So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (10 page)

"It was very odd," she said, much as one of the pursuing Egyptians might have said that the behaviour of the Red Sea when Moses waved his rod at it was a little on the strange side.
"Very odd," she repeated, "for days before, the strangest feeling had been building in me, as if I was going to give birth. No, it wasn't like that in fact, it was more as if I was being connected into something, bit by bit. No, not even that; it was as if the whole of the Earth, through me, was going to ..."
"Does the number," said Arthur gently, "forty-two mean anything to you at all?"
"What? No, what are you talking about?" exclaimed Fenchurch.
"Just a thought," murmured Arthur.
"Arthur, I mean this, this is very real to me, this is serious."
"I was being perfectly serious," said Arthur. "It's just the Universe I'm never quite sure about."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Tell me the rest of it," he said. "Don't worry if it sounds odd. Believe me, you are talking to someone who has seen a lot of stuff," he added, "that is odd. And I don't mean biscuits."
She nodded, and seemed to believe him. Suddenly, she gripped his arm.
"It was so simple," she said, "so wonderfully and extraordinarily simple, when it came."
"What was it?" said Arthur quietly.
"Arthur, you see," she said, "that's what I no longer know. And the loss is unbearable. If I try to think back to it, it all goes flickery and jumpy, and if I try too hard, I get as far as the teacup and I just black out."
"What?"
"Well, like your story," she said, "the best bit happened in a cafe. I was sitting there, having a cup of tea. This was after days of this build up, the feeling of becoming connected up. I think I was buzzing gently. And there was some work going on at a building site opposite the cafe, and I was watching it through the window, over the rim of my teacup, which I always find is the nicest way of watching other people working. And suddenly, there it was in my mind, this message from somewhere. And it was so simple. It made such sense of everything. I just sat up and thought, `Oh! Oh, well that's all right then.' I was so startled I almost dropped my teacup, in fact I think I did drop it. Yes," she added thoughtfully, "I'm sure I did. How much sense am I making?"
"It was fine up to the bit about the teacup."
She shook her head, and shook it again, as if trying to clear it, which is what she was trying to do.
"Well that's it," she said. "Fine up to the bit about the teacup. That was the point at which it seemed to me quite literally as if the world exploded."
"What ...?"
"I know it sounds crazy, and everybody says it was hallucinations, but if that was hallucinations then I have hallucinations in big screen 3D with 16-track Dolby Stereo and should probably hire myself out to people who are bored with shark movies. It was as if the ground was literally ripped from under my feet, and ... and ..."
She patted the grass lightly, as if for reassurance, and then seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say.
"And I woke up in hospital. I suppose I've been in and out ever since. And that's why I have an instinctive nervousness," she said, "of sudden startling revelations that's everything's going to be all right." She looked up at him.
Arthur had simply ceased to worry himself about the strange anomalies surrounding his return to his home world, or rather had consigned them to that part of his mind marked "Things to think about - Urgent." "Here is the world," he had told himself. "Here, for whatever reason, is the world, and here it stays. With me on it." But now it seemed to go swimmy around him, as it had that night in the car when Fenchurch's brother had told him the silly stories about the CIA agent in the reservoir. The trees went swimmy. The lake went swimmy, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be alarmed by because a grey goose had just landed on it. The geese were having a great relaxed time and had no major answers they wished to know the questions to.
"Anyway," said Fenchurch, suddenly and bright ly and with a wide- eyed smile, "there is something wrong with part of me, and you've got to find out what it is. We'll go home."
Arthur shook his head.
"What's the matter?" she said.
Arthur had shaken his head, not to disagree with her suggestion which he thought was a truly excellent one, one of the world's great suggestions, but because he was just for a moment trying to free himself of the recurring impression he had that just when he was least expecting it the Universe would suddenly leap out from behind a door and go boo at him.
"I'm just trying to get this entirely clear in my mind," said Arthur, "you say you felt as if the Earth actually ... exploded ..."
"Yes. More than felt."
"Which is what everybody else says," he said hesitantly, "is hallucinations?"
"Yes, but Arthur that's ridiculous. People think that if you just say `hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will just go away. It's just a word, it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't explain why the dolphins disappeared."
"No," said Arthur. "No," he added thoughtfully. "No," he added again, even more thoughtfully. "What?" he said at last.
"Doesn't explain the dolphins disappearing."
"No," said Arthur, "I see that. Which dolphins do you mean?"
"What do you mean which dolphins? I'm talking about when all the dolphins disappeared."
She put her hand on his knee, which made him realize that the tingling going up and down his spine was not her gently stroking his back, and must instead be one of the nasty creepy feelings he so often got when people were trying to explain things to him.
"The dolphins?"
"Yes."
"All the dolphins," said Arthur, "disappeared?"
"Yes."
"The dolphins? You're saying the dolphins all disappeared? Is this," said Arthur, trying to be absolutely clear on this point, "what you're saying?"
"Arthur where have you been for heaven's sake? The dolphins all disappeared on the same day I ..."
She stared him intently in his startled eyes.
"What ...?"
"No dolphins. All gone. Vanished."
She searched his face.
"Did you really not know that?"
It was clear from his startled expression that he did not.
"Where did they go?" he asked.
"No one knows. That's what vanished means." She paused. "Well, there is one man who says he knows about it, but everyone says he lives in California," she said, "and is mad. I was thinking of going to see him because it seems the only lead I've got on what happened to me."
She shrugged, and then looked at him long and quietly. She lay her hand on the side of his face.
"I really would like to know where you've been," she said. "I think something terrible happened to you then as well. And that's why we recognized each other."
She glanced around the park, which was now being gathered into the clutches of dusk.
"Well," she said, "now you've got someone you can tell."
Arthur slowly let out a long year of a sigh.
"It is," he said, "a very long story."
Fenchurch leaned across him and drew over her canvas bag.
"Is it anything to do with this?" she said. The thing she took out of her bag was battered and travelworn as it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half-buried in the marbled sands that fringe the heady vapoured oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and since its makers had thought that these were exactly the sorts of things that might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a sturdy plastic cover and written on it, in large friendly letters, the words "Don't Panic".
"Where did you get this?" said Arthur, startled, taking it from her.
"Ah," she said, "I thought it was yours. In Russell's car that night. You dropped it. Have you been to many of these places?"
Arthur drew the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy from its cover. It was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some buttons till the screen flared with text.
"A few," he said.
"Can we go to them?"
"What? No," said Arthur abruptly, then relented, but relented warily. "Do you want to?" he said, hoping for the answer no. It was an act of great generosity on his part not to say, "You don't want to, do you?" which expects it.
"Yes," she said. "I want to know what the message was that I lost, and where it came from. Because I don't think," she added, standing up and looking round the increasing gloom of the park, "that it came from here."
"I'm not even sure," she further added, slipping her arm around Arthur's waist, "that I know where here is."
Chapter 21
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, as has been remarked before often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing. It is, essentially, as the title implies, a guide book. The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable portion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
This is:
Change.
Read it through again and you'll get it.
The Galaxy is a rapidly changing place. There is, frankly, so much of it, every bit of which is continually on the move, continually changing. A bit of a nightmare, you might think, for a scrupulous and conscientious editor diligently striving to keep this massively detailed and complex electronic tome abreast of all the changing circumstances and conditions that the Galaxy throws up every minute of every hour of every day, and you would be wrong. Where you would be wrong would be in failing to realize that the editor, like all the editors of the Guide has ever had, has no real grasp of the meanings of the words "scrupulous", "conscientious" or "diligent", and tends to get his nightmares through a straw.
Entries tend to get updated or not across the Sub-Etha Net according to if they read good.
Take for example, the case of Brequinda on the Foth of Avalars, famed in myth, legend and stultifyingly dull tri-d mini-serieses as home of the magnificent and magical Fuolornis Fire Dragon.
In Ancient days, when Fragilis sang and Saxaquine of the Quenelux held sway, when the air was sweet and the nights fragrant, but everyone somehow managed to be, or so they claimed, though how on earth they could have thought that anyone was even remotely likely to believe such a preposterous claim what with all the sweet air and fragrant nights and whatnot is anyone's guess, virgins, it was not possible to heave a brick on Brequinda in the Foth of Avalars without hitting at least half a dozen Fuolornis Fire Dragons.
Whether you would want to do that is another matter.
Not that Fire Dragons weren't an essentially peace-loving species, because they were. They adored it to bits, and this wholesale adoring of things to bits was often in itself the problem: one so often hurts the one one loves, especially if one is a Fuolornis Fire Dragon with breath like a rocket booster and teeth like a park fence. Another problem was that once they were in the mood they often went on to hurt quite a lot of the ones that other people loved as well. Add to all that the relatively small number of madmen who actually went around the place heaving bricks, and you end up with a lot of people on Brequinda in the Foth of Avalars getting seriously hurt by dragons.
But did they mind? They did not.
Were they heard to bemoan their fate? No.
The Fuolornis Fire Dragons were revered throughout the lands of Brequinda in the Foth of valors for their savage beauty, their noble ways and their habit of biting people who didn't revere them.
Why was this?
The answer was simple.
Sex.
There is, for some unfathomed reason, something almost unbearably sexy about having huge fire-breathing magical dragons flying low about the sky on moonlit nights which were already dangerously on the sweet and fragrant side.
Why this should be so, the romance-besotted people of Brequinda in the Foth of Avalars could not have told you, and would not have stopped to discuss the matter once the effect was up and going, for no sooner would a flock of half a dozen silk-winged leather-bodied Fuolornis Fire Dragons heave into sight across the evening horizon than half the people of Brequinda are scurrying off into the woods with the other half, there to spend a busy breathless night together and emerge with the first rays of dawn all smiling and happy and still claiming, rather endearingly, to be virgins, if rather flushed and sticky virgins.
Pheromones, some researchers said.
Something sonic, others claimed.
The place was always stiff with researchers trying to get to the bottom of it all and taking a very long time about it.
Not surprisingly, the Guide's graphically enticing description of the general state of affairs on this planet has proved to be astonishingly popular amongst hitch-hikers who allow themselves to be guided by it, and so it has simply never been taken out, and it is therefore left to latter-day travellers to find out for themselves that today's modern Brequinda in the City State of Avalars is now little more than concrete, strip joints and Dragon Burger Bars.
Chapter 22
The night in Islington was sweet and fragrant.
There were, of course, no Fuolornis Fire Dragons about in the alley, but if any had chanced by they might just as well have sloped off across the road for a pizza, for they were not going to be needed.
Had an emergency cropped up while they were still in the middle of thei r American Hots with extra anchovy they could always have sent across a message to put Dire Straits on the stereo, which is now known to have much the same effect.
"No," said Fenchurch, "not yet."
Arthur put Dire Straits on the stereo. Fenchurch pushed ajar the upstairs front door to let in a little more of the sweet fragrant night air. They both sat on some of the furniture made out of cushions, very close to the open bottle of champagne.
"No," said Fenchurch, "not till you've found out what's wrong with me, which bit. But I suppose," she added very, very, very quietly, "that we may as well start with where your hand is now."
Arthur said, "So which way do I go?"
"Down," said Fenchurch, "on this occasion."
He moved his hand.
"Down," she said, "is in fact the other way."
"Oh yes."
Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff beer - which is not strictly relevant at this point since the record hadn't yet got to that bit, but there will be too much else going on when it does, and furthermore the chronicler does not intend to sit here with a track list and a stopwatch, so it seems best to mention it now while things are still moving slowly.