Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [62]
“We’ll come to that in a minute,” said the bird. “Just how many, please?”
“Well, you’re sort of …” Random gestured helplessly off into the distance.
“I see, still infinite in extent, but at least we’re homing in on the right dimensional matrix. Good. No, the answer is an orange and two lemons.”
“Lemons?”
“If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon, what do I have left?”
“Huh?”
“Okay, so you think that time flows that way, do you? Interesting. Am I still infinite?” it asked, ballooning this way and that in space. “Am I infinite now? How yellow am I?”
Moment by moment the bird was going through mind-mangling transformations of shape and extent.
“I can’t …” said Random, bewildered.
“You don’t have to answer, I can tell from watching you now. So. Am I your mother? Am I a rock? So I seem huge, squishy and sinuously intertwined? No? How about now? Am I going backward?”
For once the bird was perfectly still and steady.
“No,” said Random.
“Well, I was in fact, I was moving backward in time. Hmmm. Well, I think we’ve sorted all that out now. If you’d like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions thirteen to twenty-two that you really wouldn’t want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place. I can easily not say words like ‘damn’ if it offends you.”
“Say what you damn well like.”
“I will.”
“What the hell are you?” demanded Random.
“I am the Guide. In your universe I am your Guide. In fact I inhabit what is technically known as the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash, which means … well, let me show you.”
It turned in midair and swooped out of the cave, and then perched on a rock, just beneath an overhang, out of the rain, which was getting heavier again.
“Come on,” it said, “watch this.”
Random didn’t like being bossed around by a bird, but she followed it to the mouth of the cave anyway, still fingering the rock in her pocket.
“Rain,” said the bird. “You see? Just rain.”
“I know what rain is.”
Sheets of the stuff were sweeping through the night, moonlight sifting through it.
“So what is it?”
“What do you mean, what is it? Look, who are you? What were you doing in that box? Why have I spent a night running through the forest fending off demented squirrels to find that all I’ve got at the end of it is a bird asking me what rain is? It’s just water falling through the bloody air, that’s what it is. Anything else you want to know or can we go home now?”
There was a long pause before the bird answered, “You want to go home?”
“I haven’t got a home!” Random almost shocked herself, she screamed the words so loudly.
“Look into the rain …” said the birdGuide.
“I’m looking into the rain! What else is there to look at?”
“What do you see?”
“What do you mean, you stupid bird? I just see a load of rain. It’s just water, falling.”
“What shapes do you see in the water?”
“Shapes? There aren’t any shapes. It’s just, just …”
“Just a mish mash,” said the bird Guide.
“Yes …”
“Now what do you see?”
Just on the very edge of visibility a thin faint beam fanned out of the bird’s eyes. In the dry air beneath the overhang there was nothing to see. Where the beam hit the drops of rain as they fell through it, there was a flat sheet of light, so bright and vivid it seemed solid.
“Oh, great. A laser show,” said Random, fractiously. “Never seen one of those before, of course, except at about five million rock conceits.”
“Tell me what you see!”
“Just a flat sheet! Stupid bird.”
“There’s nothing there that wasn’t there before. I’m just using light to draw your attention to certain drops at certain moments. Now what