Mostly Harmless (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #5)

by Douglas Adams

Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

‘You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.’

‘Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.’

A door at the back of the room led to something Trillian couldn’t see because the door was closed.

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.

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.

‘You don’t have to answer, I can tell from watching you now. So. Am I your mother? Am I a rock? Do I seem huge, squishy and sinuously intertwined? No? How about now? Am I going backwards?’ For once the bird was perfectly still and steady. ‘No,’ said Random. ‘Well, I was in fact, I was moving backwards 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.’

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 bird Guide. ‘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 concerts.’ ‘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 do you see?’ The light shut off. ‘Nothing.’ ‘I’m doing exactly the same thing, but with ultra-violet light. You can’t see it.’ ‘So what’s the point of showing me something I can’t see?’ ‘So that you understand that just because you see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s there. And if you don’t see something it doesn’t mean to say it’s not there, it’s only what your senses bring to your attention.’ ‘I’m bored with this,’ said Random, and then gasped. Hanging in the rain was a giant and very vivid three-dimensional image of her father looking startled about something.

‘I leaped out of a high-rise office window.’ This cheered Arthur up. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Why don’t you do it again?’ ‘I did.’ ‘Hmmm,’ said Arthur, disappointed. ‘Obviously no good came of it.’

The ship had come sweeping in over a dark and sombre landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars on the mind of an abandoned child.