by Tom Holt
He reached the Leiden branch of the Credit Mayonnais an hour before closing time, and was shown into a huge steel box whose sides were lined with small steel boxes. A sour-faced man spent a hundred years checking through the paperwork, and then they performed the holy ceremony of the twin keys. Then he withdrew, leaving Theo alone with a grey stove-enamelled shoebox.
He didn’t open it straight away, even though time was running short and they’d be along any minute to throw him out. Instead, he sat in the wobbly plastic chair and looked at it. A tin box. A container, an enclosure of space. A quotation whose origin escaped him floated into his mind and got stuck there, like sweet corn skin in the gaps between the teeth; one little room an everywhere. Well, quite. The box only seemed small because he was six feet one inch tall. If he was a trifle shorter – say one inch from head to toe – he could live in it quite happily, raise a family there, maybe even rent out the bit he didn’t use to bring in some extra cash. Thanks to science and technology, the days when human achievement was limited by what a man could lift or pull were long since gone. A race of one-inch-tall life forms would have no difficulty conquering the galaxy if their technology was sufficiently advanced. And a box could hold an entire world.
Thanks, Pieter, he thought, as he reached out and turned the little key. True, he had no idea what he was going to find in there. Knowing Pieter it could be anything, from a kilo bag of uncut diamonds to a small pile of pencil sharpenings; but how many people would give you an entire world? On the small side, maybe, but one thing was for sure. It had to be an improvement on the one he was living in right now.
He opened the box, and found in it –
A small bottle
A brown manila envelope
A pink powder compact
An apple
Ah, he thought. He picked up the bottle and shook it: empty. The label was starting to peel off. There was a picture of a planet and some stars, and several columns of tiny lettering too small to read. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed; it smelt vaguely of spring flowers, stagnant water and horse dung. He put the cap back on and rested the bottle gently on the table.
There was, of course, the envelope; another container, infinite in its possibilities until he opened it. He ripped open the flap and teased out a folded sheet of paper and a smaller white envelope addressed to someone whose name he didn’t recognise. The sheet of paper was a letter, starting off Dear Theo. He leaned back in the chair, reached for the apple, sank his teeth into it and started to read.
Dear Theo,
About the only good thing I can think of about being dead is being able to give you something I was too selfish to share with anybody while I was alive. Enjoy it.
You’ll have forgotten, but I clearly remember when you were a second-year undergraduate and I was your tutor, and I set you a pretty routine assignment (I forget what it was about). You handed in your answer, and when you got it back I’d crossed out the whole thing in red and written, ‘wrong – do it again’ at the bottom in capital letters. You did it again, and I gave you full marks. I can still see the sad expression on your face the first time. You apologised.
Well, now I’m dead, so I can tell you the truth. Yes, the answers were all wrong. According to the rules of mathematics everybody uses, your equations didn’t work. I remember marking your paper, putting it down, going into the kitchen to make myself a coffee. Then I stopped dead, turned round, went back and sat down again, and I looked at the figures on the paper, and I thought: yes, but—
Damn, I wish, I really wish I’d asked you, back then, what in God’s name you were thinking about. Those calculations of yours couldn’t work in our universe. But maybe I was missing the point. I went back and read it through from the start; not looking for what I was expecting to see, but actually reading what you’d written.
What the hell. If Columbus, aged twelve, had been set a geography test – the world is (a) flat (b) round – he’d have got zero marks. But the world is round. It was that sort of a moment for me.
I spent the next seven years trying to figure out what mathematics would be like on a round world. The result is in the bottle you’ve just looked at. Take very good care of that bottle. It’s one of only five in existence. Read the label very carefully, and do exactly what it says. You’ll have to work out the maths for getting inside by yourself; I don’t want to leave instructions lying around where anyone could get hold of them, even in a safe in the Credit Mayonnais. But you shouldn’t have any trouble. You always were a bright boy.
The letter you’ll find in this envelope is addressed to a very good friend of mine who runs a small hotel on the edge of town. When he’s read the letter, he’ll give you a job. I expect you need one. The world is an unfair place. Blow up just one multi-billion-dollar research facility, and suddenly nobody wants to be your friend.
Except me, and I’m dead. You, on the other hand, are going to have a really amazingly good life, thanks to the bottle. Enjoy it, that’s the main thing. At times it may get scary, dangerous, harrowing, agonisingly painful, even life-threatening. It may quite possibly kill you, who knows? But whatever happens, always remember. It’s supposed to be fun.
Cordially,
Your friend & colleague
Pieter van Goyen.
Crazy, he thought. But, on the other hand, consider the source. If Pieter van Goyen were to give you an enormous grin and tell you he’d just found out he was a teapot, your first reaction would be to look round for a tea cosy to keep him from catching a chill. He finished off the apple, looked round for a bin or something to dump the core in, found none and put it in his pocket. A job in a hotel; well, better than the guts trolley, but he couldn’t really see what a hotelier would need a quantum mechanic for, even a disgraced one. Maybe his job would be to prove the hotel still existed each morning, before Pieter’s friend went to all the trouble of cooking breakfast. No, properly speaking you’d need a philosopher for that, not a physicist.
He caught sight of the clock on the wall; two minutes to closing time. He stuffed the bottle and the powder compact in his pocket and picked up the papers, just as the door opened and the guard came in. He shifted the papers from his right hand to his left just in time.
There was something about the hotel he found off-putting. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe it was the burnt-out cars blocking access to the gates, or the thick tangle of brambles that made it so hard to fight his way up the drive. Just possibly it was the faded cardboard sign fixed to the front door with peeling yellow Sellotape: NO ROOMS GO AWAY. Or maybe he was still feeling a bit jumpy after his encounter with the vanishing girl on the train, and it was making him ever so slightly paranoid. Yes, he decided, on balance that’s probably it.
He glanced down at the envelope in his hand. It was in Pieter’s handwriting, so of course it was practically illegible; he could make out the initials A B, and the last name began with an N. The rest of it looked disturbingly like the last desperate squiggles of a vital-signs monitor in a hospital, just before it flatlines. Ah well.
He hadn’t been knocking for much more than a quarter of an hour when the door opened, and a pretty girl smiled at him through the narrow crack between door and frame. “Hello,” she said.
“Um.”
“Sorry?”
He’d rehearsed a little speech, but for some reason he couldn’t remember it. “I’m here about a job,” he said.
The girl looked desperately sad. She was, he decided, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life – perfect oval face, shoulder-length wavy chestnut hair, clear blue eyes and all that – but not in the least attractive, as though she’d been assembled by a computer program, with the net result that, when you examined her closely, she wasn’t nearly as pretty as she looked. Nietzsche would’ve christened her the Uberwench. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But I don’t think they’re looking for anybody right now.”
“I’ve got a letter.”
“And you’re not afraid to
use it?”
“Sorry?”
She shrugged. “That was what we call a joke,” she said. “You’ll get used to them in time. What sort of a letter?”
Rather than try and explain, he held the letter out, as if it was a lion tamer’s chair. She looked down at it but didn’t touch it. “A B – sorry, I can’t read that. What does it say?”
“No idea.”
“Ah. Still, it’s a very nice letter. Cute envelope. Very clean.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s from a friend of mine. As a matter of fact, he’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry. What did he die of?”
Actually, Theo realised, I don’t know the answer to that. “It’s a letter to a friend of his.”
“Right. That’d be you, yes?”
“No.”
“Oh. I thought you said this dead person was your friend.”
“No, a different friend. He had two friends. At least two.”
“Ah. Mister Congeniality, in other words.”
Theo forced himself onwards, like a swimmer battling upstream through a custard tsunami. “My friend,” he said, “wrote this letter to his friend.”
“Fine. So why’ve you got it?”
“He gave it to me,” Theo said, “to give to his other friend. That’s A B thing. You know, on the envelope.”
“Ah,” she said sweetly, “I see. You’re a postman.”
Theo sighed. “The letter,” he ground on, like the mills of the gods with a ruptured bearing, “is asking Mr A B to give me a job.”
The girl looked at him and blinked. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Gosh. Well then, you’d better come in.”
“Thank you.”
She pushed the door wide, then stepped aside to let him pass. He found himself in a wide, airy hall, standing on a deep, soft carpet. The walls were panelled in a light, honey-coloured wood and there was a handsome walnut desk with phones and a VDU on it.
“So,” the girl was saying, “this Mr A B’s a guest here, then.”
“Um, no.” Theo noticed the ceiling; moulded plaster, painted white with gilded highlights. “I sort of thought this was his hotel.”
“Oh, you mean Mr Negative.” The girl gave him a smile you could’ve grown aubergines under. “Sorry, I should’ve guessed. Wait there a second, I’ll go and find him.”
“Mr Negative?”
She nodded. “I know,” she said, “it’s an odd kind of name, isn’t it? Won’t be long. Take a seat.”
She walked away through a doorway he hadn’t noticed before, and he looked round for a chair. There weren’t any. A B Negative, he thought, for crying out loud.
Almost at once a hidden door slid sideways in the panelling and a tall, middle-aged man in a smart blue suit stepped forward, smiling and extending his hand. Theo stuck out his own hand to shake, then remembered and lowered it again. With his left hand, he gave the man the letter.
“Ah,” the man said. “Poor, dear Pieter, such a great loss to us all. Now then.” He ripped the letter open like a wolf savaging a rabbit, and glanced at it. “You need a job.”
“Yes.”
“No problem. What can you do?”
“Well.” Here we go. “I used to be physicist, specialising in particle dynamics, but then I—”
“So you’re good with telephones.”
“Excuse me?”
“Telephones.” The man pointed at the desk. “I could use someone to man the front desk. When we’re busy.”
Apart from the two of them (and the girl, presumably, wherever she’d got to) there was no sign of another living creature on the premises. “I could do that.”
The man was peering at the end of his right sleeve. “The arm thing not a problem?”
“Um.”
“Well, we can work round it. Fine. Great. When can you start?”
Theo caught his breath. “Now?”
“Perfect. Just in the nick of time.” He folded the letter neatly four times and tucked it in his top pocket, like a handkerchief. “I’m the owner, by the way. It’s my hotel,” he explained.
“Mr Negative.”
The man laughed. “Call me Bill. Fact is,” he added, lowering his voice and grinning, “A B Negative isn’t my real name.”
“You don’t say.”
“I mean,” Call-me-Bill went on, “what sort of a world would it be if we went around calling ourselves by our real names? I’ll get Matasuntha to show you to your room.”
Calling it a room was accurate but misleading; like describing the Titanic as a boat, or Pol Pot as a bit of a scallywag. Theo had been in rooms like it before, but there’d been lots of other people there at the time, in evening dress, dancing. In the exact centre of it there was a bed, and, far away on the wall opposite the door, a small wardrobe and a plain, straight-backed chair. Apart from that, it was empty. “Staff quarters,” the girl told him sympathetically. “Still, it keeps the rain off.”
“It’ll be fine.”
She shrugged. “Staff bathroom’s in the basement,” she said. They’d just climbed twelve flights of stairs. “Breakfast in the kitchen, seven sharp. Well, seven till ten thirty, this isn’t Nazi Germany. Laundry—”
“Excuse me,” Theo said.
“Yes?”
“Well.” He had no idea how to put this. “This hotel.”
“Yes?”
“It doesn’t seem terribly busy.”
She looked at him as if he’d just commented on the arid dryness of the sea. “We do all right,” she said.
“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting—”
“In fact,” she went on, “this is our busiest year since 1947.”
“Ah.”
“Even as we speak,” she went on, “we’ve got two guests. Mr Nordstrom and Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz. Both,” she added, “at the same time.”
“Ah,” he said.
“So really,” she went on, “you’re a bit of a godsend. What happened to your arm, by the way?”
“Accident.” She was waiting for further and better particulars. “I blew up a mountain.”
“Oh, right. Well, as I was saying, laundry day is Tuesday, just chuck your stuff in the basket outside the housekeeper’s room. There’s a uniform goes with the job, but we’re bound to have your size in stock, I’ll bring it up to you later. That’s about it, really, unless there’s any questions you’d like to ask.”
He looked round at the vast, empty room and the beautiful girl called Matasuntha, his co-worker in the huge, ornate hotel with brambles crowding the drive. “No, no questions.”
“Splendid.” She gave him a big smile. “Ciao for now, then. Bye.”
She closed the door behind her. He stood for a moment like the first man on the Moon, then walked all the way across the room to the bed. He closed his eyes and sat down.
No guts, he told himself; no shiny grey coils of intestine to be shovelled into a trolley with his bare hands. It was something to cling on to. But, that said, a man can get used to hauling guts around. Other stuff can be harder to cope with.
The room, he noticed, had no window; the light came from a gigantic crystal chandelier, hovering way above his head, like a distant galaxy. The bed was quite exceptionally comfortable. He lay back, and, as he did so, something dug into his thigh. The bottle.
He wriggled sideways and fished it out of his pocket. It snagged in the lining, as if it didn’t want to come out. He looked at it. A bottle. Great.
Read the label very carefully, Pieter’s letter had said, and do exactly what it says. He squinted at it, but the lettering was tiny; he’d need a magnifying glass or maybe a microscope. He looked around for somewhere to put the bottle, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere, so he reached down and stowed it under the bed. A slight eddy in his stomach reminded him that he was hungry. He hadn’t, in fact, eaten anything all day, not since the apple in the bank –
He sat up straight. Odd, he thought.
He reconstructed the sequence
of events. He’d arrived at the bank, gone down to the safe deposit box room, opened the box. Inside it, among other things, a crisp, delicious, perfectly fresh apple, which he’d eaten. He was no expert, but how long exactly will an apple stay fresh? It was quite possible that the safe deposit boxes were airtight, which would make a difference, he supposed; but he’d eaten elderly apples in his time, and they tended to get soft and waxy, which this one hadn’t been. So; a week, maybe? Two weeks?
It was over a month since Pieter had died. He cast his mind back. The box had been covered with a fine layer of dust, he remembered brushing it off his hands. Strange, he thought. For a start, why would anyone keep a perfectly ordinary apple in his safe deposit box? By the same token, why would the bank have gone to the trouble of putting an apple in there a day or so before Pieter’s heir was due to arrive? No, they couldn’t have done that; the box needed two keys to open it. Pieter must’ve put the apple in the box.
Pieter, now he came to think of it, hated apples.
Beyond all question, there was a perfectly simple, logical explanation for all of it. Bound to be. Just because he couldn’t think of one right now didn’t mean to say there wasn’t one, just as the fact you can’t see the Moon doesn’t mean it’s not still there. If he really applied his mind, no doubt he could come up with a unified theory of everything which would account for the apple, Mr A B not-my-real-name Negative, the beautiful Matasuntha, the empty five-star hotel with the wrecked cars out front, and the empty bottle in Pieter’s safe deposit box. But figuring out united theories of everything; that was the sort of stuff scientists do, and Theo was through with science. Other people, laymen, mundanes, don’t bother with the deep thinking, they just accept stuff and get on with their lives. They don’t ask questions. They don’t read the small print.
So he went down to the lobby, which was deserted, and looked in the drawers of the beautiful walnut desk. Rather to his surprise, he found what he’d been looking for: a magnifying glass. He looked round to see if anyone was watching, then quickly slipped the glass in his trouser pocket and dashed back up the stairs to his room.