Mostly Harmless [51]
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 existence 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.'
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?
Extract from Practical Parenting in a Fractally
Demented Universe
"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 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