`You mean you went to a DNA bank?’ Arthur had asked, pop-eyed.
`Yes. But she wasn’t quite as random as her name suggests, because, of course, you were the only homo sapiens donor. I must say, though, it seems you were quite a frequent flyer.’
Arthur had stared wide-eyed at the unhappy looking girl who was slouching awkwardly in the door-frame looking at him.
`But when… how long…?’
`You mean, what age is she?’
`Yes.’
`The wrong one.’
`What do you mean?’
`I mean that I haven’t any idea.’
`What?’
`Well, in my time line I think it’s about ten years since I had her, but she’s obviously quite a lot older than that. I spend my life going backwards and forwards in time, you see. The job. I used to take her with me when I could, but it just wasn’t always possible. Then I used to put her into day care time zones, but you just can’t get reliable time tracking now. You leave them there in the morning, you’ve simply no idea how old they’ll be in the evening. You complain till you’re blue in the face but it doesn’t get you anywhere. I left her at one of the places for a few hours once, and when I came back she’d passed puberty. I’ve done all I can, Arthur, it’s over to you. I’ve got a war to cover.’
The ten seconds that passed after Trillian left were about the longest of Arthur Dent’s life. Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you travelled.
This will come to you as a profound personal shock, particularly if you didn’t know you had a twin brother or sister. The seconds that you have been absent for will not have been sufficient time to prepare you for the shock of new and strangely distended family relationships when you return.
Ten seconds’ silence was not enough time for Arthur to reassemble his whole view of himself and his life in a way that suddenly included an entire new daughter of whose merest exist- ence he had had not the slightest inkling of a suspicion when he had woken that morning. Deep, emotional family ties cannot be constructed in ten seconds, however far and fast you travel away from them, and Arthur could only feel helpless, bewildered and numb as he looked at the girl standing in his doorway, staring at his floor.
He supposed that there was no point in pretending not to be hopeless.
He walked over and he hugged her.
`I don’t love you,’ he said. `I’m sorry. I don’t even know you yet. But give me a few minutes.’ {\it We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, `Oh, hi Ed! Nice tan. How’s Carol?’ involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your kid a break, OK? \begin{flushright} Extract from Practical Parenting in a Fractally \end{flushright} \begin{flushright} Demented Universe \end{flushright} }
`What’s this?’
Arthur had almost given up. That is to say, he was not going to give up. He was absolutely not going to give up. Not now. Not ever. But if he had been the sort of person who was going to give up, this was probably the time he would have done it.
Not content with being surly, bad-tempered, wanting to go and play in the paleozoic era, not seeing why they had to have the gravity on the whole time and shouting at the sun to stop following her, Random had also used his carving knife to dig up stones to throw at the pikka birds for looking at her like that.