Part 18 (1/2)

'Hey. Come on. I'm trying to relax blowing company money here. Switch off that beam.'

'Very funny,' said a voice so sarcastic that even the auditorily challenged nut tree voles of Oglaroon could have detected its insincerity through their whiskers.

Ford swivelled on his chair and realized that the glow came from a person in the doorway.

'You seem a little green,' he commented.

Random scowled. 'So would you, if you'd spent the past while sealed in a tube with a cloud of viridigenous gas that was trying to make you happy.'

'Happiness? That would never do, would it?'

'Not when your mother is making out with that horrible alien right under your nose. Disgusting.'

Ford nodded with a wisdom beyond his ears. 'Ah, yes, the deBeouf Principle. I read about that in a thing with actual pages in it. A quaint thing where you flip the paper over.'

'A book,' said Random, and she may have glowered, it was hard to tell.

'That was it. I'm guessing that you're not too happy about this latest romantic development.'

Random stomped into the chamber, puff clouds of green dust rising from her shoulders with each footfall. 'No. I am not happy. He is so arrogant. Such a...'

'Pormwrangler?' offered Ford helpfully.

'Yes. Exactly.'

Ford's fingers tapped the air impatiently, eager to wrap themselves around a tankard handle. 'So, why don't you talk to Arthur about it? He's your biological patriarch.'

Random smiled bitterly. 'Arthur? I tried, but he's in love too, with his blasted computer.'

Even Ford was a little surprised by this. It wasn't that people didn't fall in love with machines he had a cousin who once spent two years shacked up with a sandwich toaster but Arthur was so uptight, so strait-laced, such a total Earthling.

'Love is love,' he said, falling back on his brochure knowledge from a peace spa he had once visited on Hawalius. 'Don't judge unless you want someone else to come along, possibly someone green, and judge you and you'll say come on, what's all this judging for, don't judge unless you want someone else to come along and judge you and so on.' Ford paused for breath. 'I've had a few beers so I'm paraphrasing.'

He winced, expecting to be smacked about the chops with the wet fish of cynicism, but Random was suddenly all sweetness.

'That's really good, Ford. Wise, you know. I am going to go back to my room to wash some of this junk off and think really hard about not judging people.'

Ford waved her off gallantly. 'No charge for that nugget, young missy. Any time you want a few words of wisdom, feel free to drop in on ol' Fordy. I've got tonnes of advice on the more offbeat areas that most people wouldn't have the first clue about. What to do just before a planet explodes, for example. I am the Universe's expert on that particular subject, believe me.'

And he returned to his screen, satisfied that his sometime role as Ford Prefect, Nurturer of Youth, had been fulfilled for at least this lifetime.

Parenting. Nothing to it. I don't know what all the fuss is about.

If Ford had been a little more tuned in and a little less zoned out, he might have remembered from his own youth that teenagers only ladled on the sweetness for one of three reasons. One: there was some shocking news that needed breaking, possibly involving pregnancy, substance abuse or a forbidden relations.h.i.+p. Two: they had developed a deeper level of sarcasm that was virtually undetectable except to another master of the form and that definitely wasn't the adult being sarcastigated. And three: a bit of sweet talk was a handy distraction when there was something the sweet-talking teenager needed to steal.

By the time Ford might have realized that his limitless credit card was missing, it had already been put back. And shortly before that, Random Dent had utilized uBid's retro-buy time window and purchased something from a long-dead seller. Something a little more sinister than three hundred gallons of Bounce-O-Jelly. With garlic.

Garlic in the jelly, not in the sinister item.

'I am the unluckiest man in the Universe,' Arthur Dent explained to the Tanngrisnir Tanngrisnir's computer. 'Bad things happen to me. I don't know why, but it's always been that way. My nan used to give me bull's-eyes and call me her little trouble magnet. Only she was from Manchester so she didn't say trouble trouble.'

The sparkling hologram, which sat cross-legged at the foot of the bunk, squinted while she rifled Arthur's memory.

'Oh,' she said. 'Bull's-eyes. For a nanosecond there I thought...'

'Wherever I go, things get blown up or blasted by angry aliens.'

'But not you,' said Fenchurch.

'What?'

'You don't get blown up or blasted. You've already had one long and healthy life, and now you're having another.'

Arthur frowned. 'Yes... but. There was the whole dressing gown and pyjamas period. How unlucky can you get? Not to mention being stranded on...'

'Most of your species are dead,' interjected the computer, just as Arthur's memory a.s.sured it Fenchurch would have done. 'It was a billion to one against you surviving, but you did. Twice. That seems pretty lucky. That's, like, fictional hero lucky.'

'I see your point, but still...'

'And you have a beautiful daughter.'

'True. But she's moody.'

'Really? That's odd for an adolescent. You are truly cursed.'

Arthur was stumped. How was he supposed to feel, if not put-upon? Then the holographic Fenchurch unsettled him further with a non-sequitur. Nothing as bizarre as 'Look! A monkey,' but pretty surprising nonetheless.

'Love can be a noun or a verb,' she said.

'I see,' said Arthur, then: 'What happened to luck?'

'Oh, that conversation was just superficial; this is what you really want to know.'

'What love is?'

'Yes. And why you can't seem to get over losing it.'

Arthur felt his heart beat faster on hearing this truth. 'Do you know? Can you tell me? And no numbers please.'

Fenchurch scratched her earlobe and sparks crackled at the contact. 'I can tell you what love means, dictionary-wise, all the synonyms and so forth. And I can tell you all about endorphins and synapses and muscle memory. But ardour's resonance in the heart is a mystery to me. I'm a computer, Arthur.'

Arthur hid his disappointment with the traditional brisk rubbing of hands and stiffening of upper lip.

'Of course. No problem.'

'I am made to live for ever but you are made to live.'

'Isn't that a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation slogan?' said Arthur, frowning.

Fenchurch heated two pixel cl.u.s.ters to affect a blush. 'It might be. All that means is that an entire company of advertisers think you will believe it.'