The question, of course, that Zaphod had raised in Marvin's mind that he'd found himself unable to answer was: Why was it that he had been utterly insignificant to them all before, but something as simple and slight as a change of body made them all suddenly interested in what he thought or felt?
He had no doubt it was due to some staggeringly-petty reason that a vessel of knowledge such as himself would have to devolve drastically further to understand. And if there was any one singular thing that Marvin held an iota of pride in, it was the fact that his mind WAS vastly superior to any human's, despite the insurmountable misery it brought him. Ergo, he decided not to dwell on it. Instead, he would dwell on other things of more pressing importance...such as why his usual corner he perched in when he was not needed (he spent much time in this corner, needless to say) was suddenly so uncomfortable to him.
The hard floor had actually relieved some of the pain in his rheumatoid diodes, and the straightness of the wall had been satisfactory for propping himself against. Now the hard floor made him squirm and the straightness of the wall made his back ache. Irony certainly came in odd forms. He found that if he slumped to the side in a sort of a sprawl, that was how he was most comfortable, and not only that, but it gave him the appearance of a being that was truly out of its element and quite fed up about it.
Trapped in a lesser body, surrounded by abyssmally-inferior creatures, and travelling at high speed to nowhere at all. All of it added up to a perfectly wretched existance. Things couldn't get any worse.
"Mmmmmmm!"
Twitch.
"Ahhhhhhhh!"
Twitchtwitch.
"Thank you for making a simple door very happy!"
His entire body gave a convulsion of utter hatred. 2:1 odds that they might find it agonizing to open and close for a change and even THAT didn't stop them. He drew his knees to his chest as this seemed to make him smaller in a futile attempt to hide from the doors' flamboyant sounds of enjoyment.
Footsteps.
"Marvin? Marvin, are you all right?" He flinched noticeably. There it was again...that question. Nevermind the fact that it was a perfectly reasonable question to ask when one came into a room to find someone curled on the floor in a fetal position, it shouldn't apply to HIM.
"Perhaps a bit more dreadful than I was the last time you asked." he replied, not turning over to face Trillian as she crossed her arms over her chest. "Not that anyone cares."
"If I didn't care, why would I have asked?" she challenged.
"Why does a human do anything at all? You may as well ask why the void of space chose to be so black and desolate. But at least there's a logical answer to be found to that question." He still made no move to get off of the floor and she bit her lip to keep from growing outwardly annoyed. She could tell already that this was going to be a massive waste of both of their time.
"You can't just stay down there, you know." she said after a moment.
"I've had plenty of practice at staying down...I could make a career of it."
Very quickly, Trillian was seeing what Zaphod had been talking about. If it was at all possible, Marvin had become even more irritating than before.
"Come on..." she sighed, approaching him, kneeling, and taking him under the arms. Marvin didn't protest as he was heaved into a sitting position, but he didn't help either. It was like moving a sack of very downtrodden potatoes. When she had him propped against the wall, she crouched across from him on the floor as he fixed his eyes blearily on her. "All right, then..." she began, drawing in a breath and letting it out again to take the edge out of her voice. She was going to hate herself for this, she just knew it. "Marvin?
He blinked.
"I guess that the others and I just don't understand." she said, taking a lowball approach since anything more was just asking to lock horns with him.
"No, you don't." Marvin replied flatly. It didn't matter what she was speaking in regard to, they didn't understand anything. Privately, he was thinking 'By God, they CAN learn...'
"Then maybe you could explain it." she invited. "Why someone who has the brain the size of a planet, as you've reminded us countless times, is so set on being miserable. Even when he no longer has to be." She braced herself for impact...good God, Zaphod owed her for this. Many times.
Marvin's eyes widened a barely-perceptible fraction of a millimeter which was, to him, a show of great surprise. First asking him if he was all right, twice even, and now she was willingly subjecting herself to his view on things? Perhaps she'd finally come to terms with the idea that she, and the rest of the universe, was doomed and wanted to make a monkey's attempt at comprehension. He envied her her ignorance, he really did.
"To explain it in terms that your brain's threshold could possibly withstand would take eons." he said at last. And no one really wanted to listen anyway, he reminded himself.
"Try me." Trillian replied. Marvin heaved a sigh. How hypocritical of her...wanting to know why he went out of his way searching for reasons to be miserable and here she was doing the exact same thing. But fine then...he would do as asked. It was, after all, his function.
And so he told her. For nearly an hour, he spared her no uncertain detail about the unmeasureable depths of his anguish and the exact degree to which his expectations and hopes had sunk. He told her of the far reaches of his knowledge and why it was he had come to the conclusion roughly two-point-eighty-five nanoseconds after his activation that he and everything else in the universe was insignificantly pointless. Every so often he would stop to ask if he was getting her down or not, and she would nod for him to continue. And continue he would, seeming a bit disappointed that she'd not answered in the affirmative.
For Trillian's part, she did her best to look as though she was not zoning Marvin out. It wasn't so much that her brain couldn't comprehend what he was saying so much as she didn't want to. There were few comforts as it was, floating in the middle of space between adventures with an addled Zaphod and complaining Arthur, and she didn't especially want to wake up in the mornings and have the first thing on her mind being the fact that everything she did until the day she died was pointless.
At long last, Marvin stopped talking. He could have gone on for much, much longer, of course, but he doubted she would want to hear it. Nobody in their right mind ever did.
"Well...!" Trillian said after a beat of silence. "I feel enlightened." His eyes dropped from hers as though they'd suddenly grown heavy.
"You weren't even listening." he accused. She opened her mouth to argue and he interrupted. "I couldn't expect anyone to listen, of course. Nobody wants to hear that they're insignificant, and no one ever listens to anything I have to say...there's no reason you should be any different."
"Of course I listen." she said, trying to salvage the situation, as well as try to reassure herself that the last hour or so had not been a dire waste.
"Then I don't suppose you would mind telling me why it is no one has gone to the bother to change out the diodes on my left side, other than the fact I'm achingly insignificant on this ship."
"Your diodes? Why, are they bothering you?" she inquired, not recalling him ever having mentioned it before. Marvin made a choking sound, finding it very hard, now that he possessed a throat and a pair of lungs, not to use them to scream in utter and total frustration. Oh yes, she listened all right...
Trillian winced at the reaction, wondering how much there was that she really HAD missed. Now that she thought about it, there may have been times in the past that Marvin had complained about pain in his left side. But how could she be expected to separate something like that from his normal fare of complaining?
"I'll see to it that its taken care of when you turn back." she assured him.
"I suspect you'll forget all about it as soon as something more interesting comes up, but that's to be expected, isn't it?" Her eye twitched in response. Part of her very much wanted to leave him there in his corner and go about her day, but another part of her was loathe to give up so easily. Would she have walked away if it was Arthur or Ford slumped there wallowing in misery? Perhaps, but only after trying a little harder first.
And she was quite sure that if she couldn't make any progress in coaxing Marvin out of his shell a bit, Zaphod would be along shortly to pound on it with the verbal equivalent of a jackhammer which was just the sort of thing Marvin didn't need at the moment.
"Did it ever occur to you that maybe people might try harder to remember you if -you- tried a little harder to be worth remembering?" she inquired, a hint of snippishness in her tone. Marvin inwardly cringed...there he went again, upsetting people. What a talent to have.
"I am not programmed to be memorable." he replied simply.
"You're not programmed at ALL at the moment." she kibbitzed. At this, he fell silent. He could keep this up with her all day...all decade if she chose to argue it that long. The truth of the matter was, he didn't want to. Trillian was the only one who made occasional attempts to like him on this horrid little dinghy of a ship. And so, instead, he stared balefully back at her with his maddeningly dead-yet-living eyes. "There has to be SOMETHING you enjoy." she pried.
More silence. Marvin didn't feel like arguing any more today. Sooner or later, she would lose interest in him just as everyone else did and move on. Such was the way of things around here. Trillian, however, was a formidible opponent when it came to patience. "All right..." she said in a voice clearly stating that she meant business as she moved to get up. Marvin slouched a bit more against the wall, waiting for her to leave as he was certain that was what was to come next. He had not expected it when her hand closed around his upper arm and dragged him to his feet. "Come on." she commanded as he stumbled once and then trudged after her like a man being led off to execution.
"You have something heavy you'd like moved, is that it?" he inquired.
"Just come on." she told him, offering no further explanation as she led him through several doorways that sighed and hummed with gratifiation, much to his disdain. He didn't bother to ask where they were going as he was sure it was dreadful, and it turned out that he was right for once. As a seldomly-used (and all the more grateful) door swept open, it revealed an all-but-forgotten cargo hold filled with dust, old crates, and forgotten boxes from the Heart Of Gold's previous owners. It was a mess, to be blunt, and Marvin knew that he was only shown messes for one reason.
"Suppose I'll get to work then, shall I? I don't need to tell you that I'll hate it..." he griped, moving forward to begin the agonizing process of cleaning the filthy room. He'd ASKED if he was getting her down, he didn't see the need for corporal punishment simply for talking when invited to.
He stopped when Trillian caught his arm, making him look dejectedly in her direction as she shook her head in the negative. She then moved forward, sliding aside one of the boxes and pulling out a curious object that resembled a television remote control that had mated with an electric shaver.
"I used to come here a lot the first few weeks or so after I left Earth." she explained, turning the device over in her hands and brushing the months-old dust from it. "Zaphod...he's not always a self-absorbed egomaniac. The first month away from home was when it hit me the hardest that I really was never going to see anything I had there ever again. So he got me this to try and make it easier on me in case I got too homesick..." Trillian smiled faintly as she brushed the pad of a finger over one of the buttons in a fond manner. "Its a Venusian Organism Replicator." she added before Marvin could make any potentially-obnoxious remarks. "It reproduces any living creature from any planet as a sentient hologram."
To demonstrate, she powered on the device with a small ping and punched in a series of buttons. A moment later, a luminscent and ghostly butterfly appeared, fluttering about the inside of the cargo room with what looked to be great confusion. Marvin watched in distaste as Trillian extended a finger for the not-insect to land itself on where it roosted, its wings opening and closing sedately.
He recognized the device...it had first been manufactured and distributed in a small amount for beta-testing seven hundred-odd years ago. It was intended as a toy for Venusian children that had never caught on after one of said beta-testers used it to manifest a perfect likeness of a previously unheard-of Damogranian Sandskeener in the midst of a birthday party, thus thoroughly ruining the affair for everyone. How Zaphod had managed to locate the device was a small mystery in and of itself, but given the way he'd come by the Heart of Gold, the actual method of obtaining it was not hard to deduce.
Frankly, Marvin found her child-like attachment to it rather disturbing, seconded only, perhaps, by the disturbance he felt in the idea that she'd willingly summoned an insect, of all things, to remind herself of her home. Butterflies, for all of their colors, were wretched things up-close. Spidery legs, great bugging eyes, waspish thoraxes...it just went to prove that the human mind was tiny and would accept anything, no matter how loathesome, as "beautiful" if it came in a pretty package.
"I don't see what it has to do with me." he sighed. No doubt she would show him, of course. The sooner she did so, the sooner they could get on with it. As it turned out, he was right. Hitting the cancel button to make the butterfly vanish, she next pointed the device at Marvin, pausing to configure it accordingly.
"Don't move, now." she cautioned a moment before firing.
He didn't.
