He opened his eyes.
The strange thing was pulsating irritably at him, tapping some kind of pseudopodia on the desk.
Arthur shook his head and looked at the next sheet of paper.
Grim, he thought. And the next.
Very grim. And the next.
Oh… Now that looked better.
It was a world called Bartledan. It had oxygen. It had green hills. It even, it seemed, had a renowned literary culture. But the thing that most aroused his interest was a photograph of a small bunch of Bartledanian people, standing around in a village square, smiling pleasantly at the camera.
`Ah,’ he said, and held the picture up to the strange thing behind the desk.
Its eyes squirmed out on stalks and roiled up and down the piece of paper, leaving a glistening trail of slime all over it.
`Yes,’ it said with distaste. `They do look exactly like you.’
Arthur moved to Bartledan and, using some money he had made by selling some toenail clippings and spit to a DNA bank, he bought himself a room in the village featured in the picture. It was pleasant there. The air was balmy. The people looked like him and seemed not to mind him being there. They didn’t attack him with anything. He bought some clothes and a cupboard to put them in.
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.
At first he tried to sit and read. But the literature of Bartledan, famed though it was throughout this sector of the Galaxy for its subtlety and grace, didn’t seem to be able to sustain his interest. The problem was that it wasn’t actually about human beings after all. It wasn’t about what human beings wanted. The people of Bartledan were remarkably like human beings to look at, but when you said `Good evening’ to one, he would tend to look around with a slight sense of surprise, sniff the air and say that, yes, he supposed that it probably was a goodish evening now that Arthur came to mention it.
`No, what I meant was to wish you a good evening,’ Arthur would say, or rather, used to say. He soon learned to avoid these conversations. `I mean that I hope you have a good evening,’ he would add.
More puzzlement.
`Wish?’ the Bartledanian would say at last, in polite bafflement.
`Er, yes,’ Arthur would then have said. `I’m just expressing the hope that…’
`Hope?’
`Yes.’
`What is hope?’
Good question, thought Arthur to himself, and retreated back to his room to think about things.
On the one hand he could only recognise and respect what he learnt about the Bartledanian view of the universe, which was that the universe was what the universe was, take it or leave it. On the other hand he could not help but feel that not to desire anything, not ever to. wish or to hope, was just not natural.
Natural. There was a tricky word.
He had long ago realised that a lot of things that he had thought of as natural, like buying people presents at Christmas, stopping at red lights or falling at a rate of 32 feet/second/second, were just the habits of his own world and didn’t necessarily work the same way anywhere else; but not to wish – that really couldn’t be natural, could it? That would be like not breathing.
Breathing was another thing that the Bartledanians didn’t do, despite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. They just stood there. Occasionally they ran around and played netball and stuff (without ever wishing to win though, of course – they would just play, and whoever won, won), but they never actually breathed. It was, for some reason, unnecessary. Arthur quickly learned that playing netball with them was just too spooky. Though they looked like humans, and even moved and sounded like humans, they didn’t breathe and they didn’t wish for things.
Breathing and wishing for things, on the other hand, was just about all that Arthur seemed to do all day. Sometimes he would wish for things so much that his breathing would get quite agitated, and he would have to go and lie down for a bit. On his own. In his small room. So far from the world which had given birth to him that his brain could not even process the sort of numbers involved without just going limp.