Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

CHAPTER 29

Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain forests, which was raining: hence the name.

It was a gentle, persistent rain, not the heavy slashing which would come later in the year, in the hot season. It formed a fine dripping mist through which the occasional shaft of sunlight would break, be softened and pass through on its way towards the wet bark of a calvaria tree on which it would settle and glisten. Sometimes it would do this next to a butterfly or a tiny motionless sparkling lizard, and then the effect would be almost unbearable.

Away up in the high canopy of the trees an utterly extraordinary thought would suddenly strike a bird, and it would go flapping wildly through the branches and settle at last in a different and altogether better tree where it would sit and consider things again more calmly until the same thought came along and struck it again, or it was time to eat.

The air was full of scents — the light fragrance of flowers, and the heavy odour of the sodden mulch with which the floor of the forest was carpeted.

Confusions of roots tangled through the mulch, moss grew on them, insects crawled.

In a space in the forest, on an empty patch of wet ground between a circle of craning trees, appeared quietly and without fuss a plain white door. After a few seconds it opened a little way with a slight squeak. A tall thin man looked out, looked around, blinked in surprise, and quietly pulled the door closed again.

A few seconds later the door opened again and Reg looked out.

“It's real,” he said, “I promise you. Come out and see for yourself.”

Walking out into the forest, he turned and beckoned the other two to follow him.

Dirk stepped boldly through, seemed disconcerted for about the length of time it takes to blink twice, and then announced that he saw exactly how it worked, that it was obviously to do with the unreal numbers that lay between minimum quantum distances and defined the fractal contours of the enfolded Universe and he was only astonished at himself for not having thought of it himself.

“Like the catflap,” said Richard from the doorway behind him.

“Er, yes, quite so,” said Dirk, taking off his spectacles and leaning against a tree wiping them, “you spotted of course that I was lying. A perfectly natural reflex in the circumstances as I think you'll agree. Perfectly natural.” He squinted slightly and put his spectacles back on. They began to mist up again almost immediately.

“Astounding,” he admitted.

Richard stepped through more hesitantly and stood rocking for a moment with one foot still on the floor in Reg's room and the other on the wet earth of the forest. Then he stepped forward and committed himself fully. His lungs instantly filled with the heady vapours and his mind with the wonder of the place. He turned and looked at the doorway through which he had walked. It was still a perfectly ordinary door frame with a perfectly ordinary little white door swinging open in it, but it was standing free in the open forest, and through it could clearly be seen the room he had just stepped out of.

He walked wonderingly round the back of the door, testing each foot on the muddy ground, not so much for fear of slipping as for fear that it might simply not be there. From behind it was just a perfectly ordinary open door frame, such as you might fail to find in any perfectly ordinary rain forest. He walked through the door from behind, and looking back again could once more see, as if he had just stepped out of them again, the college rooms of Professor Urban Chronotis of St Cedd's College, Cambridge, which must be thousands of miles away. Thousands? Where were they?

He peered off through the trees and thought he caught a slight shimmer in the distance, between the trees.

“Is that the sea?” he asked.

“You can see it a little more clearly from up here,” called Reg, who had walked on a little way up a slippery incline and was now leaning, puffing, against a tree. He pointed.

The other two followed him up, pulling themselves noisily through the branches and causing a lot of cawing and complaining from unseen birds high above.

“The Pacific?” asked Dirk.

“The Indian Ocean,” said Reg.

Dirk wiped his glasses again and had another look.

“Ah, yes, of course,” he said.

“Not Madagascar?” said Richard. “I've been there —”

“Have you?” said Reg. “One of the most beautiful and astonishing places on Earth, and one that is also full of the most appalling… temptations for me. No.”

His voice trembled slightly, and he cleared his throat.

“No,” he continued, “Madagascar is — let me see, which direction are we — where's the sun? Yes. That way. Westish. Madagascar is about five hundred miles roughly west of here. The island of Reunion lies roughly in-between.”

“Er, what's the place called?” said Dirk suddenly, rapping his knuckles on the tree and frightening a lizard. “Place where that stamp comes from, er — Mauritius.”

“Stamp?” said Reg.

“Yes, you must know,” said Dirk, “very famous stamp. Can't remember anything about it, but it comes from here. Mauritius. Famous for its very remarkable stamp, all brown and smudged and you could buy Blenheim Palace with it. Or am I thinking of British Guiana?”

“Only you,” said Richard, “know what you are thinking of.”

“Is it Mauritius?”

“It is,” said Reg, “it is Mauritius.”

“But you don't collect stamps?”

“No.”

“What on earth's that?” said Richard suddenly, but Dirk carried on with his thought to Reg, “Pity, you could get some nice first-day covers, couldn't you?”

Reg shrugged. “Not really interested,” he said.

Richard slithered back down the slope behind them.

“So what's the great attraction here?” said Dirk. “It's not, I have to confess, what I was expecting. Very nice in its way, of course, all this nature, but I'm a city boy myself, I'm afraid.” He cleaned his glasses once again and pushed them back up his nose.

He started backwards at what he saw, and heard a strange little chuckle from Reg. Just in front of the door back into Reg's room, the most extraordinary confrontation was taking place.

A large cross bird was looking at Richard and Richard was looking at a large cross bird. Richard was looking at the bird as if it was the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen in his life, and the bird was looking at Richard as if defying him to find its beak even remotely funny.

Once it had satisfied itself that Richard did not intend to laugh, the bird regarded him instead with a sort of grim irritable tolerance and wondered if he was just going to stand there or actually do something useful and feed it. It padded a couple of steps back and a couple of steps to the side and then just a single step forward again, on great waddling yellow feet. It then looked at him again, impatiently, and squarked an impatient squark. The bird then bent forward and scraped its great absurd red beak across the ground as if to give Richard the idea that this might be a good area to look for things to give it to eat.

“It eats the nuts of the calvaria tree,” called out Reg to Richard.

The big bird looked sharply up at Reg in annoyance, as if to say that it was perfectly clear to any idiot what it ate. It then looked back at Richard once more and stuck its head on one side as if it had suddenly been struck by the thought that perhaps it was an idiot it had to deal with, and that it might need to reconsider its strategy accordingly.

“There are one or two on the ground behind you,” called Reg softly.

In a trance of astonishment Richard turned awkwardly and saw one or two large nuts lying on the ground. He bent and picked one up, glancing up at Reg, who gave him a reassuring nod. Tentatively Richard held the thing out to the bird, which leant forward and pecked it sharply from between his fingers. Then, because Richard's hand was still stretched out, the bird knocked it irritably aside with its beak.

Once Richard had withdrawn to a respectful distance, it stretched its neck up, closed its large yellow eyes and seemed to gargle gracelessly as it shook the nut down its neck into its maw. It appeared then to be at least partially satisfied. Whereas before it had been a cross dodo, it was at least now a cross, fed dodo, which was probably about as much as it could hope for in this life.

It made a slow, waddling, on-the-spot turn and padded back into the forest whence it had come, as if defying Richard to find the little tuft of curly feathers stuck up on top of its backside even remotely funny.

“I only come to look,” said Reg in a small voice, and glancing at him Dirk was discomfited to see that the old man's eyes were brimming with tears which he quickly brushed away. “Really, it is not for me to interfere —”

Richard came scurrying breathlessly up to them.

“Was that a dodo?” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” said Reg, “one of only three left at this time. The year is 1676. They will all be dead within four years, and after that no one will ever see them again. Come,” he said, “let us go.”

Behind the stoutly locked outer door in the corner staircase in the Second Court of St Cedd's College, where only a millisecond earlier there had been a slight flicker as the inner door departed, there was another slight flicker as the inner door now returned.

Walking through the dark evening towards it the large figure of Michael Wenton-Weakes looked up at the corner windows. If any slight flicker had been visible, it would have gone unnoticed in the dim dancing firelight that spilled from the window.

The figure then looked up into the darkness of the sky, looking for what it knew to be there though there was not the slightest chance of seeing it, even on a clear night which this was not. The orbits of Earth were now so cluttered with pieces of junk and debris that one more item among them — even such a large one as this was — would pass perpetually unnoticed. Indeed, it had done so, though its influence had from time to time exerted itself. From time to time. When the waves had been strong. Not for nearly two hundred years had they been so strong as now they were again.

And all at last was now in place. The perfect carrier had been found.

The perfect carrier moved his footsteps onwards through the court.

The Professor himself had seemed the perfect choice at first, but that attempt had ended in frustration, fury, and then — inspiration! Bring a Monk to Earth! They were designed to believe anything, to be completely malleable. It could be suborned to undertake the task with the greatest of ease.

Unfortunately, however, this one had proved to be completely hopeless. Getting it to believe something was very easy. Getting it to continue to believe the same thing for more than five minutes at a time had proved to be an even more impossible task than that of getting the Professor to do what he fundamentally wanted to do but wouldn't allow himself.

Then another failure and then, miraculously, the perfect carrier had come at last. The perfect carrier had already proved that it would have no compunction in doing what would have to be done.

Damply, clogged in mist, the moon struggled in a corner of the sky to rise. At the window, a shadow moved.