“I beg your pardon?” he called out.

“I said, can I help you?” she said, in a thin, scratchy voice that he could only just hear.

“Er, I came to ask your advice,” he called back, feeling a bit ridiculous.

She turned to peer at him, myopically, then turned back, swiped at a fly and missed.

“What about?” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I said, what about?” she almost screeched.

“Well,” said Arthur. “Just sort of general advice, really. It said in the brochure—”

“Ha! Brochure!” spat the old woman. She seemed to be waving her bat more or less at random now.

Arthur fished the crumpled-up brochure from his pocket. He wasn’t quite certain why. He had already read it and she, he expected, wouldn’t want to. He unfolded it anyway in order to have something to frown thoughtfully at for a moment or two. The copy in the brochure twittered on about the ancient mystical arts of the seers and sages of Hawalius, and wildly overrepresented the level of accommodation available in Hawalion. Arthur still carried a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with him but found, when he consulted it, that the entries were becoming more abstruse and paranoid and had lots of xs and js and [s in them. Something was wrong somewhere. Whether it was in his own personal unit, or whether it was something or someone going terribly amiss, or perhaps just hallucinating, at the heart of the Guide organization itself, he didn’t know. But one way or another he was even less inclined to trust it than usual, which meant that he trusted it not one bit, and mostly used it for eating his sandwiches off of when he was sitting on a rock staring at something.

The woman had turned and was walking slowly toward him now. Arthur tried, without making it too obvious, to judge the wind direction, and bobbed about a bit as she approached.

“Advice,” she said. “Advice, eh?”

“Er, yes,” said Arthur. “Yes. That is—”

He frowned again at the brochure, as if to be certain that he hadn’t misread it and stupidly turned up on the wrong planet or something. The brochure said, “The friendly local inhabitants will be glad to share with you the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients. Peer with them into the swirling mysteries of past and future time!” There were some coupons as well, but Arthur had been far too embarrassed actually to cut them out or try to present them to anybody.

“Advice, eh?” said the old woman again. “Just sort of general advice, you say. On what? What to do with your life, that sort of thing?”

“Yes,” said Arthur. “That sort of thing. Bit of a problem I sometimes find if I’m being perfectly honest.” He was trying desperately, with tiny darting movements, to stay upwind of her. She surprised him by suddenly turning sharply away from him and heading off toward her cave.

“You’ll have to help me with the photocopier, then,” she said.

“What?” said Arthur.

“The photocopier,” she repeated, patiently. “You’ll have to help me drag it out. It’s solar-powered. I have to keep it in the cave, though, so the birds don’t shit on it.”

“I see,” said Arthur.

“I’d take a few deep breaths if I were you,” muttered the old woman, as she stomped into the gloom of the cave mouth.

Arthur did as she advised. He almost hyperventilated in fact. When he felt he was ready, he held his breath and followed her in.

The photocopier was a big old thing on a rickety trolley. It stood just inside the dim shadows of the cave. The wheels were stuck obstinately in different directions and the ground was rough and stony.

“Go ahead and take a breath outside,” said the old woman. Arthur was going red in the face trying to help her move the thing.

He nodded in relief. If she wasn’t going to be embarrassed about it, then neither, he was determined, would he. He stepped outside and took a few breaths, then came back in to do more heaving and pushing. He had to do this quite a few times till at last the machine was outside.

The sun beat down on it. The old woman disappeared back into her cave again and brought with her some mottled metal panels, which she connected to the machine to collect the sun’s energy.

She squinted up into the sky. The sun was quite bright, but the day was hazy and vague.

“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 inquired 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 goatlike things. She spat the lump out onto the pile. She hobbled slowly back to the can. She tried to unhook it from the sort of tripodlike 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 downward from her cave and toward 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 realized 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 is 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 goatlike things and started to set about the flies with vim and vigor.

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 centers on some of the more affluent worlds in the Northwest ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was easier by a factor of about 17 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 centers knew about it all too well.