Oh sure, humanity and the others had roamed through a quarter of the galaxy, settling and building worlds and creating bureaucracies. Space, he said, had never been truly and properly explored. "Our ship was Pixikin-you know that already. "And Arlysa Timbriun, our pilot." My voice weakened at that point, and I struggled to compose myself, to orient my memory. I just supplied the capital and went along for the ride." That's what one of my heroes thought, and he decided to go see for himself. Maybe there was something to be seen, and discovered, and appreciated, out there in the emptiness of space. There was just one problem with this development.
Everyone traveled by tachyon beam instead faster, neater, cheaper. No one traveled through space to get between the stars anymore. In this particular future, I imagined that space travel had become an annoying thing of the past. My story was about space itself being a habitat-not literally, like a house or a space station, but philosophically.
It was an open anthology, and I decided to take a shot at it. Writer and sometimes editor Susan Shwartz was editing an anthology of stories about habitats in space, homes away from our Earth home. In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.Įxotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no life form in the Galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing, which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is.įor when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here." In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.įor instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. "Phreeow!" admitted Zaphod, much impressed. "You ever had a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster?" asked Zaphod sharply. "Listen!" said Roosta urgently, "you can kill a man, destroy his body, break his spirit, but only the Total Perspective Vortex can annihilate a man's soul! The treatment lasts seconds, but the effect lasts the rest of your life!" "Only," said Roosta, "the most savage psychic torture a sentinent being can undergo." He believed that he had heard of all the fun things in the Galaxy, so he assumed that the Total Perspective Vortex was not fun.
"They're going to feed you," said Roosta, "into the Total Perspective Vortex!" "They're going to feed me?" hazarded Zaphod hopefully. "Beeblebrox," he said, sticking his hands behind his head, "have you any idea what's going to happen to you on the Frogstar?"
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