Volume 5 - Mostly Harmless Read online

  Tricia saw an angle here which she quickly sold to her producer.

  Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn’t must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.

  That must throw a few calculations out, mustn’t it?

  What about all those star charts and planetary motions and so on? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising? Wouldn’t the whole of astrology have to be rethought? Wouldn’t now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis? If we’d known about Rupert three years ago, might President Hudson have been eating the chocolate flavor on Thursday rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort of thing.

  Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.

  To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was, for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase of her life, a first-class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in astrophysics.

  As she was getting into the elevator, Tricia, slightly preoccupied, realized she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it was and there wasn’t anything she particularly needed in it. She let the door close behind her.

  Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had taught her anything it was this: Never go back for your bag.

  As the elevator went down she stared at the ceiling in a rather intent way. Anyone who didn’t know Tricia McMillan better would have said that that was exactly the way people sometimes stared upward when they were trying to hold back tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera mounted up in the corner. She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later, and went up to the reception desk again.

  “Now, I’m going to write this out,” she said, “because I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

  She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper, then her room number, then IN THE BAR and gave it to the receptionist, who looked at it.

  “That’s in case there’s a message for me. Okay?”

  The receptionist continued to look at it.

  “You want me to see if she’s in her room?” he said.

  Two minutes later, Tricia swiveled into the bar seat next to Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.

  “You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit up at the bar rather than demurely at a table,” she said.

  This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise.

  “Vodka?” said Gail.

  “Yes,” said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself from asking, How did you know? but Gail answered anyway.

  “I asked the barman,” she said, with a kindly smile.

  The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly across the glossy mahogany.

  “Thank you,” said Tricia, stirring it sharply.

  She didn’t know quite what to make out of all this sudden niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People in New York were not nice to each other without reason.

  “Ms. Andrews,” she said, firmly, “I’m sorry that you’re not happy. I know you probably feel I was a bit rough with you this morning, but astrology is, after all, just popular entertainment, which is fine. It’s part of showbiz and it’s a part that you have done well out of and good luck to you. It’s fun. It’s not a science though, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for one. I think that’s something we both managed to demonstrate very successfully together this morning, while at the same time generating some popular entertainment, which is what we both do for a living. I’m sorry if you have a problem with that.”

  “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 t
o 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 Bloomingdale’s had seemed to make a particular point of watching her trying on hats. She was obviously going dotty. She had even imagined that a bird in Central Park had been peering at her rather intently.

  She decided to put it out of her mind and took a sip of her vodka. Someone was walking around the bar asking people if they were Mr. MacManus.

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly blurting it out. “I don’t know how you worked it out, but …”

  “I didn’t work it out, as you put it. I just listened to what you were saying.”

  “What I lost, I think, was a whole other life.”

  “Everybody does that. Every moment of every day. Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don’t notice. Some we do. Sounds like you noticed one.”

  “Oh yes, I noticed,” said Tricia. “All right. Here it is. It’s very simple. Many years ago I met a guy at a party. He said he was from another planet and did I want to go along with him. I said, yes, okay. It was that kind of party. I said to him to wait while I went to get my bag and then I’d be happy to go off to another planet with him. He said I wouldn’t need my bag. I said he obviously came from a very backward planet or he’d know that a woman always needed to take her bag with her. He got a bit impatient, but I wasn’t going to be a complete pushover just because he said he was from another planet.

  “I went upstairs. Took me a while to find my bag, and then there was someone else in the bathroom. Came down and he was gone.”

  Tricia paused.

  “And …?” said Gail.

  “The garden door was open. I went outside. There were lights. Some kind of gleaming thing. I was just in time to see it rise up into the sky, shoot silently up through the clouds and disappear. That was it. End of story. End of one life, beginning of another. But hardly a moment of this life goes by that I don’t wonder about some other me. A me that didn’t go back for her bag. I feel like she’s out there somewhere and I’m walking in her shadow.”

  A member of the hotel staff was now going around the bar asking people if they were Mr. Miller. Nobody was.

  “You really think this … person was from another planet?” asked Gail.

  “Oh, certainly. There was the spacecraft. Oh, and also he had two heads.”

  “Two? Didn’t anybody else notice?”

  “It was a fancy dress party.”

  “I see …”

  “And he had a bird cage over it, of course. With a cloth over the cage. Pretended he had a parrot. He tapped on the cage and it did a lot of stupid ‘Pretty Polly’ stuff and squawking and so on. Then he pulled the cloth back for a moment and roared with laughter. There was another head in there, laughing along with him. It was a worrying moment, I can tell you.”

  “I think you probably did the right thing, dear, don’t you?” said Gail.

  “No,” said Tricia. “No, I don’t. And I couldn’t carry on doing what I was doing either. I was an astrophysicist, you see. You can’t be an astrophysicist properly if you’ve actually met someone from another planet who’s got a second head that pretends to be a parrot. You just can’t do it. I couldn’t at least.”

  “I can see it would be hard. And that’s probably why you tend to be a little hard on other people who talk what sounds like complete nonsense.”

  “Yes,” said Tricia. “I expect you’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever told this, by the way.”

  “I wondered. You married?”

  “Er, no. So hard to tell these days, isn’t it? But you’re right to ask because that was probably the reason. I came very close a few times, mostly because I wanted to have a kid. But every guy ended up asking why I was constantly looking over his shoulder. What do you tell someone? At one point I even thought I might just go to a sperm bank and take pot luck. Have somebody’s child at random.”

  “You can’t seriously do that, can you?”

  Tricia laughed. “Probably not. I never quite went and found out for real. Never quite did it. Story of my life. Never quite did the real thing. That’s why I’m in television, I guess. Nothing is real.”

  “Excuse me, lady, your name Tricia McMillan?”

  Tricia looked around in surprise. There was a man standing there in a chauffeur’s hat.

  “Yes,” she said, instantly pulling herself back together again.

  “Lady, I been looking for you for about an hour. Hotel said they didn’t have anybody of that name, but I checked back with Mr. Martin’s office and they said that this was definitely where you were staying. So I ask again, they still say they never heard of you, so I get them to page you anyway and they can’t find you. In the end I get the office to fax a picture of you through to the car and have a look myself.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “May be a bit late now, but do you want to go anyway?”

  Tricia was stunned.

  “Mr. Martin? You mean Andy Martin at NBS?”

  “That’s correct, lady. Screen test for ‘U.S./A.M.’ ”

  Tricia shot up out of her seat. She couldn’t even bear to think of all the messages she’d heard for Mr. MacManus and Mr. Miller.

  “Only we have to hurry,” said the chauffeur. “As I heard it Mr. Martin thinks it might be worth trying a British accent. His boss at the network is dead against the idea. That’s Mr. Zwingler, and I happen to know he’s flying out to the coast this evening because I’m the one has to pick him up and take him to the airport.”

  “Okay,” said Tricia, “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  “Okay, lady. It’s the big limo out the front.”

  Tricia turned back to Gail. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Go! Go!” said Gail. “And good luck. I’ve enjoyed meeting you.”

  Tricia made to reach for her bag for some cash.

  “Damn,” she said. She’d left it upstairs.

  “Drinks are on me,” insisted Gail. “Really. It’s been very interesting.”

  Tricia sighed.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about this morning and …”

  “Don’t say another word. I’m fine. It’s only astrology. It’s harmless. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Thanks.” On an impulse, Tricia gave her a hug.

  “You got everything?” said the chauffeur. “You don’t want to pick up your bag or anything?”

  “If there’s one thing that life’s taught me,” said Tricia, “it’s never go back for your bag.”

  Just a little over an hour later, Tricia sat on one of the pair of beds in her hotel room. For a few minutes she didn’t move. She just stared at her bag, which was sitting innocently on top of the other bed.

  In her hand was a note from Gail Andrews, saying, “Don’t be too disappointed. Do ring if you want to talk about it. If I were you I’d stay in at home tomorrow night. Get some rest. But don’t mind me, and don’t worry. It’s only astrology. It’s not the end of the world. Gail.”

  The chauffeur had been dead right. In fact the chauffeur seemed to know more about what was going on inside NBS than any other single person she had encountered in the organization. Martin had been keen, Zwingler had not. She had had her one shot at proving Martin right and she had blown it.

  Oh well. Oh well, oh well, oh well.

  Time to go home. Time to phone the airline and see if she could still get the red-eye back to Heathrow tonight. She reached for the big phone directory.

  Oh. First things first.

  She put down the directory again, picked up her handbag and took it through to the bathroom. She put it down and to
ok out the small plastic case that held her contact lenses, without which she had been unable to properly read either the script or the autocue.

  As she dabbed each tiny plastic cup into her eyes, she reflected that if there was one thing life had taught her, it was that there are some times when you do not go back for your bag and other times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasions.

  3

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is now well established that all known gods came into existence a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time.

  One encouraging thing the Guide does have to say on the subject of parallel universes is that you don’t stand the remotest chance of understanding it. You can therefore say “What?” and “Eh?” and even go cross-eyed and start to blither if you like without any fear of making a fool of yourself.

  The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel.

  It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you don’t try to realize that until a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true.

  The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.

  The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn’t mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home.