Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (4 page)

‘But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well.  Well, I thought it was silly.  The corporate world went bananas over it.’

Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt.

‘You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers,’ enthused Richard.  ‘Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths.’

‘You mean tunes,’ said Reg.  The carrot had not moved yet.

Richard grinned.

‘Tunes would be a very good word for it.  I must remember that.’

‘It would help you speak more easily.’  Reg returned the carrot to his plate, untasted.  ‘And this software did well, then?’  he asked.

‘Not so much here.  The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats.  It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’d probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end.  Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing, commercially.  Though the thing that’s interesting me most now is what happens if you leave the accounts out of it.  Turn the numbers that represent the way a swallow’s wings beat directly into music.  What would you hear?  Not the sound of cash registers, according to Gordon.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Reg, ‘quite fascinating,’ and popped the carrot at last into his mouth.  He turned and leaned forward to speak to his new girlfriend.

‘Watkin loses,’ he pronounced.  ‘The carrots have achieved a new all-time low.  Sorry, Watkin, but awful as you are, the carrots, I’m afraid, are world-beaters.’

The girl giggled more easily than last time and she smiled at him.  Watkin was trying to take all this good-naturedly, but it was clear as his eyes swam at Reg that he was more used to discomfiting than being discomfited.

‘Please, Daddy, can I now?’  With her new-found, if slight, confidence, the girl had also found a voice.

‘Later,’ insisted her father.

‘This is already later.  I’ve been timing it.’

‘Well...’ He hesitated, and was lost.

‘We’ve been to Greece,’ announced the girl in a small but awed voice.

‘Ah, have you indeed,’ said Watkin, with a little nod.  ‘Well, well.  Anywhere in particular, or just Greece generally?’

‘Patmos,’ she said decisively.  ‘It was beautiful.  I think Patmos is the most beautiful place in the whole world.  Except the ferry never came when it said it would.  Never, ever.  I timed it.  We missed our flight but I didn’t mind.’

‘Ah, Patmos, I see,’ said Watkin, who was clearly roused by the news.  ‘Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well.  I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables.  A work of the sublimest fiction.  Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this.  Hmm, yes.  I think so.’

She frowned at him.

‘I found a pot,’ she said.

‘Probably nothing,’ interrupted her father hastily.  ‘You know the way it is.  Everyone who goes to Greece for the first time thinks they’ve found a pot, don’t they?  Ha, ha.’

There were general nods.  This was true.  Irritating, but true.

‘I found it in the harbour,’ she said, ‘in the water.  While we were waiting for the damn ferry.’

‘Sarah! I’ve told you...’

‘It’s just what you called it.  And worse.  You called it words I didn’t think you knew.  Anyway, I thought that if everyone here was meant to be so clever, then someone would be able to tell me if it was a proper ancient Greek thing or not.  I think it’s very old.  Will you please let them see it, Daddy?’

Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to fish about under his chair.

‘Did you know, young lady,’ said Watkin to her, ‘that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos?  It was indeed.  By Saint John the Divine, as you know.  To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry.  Oh, yes, I think so.  It starts off, doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair.  I find that very suggestive.  Perhaps you should write a paper on it.’  He nodded at her.

She looked at him as if he were mad.

‘Well, here it is,’ said her father, plonking the thing down on the table.  ‘Just a pot, as you see.  She’s only six,’ he added with a grim smile, ‘aren’t you, dear?’

‘Seven,’ said Sarah.

The pot was quite small, about five inches high and four inches across at its widest point.  The body was almost spherical, with a very narrow neck extending about an inch above the body.  The neck and about half of the surface area were encrusted with hard-caked earth, but the parts of the pot that could be seen were of a rough, ruddy texture.

Sarah took it and thrust it into the hands of the don sitting on her right.

‘You look clever,’ she said.  ‘Tell me what you think.’

The don took it, and turned it over with a slightly supercilious air.  ‘I’m sure if you scraped away the mud from the bottom,’ he remarked wittily, ‘it would probably say “Made in Birmingham”.’

‘That old, eh?’ said Sarah’s father with a forced laugh.  ‘Long time since anything was made there.’

‘Anyway,’ said the don, ‘not my field, I’m a molecular biologist.  Anyone else want to have a look?’

This question was not greeted with wild yelps of enthusiasm, but nevertheless the pot was passed from hand to hand around the far end of the table in a desultory fashion.  It was goggled at through pebble glasses, peered at through horn-rims, gazed at over half-moons, and squinted at by someone who had left his glasses in his other suit, which he very much feared had now gone to the cleaner’s.  No one seemed to know how old it was, or to care very much.  The young girl’s face began to grow downhearted again.

‘Sour lot,’ said Reg to Richard.  He picked up a silver salt cellar again and held it up.

‘Young lady,’ he said, leaning forward to address her.

‘Oh, not again, you old fool,’ muttered the aged archaeologist Cawley, sitting back and putting his hands over his ears.

‘Young lady,’ repeated Reg, ‘regard this simple silver salt cellar.  Regard this simple hat.’

‘You haven’t got a hat,’ said the girl sulkily.

‘Oh,’ said Reg, ‘a moment please,’ and he went and fetched his woolly red one.

‘Regard,’ he said again, ‘this simple silver salt cellar.  Regard this simple woolly hat.  I put the salt cellar in the hat, thus, and I pass the hat to you.  The next part of the trick, dear lady... is up to you.’

He handed the hat to her, past their two intervening neighbours, Cawley and Watkin.  She took the hat and looked inside it.

‘Where’s it gone?’ she asked, staring into the hat.

‘It’s wherever you put it,’ said Reg.

‘Oh,’ said Sarah, ‘I see.  Well... that wasn’t very good.’

Reg shrugged.  ‘A humble trick, but it gives me pleasure,’ he said, and turned back to Richard.  ‘Now, what were we talking about?’

Richard looked at him with a slight sense of shock.  He knew that the Professor had always been prone to sudden and erratic mood swings, but it was as if all the warmth had drained out of him in an instant.  He now wore the same distracted expression Richard had seen on his face when first he had arrived at his door that evening, apparently completely unexpected.  Reg seemed then to sense that Richard was taken aback and quickly reassembled a smile.

‘My dear chap!’ he said.  ‘My dear chap!  My dear, dear chap!  What was I saying?’

‘Er, you were saying “My dear chap”.’

‘Yes, but I feel sure it was a prelude to something.  A sort of short toccata on the theme of what a splendid fellow you are prior to introducing the main subject of my discourse, the nature of which I currently forget.  You have no idea what I was about to say?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.  Well, I suppose I should be pleased.  If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?  Now, how’s our young guest’s pot doing?’

In fact it had reached Watkin, who pronounced himself no expert on what the ancients had made for themselves to drink out of, only on what they had written as a result.  He said that Cawley was the one to whose knowledge and experience they should all bow, and attempted to give the pot to him.

‘I said,’ he repeated, ‘yours was the knowledge and experience to which we should bow.  Oh, for heaven’s sake, take your hands off your ears and have a look at the thing.’

Gently, but firmly, he drew Cawley’s right hand from his ear, explained the situation to him once again, and handed him the pot.  Cawley gave it a cursory but clearly expert examination.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about two hundred years old, I would think.  Very rough.  Very crude example of its type.  Utterly without value, of course.’

He put it down peremptorily and gazed off into the old minstrel gallery, which appeared to anger him for some reason.

The effect on Sarah was immediate.  Already discouraged, she was thoroughly downcast by this.  She bit her lip and threw herself back against her chair, feeling once again thoroughly out of place and childish.  Her father gave her a warning look about misbehaving, and then apologised for her again.

‘Well, Buxtehude,’ he hurried on to say, ‘yes, good old Buxtehude.  We’ll have to see what we can do.  Tell me...’

‘Young lady,’ interrupted a voice, hoarse with astonishment, ‘you are clearly a magician and enchantress of prodigious powers!’

All eyes turned to Reg, the old show-off.  He was gripping the pot and staring at it with manic fascination.  He turned his eyes slowly to the little girl, as if for the first time assessing the power of a feared adversary.

‘I bow to you,’ he whispered.  ‘I, unworthy though I am to speak in the presence of such a power as yours, beg leave to congratulate you on one of the finest feats of the conjurer’s art it has been my privilege to witness!’

Sarah stared at him with widening eyes.

‘May I show these people what you have wrought?’ he asked earnestly.

Very faintly she nodded, and he fetched her formerly precious, but now sadly discredited, pot a sharp rap on the table.

It split into two irregular parts, the caked clay with which it was surrounded falling in jagged shards on the table.  One side of the pot fell away, leaving the rest standing.

Sarah’s eyes goggled at the stained and tarnished but clearly recognisable silver college salt cellar, standing jammed in the remains of the pot.

‘Stupid old fool,’ muttered Cawley.

After the general disparagement and condemnation of this cheap parlour trick had died down -- none of which could dim the awe in Sarah’s eyes -- Reg turned to Richard and said, idly:  ‘Who was that friend of yours when you were here, do you ever see him?  Chap with an odd East European name.  Svlad something.  Svlad Cjelli.  Remember the fellow?’

Richard looked at him blankly for a moment.

‘Svlad?’ he said.  ‘Oh, you mean Dirk.  Dirk Cjelli.  No.  I never stayed in touch.  I’ve bumped into him a couple of times in the street but that’s all.  I think he changes his name from time to time.  Why do you ask?’

CHAPTER 5

High on his rocky promontory the Electric Monk continued to sit on a horse which was going quietly and uncomplainingly spare.  From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into the valley, with which it was having a problem, but the problem was a new and hideous one to the Monk, for it was this -- Doubt.

He never suffered it for long, but when he did, it gnawed at the very root of his being.

The day was hot; the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass.  Nothing moved, not even the Monk.  But strange things were beginning to fizz in its brain, as they did from time to time when a piece of data became misaddressed as it passed through its input buffer.

But then the Monk began to believe, fitfully and nervously at first, but then with a great searing white flame of belief which overturned all previous beliefs, including the stupid one about the valley being pink, that somewhere down in the valley, about a mile from where he was sitting, there would shortly open up a mysterious doorway into a strange and distant world, a doorway through which he might enter.  An astounding idea.

Astoundingly enough, however, on this one occasion he was perfectly right.

The horse sensed that something was up.

It pricked up its ears and gently shook its head.  It had gone into a sort of trance looking at the same clump of rocks for so long, and was on the verge of imagining them to be pink itself.  It shook its head a little harder.

A slight twitch on the reins, and a prod from the Monk’s heels and they were off, picking their way carefully down the rocky incline.  The way was difficult.  Much of it was loose shale -- loose brown and grey shale, with the occasional brown and green plant clinging to a precarious existence on it.  The Monk noticed this without embarrassment.  It was an older, wiser Monk now, and had put childish things behind it.  Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were all natural stages through which one had to pass on the path to true enlightenment.

The sun beat hard on them.  The Monk wiped the sweat and dust off its face and paused, leaning forward on the horse’s neck.  It peered down through the shimmering heat haze at a large outcrop of rock which stood out on to the floor of the valley.  There, behind that outcrop, was where the Monk thought, or rather passionately believed to the core of its being, the door would appear.  It tried to focus more closely, but the details of the view swam confusingly in the hot rising air.

As it sat back in its saddle, and was about to prod the horse onward, it suddenly noticed a rather odd thing.

On a flattish wall of rock nearby, in fact so nearby that the Monk was surprised not to have noticed it before, was a large painting.  The painting was crudely drawn, though not without a certain stylish sweep of line, and seemed very old, possibly very, very old indeed.  The paint was faded, chipped and patchy, and it was difficult to discern with any clarity what the picture was.  The Monk approached the picture more closely.  It looked like a primitive hunting scene.

The group of purple, multi-limbed creatures were clearly early hunters.  They carried rough spears, and were in hot pursuit of a large horned and armoured creature, which appeared to have been wounded in the hunt already.  The colours were now so dim as to be almost non-existent.  In fact, all that could be clearly seen was the white of the hunters’ teeth, which seemed to shine with a whiteness whose lustre was undimmed by the passage of what must have been many thousands of years.  In fact they even put the Monk’s own teeth to shame, and he had cleaned them only that morning.

The Monk had seen paintings like this before, but only in pictures or on the TV, never in real life.  They were usually to be found in caves where they were protected from the elements, otherwise they would not have survived.

The Monk looked more carefully at the immediate environs of the rock wall and noticed that, though not exactly in a cave, it was nevertheless protected by a large overhang and was well sheltered from the wind and rain.  Odd, though, that it should have managed to last so long.  Odder still that it should appear not to have been discovered.  Such cave paintings as there were, were all famous and familiar images, but this was not one that he had ever seen before.

Perhaps this was a dramatic and historic find he had made.  Perhaps if he were to return to the city and announce this discovery he would be welcomed back, given a new motherboard after all and allowed to believe -- to believe -- believe what?  He paused, blinked, and shook his head to clear a momentary system error.

He pulled himself up short.

He believed in a door.  He must find that door.  The door was the way to... to...

The Door was The Way.

Good.

Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.

Brusquely he tugged the horse’s head round and urged it onward and downward.  Within a few minutes more of tricky manoeuvring they had reached the valley floor, and he was momentarily disconcerted to discover that the fine top layer of dust that had settled on the brown parched earth was indeed a very pale brownish pink, particularly on the banks of the sluggish trickle of mud which was all that remained, in the hot season, of the river that flowed through the valley when the rains came.  He dismounted and bent down to feel the pink dust and run it through his fingers.  It was very fine and soft and felt pleasant as he rubbed it on his skin.  It was about the same colour, perhaps a little paler.

The horse was looking at him.  He realised, a little belatedly perhaps, that the horse must be extremely thirsty.  He was extremely thirsty himself, but had tried to keep his mind off it.  He unbuckled the water flask from the saddle.  It was pathetically light.  He unscrewed the top and took one single swig.  Then he poured a little into his cupped hand and offered it to the horse, who slurped at it greedily and briefly.

The horse looked at him again.

The Monk shook his head sadly, resealed the bottle and replaced it.  He knew, in that small part of his mind where he kept factual and logical information, that it would not last much longer, and that, without it, neither would they.  It was only his Belief that kept him going, currently his Belief in The Door.

He brushed the pink dust from his rough habit, and then stood looking at the rocky outcrop, a mere hundred yards distant.  He looked at it not without a slight, tiny trepidation.  Although the major part of his mind was firm in its eternal and unshakeable Belief that there would be a Door behind the outcrop, and that the Door would be The Way, yet the tiny part of his brain that understood about the water bottle could not help but recall past disappointments and sounded a very tiny but jarring note of caution.

If he elected not to go and see The Door for himself, then he could continue to believe in it forever.  It would be the lodestone of his life (what little was left of it, said the part of his brain that knew about the water bottle).

If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to the Door and it wasn’t there... what then?

The horse whinnied impatiently.

The answer, of course, was very simple.  He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function.  He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?

The Door would still be there, even if the door was not.

He pulled himself together.  The Door would be there, and he must now go to it, because The Door was The Way.

Instead of remounting his horse, he led it.  The Way was but a short way, and he should enter the presence of the Door in humility.

He walked, brave and erect, with solemn slowness.  He approached the rocky outcrop.  He reached it.  He turned the corner.  He looked.

The Door was there.

The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised.

The Monk fell to his knees in awe and bewilderment.  So braced was he for dealing with the disappointment that was habitually his lot that, though he would never know to admit it, he was completely unprepared for this.  He stared at The Door in sheer, blank system error.

It was a door such as he had never seen before.  All the doors he knew were great steel-reinforced things, because of all the video recorders and dishwashers that were kept behind them, plus of course all the expensive Electric Monks that were needed to believe in it all.  This one was simple, wooden and small, about his own size.  A Monk-size door, painted white, with a single, slightly dented brass knob slightly less than halfway up one side.  It was set simply in the rock face, with no explanation as to its origin or purpose.

Hardly knowing how he dared, the poor startled Monk staggered to his feet and, leading his horse, walked nervously forward towards it.  He reached out and touched it.  He was so startled when no alarms went off that he jumped back.  He touched it again, more firmly this time.

He let his hand drop slowly to the handle -- again, no alarms.  He waited to be sure, and then he turned it, very, very gently.  He felt a mechanism release.  He held his breath.  Nothing.  He drew the door towards him, and it came easily.  He looked inside, but the interior was so dim in contrast with the desert sun outside that he could see nothing.  At last, almost dead with wonder, he entered, pulling the horse in after him.

A few minutes later, a figure that had been sitting out of sight around the next outcrop of rock finished rubbing dust on his face, stood up, stretched his limbs and made his way back towards the door, patting his clothes as he did so.