So long, and thanks for all the fish [50]
"You have one of those too?" he said to both of them.
"Yes." They both said it.
He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he held up the bowl to catch the light of the Californian sun.
The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to chime with the intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around the sand and upon them. He turned it, and turned it. They could see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words "So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish."
"Do you know," asked Wonko quietly, "what it is?"
They each shook their heads slowly, and with wonder, almost hypnotized by the flashing of the lightning shadows in the grey glass.
"It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko in a low quiet voice, "the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to."
He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked again at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.
"Have you ..." he said to Arthur, "what have you done with yours? May I ask you that?"
"Er, I keep a fish in it," said Arthur, slightly embarrassed. "I happened to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and, er, there was this bowl." He tailed off.
"You've done nothing else? No," he said, "if you had, you would know." He shook his head again.
"My wife kept wheatgerm in ours," resumed Wonko, with some new tone in his voice, "until last night ..."
"What," said Arthur slowly and hushedly, "happened last night?"
"We ran out of wheatgerm," said Wonko, evenly. "My wife," he added, "has gone to get some more." He seemed lost with his own thoughts for a moment.
"And what happened then?" said Fenchurch, in the same breathless tone.
"I washed it," said Wonko. "I washed it very carefully, very very carefully, removing every last speck of wheatgerm, then I dried it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully, turning it over and over. Then I held it to my ear. Have you ... have you held one to your ear?"
They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly.
"Perhaps," he said, "you should."
Chapter 32
The deep roar of the ocean.
The break of waves on further shores than thought can find.
The silent thunders of the deep.
And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, the half-articulated songs of thought.
Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together.
A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.
Waves of joy on — where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.
A fugue of voices now, clamouring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.
And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the flight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.
Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.
"This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell."
And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly grey bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.
Chapter 33
That night they stayed Outside the Asylum and watched TV from inside it.
"This is what I wanted you to see," said Wonko the Sane when the news came around again, "an old colleague of mine. He's over in your country running an investigation. Just watch."
It was a press conference.
"I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-Causal Meteorological Phenomenon."
"Can you tell us what that means?"
"I'm not altogether sure. Let's be straight