Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [37]
Arthur moved to Bartledan and, using some money he had made by selling some toenail clippings and spit to a DNA bank, he bought himself a room in the village featured in the picture. It was pleasant there. The air was balmy. The people looked like him and seemed not to mind him being there. They didn’t attack him with anything. He bought some clothes and a cupboard to put them in.
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.
At first he tried to sit and read. But the literature of Bartledan, famed though it was throughout this sector of the Galaxy for its subtlety and grace, didn’t seem to be able to sustain his interest. The problem was that it wasn’t actually about human beings after all. It wasn’t about what human beings wanted. The people of Bartledan were remarkably like human beings to look at, but when you said “Good evening” to one, he would tend to look around with a slight sense of surprise, sniff the air and say that, yes, he supposed that it probably was a goodish evening now that Arthur came to mention it.
“No, what I meant was to wish you a good evening,” Arthur would say, or rather, used to say. He soon learned to avoid these conversations. “I mean that I hope you have a good evening,” he would add.
More puzzlement.
“Wish?” the Bartledanian would say at last, in polite bafflement.
“Er, yes,” Arthur would then have said. “I’m just expressing the hope that …”
“Hope?”
“Yes.”
“What is hope?”
Good question, thought Arthur to himself, and retreated back to his room to think about things.
On the one hand he could only recognize and respect what he learned about the Bartledanian view of the Universe, which was that the Universe was what the Universe was, take it or leave it. On the other hand he could not help but feel that not to desire anything, not ever to wish or to hope, was just not natural.
Natural. There was a tricky word.
He had long ago realized that a lot of things that he had thought of as natural, like buying people presents at Christmas, stopping at red lights or falling at a rate of 32 feet per second, were just the habits of his own world and didn’t necessarily work the same way anywhere else; but not to wish-that really couldn’t be natural, could it? That would be like not breathing.
Breathing was another thing that the Bartledanians didn’t do, despite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. They just stood there. Occasionally they ran around and played netball and stuff (without ever wishing to win, though, of course-they would just play and whoever won, won), but they never actually breathed. It was, for some reason, unnecessary. Arthur quickly learned that playing netball with them was just too spooky. Though they looked like humans, and even moved and sounded like humans, they didn’t breathe and they didn’t wish for things.
Breathing and wishing for things, on the other hand, was just about all that Arthur seemed to do all day. Sometimes he would wish for things so much that his breathing would get quite agitated, and he would have to go and lie down for a bit. On his own. In his small room. So far from the world that had given birth to him that his brain could not even process the sort of numbers involved without just going limp.
He preferred not to think about it. He preferred just to sit and read-or at least he would prefer it if there was anything worth reading. But nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted anything. Not even a glass of water. Certainly, they would fetch one if they were thirsty, but if there wasn’t one available, they would think no more about it. He had just read an entire book in which the main character had, over the course of a week, done some work in his garden, played a great deal of netball, helped mend a road, fathered a child on his wife and then unexpectedly died of thirst just before the last chapter. In exasperation Arthur had combed his way back through the book and in the end had found a passing reference to some problem with the plumbing in chapter two. And that was it. So the guy dies. It just happens.