Part Four
Doughnut Go Gentle Into That Good Night
As he fell out of nowhere, his head hit the side of the desk, which meant that the crucial quarter-second during which he’d have had the element of surprise was wasted in suffering pain and feeling dizzy. By the time all that stuff had run its course, it was too late. Oh well.“Hi,” she said. “Well?”
He looked up at her. No doubt about it, she was a beautiful woman, with captivating eyes and a lovely smile. A pity she was going to die so young. “You—”
She wasn’t listening, or even looking at him. She was waiting for something; something that hadn’t happened. Suddenly, Theo knew what it was.
“He’s not coming,” he said.
“What?”
“Max. He’s not coming.”
Actually, it was far better than merely killing her. The look of pain on her face would’ve touched a heart of stone, provided that it hadn’t just escaped by the skin of its teeth from a posse of blood-crazed Disney folk. “What? He’s not—”
For a moment he was tempted; but he was a scientist, devoted to the truth. “He’s not dead, if that’s what you mean. He’s still there. I got out, he didn’t.”
“You left him there.” She was very beautiful when she was angry, but beauty isn’t everything. “Your own brother.”
“I tried,” Theo said. “But I got ambushed by the bad guys. I nearly didn’t make it.”
She didn’t seem all that interested. “You left him there,” she repeated. “Oh, swell.”
Slowly and painfully he picked himself up off the floor and leaned against the desk. All the unaccustomed running about had taken its toll. At least he had proper clothes again. “So,” he said, “you and Max. I should’ve guessed.”
She dropped into the chair and buried her face in her hands. “I should’ve known better than to rely on you,” she said. “A perfectly simple, straightforward little job.”
Somehow, though, he found he couldn’t be angry, not now that he knew. Women under the influence of Max, he was aware from long experience, weren’t responsible for their actions. Still, there was one point he felt he had to clear up. “You kissed me,” he said.
“Yes. Well?”
“You kissed me,” he repeated, “to get a sample of my DNA, so you could get past the security lockout on the powder compact. That’s how you were able to send the message in the bottle, and the doughnut. Well? Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re Max’s—”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” Which, he realised as soon as he’d said it, wasn’t true at all. It wasn’t fine, not by a long chalk. But, by the same token, it wasn’t her fault. You could no more blame girls for catching a dose of Max than you could find fault with trees for squashing houses when blown down by a high wind. “Well, I’ll be going now, then.”
Her head shot up like the price of gold in a recession. “You what?”
“I’m leaving. Well, you don’t need me any more, do you? You can get into the powder compact, which means you can read the YouSpace manual, which means you can figure out how to make it work, which means you can go and rescue Max yourself, which means—”
“You can’t just leave,” she said.
“Why not?”
“We need you. You’re the only one who can understand all this shit.”
Theo smiled at her. “By all this shit, presumably you mean Pieter van Goyen’s epoch-making advances in quantum physics?”
“Yes.”
“I’m leaving,” he repeated. “I think I’ll give the animal slaughtering business another try. You meet a better class of people.”
“Uncle Bill won’t let you. He knows people.”
Theo nodded. “So do I,” he said. “I know you, and your uncle Bill, and my brother Max. That’s why I’m leaving. I thought I knew Pieter, but nobody’s right all the time. Have a nice day.”
He’d got as far as the door; he’d put his hand on the doorknob. “Please don’t go.”
She was good. Not quite in Max’s class when it came to pathetic wheedling, but you couldn’t blame her for that. She was good enough, which was all that mattered.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ll help you rescue my worthless jerk of a brother, and then you and he can make each other thoroughly miserable while I go and try and salvage something from the wreck of my life. Agreed?”
She nodded brightly. “Sure,” she said. “You won’t regret it, I promise you.”
“You’d be amazed what I can regret if I put my mind to it.
She laughed. He recognised the distinctive timbre. It was the noise a girl makes when she’s laughing at a joke her boyfriend’s just made; she hasn’t actually got the joke, or she doesn’t think it’s particularly funny, but she’s doing the best she can. From Matasuntha, it sounded dangerous, and it occurred to him that if Max was rescued and restored to her loving arms, it wouldn’t be all that long before he started thinking wistfully of the quietly idyllic life he’d led in the cave, being waited on hand and foot by Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, Dozy, Bashful, Grumpy and Doc. In fact, if ever a couple truly deserved each other, they did. You’d need a far darker imagination than Theo could lay claim to in order to dream up any punishment more exquisitely suitable.
“First, though,” he said, with an entirely authentic yawn, “I’m going to get some sleep. Please go away, using the door provided.”
She was smiling at him. In any number of parallel universes, many of them only slightly different from this one, he’d have liked that a lot. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll tell Uncle Bill we’re nearly there, he’ll be thrilled.”
“Oh, and the powder compact.”
“Yes?”
“Leave it on the desk on your way out.”
She paused and looked at him, and he couldn’t quite read what her face was saying. “I was going to see if I could download—”
“Leave it,” he said. “On the desk.”
“OK.” There was a slight click as she put it down. “I just thought, I could study it for a bit while you’re resting. One less thing for you to do.”
“That’s very sweet of you, but no thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” She hadn’t moved. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“There’s one thing you can do for me.”
“Yes?”
“Go away,” Theo said firmly. “That’d be a major contribution to the success of the project.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
Theo grinned sadly at her. “That’s the trouble with the truth,” he said, “it’s got such appallingly bad manners. Tall rectangular thing over there, hinges on one side, opening and shutting mechanism on the other. Let’s see if you can figure out how to make it work.”
She still didn’t move. “Why are you so keen to get rid of me all of a sudden?”
He broadened the grin into a beautiful smile. “Because I don’t like you,” he said. “Bye.”
She shot him a high-velocity sigh, stalked to the door, dragged it open, walked through it and slammed it behind her. It was a magnificent slam, executed with plenty of wrist and forearm to achieve the maximum terminal momentum, and the aftershock vibrated right through the wall, into the bookshelf over the desk, right down to the bottom shelf, on which she must at some point have placed the YouSpace bottle. It quivered for a moment, walking a millimetre or so towards the edge like an old-fashioned washing machine. Theo only noticed it as it quivered over the point of no return. He dived, his invisible arm extended, grabbing at it as it finally toppled and dropped into empty air. It was a splendid effort, and fell only a couple of centimetres short.
Theo crunched down on to the desk, heard a crack and felt first his elbow and then his head bash against something hard. The impact jarred his bones and rattled his teeth, but he barely noticed. He was totally preoccupied watching the YouSpace bottle tumble once, twice through the air before catching the edge of the desk. There was a snap, like a bone breaking, and suddenly the carpet was littered with little bits of broken glass.
“And another thing.” Matasuntha was standing in the doorway. Whatever the other thing was, it never got mentioned. She was staring at the emerald shrapnel on the floor. Her mouth was open, but no sound came out for quite some time.
“It’s no good,” Theo said for the fifteenth time. “You can’t mend it.”
Uncle Bill looked up at him hopelessly. He had splinters of glass stuck to his fingers with superglue. “It says on the label, sticks anything,” he said.
Theo nodded. “In this reality, yes. But there’s an infinite number of realities where it doesn’t, and they were all in the bottle. By the way, you’re kneeling on the tube.”
“What? Oh.” Uncle Bill frowned, looked down and tried to stand up. The carpet swelled up round his leg like a blister, but he stayed on his knees. “Maybe if we tried duct tape—”
Theo sighed. “Believe it or not,” he said, “there are some eventualities where even duct tape won’t cut it. Sorry, but this won’t work.”
Matasuntha made an impatient gesture, emphasised by the large sliver of bottle glued to her wrist. “All right then,” she said. “If you’re so goddamn smart, what do you suggest?”
“Give up,” Theo said sweetly. “Forget it. Find something else to do. I know,” he went on, “how about turning this place into a hotel?”
“The hell with that,” Matasuntha snapped. “We’re so close. You actually went there, and we’ve got the user’s manual—”
“Hold it,” Uncle Bill said urgently. “That’s it, the user’s manual. Look and see what it says. Under broken bottle.”
Theo shrugged, took the powder compact from his pocket, opened it and traced his finger down the mirror. “Hey,” he said, “there’s an entry for that. If the bottle gets smashed.”
Uncle Bill surged up to look over his shoulder, but the carpet held him fast; he toppled and landed on his hands. “Well? What does it say?”
“Just a second.” Theo was scrolling down. “Here, yes. Buy a new one. Right.” he snapped the compact shut and pocketed it.
“The answer’s obvious,” Matasuntha said. “He’ll have to make one from scratch.”
An overwhelming urge to laugh hit Theo like a fist in the midriff. “You’re kidding,” he gasped. “Oh, please tell me you meant that as a joke.”
“You’ve got Pieter’s notes,” Uncle Bull said. “You were his student. I don’t see why you shouldn’t give it a try.”
“You’re crazy. Tell him he’s crazy,” he snapped at Matasuntha, who gave him a cold stare in return. “Go on, tell him.”
But Matasuntha was studying him, as if he was half a worm she’d found in an apple. “Of course he can do it,” she said. “He’s smart. They wouldn’t have put him in charge of the hadron collider if he wasn’t pretty damn smart.”
“I blew it up.”
“Because you’re careless,” Matasuntha replied. “You can be careless and smart at the same time. No, what you’re thinking of doing is going off somewhere and making a YouSpace thing all for yourself, cutting us right out of the deal.
“She’s nuts,” Theo yelled. “Tell her, she’s nuts. I have no interest whatsoever in your stupid, lethally dangerous—”
“You wouldn’t.” Uncle Bill was looking at him with the sort of expression Mother Teresa might have worn if she’d caught one of the novices raiding the petty cash. “That’s so low.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Theo sat down on the floor and buried his head in his hands. “Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you think, I’ll try it. Doomed to failure,” he added, “a complete and utter waste of time, but so what? Anything so long as you stop looking at me.”
For three days and most of three nights, Theo stared at Pieter van Goyen’s notes. He might as well have been gazing at the sun, because the experience left him dazzled and blind. No doubt about it, Pieter’s work was utterly brilliant – the equations danced and sparkled on the screen, sometimes surging forward like a tidal wave, sometimes shearing off at an angle like a shoal of tiny, transparent fish – but, after seventy-two hours in their company, he was forced to the conclusion that he now knew considerably less about quantum mechanics than he had when he started. All he could say for certain was that Pieter had succeeded, and that what has been done once can be done again. The notes, however, were to all intents and purposes useless.
Fine.
At dawn on the fourth day, he switched off the screen, put the notebooks carefully away in a drawer, grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and decided to figure it all out for himself, from first principles. It was a fine and noble moment, which lasted for about three seconds. Then he looked down at the paper and saw that it was still blank. So he drew a small blue dot, and wrote above it, You Are Here.
That didn’t help at all, so he drew a bottle round the dot, and then some wavy lines to represent the sea on which the bottle was floating; it was now a ship, in a bottle, on the sea, the ship being the message. He turned the paper over and drew the bottle sticking up out of the sand on a beach (he drew a sandcastle to make it clear where it was supposed to be). The idea was that someone, typically a poor but deserving fisherman, would come along and give the bottle a brisk rub, at which point the genie would come whooshing out and solve all his problems –
At this point he paused and wondered if he’d finally flipped, or whether this was an Einstein’s tramcar moment, the point at which a homely analogy floodlit the runway on which divine inspiration could touch down and taxi smoothly to a halt. Six minutes later, he folded the paper into an aeroplane and sent it sailing gracefully across the room. He then spent two hours reading up the lives of great scientists on Wikipedia. That didn’t help much, either. Then he turned off the screen and sat in his chair, pretending to be dead. Death, he reflected, was probably like playing the piano; the only way to get really good at it is to practise extensively beforehand.
He’d got to the stage where he couldn’t feel his toes when a tiny noise made him look up. It had come from the direction of the door, which he’d locked to avoid interruption. The key was turning in the keyhole.
Keys don’t usually do that, except in Spielberg films. He’d just made up his mind to go and investigate when the door opened and two men burst in. One of them was short and very old. The other was young, tall, blond, windmill-eared and eating a sandwich.
“You two,” Theo said. “What—?”
The old man gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry about this,” he said, then nodded to his grandson, who grabbed Theo by the lapels and lifted him up so violently that his head banged hard on the ceiling. There was a beautiful firework display that nobody else could see, followed by –
Theo opened his eyes and groaned. “Lunchbox,” he said.
The young man gave him a shy smile, then took another bite of his individual pork pie. There was a sharp jolt, as the van went over a pothole.
“You awake, Mr Bernstein?” The old man turned round in the driving seat to look at him. Theo, who could see past him and through the windscreen, yelled, “Look out!” The old man waggled the steering wheel, the van lurched, and a lorry horn dopplered past over to their left. “You feeling OK, Mr Bernstein? Sorry about this.”
“Keep your eyes on the road!”
“No worries, Mr Bernstein, I been driving fifty years, never had an” – the van swerved so ferociously that for a moment it flexed like a drawn bow – “accident. It’s all right, you’re perfectly safe.”
By now, Theo was painfully aware of the handcuffs and the rope around his ankles. “No I’m not,” he shouted back. “Stop the van now. I mean it.”
The young man was peeling the foil lid off a yoghurt. “Sorry,” the old man said, “but we got our instructions. Your sister wants to see you. Urgent.” “Fine. Tell me when and where, and I’ll take the bus.”
“Don’t you worry, Mr Bernstein, we’ll be there in an hour or so. How’s the head?”
“Hurts like hell.”
“Sorry about that. I told the lad, there was no call for him knocking you out like that. Trouble is, he don’t know his own strength. Say sorry to Mr Bernstein, Art.”
The young man took the plastic spoon out of his mouth and made a noise like a bumblebee in a padded box. “He says he’s sorry,” the old man said. “He’s a good lad really, and, anyhow, I promised his mother. You just lie still and relax, Mr Bernstein. Rest your head.”
The old man must have stood on the brake at this point, because the van compressed like a spring. Theo slid forward until his feet collided with the back of the passenger seat; then his unsupported head bumped against the hard floor. The fireworks display started up again, but he wasn’t in the mood. There’s a time and a place for whooshing red rockets and swirly purple and green Catherine wheels, and this was neither. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see a way of getting the old man to stop without getting all of them killed. Unless –
“Excuse me.”
“Hm?”
“Would you mind very much slowing down a bit? Only, I get travel sick, you see, and—”
“What? Oh, right.” The van slowed down (a horn blared behind and to the side, but all in a good cause this time) and Theo felt a wave of relief wash through him. Over the last year he hadn’t enjoyed his life very much, but apparently he wasn’t quite ready to die just yet. Life, he decided, is a bit like an optimist reading a Martin Amis novel; he keeps going, no matter what, just in case it gets good towards the end. “Art, give the gentleman a paper bag, just in case.”
Lunchbox fished in his pocket, uncrumpled a bag and laid it on Theo’s chest like a floral tribute. “Thanks,” Theo said, “but I can’t use my hands, you see, so—”
“Good point,” the old man said. “Art, I think we can do without the cuffs.”
It took Lunchbox quite some time to find the key. It turned up eventually, buried under three film-wrapped bricks of ham and tomato, two more of BLT, four rather squashed Swiss rolls, a book-sized wedge of cheese and three Snickers bars. Then he looked down at Theo’s hands and frowned.
“His right hand’s invisible,” the old man said. “Take off the left one and perhaps you’d be good enough to do the other one yourself, Mr Bernstein. He’s a good boy, but not what you might call practical.”
The removal of the handcuffs opened a new range of options, all of which Theo reluctantly dismissed. Lunchbox might be skinny and dimmer than a hotel corridor light bulb, but he’d proved strong enough to bash Theo stupid just by lifting him a little too enthusiastically. The old man had slowed down a bit, but kicking the van doors open and jumping out still didn’t appeal terribly much. It looked, therefore, like he was on his way to see Janine. At least he’d arrive without cramp or pins and needles up to the elbows.
“What does my sister want to see me for?”
“No idea, sorry,” the old man said. “All we was told was, fetch him over here immediately. I expect she just wants to talk to you a bit.”
Theo nodded slowly. “Tell me, Mr – sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“That’s all right, Mr Bernstein. Don’t worry about it.”
Oh well. “Tell me,” he repeated, “if Janine were to order you to, well, kill me, let’s say, and dump my body out at sea, for example, you wouldn’t do that, would you? I mean, I can see you’re basically good, decent people, with standards. You’d never dream of doing anything like that, I can tell.”
A short and rather awkward silence; then the old man said, “The way I look at it, Mr Bernstein, there’s no use worrying about stuff. I mean, for all you or I know, the planet could get hit by an asteroid and then that’s all of us gone, just like that. If you start thinking about things, you’d never be able to sleep at night. Would you like something to eat, Mr Bernstein? Art, give the gentleman a sandwich.”
The look of terror that covered the young man’s face would have melted the heart of a tax inspector. “Better not,” Theo said quickly. “Like I said, motion sickness. Not a good idea.”
“Ah. Right, well, if you change your mind, just say.”
Theo shuffled around a bit until he was able to prop himself up against the van doors. His head hurt every time the old man braked suddenly or swerved, but eventually he dropped into a vague half and half doze, which was considerably more restful than watching Lunchbox eat. In his semi-conscious state he was dimly aware of a cellphone warbling, and the old man saying something about being just a little bit behind schedule but otherwise all according to plan, and ETA at the designated transfer point in twenty minutes, and a bunch of other stuff that Theo couldn’t be bothered to follow. He was just about to drift into a proper dream, probably the one where he was back at his old school and he’d just been elected pope by a full conclave of the Roman Catholic Church, and nobody would believe him because he was only eleven, when –
Somebody was prodding his shoulder.
“Wake up, Your Holiness.” Prod, prod. “Here, Nev, gimme the plant mister, the silly old bugger’s out like a light.”
He opened his eyes. A cardinal, in a red cassock and mozetta, was bending over him holding a plastic water-squirter bottle. He had an earring in his left ear.
“You’re Australian,” Theo said.
The cardinal sighed. “That’s right, Your Holiness. Now, sit up and put your teeth in, and then it’ll be time for your call to the Kremlin. You know how the Tsar gets if he’s kept waiting.”
Over the cardinal’s shoulder, across a long and richly furnished room, Theo could see a huge open window. It looked like he was on the top floor of a very high building, and the view was magnificent; a vast expanse of blue water under a cloudless sky, at the edges a horizon fringed with skyscrapers, the Sydney Harbour Bridge –
The cardinal was offering him a gold plate, on which rested a set of false teeth. “Am I the Pope?” Theo asked.
“That’s right, Your Holiness.”
“What are we doing in Australia?”
Sigh. “You live here. We’re in the Vatican.” The cardinal turned his head and spoke to someone beyond Theo’s range of vision. “Two of the pink pills today, I reckon, Nev. Can’t have him talking to the Tsar in this state, probably start a war.”
Theo wriggled. The chair he was sitting in was huge, and his feet weren’t touching the ground. “The Vatican’s in Rome,” he said. “Why are we—?”
“Was in Rome,” the cardinal sighed, “till 1973, when the hadron collider blew up and Italy got buried in ash. Then we moved, remember? Now, take your pills and you’ll be just fine.”
An acolyte thrust a silver saucer with pink pills on it in his face. He dodged it. “The Tsar?”
The cardinal rolled his eyes. “That’s right. You’re finalising the partition of Brazil, remember? No, you don’t, do you? Better have one of the blue pills as well, Nev, or we’ll be here all flaming day.”
“What Tsar? There is no Tsar. There was a revolution—”
“Bloody hell, he’s off again.” The cardinal shook his head, making his earring swing wildly. “Listen, Your Holiness. You’re Pope Wayne XXIII, we’re in Sydney, in the Vatican, it’s 2016 and you’re in the middle of negotiating who gets Latin America south of Guatemala with the Emperor of bloody Russia. You need to pull yourself together, Wayne mate, or there’s going to be tears before bedtime.”
Theo wasn’t having much luck with words, but numbers still seemed to make sense. Twenty sixteen. The future. In which case –
“Sorry,” he said, and grinned. “I remember now.”
The cardinal relaxed. “That’s fine, Your Holiness. Man of your age, it’s only to be expected. Now, if you’ll just take your pills, we can decide the fate of Christendom without making a right royal bog-up of it.”
“Yes, of course.” Theo nodded wisely. “But first, if it’s all right, I’d quite like something to eat.”
The cardinal looked uncertain. “You sure? You know what happens if—”
“Yes,” Theo said, and gripped his hands on the arms of his chair. The gesture wasn’t wasted on the cardinal, because he nodded to the acolyte. “Fetch his Holiness a Vegemite sarny, Nev, quick as you like.”
“Actually,” Theo said firmly, “what I’d really like is a doughnut.”
The cardinal’s face hardened. “Come on, Your Holiness, you know what the doc said. No doughnuts, under any circumstances.”
“Oh. In that case, how about a b—?”
“Or bagels. Or Polo mints. He told you, remember? One more doughnut, it’ll be the death of you.”
A surge of panic swept through Theo. “Look,” he said, “I’m the Pope and I want a doughnut. Now. And that’s ex cathedra.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not – get that, will you, Nev?” the cardinal said, as a phone rang somewhere. “Doctor’s orders,” he went on. “No doughnuts and no bagels, or he won’t be responsible.”
“I forgive him,” Theo said grimly. “You too. Plenary absolution, provided I get my doughnut now. Understood?”
The acolyte was back, holding a phone. “It’s the Tsar,” he mouthed.
“Buggery.” The cardinal pulled a sad face. “All right, give it here. The pills,” he hissed.
“Not unless I get a—”
“All right.” The cardinal grabbed the phone. “Please hold for His Holiness, Your Majesty.” He held the phone out to Theo, who raised his eyebrows. The cardinal mouthed Yes, all right, and Theo took the pills from the saucer, popped them in his mouth and stuffed them in his cheek with the tip of his tongue. Then he took the phone and said, “Yes?”
“Theo?”
“J—” He managed to choke back the rest of her name just in time. Janine’s voice. “Speaking.”
“Theo, you total shit, where are you? We’ve been looking everywhere.”
The acolyte had left the room, but the cardinal was still there. Never mind. As soon as the doughnut arrived, he’d be out of there. “I’m in the Vatican,” he said. “In Sydney.”
The cardinal groaned and turned away.
“You what?”
“In the Vatican. Sydney, Australia. So, you wanted to talk to me.”
“What the hell are you doing there? You should be on the planet of the Disney creatures, rescuing Max.”
Theo opened his eyes very wide. “You know about that.”
“Of course I do, I’m not stupid. What the hell are you doing in Sydney?”
“I’m the Pope.”
The cardinal made a low moaning noise. “What do you mean, you’re the—? Oh, forget it,” Janine said. “Stop pissing around and go and get Max, right now.”
The acolyte was approaching. He held a golden salver, in the exact centre of which was a doughnut. Theo leaned forward and grabbed at it, but the acolyte held it just out of reach. Then the cardinal handed him a note on a scrap of paper: not till you’ve got us Porto Alegre.
Fine, Theo thought, if that’s what it takes. “I insist you let us have everything south of the Serra Geral,” he said. “Otherwise, the deal’s off.”
The cardinal nodded approvingly. “You what?” Janine said.
“I mean it,” Theo said firmly, his eyes glued to the doughnut. “What? Yes, that’s fine. I’m glad we were able to agree on that. So, if you can picture a line running approximately fifteen degrees forty-five minutes south—”
“Theo, unless you go and rescue Max this minute, I’m going to have you killed, do you understand me? I mean it.”
The doughnut was still just beyond the furthest extent of his arm. “And how am I supposed to go about doing that exactly?”
“Easy. Just do what you usually do. Go there, get Max, come back.”
“What I usually do,” Theo repeated. “You don’t know how it works, do you?”
“Of course I do.”
Years of experience; he knew when she was lying. “Which is why I ended up here,” he said, “instead of the planet of the Disney creatures.”
The cardinal let out a low whimpering noise and grabbed the phone from Theo’s hand. “G’day, Your Majesty,” he said, “sorry about this but His Holiness would appear to have had a heart attack. He’ll call you back soon as he’s feeling better. Cheerio.” He pressed the kill button so hard he splintered the casing, and dropped the phone on the floor. “That does it,” he snapped. “Sorry, Wayne, mate, but this time you’ve gone too far. Nev, get me the Archbishop of Wangaratta.”
Quickly, Theo did the mental arithmetic; distance, time, velocity, angle. Then he lunged.
He almost made it; almost, but not quite. Later he realised that he’d been basing his calculations on the length of his arm in his home universe, whereas in this one it was 0.9 centimetres shorter. His nails scraped the edge of the salver, but that was as close as he got. Then he overbalanced and hit the floor. “The doughnut,” he screamed. “Give me the doughnut.”
The cardinal was staring at him with a mixture of loathing and pity. “Nev,” he said, “His Holiness is having some kind of seizure. Lock him in the dunnee and call Doc O’Shaugnessy.”
Respectful but extremely strong hands attached themselves to the front of Theo’s robes and hauled him to his feet; then the floor and ceiling changed places for a while, as Theo was carried across the room and dumped in a toilet. He tried the door, but it wouldn’t open; presumably Nev had wedged it shut with the back of a chair. Marvellous.
After that, not much happened for quite some time. It was rather a nice toilet, as toilets go; it had a marble floor and gold-plated taps, and the paper was purple, monogrammed with the papal crossed keys. Theo put the seat down and sat on it, and waited for someone to come and let him out.
There was a mirror, which was interesting; the face that stared back at him was more or less his own, but about forty years older. He didn’t feel that old, so presumably the transformation was entirely superficial. His right arm was visible, and he was wearing a big, chunky ring; if he ever got home again and managed to take it with him, it’d be worth good money, but he was fairly sure he wouldn’t be allowed to keep it. That, after all, would be something nice, and YouSpace didn’t seem to work like that.
Janine, he thought. Janine and Max. That’s the problem with being human. We have brains capable of figuring out the universe to a thousand decimal places, we can build machines as tall as mountains or as tiny as specks of dust, we can prise open atoms like walnuts, we can calculate the weights of distant stars, manipulate nature, ride on super-sophisticated fireworks out beyond the atmosphere, we could blow up our own planet in the time it takes to blow your nose; there’s practically nothing we can’t do, except choose our relatives. Everything else: no bother, piece of cake. But the one thing that’d do more to alleviate stress and grief and give us a head start in the pursuit of happiness is entirely beyond us, further than the Andromeda galaxy, more elusive than the Higgs-Boson. No wonder there isn’t a Nobel prize for putting up with your family. They wouldn’t be able to find anyone to give it to.
He was here, presumably, because he’d been dreaming about being made pope; his subconscious mind must’ve instructed a YouSpace device to find a reality in which that could happen, and the bottle had sent him here. From that it followed that Janine had such a thing; also, that she didn’t know how to use it, or she’d have sent him directly to the Disney planet. One disturbing factor was the doctor’s prohibition on doughnuts, bagels and Polo mints. That suggested to him that someone was determined not to allow him to escape before he’d completed his mission – finding Max – and logic required that that person should be Janine. But if she could program in such a sophisticated element as no-doughnuts-or-bagels, why couldn’t she work the YouTube bottle herself? That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of course, Janine’s actions had never been exactly rational. How many Janines does it take to change a light bulb? Three: one to rip the socket and flex out of the ceiling, one to burn down the house to punish it for popping a bulb, and one to complain that the other two are out to get her. Even so. Curious.
Meanwhile, there was the small matter of how he was going to get out of here and back to where he belonged. He closed his eyes and pictured the doughnut he’d been so close to grabbing. It proved that there were doughnuts in this reality, in this building; the question was, how to get his hands on one. Unless –
Ten seconds later, a promising hypothesis went down in flames. The hole in the middle of a toilet seat didn’t work –
“Um, Your Holiness.”
Nev the acolyte was standing in the doorway. Theo could see him quite clearly, through the hole in the toilet seat. “Yes?”
“Doctor O’Shaugnessy’s here,” said Nev. “If you’d like to follow me.”
“Sure.” Theo got up, closed the lid, straightened his robes and followed Nev into the throne room. There was a man standing with his back to them both, gazing out through the picture window at the magnificent view; a short, bald man with shoulders so sloping and dandruff-flaked you could’ve used them to stage the Winter Olympics.
“Thanks, Nev,” the man said. “You can leave us to it. I’ll shout if I need you for anything.”
Nev only took a second and a bit to walk to the door, open it and close it again after him. For Theo, it felt like an eternity: long enough to grow stalactites from the ceiling and hold a glacier race right around the Equator. Eventually, though, the man turned round to face him.
“Hello, Theo,” he said.
“Pieter?”
Pieter van Goyen smiled at him; the same twinkly-hippo smile he remembered from – what was it? A thousand years ago? – when his most desperate problem was how to explain why the assignment he was supposed to be handing in somehow hadn’t got started yet. “I never realised you wanted to be the Pope,” he said. “Is this a new direction for you, or something you’ve always aspired to?”
“You’re dead.”
Pieter grinned. “No, I’m not,” he said.
“You’re dead. I saw it. They shot you with a ray gun. You disintegrated.”
“Ah.” Pieter did that hands-raised-fingers-spread gesture. “That.”
“Yes, that.”
“Your trouble is,” Pieter said kindly, “you don’t think. You assume. I hoped I’d cured you of that back in your second year, but obviously not.”
“Pieter…”
Pieter looked round, located a chair and sat in it. There was a faint creaking noise, but somehow the chair held, banishing any doubt that they were in a wholly different universe. “You visited one of my default realities, yes?”
“If you say so. Look—”
“Not a particularly attractive place,” Pieter went on. “Bizarrely improbable aliens in a setting all too obviously derived from the cantina at Mos Eisley. Did it occur to you to ask yourself why I’d choose to make something like that a default? No,” he went on, as Theo started to make not-interested noises, “clearly not. Well, try it now.”
Angrily resentful at being given homework at a time like this, Theo jammed his brain into gear. “Because it’s the only universe where some specific thing can happen.”
“Warm.”
“A law of physics doesn’t apply.”
“Warmer.”
Click. “Teleportation,” Theo barked. “It’s a universe where it’s possible to teleport.”
Pieter clapped his hands together once and pointed at him. “A long and bumpy ride, but you got there in the end.”
“And the ray guns—”
“Were real ray guns,” Pieter said, “if you’ll excuse the apparent paradox. Fortunately, when I’m there, I carry a teleport activator key with me at all times. I beamed out. Simple as that.”
Theo suddenly felt terribly weary, as though he was just about to run out of fuel. “All right,” he said, “I guess that accounts for it, and you really are still alive—”
“Thank you so much,” Pieter said gravely.
“That doesn’t explain,” Theo went on, with a last flicker of rage, “why you won’t let them give me a doughnut.”
“Ah.”
“Doctor’s orders. Apparently you’re the doctor. Why?”
Pieter wriggled a little in his chair, and there was a faint splitting sound. “Because I wanted to keep you here until I found you,” he said. “Which wasn’t easy, believe you me. Honestly, Theo, of all the Vaticans in all the autonomous Papal States in all the multiverse, why did you have to choose this one? It’s so hopelessly obscure it barely registers. You do realise, this whole reality is posited on Rupert Murdoch converting to Roman Catholicism in 1962, following a profound spiritual experience on the road between Rockhampton and Toowoomba. In order for that to happen, they’ve had to do without the Internet, the Russian Revolution and forty-eight per cent of the Renaissance. Oh, and the Roman Empire celebrated its 2,750th anniversary in 1999. They had a procession and a sherbet fountain, and fifty Seventh-day Adventists were thrown to the lemurs.”
“Lemurs?”
“Health and safety. You can see why it took me a while to track you down. Talk about off the beaten track. In probability terms, this is the sticks.”
Amazing how Pieter could make him feel guilty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was dreaming.”
“You dream about being the Pope?”
“On this one specific occasion,” Theo protested. “I was back at school, and—”
“Ah.” Pieter nodded. “And some idiot initiated a YouSpace field—”
“I thought you weren’t going to call it that.”
“While you were still asleep and dreaming, so your unconscious mind directed the parameters index locator wizard to find a reality in which you could be the Pope.” Pieter’s face cracked into a grin. “This one. Showing just how screwed up the universe would have to be before you’d get elected to high ecclesiastical office. Rather reassuring, actually, if you care to look at it from that perspective. Anyhow,” he went on, fishing in his inside pocket and producing a cigar the size of a medium torpedo, “no harm done. You’re here, I’m here, we can get down to business. Oh, don’t worry,” he added, as he lit the cigar and blew out a cloud large enough to asphyxiate most of San Francisco, “one good thing about this universe. Nicotine is good for you. Trust me,” he added, “I’m a doctor.”
Theo fanned a clearing in the smoke with his hand, just enough that he could see Pieter’s face. “I take it you want something.”
Pieter looked hurt. “Oh, come on,” he said. “One little thing I want you to do for me, after everything I’ve done for you.”
“Such as.”
“Oh, let me see. I got you a job, left you YouSpace, the most amazing recreational tool in human history, which will make you the richest man who ever lived. Well?” he smiled. “How am I doing?”
Theo gave him a cold stare. “As far as the job goes,” he said, “I was happier hauling guts in the slaughterhouse. The YouSpace thing is utterly terrifying and horribly dangerous, and you can insert it in a region of negative solar activity. Also, you brought Max back into my life. And Janine. Thank you so f*cking much.”
“Janine,” Pieter repeated. “Ah yes, that charming sister of yours. How does she fit in?”
“She knows Max is alive. She’s got one of your magic bottles. She sent me here to find him.”
Pieter frowned. “Just a moment,” he said. “Rewind that last bit. She sent you here.”
Theo shrugged impatiently. “Well, not here specifically. But she wants me to rescue Max and bring him home. So she had me kidnapped, and she put me in her YouSpace thing—”
“Her YouSpace thing.”
“Yes. Mine got broken, which as far as I’m concerned is no great loss, thank you all the same. There was this planet where—”
He stopped short. The look on Pieter’s face had drained all the language out of him. Pieter was scared. “What?” Theo demanded. “Why are you gawping at me like that?”
Pieter did a shut-up gesture with his hands. “Slowly, and try and be coherent, just for me. Your bottle got broken?”
Theo nodded. “Matasuntha—”
“And your sister’s got a bottle, and she kidnapped you.”
“I just said—”
“And presumably she doesn’t know how to use it, because without the user’s manual—”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, my God.”
Some people panic easily. They lose their cool so often and so readily that they’d be well advised to wear it round their neck on a bit of string, like a librarian’s glasses. Pieter, though; Pieter had never, in all the years Theo’d known him, displayed anything remotely resembling anxiety, doubt or fear; not unless you counted the time he’d run out of coffee at 3 a.m. in the middle of the summer vacation, when all his neighbours were away. To see the look on his face right now was like asking God a question and being met with a blank stare and a shrug. “Pieter?”
He’d gone white, and his eyes were huge. It made him look like Gollum on a bad few-remaining-strands-of-hair day. “You do realise what this means.”
“No, of course not. Nobody ever explains anything.”
“It means,” Pieter said, and his voice was high and slightly shrill, “we’re stuck here. Both of us.”
Did not compute. “No, it doesn’t. There’s doughnuts, in the kitchen. There must be. They brought me one, only—”
“They won’t work,” Pieter yelled. “For God’s sake, Theo, didn’t you read the user’s manual?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. Skimmed through it.”
Terror made Pieter look slightly bigger and considerably thinner, for some reason. Also a lot older. “If you’d taken the time to read the manual,” he said, “you’d know that the interface transit retrieval talisman is personalised to each individual module—”
“Excuse me?”
“Each bottle’s made differently,” Pieter translated scornfully. “So that only the registered owner and people in actual physical contact with him can use doughnuts to go backwards and forwards. It’s a security measure.”
Theo would quite like to have told Pieter what he thought of his various security measures, but he decided that the situation was already fraught enough to be going on with. “I see,” he said. “No, actually I don’t. How does that—?”
Pieter sighed. “It was to stop the locals in other realities you happen to be visiting from accidentally straying into ours every time they happened to look through the hole in a doughnut. Otherwise there’d be chaos, obviously, thousands of doughnut eaters from alien realities suddenly materialising on the streets of our major cities. That’s why it’s so vitally important that you only travel through your bottle. Use someone else’s, and the doughnuts won’t work. You’d be stranded.”
When the going gets panic-stricken, the panic-stricken get going. The solution popped neatly into Theo’s mind without him even having to think. “But that’s OK,” he said. “You got here through YouSpace, right? So, you’ve got a bottle. We get a doughnut, I grab hold of you, we both go home. Simple.”
Pieter gave him a long, sad look. “I had a bottle.”
“Yes? And?”
“I left it to you. In my goddamn will. And you broke it.”
Image the hot shower you’d been looking forward to all day turned out to be iced water. “The same—”
“Yes.” Pieter closed his eyes. “As it clearly states in the manual, each unit can be registered with up to three authorised users.” He sighed, and shook his head. “How do you think I got here? Walked? Got the bus?”
“But—” Theo realised he’d finally had enough, even from Pieter van Goyen. “For crying out loud, Pieter, explain. Otherwise—”
“What?”
Theo forced his face into a grim, hard expression. It was like getting your foot into one of your eight-year-old daughter’s shoes. “Otherwise,” he said, “I’m going to go out there and be the best possible pope I can be, and you can spend the rest of your life treating German measles. It wouldn’t be so bad,” he added cheerfully. “Better than cleaning up in the slaughterhouse, anyway.”
“In Australia?”
“Better than the slaughterhouse,” Theo said firmly. “I’ve been thinking for some time I ought to settle down, make something of my life. The Papacy wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but what the hell. I could really make a difference, being pope.”
“So could a ring-tailed possum flying an airliner. Look, we both know you’re bluffing.”
Theo scowled at him, then made the sign of the cross. “Pax vobiscum, scumbag,” he said. “Oh, and you’re fired. I’ve felt for some time I need a personal physician with integrity and compassion. Not to mention a medical degree.”
Pieter sighed, then shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “After all,” he added, “it’s not like we’re going anywhere in a hurry.” He looked down at the cigar between his fingers, which had gone out, and relit it. “We need coffee,” he said. “Medical emergency. There’s a bell around here somewhere. You ring it, and some clown comes and takes your order. Ah. This’ll do.”
There was indeed a small silver bell, resting on a beautiful leather-bound Bible, next to a silver candlestick, in which a fat white candle dimly flickered. The combination stirred something in Theo’s memory, but he couldn’t be bothered to follow it up. He shook the bell and it tinkled, and a moment later Nev the acolyte appeared. “Your Holiness?”
“Coffee,” Pieter said. “Strong. Lots.”
“Your Holiness,” Nev repeated. “Is that wise?”
Theo shrugged. “He’s the doctor,” he said. “He says it’s OK.”
Nev continued to stare at the bell in Theo’s hand, and the candle, which had gone out. “You don’t think it’s a bit, well, extreme?”
“What, coffee?”
“Excommunicating the whole of Sydney.”
Theo frowned, then looked back over his shoulder through the picture window. Ah, he thought. Bell, book and candle. Oops. “Did I just do that?”
“Afraid so, Your Holiness.”
“Butterfingers,” Pieter muttered. “His Holiness just had one of his funny turns,” he went on, as the cardinal appeared in the doorway. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. He gets these sudden incontrollable rages, and then, wham, eternal damnation from Wollongong to Gosford. I’ll give him something for it, he’ll be fine soon. Meanwhile, some coffee would be nice, if it’s no bother.”
Nev and the cardinal backed out slowly, taking care to maintain eye contact until the door was safely shut behind them. “Thanks, Pieter,” Theo said. “Thanks a lot.”
Pieter shrugged. “When you decide to make a difference, you don’t muck about.” he said. “I think your chances of staying here and living a nice, quiet life aren’t quite what they were. I’m not quite sure what’s involved in getting rid of a pope who’s gone out of his gourd, but there’s bound to be a proper procedure.” He smiled, then added, “Don’t ever threaten me, Theo, it’s rude and I don’t like it. Understood? Splendid. Right, what do you suggest we do now?”
“I don’t know, do I?” Theo yelled. “I just want to go home.”
“Can’t, sorry.” Pieter gave him a look you could’ve crushed diamonds with. “Not if the bottle’s broken.”
“The phone.” A tiny spurt of hope. “We could use the phone.”
“What, to order in pizza?”
“To call Janine. My sister.”
Pieter shook his head sadly. “All right,” he said, “it’s possible there’s a version of your sister in this reality. But she won’t know what’s going on, and she most definitely won’t be able to get you home. Obviously you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said, or you’d—”
“She rang me,” Theo said. “Just now.”
If Time is a piece of cheese, the two seconds that followed were fondue. “I beg your pardon?”
“She called me. Everyone thought she was the Tsar, naturally—”
“Of course. Easy mistake to make.”
“—but it was her, I talked to her, she told me to find Max. Then the cardinal grabbed the phone and told her I’d had a heart attack, so I didn’t get to ask her how she’d got me here. But if she got me here, she can get me back. Can’t she?”
Pieter hadn’t breathed for quite some time. “Not sure,” he said. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“Well, it looks like she’s got a YouSpace bottle,” Pieter said, puffing at his cigar, which had gone out again. “So in theory, yes. But I doubt very much if she knows how to work it.”
Theo grinned. “Maybe not,” he said. “But you do.”
“Yes,” Pieter said. “I do, don’t I? Good thought.”
“It’d be like those aeroplane disaster movies, where the guy on the ground tells the complete novice how to land the plane.”
“Um. Bad analogy.”
“So all we’ve got to do is call her back.”
“Of course. Got her number, have you? Bearing in mind that it’s absolutely impossible to send a telephone signal of any sort across the transdimensional vortex.”
“She did it,” Theo said simply. “So it’s possible. And I don’t need her number.” He picked up the phone. “All I have to do is press the call-you-back button and we’re there.”
“Theo.” Pieter’s face was as unreadable as On Chesil Beach. “I think you may just have had a good idea. Hard to accept, I know, but we are, after all, scientists. Well, don’t just stand there like the Prune-King’s daughter. Do it.”
Slowly and carefully, Theo flexed his fingers, making sure they all worked. It was still rather weird, being able to see them again. “All right,” he said. “On one condition.”
“Theo—”
“One condition. Just one. Otherwise, we stay here and learn to love Aussie Rules Football. Well?”
“Whatever.”
“The condition is,” Theo said gravely, “you explain.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
“Oh, that. Yes, if you like. Now, press the damn button.” Feeling a bit like the President after the Russian premier has refused to take back what he just said about motherhood and apple pie, Theo placed the tip of his finger over the button, until he could just feel the texture of it, and applied gentle but consistent pressure. There was an agonising pause, followed by the dial tone.
“Well?”
“Quiet, it’s ringing.”
Four rings; five. Then a male voice Theo didn’t recognise said, “Ja?”
“Hello. I’d like to speak to Janine, please.”
“Huh?”
Deep breath. “Janine Bernstein. Could I possibly talk to her, please?”
Pause. “Zis is Kurt. Vat you vant?”
Pieter was pulling the sort of face the human skin wasn’t designed to cope with. “Please may I speak to Janine Bernstein. Please.”
“She not here. She gone out. Zis is Kurt. Vat you—?”
“Do you know when she’s likely to be back? It’s very important.”
“She gone out. I ott-chob man. She not tell me ven she come back. Vy ze hell she tell me anyzing. I not care. I chust vurk here.”
Theo tried to count to ten. He got as far as three. “Is there any way you could get a message to her? It really is extremely—”
“I write note. She not read. She never read note. I write anyhow, is vaste of time. I write note.”
Pieter was making faint mewing noises, like a sick cat. “Can you please tell me the phone number?”
“Vas?”
“The number. The phone number I’m calling on right now?”
“Vy you ask? You know number. You calling on number. Vot you ask me for?”
“Please?”
“I not know number. I chust vurk here. Is lousy job. I cut grass, vosh vindows, take out trash, I not gottdamn social secretary. You get off ze line now. I go.”
“Please tell her,” Theo said desperately. “Theo called. About Max. Urgent. Really, really urgent.”
“I write note. Vaste of paper. She not read. I go now.”
The click, and then the whirr. Theo slowly put the phone down. “She’s out,” he said. “I left a message.”
“That’s it, then,” Pieter said. “We’re screwed. We’re going to be stuck here for the rest of our lives. In Australia.”
“No we aren’t.” Theo said firmly. “Janine will get my message and call us back, and then—” He gave up. “You’re right,” he said. “We’re screwed. Oh well.”
“Oh well?”
“It’s not so bad,” Theo said. “At least it’s the twenty-first century and the people are human. Think about it. We could be stuck where Max is.”
Pieter shrugged. “That’s not so bad, either. There’s humans living on the southern continent. They’re all princesses. No men, just a load of rich, lonely young women in sparkly dresses. There are definitely worse places, trust me.”
“Yes, well. Max isn’t there, is he? He’s stuck in a cave surrounded by furry animals with automatic weapons.”
“In accordance with the fundamental human right to keep and arm bears. Yes, I know. Old but gold. He’ll be all right, don’t worry. Besides, I thought you didn’t give a damn.”
Theo shook his head. “I don’t like him but I don’t want him killed. He’s my brother.” He sighed. “It’s a very special relationship, you know? No, I don’t suppose you do.”
“Actually, that’s how I feel about my sister. Two parts a sort of mystical union of souls, three parts constant unbearable irritation. Also, I never know what to get her for her birthday.” Pieter sat down on the papal throne and relit his cigar for the third time. “You could knock through that partition wall there and turn this whole wing into a bowling alley.”
“She’ll call us,” Theo said. “I mean, she wants me to find Max, she’ll be on that phone any moment now. Not that she gives a damn about me, but where Max is concerned—”
“Theo,” Pieter said, “forget it. We aren’t going anywhere. Did I tell you about the time-decay thing?”
“The what?”
“Ah.” Pieter nodded slowly. “Key piece of information. It’s in the manual, of course, but since you couldn’t be bothered to read it—”
“Pieter.”
“Fine, right. As you should’ve figured out for yourself, the YouSpace acceleration effect subjects organic matter to extreme prototachyonic inversion stress. That’s fine so long as you’re inside the bottle’s ambient baryon field, and returning to your reality of origin purges all the prototachyons out of your system, so it’s no bother at all once you’re home. But if you leave the baryon field, which happens if, to take an example purely at random, you’re stranded because the bottle’s got busted, the build-up of antiprototachyonic radiation in your body tissue quickly leads to cellular degradation resulting in nucleotide dysfunction and catastrophic failure of protein cohesion.” He paused, took in Theo’s blank stare and translated, “You go all runny, then you fall to bits. Or at least,” he added with a slight shudder, “that’s what’s in store for me. You’re probably OK. As far as we know, the bottle that brought you here is intact.”
Theo stared at him. “You’re going to—”
“Yup. In about a hundred and forty hours. They’ll have to bury me in an ice-cream carton. Same goes for Max, of course. Hence,” he added, blowing out a dense blue cloud, “my apparently flippant and devil-may-care demeanour, imperfectly concealing a very real sense of shit-scaredness and existential terror.”
“Pieter,” Theo whimpered, “we’ve got to do something.”
Pieter smiled. “I am doing something,” he said. “I’m sitting on the Throne of St Peter smoking a good cigar. It won’t help any, but neither would anything else, so why the hell not?”
“Janine—”
“Is not going to call,” Pieter said firmly. “Stop torturing yourself with false hopes and accept the situation. Prepare yourself for the inevitable. And you might start looking round for a bucket or something. I’d hate for my mortal remains to soak away into the carpet.”
The phone rang.
“It’s her,” Pieter screamed. “Out of the way!” He launched himself out of the throne, shouldered past Theo, grabbed the phone and yelled, “Yes?”
Theo tried to take the phone from him, and got a hand in his face. “What?” Pieter was saying. “What? No. Who is this? No, sorry, but – no. Get off the f*cking line, Your Majesty, we’re expecting an important call. Yeah, and yours too.” Slam.
“That wasn’t Janine, then,” Theo said.
“No.” Pieter hobbled back to the throne and sat down heavily. “Just the Tsar, about some idiotic treaty. I told you, didn’t I? She’s not going to come through for us. So stop deluding yourself and… ”
Ring. Ring.
This time, Theo beat him to it by a clear thousandth of a second. “Hello? Janine?”
“Hi. This is a free message. Right across the country, thousands of people just like you are paying too much for their personal loans. Call us now for a really great deal on—”
Dimly, Theo was aware of movement, and a hand gripping his wrist. “Don’t throw the phone,” Pieter was shouting at him. “We may still need it. Don’t throw the phone.”
“What?” The red mist that had covered his eyes started to dissipate, and he let Pieter take the phone away from him. “That wasn’t Janine,” he said.
“I’d kind of gathered.”
“She’s not going to call, is she?”
“No.”
“And now we can’t call her back, because she’s not the most recent caller any more.” Suddenly he felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders; he’d been let off having to hope, and now he could relax into despair. “We’re screwed. You’re going to die. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Mister Tactful,” Pieter said. “I wonder, though.”
Hope is a bit like bindweed, or Russian vine. Just when you think you’ve killed off the last root, there it is, back again. “What?”
“Do you think they’ve got any booze around here? They must have. I wonder how we go about getting hold of some.”
“Pieter.”
“Well, why the hell not? What can a person do in a hundred and forty hours? He can watch the whole of Star Trek Voyager on DVD, or he can get really, really, really stonked.”
“Pieter—”
“True, both options would leave you regarding death as a merciful release, but—”
“Pieter!” He hadn’t meant to shout. “Pull yourself together, for crying out loud. Think of something. You’re a Nobel Laureate, aren’t you? You invented this horrible thing. You can’t just crawl away and get drunk. It’s—”
“What?”
“It’s what Max would do.”
“Ah.” Pieter grinned. “Great minds.” He picked up the little silver bell and shook it ferociously. A moment later, Nev appeared. “We want a drink,” Pieter thundered at him. “For medicinal purposes. Now.”
Nev looked at Theo, who hesitated, then nodded. “Right,” Pieter said. “What’ve you got?”
“Would Your Holiness like to see the wine-cellar inventory?”
“The hell with wine,” Pieter said, but Theo shushed him. Three little words. “Wine cellar inventory?”
“Yes, Your Holiness. It’s very extensive. In excess of ten thousand bottles.”
Theo smiled. “Fetch,” he said.
“That’s not the way to go about it,” Pieter protested, as Nev withdrew. “Wine’s all very well for polite social occasions, but for the genuine, all-out, peel-back-a-million-years-of-evolution experience, you need the hard stuff.”
“Hush,” Theo said gently. “Ah,” he went on, as Nev reappeared with a large loose-leaf folder, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” He looked up and down the columns of names and dates, but nothing rang a bell. Not to worry. “I think we’ll try the Château Cheval Blanc 1961. Thank you, Nev. Go in peace.”
“I don’t know what’s got into you,” Pieter growled, as Nev scuttled away. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want fruitiness, body, a faint tang of woodsmoke and a great nose. I want to get drunk.”
Theo gave him a sweet and gentle smile. “Trust me.”
“Trust you? The man who blew up the VVLHC?”
The smile died instantly. “You please yourself,” Theo said. “You can stay here, get smashed, practise medicine, turn into soup, do what the hell you like. I plan on going home. You don’t have to come. In fact, right now I’d rather you didn’t.”
“But—” What happened then was really rather fascinating. Pieter’s lips continued to move for a second or so, presumably carrying on with the protests and the abuse, but no sound came out. Then he frowned. “You don’t think—”
Theo nodded. “Yes.”
“But what possible reason can you have for believing…?”
Theo shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Intuition. Instinct. A pattern gradually beginning to emerge. Anyhow,” he added, “it’s worth a try. And if I’m wrong, the worst that can happen is we get to share a bottle of nice wine.”
“But—”
“Put it this way,” Theo said. “A piece of string has two ends. Otherwise, it’s not a piece of string. OK?”
“What’s string got to do with anything, for crying out loud?”
Theo knew that if he was proved wrong he was going to regret this moment. But what the hell? It’s not every day you get to be intolerably smug to a Nobel prizewinner. “String’s got to do with everything,” he said. “I’d have thought you’d have known that, being a professor. And put that horrible cigar out, it’s giving me a headache.”
Pieter glared at him, then ground out the butt on the arm of the throne. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Theo turned his back, walked to the window and gazed out at the view: the sea, the soaring buildings, the impossibly blue sky. True, it was a world in which Russia was still ruled by a Tsar and the Vatican stood where the Sydney Quay Deli ought to be; also, if Pieter had been telling the truth, the Internet hadn’t happened and Europe was still ruled by the Caesars. Even so, from up here it looked habitable and survivable, if he didn’t melt down to the consistency of thick minestrone over the next few days. Compared with how the world had looked the day after the VVLHC, the other Big Bang, it wasn’t so bad. And, if he stayed here, he’d be free of YouSpace, that nasty little room where he’d bashed his brains out trying to do impossible maths, Max, Janine, Matasuntha’s Uncle Bill, not to mention Matasuntha herself –
Yes. Well.
– Max, Janine, Matasuntha’s Uncle Bill and the entire scientific community who reckoned he should’ve been coated in honey and pegged down over an anthill because of the harm he’d done to the popular conception of the sciences. That was an awful lot of bad stuff to leave behind in one go. Catastrophic change can sometimes have its good side. Having all your teeth pulled out at once isn’t so bad if all of them were giving you toothache.
Nev was back, with a cobwebby bottle, a corkscrew and two glasses. Theo looked at the bottle for some time, then said, “I don’t know how you do this.”
“Simple,” Pieter replied. “Pull the cork. If it’s a single-use spatio-temporal dislocation module, the vortex effect automatically engages, and you’re drawn into the dysperistaltic field, and there you are. If it’s not, you tilt the bottle to roughly thirty degrees to the horizontal and aim the booze at a glass.”
Theo went to get the bottle, but his hand was shaking. “You do it.”
“If you like. If it’s corked, though, we send it back. Agreed?”
Pieter slit the foil, drove in the corkscrew, wound it and pulled. There was a soft pop. Nothing happened. They looked at each other, then Pieter bent over the bottle and stared down into the neck. “Shit,” he said, “it’s just wi—”