by Tom Holt
“I bet you lie awake at night worrying,” Maurice said sympathetically. “Well, it’s been utterly fantastic seeing you again, but I really do have to—”
“So this project has got to work,” George said. “That’s all there is to it. Muffin?”
“Excuse me?”
“Would you like a muffin with your coffee? Irina, bring us a plate of those pearl and rosewater muffins.”
Here’s a moral dilemma for you. If you’re held against your will by a toxic jerk and offered muffins, should you eat one? But Maurice was feeling peckish, and they did look rather good, though in fact they turned out to taste mostly of plaster of Paris.
“Actually,” George was saying, “it’s basically a very simple idea. Multiverse theory.”
“That’s a very simple idea,” Maurice said. “I see.”
“Multiverse theory states,” George went on, “that there’s an infinite number of universes existing concurrently, one universe for every conceivable possibility. So, for example, there’s this universe, where you just bit into that muffin—”
“Jolly good, by the way. Yum.”
“And another one where you didn’t bite the muffin, and another one where you bit into the muffin but didn’t drop crumbs all over my priceless seventeenth-century Isfahan rug, and another one where you bit into the muffin, which somehow managed to contain a large chunk of brick, and broke a tooth, and another one where immediately after biting into the muffin and dropping crumbs, you spat it out, and another one where you spat it out but didn’t drop crumbs, and so on,” George added, “infinitely. OK so far?”
“Mphm.”
“Fine.” George nodded happily. “So, in multiverse theory, out there somewhere there’s a whole lot of universes in which, back in say 2006, the CEO of Schliemann Brothers called all the pushy, edgy young investment bankers into his office and told them to stop being so damn stupid or else there’d be serious trouble. And so there was no global financial crisis, and trillions of dollars didn’t get wiped off the net value of the human race, and buying a European government bond would be a marginally safer investment than playing the slot machines in Vegas. Still with me?”
Sadly, yes. “All clear so far, George.”
“And there,” George said triumphantly, “is where you’ll find the biggest financial opportunity in the history of mankind. That’s how I’m going to make my pile, Maurice. Inter-multiverse speculation. When I’m done, compared to me Tutankhamun and Montezuma and Louis XIV – well, they’ll be you, Maurice. No offence.”
“None taken.”
“What I need to discover,” George went on, and there was a tiny bit of muffin stuck to the corner of his mouth, “is a stable transdimensional portal that I can send money through. Not people or things, you understand; I think that might be possible – they were doing some work on it in Leiden a year or so back – but really that’s not necessary. Money’s different. It’s more of an idea than a thing, if you think about it. I mean, if I was to tell my bank to send your bank a million dollars, they wouldn’t actually load a thick wodge of paper into an armoured van, they’d just type in a number and hit Send. Well, then. If you can do that between the Seychelles and London, why not between this London and another exactly-identical-except-for-one-tiny-detail London occupying the same point in space/time but a couple of degrees apart in the D axis?”
“Why indeed, George? My God, is that the time?”
“And then,” George said, “the fun really starts. I could buy up trillions of dollars of toxic assets here, send them over there, turn them into valuable assets there and bring them back here where they’d be worth trillions and trillions of dollars, which I could then use to buy even more of the toxic stuff at a cent on the dollar face value, to ship over there – and so it goes on. Brilliant. And so very, very simple.”
Maurice frowned. “George.”
“Mm?”
He’d have to choose his words. “Wouldn’t that have the effect of vastly hyperinflating the economy over here, while infecting the economy over there with the same ghastly problems we’ve had over here and which they over there managed to avoid?”
George beamed at him. “Exactly,” he said. “Which means there’d then be a whole world of toxic assets in that universe that I could buy for peanuts and then sell on in another universe – there’s an infinite number of them, remember – and so on and so on, for ever.” He paused and frowned. “Something’s bothering you,” he said.
“A bit.”
“Go on.”
“Well,” Maurice said, “not wanting to seem like a wet blanket or anything, but wouldn’t you be visiting untold misery on billions and billions of innocent people?”
George shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “But think about it, will you? In all these universes, circa 2006, in each and every one of them, the US president would still be George Bush and the UK prime minister would be Tony Blair. They’re going to come to a bad end somehow or other, on that you can rely. Quite likely, most of them are going to get blown to tiny bits when the kind men in white coats aren’t in time to stop George and Tony dropping an atom bomb on Tehran. So really, it’s as broad as it’s long, isn’t it?”
A not implausible argument, Maurice had to confess. Even so. “George,” Maurice said gently, “I don’t think you can do that.”
“Not right now, certainly,” George said, with a shake of his head. “But we’re close, and getting closer. If only we could fix that stable interface, we’d be laughing.”
After the horse had bolted, presumably. “Some of us, George.”
George didn’t seem to hear that. “There was a guy called Pieter van Goyen,” he said. “Professor at the University of Leiden. They do say he was pretty close at one point, just before he vanished. That was shortly after the Very Very Large Hadron Collider blew up. You remember that?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, Van Goyen was key. Not just key, but key key. What I wouldn’t give for an hour alone with his notes. But they seem to have disappeared at the same time he did. Bummer.”
“A tragedy.” Maurice stood up. “George, it was very good of you to see me and incredibly kind of you to lend me all that money, which I’ll repay if it’s the last thing I do, but I’ve got to go now, before I feel compelled to kill you for the sake of humanity. Cheers, George.”
But George was lost somewhere in his train of thought, which had wandered into a siding somewhere far away and gone to sleep. “Yes, right, so long, Maurice. I’ll give Steve your best when I see her next.”
“Um, George.”
“Mm?”
“How do I get out of here?”
George looked up at him and grinned. “Jermaine,” he said, “show Mr Katz out.”
It was wonderful to be out in the fresh air again, like being reborn, but he couldn’t enjoy it properly. As he wandered aimlessly down the street, his brain was buzzing with far more traffic than it could comfortably handle.
Stephanie’s OK. Thank God. Stephanie and George. The bitch.
He went to the bank and paid in George’s cheque, before he could change his mind. And why not, he told himself; I’ve also taken money from the UK government, and they’ve done some pretty appalling things over the years. And now at least I won’t have to move out of the flat, and I can—
What, exactly? The futile quest for Stephanie had preoccupied him for so long that he couldn’t really come to terms with it being over; take that out of his life, and what was left? Also, somehow or other, he’d got into the habit of thinking that once he found her (rescued her, in his imagination), inevitably thereafter they’d be – well, you know, together somehow; not necessarily in a stereotypical Hollywood romantic sense, but, well, something. But apparently not. Instead, she’s knocking off that unspeakable bastard George – how could she? That’s just gross. You think you know people, and then—
George and Stephanie. Multiverse theory. Somewhere, every possibility, however weird and hideously biza
rre, is real. But not that one, surely.
No more weird and hideously bizarre than a dragon in his bedroom. No, belay that; much weirder, vastly more disturbing and unnatural. Dragons and self-levitating doughnuts and prophetic women on the Underground and Mr Fisher-King – that was all just stuff, which he could just about ignore and put out of his mind. Extreme violation of the fundamental laws of human nature was something completely different. Stephanie had always hated George; well, they all had, back when they were fifteen and the world had been so much easier. But strange things do happen to people as time passes – Kieran and Shawna, for crying out loud; now that had to be multiverse theory, because nothing else could possibly explain it – and when you came to think of it, if you overlooked the arrogance and the self-centredness and the pure evil and so forth, George was not such a bad catch, from a purely materialistic point of view – you couldn’t blame a girl for being tempted. Well, yes you could; in fact there’d be something seriously wrong with you if you didn’t, but things like that happen: love is brittle and transitory, but money… It’s an idea, George had said, rather than a thing. Quite a nice idea, actually. You could put up with an awful lot, for an idea like that.
Some people could. Most people. 99.999 per cent of people. But not Stephanie.
Consider (he told himself, as he filed through the ticket barrier and down onto the platform) Stephanie, just for a moment. Here’s someone who could’ve been – well, not anything, let’s be realistic, but something – but who instead chose the army: heavy boots, clothes designed to make you look like woodland, mud, boredom, rules, a system designed to humiliate everyone and suppress all traces of individuality, getting yelled at, getting shot at, getting stuck behind a desk doing a job that made his own typical day at work (when he’d had typical days at work; he could remember back that far, just about) look like a garden of entrancing possibilities. A person who made that choice probably wasn’t the sort who put luxury, ostentation and effete idleness on the top of their priorities list. So, if she wasn’t going out with George because of his money, then why the hell—?
I don’t want to think about it. There, that was that dealt with. Instead, he thought about being in a position to pay the rent, which meant sleeping in his own bed, which meant some recognisable form of life would go on, for a while, until something came along and made everything all right.
Well, of course.
The train (he couldn’t remember boarding it, but presumably he must’ve done) stopped sharply, shaking him out of his deep well of thought. He looked up; nothing but dark tunnel wall outside the window, with the usual heavy insulated cables mounted on brackets. He turned his head and looked round the compartment. It was empty, apart from a man and a girl, enveloped in each other like a bad car wreck, at the far end. He turned away quickly. They might have seen him, but that was rather unlikely, given how preoccupied they were with each other. Well, he thought, good luck to them. True love, or the illusion thereof; that reminded him of George and Stephanie, and he winced. Stupid, of course; he hadn’t been in love with Stephanie. In fact, the very idea was absurd and mildly grotesque, because you can’t be in love with your oldest friend. True, there had been that awkward, interrupted kiss round the back of the science block, but that had been enough to prove beyond question that there was no chemistry between them whatsoever; and then the doughnut had joined them to each other in a way that mere hormones could never hope to achieve.
The train slowly began to move. He really wished he’d brought something to read.
The happy couple were still at it when he stood up to get off. He tried not to look at them, but inadvertently glanced in their direction just as the doors opened. The girl – no, it couldn’t be.
The doors were closing again. He leapt through them like a startled gazelle, and the train pulled away.
The girl had been Stephanie. No, of course it hadn’t, because she was in Greenland, playing happily with razor wire and dreaming of her own true love. Also, it wasn’t Stephanie, because – Maurice was no great shakes at judging women’s ages, but the girl in the train was at least five years younger; same age, roughly, as her partner, who’d been him.
Not quite him. More like Maurice Katz around about his twentieth birthday. Of course, you don’t ever recognise yourself, do you? You’re so used to seeing the wrong-way-round two-dimensional mirror image of yourself that you simply don’t associate the right-way-round 3D real thing with yourself. Also, you can never see it, so you can hardly be expected to recognise it, can you? Then subtract five years, reducing yourself to a time of life when the face and body are still in a state of flux; there’s a significant difference in appearance between twenty and twenty-five.
That was her. And me. And has it ever occurred to you how much the London Underground logo looks like a doughnut? Well, a doughnut with a horizontal line through it – a doughnut kebab. Her. And me. Only not.
No wonder he didn’t like the Tube very much. Because of all the dead people, or at the very least, the people from the past, and the future. It’s something I ate, he told himself, and that was plausible enough (swan-liver pâté and wind-dried Thomson’s gazelle and muffins flavoured with ground-up pearls; maybe George could be explained in terms of his diet). Definitely not her and me, because if we’d ever done that on a Tube train, or anywhere for that matter, there was absolutely zero chance that it would’ve slipped his mind. So, unless he’d somehow strayed for a split second into one of George’s lunatic alternative universes, it could only have been a straightforward case of mistaken identity. So there.
He went back to the flat. There were no dragons, and it was his for another month. He picked the mail up off the doormat and glanced at it. Junk, junk, junk, junk, official-looking letter, junk. He sat down, turned the letter over in his hands a couple of times, and opened it.
From Carbonec Industries plc:
Dear Mr Katz,
Further to your recent interview, we are pleased to offer you the post of junior administrative assistant. Please contact our Ms Blanchemains on the above number to confirm availability and start date.
Cordially,
D. Nacien
Human Resources
He stared at it for about ten minutes. No, he thought, surely not. Impossible. I mean, I told him the truth—
And then he thought, Yes, but presumably so did all the other applicants, God help them, so it was a level playing field, sort of thing, and—Even so, for Maurice Katz to beat two hundred other applicants, the playing field would have to be tilted like the side of a house, and him the only one with crampons. Unbelievable. He frowned, and examined the letter head carefully, to see if it had been mocked up with Letraset. But it hadn’t been, and, anyhow, none of his friends knew he’d been for the interview, so it couldn’t be a practical joke.
There was only one thing he could do. He picked up the phone and dialled the number.
“Human Resources,” said a nice Irish voice. “Isolda Blanchemains speaking; how can I help you?”
“Um.”
“Excuse me?”
“Look,” Maurice said wildly, “the thing is, I’ve just had a letter from you, and you’ve given me a job.”
Slight pause. “How nice for you. You’ll like it here.”
“Um.”
Another slight pause. “Can you give me a hint of some kind? Possibly even your name?”
“What? Oh, right. Maurice Katz.”
“Like the musical?”
“Sorry? Oh, I see, no. With a K. And a Z.”
“Ah yes, right, here you are. Yes, I can confirm that. Junior admin assistant. Congratulations, by the way.”
“Sorry?”
“For getting the job.”
“Ah, right, got you. Um yes, that’s me.”
“Mphm. Did they give you the truth serum?”
“Yes.”
“Ghastly, isn’t it? Looks as though it turned out OK for you, though. Right, now then. Can you be here tomorrow, nine a.m.
?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all right, then. Go to Reception and ask for Leroy Pecheur; he’ll see to you.”
“Um.”
“Yes?”
“Should I sort of bring anything?”
Pause. “Flowers and chocolates would be nice, but don’t feel you have to. Otherwise, no, nothing springs to mind.”
“No paperwork or anything.”
“Oh, we’ll sort all that out when you’re settled in. Now remember: nine o’clock, Reception, Leroy Pecheur. Got that? Excellent. Welcome to the family, Maurice. You know, I don’t think we’ve had a Maurice before. Several Mervyns, a Marvin and a Marcus, God help us, but no Maurice.”
“Um.”
“Don’t imagine you’ll be Maurice for very long, mind, so you’d better choose which you’d rather be, Morrie or Moz. Sorry, was there something?”
“Um, yes,” Maurice said. “Why me?”
“’Scuse me?”
“There were over two hundred applicants,” Maurice said. “Why me?”
“Ah.” She practically sang the word. Of course, you can sing almost anything if you’re Irish. “You’d have to ask Dave, Mr Nacien, about that. Only I wouldn’t. All right?”
“Yes. Um. Thank you.”
“Bye now.”
“Bye.”
He put the phone back in a sort of a daze. It’ll have to be Morrie, then, he decided. Death before Moz.
Multiverse theory, he thought, putting his feet up on the sofa and closing his eyes. So, let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Every choice, every occasion on which things could go one way or another, no matter how trivial, is a brave new world, and every road not travelled by is still out there somewhere if only you could find it. A likely story. But scientists believed in it, so it had to be true, or at least trueish. So, according to multiverse theory, there’s a universe somewhere in which that could – would – have been Stephanie and me, on the train. Extraordinary thought. But if the multiverse is infinite, like George said it is, then somewhere there must also be trains where I’m making out with Linda Evangelista, Meryl Streep, the nice-looking girl from the dry cleaners, her mother and Condaleezza Rice. Maybe all five at once. Inevitably all five at once, given the nature of infinity. And if George hasn’t gone barking mad and there really could be a way to access these other universes, really and truly, I should’ve killed the mad bastard while I had the chance. Still, too late now. Or not; in some universe somewhere, presumably I did.