When It's a Jar

by Tom Holt

  “No, it was me,” Maurice insisted, but Theo didn’t seem to be listening. “I knew I should never have given him one, the treacherous little creep,” Theo went on. “Oh, I loaded it with safety protocols so he couldn’t do anything bad with it, but he’s crafty, Max is, he must’ve figured out how to disable them. And then he used the bottle to strand me in that jar thing. The bastard.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Maurice insisted. “That was George, or me. Both of us. Max has been trying to rescue you. Or trying to get me to rescue you, which is more or less the same thing, I suppose. He told me; he came looking for you using his bottle, and got stuck.”

  “No.” Theo’s face had set hard, like a neglected paint-brush. “If something horrible is happening to me, it’ll be Max. Everything bad is Max, always has been.”

  Maurice drew in a long, deep breath, but before he could put words to it, he heard a very faint but nonetheless irritating jingle, coming from inside his jacket. Theo heard it too. “Your clothing is singing to us,” he said. “That’s—”

  “My phone.” Maurice started clawing at his front. Suddenly his inside pocket was harder to find than Lord Lucan. “That’s not possible,” he said. “My phone can’t work, we’re in a—”

  “Universe where your phone works,” Theo said. “What’s a phone?”

  Maurice hauled it out, flipped it open and said, “Yes?”

  “Maurice? It’s Kieran.”

  For a moment, Maurice couldn’t make any sense of that at all. Then he thought; Kieran. Kieran I was at school with. Kieran-and-Shawna, otherwise known as the Fight Club. “Kieran?”

  “Yes. How’s things?”

  “Um, fine. How’s Shawna?”

  “Don’t ask. Listen, there’s a bunch of us getting together for Darren’s birthday, nothing special, just meeting up at Wetherspoon’s and having a few jars. Shawna wondered if you’d fancy—”

  “A few whats?”

  “Jars.” Kieran sighed. “A few drinks. Beer. Brown stuff that makes you fall over. Anyway, if you fancy coming along, it’s seven thirty on Fri—”

  “A few whats?”

  “Maurice? You sound a bit funny, mate. Are you—?”

  “Call you back.” He snapped the phone shut and lunged forward, until he was practically in Theo’s face. “Listen,” he said urgently. “When is a door not a door?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When it’s a jar. When is a jar not a jar?”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “When it’s a beer.” He smacked his forehead in self-rebuke. “It’s so obvious, I must be really stupid.,” he said. “What sort of bottle?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What sort of bottle did you use to make your space things?”

  “YouSpace modules.” Theo frowned. “I don’t know. I think five of them were green and one was brown. About yay high.” He held his hands roughly a beer-bottle-length apart. “And about so wide.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Sureish. Possibly sure.”

  Maurice forgave him for that. “Now then,” he said. “What comes in brown and green bottles about that sort of size? Say, a third of a litre.”

  “A third of a litre.”

  “No, it’s an expression. Well?”

  Theo shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Beer,” Maurice roared. “You made your gadgets out of beer bottles.”

  Theo blinked. “You know what,” he said, in a soft, almost awestruck voice, “I do believe you’re right. In a café, in Rio de—”

  “Beer bottles.” Maurice’s eyes were shining. “Now, I really need you to remember. You said you gave them to people. One to Max, yes. Who else?”

  An agonised look crawled across Theo’s face. “Sorry,” he said.

  “All right, not to worry.” He felt as if he’d just been shot out of a cannon: rushing at enormous speed, not under his own control, but definitely going somewhere. “What happens to old beer bottles, do you think? Once they’re empty, I mean.”

  “Um.” Theo frowned. “Well, they could just get thrown out in the trash, but that would be environmentally irresponsible, so nobody in his right mind would do that; so, presumably, they’re taken back to the beer-making place, washed out and refilled. Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Maurice repeated. “So, just suppose one of your YouSpace bottles got accidentally dumped in a bottle bank, taken back to the brewery, just like you said. They wash it out and put beer in it. Would that stop it working? As a YouSpace thing, I mean.”

  Theo shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought so. I mean, it’s not as if transdimensional correlative algorhythms are going to rust if they get wet.”

  “And then the brewery ships the bottle out again; for export, maybe – it could have ended up pretty well anywhere. Couldn’t it?”

  “Well—” Theo nodded. “I suppose so.”

  “In which case—”

  “But you’d need to activate it before it’d start working.”

  “Activate it?”

  “Yes. Set it going. Turn it on.”

  “Fine. How would you do that?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  Maurice closed his eyes. Painfully slowly up the ladder, dizzyingly fast down the snake. Never mind. “But presumably it’s something that could happen accidentally. Well?”

  “I suppose so,” Theo said. “I mean, multiverse theory—”

  “Whatever,” Maurice said firmly. “Here’s the scenario. One of your beer bottles got thrown out and recycled and accidentally switched on. Therefore, the doughnut now works. Therefore, we can use it to get out of here. Well?”

  Theo looked thoughtful. “Define out of here,” he said.

  Oh come on. “Not in here,” Maurice shouted. “Not stuck in a locked room with no food or water. Not stuck in a locked room with no food or water that shouldn’t be here. Anywhere’s got to be better than that, right?”

  “Um.”

  “Not Um,” Maurice said furiously. “Take it from me; I’m an expert on Um and this is one case where it doesn’t apply. If we stay here, we die. Got that?”

  “If you say so,” Theo replied meekly. “I just think we ought to be a tiny bit careful about—”

  Too late. Maurice had pulled out the doughnut. It was starting to look a little bit sad, what an antiques dealer would call distressed, but it was still in one piece, with a clearly defined central hole, through which—

  “Um,” said Maurice.

  A tall man in a white jacket with brass buttons handed him a beer. He looked at it.

  “You know about these things,” Theo said, about two feet to his left. “Does this kind of stuff happen very often?”

  Maurice looked round. The first thing that registered with him was the huge crystal chandelier, glistening like a galaxy seen far off from deep space. Then the gleaming polished wood floor; then the hundred or so six-seater round tables, with their snow-white tablecloths. Then the bizarre assortment of people sitting around those same tables. Then the stage and rostrum at the far end of the room. “What stuff?”

  “One moment we’re trapped in a cellar—”

  “Sub-basement.”

  “Sub-basement, then, with no food and no way out, and then a fraction of a second later we’re here, wherever this is.” He pulled a sad face. “It wasn’t like this when I was in my jar. I knew where I was.”

  “Not for very long,” Maurice pointed out. “They kept erasing your brain, remember?”

  “Well, no.”

  “I think,” Maurice said, “that we’ve been YouSpaced. Come on, you invented the stupid—Hang on.”

  “What?”

  He stared. “You’re better.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A moment ago you were lying in bed with about a million tubes stuck in your arm.”

  “So I was.” Theo looked down. “Now there’s a weird thing.”

  “What?”

  “You and I are wearing prac
tically identical clothes. Two black garments, one white one and some kind of strange black noose thing around our necks. Is that a coincidence, or what?”

  “Black tie. Formal wear.” He considered trying to explain, but when you come right down to it, there is no rational explanation for the tuxedo. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “it’s, um, a thing.”

  “All those other people—”

  “Yes. Like I was saying. You invented this YouSpace stuff. What just happened?”

  Theo shrugged. “Assuming what just happened actually was a YouSpace event, you decided we should come here.”

  “I decided?”

  “Well, I didn’t, so it must’ve been you. What instructions did you give the interface?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Theo gave him a look. “Well, you must’ve wanted it to do something.”

  “I—Well, I just thought, Get us out of here. And—”

  “Here we are.” Theo nodded. “I have a vague recollection that the YouSpace device is sort of mildly telepathic. You think what you want it to do, where you want to go, and that’s how you program it. Of course, if you aren’t pretty damn precise, there’s a margin for misinterpretation.”

  A margin for—Maurice reckoned he understood. Unless YouSpace was infinitely more sophisticated than any form of technology he was used to, it operated on more or less the same sort of logic as, say, the Windows spellcheck. All in all, they were extremely lucky not to have rematerialised at the bottom of the sea. “Oh well,” he said, sipping his beer, “no harm done, I suppose. All we have to do is take another trip through the doughnut, this time being a bit more careful about—”

  He’d been fishing in his pocket for the doughnut. He’d found it. He drew it out and put it on the plate in front of him, whereupon a large black bird swooped down out of nowhere, snatched it up in its beak and flapped away, struggling to gain enough height to clear the heads of the party at the next table. Mildly stunned, he watched the bird make its laborious way across the room, until it eventually flopped down on the shoulder of a tall, grey-ponytailed, eyepatch-wearing man in the far corner, who took the doughnut from the bird’s beak, brushed it off against his sleeve and ate it.

  “Did you see that?” Maurice asked. “That bird stole our doughnut.”

  “Yes. Is that normal at this sort of occasion?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got no idea what this is.” He studied the room again, aware of the faint tinkling of the bell of memory. “If I didn’t know better I’d say it was the Oscars or something.”

  “The…?”

  Another thing you couldn’t possibly explain. (Well, go on. You try.) “But that makes no sense,” Maurice went on, “because why would my subconscious mind tell the YouSpace thing to take us to the Academy Awards? So it can’t be—”

  A PA system made one of those extraordinary twanging noises. Instinctively, Maurice looked at the rostrum, and saw a man in glasses and a tux and a woman in evening dress. The woman handed the man an envelope. “Actually,” Theo said, “thinking about it logically, I can sort of reconstruct a possible subconscious train of thought that might’ve led you to bring us here. If I’m right…”

  “… Nominations for the Best Thunder God award are…” The man pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. “Jupiter, for the Roman Empire, 776 BC TO AD 326.”

  There was a roll of applause. “Ah,” Theo said. “Thought so.”

  “Unkulunkulu, for Southern Africa…”

  “You what?” Maurice hissed.

  “Well,” Theo said, “it’s really quite simple. When you thought, Get us out of here, what you actually meant was—”

  “And finally,” boomed the man on the podium, “Thor, for Dark Age Scandinavia. And the winner is—”

  “I don’t deserve to be here, so take me to where I ought to be,” Theo went on, raising his voice to make himself heard over the applause for Thor. “And clearly, deep down you’ve got such a high opinion of yourself—”

  “Thor, for Dark Age Scandinavia!” The room erupted into clapping, cheers, rolls of thunder and the opening bars of Also Sprach Zarathustra. A huge man in a white tuxedo got up from a table about ten yards away and lumbered towards the podium, waving as he went.

  “—that you reckon you deserve universal recognition for your selfless and heroic acts,” Theo shouted, as Thor shook hands with the man with glasses, who doubled up with pain and snatched his hand away. “Not that I’m saying you don’t, of course, but—”

  “Shh!” A stern-looking woman with an owl on her shoulder at the next table was glaring at them.

  “I’m just saying,” Theo whispered, “clearly, your view of yourself casts you in a stereotypically heroic mould, so when the YouSpace—”

  “No,” Maurice protested, “that can’t be right, I don’t—”

  “Shhh!”

  “… To Ymir,” Thor was saying, “for creating the world out of the Void of Gunningagap, and to Audunla the Cosmic Cow, for licking the primal salt block into the shape of the first humanoid, and to Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen, the very special goats who pull the Chariot of Thunder and of course a very, very special thank you to Odin—” (the grey-haired man with the big black doughnut-stealing bird smirked happily) “—for building Valhalla—”

  “If you say so,” Theo whispered meekly. “It’s just that it does sort of fit all the known facts. And if not, what the hell are we doing here?”

  “And finally and last of all,” Thor went on, “a really big, big thank you to my worshippers, for believing in me.” Thunderous applause, flashes of forked lightning; the woman on the podium handed Thor a little silvery statuette the size of an egg-cup, which he lifted two-handed over his head and brandished all the way back to his seat.

  “I don’t know, do I?” Maurice snapped, whereupon a waiter brought him another beer. He looked at it. The glass, but no bottle.

  Theo shrugged. “Ah well,” he said. “I suppose it’s better than being stuck in that cellar. Why do they keep giving you things to drink, by the way? Are you thirsty?”

  Maurice massaged his face with the heel of his hand, as if he’d just woken up. “I think you could be right about the subconsciously giving it instructions thing,” he said. “I mean, that does sound like the sort of thing that could happen with computers. But all this…” He paused, while the man with glasses read out the nominations for Best Bull-Headed Monster. “No, this isn’t really me. All I ever wanted was a quiet life.”

  “Ah. Fair enough. Me too, presumably. After all, who in his right mind would want a noisy one?”

  “In which case,” Maurice went on, “what did I tell the stupid thing? I’d have thought it’d have been something like, take me somewhere safe—”

  Theo looked around. “I think this is fairly safe.”

  “—where we could get something to eat and drink—”

  “Talking of which,” Theo interrupted, looking at the plate on Maurice’s side of the table, “are you going to eat that sort-of-pink-thing with leaves all round it? Only it looks much nicer than the biscuit.”

  “—where we might stand a chance of finding out what’s really going on—”

  The man in the glasses had just been handed an envelope. “And the winner of the Most Obscure Esoteric Mystic category is – Zoroaster, for the Zend-Avesta!”

  “All right,” Maurice muttered, as Theo looked at him. “Point taken. But what I really really want most of all is to go home, so—”

  “In the Difficult Return Journey category: Ulysses, for the Odyssey—”

  Maurice turned his head and glared at the podium, but nobody was looking at him. “I suspect what happened,” Theo said kindly, “is that when you looked through the doughnut, you were thinking all sorts of different things, and YouSpace was just trying to do them all at the same time. Bit of a tall order, I guess. So it chose this place because it’s a sort of—”

  “Unfortunately,” the man
with glasses said, “Ulysses isn’t able to be here with us tonight, so collecting the award on his behalf—”

  “—compromise,” Theo said. “But with definite mythic-heroic overtones nevertheless, so I think I was probably right about that side of it. What do you reckon?”

  Maurice scowled at his beer. “If it wasn’t for the fact that I’d just shot him, I’d assume George was behind it somehow,” he said darkly. “Just the sort of thing he’d think was funny.”

  “In the Most Evil category, the nominations are: Mordred, for the Morte Darthur; the Serpent, for the Garden of Eden; Captain Hook, for Peter Pan. And the winner is…”

  “But he’s dead,” Maurice said. “So it can’t—”

  “Shhhh!”

  “—be him, can it?” Maurice hissed. “After all, I saw him—”

  “Only in that universe,” Theo said.

  At that moment, the room erupted in deafening cheers and applause, leaving Maurice to contemplate the implications of what Theo had just said. “Hang on,” he shouted. “Does that mean—?”

  A man walked up to the podium with a huge snake draped around his neck like a Tom Baker scarf. “That he’s still alive in some other part of the multiverse?” Theo nodded. “Almost certainly. When I was looking for Pieter – that’s Pieter van Goyen, my old professor – I saw him get blown to bits by space aliens, but—”

  The snake was telling the audience they were all wonderful, wonderful people and it loved them all. “So you’re saying he’s probably still alive? Here, say, in this—?”

  “Almost certainly, yes.”

  “Hellfire.” Maurice scowled. “In that case, it’s definitely George. After all, he was the one who was keeping you locked up in that jar thing. He had some insane scheme about making money on the stock market or something. Bet you anything you like he’s the one who’s got your bottle.”

  “It’s possible,” Theo said politely. “Only, I’m not quite sure how this particular universe would be to his advantage. You’ve got to admit, there’s nothing particularly bad about it.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Nominations for the Greatest Hero category,” the man in the glasses read out. “Siegfried, for the Volsung cycle; Hercules, for the Twelve Labours—”