When It's a Jar

by Tom Holt

  “Actually, “Theo said, “it’s rather—”

  “And Maurice Katz, for the rescue of Theo Bernstein. And the winner is…”

  Maurice’s jaw dropped like BP shares after an oil spill. “Oh for crying out loud,” he moaned.

  “… Hercules,” the man with glasses boomed out, “for the Twelve Labours!”

  The room exploded with noise. A huge man with a lion’s skin draped over his tuxedo jumped up and shook his fists in the air. “Oh,” Maurice said.

  “Never mind,” Theo said kindly. “There’s always next year.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Which goes to show,” Theo went on, “you were right. It wasn’t your overblown ego that brought us here, or else you’d have won.”

  “Not that I give a damn,” Maurice said, in a slightly strained voice. “I mean, fair play to the man; he did strangle those snakes in his cot. Even so—”

  Hercules had grabbed the microphone and was launching into an impassioned tirade about the plight of endangered Emperor penguins on Coulman Island. “You’re upset,” Theo said.

  “What, me? God, no. I mean, it’s just a silly little tin statue, and everyone knows it’s all a great big fix anyhow; I expect the Disney people’ve got some movie in the pipeline—” He stopped and shook himself, like a wet dog. “I am not upset,” he said firmly, “because this isn’t real. It’s just—”

  “Oh, it’s real all right,” Theo said. “That’s the whole point of YouSpace. But on the day, the better man won, so—”

  “Here, you.” Maurice waved furiously at a passing waiter. “I want a plate of doughnuts, this table, now.”

  The waiter bowed slightly and withdrew. “So if it’s not your friend George,” Theo said, “and it’s not you wanting to be the greatest hero ever, that still leaves us not knowing what all this is in aid of. Unless, of course—”

  The security people had finally got the microphone back from Hercules, and passed it to the man with glasses. “And finally,” he said. “Nominations for the Best Creator award are as follows. Vishnu, for creating the universe; Amon-Ra, for creating the universe—”

  “Oh goodness,” Theo muttered.

  “And Theo Bernstein, for blowing up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider. And the winner is—”

  Maurice’s face was like thunder. “Bet you,” he hissed savagely. “Bet you a million dollars—”

  “Theo Bernstein, for blowing up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider.”

  The loudest cheers yet. Clapping so intense that it welded itself into a solid wall of noise. A spotlight, bright as a supernova, bathed Theo in blinding white light, and he rose to his feet, like a man in a dream.

  Sit down, Maurice yelled, you can’t go up there; it’s a trick, it’s a trap, it’s not real. But the noise was so loud he couldn’t hear himself, so there was no way of knowing whether he’d actually said the words or merely thought them. Made no odds. He was wrong anyhow. Not a trick or a trap. As Theo arrived at the podium and reached out his hand for the silly little statue, Maurice finally understood. Pretty obvious, actually.

  The subconscious command he’d given the doughnut—

  Theo cleared his throat and grinned feebly. He was going to make a speech. Oh well.

  The subconscious command—

  “As a very good friend of mine would say,” Theo said, “Um.”

  The subconscious command (they were laughing and cheering) must have been: Get Theo Bernstein to where he needs to be. Your actual basic selfless, altruistic act.

  “First of all,” Theo said, “I’d like to—”

  Now he came to think of it, Theo had mumbled something about being God, or having created the world, or some such nonsense, at some point. Blowing up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider obviously came into it somewhere. If he could be bothered, he’d ask to hear the full story sometime. Meanwhile, the doughnut had brought Theo here because here was where he was supposed to be: to collect his award, receive the recognition of his peers, all that kind of stuff. By the same token, Theo would never have brought himself here—

  “—apologise,” Theo went on. “Because, if I really did create the multiverse, I can’t help feeling I didn’t do a particularly wonderful job. So, to everyone out there whose lives aren’t exactly the way they’d like them to be: sorry.”

  —Because, unlike every other candidate for the Best Creator award, the one thing Theo didn’t go around looking for was praise, adulation, worship, sacrifices, burnt offerings, choral evensong, any of that stuff. Far too modest and self-effacing. Which, presumably, was why he’d won, and why it’d never have occurred to him to tell the doughnut to bring him here. Which was why—

  “Next, I’d like to say a really big thank you to my friend Maurice Katz, who rescued—”

  —Some other poor sod had to be lumbered with the job of doing it. Which sort of answered one question, but begged a whole hatful of others. Why me, for example; now there was a question. Because it was my fault, because in the life I ought to have had I was George, and George inadvertently trapped Theo in the beer bottle that was the jar that was the door between the dimensions, so I had to be shunted back into a parallel universe where I could make good the damage I’d done, which has now happened, and I got nominated for Best Hero, even though I somehow ended up losing out to a lion-skin-draped club-toting monster-botherer, and how was that fair, exactly?

  Someone moved behind him and he felt a hand clobber his shoulder. He jerked his head round to see who it was, and found himself nose to nose with Max, who grinned at him and slid into the chair Theo had been sitting in.

  “What the—?”

  “Shh,” Max said, nodding towards the podium, where Theo was thanking the junior deputy assistant under-managers in the stock control department of the VVLHC project gift shop. “The boy done good, yes?”

  “How the hell did—?”

  “Shhh!”

  Maurice had never felt less like shhhing in his entire life, but Max clearly wasn’t going to answer questions while Theo was still on his feet, so there was no point in making a big thing out of it. Accordingly he clenched his teeth together hard and looked away, and caught sight of more familiar faces sitting at the table directly behind: Mr Pecheur, a sullen-faced woman who somehow managed to look strikingly like both Theo and Max, Stephanie and—

  “But that’s not—” he mumbled. “That can’t be—”

  George, who was lifting a black attaché case onto the table and flipping the catches.

  “Finally,” Theo was saying, “I’m reminded of the words of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who said, ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ Now I don’t know if Gottfried is here tonight” (at which point a short, fat man stood up and bowed solemnly towards the podium) “but, ladies and gentlemen, I reckon I’m uniquely qualified to assure you that this is the best of all possible worlds, and—”

  George took a shiny black tube out of the case and screwed it onto the end of a longer, thinner shiny black tube.

  “If it gets any better than this, well, all I can say is—”

  George fitted the long, thin black tube into a chunky black rectangular box thing and gave it half a twist; it clicked into place.

  “Anyhow, that’s quite enough from me, so I’d just like to add that this award isn’t just for me alone, it’s for all the incredibly talented and dedicated men and women at the Very Very Large Hadron Collider—”

  Resting his elbows squarely on the table, George pointed the assembled thing at Theo and squinted carefully down the length of it.

  “—but for whose passion, determination and sheer unrelenting hard work there’d have been nothing for me to inadvertently blow up—”

  Hang on, Maurice thought, that thing George is pointing at Theo – doesn’t it look uncommonly like a gun?

  “I have great pleasure in accepting this truly wonderful award—”

  Some little part of a greater mechanism clicked into place in Ma
urice’s head, releasing a spring that activated his legs and would’ve shot him out of his chair and onto his feet, if Max hadn’t grabbed him firmly by the elbow and dragged him down again. “Shh!”

  George was taking aim. Stephanie was pouring wine into Mr Pecheur’s glass. The sullen-faced woman was lighting a cigarette. A waiter approached with the doughnuts Maurice had ordered earlier.

  “Thank you!”

  Deafening applause; more than enough background noise to drown out the muffled thud of the silenced rifle. In that split second, with a quite exceptional degree of clarity, Maurice knew exactly what he ought to have done. He should’ve pushed Max’s hand aside, jumped up, put himself between George and Theo and taken the bullet himself.

  Then he looked down at the two-dimensional red rose on his shirt front, and realised he’d just done exactly that.

  Sod it, I’m dead, he thought. Then he opened his eyes. No, apparently not.

  “Theo?” he called out, and his voice echoed off the stone walls of a huge, empty room. Stone floor, too: ceiling very high, supported by massive oak beams. Freezing cold. “Theo? You there?”

  No reply. He looked down again, and saw he was still wearing his bloodsoaked dress shirt. He frowned. A waiter had been heading his way with a pile of doughnuts on a silver salver, but he’d got shot before the man had reached him. But there had to have been some kind of YouSpace event, snatching him from the jaws of death in roughly the same way as Theo had been saved from the goblin’s crossbow, or else he’d have bought the farm for sure. Gingerly he touched the reddened cloth: wet and warm. But he couldn’t feel any pain. Couldn’t feel anything.

  So how—? He looked round. Footsteps – boot heels on a slab floor – coming his way.

  So how come he wasn’t dead? No doughnut; and the bullet had definitely hit him. At that range it must’ve gone clean through him—

  Aha. He grinned feverishly. At the moment of impact he’d looked down, looked at the wound, the hole in his tummy. In the split nanosecond before the hole that the bullet had blasted through him closed up with blood and relaxing tissue, he must’ve looked through it, as through a doughnut or a bagel; and that, apparently, had been enough to trigger a YouSpace event and bring him here, wherever here might be. A bit grisly, he decided, and not maybe in the best possible taste, but what the heck. Better gruesomely alive than the other thing, any day.

  A door at the far end of the hall opened, and a young woman entered the room. For one heart-stopping moment he was sure it was Stephanie, but it wasn’t. Same height, same build, quite similar face, remarkably similar default expression, but it wasn’t her. The woman looked at him, frowned, overcame whatever doubts or misgivings she’d been troubled by and said, “This way.”

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Maurice—”

  “Katz, yes, I know. Follow me.”

  He stayed where he was. “Excuse me,” he said. “Where is this, exactly?”

  She looked at him. She was, he realised, wearing what looked like a chainmail nightie. “Say what?”

  “This place. I don’t know where I am.”

  Slight sigh. “A certain degree of confusion is perfectly normal,” she replied. “Now come on, for crying out loud. He gets really pissy if he’s kept waiting.”

  “Who’s—?” Maurice said, but she turned on her heel and walked away so fast that he had to break into a trot to keep up with her.

  “You were about to tell me,” he said, breathing hard, “where this is.”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “Who gets pissy if he’s kept waiting?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They’d reached the door. Something about it reminded Maurice of something or other, and as he walked through it – on the other side, the foot of a stone staircase – his hand brushed against it and immediately he recognised the feel: cold, hard, alien, so smooth it very nearly wasn’t there at all.

  “You’ve got an Omskium door,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s funny. There was an Omskium door where I used to work.”

  “Really.”

  “That’s right, yes. Only, I sort of had the impression it was the only one anywhere in the universe.”

  “Well,” she said briskly, not looking round, “there you go. Keep up.”

  Easier said than done; the steps of the staircase were steeply raked, and it seemed to go on for ever. It occurred to him to wonder why he’d suffered no apparent ill effects from the bullet wound. Theo Bernstein, shot with a goblin cross-bow, had needed IV drips and a bank of monitors. But maybe the universe he’d YouSpaced into had advanced medical technology or ambient bacteria with amazing curative properties. In which case, yippee; and what a pleasant change it made, landing somewhere nice, even if the locals were annoyingly uninformative.

  “Through here.” They’d reached the top of the staircase. Maurice looked round. It was as if someone had rebuilt the front office of the Carbonec building in rough-hewn granite blocks, ten times larger; the layout was roughly the same, but vast and horribly bleak. First chance I get, he promised himself, it’s a one-way doughnut to civilisation. This place gives me the creeps.

  They crossed the wide floor of the front office. The woman stopped in a corner and just stood there for a while. “Excuse me,” Maurice said, but then he heard a by-now familiar ting, and a door in apparently nothing slid open. The question was: is it a jar or a lift? When is a lift not a lift? Of course: when it’s a—

  “Get in.”

  They rode the invisible lift for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually, when Maurice had more or less made up his mind that it must be a jar after all, they stopped and the door slid open. The woman hesitated just a moment before getting out.

  “Look,” she said. “I—Um. Oh, this is difficult.”

  Maurice wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “What’s difficult?”

  She gave him a look that seemed to go right through him to the sub-atomic level. “The fact is,” she said fiercely, “I like you. You’re not like the rest of them round here. And you remind me of someone I used to know.”

  “Funny you should say that—”

  “Shut up. Anyhow,” she went on, her face slightly red, “I shouldn’t be saying this, but—”

  “But?”

  She lowered her voice to a rasping whisper. “Be careful,” she said. “Got that?”

  “Um.”

  “Right.” She grabbed him by the arm and hauled him out of the lift. “Straight ahead down the corridor, then second on your left, you can’t miss it. And, er—”

  “What?”

  “Good luck,” she mumbled; then she turned on her heel, stepped into the lift and vanished.

  Be careful. In isolation, possibly the most useless piece of advice one sentient being can give another. I’m always careful, Maurice protested to himself. And a fat lot of good—

  The corridor, although built from the same brutally monolithic stone slabs as everything else, was achingly familiar, as was the bench opposite the door he didn’t miss. It couldn’t be, and it wasn’t; but when he looked at it he knew it instantly – not the thing itself, but its perfect equivalent. It was the bench outside Mr Fisher-King’s study at school.

  Um, he thought.

  Be careful, he told himself, as he knocked on the (Omskium) door. All right; I’m being careful, already.

  The door swung open, and he walked through.

  The room was enormous – so big, in fact, that he couldn’t see three of the walls. He just had to assume they were there, because the ceiling (which had to be up there somewhere) must be resting on something or else it’d have fallen down. It didn’t help with the scale/perspective issue that someone had seen fit to whitewash all the surfaces. Light, a lot of it, was coming in from somewhere, but he couldn’t see its source.

  Directly in front of him, a man sat in a chair. He hoped very much that the chair wasn’t made out of human tibias and femurs expertly dovetailed together, but
it sure looked that way. He recognised the man instantly.

  “Oh,” the man said. “It’s you.”

  He wasn’t wearing his tux, but he still had the eyepatch, the grey ponytail and the huge black bird (the one that had stolen his doughnut at the awards ceremony) perched on his shoulder. He was tapping the fingers of his left hand on the arm (no pun intended) of the chair.

  “Excuse me,” Maurice said, “but—”

  “Yes,” the man said; and although Maurice wasn’t quite sure which question the man was answering, he decided not to press the issue. “Anyhow, here you are, at last. There’s a meet-and-greet speech, but we can skip it if you’d rather.”

  “Um.”

  The man made a vague gesture. “Well,” he said, indicating the amorphous vastness all around them, “this is basically it. What you see is what you get. Have a really great time.”

  “Excuse me,” Maurice repeated. “You were at the awards—”

  The man nodded. “Hard luck about the Best Hero thing,” he said, “though I think you ought to know, I didn’t vote for you. Not because you didn’t deserve it, but because I don’t like you very much. Well, that’s that got out of the way. Any questions?”

  “Yes,” Maurice said. “Where is this?”

  “You what?”

  Maurice took a deep breath. Yes, he was overawed and intimidated, but there are limits; and a man who’s just missed out on Best Hero by a whisker shouldn’t take that sort of thing from anyone. “This place,” he said. “What and where?”

  The man narrowed his eyes. “Are you serious?”

  That didn’t sound terribly good. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I’ve only just got here, but you know who I am – it’s like you were expecting me – but for the life of me I can’t—Sorry,” he said. “Did I just say something funny?”

  The man was grinning. “Yes. Oh for crying out loud,” he went on, “you don’t get it, do you? You’re dead.”

  That gave him a nasty turn for a second, but he knew it wasn’t true. “No I’m not.”