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  She was alone again, but trembling with confusion. She got unsteadily to her feet, picked up her rock and her parcel, then paused and picked up the scrap of paper as well. It was so soggy and dilapidated it was hard to make out what it was. It seemed just to be a fragment of an in-flight magazine.

  Just as Random was trying to understand exactly what it was that this all meant, a man walked out into the clearing in which she was standing, raised a vicious-looking gun and shot her.

  Arthur was thrashing around hopelessly two or three miles behind her, on the upward side of the hill. Within minutes of setting out he had gone back again and equipped himself with a lamp. Not an electric one. The only electric light in the place was the one that Random had brought with her. This was a kind of dim hurricane lamp: a perforated metal canister from Strinder's forge, which contained a reservoir of inflammable fish oil, a wick of knotted dried grass and was wrapped in a translucent film made from dried membranes from the gut of a Perfectly Normal Beast.

  It had now gone out.

  Arthur jiggled around with it in a thoroughly pointless kind of a way for a few seconds. There was clearly no way he was going to get the thing suddenly to burst into flame again in the middle of a rainstorm, but it's impossible not to make a token effort. Reluctantly he threw the thing aside.

  What to do? This was hopeless. He was absolutely sodden, his clothes heavy and billowing with the rain, and now he was lost in the dark as well.

  For a brief second he was lost in the blinding light, and then he was lost in the dark again.

  The sheet of lightning had at least shown him that he was very close to the brow of the hill. Once he had breasted that he would . . . well, he wasn't certain what he would do. He'd have to work that out when he got there.

  He limped forward and upwards.

  A few minutes later he knew that he was standing panting at the top. There was some kind of dim glow in the distance below him. He had no idea what it was, and indeed he hardly liked to think. It was the only thing he had to make towards, though, so he started to make his way, stumbling, lost and frightened towards it.

  The flash of lethal light passed straight through Random and, about two seconds later, so did the man who had shot it. Other than that he paid her no attention whatsoever. He had shot someone standing behind her, and when she turned to look. he was kneeling over the body and going through its pockets.

  The tableau froze and vanished. It was replaced a second later by a giant pair of teeth framed by immense and perfectly glossed red lips. A huge blue brush appeared out of nowhere and started foamily to scrub at the teeth, which continued to hang there gleaming in the shimmering curtain of rain.

  Random blinked at it twice before she got it.

  It was a commercial. The guy who had shot her was part of a holographic in-flight movie. She must now be very close to where the ship had crashed. Obviously some of its systems were more indestructible than others.

  The next half-mile of the journey was particularly trouble-some. Not only did she have the cold and the rain and the night to contend with, but also the fractured and thrashing remains of the ship's on-board entertainment system. Spaceships and jetcars and helipods crashed and exploded continuously around her, illuminating the night, villainous people in strange hats smug-gled dangerous drugs through her, and the combined orchestra and chorus of the Hallapolis State Opera performed the closing March of the AnjaQantine Star Guard from Act IV of Rizgar's Blamwellamum of Woont in a little glade somewhere off to her left.

  And then she was standing on the lip of a very nasty looking and bubbly-edged crater. There was still a faint warm glow coming from what would otherwise have looked like an enormous piece of caramelised chewing gum in the centre of the pit: the melted remains of a great spaceship.

  She stood looking at it for a longish while, and then at last started to walk along and around the edge of the crater. She was no longer certain what she was looking for, but kept moving anyway, keeping the horror of the pit to her left.

  The rain was beginning to ease off a little, but it was still extremely wet, and since she didn't know what it was that was in the box, whether it was perhaps something delicate or dam-ageable, she thought she ought to find somewhere reasonably dry to open it. She hoped she hadn't already damaged it by dropping it.

  She played her torch around the surrounding trees, which were thin on the ground here, and mostly charred and broken. In the middle distance she thought she could see a jumbled outcrop of rock which might provide some shelter, and she started to pick her way towards it. All around she found the detritus that had been ejected from the ship as it broke up, before the final fireball.

  After she had moved two or three hundred yards from the edge of the crater she came across the tattered fragments of some fluffy pink material, sodden, muddied and drooping amongst the broken trees. She guessed, correctly, that this must be the remains of the escape cocoon that had saved her father's life. She went and looked at it more closely, and then noticed something close to it on the ground, half covered in mud.

  She picked it up and wiped the mud off it. It was some kind of electronic device the size of a small book. Feebly glowing on its cover, in response to her touch, were some large friendly letters. They said DON'T PANIC. She knew what this was. It was her father's copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

  She felt instantly reassured by it, turned her head up to the thundery sky and let some rain wash over her face and into her mouth.

  She shook her head and hurried on towards the rocks. Clamber-ing up and over them she almost immediately found the perfect thing. The mouth of a cave. She played her torch into its inte-rior. It seemed to be dry and safe. Picking her way carefully, she walked in. It was quite spacious, but didn't go that deep. Exhausted and relieved she sat on a convenient rock, put the box down in front of her and started immediately to open it.

  Chapter 17

  For a long period of time there was much speculation and controversy about where the so-called 'missing matter' of the Universe had got to. All over the Galaxy the science depart-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 be 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 dropped 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 bit 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 tha
t 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 definitely 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.

  'So who is it?' demanded Random.

  '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.