Doughnut

“Oh, that,” Call-me-Bill said. “Yes, I remember him talking about it. He’d been at an airport, and the only book on the bookstall that didn’t have a pink cover was Twilight. I guess that’s where he got the idea from. Anyhow,” he went on, before Theo could express himself fully on the subject, “I take it from what you just said that you’re not quite there yet.”

“No.”

“Never mind.” Call-me-Bill clicked his tongue and smiled. “Keep at it, I know you’ll get there in the end.”

Maybe traces of the wolf had come back with him through the doughnut’s eye; he growled, and the hair on the back of his neck bristled slightly. “It’s pointless,” he said. “It’s like there’s some kind of built-in mechanism. As soon as I’m about to find out something useful, horrible things happen and I just about escape with my life.”

“Could be,” Call-me-Bill said thoughtfully. “Pieter was keen on his security protocols. I expect that when you find out the proper start-up procedure, that sort of thing won’t happen any more.”

He thought hard over the next few days. It had been Max’s voice, no question about it. Why, though, was he surprised by that? If YouSpace could project him into parallel universes, then it followed that there were versions of reality out there somewhere in which Max hadn’t died. If he’d survived, he’d be, what, thirty-six; in an infinite multiverse, there’d be an alternative world or two in which Max had never gone off the rails to begin with. Instead, he’d become a physicist, worked with Pieter van Goyen, was now leading a dull, blameless life advancing the sum of human knowledge. True, that version was so profoundly weird and unlikely that it also allowed for the existence of werewolves, but never mind. Infinity is infinite.

In which case, a sort of Max was out there, alive, well and modestly flourishing. Two points to consider. One, would such a Max be his Max in any meaningful sense? Two, did he really want to make contact with any variant or avatar of his infinitely annoying brother? Point one was a bit too metaphysical for his taste, but point two was well worth serious consideration. Provided Max was safe and well and capable of fending for himself, did he really want to see him again? Well?

There was a voice in his head that said: come on, he’s your brother, dammit. There was another voice that said: exactly. The first voice said: he’s your own flesh and blood. The second voice said: so’s Janine. The first voice said: you and Max have got unfinished business to sort out. The second voice said: yes, I never did get around to ripping his lungs out with a blunt spoon, oh well, never mind. The first voice said: be serious, can’t you? The second voice said: I am serious, believe me.

The first voice said: Max might know how to make YouSpace work. The second voice said: how unlikely is that? The first voice said: about as likely as werewolves. Exactly, said the second voice, and realised it had walked right into that one.

Yes, said the second voice, rallying bravely, but the only reason you want to get YouSpace working is so you could see if Max is out there somewhere. Not the only reason, said the first voice, but its heart wasn’t in it; there’s the money as well, if we can get this thing working and make it safe to use, it could be huge, it could be the biggest thing in home entertainment since –

The second voice said: hm.

Some money would be nice, the first voice said. Well, wouldn’t it?

Put like that, the second voice had to concede, there was a case to answer. And besides, the first voice went on, it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do, is it? I mean, before all this started you were sleeping on the slaughterhouse floor and shovelling guts all day, just to stay alive. This is better than that, surely. The second voice muttered something about lynch mobs and werewolves, but the first voice pretended it hadn’t heard.

Yes, but it’s dangerous. You could get –

Theo sat up straight. He’d remembered a scene he’d walked in on, something he hadn’t been supposed to see: Mr Nordstrom lying on the floor in Reception, soaked in blood, with Call-me-Bill and Matasuntha and Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz trying to stick him back together before he fell to bits. And what was it he’d said?

Mr Nordstrom was in his room: Room 3, third floor. It actually looked like a perfectly normal hotel room, right down to the upper half of a pair of trousers sticking out of the wall-mounted trouser press like a blue pin-striped tongue. Mr Nordstrom looked at him, scowled and said, “Yes?”

“Hi,” Theo said. “Can I come in?”

“Why?”

“Because this isn’t a hotel, I’m not a desk clerk, you’re not a guest and the wine cellar sure as hell isn’t a wine cellar.”

Mr Nordstrom nodded. “I can let you have five minutes,” he said, and pushed open the door.

As he walked in, Theo looked round until he saw what he’d been looking for. He recognised it at once, even though he’d never seen one before. Once he’d postulated its existence, figuring out what it’d look like hadn’t been too difficult.

“Pieter van Goyen?” he asked, as he picked it up.

“Yes, Pieter made it, and for Christ’s sake be careful with it.” Mr Nordstrom reached out a hand to take it from him, but Theo held it just out of reach.

“Let’s see,” Theo said. “You put the bottle in this end here, right? Yes, and then you plug this flex into the wall, and this end here—”

“That’s the projector,” Mr Nordstrom said. “It projects the image of an archway on to any flat surface, like a wall.”

“And that’s the way in?”

Mr Nordstrom nodded, and he handed the machine back to him. “And it works?”

“Oh, it works just fine,” Mr Nordstrom said, taking it and putting it carefully down on a table. “So long as you’ve got pre-loaded capsules to go in it.”

Theo smiled and sat down on the bed. “That’s what all those bottles in the cellar are, aren’t they?”

Mr Nordstrom frowned. “You don’t know?”

“No, so I’m working it out for myself.”

“Bill hasn’t—?”

Theo shook his head. “Bill hasn’t told me and I haven’t asked,” he said. “I have the feeling that truth percolates through Bill the way water does through the human kidney. It goes in as truth and comes out as something quite like it, but not exactly the same.” He grinned. “Shoot.”

“What?”

“Talk. Tell me stuff. Or I’m leaving.”

Mr Nordstrom glowered at him, then sank down in a chair. “Fine,” he said. “You know about the parallel universe project?”

“Let’s assume I do. Bits. Who are you?”

“You don’t – right, fine.” Mr Nordstrom looked hurt. “I’m Jake Nordstrom, CEO of Heartless & Amoral Capital Investments. I’ve put three billion dollars into this.”

“Ah.”

“Which is awkward, since I only have two billion dollars.”

“Ah.”

“The other billion – well,” Mr Nordstrom went on, “you get the idea. What else do you want to know?”

“The bottles.”

Mr Nordstrom nodded. “Each bottle contains five standard hours in an alternative reality. You put the bottle in the machine, the arch appears, you walk through, you’re there. Then you come home.”

Theo steepled his fingers. “The other day,” he said, “you were nearly killed playing with that thing.”

“That’s right.” Mr Nordstrom didn’t sound too bothered. “Somehow, I got the wrong bottle. I was expecting a Paris bordello circa 1898. What I got was heavy street-fighting in the closing stages of the Vietnam War. We’re still trying to figure out how it happened.”

“That may have been my fault,” Theo said. “You see, I wanted to hide this” – he took Pieter’s bottle out of his pocket, then put it back again, just in case Mr Nordstrom got ideas – ”and the wine cellar seemed like a good idea. I moved a few bottles around. Presumably—”

“Yes.” Mr Nordstrom breathed out heavily through his nose but didn’t move. “You weren’t to know, I guess.”

“Quite. You’ll notice, I’m managing to cope with the guilt pretty well. I figure, if people don’t tell me things, I can’t be expected to know them. Right?”

“That bottle…”

“Yes?”

“Bill told me. Pieter left it to you, in his will.”

“So he did.”

“Properly speaking, it belongs to me.”

Theo sighed. “You know, if circumstances were just a little different, you could have the frigging thing. All it’s done so far is try and kill me.”

“Ah. Safety proto—”

“So people keep telling me, yes. But I need it, for now, anyway. When I’ve done with it—” He shrugged. “So, the sooner I get what I need, the sooner you get the bottle. Understood?”

Mr Nordstrom gave him the sort of look you might expect to see on the face of a tiger which, as it’s about to pounce on a quivering fawn, notices that the fawn’s just pulled a gun on it. “Sure,” he said. “What else can I tell you?”

Theo shrugged, picked up the bottle-reader again, turned it upside down, and put it back on the table. “Mishaps aside,” he said, “this gadget seems to work pretty well.”

“It’s all right, I suppose,” Mr Nordstrom said. “But it has significant drawbacks. You see, it’s not real.”

Theo raised an eyebrow. “So?”

Mr Nordstrom smiled. “It’s like the difference between sex and masturbation. This machine isn’t that much better than your garden-variety virtual reality, except you don’t have electrodes up your nose. What’s in the bottles is five hours taken at random, remotely, from a parallel universe. You’ve got no control over who you are in it, what you can do there, what’s going to happen. Pieter had some way of—” He paused and scratched his chin. “Well, it’s a bit like drilling a hole in a barrel and siphoning off a bit of what’s inside. He didn’t have to go there, he could do it from here. But he was doing it blind. So, it’s pot luck. You could get five hours of thrilling adventure and extreme sensual pleasure, or you could end up with five hours of speeches from a party conference. People aren’t going to pay good money for that.”

Theo grinned. “I can imagine.”

“Also,” Mr Nordstrom went on, “it’s prohibitively expensive. One of those bottles costs best part of a million dollars, and Pieter couldn’t figure out a way of bringing the unit cost down. That’s why he decided we had to move on to phase two.”

“YouSpace.”

“I thought we’d decided we weren’t going to call it that. Anyway, yes. That was the plan. This is really just a dead end.”

“You seem to like it.”

Mr Nordstrom laughed. “Well, I paid for it,” he said, “I figure I might as well get some use out of it. But it’s pretty poor stuff, mostly. Apart from the Vietnam thing, I’ve been to a fairy-tale world where dragons exist and magic really works…”

“Interesting.”

“It should’ve been, yes. But I spent five hours as a clerk in their equivalent of the Inland Revenue. Or there was the one where women outnumber men six hundred to one. I had high hopes of that.”

Theo’s eyes widened a little. “Yes?”

“Oh, it was all right,” Mr Nordstrom said, “if you enjoy spending a morning alone on a fishing boat in the middle of the ocean. No control, you see. You’ve got to be able to jump in at the right time and place, or the customer simply won’t want it. It’d be like having a TV that insists on making you watch the Ring cycle live from Bayreuth.”

Theo thought for a moment. “When you got back from Vietnam,” he said, “you were in pretty bad shape.”

“Ah.” Mr Nordstrom smiled. “That time, we got lucky. Well, luckyish. Nineteen ninety-six Merlot. It’s five hours in a hospital in the twenty-seventh century. Unfortunately we’ve only got a few bottles of that left.” He pulled a face. “We started off with two cases. Like I said, you just don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for when you go through that arch.”

Theo pursed his lips. “It sounds like hours of boredom punctuated with brief incidents of violence and fear,” he said. “What’s the fun in that?”

“Why do Canadians watch ice hockey? Something to do, I guess. Besides, like I told you, I paid for it. Well.” He frowned. “I embezzled the money that paid for it. It’ll be me that gets slung in jail when the auditors figure out where it’s gone. So, why not?”

Theo wasn’t listening. Something Mr Nordstrom had said had set off a chain reaction in his head. Pieter left it to you in his will. Perfectly true; but the YouSpace bottle hadn’t been all he’d inherited –

A small bottle.

A brown manila envelope.

A pink powder compact.

An apple.

“And anyway,” Mr Nordstrom was saying, “seventy million of that ninety-two million was what Fedeyevski, you know, the Russian oligarch, ripped off from some mid-eastern dictator, who skimmed it off oil company sweeteners, so who that really belongs to I’d really hate to have to guess…”

The apple; he could understand that, just about. An apple that stayed perfectly fresh after weeks in a safe deposit box; some kind of stasis field, presumably a by-product of Pieter’s alternate universe research, intended to pique his curiosity and point him in the right direction. Sorry, Pieter, I was too dumb or too preoccupied to pick up on that one. But the powder compact –

“And twelve million of that is the CEO’s cut from a pharmaceutical company’s slush fund, which I was supposed to have invested in armaments R&D, there’s this outfit in New Mexico who figure they’ve found a way round the small print in the Geneva Convention so they can produce mustard gas, provided they don’t actually call it that…”

The powder compact. He could remember picking it up and slipping it in his pocket at the bank, but, after that, he couldn’t recall having seen it. At the time, he’d subconsciously rationalised it as a souvenir or something, most likely a memento of some lost love. Now he came to think about it, though, Pieter hadn’t been a lost-love kind of guy. If he’d kept anything to remind him of a long-ago moment of ecstasy and passion, it’d most likely have been a Snickers wrapper.

“I said,” Mr Nordstrom growled at him, “what are you going to do?”

Excellent question. “Sorry, what?”

“Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

Theo nodded. “Several,” he said. “But I skipped most of them, because they didn’t seem to be important. Well, thanks, got to go.”

He stood up, but Mr Nordstrom was quicker. He stood between Theo and the door, scowling horribly. “You’ve got to get this thing working, understand? All that money—”

“Oh, money,” Theo said cheerfully. “Can’t buy you happiness, you know. You look at my sister. She’s got loads of it, and she’s miserable as hell. Would you mind moving eighteen centimetres to the left? That’s the ticket.”

He raced back to him room. His jacket was hanging on a hook behind the door. He grabbed it and plunged his hand into each pocket in turn. He didn’t find a pink powder compact, but he did come across something of approximately the same size and diameter. A hole.

He sank down in his chair and grinned, mostly because grinning is easier than crying, and he felt the need to conserve his strength. It served him right, of course. He should’ve realised the significance of the wretched thing earlier – assuming it had any, of course, and was something other than a receptacle for pink powder. Not that it mattered now. He had no idea how long the hole had been there, so the compact could be anywhere between here and the bank. He could look for it, of course, but that would require energy and enthusiasm. Right now, if energy and enthusiasm were money, he’d be Greece.

He looked at his room – the desk, the mountain of small paper darts made from Pieter’s printout – and decided he needed to be somewhere else for a while. Just for a split second, he considered taking to the bottle. He could sort of see the attraction of a restful hour in an alternative reality at a time like this; a universe in which Pieter van Goyen had died at birth, for example, or a place in which the loudest sound ever recorded was a leaf drifting down to the forest floor. But there was no chance that the bottle would take him anywhere like that, so he wandered down to the lobby instead.

Matasuntha was sitting at the reception desk. Pointless, he thought, because now he knew what was going on, what was the point of pretending this place was a hotel? She turned to give him a reproachful look, then shrugged and smiled. “How’s it going?”

“Nowhere,” he replied.

“Not your fault.”

“What?”

“It’s not your fault you can’t figure out how to make it work,” she said. “If you ask me, Uncle Bill’s being pretty unreasonable asking you to. But he’s desperate, bless him.”

“I know. All that money.”

She nodded. “I don’t think he’d be so worried if it was just his money,” she said. “But it’s mine, and Mr Nordstrom’s, and Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz’stoo. He feels responsible.”

“Indeed.” Theo perched on the edge of the desk. “That drip-drip noise you can hear is my heart bleeding.” He sighed; he felt he ought to be hostile and unpleasant, but it was too much effort. “Losing lots of money isn’t that big a deal,” he said. “Trust me, I know all about it.”

She grinned at him. “It’s made you a better person, right?”

“Well, no. It’s made me a thinner, shabbier, more miserable person stranded in a pseudo-hotel with a lot of lunatics because he’s got nowhere else to go. Apart from that, though, it’s not so bad. As you’ll find out for yourself quite soon, I imagine.”

“Thank you so much.” She gave him a sort of mock-frown. “Well, I’ll try and handle poverty with the same grace and dignity you’re showing. Aren’t I lucky to have such a splendid role model?”

“You bet. I had to make do with Gandhi and St Francis of Assisi, which probably explains why I’m such a mess.” He stopped short and stared at her. “What are you doing?”

She looked up at him. “My face, what does it look like?”

“Where did you get that?”

“What, this?” She held up her powder compact for him to inspect. “Actually, I’m not sure.”

“Think.”

“Lancôme?” She squinted at the compact. “No, definitely not. Too pink. Now I come to think of it, I found it. On the floor, down in the wine cellar.”

He swooped like a hawk and snatched it from her hand. “Hey,” she said, but he was holding it up to the light, looking for –

“Do you mind?” she said. “I haven’t finished with it yet. I’ve got one half of my face glossy and the other half matte.”

“Start a fashion,” Theo snapped. He’d found something. “In the drawer, there’s a magnifying glass. Quickly.”

She scowled at him, but he wasn’t looking, so she fished out the glass and handed it to him. “Well?” she said. “What’s so earth-shatteringly urgent?”

“P V G,” Theo replied. “There, see for yourself.” He handed her the glass and the compact. “Looks to me like it was scratched on with a pin or a compass point or something.”

“Stupendous,” she said. “I still don’t quite see why I can’t powder the other side of my nose.”

“P V G. Pieter van Goyen.” He breathed out slowly through his nose. “It’s mine,” he said. “Pieter left it to me in his will.”

“Fancy that. Other people get houses and money.”

“It was in my pocket. I forgot about it till just now, and then I found there was a hole and it must’ve fallen through.”

“Aren’t you lucky I found it, then?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Now can I—?”

“What? Yes, sure. No,” he amended quickly, snatching it back from her. He felt for a catch or something to open it, but there didn’t seem to be anything like that. Matasuntha watched him for a while, then sighed. “Give it here,” she said.

“No. It’s mine.”

“All right, it’s yours. Now give it here and I’ll show you how to open it.”

He hesitated. “I can manage.”

“No you can’t.”

“I’m a quantum physicist,” he muttered, scrabbling with his fingernails at the seam. “I can open a goddamn powder compact—”

“You’re a man,” she replied. He sighed, nodded and handed it to her. She opened it and gave it back.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Tie your shoelaces for you later, if you ask nicely.”

He was staring into the mirror in the lid, but all he could see there was a bewildered idiot, and he could look at one of those any time he liked. He picked out the little pink sponge thing, but under it there was only pink powder. “Is that it?”

“What?”

“There aren’t any hidden compartments of anything?”

“Well, usually there’s a network of tunnels leading to the hinge. No, of course not.”

He stared, then breathed out slowly through his nose, misting the mirror. “Sod it,” he said. “I was so certain I was on to something.” He looked away. The idiot was now a blurred idiot, and it was getting on his nerves. “I thought, maybe Pieter had hidden a message or something—”

“Look.”

The mirror was demisting itself, and, as the cloud dissipated, he saw that the idiot had gone. In its place –

“The magnifier, quick,” he snapped, but she was already holding it out. He grabbed it and screwed up his eyes to read the tiny words on the screen. “Is this normal?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “Move your head, I can’t see.”

It occurred to him that maybe he didn’t want Matasuntha reading Pieter’s hidden message to him over his shoulder. But it was too late to do anything about that now, not unless he wanted to make an official declaration of war. He moved his head a little. “You can read that?”

“Mphm.”

“You must have eyes like a hawk.”

“Small, round and yellow. You say the sweetest things.” He moved the glass closer, and the words came into focus. His breath caught in his throat as he made out –

YouSpace 1.1

User’s Manual

“Oh, my God,” Matasuntha said softly.

Theo moaned quietly. “I’ve been carrying it around with me all this time—”

“Correction,” she pointed out. “You dropped it. I found it.”

“Yes, well.” He frowned. “What happened? Why didn’t it do this when you opened it?”

She shrugged. “At a guess, DNA recognition security protocols. It only came on when you breathed on it.”

“Ah, right.” He stared a moment or so longer, then scowled. “It’s stuck. How do I make it scroll down?”

“I don’t know, do I?” She clicked her tongue. “You’re the science wiz, as you never seem to tire of reminding me, you figure it out.”

He tried. He prodded the hinges, stroked the rim with his fingertip, tapped on the lid, ran his fingernail over the mirror: nothing. The original message grinned back at him unchanged.

“This is hopeless,” he snapped. “Useless frigging thing—”

“You’re going to hit it now, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Well, like I said, you’re a man. You’ve done the swearing-at-it thing, so hitting’s obviously next. Try talking to it.”

“Don’t be so—” He stopped. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Next.” Immediately, the screen cleared and was replaced by a column headed List of Contents. He didn’t turn his head; but he could feel her smirk burning the skin on the back of his neck. “Right,” he said. “Let’s see.” He moved the glass forward again and said aloud: “Getting Started.”

The screen changed. The phone rang.

Theo froze. The phone rang again, and Matasuntha picked it up and said, “Hello?” He shook himself, and crouched forward to read the next menu, as Matasuntha said, “Who’s calling please?” in her best receptionist’s voice. 1.1. Security protocols –

“It’s for you.”

“What?”

She was holding the phone out for him to take. He scowled horribly at it. “Take a message.”

“I don’t think so.”

He made a terrible sighing noise, then grabbed the phone and snapped, “Yes?”

“Theo Bernstein?” A man’s voice, unfamiliar.

“Yes. Look, I’m really busy right now—”

“Armed police. We have the hotel surrounded.”

YouSpace isn’t the only place where a fraction of a second can last for years. A fraction of a second later, he managed to mumble, “You what?”

“Armed police. Throw out your weapon and come out with your hands up.”

Matasuntha gave him a sympathetic shrug. A nice thought, but it didn’t really help much. “I haven’t got a weapon,” Theo said.

“Oh. Hold the line, please.”

“I think Uncle Bill’s got a baseball bat you could borrow,” Matasuntha whispered. “If it’d make things easier.”

“Hello? Mr Bernstein?”

“Hello, yes?”

“Are you quite sure you haven’t got a weapon?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, come out with your hands up.”

“But—”

Click, whirr. Theo stared at the phone, then put it back. “I thought you said—”

“Mphm. I thought so too. Maybe Uncle Bill changed his mind or something.” She shrugged. “You’d better go out,” she said. “I’ll get Uncle Bill and we’ll come down to the station and sort it all out, I promise.”

He looked at her, then at the compact in his hand. He really didn’t want to, but –

“Here,” he said, “you take this. Look after it, all right?”

“Thanks.” She took the compact, picked up the sponge and started dabbing at her nose. “Well, go on, then,” she said. “Otherwise they’ll be kicking the door down.”

He turned to go; she stood up quickly, darted in front of him and kissed him hard on the mouth. “Try not to get shot,” she said. “Promise?”

Theo nodded dumbly and headed for the door. He opened it and peered outside. There didn’t seem to be anybody about. Feeling more than a little foolish, he lifted both arms above his head, like a Chicago voter in a show of hands, and walked forward.

“Hold it right there,” said a voice. “And don’t try anything smart.”

There was something about the voice. It was doing its best, bless it; the words were rasped out and bitten off, with a definite attempt at menace, but the voice itself was high and thin. “Hello?” Theo called out. “Where are you, I can’t—”

“Shut it,” quavered the voice. “All right, throw down your weapons and—”

“Um,” Theo said. “We’ve been through all that already, I haven’t got any.”

“Positive?”

“I think I’d have noticed.”

A clump of the head-high nettles that grew up through the tarmac of the hotel drive parted, and two men came out. One of them was well over six feet tall, fair-haired, skinny, roughly seventeen years old and fitted with the biggest ears Theo had ever seen on a human being. He was eating a sandwich. The other man was tiny and somewhere between ninety and a hundred and six, and wore a jet-black curly wig that wasn’t on quite straight. It made him look a bit like a freeze-dried Elvis. “Don’t move,” he said. “Or we’ll drop you where you stand.”

Theo stared at him. “You’re not a policeman,” he said.

The old man gave him a wounded glare. “Thirty years,” he said. “Best motor pool superintendent they ever had. And once a cop, always—”

“And neither is he.”

The old man looked sheepish. “That’s my grandson,” he said. “Learning the business, he is. Good lad, very keen.” The good lad finished his sandwich and produced another one from his pocket. “Lunchbox, they call him,” the old man said resignedly, “because he’s always stuffing his face. But keen as mustard, really.”

The boy gobbled the last mouthful and immediately switched to standby mode. Theo lowered his arms and massaged his triceps. “And you’re not armed,” he pointed out. “Are you?”

“Technically, no. But don’t you try anything,” the old man added quickly, “or he’ll do you. He could snap your neck like a twig if he wanted to.”

The boy carried on doing his impression of a radio mast. Theo sighed. “What’s all this about?” he said.

“We got this for you.” The old man poked his glasses on to the bridge of his nose, rummaged in his pockets and produced a matchbox, an appallingly filthy handkerchief, a crumpled paper bag and a folded sheet of paper, which he thrust in Theo’s direction. “Summons,” he said.

“What for?”

“Breach of injunction,” the old man replied. Theo shrugged and stepped forward to take the paper; the old man shrank back, and Lunchbox stepped neatly behind him. Theo took the paper and unfolded it.

“Oh for crying out loud,” he said. “She phoned me.”

“None of our business,” the old man whimpered, “we just do as we’re told, so don’t go getting violent. I just got to say the word, and he’ll do you, like I said.”

Lunchbox was unwrapping a chocolate Swiss roll. “Fine,” Theo said. “So, Janine sent you.”

“The plaintiff,” the old man said.

Theo raised an eyebrow. “No offence,” he said, “but I’d have thought she could’ve afforded better. I mean, look at you.”

“Bugger that,” the old man said angrily. “We’re the best, we are. Twenty-five years in the trade, mate, seen it all, trouble is our business. For crying out loud, Arthur,” he added, without turning round, as Lunchbox took out his phone and started texting furiously, “not when we’re on a job, all right?”

Lunchbox took no notice. The old man shrugged. “Anyhow,” he said, “you’ve got your bit of paper and that’s due service, so there’s no point trying any rough stuff, and even if you did—”

“I know,” Theo said, “neck snapped like a twig.” He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “Have you two been watching me?”

The old man nodded. “Kept you under surveillance ever since you got here,” he said. “Don’t get out much, do you?”

“You’d be surprised,” Theo replied. “Look, could you please ask Janine from me to make up her mind? Either she never wants to see or hear from me again, or she can call me, that’s fine. Let me know what she decides, all right?”

“Not up to us, is it?” The old man looked vaguely shocked. “You don’t catch us telling the client what to do. You want to ask her something, write to her lawyers.”

“Ah. I’m allowed to do that, am I?”

“Try it and see. Anyhow, don’t let us keep you. Come on, Arthur,” he added, as Lunchbox unwrapped an individual pork pie. “You’d think he’d be as fat as a barrel, but look at him.”

Theo went back inside. Matasuntha had gone, but the powder compact was still on the desk. For some reason, that made him feel happy. He picked it up and went back to his room.

She was there, sitting in the one chair, stirring a cup of coffee. “Hi,” she said. “You didn’t get shot then?”

“Apparently not. What are you doing here?”

As he said the words, he saw that there were two coffee mugs on the desk. “I had every confidence you’d beat the rap,” she said. “Milk and sugar?”

“They weren’t real policemen.”

She grinned. “Thought not. I took the call, remember? And I don’t think there’s many ninety-year-old policemen, or at least not assigned to the SWAT teams. Who was it?”

He explained, about Janine and the injunction, and was rewarded with an appropriately bewildered look. “Your sister’s having you followed?”

“I tell myself it’s a sign of affection, like the way some cats bite you to the bone,” he said. “But I don’t think it is, really.”

“No?”

“No. I think it’s because she’s sick in the head and fundamentally nasty. But what the hell, nobody’s perfect.”

She gave him a second and a half of sympathetic grimacing, then said, “You found the compact?”

“Yes.”

“I left it,” she said, “so you’d see how honest and trustworthy I am.”

“And it’s DNA-encoded so only I can make it work.”

“That too. Well? Let’s see it.”

He sighed. On the other hand, said a small voice in his head, it’d be quite nice to have some company for a change, instead of having to do it all on your own. He thought about that, and could see the merit in it. That said, he recognised that small internal voice. It was the same one that had urged him to propose to his third wife. But, he rationalised, getting rid of her would be more trouble than letting her stay. “Here,” he said, and put the compact on the table.

She was frowning. “That’s so weird,” she said, and he realised he’d been using his invisible hand. “Can’t you put a glove over it or something?”

“Sure,” he said. “But all that’d happen would be, I’d be wearing an invisible glove.”

“Whatever.” She shrugged, then gave him an accusing frown. “Oh, and you never answered my question.”

“What? Which question?”

“Milk and sugar?”

“What? Oh. Yes.”

“Milk and sugar.”

“Yes.”

“Help yourself.” She pointed at a carton and a small bowl of sugar lumps, and bent her head over the compact. The mirror reflected her face, and that was all. “Presumably we can download this into a laptop or something,” she said, frowning.

“No idea,” Theo replied, putting his mug on the desk and leaning over her shoulder. “I think I’d better have the chair,” he said.

“Fine.” She stood up, and he took her place. Now she was leaning over his shoulder, and the ends of her hair were just touching his cheek. He tried very hard to ignore that. “Right,” he said briskly, “here goes.” He licked the tip of his index finger and pressed it to the glass of the mirror, which immediately brought up –

YouSpace 1.1

User’s Manual

“Next,” he said, and when the list of contents appeared, he said, “Getting Started.” The screen cleared, a tiny red horse galloped across his face, and a page of text stood out on a white background.

“You need a PIN number,” she said in his ear.

“Already done that,” he said.

“What is it?”

He pretended he hadn’t heard. “What I want to know,” he said, “is how you cancel the security protocols. The ones that keep landing me in life-threatening situations.”

The screen cleared again, the red horse cantered across the bridge of his nose, and –

6.2.1 Cancelling security protocols.

In order to cancel the security protocols, wish for the security protocols to be cancelled.

“Is that it?” she said.

He shrugged. “Is that it?” he asked. The screen cleared, and-

Yes.

“Oh well,” Theo said. “Right, then. How do you choose where you want to go?”

27.6.13 Choosing where you want to go.

In order to choose where you want to go, choose where you want to go.

“We’ve got to try this,” she said. “It can’t be this easy.”

“What, now?”

“Got anything else you really need to do?”

He frowned; then he took the bottle from his pocket. “I’m not sure about this.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

Her hair was tickling the side of his neck. “Do you get upset when people lie to you?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, I trust you.” The bottle was resting on a nest of his fingertips. “The hell with it,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t know. My mind’s gone a complete blank.”

“Mine too.” He closed his eyes. Somewhere nice, he thought. Oh, and deactivate the security protocols.

Somewhere nice…



He opened his eyes and saw a seagull.

Somewhere nice. He could feel the warmth of the sun on his face, and sand under his bare legs. Lying beside him, in a bikini, was a woman with long red hair. He could only see the back of her head, but that was all he needed to see –

“Amanda?”

“Mphm.” It was her all right. Nobody else in the world could do that soft sleepy grunt of utter contentment. Quickly he glanced down. His right hand was still visible, and there was a wedding ring on its fourth finger.

“Honey,” he said, “what’s the date today?”

She told him. She was quite right too.

He couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. Somewhere nice… Somewhere, a time and a place, where the VVLHC hadn’t blown up, he was still married to Amanda, and they were lying on a beach together in the sun. And – because that was what was so very different about YouSpace – it was real –

The sky, he noticed, was emerald-green.

She grunted again, and he realised he was staring at her right shoulder blade. He’d always been ridiculously fond of it, though when he’d mentioned the fact she’d accused him of being weird. And all he’d done was think somewhere nice.

If it’s real, he thought, I don’t have to go back.

He lifted his head, just to make sure. He didn’t recognise the beach, but it was everything a beach should be: a perfect interval between the blue sea and everyday life, a thin golden ribbon of calm joy. So, if the VVLHC hadn’t blown up, presumably he still had his job. And – his mouth went suddenly dry – the money. Maybe, if he was quick, there’d be time to get all the money out of Schliemann Brothers before the crash –

About fifteen yards away, he saw the back of a man’s head, just visible over the top of a colossal sandcastle. It was blond and curly, and it had enormous ears. He blinked, then shifted a little, just enough so that he could see round the side of the sandcastle. Sure enough; there were Lunchbox, in swimming trunks, eating a bacon, lettuce and tomato roll, and the old man, in a raincoat and a scarf, screwing a long lens into a camera body. Well, he thought, almost perfect. But close enough can be good enough, sometimes. Behind him, he heard a crunch, which he recognised as the sound of someone biting into an apple.

Amanda growled and turned over. He smiled at her. She smiled at him. And then her face froze.

“Theo,” she said, “who the hell is that?”

She was looking past him. He wriggled round, and saw Matasuntha, wearing two pieces of string and biting into an apple. She smiled, waggled her fingers and said, “Hi, Theo.”

Amanda moved like a cobra. She sort of slithered and reared up out of the sand, and the look on her face was one he’d seen ever so many times before, though never quite at this level of intensity.

“Um,” he said.

It was what he’d always said, and it had never done him any good. In fact, he remembered, it was surefire guaranteed to make things much, much worse. “Well?” she snapped. “I’m waiting.”

“I’m Mattie,” Matasuntha said. “Who are you?”

There’s never a doughnut when you want one. “I’m his wife,” Amanda said, in a voice you could’ve preserved mammoths in. “For the time being, anyhow.”

Matasuntha frowned. “You never said you were married. I’m not sure I’d have come here with you if I’d known you were—”

“Theo—”

And then he saw it: fifty yards or so down the beach, under a canvas awning, a man in a white T-shirt, frying doughnuts over a portable gas ring. “Just a moment,” he said, swooping and grabbing Amanda’s handbag. “Won’t be long.”

When he got back, twirling the doughnut round his finger, Amanda and Matasuntha were more or less where he’d left them. Amanda snatched her bag back from him and lashed out at his ankle with her foot. He swerved to avoid her, darted behind Matasuntha, who turned her head to look at him, and smiled at them both. “I’m going now,” he said.

“Theo,” Amanda said. “If you leave now, don’t bother coming back, you hear me?”

He ignored her. He was smiling straight at Matasuntha, who finally got the point. “Theo,” she said. “How do you—?”

“Ah,” he said. “That’d be telling. Well, have fun, you two. I feel sure you’re going to be great friends.”

The doughnut was a circular frame for a miniature of Matasuntha Suddenly Worried, but not for very long.



He just had time to sit down and put his feet up on the desk. Then she was back.

“You bastard,” she said.

She looked different: pale, thinner, hair tangled and bedraggled, fingernails bitten short. “Hi,” he said, as she dropped to the floor, sat with her back to the wall and pulled her shoes off. “You got home all right, then.”

“Eight weeks,” she spat at him. “Eight weeks I was stranded there, you total—”

“But you figured it out in the end, I take it.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was rummaging about in a dustbin looking for something to eat, there were some cakes and things, I picked one up to see if it was edible, and here I am. No thanks,” she added bitterly, “to you. How could you?”

Theo gave her a pleasant smile. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the same way you made Amanda believe we were having an affair. You might care to explain that.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She was massaging the soles of her feet. “If I hadn’t, you’d have stayed there, right?”

“Yes,” Theo said crisply. “And why the hell not?”

“Because we need you here.” She picked up her shoes and threw them across the room. “Here, give me the compact, I need to do my face. I spent four nights sleeping on a bench in the bus station.”

He hesitated, then snapped the compact shut and tossed it to her. She caught it one-handed, without looking. “I may forgive you,” she said, “if you bring me food, right now. And coffee,” she added, with a catch in her voice. “You know how long it’s been since I tasted coffee?”

So he went to the kitchen, where he found Call-me-Bill busy at the stove.

“Potato dauphinoise,” he said. “How’s it going?”

Theo hesitated. Of course, he’d get all the news from Matasuntha soon enough. “Hopeful signs,” he said.

“Great.” Call-me-Bill poured cream into the pan from a large jug. “How hopeful?”

“Cautious optimism.”

“That could mean anything,” Call-me-Bill said. “Like, if it wasn’t for cautious optimism, I wouldn’t bother getting out of bed in the morning.”

Theo opened some cupboards until he found a tin of corned beef, which he opened and turned out on to a plate. “Any coffee going?”

Call-me-Bill nodded at a pot on the stove. “Oh, there was a phone call for you. I took a message.”

“Who from?”

“I think he said his name was Captain Zod.”

There was a crash as the plate hit the floor. “Captain—”

“Zod. That’s an Albanian name, isn’t it?”

Theo stooped, gathered up the corned beef with his fingers and stuck it in his pocket. Then he grabbed the coffee pot and ran out to Reception. On the desk was a little yellow sticky: Captain Zod, and a number.

He called the number. It rang and rang.

“What kept you?” she demanded, as he returned breathless to his room. “I was just about to start gnawing the edge of the desk.”

He fished the corned beef out of his pocket. It had crumbled into three clods, which had acquired a surface coating of grime and bits of fluff. She didn’t seem to mind. “Is that coffee?” she asked with her mouth full.

“Yes. Damn, I didn’t bring a cup.”

“No matter.” She grabbed the pot, put the spout in her mouth and tipped her head back. After a long interval of glugging she sighed and wiped her mouth and chin with her wrist. “I think,” she said, “I’ll be all right now. It was close, but—” She stopped, and frowned. “Who are you calling?”

Theo had the phone to his ear. It rang and rang. After fifty-six rings, he gave up.

“Well?”

He sighed and perched on the edge of the desk. “When I was a kid,” he said, “about ten years old, my brother was eleven, we were nuts about Star Trek.”

“Not to worry,” she said. “You grew out of it, that’s the main thing.”

“We used to play this game,” Theo went on. “I was Captain Sherman of the Dauntless. My brother Max was Captain Zod of the Fremulan star destroyer Ob.”

“Really?”

“Mphm.” He handed her the yellow sticky. “The thing is, it was a secret. Nobody else knew.”

She looked at him. “That’s Uncle Bill’s writing.”

“Yup.”

She frowned. “What about your sister? She must’ve known.”

He shook his head. “She hated Star Trek. Star Wars fan.”

“That would explain a great deal. So, not her, then.”

“No.”

“And you tried the number.”

“No reply.”

She took another swig from the coffee pot, then stood up wearily. “Mind out of the way,” she said, elbowing him gently aside so she could sit down at the computer. “Now then.”

“What are you doing?”

“Tracing the call.” She played a piano concerto on the keys, and a screen full of numbers appeared. She glanced down at the yellow sticky and typed. “Uncle Bill has friends in low places. Right, here we are. Your call – oh.”

“What?”

“Came from a payphone in a bar in Caracas,” she said. “Sounds to me like someone’s jerking your chain. You sure it couldn’t be your sister?”

He shook his head. “Thanks for trying.” He sighed, and took her place on the floor. “Why is it,” he said, “I’m never here to take my calls?”

“You ought to get a cellphone,” she replied, tapping keys. “You want the address of the bar?”

“Not particularly.” He played back how he’d said that in his mind, and added, “Thanks for offering, but I don’t think it’d help.”

“He left the number. He wants you to call him back.”

“I doubt it.” He could feel his temper slipping away from him, like the last glimpse of land before it sinks below the horizon. “I think someone’s been to a parallel universe where he’s still alive. He’s got Max to tell him about the Star Trek thing, and now he’s playing mind games with me.”

“Why would anyone—?”

“I don’t know, do I?” The bump and wrench, like a tooth being pulled from an anaesthetised gum, had been his temper finally letting go. He didn’t particularly want to be angry right now, but it seemed he had little choice in the matter. “It’s a hypothesis,” he said. “That’s what scientists do. They think up something that sort of fits the facts, and then they see if they can prove it. If they can be bothered. I’m not sure I can, to be honest.”

“He’s your brother.”

“Was my brother. And you know what? I never liked him much.” He paused. It had never occurred to him to wonder why, until now, when the answer suddenly turned up on his mental doorstep. “He cheated.”

“What?”

“He always cheated,” Theo said. “At everything. Even when we were playing Star Trek. There was a bit where you had to throw a dice, and his always seemed to roll off the table on to the floor, and he’d pick it up and say it was a six before I had a chance to look.” He listened to what he’d just said, and laughed. “Not just that. He cheated at every damn thing, and he still always lost.”

“Sounds like he’s trying to cheat at being dead.”

“He’ll lose. He always loses. You know, if sometimes he won, I could’ve forgiven the cheating.”

There was a pause; then she said, “None of this would matter if it’s really just someone pretending to be him.”

“That’s cheating too,” Theo said furiously. “Like when he paid some guy to pretend to be him in an exam. Now he’s getting someone to do his living for him.”

“Did he pass the exam?”

“No. The guy he paid didn’t know spit about higher maths. Got sixteen per cent.”

Matasuntha was nodding slowly. “I can see how you’d lose patience with someone like that. Still.” She shook her hair out of her eyes. Amanda used to do that, but not quite the same way. On balance, he preferred how Matasuntha did it. “He’s dead. That’s final. Nothing can change that.”

There are moments in every great scientist’s life when a light comes on, illuminating shapes previously indistinguishable in the dark. Sometimes there’s apples and bathwater and tramcars to give a little nudge, though they usually miss out on the glory; when did you last see a copy of The General Theory of Relativity, by A. Einstein and A. Tramcar? Theo wasn’t like that. “What did you just say?”

“What? Well, just that your brother’s dead, and nothing can—”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

She gave him a sweet and simple smile. “Right,” she said. “He’s not dead. Instead, he’s emigrated to the Isle of Avalon, along with Elvis and JFK and Princess Di, and every now and again he pops over to Caracas to make annoying phone calls. Next he’ll be talking to you from your microwave. Come on, Theo. They found an actual body.”

“No, they didn’t. All they found was one tooth.”

She frowned at him. “I’d forgotten that. You think—”

“He was mixed up with some nasty people,” Theo said. “And he was Pieter’s ex-student. And Pieter was ridiculously kind-hearted sometimes and a lousy judge of character. He liked some really useless people.”

“You mean your brother?”

Theo nodded. “I never could understand why. I mean, Max never did any work, he spent his whole time boozing and doing drugs and demonstrating a totally unreconstructed attitude towards sexual politics. Basically, all he did was buy drinks for people and have a good time.”

“And you can’t see why Pieter liked him.”

“No, it’s a complete mystery. But…” Theo closed his eyes for a moment. “Consider this. Max is at the end of his rope, he needs to get far, far away and make himself very hard to find. Pieter, meanwhile, is at a crucial point in his experiments with alternative universes. He needs to send someone over there, to see if it works. Like putting a monkey in a spaceship and blasting it into orbit. Actually, that’s a very good analogy.”

“Max was the monkey.”

“Mphm. Not quite as intelligent and far less self-disciplined, but considerably more expendable. They fake Max’s death, and Pieter sends him to Somewhere Else.”

Matasuntha frowned thoughtfully. “And there he still is.”

“Presumably.”

“Then who’s phoning you from a bar in Caracas?”

The history of science doesn’t record the moments of hesitation and doubt; as, for example, when Archimedes’ wife yelled at him for slopping water all over the bathroom floor, or Mrs Newton said, “So an apple fell on you. So what?” You have to extrapolate that there were such moments, and the genius in question rose above them and moved on. “I don’t know, do I? Maybe it’s someone who knows what happened and thinks I know where he is. Maybe he’s found a way to come back.”

“YouSpace.”

One of only three in existence. Leaving two unaccounted for. “Maybe.”

She took the lid off the coffee pot and peered inside. “This isn’t any good,” she said. “Can a human being die of caffeine deprivation? Let’s not find out.” She went out, and came back a few minutes later with a fresh pot, two mugs, a carton of milk and a sugar bowl.

“Better now?”

“Marginally,” she replied, pouring coffee into both mugs. “Milk and sugar, right?”

He nodded. “You think Max may have got hold of a YouSpace bottle?”

She lifted her mug and gobbled energetically. “Well, you can find out easily enough,” she said.

“Can I?”

“Sure. Go there.”

“What?”

She gave him an even-you-should-be-able-to-understand look. “Tell the bottle you want to go to the universe where Max is hiding out,” she said. “Simple.”

Two voices in his head; one shouting Yes, the other yelling No. “Hold on, though,” he said. “Multiverse theory.”

“Excuse me?”

He took a moment to think it through. “Multiverse theory states that in an infinite multiverse there’s a universe for every possibility. Thus, if I formulate the possibility of a universe where Max is hiding out in YouSpace, it’ll exist and I can go there. Question is, would it have existed if I hadn’t conceived of it, or am I calling it into existence just by thinking about it?”

“Oh, for crying out loud.”

Fair comment. “I was only trying to think of every possible outcome, just in case—”

“Drink your coffee before it gets cold.”

For once, the bad thing he was being urged to forestall had already happened; the coffee was tepid, and she’d put in too much sugar. “I still don’t like the idea,” he said.

“You don’t want to find out if your brother’s still alive?”

“I meant the whole idea of fooling around with alternate realities,” he said, though she’d been closer to the mark than he felt comfortable with. “I mean, for all we know there could be the most appalling consequences we haven’t even begun to imagine. Trust me,” he added bitterly, “I know about what happens when things go wrong.”

She looked at him. “Yes, and every time a butterfly flaps its wings, there’s a risk of hurricanes in Kansas. What are you going to do? Tour the Amazon with a can of bug spray? If everybody thought like you, nobody’d ever do anything.”

“Yes, but—”

“And what happened to you,” she went on mercilessly, “was because you made a mistake. You got it wrong. You screwed up. Try not to screw up this time, and it’ll be fine.”

The foul taste in his mouth was probably only the coffee. “Fine,” he said. “That’s your considered judgement on messing around with the nature of causality.”

“Pieter van Goyen thought it was OK.”

And there she had him. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “All right,” he said. “But first I’m going to do the maths. Properly, not rushing. And then I’m going to check it, five times, maybe six. And then—”

He yawned. “Sure,” she said. “That’d be sensible. Maybe you should get some rest first, you look dead beat.”

She had a point. He did feel tired. In fact, for two pins he’d close his eyes again and take a nap right now. “I think I might just lie down for a moment,” he said.

“You do that.”

He looked across the room to the bed. It was ever such a long way away. The floor, on the other hand, was much more conveniently situated, and he could get there simply by falling. So he did that.

“Sorry,” she said, reaching over him and picking up the powder compact. He started to protest, but a yawn took control of his face and stretched it till the skin burned. “Happy landings,” she added, as she picked up the bottle. “Now, then—”

“Wha—?”

“Take care,” she said (and her voice came from a long way away, filtered through a lot of thick soggy mist, which swirled inside his head.) “And no hard feelings, OK?”



In the beginning was the Word.

Hardly likely, is it? In order for it to be a word, it would’ve had to belong to a language; otherwise it’d just have been a random, meaningless noise – zwwgmf, prblwbl, bweeeg. You can’t have a one-word language; words need context. Therefore, of all the things that could possibly exist in isolation at the Beginning, a word is the least plausible. All right, back-burnerise the Word for now, let’s try something else.

In the beginning was (say) the Mouse; fine, except that unless some primeval crumbs happened along pretty soon thereafter, it’d quickly have become first a hungry, then a dead mouse, and the universe would’ve fizzled out almost immediately.

In the beginning was the Lump of Inert Rock; better, except that everything we know about rock tells us that it’s the end of a process rather than the beginning. It’s cold lava or dried, compressed mud, or the shells of a billion tiny shellfish squashed up tight. In the beginning was the Lump of Inert Rock is like saying the empty packet came before the breakfast cereal.

In the beginning was the Ball of Burning Gas; now perhaps we’re getting somewhere, because you might argue that bits of that ball exist to this day, in the form of stars, scattered about the place like a teenager’s possessions, and that could be taken as some kind of corroborative evidence of something, even if it’s just that God is eternally fifteen years old.

It’s still a hell of an ask, though. Since nobody was around to see it, how can anyone really know? Walk into any courtroom and listen to the witnesses, and you’ll soon learn how very, very difficult it is to prove anything, even with the help of the time-burnished machinery of the law and half a dozen extremely well-trained and well-paid lawyers. The ball-of-burning-gas idea, like the lump-of-rock, mouse and word hypotheses, basically relies on blind faith; and, if you’re going to believe in something, the word is a far more elegant and intellectually pleasing choice than a boulder or a fireball.

Even more elegant, not to mention more democratic and egalitarian, would be to say that they’re all true. If we posit a multiverse rather than a mere universe, it’s not only possible but logically inevitable. In multiverse theory, everything exists (somewhere, over the rainbow, presumably, but the best academic authorities have yet to tackle the issue); the only limitation on perfect clarity is our limited ability to imagine. But, just because we can’t conceive of a functional word – or mouse-originated universe, that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t out there somewhere, six degrees up and three left from the indigo band. That’d be like saying that a black cat in a coal cellar doesn’t exist until we turn the light on.



He woke up on a rocky plateau overlooking a dark blue lake. Overhead, a white sun blazed in a cloudless sky. For some reason he was wearing what looked like a pilot’s flight suit. His head hurt.

He stood up, felt dizzy and sat down again. That bloody woman, he thought. Drink up your coffee before it gets cold.

Standing up was a little bit easier the second time. He looked around, but there was nothing to see except blue water on one side and brown rock on the other. No doughnut vendors anywhere.

Why the hell had she done it? Payback, because he’d left her stranded on the beach with Amanda? A plausible enough hypothesis, except she wouldn’t have had time, surely; she’d only been gone a few minutes, to refill the coffee pot. Long enough, he decided. And there was no need to speculate in depth about her motivation in marooning him, because he’d done precisely the same thing to her, not so long ago. A spectacularly dumb move on his part, he couldn’t help thinking, except that at the time he’d been so angry –

In the distance he could just hear a faint sound of voices. So that was all right, then. In a moment, when he’d caught his breath and finished thinking murderous thoughts about Matasuntha (he didn’t want to have to rush that part) he could stroll over and find the statutory doughnut seller, and then he could leave. No problem.

That was, of course, the difference. He knew how to get home, and she knew he knew. He’d left her to figure it out for herself, and she’d only made it back by sheer fluke. Considered in that light, her stranding him here was little more than a prank, and he probably deserved it. In fact, he was only feeling angry because she’d made a fool out of him. How she’d laugh when he got back – in her terms, a fraction of a second after he’d left – and how helpful it’d be to their working relationship (he told himself) if he took the joke in good part. Query: would he feel this way if she hadn’t kissed him before he went off to face the old man and his idiot grandson? He thought about that, and decided not to think about it any more.

He yawned. It was really quite pleasant here. The sun was bright, the rocks were warm and the blue water of the lake was crystal-clear. You could spend a lot of money and waste many, many hours being publically humiliated in airports and end up at far worse places. A beach umbrella and a long, cool drink would be nice. He wished for them, but that didn’t seem to work. Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Once you were here, the experience was real. That was the whole point.

A cool breeze, just enough to be refreshing, blew across the lake, ruffling the surface. Because time didn’t pass inside YouSpace, he could stay here as long as he liked and lose no time at all. He lay back on the rock and absorbed sunlight like a lizard for a while. There would definitely be a public demand for this product, he decided, if it could be made to work safely and reliably. Or even if it couldn’t, he reflected; after all, Microsoft did OK, and their stuff –

The voices were getting closer. Damn, he thought. He was enjoying the solitude, and a large party of tourists would spoil the mood. He looked round. It was a huge lake; plenty of space for them and for him, without anybody having to share. He stood up, but he couldn’t see anyone. The voices were coming from just over the horizon, where a gently inclined sand dune slouched against the sky. From the top of the dune, he ought to be able to see where the tourists (Germans, probably, or Italians, if the racket was anything to go by) were coming from.

The sand was a bit awkward to walk on, but he made the top of the dune without undue effort and looked across a wide valley. About two hundred yards away was a cornfield, on the edge of which he could make out tiny figures. They didn’t seem to be heading his way. In fact, they seemed to be happily engaged in playing in the corn; an odd thing to do, even for holidaymakers. His curiosity piqued, he set off down the slope to get a closer look.

Halfway down, he made out an interesting sight: a red and white striped awning, in the middle of nowhere. As an old YouSpace hand, he reckoned he knew what that was: the local doughnut outlet. Not a bad idea, he told himself, to get his doughnut now, while he thought of it, just in case there was a problem. He altered course a few degrees and headed for the doughnut stall.

He’d covered half the distance when it occurred to him to look back towards the cornfield. He could see the people rather more clearly now. There was something weird about them. For one thing, they were dressed oddly. He stopped for a more deliberate view. They looked like actors or fashion models – they were all young, strikingly tall and uniformly blond – but for some reason best known to themselves they were dressed up as cavemen. Also, they weren’t playing in the cornfield. They were robbing it.

Curious behaviour. They were grabbing handfuls of wheat ears and stuffing them in their mouths. There was, of course, some logical explanation, probably involving a New Age colony or a music video, but the image was disturbing enough to make him quicken his pace towards the doughnut stall. After all, the werewolf scenario had seemed normal enough until the full moon butted in and spoiled everything. He’d had a nice relaxing half-hour, he decided, and it was time to go. No point in ruining an otherwise pleasant experience by hanging around too long or getting involved.

He broke into a gentle trot and arrived at the doughnut stall very slightly out of breath. Under the shade of the awning he could see a long trestle table covered with trays of doughnuts, eclairs, cream horns, buns, cupcakes and flapjacks, which reminded him that he’d skipped a meal or so recently. He couldn’t see a stallholder, so he reached for the nearest doughnut –

Something slammed against the side of his head, and he dropped forward, banging his chin on the edge of the table as he fell. The world had gone all soft and runny, and he heard a voice, above and behind him.

“Damn humans.” The voice sounded more weary than angry. “It’s time they did something.”

“In broad daylight too.”

Um, he thought, but he wasn’t up to doing anything more energetic than lying still and groaning.

“It’s wearing clothes.”

“I swear they’re getting worse.” He heard the sound of a cellphone being dialled. “Hello? Put me through to Pest Control, will you? Thanks, I’ll hold.”

“Never seen one in clothes before.”

It wasn’t sounding good. With a substantial effort, he wriggled round and saw two animals.

No he didn’t. At first glance he’d taken them for animals, but that was because he’d just had his brains shaken up by a powerful blow to the head. Not animals. The word zoomorph floated into his mind from somewhere (he couldn’t help being impressed at his own resilience; how many people could come up with zoomorph a few seconds after being bashed stupid?) Animal-shaped, but not animals as such. More like –

“Look out, it’s coming round.”

Cuddly toys. Two of them. One of them was bear-sized and sort of bear-shaped, except that no bear ever looked anything like that, or ever had fur that distinctly unnatural shade of orangey-lemon, or wore a little red jacket two sizes two small for its shoulders, or had eyebrows. By the same token, the other one wasn’t a tiger, because tigers don’t stand upright, or have anomalously humanoid jaws and pink noses. That was it, he suddenly realised; that was what was so terribly wrong. They weren’t just unnatural, or anatomically impossible. They were cute.

“Yes, hello?” The tiger was talking into a phone pressed to its ridiculously implausible ear. “Yes, I’m calling from the doughnut stand at BY129865, we’ve got a rogue human, could you send a team to—? Right, yes. Only, hurry, will you? We’ve got it cornered, but it looks pretty lively. And…” The tiger hesitated. “It’s wearing clothes. Yes, really. OK. Thanks.”

Then Theo recognised the voice, and it was as though a door had opened, or a light had come on. He knew these creatures. He’d known them all his life.

“Tigger?” he said. “Pooh?”

The bear nearly jumped out of its skin. The tiger froze. “It’s talking,” it whispered.

“Like hell it is,” the bear replied, in a high, brittle voice. “It’s just barking.”

“It said our names.”

Slowly and cautiously, the bear reached out and grabbed a hammer. “Some of them can do that,” it said, trying to sound casual and failing dismally. “People train them to repeat names and simple phrases. My cousin Paddington had one once that could sing all four verses of ‘Bear Necessities’. Didn’t mean it could talk, though. Didn’t make it intelligent.”

The tiger was grimly maintaining eye contact. “If it moves,” it said, “bash its head in.”

This isn’t right, Theo told himself, it’s people dressed up in costumes, like at Disneyland. But he knew instinctively that there was nothing even remotely human under the fur. Another memory stirred; a film, this time. His mouth was completely dry, as if he’d slept with it open.

Behind him, he could hear screams, and gunshots. The bear relaxed. “It’s the patrol,” it said. “They’ll be here in two shakes.”

“You think they’ll be able to catch it?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they’ll just shoot it, who gives a damn?”

I do, Theo thought, and remembered he was a scientist and a mathematician. Let x, therefore, be the time needed for a hammer y held in the paw of a bear P to move the distance Z between the bear’s chest and the head of a human T moving from A to B. Assuming an average speed s for the hammer and s1 for the human –

He did the equation, and got the result s1 = 2.16 metres/second. He wasn’t sure he could move that fast, but it was probably worth a try.

“Hey, it’s getting away!” the tiger yelled as he streaked past. He felt the slipstream of the hammer just behind his ear, but not the hammer itself. He ran.

As he powered up the slope, he realised his tactical error. Instead of running away, he should’ve lunged forward, towards the doughnuts. Damn. There was, however, no chance of going back. Obese and anatomically unworkable it might have been, but the bear had amazingly fast reflexes. Without the element of surprise and the additional element of horrified bewilderment, he’d never have made it past them. He put his head down and made himself run faster, until he reached the top of the slope, where he lost his footing in the soft sand, slipped and fell. Hauling himself to his feet, he looked up and saw –

The humans on the edge of the cornfield were under attack. A dozen enormous jet-black mice, on horseback, were riding round them, shooting from the saddle with carbines. Some of the mice wore red trousers, the others had blue dresses and enormous pink ribbons on top of their heads. The humans were screaming, scattering wildly as the mice pressed home their charge. One or two of them fell and didn’t get up.

Disneyland, Theo thought. Oh shit.

Over to his left he heard a mechanical rattle, the sort of noise you get when you rack the action of an automatic rifle. He turned and saw a horse standing a few yards away. On its back was a huge black mouse, blue-skirted and pink-ribboned. It was looking straight at him down the barrel of its gun.

“No,” he yelled. “Minnie, no!”

The mouse froze. A slow frown creased its incongruously pink forehead. Theo opened his mouth to shout again, but something hit him so hard he was knocked off his feet. The sound wave, moving appreciably slower than the bullet, reached him just before he blacked out.



His head hurt.

He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a cage; wrist-thick bamboo poles lashed together with rope. Very gently he put his hand to the side of his head. His hair was sticky.

Across the room, on the other side of the bars, an enormous duck was sitting on a stool. It wore a blue sailor jacket and a bonnet with dangling ribbons, and it was nursing a rifle. It was looking past him, as if trying very, very hard not to see him.

“Excuse me,” Theo said.

He could’ve sworn he saw the duck wince ever so slightly. Apart from that, it didn’t move, just carried on staring dead ahead as though its life depended on it.

“Um, excuse me. Donald, isn’t it?”

This time, he saw the duck’s hand-like wing tighten on the grip of its gun, and maybe its huge oval eyes widened a little; anyway, they hadn’t blinked once. All in all, he got the impression of a duck determinedly not hearing voices coming from a human in a cage. The plan he’d been working on withered and died. This wasn’t a duck that could be reasoned with.

A surge of pain in his head made him lie back, and he stared at the bare wooden rafters for a while, trying to fight off the panic that was gradually, relentlessly, working its way into his mind. He’d never really thought about death before, except in a vague, objective kind of a way. He was aware that it existed, but so did Omsk; both of them were distant, irrelevant and not particularly attractive, and he had no intention of visiting either of them. The thought that he might die alone, pointlessly, unnoticed, unaided and quite possibly at the paws of viciously predatory cartoon characters would never have occurred to him, and he was entirely unprepared to deal with it.

But then, dealing with stuff had never been his strongest suit; he’d always preferred to run away, and right now he could see no reason to change the habits of a lifetime. The obstacles in his path consisted of a bamboo cage and an armed duck. What, he asked himself, would Einstein have done? Or Niels Bohr?

“Help!” he shouted. “Guard!”

The duck didn’t move.

“Guard!” He paused, then added, “Aargh!”

The upper and lower mandible of the duck’s beak were moving slightly, as if it was muttering something to itself over and over again under its breath. “Help!” he yelled. “Heart attack! I’m dying!”

Slowly, the duck turned its head and stared at him. It didn’t need to say anything; words, indeed, would probably have ruined the effect. “Sorry,” Theo mumbled, “false alarm. I’m fine now.”

The duck gave him another second and a half of the stare, then moved its head away and carried on contemplating the opposite wall. Theo lay down on the floor and curled up in a little ball. It seemed the sensible thing to do.

Some time later, he heard voices and looked up. The duck was on its feet, rigidly to attention, wing-feather-tips brushing its temple in a millimetre-perfect salute. The two newcomers didn’t seem to have noticed. One of them, a blue-grey donkey with a lilac belly and a bow tied to its tail, was taking readings with some kind of instrument that whirred and flinked tiny red and green lights. The other, a tiny deformed-looking pig with the body of a pink wasp, was filling a syringe from a brown glass bottle.

“Leave us,” the donkey said to the guard, which saluted again and left the room. The pig squirted a tiny drop of something blue from the needle of its syringe, and put the bottle away in a big black bag.

Really not good, Theo decided. He reckoned he could probably take the pig, if he caught it unaware, but the donkey was big and mean-looking, and the guard would be only a shout away. He had no idea what was in the syringe, but he’d been around the scientific community long enough to figure that it probably wasn’t anything he’d want inserted in him. He stayed where he was and tried to look as though he was fast asleep.

They came across and stood a few feet from the cage, gazing at him as though he had little dotted lines tattooed on his skin. Then the pig said, “I don’t know, it looks perfectly normal. Its hair’s not the right colour, but that could be ordinary genetic mutation.”

“The clothes,” replied the donkey. “Where’d it get them?”

The pig leaned forward to look. “Some kind of military uniform.”

“Not one I recognise. And the shoes. Look at the shoes. What kind of feet do you suppose would fit in shoes like that?”

Valid point. The animals he’d seen so far either had bare, rounded stubs at the end of their legs, or else wore footwear like plump cloth bags tied at the ankle. How any of them could stand up without falling over was a mystery to him. He tried to shuffle his feet under him, but it was clearly too late for that.

“The shoes,” the donkey went on, “clearly weren’t made for any sentient species known to us. But they were made. They appear to be the product of sophisticated manufacturing techniques, maybe even mass production. Therefore somebody made them.” It glanced down at its scanner again, and its frown deepened. “Ask yourself,” it said. “Who made them, and what for?”

The pig rubbed its vestigial chin. “Some people like to dress up their pet humans in quaint costumes,” it said. “Maybe—”

“And it talks,” the donkey said grimly.

The pig looked up at it. “Surely not.”

“That was what the report said.” The donkey looked at the door to make sure it was closed, and lowered its voice. “Surely you can grasp the significance. A talking human, wearing unfamiliar clothes and bizarre footwear, suddenly appearing out of nowhere. If it means what I think it means…”

The pig looked terrified. “The Catastrophic Origin theory,” it whispered. “But surely—”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” the donkey said. “Now, I suggest we start by administering the hydroglyco-barythane, followed by an incremental series of electric shocks.”

In spite of himself, Theo made a soft whimpering noise. Both animals turned and stared.

“I think,” the piglet said in a horrified whisper, “it can understand what we’re saying.”

The donkey nodded slowly. “So do I,” it said. “Of course, we can test that quite easily using tetracyanic acid and a simple thumbscrew.”

“Um,” Theo said loudly, “sorry to interrupt but I couldn’t help overhearing, and if it’d save you the trouble, then, yes, I can understand you. Well, not the hydroglycowhatsit stuff, because I’m not a chemist, but the general sort of gist of things, no problem—”

The donkey’s head shot up. The pig made a terrified squealing noise and scrabbled in its bag, producing a small but efficient-looking handgun. “Let’s shoot it now,” it said quickly. “We can get all the answers we need from dissecting it.”

“Calm down, Professor,” the donkey said quietly. “And put that thing away, for now at least. I assure you, the cage is quite robust, and the guard is close by. We’re in no danger.”

“Physical danger, perhaps not,” the pig muttered darkly. “Spiritual danger, on the other hand—”

“Come now,” the donkey said, and its lips curled in a sort of smile. “You’re supposed to be a scientist. It’s not going to eat your soul, you know. That’s just a story.”

The pig seemed a little bit calmer, but it was still holding the gun. “Quite,” it said. “And as a scientist, I know that folk tales and legends often have a solid foundation in fact. If that – that thing makes the slightest attempt to cuddle me, I’m shooting first and rationalising afterwards, is that understood?”

“Of course. If you have to shoot, though, try and avoid the head. I’m particularly keen to examine the upper hippocampus, and I can’t do that if you’ve spattered it all over the opposite wall.”

“Um, excuse me,” Theo yelped desperately, “but really, there’s no need. I’m a scientist myself, I can tell you what’s inside my head without you cutting it open.”

The pig squeaked loudly and darted behind the donkey, aiming the gun at Theo between the donkey’s ears. The donkey opened its mouth once or twice, then said, “You’re a scientist?”

“It’s just some words it’s picked up listening to its owners,” the piglet muttered. “I say shoot it now, before it does something to our brains.”

The donkey wasn’t listening. “You mustn’t mind my colleague,” it said slowly, “he had a strict orthodox upbringing, you know, stories about Before, when humans ruled the world. I won’t let him shoot you—”

“Thanks,” Theo gasped.

“Unless absolutely necessary. Tell me,” the donkey went on, gently easing the pig backwards with one of its hind legs, “where are you from? Come to that, what are you?”

“Um.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s a long story,” Theo said cautiously. “Are you by any chance familiar with Everett’s work on relative state formulation?”

“That does it,” whimpered the pig. “I’m going to count to three, and then—”

“Be quiet,” snapped the donkey. “Say that again, will you?”

“Relative state formulation,” Theo repeated. “It’s the basis of modern multiverse theory. Put simply—”

“Multiverse,” the donkey said slowly. “Now there’s a word you don’t hear every day.”

“I’ve never heard it,” squeaked the pig. “It sounds silly. How can you have a multiuniverse? I mean, the universe is like, everything, right? So how can you…?”

Without looking round, the donkey lashed out with its hind legs, hitting the pig square in the chest and hurling it across the room. There was a soft thud as it smashed into the wall; then it dropped to the floor like a cushion and lay still.

“Now then,” the donkey said briskly, swishing its berib-boned tail, “we don’t have much time. I’ll have to think of a plausible story to tell the guard, but that won’t be a problem. Between you and me” – the donkey was nibbling at the ropes that held the bamboo rods together – “the ducks aren’t the pinkest ribbons in the drawer, if you get my drift.”

Theo backed away until the cage stopped him. “What are you—?”

“Breaking you out of here, what does it look like?” the donkey said with its mouth full. “Unless you want to stay here and get vivisected by the scientific community. Sorry, I neglected to consult you on that. Well?”

“On balance,” Theo said, “no, not really. But—”

“That’s all right, then,” the donkey said, spitting out a mouthful of chewed-up fibres. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to give the bars directly ahead of you a good sharp kick.”

There was a crash as the cage collapsed. A couple of bamboo rods bounced off Theo’s head, but they were light enough not to bother him; just as well, since his head was spinning enough already. “Well,” the donkey said, nuzzling through the pig’s pockets, “are you coming or not?” It teased out a fat wallet with its teeth and tossed it through the air at Theo, who dropped it. “In there you’ll find a security pass,” the donkey said. “That’s it, the bright blue one. We’ll need that. Now,” it went on, “get the pig’s clothes and put them on.”

The pig was dressed in a sort of giant nappy. “That’s silly,” Theo said. “I’ll never pass for Piglet. The ears are all wrong, for one thing.”

The donkey sighed. “Fine,” it said. “Stay here.” Then it frowned. “You called it—”

“Piglet,” Theo said. “From Winnie the—”

The donkey gave him the most intense stare he’d ever been subjected to. “Pooh,” he said. “Yes. You’re going to have to tell me how you know that. But not now,” it added, pulling itself together. “Get dressed, then put Piglet in the cage, what’s left of it. And keep your mouth shut, whatever you do.”

A little later, while Theo struggled desperately to keep the nappy from sliding down round his ankles, the donkey went to the door and pushed it open a crack. “Guard.”

Theo couldn’t see the duck, but he could hear its voice. “Sir.”

“There’s been a dreadful accident,” the donkey said. “The human broke out of its cage and attacked us. I managed to subdue it, but my colleague is badly hurt. I shall take him to the Owl for medical treatment. You must stay outside this door and not let anyone pass until I return. Is that understood?”

“Sir.”

“Very good. Carry on.” The donkey backed into the room. “Right,” it whispered, “In the pig’s bag there’s a roll of bandage. Wind it round your head and face, and then I’ll help you with the arms and legs. Quickly.”

“And remember,” the donkey added, as Theo, mummified except for a narrow slit for his eyes, scrambled on to the donkey’s back, “you’re dying, so groan a bit. But don’t overdo it.”

The duck didn’t even look at him as they went past. Various bears, rabbits, baby deer, bipedal gun-toting dogs and generic small cuddly mammals turned to stare at them as they crossed the compound, but the donkey kept calling out, “Medical emergency! Radiation!” as they passed, so they had a clear run as far as the checkpoint gates, which were guarded by two elephants with huge ears, little yellow caps and shotguns.

“Medical emergency,” the donkey said.

The elephants didn’t move. “Papers.”

“My colleague here was standing right next to the reactor core when it blew,” the donkey said. “He’s suffering from massive radiation exposure. For pity’s sake, don’t get too close.”

“Papers.”

“He’s already starting to mutate,” the donkey said. “I need to get him to the university, we’ve got equipment there that might save him. Don’t look,” he added, as one elephant leaned forward, “it’s horrible.”

The elephant stretched out its trunk and twitched aside a fold of bandage from Theo’s face. “My God,” the elephant said, “he’s right.” It shrank back and shouldered arms. “Pass,” it said.

Half a mile from the compound, the donkey stopped, looked back and said, “Right. We’re clear. Get the hell off me.”

Theo slid to the ground and started clawing at the bandages, which had been driving him crazy. It took him a minute or so, but eventually he was free of them, at which point he became painfully aware that he was wearing nothing but the pig’s bulbous pink nappy. He cringed, and tried not to think about it.

“Come on,” the donkey said. “We’ve still got a long way to go.”

They walked in silence for a while. The donkey was tense, forever craning its neck to look around for pursuers or patrols. “I figure we’ve got an hour’s start on them,” it said eventually. “Then someone’s going to come looking for Piglet and me. And then the candy floss is really going to hit the fan.”

Theo had been meaning to ask. “Why?” he said. “Why did you rescue me?”

The donkey gave him a long, sad look. “Because you’re not the first sentient talking human I’ve come across, is why,” he said. “And because I’m a true scientist. I may hate the truth with every bit of kapock of my stuffing, but I can’t deny it’s true. It’s a little thing called integrity, I don’t suppose you have it where you came from.”

“Well,” Theo said. “Actually, yes. Sort of.”

“Really? You surprise me.” The donkey stopped and glowered at him. “I’m inclined to doubt that,” it said.

“Oh?”

“Oh yes. Because,” it went on, “if sentient talking humans really exist, then it’s more than likely that there’s a grain of truth in the old stories. In which case,” he added, “I ought to kick your arse from here to the Hundred Acre Wood.” An agonised expression passed over his face. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got to ask. Are you him?”

“Who?”

“Christopher Robin.”

Theo shook his head slowly. “Not as such, no.”

The donkey breathed slowly in and out. “Thought not,” he said. “Too old, for one thing. Also, I resolutely refuse to believe in the existence of Christopher Robin. You could say that’s the cornerstone of my very being.”

“Nope,” Theo said, “I’m not him.”

“Ah.”

“But he was real,” Theo couldn’t resist adding. “He grew up and ran a bookshop somewhere in the west of England. Died about fifteen years ago.”

The donkey groaned and said nothing for a while. Then it stopped again. “And the rest of it?” it said. “Is it true?”

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

The donkey looked away. “That once upon a time, your kind enslaved my kind, treating them as toys and playthings, until finally – after the Great Machine blew up and laid waste your entire civilisation – we rose up, burnt what was left of your cities to the ground and slaughtered you by the million, until there were so few of you left that you wandered into the woods and mountains and reverted to wild, senseless animals. Well?”

“The first bit, yes,” Theo said. “Sorry about that, by the way. The other bit, um, not yet.”

The donkey looked at him. “Not yet?”

“Not where I come from.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. All this happened hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

“Um,” Theo said.

The donkey stared at him for a moment, then suddenly nodded. “Multiverse theory.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re from a different—”

“Yup.”

“Ah.” The donkey looked faintly relieved. “So what you mean is, you’re from somewhere that might, if a highly speculative theory is correct, be a universe parallel to our own in certain respects, but which almost certainly differs from it in others, and might therefore differ in regard to the existence of Christopher Robin and the historical reality of the so-called Age of Degradation. Yes?”

“I suppose so.”

“Excellent.” The donkey cheered up immediately. “So long as it’s just a theory, I can more or less live with it. Right, let’s get moving. We haven’t got all day, you know.”

They followed a winding path down to a long, broad, sandy beach. Behind it a steep granite cliff reared up to the sky, from which a cruelly hot sun beat down on them. They walked across the sand for about a mile, and came to the mouth of a cave.

“In there,” the donkey said, nodding his head at the cave mouth. “Right, this is where I leave you.” He hesitated, then added: “Good luck.”

“What about you?” Theo said. “You can’t go back. What are you going to do?”

The donkey shrugged. It was the gesture he’d been born for. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s only me, after all. I expect I’ll wander aimlessly around for a bit and then I’ll die.”

Instinctively Theo reached out a hand to give the donkey a consoling pat, but it shrank away and scowled horribly at him. “Don’t even think about it, human,” it growled.

“Sorry. I was just—”

“Yeah, right. Next thing you know, you’ll be wanting me to sleep on your pillow. Now get out of my sight, before I decide to turn you in to the authorities.”

Theo lowered his hand. “I understand,” he said. “And I’m sorry, I didn’t think. Thank you,” he said. “You’re a true scientist, Eeyore.”

The donkey’s lower lip quivered. “You’re just saying that because I sacrificed everything to save your worthless life.”

“Yes.”

“Think nothing of it,” the donkey said gravely. “Well, so long.”

Theo turned quickly away and plunged into the cave. It was dark, and it took him a while for his eyes to adjust. Eventually he saw a rocky floor and a roof fringed with stalactites. And a suitcase.

He blinked. It was a nice suitcase; pigskin, with chromed buckles. It had been around. There were scuff marks, and a couple of flight labels. On the lid, level with the handle, were initials in gold: MCB.

The C stood for Cornelius.

A little voice in his head said: I really wish I wasn’t wearing a pink nappy at this point. He ignored it, cleared his throat and said, “Max?”

No reply. He took a step forward and tried to open the suitcase, but it was locked. He sighed and, feeling suddenly and comprehensively weary, sat down on the floor.

“Theo.”

He jumped up and spun round. A tall, thin figure stepped out of the shadows at the back of the cave. There was a sudden dazzling flare of flame, clouded by drifting blue smoke. The man had lit a cigar.

“Max?”

“Hi, Theo. What kept you?”

Max stepped forward. He was wearing an elegant white silk suit, a white shirt and two-tone fawn and brown shoes. His hair – a trifle longer than it used to be – was beautifully cut and combed, but uniformly silver-grey. It suited him, of course. Everything always suited Max. If he slipped and fell in a slurry pit, it’d only be a matter of time before slurry started featuring heavily in the latest collections from Diesel and Ralph Lauren. A cigar the size of a torpedo jutted out of the corner of his mouth.

“Max.”

“Theo.”

“You f*cking evil f*cking bastard,” Theo said. “Why aren’t you dead?”

Max removed the cigar and smiled at him. “Pleased to see you too, Theo. And don’t call me a bastard, it’s disrespectful to our mother.” He took a long pull on the cigar and threw it away. “What is that thing you’re wearing? It looks like a—”

“Max.”

“Yes, I think we’ve established that. Sit down, for crying out loud, and have a drink.”

Without looking, Theo backed away until he tripped and landed on his backside. Max leaned back into the shadows and produced a canvas director’s chair, in which he perched gracefully. From his inside pocket he drew a silver flask. “Remy Martin,” he said, unscrewing the cap. “You can’t get it here, of course, so I’m having to make it last. No? Suit yourself.” He took a neat swig from the flask and put it away. “Well,” he said, “I’d like to say how good you’re looking.” He frowned. “But I’m addicted to the truth, so I can’t. You look like shit. How’s Amanda?”

It took Theo a moment to remember the name. “She left me.”

“Pity. She was too good for you, of course.”

“How the hell do you know about Amanda? You died before we got married.”

“I try and take an interest,” Max replied. “Also, I’m not dead.” He yawned, and took out a cigar case. “I tried to call you but you weren’t there.”

“Max, you complete shit,” Theo said gently, “what are you doing here?”

Max lit his cigar with a gold Zippo. “I guess you could say resting. That’s what actors call it, when they can’t get a job. Fortunately—” He puffed at the cigar. “My needs are few and simple. The Seven Dwarves bring me food.” He smiled. “They seem to have got it into their heads that I’m Walt Disney, which makes me sort of like God in their eyes. Of course they’re sworn to secrecy, so they won’t tell the others. And the donkey knows about me, of course. I like him, he’s a doll.” Smoke streamed down through his nostrils. “I expect you’d like me to tell you how I got here.”

“I think you should,” Theo replied. “And then I can kill you.”

Max smiled indulgently. “You’re just saying that,” he said. “Well, let’s see, where to begin?”

“How about my favourite part? The bit where you died.”

“Ah, but I didn’t.” Max smiled. “That was just make-believe. You may recall, I’d got myself into a bit of a jam.”

“You faked your own death.”

Max opened his mouth, put a finger under his top lip and lifted it to show a gap. “I keep getting false ones fitted,” he said, “but every time I move somewhere new, they vanish. No dentists here, of course, or at least not human ones. Actually, I don’t think they have teeth here. In fact, you hardly ever see them eat. And I don’t think they ever shit. Probably don’t have the right plumbing.”

“You faked your death,” Theo repeated. “Then what?”

Max sighed and tipped ash from his cigar. “Well, I was at a bit of a loose end, really. My family had more or less disowned me.” He gave Theo a reproachful look. “I couldn’t really trust any of my so-called friends not to give me away to the bad guys. All I could think of was Pieter van Goyen. He’d always liked me, you know. I wasn’t sure what he could do for me – like, college professors don’t have a lot of money – but I had this feeling that a smart guy like that would be able to think of something. And he did.”

“YouSpace.”

Max shook his head. “We decided not to call it that,” he said. “Too sort of bland. But yes. Or, at least, the first prototype of the technology that’d lead to YouSpace. Pieter warned me, he said it was all mostly theoretical and there was no way of being sure it’d work, let alone getting me back again. But I didn’t really have too many options at that juncture. So I said yes, please, and off I went.”

His cigar had gone out. He paused to relight it, then went on: “In retrospect, I was really lucky. I mean, I could’ve landed up anywhere. But where I ended up was this kind of cute agrarian idyll, sort of like Switzerland only warmer. A peasant family took me in, fed me and looked after me and all. I stayed there for about three months. But then there was a spot of trouble.”

Theo waited a few seconds, then asked, “What?”

“The daughter got pregnant. Shame, she was a nice kid. Anyhow, I had to get out of there in a hurry, so I wandered around for a bit, ended up in a biggish town, got a job in a bank. Well, they called it a bank. It was all pretty medieval. Abacuses instead of computers, you know? I did my best to fly straight, but I guess the temptation was too much for me. I’m forced to conclude I have a rather low temptation threshold. Not my fault, I was born that way.”

“You stole from the bank.”

Max shrugged. “I’d been a tad unlucky playing cards at the tavern,” he said, “and, really, it was like taking candy from a kid. Only some bastard must’ve told on me, because they found out and I landed up in jail. That was bad,” Max added, with a shiver. “Positively medieval. Well, I had a bit of the money still stashed away, but when I tried to make a deal with the warders, they couldn’t understand what I was talking about. Do you know, in that universe they had no idea of the concept of bribery and corruption?”

“You soon taught them, though.”

“You bet. Once they’d caught on, they thought it was a great idea. After that, I travelled for a while. You know me. Restless.”

“One jump ahead of disaster, you mean.”

“Restless,” Max repeated firmly. “I hate to vegetate. Actually, I’d hooked up with this sort of band of pirates when Pieter found me. He’d figured out the next step in the technology, you see; a stable gateway.”

Theo frowned. “What, you mean like horses could go in and out?”

“Stable,” Max said sternly, “as in staying put for more than ninety seconds. So, first thing he did was come and look for me. It took him a while, but he was able to trace me by scanning the resonance pulses for my unique molecular key. Just as well he showed up when he did, actually, because by then the pirates were sort of miffed at me, for some reason.”

“People can be so unreasonable,” Theo muttered darkly. “What did you do, lose their ship in a poker game?”

“Anyway,” Max went on, “Pieter gave me this.” From his jacket pocket he produced a bottle. At first glance, it looked like one of those miniatures you get in hotel minibars and on planes. When Theo looked more closely, however, he saw there was a tiny little globe floating near the neck of the bottle. If he peered really close, he could just make out Australia.

“Cute, isn’t it?” Max said. “The globe is in fact the acceleration chamber. Originally it was going to be a clock, and the particle diffuser was going to be a little cuckoo that came out on a spring. But the first time he tried it, the cuckoo accelerated to three times light speed and shot down a News International satellite on its way out of planetary orbit. The bottle’s safer.”

“That’s a—” He realised there was no technical term, and for a moment he was struck dumb. A scientist without jargon is like a glider on a still day. “A YouSpace module,” he improvised. “Like the one I’ve got.”

Max’s eyebrows shot up. “You’ve got one?”

“Well, yes. Pieter left it to me in his will.”

“Pieter’s dead?”

Years ago, Theo had been trapped at the bar at a conference by an obnoxious semiconductor expert who insisted on telling him about a strip club in Amsterdam where the girls all wore shimmery sort-of-thin-stuff (the right word was diaphanous, but Theo couldn’t be bothered to tell him) dresses; and when the lighting guy did some clever thing with the overhead spots, the light changed direction and it was as though they weren’t wearing anything at all. Annoyingly, that was what Max reminded him of at that particular moment; the angle had shifted just a little, and suddenly there was Max, deprived of his layers of camouflage and armour, a small, frightened man who’s just realised that the last bus has left without him. “Yes,” Theo said. “Didn’t you know?”

“He can’t be. I saw him only a week ago.”

“I saw him die,” Theo replied quietly. “He was killed by space aliens in a bar. They shot him with a ray gun. There was nothing left.”

“My God,” Max said. “And you’re sure it was…?”

“Him? Oh yes. Remember, I knew him much longer than you did. It was Pieter all right. The real Pieter. He’s dead all right.”

“Christ,” Max said. “That’s bad. You know what that means?”

“His second Nobel prize will have to be posthumous?”

“I’m stuck here, is what it means,” Max said furiously. “I can’t get out. That thing” – he jabbed a finger at the miniature bottle – “has packed up, it doesn’t work any more. Brilliant for holding ten cc’s of the liquid of your choice, f*ck-all use for anything else.” Suddenly he frowned, then turned his head and stared at Theo with a desperate look on his face. “Just a minute, what am I saying? You got here, right? So, you must have a working YouSpace bottle. Well?”

“Yes.”

“There you are, then.” Joyfully, Max punched his left palm with his right fist. “You can get us both out of here. I always knew there was some purpose to your existence.”

“Not got it with me, though.”

“What?”

Theo smiled at him. “Matasuntha – you know her? Right, fine. Matasuntha put knockout drops in my coffee and stranded me here. The only way I can get back again is if I look through the hole in a doughnut.”

A tragic look appeared on Max’s face. “Theo, please,” he said, “don’t crack up on me now, you’re all I’ve got. What are you talking about?”

“A doughnut,” Theo repeated calmly. “Or, apparently, a bagel, though I haven’t tried that yet. And don’t ask me how or why, but it does work. You hold it like this.” He mimed holding up a doughnut. “And you look through the hole in the middle, and, bang, you’re home.”

Max’s face had crumpled into a little sad mask. “Theo, if you’re jerking me around, so help me I’ll strangle you. A doughnut.”

Theo nodded. “Apparently it’s sort of hardwired into the OS that, wherever I go, there’s always a shop or a stall selling doughnuts within easy walking distance of where I arrive. Actually, that’s true, at least so far. There was one here.”

“So? Why didn’t you—?”

“Staffed by Disney creatures,” Theo said. “They called the police, or whatever the killer mice are supposed to be. That’s how I got caught.”

“You idiot,” Max said sadly, and for a split second Theo actually felt guilty, until he remembered who he was talking to. “Doughnuts, for crying out loud. I’ve been here over a year and I’ve never seen any doughnuts.”

Theo shrugged. “Get your dwarf buddies to bring you some,” he said.

“I could ask them, I guess,” Max said doubtfully. “Mostly they bring bread and cheese. You have no idea how heartily sick I am of bread and cheese. Tell you what,” he went on, “soon as we get back, you’re going to buy me a five-course dinner at Delmonico’s. I can tell you right now what I’ll have, I’ll start with the—”

“You’ll be lucky,” Theo interrupted him. “I’m broke.”

“Bullshit. You got my share of Dad’s money as well as your own.”

“Ah,” Theo said, and told him about Schliemann Brothers. Max stared at him for a moment, then uttered a long, low groan. “You moron,” he said. “Of all the half-witted—”

“Max—”

“All right.” Max sat up straight and clenched his hands into fists. “Us fighting won’t help anything, let’s just concentrate on getting out of here, and then we’ll figure out what to do.” He frowned, then said, “How about Janine? She hasn’t lost her share, has she?”

“No. In fact, she’s—”

“That’s OK, then,” Max said. “Janine’ll see me right, she always liked me best. So, doughnuts.” He clasped his hands together, index fingers pressed to the sides of his nose; his habitual thinking pose. It always made you think you were in the presence of genius in action, which shows how gullible people can be. “In case the dwarves can’t provide, we need a Plan B. You say there’s a doughnut stall close to where you came in?”

“Yes, but there are these psychotic Disney animals—”

“For Christ’s sake, Theo, don’t be such a worrywart. You always did make such a fuss about doing the simplest little thing. No wonder Dad used to get so mad at you all the time.”

“Dad did not—”

Max raised his hand. “Not to mention,” he said reproachfully, “always having to have the last word. I guess it was unrealistic of me to imagine you’d have changed since I saw you last. Still, you ought to try. You owe it to yourself.”

“Max.” Theo stood up slowly. “You know, I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure about this parallel-universe-alternate-reality thing. I don’t see how it could possibly work.”

Max sighed. “Theo,” he said, “this is not the time for—”

“Because,” Theo went on firmly, “if multiverse theory is right and there really are an infinite number of realities out there someplace, then somewhere there’d have to be a universe where you aren’t a shallow, self-obsessed, feckless, obnoxious, arrogant, poisonous little shit. And I just can’t believe in that. Moons made of green cheese and worlds supported in the branches of giant ash trees, yes. A bearable Max, no way. It’s just not possible. So long.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get a couple of doughnuts, where d’you think?”

“Fine,” Max grunted, relighting his cigar. “Don’t be all day about it.”

Outside, the sun was skin-flayingly bright and hot, conspiring with the white sand to burn the inside of his eyelids red raw. He stomped along the beach for a while, trying to remember which way he’d come, until he came to a massive outcrop of rock jutting out almost to the edge of the sea. He walked round it, and saw a statue.

Once, he guessed, it must’ve been twice the size, but drifting sand had buried it up to its waist. It was a mouse: twenty feet tall, with circular ears and a cute button nose the size of a diving bell, its lips drawn back in a frozen, sneering grin, its long, elliptical eyes scoured blank by centuries of drifting sand and sea spray. Theo stood and gazed at it for a moment, then shrugged, gave it the finger and trudged on.

After an unspecified time, he staggered, dropped to his knees and rolled over on to his side, unable to go any further. The sea was only a yard or so away, and it looked cool and soothing; he wriggled across to it crab-fashion and plunged his aching feet into the water. The salt bit into the cracks and scratches; the pain startled him out of a vague, resigned doze he’d begun to drift into, and probably just as well. Falling asleep out in the open under a sun that hot would be one way of ending all his troubles, but there might still be a better one.

There was something bobbing in the water, a yard or so out. He watched it for a while, unable to summon up the mental energy to identify it. Then a wave lifted it a little, and he realised it was a bottle. That made him laugh out loud. It would be perfect, he decided, if there was a message in it, but of course there wouldn’t be. It was just a bottle: junk, litter, pollution. If he was home, or if he gave a damn about this rotten planet, he’d feel a spurt of moral indignation about that. Right now, though, he simply couldn’t be bothered.

But the bottle stayed roughly where it was, bobbing energetically up and down like a dog with its lead in its mouth, demanding to be taken for a walk. A bottle, he thought. Actually, a useful commodity. Fairly soon he was going to get dehydrated. If by some miracle he found a source of fresh water, a bottle would come in handy. Groaning self-indulgently (but why not? Nobody there to see) he crawled into the delightfully cool water and reached out until his fingers closed around the bottle’s neck. He lifted it up and looked through it. There was something inside.

A message in a bottle. Oh please.

On the other hand, why the hell not? He unscrewed the cap and shook the bottle; the wedge of brown paper slid forward and lodged in the neck. He looked around for something to winkle it out with, but the seashore was depressingly short on toolkits. In fact, the only artefact beside the bottle within visual range was Piglet’s nappy, secured with a safety pin…

Even then, it took him ten minutes’ worth of patient and not-so-patient fiddling, scrabbling, teasing and high-octane bad language before he was able to get his fingernails closed on a tiny corner of paper and draw the message out. He dropped the bottle and the pin and unfolded the message. It was a map.

To be precise, it was a map of the beach; because there was the Mickey Mouse statue, there was the rocky pillar, and there was a cross, correlating exactly to his present position, marked U are Hear. Proceeding from the cross was a dotted line, which sprawled and wandered around the beach in a series of long, lazy curves until it reached a crudely drawn O, above which was written donuts.

He looked back at the beach and saw the dotted line. It was composed of the footprints he’d made getting there and retrieving the bottle. The O marked the spot where he’d stood and stared up at the statue. He scowled at the map, then screwed it into a ball and threw it away. Being rescued is one thing, but nobody loves a smartarse.

Gathering the folds of the nappy in his right hand (he couldn’t now find the safety pin) he retraced his steps until he was standing once again in the shadow of the colossal mouse. A seagull perched on the mouse’s left ear spread its wings and launched itself into the air, complaining bitterly about the inconvenience. He knelt down and started scrabbling in the sand with his fingers.

Almost immediately, he connected with something. It proved to be a small tin box, olive-green, on whose lid was stencilled in white, property of US Government, along with a serial number and a hazmat symbol that suggested the box had once contained weapons’ grade plutonium. He was inclined to doubt that, somehow. He flipped off the lid and saw a doughnut.

Gingerly he prodded it with his forefinger. It was soft enough to be fresh, and still faintly warm, glistening with frying oil. He picked it up, taking care to keep it sideways on, so he wouldn’t inadvertently look through the hole. He hesitated. His moral duty was to take it back to the cave, where Max was waiting. He hesitated a bit longer.

He’s your brother, said his conscience, but even it didn’t sound terribly enthusiastic. I know that, he thought, and I’m glad he’s alive after all, I guess. But he’s all right here, isn’t he? I mean, the Seven Dwarves are bringing him food and presumably doing his laundry, or else how come his suit is so spotlessly, immaculately white, and at least here there aren’t Mob hitmen gunning for him, like there would be back home. Would I really be doing him a favour, taking him back into harm’s way? Surely it’d be better, kinder, to leave him here for now, go back, figure out a way of taking him from here to a more suitable parallel universe, where he could be safe and happy and a very, very long way away…

Well?

His conscience didn’t reply immediately. Perhaps it was wrestling with its conscience, and so on and so forth, like two mirrors facing each other. That was the sort of thing that happened when Max was involved. When it finally spoke, the best it could come up with was Yes, but.

That, however, was enough. He sighed, stood up, took a firm grip on the hem of the nappy and headed for the rocky outcrop.

As he rounded it, he felt something whistle past his cheek; swishswishswish, the sound a bullet makes as it spins in flight. A fraction of a second later, he heard the bang. He looked up and saw a bunch of red-jacketed bears on the edge of the cliff. A spurt of sand kicked up a yard or so to his left; another bang. Oh hell.

He turned to run back the way he’d just come, but he could hear shouting, someone yelling orders. They were behind him as well as in front. Quickly, he assessed the distance to the bears on the cliff: four hundred yards, at least. A moving target at four hundred yards was a pretty tall order. Letting go of the nappy and letting it slide to the ground, he picked a line across the beach and started to run.

He’d never been much of an athlete, even at school, but the gunshots and splashes in the sand motivated him in a way that a succession of PE teachers and coaches had never quite managed. I’m going to make it, he was just thinking, when a dappled whitetail fawn rose up out of the dunes on his left, about twenty-five yards away, and drew a bead on him with a slide-action shotgun. He skidded to a halt, his feet scouring ruts in the sand, just as the fawn fired. He felt the slipstream of the shot charge, a welcome breath of air on such a hot day. Behind him he could hear hooves thudding. Another volley of shots from the bears on the clifftop bracketed him with admirable precision. For a split second he considered plunging into the sea and swimming for it; just then, half a dozen mermaids burst up through the water and aimed at him with spear guns. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of three elephants, their huge ears flapping like wings, flying directly at him out of the sun.

He grinned.

There’s conscience, and there’s brotherly love, and there’s getting your head blown off. Sorry, Max, he said to himself, and slowly raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender. All it took was a slight tilt of the wrist to bring the doughnut into line. Through the hole in the middle he saw an elephant bank into an Immelman turn, and then –