Part Three
Somewhere Over The Doughnut
“You’re dead,” Theo said.They were sitting in a back I room, on tiny kindergarten chairs, around a table on which rested a green bottle, two green cups and a plate of the weird green doughnuts. “Am I?” Pieter said. “Well, yes, I suppose I must be, if you’re here.” He frowned. “Pity,” he said. “Oh well. Comes to us all in the end, I guess. How did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” Theo admitted.
“You don’t know. Fine.” Pieter shrugged. “But you got my legacy, obviously.”
“Yes.”
Pieter grinned. “And what do you think of it? Isn’t it great?”
Yes, he told himself, that’s all very well, but if I strangle Pieter, how am I going to get back home? So, reluctantly, he didn’t. Instead, he said, “No.”
Pieter stared at him. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s horrible.” The words burst out of his mouth like water from a cracked pipe. “Three times I’ve used it so far, and each time I’ve nearly been killed in a bar. If that’s your idea of a good time, then—”
He broke off. Pieter was gazing at him out of huge round eyes. “You mean to say you haven’t reset the narrative parameters?”
“What?”
Pieter swelled up like a bullfrog, then started to laugh. It took him quite some time, during which Theo nearly burst a blood vessel staying calm. “You haven’t, have you?” Pieter said eventually. “You’ve left them set on default.”
“If you say so.”
“My God.” Pieter wiped the tears out of his eyes with his sleeve. “You halfwit, the default settings are an anti-tamper device. If you go into YouSpace without resetting them you’re launched into a life-threatening scenario designed to scare you shitless. Didn’t you read the manual?”
“What manual?”
“I didn’t leave you a copy of the manual?”
Theo’s fists were starting to hurt. “No, you didn’t.”
“Ah. Well, never mind. Now you know. First thing when you get back, reset the narrative parameters in MyYouSpace. Then you can choose whatever you like. Personally, I always like to start off waking up in bed with a beautiful woman I’ve never seen before, but it’s entirely up to you. All you have to do is—”
“Pieter,” Theo interrupted firmly. “What’s all this about my brother Max?”
Pieter frowned at him. “You’ve got a brother? I didn’t know that.”
“Max. He died, years ago.”
“I’m sorry. Were you close?”
“Pieter.” His head was beginning to throb, but he ignored it. “Everywhere I go in this portable nightmare of yours, people tell me you and Max are hanging out together. What the hell is all that about?”
Pieter rubbed his chin with his fist. “I’m sorry, I haven’t the faintest idea. I never knew you had a brother. You never told me.”
“Didn’t I?” Suddenly, Theo couldn’t remember. It was possible. His brother had never been a subject he’d been happy talking about. “But in that case, if you didn’t—”
He got no further. At that moment, the door flew open and five aliens burst into the room. They were holding silvery things, sort of like small fire extinguishers. When Pieter saw them, he reached inside his coat for something; whatever it was, he wasn’t quick enough. Dazzling jets of plasma shot out of the fire extinguishers and splashed over him. For a split second Pieter was perfectly still, bathed in white fire. Then he shrivelled, like a leaf on a bonfire. His body became a cinder, the cinder became ash, which lost its shape and crumbled in a neat pyramid on the floor.
Theo watched as the aliens shifted their weapons and pointed them straight at him. Fortunately, he saw them through the hole in one of the weird green doughnuts.
When his shift was over, he found a note for him from Call-me-Bill on the reception desk, telling him that he was now in Room 1. This turned out to be the whole of the third floor. It was quite nice, if your idea of a cosy little nest is the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the main thing was, there was a bed. He fell on it and was asleep as soon as he touched the mattress.
He was woken by what at first he thought was a growling noise, but which proved to be a phone on the bedside table. He grabbed it, mostly to make it shut up, and moaned, “Yes?” into the mouthpiece.
“Theo?”
He’d never woken up so fast in his entire life. Usually, his progress from asleep to awake was slow and gradual, like Man evolving from plankton. This time, though, all the lights in his head came on instantly. “Janine?”
“You total shit, Theo.”
Yes, it was Janine all right. “Hey, sis. Long time no—”
“Shut the f*ck up and listen.” Pause. Janine had forgotten what she was going to say. “Anyhow,” she said, “how are you? How’s tricks?”
“Fine.” He frowned. Why had he just said that, when it was patently untrue? Force of habit, presumably. “How about you?”
“Awful. Everything sucks. I got kicked out of the clinic, my probation officer hates me and Raoul left me for a seventeen-year-old waitress.”
“Apart from that.”
“Lousy. Anyhow, what do you care? You never gave a damn about me.”
He remembered something. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to you. The injunction—”
“Screw the injunction.” Another pause. “Theo, I’m frightened.”
He opened his mouth, but all the words had been repossessed by the Vocabulary Bailiff. All of them except one. “Sis?”
“I’m frightened, Theo. Shit, I’m goddamn terrified. I think I’m going crazy.”
Well, he thought. “What makes you think that?”
“I—” Three seconds’ silence. Three seconds is actually quite a long time. “I’m, like, hearing voices.”
Again. “I thought Dr Ionescu had you on medication for that.”
“Not those kind of voices, you idiot. I thought—”
“Yes?”
“I got a phone call. It sounded like Max.”
His turn; four seconds. “Remind me,” he said, in a fake-casual voice he hated himself for. “Which one was Raoul? Wasn’t he your tai chi instructor?”
“That was Ramon. Theo, I heard him. I heard his voice.”
He felt as though he was standing in front of a door, through which he definitely didn’t want to go. “How did you find me?” he asked.
“What?”
“How do you know where I am? Where did you get this number from?”
An impatient click of the tongue, crisp as a bone snapping. “I’ve got you under twenty-four-seven surveillance.”
“You what?”
“I’ve been doing it for years,” she replied impatiently. “Oh for God’s sake, Theo. If I’d known you were going to make a fuss about it, I wouldn’t have told you.”
“I’m not making a fuss,” Theo replied gently. “Just out of interest, though, why?”
“To protect myself, of course. Don’t think for a second I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
She laughed, harsh and cold. “About you conspiring with that a*shole Ionescu to get me certified insane and locked away so you can get hold of my money. So, naturally, I have you followed. Look, do we have to go into all that right now?”
In the past he’d tried counting to ten before saying anything. Then it had crept up to twenty, then twenty-five. “Sorry,” he said. “I mean, for what it’s worth, that’s a complete figment of your imagination, but—”
“You see? Now you’re saying I’m delusional. F*ck you, Theo, I should’ve known better than to expect any help out of you.”
“Sis—”
Click. Whirr. He sighed, put the receiver back and waited. Ten seconds later, the phone rang again. He picked it up.
“Hi, sis.”
“You’re a total bastard, Theo.”
“If I was a total bastard, you wouldn’t be my sister.”
“Theo.”
“Sorry. Look,” he said, before she could start up again, “about this phone call. You’re sure it was Max’s voice?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“So tell me about it. What happened?”
Pause, while she collected her thoughts. Considering the dreadful things she’d done to her brain over the years, it was still in remarkably good shape. The little brain that tried. “I was sitting by the pool,” she said, “and Lise-Marie – you remember her?”
The vulture-like French Canadian woman who guarded access to Janine with the single-minded ferocity of a dragon in Norse mythology. Like any near-death experience, hard to forget. “Yup. And?”
“Lise-Marie said, there’s a call for you, and I said, who is it? And she said, your brother, so I assumed it was you, so I said, put it through. And it was—”
Long pause. “Max,” Theo said.
“You think I’m crazy.”
“No,” Theo said. “Not this time.”
“Theo—”
“Sorry, sorry. So what did he say?”
Long silence. Just when he’d begun to worry, she said, “Hi, Jan. That’s what he said. And I said, who the hell is this? And he said, come on, Jan, don’t you recognise me? And then I screamed and threw the phone in the pool.”
Like you do. “Ah.”
“Who the f*ck else ever called me Jan, Theo?”
Nobody; at least, not twice. “So what did you—?”
“I think I wasn’t very well for a bit after that,” Janine went on, “because the next thing I remember was waking up and Ionescu standing over me saying it’d probably be best to leave the straps on for a while. And then he asked me who the call was from.”
“Right. And what did you say?”
“I said it was from you. Well, I wasn’t going to say I’d just been talking to my dead brother, was I? He’d have thought I was nuts, I’d have been put away. I do not trust that man.
Theo pursed his lips. Dr Ionescu was brilliant and, in his opinion, longer-suffering than Lebanon, but it didn’t do to tell Janine that. “Fine,” he said. “When was this, exactly?”
“What? Oh, two days ago, maybe three. I’ve been trying to get through to you, but your people keep pretending you aren’t there. You know how hurtful that is?”
“You could’ve left a number.”
“What, and have you harassing me? No way.” Another pause. “You believe me?”
“That it might’ve been Max? Actually, yes, I do.”
“So you don’t think I’m crazy.”
“No.”
A very long pause. “You’re just saying that to make me crazier,” Janine said. “You think that if you encourage me in my delusions it’ll be easier to get me put away. Dr Ionescu—”
“Janine. I believe you.”
“Yeah, right. Why?”
“Because—” He clamped his mouth shut just in time. Because people in an alternative universe keep saying Max has been seen with my dead friend Pieter. “Because you’re my sister, and I know you,” he said. “Sometimes you do some rather injudicious stuff, but basically you’re as sane as I am. So, if you say you heard Max, I believe you. Simple as that.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Yet another pause. Then: “What the hell do you mean, injudicious? What have I ever done that—?”
“Well,” Theo said, “having me followed, for a start.”
“You’re upset about that, aren’t you?”
Upset. Oh boy. “A bit, yes.”
“I bet you’re thinking, she must be crazy, to do something like that.”
“Janine.”
“Yes?”
“Promise me,” he said. “If you hear – well, if you hear that voice again, call me, will you?”
“OK.”
“And getting the call traced might not be a bad idea.”
“For f*ck’s sake, Theo.” She was starting to feel better, evidently. “Of course I did that. All my calls are traced, naturally. But it was from a cellphone, they couldn’t get a fix, not even which country he was calling from.”
That he could believe. “And if he calls again, for crying out loud, talk to him. OK?”
“Yes, Theo.”
“And then call me.”
“Yes, Theo.” Pause. “Look, about the having-you-followed thing.”
Theo sighed. “It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You won’t tell Dr Ionescu, will you?”
“No.”
“You really really don’t think I’m crazy?”
“Really really.”
“It gets so hard sometimes.”
“I bet.”
“You’re just saying that,” she snapped, and the line went dead. He put the phone back slowly, as if afraid of waking it up.
When he reported for duty in the laundry room the next morning, there was nobody there, and all the sheets and towels and pillowcases had vanished. The machines were still in place, but although he crawled all over them trying to figure out what they were supposed to be for, he ended up no wiser than he’d been when he started. He couldn’t even tell if they ran on electricity or something else. He gave up after an hour and went back up to Reception, but there was nobody about. He sat down at the desk and turned the computer screen so he could read it. The screen flickered into life, and he typed YouSpace user’s manual into Google, just in case. Did you mean…? Google asked him reproachfully. He smiled and shook his head. Then, slowly and methodically, he went through the computer, looking for anything that might give him a clue about what was going on. There were lots and lots of files in lots and lots of folders. They were all password protected, but since there was a yellow sticky attached to the monitor with the word PASSWORD on it, followed by Flawless Diamonds Of Orthodoxy, and since the one password opened all the files, that wasn’t an insuperable problem. Opening the files, though, just made things a tiny bit worse. Nearly all of them were in languages he didn’t understand, some of them in alphabets he’d never seen before. The few in English were mostly to do with laundry collections and the contract for emptying the septic tank. There was one that looked hopeful; it was a list of words, in three columns, and the first three words in the second column were –
Bandits
Cowboys
Spaceman
But directly under those were
Nosebleed
Lyons
Ramayana
August
Thereafter
– which didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Nevertheless, he printed out a hard copy of the list and put it inside the manila envelope. Then he stood up and looked round until he saw what he’d been searching for.
It was a small box on the wall, painted red and with a glass front. He looked around for a suitable heavy object, found a fairly chunky desk stapler, and used it to smash the glass. The result was one of the loudest noises he’d ever heard, including the VVLHC blowing up.
For a surprisingly long time, nothing happened. Then Call-me-Bill came charging down the stairs, wearing a tuxedo and pyjama bottoms, yelling, “Where’s the fire?”
Theo smiled at him. “There isn’t one.”
“What?”
“There is no fire.”
“What?”
Theo pointed at the alarm and tried to mime switch-it-off, which turned out to be harder than he’d anticipated. Eventually, though, Call-me-Bill must have got the general idea, because he opened a panel next to the box and pressed a button, and the horrible noise abruptly stopped.
“Where’s the—?”
“No fire.”
“But you—”
“That,” Theo said pleasantly, “was just to get your attention. Sorry if I startled you.”
“You lunatic,” Call-me-Bill panted, sitting down on the edge of the desk and grabbing at his forehead. “You scared me half to death. I thought the building—”
“Well, it isn’t,” Theo said briskly, “so that’s all right, isn’t it? Now, while you’re here, I’d like to ask you about a few things. Would that be OK?”
“I could’ve had a heart attack,” Call-me-Bill said helplessly. “I could’ve died.”
“Ah well, omelettes and eggs.” He smiled. “If it’s the hoax element that’s bothering you, I could really set fire to the hotel, it’d be no trouble. I’m good at destroying buildings, you see. Especially,” he added cheerfully, “large hadron colliders. Hell, with all the kit you’ve got downstairs, I could fix this place so good, they’d have to cordon it off for ninety years.”
Call-me-Bill tried to back away, but the desk was in the way. “You’re nuts,” he said.
“Nuts,” Theo replied calmly, “not fired. Well? Do I still have a job or don’t I?”
“Um.” Call-me-Bill was breathing hard, and it made his throat wobble, like a bullfrog. “Obviously you’re upset about something. Is it the room? You can move back to your old room if you’d rather, I just thought—”
“Oh come on,” Theo said, and he felt a strange calm sweep over him, like the hole in the middle of a cyclone. “I just threatened to blow up the hotel.”
“I promised Pieter van Goyen—”
“About Pieter.” There had been many questions jostling about in his mind, fighting to jump the queue, but now that the name had been spoken out loud, he knew exactly what he wanted to ask. “How did he die?”
“What?”
“He’s dead, right? So, what happened to him?”
Call-me-Bill wriggled backwards on the desk. “You mustn’t fool around with the fire alarm, you know. It’s a serious breach of health and safety. We could get closed down.”
“This isn’t a hotel,” Theo said firmly. “What happened to Pieter van Goyen?”
Call-me-Bill sagged, like a tyre with a slow puncture. “There was an accident,” he said, “at the lab. It was very quick, he wouldn’t have suffered.”
“That’s nice. What sort of accident?”
“They were testing some new piece of apparatus.” Call-me-Bill was sort of stroking the side of the desk. “I don’t really know what it was, something to do with teleportation, I think, or it might’ve been antimatter. Anyhow, two people saw him go into this acceleration chamber thing, and then there must’ve been a freak electrical surge or something, because the power suddenly came on, and there was this blinding white light, and when we managed to switch it off and get inside, he wasn’t there.”
Theo pursed his lips. One stray pronoun. “And?”
“Well,” Call-me-Bill went on, “it was a sealed chamber, lined with thirty centimetres of lead. They did tests, of course, and there were a few residual traces of DNA. And a sock,” Call-me-Bill added, “with his monogram, PVG. Trouble is, only Pieter really knew exactly how the machine worked, so—”
“The lab,” Theo said. “At the university, presumably.”
“Not as such, no.”
“Here. In the basement.”
Call-me-Bill nodded slowly. “Once the police and the government people had finished investigating, we cleared it all out, naturally, and closed the project down. That’s when we decided to turn the place into a hotel. Well, you know, great big building in its own grounds, handily situated for road and rail links, it seemed like a good idea.”
Theo shook his head. “You didn’t close it down,” he said. “You and her – is she really your niece, by the way? Not that it matters.”
Call-me-Bill nodded. “My sister Morgaine’s daughter,” he said.
“And the police. Are they really looking for me?”
“No,” Call-me-Bill said, looking away. “Sorry, that was Mattie’s idea. She thought you might walk out, you see. She’s got a bit of a ruthless streak, she gets it from her mother.”
Theo took a deep breath. “Pieter’s not dead, is he?”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s gone somewhere, but he’s not dead. You or your weird niece accidentally sent him somewhere. Well?”
“He’s dead all right,” Call-me-Bill said, and the sweat on his forehead sparkled like dew in long grass. “I told you, he went into the chamber and he didn’t—”
“You sent him somewhere,” Theo repeated, “and you need me to get him back.”
Call-me-Bill’s head lifted, stayed still for a moment, then dropped back; up-down, up-down twice, as if someone was controlling it with strings. “Mattie told you.”
“No, I figured it out for myself. You see, I—” He stopped, trying to think of the right words. “I had reason to believe Pieter was still alive.”
Now the unseen puppeteer swivelled Call-me-Bill’s head sharply round to the right; a bit too sharply. Any more, and it could easily have come off. “What? What do you mean?”
“I talked to him.”
Call-me-Bill was breathing deeply in and out through his nose. “When?”
“Today.”
“Where?”
“Ah. Long story.” He tossed a mental coin, which came down and balanced delicately on its rim. So he had to make a conscious decision. “The term YouSpace mean anything to you?”
There was a long silence. Then Call-me-Bill actually grinned. “We weren’t going to call it that,” he said. “In fact, I thought we’d decided, but Pieter always was a stubborn bastard. He’d thought up the name, you see, and once he’d set his heart on it—Yes,” he went on. “You could say that.”
“Your niece doesn’t know about it.”
“Not under that name,” Call-me-Bill replied. “But she knows about it all right. Question is, how do you—”
“Another long story,” Theo cut him off. “But I saw Pieter van Goyen in YouSpace earlier today. Very much alive.”
Call-me-Bill leaned forward to sink his face into his hands, lost his balance and sort of toppled-come-slid off the desk. He stood up, looked down at the desk as though he was more hurt than angry, and sat down again. “There you are, then.”
“He’s dead,” Theo said. “I watched him die.”
Call-me-Bill’s mouth dropped open, and the colour drained from his face, as though someone had turned a stopcock and Essence of Pink had come squirting out of the overflow. “Are you serious? You saw—”
Theo nodded. “He was disintegrated by bug-eyed monsters with ray guns,” he said. He paused, then added, “Do you believe me?”
“Oh yes,” Call-me-Bill said, his mouth moving awkwardly, as if he’d just had an injection at the dentist’s. “Default setting 3, Alien Planet.” He lifted his head, and Theo could see he was close to tears. “What happened?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I’d met Pieter and we’d just started to talk when these aliens burst in and shot him. They were just about to shoot me when I did the doughnut thing and escaped.”
“Doughnut thing?”
The dropping penny sounded like a brass cannon falling down a mineshaft. “You know, the way you get out in a hurry. You don’t know, do you?”
“Never been in there,” Call-me-Bill replied. “I don’t know how.”
“Ah.” Theo smiled at him, just to be annoying. “Well, it was pretty unambiguous. He just sort of—”
He broke off, as if fingers were tightening around his throat. It had just occurred to him; Pieter had been alive, and the man he’d seen disintegrated had been the real thing. They looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” Call-me-Bill said at last. “I know you two were close.”
“Yes. You too?”
Call-me-Bill sighed. “He taught me when I was an undergraduate,” he said. “Amazing man. Of course, I wasn’t what you’d call his prize pupil. I only got in because my dad built them a new library. But Pieter – I don’t know, we just sort of hit it off. And then, after I got chucked out for being useless, we sort of stayed in touch. He used to send me postcards.”
“Postcards.”
Call-me-Bill grinned. “Picture postcards,” he said. “Niagara Falls. I think he must’ve bought a big box of them, because they were always the same one. I don’t think he ever went there, though. Anyhow, he’d write dear Bill and then best wishes from Pieter, and leave the rest blank.”
Theo could imagine Pieter doing that; wanted to stay in touch but didn’t have anything in particular to say. He tried not to remember the look on Pieter’s face when the plasma hit him.
“Anyhow,” Call-me-Bill said with an effort, “about five years ago I got a call from him. It was basically, hi Bill, how are you, and can you let me have a billion dollars? I said I haven’t got a billion dollars and he said well, how much have you got, and that’s how it started.”
“What started?”
Call-me-Bill sighed. “Now that,” he said, “is a very good question. I asked him, of course. Well, you would, if you’re investing an eight-figure sum. He grinned at me and said not to fuss about that. I told him I was just an old worrywart and I’d quite like to know. He said it’d make us all rich. I said, Pieter, I am rich and I’d quite like to stay that way. Then he laughed and changed the subject.”
“But eventually—”
“Eventually.” Call-me-Bill sat up a little straighter. “He explained it, and I could just about follow; a way of accessing alternative realities, at will. A hundred bespoke Disneylands in your coat pocket, and all of them actually real. By then we’d built the accelerator and most of the machinery, so it was a relief when he told me it was – well, a toy. About the only sure-fire money-spinners these days are toys and bombs, and I was starting to think, with him being so damn coy all the time, it had to be a bomb. But a toy was fine. It was like being in on the ground floor for PlayStation.”
The toy that had killed Pieter. Still, on balance, better than a bomb. Nearly everything is.
“Anyway.” Call-me-Bill was stroking the desk again. “We carried on with the construction work, while Pieter did the maths. Then, just when we thought we were getting there, Pieter said he’d run into a snag. Well, more like a brick wall.” Call-me-Bill scowled, then went on: “He came swanning in, sat down where you’re sitting right now, and told us that the whole thing was impossible.”
“Ah.”
“ ‘Ah’ is putting it mildly. I’d just sold nine major TV networks and an airline to pay for all the junk in the cellar, and Pieter blithely announces that the laws of physics wouldn’t let us go any further. I was just weighing up different ways of killing him when he said, of course, that’s not an insuperable problem.”
Theo frowned. “But you just said—”
“Yes. And I forgot to mention, I made him put the maths up on that screen there, and we went through it together. He was quite right. The quantum phase realignment shift matrix we needed was quite simply impossible, in a Newton-Einstein-Hawking universe. Anything we projected outside our universe would be untraceable, and therefore to all intents and purposes lost for ever. It’d be like dropping a grain of sand out of an aeroplane and then landing and trying to find it again. You could go, but no way in hell could you ever come back.”
Not an insuperable problem, huh? “Go on.”
“Well, I’d more or less narrowed the choice down to strangling him or bashing his head in with a brick when he did that sort of wise-frog grin of his and said, well, it’s obvious what we’ve got to do now; and that’s the point, I’m afraid, where I started whimpering, and it was quite some time before he could persuade me to stop.
“The key proviso, he said, was in a Newton-Einstein-Hawking universe; which was a nuisance, he said, because that was precisely the sort of universe we live in, so achieving anything here was pretty much out of the question. But, he went on, as we all know, other universes are available. Somewhere, in the infinite diversity of the multiverse as hypothesised by Tegmark, Vanchurin and Wheeler, there must be one where what we want to do is not only possible but as easy as switching channels on your TV. So, all we needed to do was relocate the base of operations to this other, more amenable universe, and we’d be home and dry. This one where we are now would then be just another parallel reality, readily accessible from our new HQ. He said it’d be no different from moving a corporation when you don’t like the local tax laws or business regulations. You shift the office overseas, and carry on trading just like you used to, but without having to pay stupid amounts of tax or obey a bunch of fatuous local laws. And once he’d found a nice user-friendly universe, getting there wouldn’t be a problem; the bugger would be getting back again, except that it wouldn’t be an issue because of the YouSpace technology, which would deal with all that, because in a non-Newton, non-Einstein, non-Hawking universe you could do that sort of thing, no trouble at all. He made it sound like getting round the no-smoking rule by stepping outside into the street.”
Call-me-Bill paused for a moment, allowing Theo to catch up with his breathing, which he’d neglected for longer than he’d realised. For a moment there, it had been like listening to Pieter, when he was in one of his brainstorming moods, the same sensation of travelling faster than light straight into the Sun; we can do this temporarily overriding do we actually want to do this, or will it get us all killed. Gradually, though, the enchantment faded, and common sense came plodding breathlessly in its wake, like an overweight amateur running a marathon. “He actually did it,” he asked helplessly, and Call-me-Bill nodded.
“We’d built a prototype of the quantum phase realignment shift matrix acceleration chamber,” he said. “In the room out back of the laundry.”
“The one that glows in the—”
“Yes, that one. Anyhow, he set the controls, so all I had to do was push a button when he gave me the signal. He told me exactly what’d happen. There’d be this blinding blue glow, he’d sort of flicker at the edges, like he was made of sand and the wind started blowing, and then he’d vanish, at which point my job was to switch everything off pretty damn quick and get the hell out of there before my face melted and ran down my shirt front. And it all went just like he said it would, and that was the last I saw of him.”
“And?”
Call-me-Bill sighed and rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “That was Phase One,” he said. “Phase Two would be Pieter arriving in the non-Newton-et cetera universe, setting up the YouSpace generators and using them to get back here. That was two months ago.” He paused and frowned at his hands. “As you know, linear time doesn’t pass in YouSpace. He should’ve been back here a split second after he left.”
A subtle blend of nausea and terror rinsed out Theo’s mind, leaving it empty for a moment. Then he said: “But YouSpace is working.”
“Oh, we know that,” Call-me-Bill replied with an unhappy grin. “So obviously he got there, and he set up the machine. Which sort of begs the question, why didn’t he come back? And now,” he added, with a catch in his voice, “you tell me you saw him get blasted by aliens with death rays.” He shook his head slowly, three times. “That was the whole point about YouSpace. It’s not a simulation, it’s not virtual reality, it’s real. Which is a great selling point, the total authenticity of the experience and so forth, but if you saw Pieter get killed, then he’s dead. And that’s—”
Theo didn’t need to be told what that was. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry.” Call-me-Bill pursed his lips. “Flow, my f*cking tears. You see, not only have I lost my dear friend and mentor, I can also kiss goodbye to three-point-three-six-five billion dollars. You know why?”
“Um.”
“Because,” Call-me-Bill went on, “and you may just have noticed this when you tried out the useless bloody thing, there is no users’ goddamn manual. Which makes it,” he carried on with rising anger, “not just useless but horribly, horribly dangerous. You noticed?”
Theo shivered. “I noticed.”
“Well, there you are. You see, Pieter was going to do a manual, but he got carried away with the jump to the other universe thing and he never got round to writing it. He knew how it all works, but we don’t. Accordingly, we’re shafted. We’ve got this amazing product we can’t do anything with. It’s like you’re sitting in the cockpit of a jet, fifty thousand feet up, and you don’t know if the green button on the dash is the landing gear or the ejector seat.”
It was a while before Theo trusted himself to speak. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do?”
A hungry look spread across Call-me-Bill’s face. “We,” he said, “meaning Mattie and me, we aren’t going to do anything. You, on the other hand, are going to be busy.”
“Me?”
“Oh yes. Pieter always said, there’s only one man alive who could understand all this shit; meaning you. What you’re going to do is, you’re going to figure it all out from first principles, and then you’re going to write the manual.”
“Me?”
“You and no other,” Call-me-Bill said grimly. “Originally, the idea was to send you in there to find Pieter and bring him back, but that’s not going to happen now, apparently. So; Plan B. If I were you, I’d sharpen my pencil and put fresh batteries in my calculator, because you, my friend, are about to reinvent the goddamn wheel.”
On the positive side, he wasn’t having to pretend he was working in a hotel any more. This meant he didn’t have to waste hours and hours sitting behind a desk in a deserted lobby. As far as the positive side went, though, that was more or less it.
The negative side, now; there was a lot of that. There was being cooped up in the room provided for him to work in – tiny, windowless and furnished with a chair, a table, a calculator, a moderate amount of air for breathing purposes and nothing else, so he couldn’t possibly be distracted – with nothing to disturb him apart from Call-me-Bill barging in every fifteen minutes bleating, “Have you done it yet?” There was the problem of the work itself. Call-me-Bill had handed him a printout of the calculations he’d found on Pieter’s laptop after his disappearance. It had taken both of them, and an improvised stretcher and a car jack, to get the printout on to the table. Plenty of material to work on, therefore; the only problem was that it made no sense whatsoever. He sprained his brain for a week trying to find a way in before he realised what the problem was –
“Variable base mathematics,” Call-me-Bill repeated. “What—?”
Theo gave him a terrible smile. “It means it keeps switching,” he said. “From base ten to base four to base sixteen, sometimes in the same line. Which means two and two could equal four, or ten, or eleven, and you’ve got no way of knowing which base you’re in from one moment to the next. Presumably there’s a reason for it, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
Call-me-Bill frowned, then smiled at him. “Very good,” he said. “Carry on.”
So on he carried, by the simple expedient of ignoring the problem and believing. This didn’t come easily. When two and two made five, all his instincts yelled at him to stop, go back, find the error and correct it. Instead, he forced himself to have faith, so that if two and two made five, that was all right because Pieter said so. Once he’d trained himself to do this, a thin, frail thread of understanding began to stretch itself, like a spider’s web in sub-zero temperatures, from one page to the next. The variable bases, he discovered, were necessary because each line of maths might well be operating in two or three or more alternative realities at the same time. In a bizarre way, though, that actually helped, after a while. Outbreaks of base six, for example, indicated activity in the primary default alternate reality – the one where he’d jumped in just after the horrible bar fight, presumably – while the cowboy-saloon reality seemed to happen mostly in base nineteen. After three weeks of battling with this garbage he was beginning to have a shadowy idea of what Pieter had been trying to do, but still no clear picture of how he’d done it, or which sheets of single-spaced mathematical symbols represented Pieter’s working notes towards writing a user’s manual.
“It’s like this,” he explained to Call-me-Bill, after a particularly fraught progress meeting. “Suppose I’m a single-cell amoeba and you want me to evolve into Einstein. Well, at the rate I’m going, in a year’s time, with a lot of luck, I might just be a sea cucumber.”
Call-me-Bill gave him an agonised look. “That’s not good enough,” he said. “The money—”
Theo said something intemperate about the money and what Call-me-Bill might like to do with it. “It’s useless,” he went on. “God only knows how long it took Pieter to do all this stuff. And he knew what he was doing, and he was a genius.”
Call-me-Bill looked at him. “So, how long—?”
“Fifty years. Maybe. If I manage to keep this pace up without turning my brain to glue, which,” he added with a scowl, “doesn’t seem very likely. If you ask me, your best bet would be to cut your losses and turn this place into a hotel. You could make good money if you could get a slice of the conference trade.”
Somehow, Call-me-Bill didn’t find that idea very appealing, so it was back to the printouts and the calculator for another excruciating week, at the end of which Theo realised there was something else at work in there, something he hadn’t identified yet, without understanding which he was simply wasting his time; at which point he kicked off his shoes, smashed the chair against the wall until there wasn’t a big enough bit left to hold on to, and spent the next eight hours folding sheets of printout into paper aeroplanes.
And then it hit him, suddenly and without warning. So simple. So utterly and completely deranged, but so very simple.
“Think about it,” he urged Call-me-Bill, who was looking at him nervously, as though expecting to have to defend himself with a chair at any moment. “In an infinite multiverse, there’s got to be some reality somewhere where all this shit is actually perfectly normal and as clear as a bell. So; we go there, we do the maths, we reconstruct the user’s manual, we use it to get home. What could possibly go wrong?”
Call-me-Bill was trying to avoid sudden movements. “Fine,” he said, “in principle. So, how precisely do you figure on finding this other reality and getting there?”
Theo beamed at him, which for some reason made him even more nervous. “Leave it with me,” he said. “I expect I’ll think of something.”
And think of something he most certainly did. Sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, with paper aeroplanes floating lazily past his head and fluttering gently to the ground, he thought of many things; the gentle chatter of a brook in spring, the patter of rain on rooftops, the breathtaking fractal beauty of birdsong and apple cores, and the many and complicated things he’d like to do to a wide variety of people, starting with his parents and working bloodily and methodically through the cast list of his life until he got to Matasuntha and Call-me-Bill. It helped, but not nearly enough.
Maybe he drifted into some sort of sleep; not the refreshing kind that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care and makes you such a trial to your hungover fellow workers, not quite the accidental doze you slide into on train journeys or during earnest films with subtitles; his body was at some kind of rest but his mind must’ve been redlining, because when he snapped out of it, he knew exactly what he was going to do next. He was dimly aware that the conclusion he’d reached was a culmination of a long and painstaking internal debate, which he’d missed out on because he’d been asleep. Not that it mattered. He was perfectly happy to take it on trust, because it seemed so obvious.
I’ll ask Max, he told himself. Max will know.
He went from sitting on the floor to lying on a bed, in a darkened room. A faint blade of orange light shone through a crack in the curtains, enough for him to see that he wasn’t alone.
Whoever she was, she was lying with her back to him. A glimmer of light from the window shone on an unruly sea of golden hair. He remembered what Pieter had said about the way he liked his YouSpace visits to start. Well, he thought.
She sighed softly and wriggled round to face him, and for the first time in a long time he found himself thinking that Pieter hadn’t been such a bad guy after all. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.
“Fancy a doughnut?” she said.
For some reason, he found it hard to speak. “A—”
“You do like doughnuts, don’t you?”
“Love ’em,” he whispered hoarsely. She grinned, hopped off the bed and returned with – why was he mildly disappointed? – a plate of doughnuts, golden brown and sugar-frosted. He picked one up and held it; then she kissed him, and it sort of slipped his mind.
“So,” she said. “I think that settles it, we are going to be friends. It’s so important, isn’t it, to be on good terms with the people you’re going to be working with?”
“Absolutely,” he whimpered. “All the latest studies on workplace interaction stress the value of a warm and cooperative ambience.”
She picked up a doughnut and nibbled the rim with her small, white teeth. “When they told me I was going to be working with Professor Pieter van Goyen – the Pieter van Goyen, the guy who designed the Quite Ridiculously Huge Hadron Collider, I thought, wow, this’ll be awesome. And then I thought, what if he’s some stuffy, flaky old guy who only cares about the project? I thought, that won’t be a lot of fun.”
“And?”
She laughed and bit a chunk out of the doughnut. “Let’s say you’ve set my mind at rest on that score, Professor.”
Her eyes were the colour of mint leaves. “Excellent,” he said. “So, um, what’s your overview of where the project’s at right now?”
She giggled and tried to stuff doughnut in his mouth. He dodged, and she kissed him instead. “I think it’s coming along just fine,” she said. “Particularly now that Max has fixed that thing with the Heisenberg collimator.”
“Max—”
“Yes, I know.” She gave him a sympathetic grin. “He’s a pain in the ass, but you’ve got to admit, he’s good at what he does. And so long as he carries on doing it,” she added, with a faintly feral glint in her eye, “that means we get some time to relax and, um, pursue other interests. Don’t know about you, but that suits me just fine.”
She reached out and put her hand on the back of his head, drawing him towards her. He didn’t exactly resist, but she stopped and looked at him. “What?”
“Max,” he said. “I don’t know anything about him. Do you—?”
She shrugged. “What’s there to know? He’s a workaholic and a flake, with below average social skills and personal hygiene issues. But you know that, for Christ’s sake. You taught him for five years.”
“That was some time ago,” Theo managed to say. “People change.”
She shook her head. “Not Maxie. But hey, who gives a damn? And anyhow, from what I hear, compared to his brother, he’s Prince frigging Charming. Just be glad we got the lesser of two a*sholes.”
“His brother,” Theo said quietly.
“You know, Theo. The clown who blew up the—”
“Oh, right. Him.”
Thanks, Pieter. She was looking at him a little oddly.
“Didn’t you teach him too?”
“Yes, but I prefer not to dwell on it.”
She laughed. “Don’t blame you. I seem to remember meeting him once, at the Leipzig conference. Little bleary-eyed guy with a stammer and a runny nose. I can’t understand how you managed to put up with him for five years.”
“Ah well,” Theo said, having first ungritted his teeth. “Time, the great healer. Anyhow, let’s not talk about him.”
“Let’s not talk at all.”
He was sitting on something. The doughnut. “I need to see Max,” he said. “Now.”
“Now?”
“Yup. I’ve just thought of something that won’t wait. Where do you think he’d be at this time?”
She gave him a long, cool look. “In bed with a glass of milk and a learned journal,” she replied. “Not like you. Why, is that what you’d rather be doing?”
He managed to squeeze her out a smile. “You wouldn’t happen to have his address and phone number?”
She sighed. “Wait there,” she said, got up and left the room. A shame, he thought, a great big shame, but what the hell. Business before pleasure. Exactly why business had to come before pleasure, especially given that linear time wasn’t passing as far as he was concerned, he was at a loss to say.
“Here.” She threw a cellphone in his lap, and dictated a number. The phone rang. Max, he thought. My God. Max.
“Hello?” But it was a woman’s voice.
“Um, is Max there, please?”
Pause. “No.”
It had been the sort of pause you get when the person answering the phone turns away and mouths are you here? and the person you want to talk to pulls a face and shakes his head. He frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Course I’m sure. It’s not exactly a grey area.”
“Sorry, of course. Um, when’s he likely to be back?”
“Couldn’t say. Who is this?”
His tongue was between his teeth, shaping the th of Theo. “Pieter van Goyen.”
“What? Sorry, Pete, didn’t recognise your voice there. It’s Marge.”
“Ah. Look, can you give him a message, please? To call me, ASAP.”
“Sure. Where are you?”
Excellent question, referring back to an earlier question, your place or mine, which he hadn’t been there for. “This number,” he said, ignoring the ferocious scowl that earned him from whatever her name was, whose phone he was presumably using. Oh well, never mind.
“I’ll be sure to tell him. Ciao, Pete.”
He killed the call. She was glaring at him.
“Sorry,” he said, handing her the phone. “But it’s important.”
“In that case,” she said, pulling on a robe, “you should’ve said to call you back at home, because that’s where you’re going. Right now.”
In the background he could hear the faint, mocking crackle of burning bridges. Oh well. “Yes, right, I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”
“For crying out loud, Pete. It’s hardly rocket science.”
“Pity. I’m good at that.”
He headed for the door. She cleared her throat. “Far be it from me,” she said, “but aren’t you going to put some clothes on?”
“What? Oh, right.” He looked round, and the dim amber light picked out a tangle of discarded garments, at least some of which must be his, in a heap by the window. Burning with the special embarrassment that only happens when you’re dressing on suffrance before getting thrown out, he fumbled for the other sock, decided he could probably do without it, and dragged his pants on. Probably, he told himself, this wasn’t how the scenario played out for Pieter. Still, he’d had the manual, even if it was only inside his head.
The phone rang.
She scowled at him. “You’d better answer it,” she said.
He grabbed it from her outstretched hand. “Hello?”
“Pieter?”
Max’s voice. For God’s sake.
He straightened up fast. “Max?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
She was still glaring, so he turned away, facing the window. He looked up and saw the sky. It was dark blue, with a round fat full moon. “Max, it’s me.”
“What?”
“It’s me, dammit. It’s—”
And then his voice jammed in his throat and he couldn’t breathe or move. Something horrible was happening to him. He could feel his face stretching, as though his nose and mouth were plastic and they’d melted, and someone was drawing them out like strings of fondue. His ears were changing too, the skin around them was being squeezed like a toothpaste tube into a strange, inappropriate shape. He wanted to yell, but his tongue was swelling in his mouth and, for some unfathomable reason, he couldn’t take his eyes off the moon.
“Pieter?” There was terror in her voice. “What the hell are you doing?”
Then he did yell, because something was bending his knees the wrong way, but inexplicably the bones didn’t snap under the intolerable pressure, and now, instead of hinging forwards, they hinged back –
“Pieter!”
His eyes still fixed on the moon, he raised his hand (his visible right hand) until he could see it, on the edge of his field of vision. It was covered in thick grey hair, which doubled in length as he watched. Suddenly the blockage in his throat cleared; he breathed in, and the shock of a million new smells, all overwhelmingly rich and detailed and crammed with information, made his head swim. He gasped and, as he closed his automatically opened mouth, he felt long, sharp teeth digging into what had been his lower lip.
He heard her scream, but she needn’t have bothered; the smell of her fear was so much more informative, and it made his mouth water. He watched her back away; she was clear when she moved, but when she stood still she was just a blur. He felt a strange twisting movement just above his bottom, and realised with a deep pang of embarrassment and shame that it was his tail, wagging.
A werewolf, for crying out loud. Pieter –
Meanwhile, though, the poor woman was clearly terrified out of her wits, and he couldn’t allow that to continue. He decided against a reassuring smile, because when a man opens his mouth and displays all his teeth, that’s fine, but when a wolf does it, the message thereby sent isn’t quite the same. Never mind; a few reassuring words would have to do instead.
He said: Don’t worry, it’s perfectly all right, I won’t bite you. What came out from between his teeth, however, was a clear, high-pitched howl that scared the life out of him until he realised it was him doing it. She, meanwhile, was scrabbling at the door handle, too paralysed with fear to make it turn. All in all, he couldn’t help thinking, not an improvement.
(And all the while, a nagging little sub-routine in the back of his mind was asking; why a werewolf, Pieter, where the hell’s the fun in that? A vampire, maybe; it’s just possible to understand the kick to be got from the dapper clothes, the swirly cloak, the subdued lighting, the necks of swooning girls. But you’d have to be profoundly weird to want to spend your leisure time moonlighting, so to speak, as a part-time dog.)
“Hello? Hello? What the hell’s going on there?”
The phone was now lying on the floor, with Max’s voice bleating tinnily out of it. He grabbed for it, but he had nothing to grab with; his fingers had gone, and all he had was stupid little stubs with claws sticking out of them; sensational for ripping and tearing flesh, not so great for holding stuff with. Max, he shouted into the mouthpiece, don’t hang up, it’s me. But that wasn’t what came out. His howl blended with the woman’s scream in an unintentional form of counterpoint; then she managed to get the door open, and scrambled through it.
He rolled on his back and thrashed his head backwards and forwards until he could feel the phone under his ear. It was making the long drone that tells you the call is over. He whimpered, squirmed and kicked until he was on his feet – four of them, goddammit – and tried to figure out what to do.
Leave, you idiot. Get out, now. Fine. A slight twitch of his nose told him exactly where the doughnut was; also what it was made from, how old it was, who had baked it and when they’d last had sex – it was on the bed, slightly squashed but still in one piece. Wonderful. All he had to do was lift it up and look through the hole –
Um.
Making the wolf body do what he wanted wasn’t easy. It was a bit like trying to fly a plane for the first time, blindfolded, with large jellyfish superglued to each fingertip. It wasn’t like crawling on hands and knees, because his hind legs were convinced he was standing upright, and trying to make them walk in a straight line was like the first time you try and reverse a car with a trailer. He could smell the doughnut to within a thousandth of an inch, but because it wasn’t moving he couldn’t see it, only a vague pixillated area, like people’s faces on TV when they don’t want to be recognised. He tried to jump up on the bed, but the wolf’s hindquarters were far more powerful than he’d anticipated, and he found himself sailing through the air and splatting himself against the opposite wall.
Come on, he ordered himself, you’re a top physicist, you can do this. He sat (good boy, sit!) and tried to work out the geometry of the problem, but it proved to be harder than he’d thought. Something to do with a different degree of depth perception; distances were different, somehow, and the pre-loaded wolf software in his head kept telling him to forget about looking for the doughnut, just smell it and pounce. He tried that and ended up in the corner of the room, in the wreckage of a small table, with a lamp flex tangled round his neck like spaghetti on a fork.
No wonder, he thought, werewolves are so aggressive. Five minutes of this, and Gandhi would be ready to rip someone’s throat out. He stood up – he was just starting to get the hang of the tail’s function as an aid to balance – and fixed his full attention on the fuzzy patch that was the doughnut. Then he opened his jaws and got a firm grip on the bedclothes, while his mind ran the calculations: velocity, mass, vector, air resistance, delta V. It wasn’t easy – being a quadruped, the wolf instinctively calculated in base four – but he made the best estimate he could manage, dug his claws into the carpet, and tugged hard.
It worked. The bedclothes shot towards him, the doughnut flipped up into the air and immediately became properly visible. He jumped, jaws open, tracking the doughnut in flight and adding forward allowance, not forgetting to compensate for the delay in its trajectory due to the Earth’s gravitational field. There was an audible click as his teeth clashed together, but he was definitely holding on to something. He landed and squinted down his nose, and saw a semicircular blur in the foreground of his vision. All right!
The urge to chew was almost overwhelming, but he forced himself not to. He dug deep inside and excavated all he could find of Theo Bernstein. The next bit was going to be the tricky part.
He could hear voices: angry, scared, men shouting orders, the banging of car doors. Not the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re a to-be-shot-on-sight monster cornered in a room with only one door. Think, he ordered his brain, but all it seemed capable of recommending was hurling himself at them and tearing them into tiny shreds, which he really didn’t want to do. On the other paw – no, hand – he had to do something; in a universe where werewolves and humans coexist, it was only logical to assume that on every cop’s belt there was at least one clip loaded with silver bullets. Nothing for it; he’d have one chance, and that’d be it.
Deep breath; then he lowered his head and lifted it sharply, opening his jaws to let the doughnut sail up into the air. It rose, spinning like a space station, and hung for a moment, waiting for gravity to notice it, rotating around its central hole. A fraction of a second later, the door was kicked open and the Special Werewolf Squad burst in. Through the sights of their silver-bullet-loaded machine guns they glimpsed a flying doughnut with what appeared to be a single red eye set in the middle like a ruby. Then they opened fire, but all they managed to shoot was a wall.