavel were so obscenely luxurious that it was said a Brequindan male would sell his mother for a night in the Sandcastle Hotel’s infamous vibro-suite. This is not as shocking as it sounds, as parents are accepted currency on Brequinda and a nicely moisturized septuagenarian with a good set of teeth can be traded for a mid-range family moto-carriage.
Ford would perhaps not have sold either parent to finance his sojourn at the Sandcastle, but there was a bi-cranial cousin who was often more trouble than he was worth.
Every night, Ford rode the fleshevator to his penthouse, croaked at the door to grant himself entry, then made time to look himself in the bloodshot eyes before passing out face down in the basin.
This is the last night, he swore nightly. Surely my body will revolt and collapse in on itself?
What would his obituary say in The Hitchhiker’s Guide? Ford wondered. It would be brief, that was for sure. A couple of words. Perhaps the same two words he had used to describe Earth all those years ago.
Mostly harmless.
Earth. Hadn’t something rather sad happened on Earth that he should be thinking about? Why were there some things he could remember, and others that were about as clear as a hazy morning on the permanently fogbound Misty Plains of Nephologia?
It was generally at about this maudlin stage that the third Gargle Blaster squeezed the last drop of consciousness from Ford’s over-juiced brain and he would giggle twice, squawk like a rodeo chicken and execute a near perfect forward tumble into the nearest bathroom receptacle.
And yet, every morning when he lifted his head from the en suite basin (if he was lucky), Ford found himself miraculously revitalized. No hangover, no dragon breath, not even a burst blood vessel in either sclera to bear witness to the previous night’s excesses.
‘You are a froody dude, Ford Prefect,’ he invariably told himself. ‘Yes, you are.’
There is something fishy going on here, his rarely heard from subconscious insisted.
Fishy?
So long and thanks for all the…
Wasn’t there something about dolphins? Not fish, true, but they inhabited the same… habitat.
Think, you idiot! Think! You should be dead a hundred times over. You have consumed enough cocktails to pickle not only yourself but several alternate versions of yourself. How are you still alive?
‘Alive and froody,’ Ford would say, often winking at himself in the mirror, marvelling at how lustrous his red hair had become, how pronounced his cheekbones. And he seemed to be growing a chin. An actual chiselled chin.
‘This place is doing me good,’ he told his reflection. ‘All the photo-leech wraps and the irradiated colono-lemming treatments are really boosting my system. I think I owe it to Ford Prefect to stay another while.’
And so he did.
On the last day, Ford charged an underwater massage to his credit card. The masseur was a Damogranian Pom Pom Squid with eleven tentacles and a thousand suckers which pummelled Ford’s back and cleaned out his pores with a series of whiplash tapotement moves. Pom Pom Squids were generally hugely overqualified for their work in the spa industry, but were tempted away from their umpteenth doctorates by the lure of high salaries, plankton-rich pools and the chance of massaging a talent scout for the music industry and maybe getting themselves a record deal.
‘Have you done any talent-scouting, friend?’ asked the squid, though he didn’t sound hopeful.
‘Nope,’ replied Ford, bubbles streaming from his plexiglass helmet, face shining orange in the pleasant glow of rock phosphorescence. ‘Though I once owned a pair of blue suede shoes, which should count for something. I still own one – the other is closer to mauve, due to it being a copy.’
The squid nipped at passing plankton as he spoke, which made conversation a little disjointed.
‘I don’t know if…’
‘If what?’
‘I hadn’t finished.’
‘It’s just that you stopped speaking.’
‘There was a glint. I thought it was lunch.’
‘You eat glints?’
‘No. Not actual glints.’
‘Good, because glints are baby gloonts, and they’re poisonous.’
‘I know. I was merely saying that…’
‘More glints?’
‘Precisely. You’re sure you’re not a talent scout then, or an agent?’
‘Nope.’
‘Oh, for zark’s sake,’ swore the squid, a little unprofessionally. ‘Two years I’ve worked here. Talent scouts and agents coming out of your suckers, they promised. Not one. Not bloody one. I was studying advanced kazoo, you know.’
Ford couldn’t resist a lead-in like that. ‘Advanced kazoo? How advanced can kazoo studies be?’
The squid was wounded. ‘Pretty advanced when you can play a thousand of them at the same time. I was in a quartet. Can you imagine?’
Ford gave it a go. He closed his eyes, enjoyed the whup-pop of the suckers on his back and imagined four thousand kazoos playing in perfect sub-aquatic harmony.
Some time later the squid enveloped Ford in half a dozen tentacles and gentl
y flipped him over. Ford opened one eye to read the squid’s badge.
I am Barzoo, read the tag. Use me as you will.
And underneath in smaller print:
I am allergic to rubber.
‘So, Barzoo. What kind of stuff did you play?’
The masseur got his tentacles a-pumping before he answered, whipping up a flurry of currents.
‘Old songs mostly. Covers. You ever hear of Hotblack Desiato?’
I have heard that name, Ford realized, but he couldn’t quite pin the memory down. Every day things got a little fuzzier.
‘Hotblack Desiato. Wasn’t he dead for a while?’
Barzoo cocked his head, thinking about this. The squid’s beak hung open, ignoring the tiny streaks of plankton flashing by.
‘Hey, if you can’t remember, don’t worry about it. I’m having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I’ve been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.’
The squid did not respond and its tentacles rested heavily on Ford’s torso like old rope.
Ford hoped that Barzoo had not suddenly died, and if the squid had passed on to the energy stage would the suckers lose their suck, or go into some kind of death-suck mode? Ford had no desire to spend the rest of his holiday having tentacles surgically removed from his torso.
Then Barzoo blinked.
‘Hey, buddy,’ sighed Ford, bubbles spiralling from his helmet. ‘Welcome back. For a second there, I thought…’
‘Battery,’ said the squid, beak clicking on the Ts. ‘Battery.’
I never noticed before, thought Ford, but that squid looks a lot like a bird.
Then the underwater massage cave dissolved and Ford Prefect found himself deposited in a room composed of blue sky.
A familiar figure sat in the opposite corner.
‘Ah,’ said Ford, remembering.
Guide Note: Remembering is generally a two-stage process involving dialogue between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain. The subconscious opens proceedings by throwing up the relevant memory, an act which releases a spurt of self-congratulatory endorphins.
‘Well done, matey,’ says the consciousness. ‘That memory is really useful right now, and I couldn’t remember where I’d put it.’
‘You and me, pal,’ says the subconscious, delighted to have its contribution acknowledged for once. ‘We’re in this together.’
Then the conscious reviews the memory in its in-tray and sends a message down to the sphincter telling it to prepare for the worst.
‘Why did you remind me of this?’ it rails against the subconscious. ‘This is awful. Terrible. I didn’t want to remember this. Why the zark do you think I shoved it to the back of my brain?’
‘That’s the last time I help you out,’ mutters the subconscious and retreats to the darker sections of itself where nasty thoughts are housed. ‘I don’t need you,’ it tells itself. ‘I can make myself another personality out of these things you’ve discarded.’ And so the seeds of schizophrenia are sown with kernels of childhood bullying, neglect, low self-esteem and prejudice.
Luckily, Betelgeuseans don’t have much of a subconscious, so that’s all right then.
‘Ah,’ said Ford again, followed quickly by, ‘Crap.’
He stepped gingerly across the floor of sky, noticing with a jolt of surprise that one of his legs flickered slightly for a moment.
I’m not real, he realized, which was enough to stick a pin in his permanently buoyant mood, but he recovered quickly, something which the room’s other occupant didn’t seem to have managed just yet.
‘Look on the bright side, old mate,’ he called to the Earthman. ‘At least you’re not lying down in front of a bulldozer, eh? At least we’re not being flushed out of a Vogon airlock, remember that? A room of sky is not too shabby, as it happens. It could be worse, a lot worse.’
And it shortly will be if I’m right about what’s going on here, thought Ford, but he didn’t voice this opinion. Arthur looked as though he’d had quite enough bad news for one day.
Inter-planetary news reporter Trillian Astra spent a few anxious moments in the press bathroom before heading into the auditorium for possibly the biggest interview of her life. In the course of a celebrated career, Trillian had spent a year undercover in prosthetics working as a Vogon clerk in the Megabrantis Cluster. She had lost her left foot to frostbite when mine raiders on Orion Beta had ramraided a madranite shaft, and more recently she had been attacked by a holistic orthodontist when she had the temerity to question the effectiveness of tooth-straightening chants.
The Galaxy knew Trillian’s name. At the height of her career she was feared by shady politicians, movie moguls and pregnant single celebrities from Alpha Centauri to Viltvodle VI, but on this day she felt the spectre of fear at her own shoulder.
Galactic President Random Dent. Her daughter. Simulcast from the University of Maximegalon live to an audience of five hundred billion.
She was nervous. No, more than that. She was terrified. Trillian had not seen her daughter since…
My God, she realized. I cannot remember precisely the last time I saw Random.
Trillian tried to calm herself with ritual.
‘You’re looking good for an old bird,’ she said to the mirror.
‘Do you really tink this, dahling?’ said the mirror, obviously highly offended by what paraded before its sensors. ‘If this is good, then you are having the low standards.’
Trillian bristled. ‘How dare you? If you had seen what I have seen, if you had been through what I’ve been through, then I think you might agree that I look pretty damn good.’
The mirror’s sighs rippled the eight gel speakers mounted in its frame.
‘Enough with the history lesson, dahling. I don’t factor in the past, I just comment on the present. And right now, let me tell you, you look like Eccentrica Gallumbits in her third cycle. And believe me, honey, by that old whore’s third cycle things were mostly liquid and gas. If I were you, I’d buy myself a good towel and a bathrobe and just…’
Trillian reached across and pounded her fist against the mirror’s mute button.
When did they start to give mirrors character traits? She could remember when only top-end androids and the occasional very special door had the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s Genuine People Personality feature.
Maybe Trillian didn’t want to hear what the mirror had to say, but she could admit to herself that it was right.
She did look old. Ancient, in fact.
That’s because I am zarking ancient. A hundred and five earth years old. What’s left of me.
Over the years Tricia McMillan had been chipped away by her job as Sub-Etha reporter and soon only Trillian would remain. This was not simply a metaphorical statement: Trillian Astra had always been prepared to sacrifice everything for the network – her friends, family, various body parts.
She lost the foot on Orion Beta during the mining hostilities. Seventy per cent of her epidermis was seared off by a plasma splash on the front line at the Carfrax Gamma Caves. Left hand and forearm were mangled by a desert crawler tread during the Dordellis Wars and her right eye poked out by a flag on a little pointy stick during a Wango-Pango teeniebop ice-capade on Gagrakacka.
So, what was left of Tricia McMillan was an original brain (with added nu-fluid), one rebuffed eye, a couple of cheeks (one buttock, one facial), an assortment of minor bones and two and a half litres of human blood. The other three litres were not technically blood at all but tears harvested from a hive of Silver-Tongued Devils, small mammals indigenous to the Hastromil system. They are relentlessly exploited because of the usefulness of absolutely every part of their beings, from their hinged silver tongues to their very thought waves, which can be harnessed to an aerial and used to boost video signal reception if you live down a hole. The same philosophers who cite the Babel fish as proof that God doesn’t exist also cite the unfortunately init
ialled STD as proof that Satan does, an argument which even a potato with a charge running through it could see undermines their initial point. But what do they care? Head doctors love controversy.
Ironically, Trillian was in Hastromil to cover a rally to protect the STD when she was run over by a Silver Tongue float, constructed even more ironically from Silver Tongue hides, which irony she then trumped by receiving a Silver Tongue transfusion while wearing a ‘Protect the Silver Tongue’ T-shirt. It was later reported, by Trillian herself, that all this localized irony overload had caused the death of eleven empaths attending the rally. Twelve, if the empath known to be already depressed was added to the statistic.
Trillian smooshed the plaskin on her cheek. It was smooth, but a little over-stretched. The guy at the checkout had promised that her face would loosen out with wear. But it never had. On bad days, Trillian thought her face looked like a skull pushed into a balloon.
A network executive had once described her as: a slim, darkish humanoid, with long waves of black hair, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes.
Not any more.
Today was one of those bad days.
Random. After all these years.
Every time she looked into her daughter’s eyes, it was like staring into pools of her own guilt.
Trillian slapped her palm against the mirror.
‘Ow! Hey!’ said the mirror, overriding the mute.
Trillian ignored it.
She needed to pull herself together. She had at one time been the Galaxy’s most respected reporter and that was an achievement. She would force her regret into its box down in the pit of her stomach and go do her job.
Trillian plucked at a strand in her helmet of coiffed simhair, squared her shoulders and walked into the auditorium to interview the daughter that had been conceived in a lograv fertility satellite clinic near Barnard’s Star.
Trillian shuddered. As if morning sickness had not been bad enough without lo-grav thrown into the mix.
Random had every right to feel displaced: her father was a test tube, her home planet, insofar as she had one, had been destroyed in several dimensions and her mother had taken one look at her and decided to vigorously pursue a career that would take her far from home for long periods.