經典科幻文學:《 基本上無害 Mostly Harmless》 第9章8

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.

一兩個鐘頭毫無交流的沉默之後，老婦人認定太陽能板已經吸收了足夠的能量，可以驅動影印機了。她再次消失在洞口，一陣東翻西找之後拿出幾張紙來喂進機器裏。

She handed the copies to Arthur.

她把吐出的紙交給阿瑟。

‘This is, er, this your advice then, is it?’ said Arthur, leafing through them uncertainly.

“這就是，呃，這就是你的建議對吧？”阿瑟猶猶豫豫地翻了翻。

‘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!’

“不，”老婦人說，“這是我這輩子的大事記。你瞧，任何人提供的建議的質量都跟這個人實際上的生活質量有關。喏，你把這份文檔讀一遍，你會發現我勾出了我所做的所有重大決定，好讓你看得明白些。每一項都有索引和交叉引用。看見了？我給你的建議就是，如果你能做出跟我完全相反的決定，那麼最後你或許不會落到……”她停下來把肺裏充滿空氣，爲接下來的感情激盪做好準備，“……這麼一個臭烘烘地破洞裏！”

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.

她一把抓起自己的乒乓球拍，捲起衣袖，跺着腳走到那堆山羊樣的東西跟前，幹勁（兒）十足地拍起蒼蠅。

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.

阿瑟到了最後一個目的地，發現那村子裏幾乎豎滿了長長的杆子。他們高的嚇人，從地面完全看不出上邊有些什麼。阿瑟努力爬上爬下，前兩根頂上都只有蓋滿鳥糞的平臺，直到第三根他才發現了別的東西，過程相當的艱辛。杆子上釘着短木樁，呈螺旋形徐徐上升，你得踩着它們往上爬。任何觀光客，哪怕稍微不如阿瑟勤勉刻苦，肯定會閃兩張照片然後立馬逃到距離最近的餐廳——在那兒你可以買到又甜又粘的巧克力蛋糕，拿到苦行僧那兒當着他們的面吃個痛快。不過，這也在很大程度上導致了本行星苦行僧的大量流失。事實上，他們幾乎全都轉戰銀河系西北部那些比較富裕的世界，開起了財源滾滾的康復中心。如今他們討生活比原先要容易大約一千七百倍，而且巧克力的味道實在妙不可言。後來大家發現，大多數苦行僧在開始苦行之前都沒嘗過巧克力是什麼味道，而大多數來康復中心的顧客則正好相反，對這東西實在過於瞭解。

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 , 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.

阿瑟在第三根杆子頂上停下來喘口氣。他呼吸急促，熱得要命，因爲每根杆子都有約莫五六十尺高。整個世界似乎都在他周圍打轉，轉得他頭暈目眩，不過阿瑟並不太擔心。因爲他知道，從邏輯上講，在去過斯達弗洛穆拉貝塔之前自己是死不了的——他還由此發展出一種態度，每每面對極端的個人危險時都異常歡欣鼓舞。坐在五十尺高的杆子上的確有些天旋地轉的感覺，不過吃塊三明治就能應付過去。他拿出預言家的影印版個人史準備開讀，突然聽到背後有人輕聲咳嗽，不禁嚇了一跳。

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.

他猛然一轉身，三明治也沒拿穩；它在空氣裏打着滾往下翻，等終於落地的時候看上去已經很小了。

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.

他身後三十尺左右還有一根杆子，在大約三打杆子裏，它顯得格外與衆不同——上頭坐着一個老頭，似乎正在沉思，而且還沉思得板起了面孔。

‘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.

“打擾一下。”阿瑟說，那人沒理他。或許是沒聽見吧。風向有些亂，阿瑟能聽見他咳嗽也是全憑運氣。

‘Hello?’ called Arthur. ‘Hello!’

“哈嘍？”阿瑟喊道，“哈嘍！”