by Tom Holt
He was here, presumably, because he’d been dreaming about being made pope; his subconscious mind must’ve instructed a YouSpace device to find a reality in which that could happen, and the bottle had sent him here. From that it followed that Janine had such a thing; also, that she didn’t know how to use it, or she’d have sent him directly to the Disney planet. One disturbing factor was the doctor’s prohibition on doughnuts, bagels and Polo mints. That suggested to him that someone was determined not to allow him to escape before he’d completed his mission – finding Max – and logic required that that person should be Janine. But if she could program in such a sophisticated element as no-doughnuts-or-bagels, why couldn’t she work the YouTube bottle herself? That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of course, Janine’s actions had never been exactly rational. How many Janines does it take to change a light bulb? Three: one to rip the socket and flex out of the ceiling, one to burn down the house to punish it for popping a bulb, and one to complain that the other two are out to get her. Even so. Curious.
Meanwhile, there was the small matter of how he was going to get out of here and back to where he belonged. He closed his eyes and pictured the doughnut he’d been so close to grabbing. It proved that there were doughnuts in this reality, in this building; the question was, how to get his hands on one. Unless –
Ten seconds later, a promising hypothesis went down in flames. The hole in the middle of a toilet seat didn’t work –
“Um, Your Holiness.”
Nev the acolyte was standing in the doorway. Theo could see him quite clearly, through the hole in the toilet seat. “Yes?”
“Doctor O’Shaugnessy’s here,” said Nev. “If you’d like to follow me.”
“Sure.” Theo got up, closed the lid, straightened his robes and followed Nev into the throne room. There was a man standing with his back to them both, gazing out through the picture window at the magnificent view; a short, bald man with shoulders so sloping and dandruff-flaked you could’ve used them to stage the Winter Olympics.
“Thanks, Nev,” the man said. “You can leave us to it. I’ll shout if I need you for anything.”
Nev only took a second and a bit to walk to the door, open it and close it again after him. For Theo, it felt like an eternity: long enough to grow stalactites from the ceiling and hold a glacier race right around the Equator. Eventually, though, the man turned round to face him.
“Hello, Theo,” he said.
“Pieter?”
Pieter van Goyen smiled at him; the same twinkly-hippo smile he remembered from – what was it? A thousand years ago? – when his most desperate problem was how to explain why the assignment he was supposed to be handing in somehow hadn’t got started yet. “I never realised you wanted to be the Pope,” he said. “Is this a new direction for you, or something you’ve always aspired to?”
“You’re dead.”
Pieter grinned. “No, I’m not,” he said.
“You’re dead. I saw it. They shot you with a ray gun. You disintegrated.”
“Ah.” Pieter did that hands-raised-fingers-spread gesture. “That.”
“Yes, that.”
“Your trouble is,” Pieter said kindly, “you don’t think. You assume. I hoped I’d cured you of that back in your second year, but obviously not.”
“Pieter…”
Pieter looked round, located a chair and sat in it. There was a faint creaking noise, but somehow the chair held, banishing any doubt that they were in a wholly different universe. “You visited one of my default realities, yes?”
“If you say so. Look—”
“Not a particularly attractive place,” Pieter went on. “Bizarrely improbable aliens in a setting all too obviously derived from the cantina at Mos Eisley. Did it occur to you to ask yourself why I’d choose to make something like that a default? No,” he went on, as Theo started to make not-interested noises, “clearly not. Well, try it now.”
Angrily resentful at being given homework at a time like this, Theo jammed his brain into gear. “Because it’s the only universe where some specific thing can happen.”
“Warm.”
“A law of physics doesn’t apply.”
“Warmer.”
Click. “Teleportation,” Theo barked. “It’s a universe where it’s possible to teleport.”
Pieter clapped his hands together once and pointed at him. “A long and bumpy ride, but you got there in the end.”
“And the ray guns—”
“Were real ray guns,” Pieter said, “if you’ll excuse the apparent paradox. Fortunately, when I’m there, I carry a teleport activator key with me at all times. I beamed out. Simple as that.”
Theo suddenly felt terribly weary, as though he was just about to run out of fuel. “All right,” he said, “I guess that accounts for it, and you really are still alive—”
“Thank you so much,” Pieter said gravely.
“That doesn’t explain,” Theo went on, with a last flicker of rage, “why you won’t let them give me a doughnut.”
“Ah.”
“Doctor’s orders. Apparently you’re the doctor. Why?”
Pieter wriggled a little in his chair, and there was a faint splitting sound. “Because I wanted to keep you here until I found you,” he said. “Which wasn’t easy, believe you me. Honestly, Theo, of all the Vaticans in all the autonomous Papal States in all the multiverse, why did you have to choose this one? It’s so hopelessly obscure it barely registers. You do realise, this whole reality is posited on Rupert Murdoch converting to Roman Catholicism in 1962, following a profound spiritual experience on the road between Rockhampton and Toowoomba. In order for that to happen, they’ve had to do without the Internet, the Russian Revolution and forty-eight per cent of the Renaissance. Oh, and the Roman Empire celebrated its 2,750th anniversary in 1999. They had a procession and a sherbet fountain, and fifty Seventh-day Adventists were thrown to the lemurs.”
“Lemurs?”
“Health and safety. You can see why it took me a while to track you down. Talk about off the beaten track. In probability terms, this is the sticks.”
Amazing how Pieter could make him feel guilty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was dreaming.”
“You dream about being the Pope?”
“On this one specific occasion,” Theo protested. “I was back at school, and—”
“Ah.” Pieter nodded. “And some idiot initiated a YouSpace field—”
“I thought you weren’t going to call it that.”
“While you were still asleep and dreaming, so your unconscious mind directed the parameters index locator wizard to find a reality in which you could be the Pope.” Pieter’s face cracked into a grin. “This one. Showing just how screwed up the universe would have to be before you’d get elected to high ecclesiastical office. Rather reassuring, actually, if you care to look at it from that perspective. Anyhow,” he went on, fishing in his inside pocket and producing a cigar the size of a medium torpedo, “no harm done. You’re here, I’m here, we can get down to business. Oh, don’t worry,” he added, as he lit the cigar and blew out a cloud large enough to asphyxiate most of San Francisco, “one good thing about this universe. Nicotine is good for you. Trust me,” he added, “I’m a doctor.”
Theo fanned a clearing in the smoke with his hand, just enough that he could see Pieter’s face. “I take it you want something.”
Pieter looked hurt. “Oh, come on,” he said. “One little thing I want you to do for me, after everything I’ve done for you.”
“Such as.”
“Oh, let me see. I got you a job, left you YouSpace, the most amazing recreational tool in human history, which will make you the richest man who ever lived. Well?” he smiled. “How am I doing?”
Theo gave him a cold stare. “As far as the job goes,” he said, “I was happier hauling guts in the slaughterhouse. The YouSpace thing is utterly terrifying and horribly dangerous, and you can insert it in a region of negative solar activity. Also, y
ou brought Max back into my life. And Janine. Thank you so fucking much.”
“Janine,” Pieter repeated. “Ah yes, that charming sister of yours. How does she fit in?”
“She knows Max is alive. She’s got one of your magic bottles. She sent me here to find him.”
Pieter frowned. “Just a moment,” he said. “Rewind that last bit. She sent you here.”
Theo shrugged impatiently. “Well, not here specifically. But she wants me to rescue Max and bring him home. So she had me kidnapped, and she put me in her YouSpace thing—”
“Her YouSpace thing.”
“Yes. Mine got broken, which as far as I’m concerned is no great loss, thank you all the same. There was this planet where—”
He stopped short. The look on Pieter’s face had drained all the language out of him. Pieter was scared. “What?” Theo demanded. “Why are you gawping at me like that?”
Pieter did a shut-up gesture with his hands. “Slowly, and try and be coherent, just for me. Your bottle got broken?”
Theo nodded. “Matasuntha—”
“And your sister’s got a bottle, and she kidnapped you.”
“I just said—”
“And presumably she doesn’t know how to use it, because without the user’s manual—”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, my God.”
Some people panic easily. They lose their cool so often and so readily that they’d be well advised to wear it round their neck on a bit of string, like a librarian’s glasses. Pieter, though; Pieter had never, in all the years Theo’d known him, displayed anything remotely resembling anxiety, doubt or fear; not unless you counted the time he’d run out of coffee at 3 a.m. in the middle of the summer vacation, when all his neighbours were away. To see the look on his face right now was like asking God a question and being met with a blank stare and a shrug. “Pieter?”
He’d gone white, and his eyes were huge. It made him look like Gollum on a bad few-remaining-strands-of-hair day. “You do realise what this means.”
“No, of course not. Nobody ever explains anything.”
“It means,” Pieter said, and his voice was high and slightly shrill, “we’re stuck here. Both of us.”
Did not compute. “No, it doesn’t. There’s doughnuts, in the kitchen. There must be. They brought me one, only—”
“They won’t work,” Pieter yelled. “For God’s sake, Theo, didn’t you read the user’s manual?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. Skimmed through it.”
Terror made Pieter look slightly bigger and considerably thinner, for some reason. Also a lot older. “If you’d taken the time to read the manual,” he said, “you’d know that the interface transit retrieval talisman is personalised to each individual module—”
“Excuse me?”
“Each bottle’s made differently,” Pieter translated scornfully. “So that only the registered owner and people in actual physical contact with him can use doughnuts to go backwards and forwards. It’s a security measure.”
Theo would quite like to have told Pieter what he thought of his various security measures, but he decided that the situation was already fraught enough to be going on with. “I see,” he said. “No, actually I don’t. How does that—?”
Pieter sighed. “It was to stop the locals in other realities you happen to be visiting from accidentally straying into ours every time they happened to look through the hole in a doughnut. Otherwise there’d be chaos, obviously, thousands of doughnut eaters from alien realities suddenly materialising on the streets of our major cities. That’s why it’s so vitally important that you only travel through your bottle. Use someone else’s, and the doughnuts won’t work. You’d be stranded.”
When the going gets panic-stricken, the panic-stricken get going. The solution popped neatly into Theo’s mind without him even having to think. “But that’s OK,” he said. “You got here through YouSpace, right? So, you’ve got a bottle. We get a doughnut, I grab hold of you, we both go home. Simple.”
Pieter gave him a long, sad look. “I had a bottle.”
“Yes? And?”
“I left it to you. In my goddamn will. And you broke it.”
Image the hot shower you’d been looking forward to all day turned out to be iced water. “The same—”
“Yes.” Pieter closed his eyes. “As it clearly states in the manual, each unit can be registered with up to three authorised users.” He sighed, and shook his head. “How do you think I got here? Walked? Got the bus?”
“But—” Theo realised he’d finally had enough, even from Pieter van Goyen. “For crying out loud, Pieter, explain. Otherwise—”
“What?”
Theo forced his face into a grim, hard expression. It was like getting your foot into one of your eight-year-old daughter’s shoes. “Otherwise,” he said, “I’m going to go out there and be the best possible pope I can be, and you can spend the rest of your life treating German measles. It wouldn’t be so bad,” he added cheerfully. “Better than cleaning up in the slaughterhouse, anyway.”
“In Australia?”
“Better than the slaughterhouse,” Theo said firmly. “I’ve been thinking for some time I ought to settle down, make something of my life. The Papacy wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but what the hell. I could really make a difference, being pope.”
“So could a ring-tailed possum flying an airliner. Look, we both know you’re bluffing.”
Theo scowled at him, then made the sign of the cross. “Pax vobiscum, scumbag,” he said. “Oh, and you’re fired. I’ve felt for some time I need a personal physician with integrity and compassion. Not to mention a medical degree.”
Pieter sighed, then shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “After all,” he added, “it’s not like we’re going anywhere in a hurry.” He looked down at the cigar between his fingers, which had gone out, and relit it. “We need coffee,” he said. “Medical emergency. There’s a bell around here somewhere. You ring it, and some clown comes and takes your order. Ah. This’ll do.”
There was indeed a small silver bell, resting on a beautiful leather-bound Bible, next to a silver candlestick, in which a fat white candle dimly flickered. The combination stirred something in Theo’s memory, but he couldn’t be bothered to follow it up. He shook the bell and it tinkled, and a moment later Nev the acolyte appeared. “Your Holiness?”
“Coffee,” Pieter said. “Strong. Lots.”
“Your Holiness,” Nev repeated. “Is that wise?”
Theo shrugged. “He’s the doctor,” he said. “He says it’s OK.”
Nev continued to stare at the bell in Theo’s hand, and the candle, which had gone out. “You don’t think it’s a bit, well, extreme?”
“What, coffee?”
“Excommunicating the whole of Sydney.”
Theo frowned, then looked back over his shoulder through the picture window. Ah, he thought. Bell, book and candle. Oops. “Did I just do that?”
“Afraid so, Your Holiness.”
“Butterfingers,” Pieter muttered. “His Holiness just had one of his funny turns,” he went on, as the cardinal appeared in the doorway. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. He gets these sudden incontrollable rages, and then, wham, eternal damnation from Wollongong to Gosford. I’ll give him something for it, he’ll be fine soon. Meanwhile, some coffee would be nice, if it’s no bother.”
Nev and the cardinal backed out slowly, taking care to maintain eye contact until the door was safely shut behind them. “Thanks, Pieter,” Theo said. “Thanks a lot.”
Pieter shrugged. “When you decide to make a difference, you don’t muck about.” he said. “I think your chances of staying here and living a nice, quiet life aren’t quite what they were. I’m not quite sure what’s involved in getting rid of a pope who’s gone out of his gourd, but there’s bound to be a proper procedure.” He smiled, then added, “Don’t ever threaten me, Theo, it’s rude and I don’t like it. Understood? Splendid. Right, what do you su
ggest we do now?”
“I don’t know, do I?” Theo yelled. “I just want to go home.”
“Can’t, sorry.” Pieter gave him a look you could’ve crushed diamonds with. “Not if the bottle’s broken.”
“The phone.” A tiny spurt of hope. “We could use the phone.”
“What, to order in pizza?”
“To call Janine. My sister.”
Pieter shook his head sadly. “All right,” he said, “it’s possible there’s a version of your sister in this reality. But she won’t know what’s going on, and she most definitely won’t be able to get you home. Obviously you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said, or you’d—”
“She rang me,” Theo said. “Just now.”
If Time is a piece of cheese, the two seconds that followed were fondue. “I beg your pardon?”
“She called me. Everyone thought she was the Tsar, naturally—”
“Of course. Easy mistake to make.”
“—but it was her, I talked to her, she told me to find Max. Then the cardinal grabbed the phone and told her I’d had a heart attack, so I didn’t get to ask her how she’d got me here. But if she got me here, she can get me back. Can’t she?”
Pieter hadn’t breathed for quite some time. “Not sure,” he said. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“Well, it looks like she’s got a YouSpace bottle,” Pieter said, puffing at his cigar, which had gone out again. “So in theory, yes. But I doubt very much if she knows how to work it.”
Theo grinned. “Maybe not,” he said. “But you do.”
“Yes,” Pieter said. “I do, don’t I? Good thought.”
“It’d be like those aeroplane disaster movies, where the guy on the ground tells the complete novice how to land the plane.”
“Um. Bad analogy.”
“So all we’ve got to do is call her back.”
“Of course. Got her number, have you? Bearing in mind that it’s absolutely impossible to send a telephone signal of any sort across the transdimensional vortex.”
“She did it,” Theo said simply. “So it’s possible. And I don’t need her number.” He picked up the phone. “All I have to do is press the call-you-back button and we’re there.”