Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [8]
“I’m perfectly happy,” said Gail Andrews.
“Oh,” said Tricia, not quite certain what to make of this. “It said in your message that you were not happy.”
“No,” said Gail Andrews. “I said in my message that I thought you were not happy, and I was just wondering why.”
Tricia felt as if she had been kicked in the back of the head. She blinked.
“What?” she said quietly.
“To do with the stars. You seemed very angry and unhappy about something to do with stars and planets when we were having our discussion, and it’s been bothering me, which is why I came to see if you were all right.”
Tricia stared at her. “Ms. Andrews-” she started, and then realized that the way she had said it sounded exactly angry and unhappy and rather undermined the protest she had been trying to make.
“Please call me Gail, if that’s okay.”
Tricia just looked bewildered.
“I know that astrology isn’t a science,” said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or-what’s that strange thing you British play?”
“Er, cricket? Self-loathing?”
“Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.
“So when you got so, I don’t know, so emotionally focused on stars and planets this morning, I began to think, she’s not angry about astrology, she really is angry and unhappy about actual stars and planets. People usually only get that unhappy and angry when they’ve lost something. That’s all I could think and I couldn’t make any more sense of it than that. So I came to see if you were okay.”
Tricia was stunned.
One part of her brain had already got started on all sorts of stuff. It was busy constructing all sorts of rebuttals to do with how ridiculous newspaper horoscopes were and the sort of statistical tricks they played on people. But gradually it petered out, because it realized that the rest of her brain wasn’t listening. She had been completely stunned.
She had just been told, by a total stranger, something she’d kept completely secret for seventeen years.
She turned to look at Gail.
“I…”
She stopped.
A tiny security camera up behind the bar had turned to follow her movement. This completely flummoxed her. Most people would not have noticed it. It was not designed to be noticed. It was not designed to suggest that nowadays even an expensive and elegant hotel in New York couldn’t be sure that its clientele wasn’t suddenly going to pull a gun or not wear a tie. But carefully hidden though it was behind the vodka, it couldn’t deceive the finely honed instinct of a TV anchor person, which was to know exactly when a camera was turning to look at her.
“Is something wrong?” asked Gail.
“No, I … I have to say that you’ve rather astonished me,” said Tricia. She decided to ignore the security TV camera. It was just her imagination playing tricks with her because she had television so much on her mind today. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. A traffic-monitoring camera, she was convinced, had swung around to follow her as she walked past it, and a security camera in Blooming-dale’s had seemed to make a particular