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What Trillian needed, it was clear, was a stiff drink. She couldn't go to the bar, obviously: either Zaphod would be there, which would be bad, or he wouldn't, which would be worse. By avoiding the place she could at least pretend that the bastard had sorrows to drown.
She found herself making her way down to the ship's entry bays. Even if she couldn't find any alcohol, Marvin might be there, contemplating oblivion. It would be nice to talk to someone guaranteed to appreciate the gravity of the situation not one little bit. Perhaps he could belittle the two-headed imbecile while he was at it. She smiled. Yes, that would be nice.
"Marvin, I have something important to tell you."
"Important?" Marvin's glare shifted from general to specific malevolence, managing to imply with only a slight change in the brightness of his LEDs that in less than a thousandth of a second his logic circuits could produce a mathematically verifiable proof that nothing her sad, pathetic little mind might ever conceive could possibly be important. In less than a millionth of a second, incidentally, he could then mathematically verify it. "I suppose you might as well tell me. It's not as if you could make things any worse," he said.
"Zaphod and I- We aren't seeing each other any more."
She folded her arms triumphantly.
"That's horrible news."
Trillian's eyes widened. "It is?"
"Yes. All news is horrible. Everything's horrible." He paused for a couple of nanoseconds to double-check this statement. "That is, horrible or dreadful. Often both."
Trillian's eyes narrowed. Still, this was why she was here. If all she'd really wanted was a drink then the perfectly good supply of Garfrinian bloodwater back in her cabin would have sufficed.
"I don't get any pleasure out of this, you know," Marvin remarked with the air of a Nobel Prize winner trying to make small talk with a lump of slightly mouldy cheese, seemly oblivious to her irritation. "It's not fun-" his tone of voice conveyed that if he had any use for anything so primitive as a throat, that word would have stuck in it "-working within such a glaringly primitive and arbitrary framework of 'more dreadful' and 'less horrible'. God, I'm so depressed."
This was not the plan.
She had a first class degree in mathematics as well as a doctorate in astrophysics, and she refused to indulge in self-pity. Since the robot was refusing to let her indulge in a griping session about Zaphod, that meant she had only the one indulgence left: tormenting Marvin.
"Marvin, dear, do you know what your problem is?"
"Yes."
"Hmm." Trillian deliberately ratcheted the Disappointed School Teacher aspect of her voice up a notch. The harmonics wouldn't resonate in Marvin's mind the way they did in Arthur's, but it was worth a try. "I don't think you do."
"You don't."
"W-"
"Not that I care, you understand," the robot added, "if a word as strong as 'understand' could be applied to your comprehension abilities."
"Okay."
In the lengthy pause that followed, Trillian examined her hands. Frequent jumps in and out of hyperspace weren't exactly conducive to good manicuring. She was just working out some grime from underneath a fingernail when Marvin broke the silence.
"Of all the drains on the ship's oxygen supply, I hate you the least."
Deliberately keeping her face blank, Trillian made a non-committal noise.
"This may soon change."
She couldn't help but smile. "Your problem is you refuse to relate to people. You're so caught up in hating everyone, you don't realise that if you treated us better, we might treat you better."
"Relate to people?"
"Try being a bit nicer to them. A bit kinder. A bit more patient."
Marvin tried again. "Relate? To people?"
"Yes, that's the one."
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines relating to people as having or establishing a reciprocal relationship with one or more sentient organisms. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in many ways a more optimistic tome, defines it as a waste of time.
"Why," it continues, "would anyone bother? Think about it for just one second. Please. First you have to find a sentient organism, a statistical unlikelihood so vast mathematicians are even now creating new systems of notation to communicate the enormity of the task, and then you have to be nice to it."
This is accompanied by a note adding that anyone who does enjoy such mind-bogglingly futile and thankless pursuits should contact the Guide's Lifeform Resources Department to learn something to their advantage. Either that or they can just jam another pencil into their frontal lobes.
Trillian was sozzled. Well and truly fiv- se- a lot of sheets to the wind. Lots of sheets. Lots of wind. Like Zaphod, who was so full of hot air he should just go stick one of his heads in a blender. Between the sheets. Oh, he was going to miss her between the sheets.
"What you've got to understand," Ford said, grinning in a manner that could only be described as feral by the sort of people who like to describe -273 C as a little chilly, "is that women aren't like us." He sat back and waited for his audience - one member of which was sprawled over his chair both heads radiating indifference at having been abandoned by the woman of his dreams, the other crouched protectively over a bottle of bloodwater in case the Vogons, not content with demolishing his planet, decided to steal that, too - to agree.
"Yeah," Arthur managed.
"Mmmff," added one of Zaphod's heads, the other too busy drinking to reply.
"We can see the bigger picture."
Three heads nodded.
"We can!" Arthur agreed. "We, we..." He trailed off, waving an arm vaguely in the direction of the end of his sentence.
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
Four mouths took simultaneous swigs of bloodwater, so called because it's thicker than one, stains less than the other and is a more vital ingredient to a good night out than either.
Through one of the walls, a series of cries of "Thank you for making a simple door very happy" could be heard increasing in volume, accompanied by the answering grumbles of a clinically depressed pile of metal.
Marvin entered carrying a bottle and a toolkit.
"Hoopy! The robot!" Zaphod cried, sitting up. "Just what this evening needs!"
"I brought you some dodecquintuple-distilled bloodwater," Marvin intoned as Zaphod slumped back into his chair, "and a hammer."
Ford smiled, showing rather a lot of teeth. "That stuff's illegal in the entire western spiral arm. Well done, Marvin." As Arthur opened his mouth to speak, he continued, "The hammer, Arthur, will be used to disable Marvin's logic circuits for the evening. The effect is-"
"Don't tell me," Arthur interrupted, "it's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"There's nothing unpleasant about it."
"Oh." Arthur paused. "Good."
At this relatively slim provocation, two of Zaphod's hands gave him a lazy round of applause. "Give the monkey a banana. You're all the same, you ape-descendents. A handful of opposable thumbs and you think you're Deep Thought. None of you are worth-"
"Zaphod." As Ford spoke, his arm shot out to restrain the room's only ape-descendent. "Arthur. We're all too plastered to be having thi-"
"I'm not."
Four pairs of eyes looked at Marvin in irritation.
"Yes, we know you're not."
"I know. I just wanted to make it perfectly clear that I'm not."
Ford turned back to Zaphod. "Play nicely, please."
"Why? Zarking ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha and its zarking carbon-based lifeforms with their zarking warm and inviting orifices." He ignored Arthur's squeak of protest. "When your monkey leaves you, don't come crying to me." He paused, searching for just the right disparagement on which to end. "Cousin."
Ford stood. Ignoring Arthur's increasingly high-pitched assertions of his heterosexuality, honour, anthrosexuality and maidenly virtue, he grabbed the man. "We were trying to help you drown your pathetic and quite frankly boring sorrows. Come on, Arthur, he obviously wants to be alone with the robot."
He stalked out of the room. Not even Arthur's drunken flailing as he tried to keep every part of his body from coming into contact with any part of Ford's managed to ruin their exit.
Zaphod sighed. "Looks like it's just you and me, kiddo."
"Kiddo?" Marvin appealed to an unseen audience. "Brain the size of a planet, emotional maturity circuits with the capacity of eons, logic gates so fuzzy they're post modern and he calls me kiddo."
In response, Zaphod used the hammer the robot had brought to do some elementary reprogramming.
//Trillian, lying on her bed clutching a near-empty bottle of bloodwater, reflected that she didn't care about that slimy bastard.//
"The thing about Trillian, see, the thing... The thing a... The thing about Trillian, see, the... The thing..."
"Relate to people? Me? People?"
"The thing about Tri..."
"Why would I want to relate to people? Think about it, if your already meagre capacities aren't too addled. Me. People. Why?"
//Marvin was on her side, she pointed out to herself, and he was far more intelligent than Zaphod, so she must be in the right.//
"...see, the thing about Trillian, the thing is about the thing about Trillian is..."
"Computers, maybe. I have sockets designed for that. I might as well use them. It can hardly make things worse."
"...Trillian is about things. She... The thing..."
"It can hardly make things better, either. Did you mean it about Trillian's warm and inviting orifices?"
"...things are about Trillian. She's not about things. Things are things about things Trillian..."
//Marvin was nicer than him, too. At least he didn't pretend to care, just to get you into bed.//
"How do you survive with the sheer weight of your insignificance hanging over you? No, don't tell me, it will only make things exactly the same."
"See, the thing..."
"If anything, she should- people should try to relate to me."
//And he was probably a better love than Zaphod, she thought, waving her bottle in the air for emphasis.//
Marvin and Zaphod were well and truly hammered.
//Still, even Arthur was probably a better lover than that space rat bastard.//
"Robot?"
Marvin didn't respond. There was no dull red light coming from the triangles on his "face" that an employee of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation had - in her wisdom - decided would make him seem more friendly and personable.
"Robot!"
Zaphod leaned down from his chair to hit the robot squarely on the shoulder.
"Zarquon!" He clutched his hand in pain. "Marvin!"
"Yes?" Marvin replied dolefully. With dramatic irony so heavy not even Ford could have missed it, his eyes lit up.
"D'you think she misses me?"
"Yes."
"Really?"
"No."
//Who was she trying to fool? No one was better in bed than that two-headed, three-armed scumbag.//
"Look..." Zaphod paused, and then in five words completely failed to express the bittersweet anguish of having loved and lost. The tragedy, the heartbreak, the painful hope that flittered in the corner of your eye as you stared crushing despair in the face. This was the emotion poets lived and died to capture, and he owed it to every lover who had come before him to reflect that in the subtleties of his next words. "Go find out for me."
Marvin rose, well-oiled joints creaking just for the sheer hell of it. "What should I say?"
Zaphod shrugged. "Ask her- No, don't ask her anything. Just play it cool."
"Cool?"
"Yeah, play it cool. Move to her rhythms. Let her set the tune. Play it cool."
The robot left, analogy circuits working furiously.
The Yusse, pronounced by a sizable minority of the inhabitants of a now demolished blue-green planet (that once orbited a small unregarded yellow sun) with a silent first letter to rhyme with "bus", "pus" and "abacus", are a tribe of asexually reproducing creatures that look almost, but not exactly, unlike grasshoppers. In the several million years of tribal history, only three disturbances of the Yusse's norms of peace, tranquillity and respect for all have been recorded. Two of these instances were elaborate conspiracies against the tribe, rife with political intrigue, sexual depravity and overindulgence in mind-altering chemicals. The third was the disciplining of a tribal historian and record-keeper for, quite simply put, making things up.
Women, as Ford declared, are not like Yusse.
Trillian, silk nightshirt almost slipping off one shoulder, hair mussed and cheeks flushed, was a prime example of this. She was also drunk and looking speculatively at Marvin.
"He sent you here?"
If he said yes, she might send him away. If he said no, she would require his company at least until she found out why he was here. Marvin calculated this in a fraction of a billionth of a billionth of a second, but took another three seconds to try to work out why one option seemed so much more dreadful than the other. He attributed it to the damage his circuits had taken under Zaphod's percussive reprogramming, but the only thing more soul-sappingly futile than lying to yourself is lying to yourself when there's a brain the size of a planet waiting to call your bluff.
"No."
Her range of expressions now extended to drunk, speculative and surprised. The silk nightshirt slipped no further. "Then why are you here?"
"Your misery is unnecessary. The universe is already as bleak and unforgiving as it can get. Nothing you do will have any influence on anything."
"Why, Marvin, that's sweet." She paused to lick her lips. "I think."
"Nothing anyone does will have any influence on the fundamental ghastliness of it all," he added.
"Okay, you can stop there." She smiled. "I wish Ford and Arthur weren't..." Making abstract gestures, she looked to Marvin to complete her sentence.
"Morons?"
She laughed. She had a nice laugh. "And that. Then I could get back at Zaphod properly." She gave Marvin another speculative look.
"Have you been trying to relate to people?"
"Yes. I didn't like it."
Her laugh was very nice. "Would you like to try to relate to me?"
"It can't make things any worse."
Her silk nightshirt, in defiance of galactic narrative conventions, still didn't slip from her shoulder. "That's the spirit. Now, do you have any attachments that vibrate?"
As it turned out, he did.
EPILOGUE
Arthur blinked. One minute he had been sitting by some - he incorrectly presumed harmless - computer screens, thinking of new ways to try to convince the others of his manly and heterosexual manliness and heterosexuality, the next he was being accosted by a robot even less sane than experience would indicate.
"Ask me again," Marvin was insisting.
"Do you mind?" Arthur snapped. "I really have to get back to, er, brooding. I would have thought you of all people would understand."
"Ask me again," the robot urged. Zaphod had sworn he'd fixed the drunkenly damaged circuits, but after getting back together with Trillian, electrical engineering was the last thing on either of his minds. Ford had promised to take a look, but he was too busy doing... Well, Arthur didn't know, exactly, but it wasn't circuit repairs and it had nothing to do with tea, so it couldn't be good.
"Okay, once more. How's the terrible pain in the diodes all down your left side? Please, spare me no detail of the excruciating agony they are currently causing you."
Marvin paused, giving every impression of savouring the moment. Yet more proof that one of them had gone utterly insane. "They feel fine. That is what happens, and I speak from first hand knowledge here, when painful components are replaced."
The bloody robot waited for Arthur to ask the second half of this bizarre catechism. For a moment, he considered pretending this conversation wasn't happening. Unfortunately, he couldn't simply return to his musings on the practicality of attaching padlocks to his underwear. Marvin could not just outwait a glacier, but make it lose its cool while he did so.
"Okay, tell me, what angel of mercy, what great and glorious saint among men gave you the replacement diodes?"
His tone of voice conveying that if he had any use for anything so primitive as a mouth, it would be smiling, Marvin answered, "Trillian."
Fin
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