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 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 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.'
