by Tom Holt
Theo let the deep breath go. “No,” he said, “that’s fine, I’ll give it a go and see what happens.” He remembered something; the contents of his belt pouch. “I haven’t got any money.”
“Doesn’t matter. Just say you want to look at it first. Sure, the baker’ll probably think you’re nuts, but three seconds later you’re going to vanish into thin air right in front of his eyes, so really, image-wise, what’ve you got to lose?” He paused, while Theo treated him to a drowning-puppy stare. “I think it’s a pretty neat idea, actually. Easy, quick, gets the job done, and in a YouSpace universe, anywhere you go you’re never more than a hundred yards from a cake shop.”
Suddenly, Theo remembered the excellent doughnuts in the hotel kitchen. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll just go and get one, then.”
Help nodded. “You won’t be needing me any more, then, so I’ll just—” He mimed walking with his fingers. “We can pick this up next time you visit,” he said.
Next time, Theo said to himself. Absolutely no chance of that. “Sure,” he said.
“Right. Well, ciao for now.” Help turned and trotted away down the hill, still limping, until he was lost to sight against the corn. Theo waited, to make absolutely sure he’d gone, then followed the line the old man had shown him. Sure enough, after about a quarter of a mile, he saw a canvas tent with a table in front of it. Behind the table stood a large, red-faced man in an apron, who was laying out loaves of bread. He looked up as Theo approached and smiled.
“Hello,” Theo said. “Are you a baker?”
“That’s right.” The red-faced man nodded. “Like my father before me. Sixteen generations, in fact. What can I do for you?”
The loaves smelt wonderful. Also there were lardy cakes, strudels, Viennese fingers, baguettes, apple turnovers, eclairs and macaroons. “Got any doughnuts?”
The baker’s smile didn’t falter, but it did sort of glaze over ever so slightly. “Yes.”
“I’d like one, please.”
“All right.” The baker didn’t move. “If you’re sure.”
“Oh yes.”
“You wouldn’t rather have a nice strudel? Gingerbread? Muffin?”
“Tempting, but I think I’ll stick with the doughnut, thanks.”
Still smiling, the baker nodded slightly. “You’re the boss. One farthing.”
Theo could feel his nerve breaking up. “Could I see it first, please?”
The smile was now a mask. “What for?”
“Oh, I just like to see what I’m buying.”
“They’re doughnuts,” the baker said. “Just doughnuts. Precision-baked to Guild specifications. Which means,” he added, “that each one is exactly the same as any other. Guaranteed.”
This isn’t going to work, Theo thought. “Humour me,” he said.
Very slowly, without breaking eye contact, the baker reached behind him into the tent and pulled out a tray of doughnuts. “There you go,” he said, keeping the tray well out of Theo’s reach, “doughnuts. Just the one, was it?”
Theo swallowed. His mouth was as dry as a hot summer in the Kalahari. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like a closer look.”
He could see the baker hesitate. “Look,” he said, still holding the tray, “no offence, but you’re not going to—”
“What?”
The smile was coming unravelled. “You’re not going to do anything weird, are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Like, well—” The baker’s fingers tightened on the tray. “Like, well, vanish. Disappear. Nothing like that?”
“Good heavens, no,” Theo croaked. “Perish the thought.”
The baker breathed out through his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Like I said, no offence. But there’s this nutcase comes round here. Short guy, fat, bald, talks funny. And every time, he asks to look at a doughnut, and as soon as I give him one, he vanishes.”
“You don’t say.”
The baker shrugged. “I know it sounds screwy,” he said apologetically. “Hell, it is screwy. I mean, people don’t just vanish, it’s not possible. Only this guy does. And it’s starting to get to me, you know?”
“I can imagine.”
The baker sighed, and rested the tray on the table. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m thinking, am I going crazy, or what? People vanishing. I don’t dare tell anyone – my wife, the guys down the Bakers’ Guild, they’d think I was nuts or something. I’m not sure I could take it if it happened again.”
Theo nodded. “But I’m not a short, fat, bald man,” he said.
“I know. That’s what’s keeping me from smashing your head in with a baking tin. Because I swear, if that guy shows up round here again, that’s what I’m gonna do. Sixteen generations of bakers, and nothing like that’s ever happened before. Of course,” he added, looking round and lowering his voice, “it wouldn’t have happened under the old duke.”
“Really.”
“You bet your life. It’s only since this new guy’s been in charge that – well, stuff’s been happening. You hear about it all over, only folks are too scared to talk about it out loud. For fear of people saying they’re crazy, you know?”
Theo nodded slowly. “Since the new guy’s been in charge.”
“Exactly. All kinds of screwy stuff. I’m not saying,” the baker added quickly, “that he’s not better than the old duke in a lot of ways, a whole lot of ways. Like, the emancipation of the serfs, ending the civil war, doing away with the whole droyt-de-seynyewer thing, all really good stuff, nobody’s gonna argue with that, he’s done a lot for the ordinary folks. Poor relief. Free visits to the doctor when you’re sick, all that. Real enlightened. But.”
“But?”
“That doesn’t make up for the screwy stuff, that’s what I say.” The baker was sweating. “No way. Me, I’d rather have the old ways back and no crazy stuff. At least you knew where you stood, you know? Like, you take the bakery business, and these new laws.”
“I’m not from around here,” Theo said.
“Ah. Figures,” the baker added, squinting at Theo’s clothes. “Well, one of the laws the new duke passed, every baker in the duchy’s got to have doughnuts available, any hour of the day or night, every day of the year, and there’s got to be a bakery stall every half-mile along all the turnpike roads, we got a duty roster nailed up in the Guild house, it’s murder. Plays hell with business, I’m telling you. But it’s the law, so what can you do?”
Theo nodded sympathetically. “That’s a very strange law,” he said.
“You’re telling me. I mean, take me, when it’s my turn I’ve gotta set up my stall out in the sticks somewhere, no passing trade, complete waste of my time, I’ve got a perfectly good shop back in town, on which I got to pay rent, but instead I got to come out here, waste a whole day, maybe sell a couple of muffins and a slice of shortbread, if I’m lucky. And if I’m unlucky, that fat bastard comes along and vanishes at me. It’s not right, I’m telling you. That’s no way to run a duchy. Well, is it?”
“Barbaric, if you ask me,” Theo said.
“You bet it’s barbaric. And if you say no, I’m not doing it, next thing you know there’s soldiers banging on your door in the middle of the night and you’re never heard of again. That’s tyranny, is what it is, and folks aren’t going to stand for it, I’m telling you.”
“That’s right,” Theo said, his hand creeping slowly towards the tray of doughnuts. “Someone ought to do something.”
“That’s what I keep saying,” the baker hissed back. “Someone damn well ought to—”
With a degree of speed and agility he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of, Theo lunged for the nearest doughnut. If the baker saw him do it, he wasn’t quick enough to react. A split second later, the doughnut was in Theo’s hand, moving through the air, drawing level with his eye. Through the hole he caught of fleeting glimpse of the baker’s agonised face, then –
He sat up sharply, dislodging t
he bottle, which rolled off the bed and landed, with a thump but unbroken, on the floor. A faint crackle told him he was sitting on the manila envelope. His watch showed eighteen minutes past ten.
The envelope was noticeably thicker than it had been. He peered inside and found a glossy brochure. It was full of beautiful photos of exotic-looking places – beaches, mountains, forests, castles – and the accompanying text was in Russian. Oh well.
Not that it mattered, because nothing on earth would ever induce him to go through all that again. He wasn’t at all sure what had just happened to him, but one thing he was certain about was that it shouldn’t have, whatever it was; it had been weird and impossible, and as a scientist he refused to believe –
Blessed are those who have seen, and yet have believed. Some kind of really advanced computer simulation – no, he couldn’t quite accept that, it had been too real, the smell of the warm earth, the slight stickiness of the doughnut… He rubbed his forefinger and thumb together. Sticky.
Talking of which – he looked down at his right arm, but there was nothing to see. He flexed the fingers. They were sticky too. But the watch on his left wrist appeared to be working perfectly.
Doughnuts, for crying out loud.
Reality? He couldn’t quite accept that, either. The talking bird; the skywriting aircraft; the little man called Help. Stuff like that simply couldn’t happen in real life.
(Yes, but if you had the technology you could have holographic projections doing impossible things in an otherwise perfectly real world. Or, since even the most conservative multiverse theories allow for an infinite number of alternative universes, why not a universe where the laws of physics are different enough to allow for talking birds, skywriting planes that don’t rip their own wings off doing Ws and transphasic portals nestling inside everyday items of patisserie? Shut up, he urged himself, this isn’t helping.)
He licked the ball of his left thumb. Traces of sugar.
Point made: no computer program, however advanced, could deposit traces of icing sugar on your fingers, not without teleportation, which is impossible. Therefore, somewhere over the doughnut, he’d touched a solid sugary sticky thing – a real one. And, if the doughnut had been real, so must the world it came from have been. Sucroferens, ergo est; it’s sticky, therefore it exists, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, working double shifts and funded by a substantial grant from the UN Weirdness Limitation Commission, couldn’t put his comfortable Newtonian world model together again.
Oh boy.
Suddenly an image of Pieter van Goyen floated into his mind, smiling at him, his mute lips forming the words it’s supposed to be fun. True, if Pieter was still alive and within arm’s reach, he’d have strangled him for subjecting him to such a violent dose of Strange. On the other hand, if it really was really real –
Fun, he thought. Fun, for God’s sake. Fun.
And why not?
He screwed his eyes shut, trying to remember what he’d seen written on the sky. The ultimate in reality wish-fulfilment technology. Five default universes, or concoct your own. Suddenly, he felt a desperate need for a detailed, comprehensive user’s manual. A world of your own, for only $49.95.
He leaned forward and grabbed the bottle. It looked pretty much the same as it had done the last time he’d looked at it; a bottle, the label covered in tiny writing: no big deal. A hollow glass cylinder topped with an open-ended truncated cone, conventionally used for storing booze, ships, djinns and messages; just do the math, and immediately it becomes an infinite space containing infinite possibility. He turned it round in his fingers, rotating it like the Earth revolves around its polar axis. 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. Pieter had said that. The wisest man he’d ever known, his friend. And why not?
He heard a rattling noise; someone was turning the handle of the door, not expecting it to be jammed shut. Theo panicked. His only thought was, where can I hide the bottle? “Just a second,” he called out, and plunged the bottle between the pillows. Then he lunged for the door and yanked away the chair.
“The door sticks,” Call-me-Bill said. “Sorry about that.”
“No problem.” Theo realised he was shaking slightly, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. “What can I…?”
“Time for your shift,” Call-me-Bill said.
“Ah, right. I’ll be there directly.”
Call-me-Bill stayed exactly where he was. “If you wouldn’t mind holding the fort till, say, midnight, that’d be grand.”
Thirteen and a half hours. Still, he couldn’t very well refuse. “No problem. I’ll just—”
“Yes?”
He couldn’t think of anything he could just do, to get rid of Call-me-Bill long enough to hide the bottle properly. “Shave,” was all he could come up with.
“Don’t bother, you’re fine,” Call-me-Bill said firmly. “Look, I hate to rush you, but there’s nobody on the desk right now, and it’s a sort of rule, the desk’s got to be covered at all times. Otherwise it invalidates the insurance.”
“Ah, right.”
“So if you wouldn’t mind going down there right away.”
“Sure. I’ll just—” No, he couldn’t think of anything. “Just a second.” He darted back to the bed, shoved his hand between the pillows, grabbed the bottle and crammed it in his pocket, doing his best to conceal it from sight. It was only after he’d done it that he realised he’d used his right hand.
“Look,” said Call-me-Bill from the doorway, “I really don’t want to hassle you, but—”
“On my way.”
He squeezed past Call-me-Bill, who didn’t move, then remembered the manila envelope. “God, sorry, won’t be a moment.” He squeezed past again, snatched up the envelope, and bolted, leaving Call-me-Bill standing in the open doorway of the room. He grinned as he clattered down the stairs. Let him search all he wanted; there was nothing for him to find.
The desk wasn’t deserted after all. Matasuntha was sitting on it, swinging her legs, reading a magazine. It had a picture of an expensively dressed woman on the cover, and all the writing was in Russian. “There you are,” she said.
“Yup. Sorry if I kept you hanging about.”
She yawned. “That’s all right.” She closed the magazine and put it on the desk. “I’m just off into town,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, thanks, I’m fine.” She hadn’t moved. “Don’t let me keep you any longer.”
She’d noticed the bulge in his coat pocket. From there, her eyes travelled to the corner of the envelope, sticking out from behind his lapel. “There’s paper and pencils in the drawer,” she said. “And a calculator, and log tables. In case you get bored.”
“Thanks.” He frowned slightly, realising what she’d just said. “Um.”
“Well, you used to be a scientist, you said. You might want to calculate something.”
He smiled at her. “Unlikely.”
“But not impossible,” she replied firmly. “Think of Einstein. He discovered relativity while working as a clerk in the patents office.”
“So he did,” Theo said. “Well, thanks for everything, and see you later. Have a great time in town.”
Reluctantly she slid off the desk and moved away, clearly trying very hard not to look at the bottle in his pocket. “Bye, now.”
“Bye.”
He sat perfectly still and quiet behind the desk for what seemed like a million years, until he was quite satisfied that she’d really gone. Then he pulled out the bottle and looked at it. She wanted it, no possible shadow of doubt about that. So, he guessed, did Call-me-Bill, who was probably ran-sacking his room for it right now. He could understand why, now that he knew what it did. As soon as his shift was over, therefore, he’d have to hide it again. Not in the cellar this time; after his insight into the operation of the wine-cellar stock-control inventory, he had a feeli
ng it wouldn’t be safe there. Outside, in the bramble jungle? He didn’t like that idea either. The depressing fact was that the enemy (it didn’t feel quite right thinking of Call-me-Bill and Matasuntha in those terms; call them the opposition instead) most likely knew the geography of this place far better than he did, and would therefore be wise to all the potential hiding places. The alternative was to carry the bottle and the envelope with him everywhere he went. But what about when he was asleep?
He heard the front door open and looked up. The woman he’d last seen helping bandage up Mr Nordstrom walked in and came up to the desk. She smiled at him and said, “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
She was tall and slim, about fifty years old, with short dark hair; elegantly and expensively dressed. At a guess, Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz, the other guest. “That’s right,” he said. “How can I…?”
“Theo Bernstein.” She nodded slightly. “Matasuntha told me about you.”
“Ah. How can I…?”
“And the name rang a bell,” she went on, “so I looked you up. You’re the man who blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider, aren’t you?”
Whimper. “Yup,” he said. “Would you like your key?”
“So.” She gazed at him as if trying to decide whether to keep him or throw him away. “You’re Pieter’s friend.”
Click. “You knew Pieter van Goyen?”
“I was married to him,” she said. “For ten years. Gloria Duchene-Wilamowicz.” She reached out her hand. He extended his left, but she shook her head. “The other one,” she said.
“Ah.” He switched hands, and they shook briefly, like diplomats. “You know about—”
“Pieter told me. We stayed in touch,” she went on. “Fascinating,” she added, releasing his hand. “It feels quite solid.”
“It is,” he said.
“What do you think happened to it?”
“No idea.” She gave him a not-good-enough look, and he went on, “I mean, I’ve got theories, heaps of them. But—” Then, quite suddenly, a question bubbled up in his mind and slipped out through his lips before he could stop it. “Pieter never told me he was married.”