by Tom Holt
“That’s the one, yes.”
“Well,” Lucy said, “I’m sure you appreciate that I can’t do teleportation or magic or anything like that, because this is just the out-of-hours helpline. I could call in one of our engineers, but by the sound of it you’d be long dead before he reached you.”
“Ah.”
“That said, I can point out that approximately two point three three seven metres left of where you’re standing, there’s a hidden trapdoor that leads to an access tunnel that’ll have you out of there in about four minutes. It comes out just behind the kebabs-and-postcards stand twenty-one degrees three minutes west of the main entrance to the pyramid. Would that help, do you think?”
“Brilliant. Amazing. You’re an angel.”
“No,” Lucy replied, “I’m the out-of-hours helpline. If you’d like to speak to an angel, I can take your name and number and ask one of my colleagues in Human Affairs to get back to you.”
Pause—about the time it takes for a man to close a mouth that’s suddenly dropped open. “Dear God,” he said. “You really are the helpline. The helpline. That’s just so—”
A caller-waiting light was flashing. “I’m sorry, but unless you have another urgent enquiry, I have to hang up now. Thank you for calling and have a nice day.”
Dear God, he’d said. Angel. Lucy grinned and shook her head. Good guesses, she thought, but no. I only work here.
5
“Jay,” said Dad, “there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
It had been a good day. The fish had been biting, and the suns (four of them; it was a Tuesday; Sinteraan is complicated) were just beginning to set. “Sure, Dad,” Jay replied, not looking up from the fly he was tying. “What’s on your mind?”
The smallest fish on Sinteraan are ninety feet long and weigh a quarter of a ton. Anything that size a conscientious angler would of course throw back. “It’s about the business,” Dad said.
“Come on, Dad, you know the rules. No talking shop when we’re fishing.”
Dad gazed for a moment at his float, bobbing gently in a pool of superheated helium. There are plenty of fish on Sinteraan, but no water. Overhead a giant bird spiralled slowly, its circles winding up a clockwork sun. “I got an offer,” he said.
Jay put the half-finished fly carefully down where he wouldn’t lose it, then turned round. “Oh,” he said.
“From the Venturi people.”
“I see.”
The relationship between Dad and Jay is both simple and complex. They’re father and son but also equal aspects of the One; it’s therefore logically impossible for them to disagree. But the way Jay turned his head and looked out over the helium marshes spoke volumes. “You hate the idea,” Dad said.
“I didn’t say that.”
Dad grinned. “Can’t say I’m mad keen on it myself,” he said. “But what the heck, it’s an offer. We haven’t exactly been inundated.”
Jay shrugged. “Told you it wouldn’t be easy finding a buyer. Not as a going concern.”
There was a warning note in there somewhere, albeit buried eyebrow-deep in due respect. But Dad had promised, when he first mooted the suggestion, that they’d sell it as a going concern or not at all. No way were the asset-strippers going to get their nasty paws on the Firmament they’d spent seven long days building with their own hands. “If you don’t want to sell, there’s an end of it,” Dad said. “It’s your business as much as mine. I just thought …” He pulled a small, sad face. “Forget it. Forget I ever mentioned it.”
Which was, of course, impossible. Jay sighed. “What’s the deal?”
Dad mentioned a number. It couldn’t possibly exist in human mathematics. They’d have to invent six new symbols and fell every tree that’s ever grown on Earth just to write it down. Jay raised an eyebrow. “Cash?”
Dad shook his head. “Half in cash, the other half in stocks and bonds. But I checked them out. They’re reputable people.”
The float twitched, and Dad grabbed his rod and started to work the reel. Sinderaan fish exist in five dimensions; unless you play them just right, they can easily slip into the past and refuse to take the bait, or zoom forward into a future where your line snags on a submerged rock. For three minutes, local time, all their concentration was fixed on the task in hand. Then, with a deft flick of his wrist, Dad jerked a sparkling silver shape out of the helium froth and into the keepnet. “Way to go,” Jay shouted, and Dad grinned. Jay loved to fish, always had.
The fish was a metempsychotic grayling, three hundred and seventy feet long, with iridescent red and purple scales. Over the centuries the species has produced seventeen of Sinteraan’s greatest physicists and nine of its finest playwrights. They weighed it and threw it back. “So,” Jay said, “what do you think?”
“What?”
“About the deal.”
“Oh that.” Dad frowned. “I don’t know. Everybody seems to think the Venturi boys are a safe pair of hands.”
Jay baited the hook, and Dad cast. The cunning fly blazed through the air like a shooting star and glowed back up at them through the banks of congealed vapour. “I guess it’s as good an offer as any,” Jay said. “Question is, do we really want to sell?
Dad took off his hat and looked at it. It was his special fishing hat: baggy, weatherbeaten, torn and frayed in places, utterly irreplaceable. It went without saying, Dad could have a better hat; he could have any hat he wanted. But this hat was his fishing hat, and it had been part of their joint lives for as long as Jay could remember, which was, of course, for ever. “That’s the question, all right,” Dad said. “Well? Do we, or not?”
Jay stood up. He was, needless to say, incapable of a violent or ungraceful gesture or movement of any sort. But. “Let’s try a bit further downstream,” he said. “I think the smaltfish might be biting.”
They were. Sinteraan smaltfish had split the atom and proved the existence of the Higgs boson when Earth was still entirely inhabited by plankton, but they still hadn’t figured out that bits of sparkly feather suddenly appearing out of nowhere right in front of their noses were very bad news indeed. “About selling,” Dad said. “I guess I can take that as a no.”
Jay sat perfectly still. “I want what’s best for you, Dad,” he said. “If you want to sell, we sell. That’s all there is to it.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “It’s just, the Venturi boys, for crying out loud. You know what they’ll do. The moment our backs are turned, they’ll fire the staff, sell off the freeholds—”
Dad shook his head. “Absolutely not. We’ll have a contract. Anything like that, streng verboten.”
“Sure,” Jay said. “Dad, the Venturis, they’ve got lawyers—”
“So have we got lawyers,” Dad replied with a smile. “At any rate, your uncle Nick’s got lawyers, any amount of ’em. Had to build a whole new wing out back of the perjurers. Son, I promise you, there’ll be none of that. We keep a golden share, so we can veto any downsizing or restructuring, and if they do anything we don’t like, we have the right to buy the whole lot back. Come on, Jay. You think I’d let them screw up everything we’ve built? You know me better than that, boy.”
The eighth day, so legend has it, Dad, Jay and Uncle Ghost spent hiding from the product liability lawyers. As with every legend, a grain of truth sparkles in there somewhere. Even so. You build a business from the ground up, you care for it, worry about it, you take pride in its progress, you’re there for it when things don’t go so well. But there always comes a time when you have to let go. Or does there?
“Fact is,” Dad said, looking out over the rippling purple bay, “I feel old.”
“You’re not—”
“No, but I feel that way. Maybe it’s time to step aside. New ideas, new energy. Didn’t I tell you once, every day in the job ought to feel like the first day—you know, bursting with energy, bubbling over with ideas? That’s just not me any more, son. And you know I’d hand the whole thing over to you like a shot, I’ve
got every confidence in you, of course I have. But I ask myself, would that be what you really want? Well? Be honest.”
Jay was silent for a very long time. Dad went on, “I know you’ve always done your very best, never less than one hundred per cent, every second of every minute of every day. But what I’m asking is, did you do it for the business or did you do it for me?”
Jay looked at him. The float bobbed unregarded. Then Jay said, “Sure, Dad. But the Venturis, for crying out loud—”
“They wouldn’t be prepared to pay so much money for it if they weren’t planning on looking after it real well. They’re not bad people, son. Maybe their approach is a little different, but who’s to say that’s a bad thing? A new approach. Fact is, son, I don’t know that we’ve been doing the greatest possible job lately. Well? What do you think?”
Jay’s head was still turned away. “They sure see things different,” he said.
Dad laughed softly. “We were like them once,” he said. “We used thunderbolts. We smote. I seem to remember a whole lot of smiting, at one time.”
“Yes, but for their own good.”
Dad shrugged. “Who’s to say they weren’t the good days? We expanded from a small tribe in a desert to half the population of the planet, back in the old smiting days. The balance sheet never lies, Jay boy. They really wanted to believe, back then.”
“They were scared—” Jay broke off sharply. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “It’s just, I never really took to the Venturis, you know?”
Dad shrugged again. “Mankind,” he said. “You think they’re happier now? Than they were back in the smiting times? Genuinely happier?”
Jay sighed. “What does Uncle Ghost think?”
“He’s with me,” Dad said firmly. “And that’s another thing. Got to think about what’s best for him. He’s not as young as he was.”
Jay, who’d always been as young as he was, made a vague gesture. “If he’s happy with the deal, well, that makes it two to one, doesn’t it?”
“Jay. You’re my eldest begotten son, with whom I am well pleased. We won’t do anything unless you’re absolutely sure. But think about it, will you? Just think about it, that’s all I’m asking.”
Jay let out a long, deep sigh. “I guess you’re right, Dad,” he said. “I didn’t do it for them, I did it for you. And if you want to call it a day …” Suddenly he smiled, like the sun bursting through clouds. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go for it.”
6
“Hello? Is that the helpline? Listen, you’ve got to get an engineer over here as quickly as possible. The sun’s just gone out.”
Another day in the office. “Let me just stop you there,” Lucy said. “When you say gone out, what do you mean, exactly?”
“What I said, you idiotic girl. One moment it was there, riding proudly through the heavens, the next moment this ghastly black disc started sliding across it, and we were all cast into darkness unspeakable. And what I want to know is, what are you going to do about it?”
“It’s all right,” Lucy said. “It’s just—”
“It is not all right,” the caller yelled, making Lucy’s head rattle. “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, and according to our Believers’ Agreement, we’re entitled to nine more hours of daylight. You’re useless. Put me through to your superior.”
“It does that sometimes,” Lucy said mildly. “It’s called an eclipse.”
“A what?”
“It’s a natural phenomenon,” Lucy said. “It happens from time to time when the Earth’s orbit round the sun happens to coincide—”
“No, no, you stupid child, you’ve got it all wrong. The sun orbits round the Earth. Everybody knows that.”
Lucy sighed, but not into the mouthpiece. “Silly me,” she said. “Yes, of course it does. What you’re experiencing is a minor exhibition of divine displeasure, caused by someone in your community committing one or more abominations unto the Lord. You can fix it yourself quite easily by sacrificing a goat and rooting out the evildoers among you. Thank—”
“Then why didn’t you say so in the first place? I don’t know, wasting my time with a lot of heretical mumbo-jumbo—”
“Thank you for calling the out-of-hours helpline,” Lucy continued, soft and remorseless as the incoming tide. “Should the problem persist, please feel free to call the regular technical helpdesk during normal hours, when a colleague will be only too pleased to suffer you gladly. Goodbye.”
She glanced at her watch. Three hours to go. She didn’t know which she minded most, the idiotic calls or the long, dreary intervals between them. She picked up her book and tried to find her place.
The phone rang.
“Hello? Is that the helpline?”
She frowned. She knew that voice. “Yes, you’re through. Lucy speaking. How can I—?”
“Was it you I was talking to the day before yesterday?”
Oh, she thought, him. Trapped-in-a-pyramid man. “Yes,” she said. “And I have to tell you, I checked your authorisation code and strictly speaking it’s no longer—”
“You really are the helpline? The helpline.”
Actually he sounded rather sweet, but she’d had a long day. “I think we’ve been through all that before,” she said. “This is the out-of-hours emergency helpline. For emergencies. Confirmation of the existence of the Supreme Being is not an emergency. May I suggest that you call the regular helpdesk during normal office hours, when a colleague will be pleased to assist you.”
Numb silence. Then, “All right. Could you give me the number?”
“Sure,” Lucy said. “Got a pencil? Fine, here goes. Six seven thweep four sningy—”
“You what?”
Lucy breathed out through her nose. “I said, six seven thweep—”
“What the Hell is thweep?”
He was starting to sound like all the others. “It’s an integer between nine and ten,” she said. “I’ll start again. Six seven—”
“What, you mean like, nine and a half?”
“No, I said an integer. That means a whole number. No fractions.”
“But there aren’t any whole numbers between nine and ten.”
Oh dear. “You’re a human mortal, aren’t you?”
“Yes. So?”
“Certain mathematical entities are only available to authorised customers. Sorry. It’s the rules. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t have—”
“Look,” said the voice. “How the Hell can I call this other number if the numbers in the number don’t exist?”
“Access to the regular helpdesk is restricted to authorised customers only, I’m afraid.”
“So I can’t ring them?”
“No. Sorry. Thank you for calling the—”
“What time do you get off work?”
Lucy blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Only,” said the voice, and she could hear an undercurrent of desperation that tugged at her heartstrings, “I was wondering, maybe we could have dinner.”
“Excuse me,” Lucy said, “and bearing in mind that your call is being recorded for training and quality-control purposes, are you asking me for a date?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes. Why? Are you seeing someone?”
“Not at the moment, no. But that’s beside the—”
“Please?”
There was something about the voice, definitely something. She heard herself say, “Three hours,” and then thought, You what? But by then she’d already said it.
“Fine. I’ll be waiting outside, if you’ll tell me where you are.”
Oh no you don’t, Mr. Clever. “In three hours and ten minutes I’ll be standing at the bus stop in Chernychevsky Street, Yakutsk. That’s in Siberia, if you’re not familiar—”
“Is that where your office is?”
“No.”
“I’ll be there.”
She frowned. “You can get to the remotest town in Siberia in three and a bit hours?”
&n
bsp; “Sure. I’m near an airbase, I’ll steal a jet fighter.”
“Do you think that’s—?”
She heard laughter. “Compared to the stuff I’ve had to do to get this far? Piece of cake. Dinner?”
“Yes, all right. But I want a starter and a pudding.”
The line went dead. She took the headphones off, stared at them for a minute and a half, then put them back on again. Crazy as six ferrets in a blender. Still, why not? She’d been happy enough with Dennis until he went off with that tart, but the unexpected and surprising weren’t really in his line. Perhaps the sort of man who got trapped in pyramids and stole jet fighters might make a pleasant change. She raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. It looked like defrosting the fridge was just going to have to wait another day.
7
The administrative section of Flipside had a strict, conservative dress code and Jenny did her best, but the programming hard-wired into her in the workshops of Prince Sitri was hard to overcome. Bernie had developed a knack of not quite looking at her. It made life a little bit easier. It didn’t help that the admin offices were next door to Number Six furnace, and Duke Hastur, their nominal head of department, insisted on keeping the central heating full on.
“It’s very hot in here,” she said. “I think I’ll take my jacket off.”
“Sure,” Bernie muttered, concentrating very hard on an energy efficiency report. A drop of sweat trickled down his nose and onto his lap. “Um, did Maintenance get back to you about the cracked gas pipe in Gluttony?”
“I’ll chase them up about it right now, Mr. Lachuk.”
“Bernie, please.” She seemed incapable of calling him by his first name. “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind, that’d be great, thanks.”
He glanced back up at his screen, but the energy efficiency report had disappeared. In its place he saw, Thou shalt have no other god but me, folks. Ho ho ho!
He sighed. The merry prankster was at it again. Accidentally-on-purpose he nudged the green phone off its cradle with his elbow, then massaged his forehead with his fingertips. All the effort, energy and resources they’d put into tracking down the prankster had come to nothing. The Third Floor was livid about it, the techies were fed up and resentful at his mild reproofs concerning lack of progress, and where the energy efficiency report had gone nobody would ever know. Why do people do that stuff? he wondered. Then he remembered where he was, and that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a reason for certain sorts of behaviour. Even so. Why couldn’t they go away and hassle the Pentagon or a nice bank or something?