ments of all the major universities were acquiring more and
more elaborate equipment to probe and search the hearts of
distant galaxies, and then the very centre and the very edges of
the whole Universe, but when eventually it was tracked down it
turned out in fact to he all the stuff which the equipment had
been packed in.
There was quite a large quantity of missing matter in the
box, little soft round white pellets of missing matter, which
Random discarded for future generations of physicists to track
down and discover all over again once the findings of the
current generation of physicists had been lost and forgotten
about.
Out of the pellets of missing matter she lifted the featureless
black disk. She put it down on a rock beside her and sifted
amongst all the missing matter to see if there was anything
else, a manual or some attachments or something, but there
was nothing else at all. Just the black disk.
She shone the torch on it.
As she did so, cracks began to appear along its apparently
featureless surface. Random backed away nervously, but then
saw that the thing, whatever it was, was merely unfolding itself.
The process was wonderfully beautiful. It was extraordinarily
elaborate but also simple and elegant. It was like a piece of
self-opening origami, or a rosebud blooming into a rose in just
a few seconds.
Where just a few moments earlier there had been a smoothly
curved black disk there was now a bird. A bird, hovering there.
Random continued to back away from it, carefully and watch-
fully.
It was a little like a pikka bird, only rather smaller. That is
to say, in fact it was larger, or to be more exact, precisely the
same size or, at least, not less than twice the size. It was also
both a lot bluer and a lot pinker than pikka birds, while at the
same time being perfectly black.
There was also something very odd about it, which Random
couldn't immediately make out.
It certainly shared with pikka birds the impression it gave
that it was watching something that you couldn't see.
Suddenly it vanished.
Then, just as suddenly everything went black. Random drop-
ped into a tense crouch, feeling for the specially sharpened rock
in her pocket again. Then the blackness receded and rolled itself
up into a ball and then the blackness was the bird again. It hung
in the air in front of her, beating its wings slowly and staring at
her.
`Excuse me,' it said suddenly, `I just have to calibrate myself.
Can you hear me when I say this?'
`When you say what?' demanded Random.
`Good,' said the bird. `And can you hear me when I say
this?' It spoke this time at a much higher pitch.
`Yes, of course I can!' said Random.
`And can you hear me when I say this?' it said, this time
in a sepulchrally deep voice.
`Yes!'
There was then a pause.
`No obviously not,' said the bird after a few seconds. `Good,
well your hearing range is obviously between 20 and 16 KHz. So.
Is this comfortable for you?' it said in a pleasant light tenor. `No
uncomfortable harmonics screeching away in the upper register?
Obviously not. Good. I can use those as data channels. Now.
How many of me can you see?'
Suddenly the air was full of nothing but interlocking birds.
Random was well used to spending time in virtual realities, but
this was something far weirder than anything she had previously
encountered. It was as if the whole geometry of space was
redefined in seamless bird shapes.
Random gasped and flung her arms round her face, her
arms moving through bird-shaped space.
`Hmmm, obviously way too many,' said the bird. `How about
now?'
It concertina-ed into a tunnel of birds, as if it was a bird
caught between parallel mirrors, reflecting infinitely into the
distance.
`What are you?' shouted Random.
`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?'
`OK, 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? 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 hit complicated, and there's all sorts of stuff going on in
dimensions 13 to 22 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 mid-air 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 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-dimen-
sional image of her father looking startled about something.
About two miles away behind Random, her father, struggling
his way through the woods suddenly stopped. He was startled to
see an image of himself looking startled about something hanging
brightly in the rain-filled air about two miles away. About two
miles away some distance to the right of the direction in which
he was heading.
He was almost completely lost, convinced he was going to die
of cold and wet and exhaustion and beginning to wish he could
just get on with it. He had just been brought an entire golfing
magazine by a squirrel, as well, and his brain. was beginning to
howl and gibber.
Seeing a huge bright image of himself light up in the sky told
him that, on balance, he was probably right to howl and gibber
but probably wrong as far as the direction he was heading was
concerned.
Taking a deep breath, he turned and headed off towards
the inexplicable light show.
`OK, so what's that supposed to prove?' demanded Random. It
was the fact that the image was her father that had startled her
rather than the appearance of the image itself. She had seen her
first hologram when she was two months old and had been put in
it to play. She had seen her most recent one about half an hour
ago playing the March of the AnjaQantine Star Guard.
`Only that it's no more there or not there than the sheet
was,' said the bird. `It's just the interaction of water from the
sky moving in one direction, with light at frequencies your senses
can detect moving in another. It makes an apparently solid image
in your mind. But it's all just images in the Mish Mash. Here's
another one for you.'
`My mother!' said Random.
`No,' said the bird.
`I know my mother when I see her!'
The image was of a woman emerging from a spacecraft
inside a large, grey hangar-like building. She was being escorted
by a group of tall, thin purplish-green creatures. It was definite-
ly Random's mother. Well, almost definitely. Trillian wouldn't
have been walking quite so uncertainly in low gravity, or looking
around her at a boring old life-support environment with quite
such a disbelieving look on her face, or carrying such a quaint
old camera.
`She is part of the extent of your mother on the probability
axis,' said the bird Guide.
`I haven't the faintest idea what you mean.'
`Space, time and probability all have axes along which it
is possible to move.'
`Still dunno. Though I think... No. Explain.'
`I thought you wanted to go home.'
`Explain!'
`Would you like to see your home?'
`See it? It was destroyed!'
`It is discontinuous along the probability axis. Look!'
Something very strange and wonderful now swam into view
in the rain. It was a huge, bluish-greenish globe, misty and
cloud-covered, turning with. majestic slowness against a black,
starry background.
`Now you see it,' said the bird. `Now you don't.'
A little less than two miles away, now, Arthur Dent stood still
in his tracks. He could not believe what he could see, hanging
there, shrouded in rain, but brilliant and vividly real against the
night sky - the Earth. He gasped at the sight of it. Then, at the
moment he gasped, it disappeared again. Then it appeared again.
Then, and this was the bit that made him give up and stick straws
in his hair, it turned into a sausage.
Random was also startled by the sight of this huge, blue and
green and watery and misty sausage hanging above her. And
now it was a string of sausages, or rather it was a string of
sausages in which many of the sausages were missing. The whole
brilliant string turned and span in a bewildering dance in the
air and then gradually slowed, grew insubstantial and faded into
the glistening darkness of the night.
`What was that?' asked Random, in a small voice.
`A glimpse along the probability axis of a discontinuously
probable object.'
`I see.'
`Most objects mutate and change along their axis of prob-
ability, but the world of your origin does something slightly
different. It lies on what you might call a fault line in the
landscape of probability which means that at many probability
co-ordinates, the whole of it simply ceases to exist. It has an
inherent instability, which is typical of anything that lies within
what are usually designated the Plural sectors. Make sense?'
`No.'
`Want to go and see for yourself?'
`To... Earth?'
`Yes.'
`Is that possible?'
The bird Guide did not answer at once. It spread its wings
and, with an easy grace, ascended into the air and flew out into
the rain which, once again, was beginning to lighten.
It soared ecstatically up into the night sky, lights flashed
around it, dimensions dither
ed in its wake. It swooped and
turned and looped and turned again and came at last to rest
two feet in front of Random's face, its wings beating slowly and
silently.
It spoke to her again.
`Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space.
That's because of the filters through which you perceive it. But
I was built with no filters at all, which means I perceive the mish
mash which contains all possible universes but which has, itself,
no size at all. For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient
and omnipotent, extremely vain, and, what is more, I come in
a handy self-carrying package. You have to work out how much
of the above is true.'
A slow smile spread over Random's face.
`You bloody little thing. You've been winding me up!'
`As I said, anything is possible.'
Random laughed. `OK,' she said. `Let's try and go to Earth.
Let's go to Earth at some point on its, er...'