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'It'll take a while,' she said.
Arthur said he was happy to wait.
The old woman shrugged and stomped across to the fire. Above it, the contents of the tin can were bubbling away. She poked about at them with a stick.
'You won't be wanting any lunch?' she enquired of Arthur.
'I've eaten, thanks,' said Arthur. 'No, really. I've eaten.'
'I'm sure you have,' said the old lady. She stirred with the stick. After a few minutes she fished a lump of something out, blew on it to cool it a little, and then put it in her mouth.
She chewed on it thoughtfully for a bit.
Then she hobbled slowly across to the pile of dead goat-like things. She spat the lump out on to the pile. She hobbled slowly back to the can. She tried to unhook it from the sort of tripod-like thing that it was hanging from.
'Can I help you?' said Arthur, jumping up politely. He hurried over.
Together they disengaged the tin from the tripod and carried it awkwardly down the slight slope that led downwards from her cave and towards a line of scrubby and gnarled trees, which marked the edge of a steep but quite shallow gully, from which a whole new range of offensive smells was emanating.
'Ready?' said the old lady.
'Yes . . .' said Arthur, though he didn't know for what.
'One,' said the old lady.
'Two,' she said.
'Three,' she added.
Arthur realised just in time what she intended. Together they tossed the contents of the tin into the gully.
After an hour or two of uncommunicative silence, the old woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves of paper and fed them through the machine.
She handed the copies to Arthur.
'This is, er, this your advice then, is it?' said Arthur, leafing through them uncertainly.
'No,' said the old lady. 'It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your life . . .' she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout, '. . . in a smelly old cave like this!'
She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve, stomped off to her pile of dead goat-like things, and started to set about the flies with vim and vigour.
The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely high poles. They were so high that it wasn't possible to tell, from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.
Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped right off to the nearest Bar & Grill, where you also could buy a range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up lucrative therapy centres on some of the more affluent worlds in the North West ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was easier by a factor of about seventeen million, and the chocolate was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of the clients who came to their therapy centres knew about it all too well.
At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around him, but it didn't worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically, he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta 4, and had therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough behind him.
He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the time it was stopped by the ground.
About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn, seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making him scowl.
'Excuse me,' said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he couldn't hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.
'Hello?' called Arthur. 'Hello!'
The man at last glanced round at him. He seemed surprised to see him. Arthur couldn't tell if he was surprised and pleased to see him or just surprised.
'Are you open?' called Arthur.
The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn't tell if he couldn't understand or couldn't hear.
'I'll pop over,' called Arthur. 'Don't go away.'
He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly down the spiralling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.
He started to make his way over to the pole on which the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realised that he had disoriented himself on the way down and didn't know for certain which one it was.
He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was the right one.
He climbed it. It wasn't.
'Damn,' he said. 'Excuse me!' he called out to the old man again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away. 'Got lost. Be with you in a minute.' Down he went again, getting very hot and bothered.
When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the pole that he knew for certain was the right one he realised that the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.
'What do you want?' shouted the old man crossly at him. He was now sitting on top of the pole that Arthur recognised was the one that he had been on himself when eating his sandwich.
'How did you get over there?' called Arthur in bewilder-ment.
'You think I'm going to tell you just like that what it took me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a pole to work out?'
'What about winter?'
'What about winter?'
'Don't you sit on the pole in the winter?'
'Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life,' said the man, 'doesn't mean I'm an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.'
'Do you have any advice for a traveller?'
'Yes. Get a beach house.'
'I see.'
The man stared out over the hot, dry scrubby landscape. From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies.
'You see her?' called the old man, suddenly.
'Yes,' said Arthur. 'I consulted her in fact.'
'Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned it down. What advice did she give you?'
'Do exactly the opposite of everything she's done.'
'In other words, get a beach house.'
'I suppose so,' said Arthur. 'Well, maybe I'll get one.
'Hmmm.'
The horizon was swimming in a fetid heat haze.
'Any other advice?' asked Arthur. 'Other than to do with real estate?'
'A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind,' said the man. He turned and looked at Arthur.
Oddly, the man's face was now only a couple of feet away. He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away whil
e his face was only two feet from Arthur's. Without moving his head, and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and stepped on to the top of another pole. Either it was just the heat, thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.
'A beach house,' he said, 'doesn't even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,' he went on, 'at boundary conditions.'
