Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  No wonder, he thought, werewolves are so aggressive. Five minutes of this, and Gandhi would be ready to rip someone’s throat out. He stood up – he was just starting to get the hang of the tail’s function as an aid to balance – and fixed his full attention on the fuzzy patch that was the doughnut. Then he opened his jaws and got a firm grip on the bedclothes, while his mind ran the calculations: velocity, mass, vector, air resistance, delta V. It wasn’t easy – being a quadruped, the wolf instinctively calculated in base four – but he made the best estimate he could manage, dug his claws into the carpet, and tugged hard.

  It worked. The bedclothes shot towards him, the doughnut flipped up into the air and immediately became properly visible. He jumped, jaws open, tracking the doughnut in flight and adding forward allowance, not forgetting to compensate for the delay in its trajectory due to the Earth’s gravitational field. There was an audible click as his teeth clashed together, but he was definitely holding on to something. He landed and squinted down his nose, and saw a semicircular blur in the foreground of his vision. All right!

  The urge to chew was almost overwhelming, but he forced himself not to. He dug deep inside and excavated all he could find of Theo Bernstein. The next bit was going to be the tricky part.

  He could hear voices: angry, scared, men shouting orders, the banging of car doors. Not the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re a to-be-shot-on-sight monster cornered in a room with only one door. Think, he ordered his brain, but all it seemed capable of recommending was hurling himself at them and tearing them into tiny shreds, which he really didn’t want to do. On the other paw – no, hand – he had to do something; in a universe where werewolves and humans coexist, it was only logical to assume that on every cop’s belt there was at least one clip loaded with silver bullets. Nothing for it; he’d have one chance, and that’d be it.

  Deep breath; then he lowered his head and lifted it sharply, opening his jaws to let the doughnut sail up into the air. It rose, spinning like a space station, and hung for a moment, waiting for gravity to notice it, rotating around its central hole. A fraction of a second later, the door was kicked open and the Special Werewolf Squad burst in. Through the sights of their silver-bullet-loaded machine guns they glimpsed a flying doughnut with what appeared to be a single red eye set in the middle like a ruby. Then they opened fire, but all they managed to shoot was a wall.

  “Oh, that,” Call-me-Bill said. “Yes, I remember him talking about it. He’d been at an airport, and the only book on the bookstall that didn’t have a pink cover was Twilight. I guess that’s where he got the idea from. Anyhow,” he went on, before Theo could express himself fully on the subject, “I take it from what you just said that you’re not quite there yet.”

  “No.”

  “Never mind.” Call-me-Bill clicked his tongue and smiled. “Keep at it, I know you’ll get there in the end.”

  Maybe traces of the wolf had come back with him through the doughnut’s eye; he growled, and the hair on the back of his neck bristled slightly. “It’s pointless,” he said. “It’s like there’s some kind of built-in mechanism. As soon as I’m about to find out something useful, horrible things happen and I just about escape with my life.”

  “Could be,” Call-me-Bill said thoughtfully. “Pieter was keen on his security protocols. I expect that when you find out the proper start-up procedure, that sort of thing won’t happen any more.”

  He thought hard over the next few days. It had been Max’s voice, no question about it. Why, though, was he surprised by that? If YouSpace could project him into parallel universes, then it followed that there were versions of reality out there somewhere in which Max hadn’t died. If he’d survived, he’d be, what, thirty-six; in an infinite multiverse, there’d be an alternative world or two in which Max had never gone off the rails to begin with. Instead, he’d become a physicist, worked with Pieter van Goyen, was now leading a dull, blameless life advancing the sum of human knowledge. True, that version was so profoundly weird and unlikely that it also allowed for the existence of werewolves, but never mind. Infinity is infinite.

  In which case, a sort of Max was out there, alive, well and modestly flourishing. Two points to consider. One, would such a Max be his Max in any meaningful sense? Two, did he really want to make contact with any variant or avatar of his infinitely annoying brother? Point one was a bit too metaphysical for his taste, but point two was well worth serious consideration. Provided Max was safe and well and capable of fending for himself, did he really want to see him again? Well?

  There was a voice in his head that said: come on, he’s your brother, dammit. There was another voice that said: exactly. The first voice said: he’s your own flesh and blood. The second voice said: so’s Janine. The first voice said: you and Max have got unfinished business to sort out. The second voice said: yes, I never did get around to ripping his lungs out with a blunt spoon, oh well, never mind. The first voice said: be serious, can’t you? The second voice said: I am serious, believe me.

  The first voice said: Max might know how to make YouSpace work. The second voice said: how unlikely is that? The first voice said: about as likely as werewolves. Exactly, said the second voice, and realised it had walked right into that one.

  Yes, said the second voice, rallying bravely, but the only reason you want to get YouSpace working is so you could see if Max is out there somewhere. Not the only reason, said the first voice, but its heart wasn’t in it; there’s the money as well, if we can get this thing working and make it safe to use, it could be huge, it could be the biggest thing in home entertainment since –

  The second voice said: hm.

  Some money would be nice, the first voice said. Well, wouldn’t it?

  Put like that, the second voice had to concede, there was a case to answer. And besides, the first voice went on, it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do, is it? I mean, before all this started you were sleeping on the slaughterhouse floor and shovelling guts all day, just to stay alive. This is better than that, surely. The second voice muttered something about lynch mobs and werewolves, but the first voice pretended it hadn’t heard.

  Yes, but it’s dangerous. You could get –

  Theo sat up straight. He’d remembered a scene he’d walked in on, something he hadn’t been supposed to see: Mr Nordstrom lying on the floor in Reception, soaked in blood, with Call-me-Bill and Matasuntha and Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz trying to stick him back together before he fell to bits. And what was it he’d said?

  Mr Nordstrom was in his room: Room 3, third floor. It actually looked like a perfectly normal hotel room, right down to the upper half of a pair of trousers sticking out of the wall-mounted trouser press like a blue pin-striped tongue. Mr Nordstrom looked at him, scowled and said, “Yes?”

  “Hi,” Theo said. “Can I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “Because this isn’t a hotel, I’m not a desk clerk, you’re not a guest and the wine cellar sure as hell isn’t a wine cellar.”

  Mr Nordstrom nodded. “I can let you have five minutes,” he said, and pushed open the door.

  As he walked in, Theo looked round until he saw what he’d been looking for. He recognised it at once, even though he’d never seen one before. Once he’d postulated its existence, figuring out what it’d look like hadn’t been too difficult.

  “Pieter van Goyen?” he asked, as he picked it up.

  “Yes, Pieter made it, and for Christ’s sake be careful with it.” Mr Nordstrom reached out a hand to take it from him, but Theo held it just out of reach.

  “Let’s see,” Theo said. “You put the bottle in this end here, right? Yes, and then you plug this flex into the wall, and this end here—”

  “That’s the projector,” Mr Nordstrom said. “It projects the image of an archway on to any flat surface, like a wall.”

  “And that’s the way in?”

  Mr Nordstrom nodded, and he handed the machine back to him. “And it works?”

  �
��Oh, it works just fine,” Mr Nordstrom said, taking it and putting it carefully down on a table. “So long as you’ve got pre-loaded capsules to go in it.”

  Theo smiled and sat down on the bed. “That’s what all those bottles in the cellar are, aren’t they?”

  Mr Nordstrom frowned. “You don’t know?”

  “No, so I’m working it out for myself.”

  “Bill hasn’t—?”

  Theo shook his head. “Bill hasn’t told me and I haven’t asked,” he said. “I have the feeling that truth percolates through Bill the way water does through the human kidney. It goes in as truth and comes out as something quite like it, but not exactly the same.” He grinned. “Shoot.”

  “What?”

  “Talk. Tell me stuff. Or I’m leaving.”

  Mr Nordstrom glowered at him, then sank down in a chair. “Fine,” he said. “You know about the parallel universe project?”

  “Let’s assume I do. Bits. Who are you?”

  “You don’t – right, fine.” Mr Nordstrom looked hurt. “I’m Jake Nordstrom, CEO of Heartless & Amoral Capital Investments. I’ve put three billion dollars into this.”

  “Ah.”

  “Which is awkward, since I only have two billion dollars.”

  “Ah.”

  “The other billion – well,” Mr Nordstrom went on, “you get the idea. What else do you want to know?”

  “The bottles.”

  Mr Nordstrom nodded. “Each bottle contains five standard hours in an alternative reality. You put the bottle in the machine, the arch appears, you walk through, you’re there. Then you come home.”

  Theo steepled his fingers. “The other day,” he said, “you were nearly killed playing with that thing.”

  “That’s right.” Mr Nordstrom didn’t sound too bothered. “Somehow, I got the wrong bottle. I was expecting a Paris bordello circa 1898. What I got was heavy street-fighting in the closing stages of the Vietnam War. We’re still trying to figure out how it happened.”

  “That may have been my fault,” Theo said. “You see, I wanted to hide this” – he took Pieter’s bottle out of his pocket, then put it back again, just in case Mr Nordstrom got ideas – ”and the wine cellar seemed like a good idea. I moved a few bottles around. Presumably—”

  “Yes.” Mr Nordstrom breathed out heavily through his nose but didn’t move. “You weren’t to know, I guess.”

  “Quite. You’ll notice, I’m managing to cope with the guilt pretty well. I figure, if people don’t tell me things, I can’t be expected to know them. Right?”

  “That bottle…”

  “Yes?”

  “Bill told me. Pieter left it to you, in his will.”

  “So he did.”

  “Properly speaking, it belongs to me.”

  Theo sighed. “You know, if circumstances were just a little different, you could have the frigging thing. All it’s done so far is try and kill me.”

  “Ah. Safety proto—”

  “So people keep telling me, yes. But I need it, for now, anyway. When I’ve done with it—” He shrugged. “So, the sooner I get what I need, the sooner you get the bottle. Understood?”

  Mr Nordstrom gave him the sort of look you might expect to see on the face of a tiger which, as it’s about to pounce on a quivering fawn, notices that the fawn’s just pulled a gun on it. “Sure,” he said. “What else can I tell you?”

  Theo shrugged, picked up the bottle-reader again, turned it upside down, and put it back on the table. “Mishaps aside,” he said, “this gadget seems to work pretty well.”

  “It’s all right, I suppose,” Mr Nordstrom said. “But it has significant drawbacks. You see, it’s not real.”

  Theo raised an eyebrow. “So?”

  Mr Nordstrom smiled. “It’s like the difference between sex and masturbation. This machine isn’t that much better than your garden-variety virtual reality, except you don’t have electrodes up your nose. What’s in the bottles is five hours taken at random, remotely, from a parallel universe. You’ve got no control over who you are in it, what you can do there, what’s going to happen. Pieter had some way of—” He paused and scratched his chin. “Well, it’s a bit like drilling a hole in a barrel and siphoning off a bit of what’s inside. He didn’t have to go there, he could do it from here. But he was doing it blind. So, it’s pot luck. You could get five hours of thrilling adventure and extreme sensual pleasure, or you could end up with five hours of speeches from a party conference. People aren’t going to pay good money for that.”

  Theo grinned. “I can imagine.”

  “Also,” Mr Nordstrom went on, “it’s prohibitively expensive. One of those bottles costs best part of a million dollars, and Pieter couldn’t figure out a way of bringing the unit cost down. That’s why he decided we had to move on to phase two.”

  “YouSpace.”

  “I thought we’d decided we weren’t going to call it that. Anyway, yes. That was the plan. This is really just a dead end.”

  “You seem to like it.”

  Mr Nordstrom laughed. “Well, I paid for it,” he said, “I figure I might as well get some use out of it. But it’s pretty poor stuff, mostly. Apart from the Vietnam thing, I’ve been to a fairy-tale world where dragons exist and magic really works…”

  “Interesting.”

  “It should’ve been, yes. But I spent five hours as a clerk in their equivalent of the Inland Revenue. Or there was the one where women outnumber men six hundred to one. I had high hopes of that.”

  Theo’s eyes widened a little. “Yes?”

  “Oh, it was all right,” Mr Nordstrom said, “if you enjoy spending a morning alone on a fishing boat in the middle of the ocean. No control, you see. You’ve got to be able to jump in at the right time and place, or the customer simply won’t want it. It’d be like having a TV that insists on making you watch the Ring cycle live from Bayreuth.”

  Theo thought for a moment. “When you got back from Vietnam,” he said, “you were in pretty bad shape.”

  “Ah.” Mr Nordstrom smiled. “That time, we got lucky. Well, luckyish. Nineteen ninety-six Merlot. It’s five hours in a hospital in the twenty-seventh century. Unfortunately we’ve only got a few bottles of that left.” He pulled a face. “We started off with two cases. Like I said, you just don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for when you go through that arch.”

  Theo pursed his lips. “It sounds like hours of boredom punctuated with brief incidents of violence and fear,” he said. “What’s the fun in that?”

  “Why do Canadians watch ice hockey? Something to do, I guess. Besides, like I told you, I paid for it. Well.” He frowned. “I embezzled the money that paid for it. It’ll be me that gets slung in jail when the auditors figure out where it’s gone. So, why not?”

  Theo wasn’t listening. Something Mr Nordstrom had said had set off a chain reaction in his head. Pieter left it to you in his will. Perfectly true; but the YouSpace bottle hadn’t been all he’d inherited –

  A small bottle.

  A brown manila envelope.

  A pink powder compact.

  An apple.

  “And anyway,” Mr Nordstrom was saying, “seventy million of that ninety-two million was what Fedeyevski, you know, the Russian oligarch, ripped off from some mid-eastern dictator, who skimmed it off oil company sweeteners, so who that really belongs to I’d really hate to have to guess…”

  The apple; he could understand that, just about. An apple that stayed perfectly fresh after weeks in a safe deposit box; some kind of stasis field, presumably a by-product of Pieter’s alternate universe research, intended to pique his curiosity and point him in the right direction. Sorry, Pieter, I was too dumb or too preoccupied to pick up on that one. But the powder compact –

  “And twelve million of that is the CEO’s cut from a pharmaceutical company’s slush fund, which I was supposed to have invested in armaments R&D, there’s this outfit in New Mexico who figure they’ve found a way round the small print in
the Geneva Convention so they can produce mustard gas, provided they don’t actually call it that…”

  The powder compact. He could remember picking it up and slipping it in his pocket at the bank, but, after that, he couldn’t recall having seen it. At the time, he’d subconsciously rationalised it as a souvenir or something, most likely a memento of some lost love. Now he came to think about it, though, Pieter hadn’t been a lost-love kind of guy. If he’d kept anything to remind him of a long-ago moment of ecstasy and passion, it’d most likely have been a Snickers wrapper.

  “I said,” Mr Nordstrom growled at him, “what are you going to do?”

  Excellent question. “Sorry, what?”

  “Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

  Theo nodded. “Several,” he said. “But I skipped most of them, because they didn’t seem to be important. Well, thanks, got to go.”

  He stood up, but Mr Nordstrom was quicker. He stood between Theo and the door, scowling horribly. “You’ve got to get this thing working, understand? All that money—”

  “Oh, money,” Theo said cheerfully. “Can’t buy you happiness, you know. You look at my sister. She’s got loads of it, and she’s miserable as hell. Would you mind moving eighteen centimetres to the left? That’s the ticket.”

  He raced back to him room. His jacket was hanging on a hook behind the door. He grabbed it and plunged his hand into each pocket in turn. He didn’t find a pink powder compact, but he did come across something of approximately the same size and diameter. A hole.

  He sank down in his chair and grinned, mostly because grinning is easier than crying, and he felt the need to conserve his strength. It served him right, of course. He should’ve realised the significance of the wretched thing earlier – assuming it had any, of course, and was something other than a receptacle for pink powder. Not that it mattered now. He had no idea how long the hole had been there, so the compact could be anywhere between here and the bank. He could look for it, of course, but that would require energy and enthusiasm. Right now, if energy and enthusiasm were money, he’d be Greece.