Earth, Air, Fire and Custard
Page 42
And that was where things started to get a bit screwed.
It was a bit, Paul decided, like being a sock inside a tumble-dryer. All around him the world, his whole life, everything he’d ever assumed or thought he knew, was swirling, spinning, not to mention chucking him about and bashing him into things. He was immortal; he was thirteen hundred years old, or he’d been alive thirteen centuries ago, he wasn’t quite sure which; he’d been designed and built, like a barn conversion, to serve some grand design, except that its grandeur consisted of putting right a cock-up caused by a dirty little financial scam. Not just him but Sophie too; and the worst part of it (no, not in the least the worst part, but beyond all question the part that hurt him the most) was that Sophie—
Mr Laertides was still blathering on, but Paul tuned out, struggling to build up the scattered Lego bricks of fact into a coherent structure. Sophie was the other half of this stupid sword, so she’d been around thirteen centuries ago too. But it was necessary, for the stupid grand design, for her to be Paul’s - his whatever, because he couldn’t bring himself to drag even the word for what he felt for her into this disgusting mess; and so she’d been dragged through time, reborn, remodelled, made over like a Victorian end-of-terrace on the Isle of Dogs, so that he’d have no choice but to love her, and she’d have no choice but to love him back—
No choice.
And when he thought about how messed up he’d been over her drinking the stupid philtre, because then it could never be the real thing . . .
If anything ever merited the term obscene, this had to be it. Paul jumped up, and with a degree of speed and agility that he’d conspicuously lacked when he was dangling off the hilt of the stupid magic sword, he reached out and clamped both his hands round Mr Laertides’s throat.
As I was saying (Mr Laertides went on, and Paul felt his fingertips meet in thin air) that was when things started to get a bit screwed. Would you mind not doing that, by the way? It doesn’t bother me in the least, but if you go on like that you’ll hurt yourself. See? Told you.
Right. Now you’re sprawling comfortably, I’ll continue. It was just as well that I’d taken the precaution of dosing you with the anti-falling-in-love stuff, because otherwise you’d have gone to the pictures with Vicky and you’d have been Cupid’s pin-cushion while they were still showing the trailers. But my foresight and attention to detail won the day - I’ve already told you, that doesn’t work, and don’t blame me if you sprain your wrist trying - and we got away with it. Bit of a blow for Vicky, of course. Actually, she’s a nice kid, for half a sword. It was a mean trick our Ricky played on her, using Countess Judy’s secret Jedi mind techniques to wash out her memory, then turning on the old Wurmtoter charm and nagging her into marrying him. Clever, though; because Ricky - well, he knows as well as anybody that no woman on Earth could be married to him for more than a week without ending up hating him beyond all measure; and if she hated him, then he could never have both halves of Tyrving, his magic sword; and then that’d be a key ingredient missing, and so it’d be impossible to recreate the Bersa Island duel. Neat; only Ricky overreached himself, got careless. It was his feud with Countess Judy, you see. When you got rid of her, it broke the spell that Ricky had put on Vicky. Straight away she was able to figure out what he’d done, and the net effect of all his ingenuity was to get her so mad at him that she was determined that the duel was going to happen. It’d be her way of getting even with him, you see. So, although none of us realised at the time, Vicky was actually on our side all along.
When Ricky realised that, of course, he freaked out completely; which was why he had to try his last and wildest shot, getting you to kill him with the poisoned custard slice. It wasn’t real poison, of course; it was custard laced with half an ounce of Van Spee’s crystals, the effect of which was to zap him across the interdimensional doobry like a rat up a conduit. Theo helped him, of course; he arranged for the crystals to be put in the custard slice. That was dead clever, actually. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
‘You are?’ Paul said.
‘Yes,’ Mr Laertides replied, as Paul tried, without success, to smash in his head with the heel of his left shoe. ‘Before we deal with that, let’s go back to the night when you came reeling home from the pub, pissed as a battalion of newts. Remember?’
‘I was not—’
‘You bloody were. You fell over in the kitchen.’
‘That,’ Paul pointed out, ‘was only because all the fuses had blown. You did that, presumably.’
Mr Laertides shook his head. ‘Not guilty,’ he said. ‘That was Theo Van Spee. He’d found out somehow or other that I’d been standing guard over you all along in my aspect or avatar as your fridge. You were getting awkwardly close to becoming a nuisance; but he couldn’t attack you at work, because I was there all the time, so it’d have to be at home, where he could neutralise me without being too obvious about it. So he sent a freak power surge down the electric mains and tried to fry me. Nearly worked, too; I really thought I’d had it that time. Which was why I tried, with what I reckoned just might be my dying breath, to explain things to you: the whole deal, Utgarth-Loke and the Great Cow. Only,’ he added reproachfully, ‘you fell asleep. And then I found I wasn’t mortally wounded after all; but I wasn’t going to hang about and let Theo have another crack at me, so I tidied the place up a bit and went away. That’s why, you may remember, when you woke up there was a brand-new fridge - a Zanussi, no less - and it had fresh milk and eggs and bacon and stuff in it, instead of all the decaying grunge I had to put up with.’
‘Fine,’ Paul said after a while. ‘So we’ve covered that bit. Get back to when I killed Ricky with the poisoned cake.’
Well (said Mr Laertides, apparently completely unfazed by Paul’s fruitless efforts to poke his eyes out with a broken biro) it was really very clever. The custard slice, you see, wasn’t poisoned when it left the sandwich-bar place. It was a perfectly good custard slice, I know that because I gave it to you myself—
What, you hadn’t worked that one out for yourself? All those identical little bald round-headed guys with obscure-sounding names, Mr Palaeologus and Mr Porphyrogenitus and what have you? They were all me. Of course. Who else did you think they were?
I gave it to you myself, in order to make sure you’d overdose on custard and fall through into Custardspace, so you could sniff out Theo’s secret lair. But when Ricky bumped into you in the corridor - spilt your coffee, if you recall, all down your front - well, while you were mopping coffee off yourself and generally fussing about and not paying attention, he quietly sneaked the massive dose of crystals into the custard slice, which he then proceeded to beg off you and eat. Now believe me, I hold no brief for the guy, he’s - he was, rather - an annoying, pompous little toad most of the time, but you’ve got to concede, he was resourceful, and he was cool under pressure. He slid neatly out of the wreck of the let’s-assassinate-me-and-then-you scenario, and straight into this Plan B, where he escapes to Custardspace and frames you for his murder. Extra cunning, of course, because he had a fair idea that Colin the goblin - remember him? - as soon as Colin the goblin found out that Tanner had you under armed goblin guard in the strongroom pending execution for murder, he’d realise that he had to rescue you or else lose out on any chance of getting his sticky claws on your stash of Van Spee’s crystals. And, of course, he knew all about that unfortunate business whereby Colin the goblin and Sophie got linked up. Perfect, as far as he was concerned, because it solved his biggest problem - how to get Sophie into Custardspace too, so that he could dose her with philtre and so neutralise your magic sword and thereby prevent the Bersa Island rematch. Simple: Colin gets you through, then goes back to collect the crystals so that both of you can escape from Custardspace. But as soon as Colin goes back, Sophie comes through. Bang! All set, everybody exactly where he wanted them to be. Clever boy, that Ricky. Shame he never amounted to anything in the end.
‘He’s dead, then,’ Paul said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Paul said, after a moment. ‘I’m sorry he’s dead. I liked - at least, I thought I liked him, a bit. I thought he was on my side, some of the time.’
‘He was,’ Mr Laertides said, ‘just so long as you were being useful. Like, in the Countess Judy business, he was on your side then, when it suited him, and he probably decided he liked you, because it’d be more convenient that way. But first and foremost he was what he was. You don’t get to be management in a firm like JWW if you aren’t what Ricky was.’
‘Oh?’ Paul said. ‘And what would that be?’
‘Totally and unalterably self-centred,’ Mr Laertides replied. ‘Like me, for instance; all I’ve ever cared about, from the moment I woke up thirty years ago, is getting the job done, nailing Theo, putting history back together again. As a result, I caused you all this grief, and Sophie, and everybody else who had the bad luck to get sucked into the mess. Or like Theo Van Spee. Oh, sure, he wasn’t in it for the money, like Tanner or Humph Wells. He was more your sort of Werner von Braun type, he went somewhere he could carry on his work, and screw loyalties and principles and, of course, other people. And Ricky, of course; all he cared about was keeping clear of me. That,’ he added, with a sweet smile, ‘and money. He liked money a lot.’
‘Oh,’ Paul said. ‘I’m still sorry, though. I killed him.’
Mr Laertides frowned. ‘He killed you, though. Twice.’
‘So what? I shouldn’t have done it; only I had to. But that doesn’t make it right.’
Mr Laertides looked at him for an uncomfortably long time. ‘You know,’ he said eventually, ‘when I designed you for this operation, I did a bloody good job. For which,’ he added, ‘for what little it’s worth, I apologise most sincerely. I had to do it, though, same as you. But that didn’t make it right.’
Paul was silent for a while, then he shrugged. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I’d probably have turned out a complete mess even if you hadn’t—’
‘Oh for crying out loud,’ Mr Laertides said.
Anyhow (Mr Laertides went on) that’s about the long and the short of it. Not the most edifying and uplifting of tales, I grant you. It’d have been far better if Theo Van Spee had been some kind of Dark Lord hell-bent on ruling the world, rather than just an obsessive academic with rather twisted priorities; and it’d have been far more satisfying for you if you’d been on a quest, battled the enemy to a standstill and chucked a ring down a crack in a volcano instead of basically just doing as you were told, once you’d finally managed to figure out what it was you were supposed to be doing. But it wasn’t like that, I’m afraid. Theo doesn’t fit the mould, for one thing. He was never cut out for Dark Lordery, mainly because - well, in this context, dark is usually just another way of saying not very bright, you’ve got to be as thick as a whole timber-yard of short planks to try that kind of gig, and whatever else Theo was, he wasn’t that. And you—
‘He’s dead too, then,’ Paul interrupted.
Mr Laertides grinned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can take my word for that. I won’t nauseate you with the details.’
‘Thank you,’ Paul said. ‘I—’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mr Laertides groaned. ‘You feel guilty about that, as well.’
But Paul just shrugged. ‘He was someone I knew. It’s always unsettling when someone you know dies. It feels odd, like the engine’s been taken to pieces and put back together again, only a bit’s been left out and it doesn’t quite run right. But guilty,’ he added, ‘no. Well, not really. Actually, I’d much prefer not to have to think about it at all.’
Good idea (said Mr Laertides). There’s a whole lot of stuff in this life that’s not nearly as big a pain in the bum as it could be, just so long as you don’t think about it. It’s there, of course, but if you made a point of fixating on every damn thing that’s wrong or bad or unfair in this universe, you’d come to a pretty bad end. You’d turn out all screwed up, bitter and warped and inhuman. Like me, in other words. Not a good idea. Don’t go there.
But I was just saying. Theo wasn’t an evil overlord type, and Ricky wasn’t, either - he was more your basic resourceful idiot - and that just leaves you. The hero. And the bit that nobody’s ever got right, not in fifty thousand years of storytelling, is what to do with the hero once the story’s over. Oh, there’s happily ever after, but you’re not a fool, you don’t believe in that for one minute. And killing off the hero at the end, that’s good from a closure point of view, but we’ve already established, no go in your case, over you death has no jurisdiction. But you were designed, built, raised and programmed specifically for the purposes of the story, and now it’s finished and you’re left over at the end. So what do we do with you?
‘Well?’ Paul asked, after a long silence.
‘Well what?’
‘Was that a rhetorical question,’ Paul asked, ‘or do you really want suggestions?’
‘Oh, I see,’ Mr Laertides said, his face relaxing out of a slight frown. ‘You want to be consulted, you want input. Well, why not? Your life, I suppose, or at least it is now, after we’ve all finished with it. All right, then, Paul. What do you want to be when you grow up?’
Paul thought for a moment. ‘Rid of you,’ he said.
Mr Laertides raised an eyebrow. ‘Me specifically? Or—?’
‘You specifically for starters,’ Paul replied, ‘and all the rest of you as well. To put it another way, I’d like for everybody I’ve come into contact with, ever since this whole horrible J. W. Wells thing started, to fuck off and leave me in peace.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Mr Laertides nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘And that’d include Sophie, of course.’
Some moments can take a ridiculously long time. To begin with, Paul had assumed it was just a trick, a word game; and he’d been about to say, ‘No, of course not Sophie’; but then the thought came wriggling into his mind that everything there might or might not be between her and him was a lie, a contrivance, every bit as untrue as if they’d both drunk the stupid bloody philtre. In fact, it was worse than the philtre, because at least she’d offered to drink it of her own free will, after Countess Judy had wiped the love out of her mind. But of course she’d offered, because her own free will was nothing of the kind. She’d been set up from birth, just as he had. He couldn’t accept love like that, because it was as real and genuine as a three-pound note. Sure, he loved her and probably always would, but it wouldn’t be fair on her, wouldn’t be right . . . and the only reason he had these stupid high moral principles, couldn’t bring himself to do something that he knew was wrong, was because Mr Laertides had seen to it that he’d been made that way.
So he took a deep breath and said, ‘Including Sophie, yes.’
‘Oh.’ Mr Laertides looked at him, shrugged, and said, ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Yes, I do. You know I do.’
‘But that’s—’ Mr Laertides thought hard, hunting through the recesses of his mind for a word apt but unfamiliar. ‘That’s silly,’ he said. ‘The two of you go together like, well, adolescence and acne.’
Paul sighed. He was fed up with this conversation. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You made us that way. And I want rid of everything you made us be. Can you understand that, or do you need me to draw you a Venn diagram?’
‘No, it’s all right.’ Mr Laertides was frowning. ‘Fine, if that’s what you want,’ he said. ‘I can fix it, sure, no problem.’
Double take. ‘You can?’
‘Of course.’ Mr Laertides grinned. ‘Me, the master of the universe, I can do pretty much anything I like
, now that Theo Van Spee’s been dealt with.’ He yawned and glanced at his watch. ‘What I think you’re getting at - though it’s hard to be certain since so much of what you say is pure drivel - what I think you’re getting at is that you’re pissed off at the idea that I made the two of you what you are, because that was necessary for the job in hand. What you’d like, therefore, is to be someone else. For both of you to be someone else, presumably, since you care more about her than about you - which is kind of sweet, in a really dozy, half-baked sort of a way. Am I right?’
‘Well,’ Paul said slowly, ‘yes. Yes, I suppose so.’
‘OK.’ Mr Laertides shrugged cheerfully. ‘Any particular person you’d like to be, or are you happy taking pot luck like everybody else? No, of course, you don’t hold with predestination and outside influence, so you’d want it to be totally random. You just want to be - let me guess - somebody normal. Yes?’
‘Sophie and me both,’ Paul replied. ‘Yes. You can do that?’
‘Well, it’s hardly rocket science. You’re sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Sure-sure or just a bit sure?’
‘Look, just get on with it, will you?’
‘Fine,’ Mr Laertides said. ‘And—’
And then, everything was different. And, shortly after that, everything was pretty much the same.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Well?’ Paul said. Mr Laertides shrugged. ‘All done,’ he said.
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it. I now formally pronounce you no longer Paul Carpenter. Well,’ he added, ‘you’re still called Paul Carpenter, because it’s a lot more fuss changing someone’s name than it is changing their personality; I mean, you’ve got to write to the DVLA and the Inland Revenue and the Council Tax people and the electricity board and all that, and frankly I haven’t got the time or the patience. But I did what you asked. To all intents and purposes, you’re now someone completely different. So’s Sophie. Don’t say thank you, will you? If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s tears of snivelling gratitude.’