`Only that 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 definite- ly 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.
`What was that?’ asked Random, in a small voice.
`A glimpse along the probability axis of a discontinuously probable object.’
`I see.’
`Most objects mutate and change along their axis of prob- ability, but the world of your origin does something slightly different. It lies on what you might call a fault line in the landscape of probability which means that at many probability co-ordinates, the whole of it simply ceases to exist. It has an inherent instability, which is typical of anything that lies within what are usually designated the Plural sectors. Make sense?’
`No.’
`Want to go and see for yourself?’
`To… Earth?’
`Yes.’
`Is that possible?’
The bird Guide did not answer at once. It spread its wings and, with an easy grace, ascended into the air and flew out into the rain which, once again, was beginning to lighten.
It soared ecstatically up into the night sky, lights flashed around it, dimensions dithered in its wake. It swooped and turned and looped and turned again and came at last to rest two feet in front of Random’s face, its wings beating slowly and silently.
It spoke to her again.
`Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space. That’s because of the filters through which you perceive it. But I was built with no filters at all, which means I perceive the mish mash which contains all possible universes but which has, itself, no size at all. For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient and omnipotent, extremely vain, and, what is more, I come in a handy self-carrying package. You have to work out how much of the above is true.’