by Tom Holt
“Theo.” Pieter’s face was as unreadable as On Chesil Beach. “I think you may just have had a good idea. Hard to accept, I know, but we are, after all, scientists. Well, don’t just stand there like the Prune-King’s daughter. Do it.”
Slowly and carefully, Theo flexed his fingers, making sure they all worked. It was still rather weird, being able to see them again. “All right,” he said. “On one condition.”
“Theo—”
“One condition. Just one. Otherwise, we stay here and learn to love Aussie Rules Football. Well?”
“Whatever.”
“The condition is,” Theo said gravely, “you explain.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
“Oh, that. Yes, if you like. Now, press the damn button.” Feeling a bit like the President after the Russian premier has refused to take back what he just said about motherhood and apple pie, Theo placed the tip of his finger over the button, until he could just feel the texture of it, and applied gentle but consistent pressure. There was an agonising pause, followed by the dial tone.
“Well?”
“Quiet, it’s ringing.”
Four rings; five. Then a male voice Theo didn’t recognise said, “Ja?”
“Hello. I’d like to speak to Janine, please.”
“Huh?”
Deep breath. “Janine Bernstein. Could I possibly talk to her, please?”
Pause. “Zis is Kurt. Vat you vant?”
Pieter was pulling the sort of face the human skin wasn’t designed to cope with. “Please may I speak to Janine Bernstein. Please.”
“She not here. She gone out. Zis is Kurt. Vat you—?”
“Do you know when she’s likely to be back? It’s very important.”
“She gone out. I ott-chob man. She not tell me ven she come back. Vy ze hell she tell me anyzing. I not care. I chust vurk here.”
Theo tried to count to ten. He got as far as three. “Is there any way you could get a message to her? It really is extremely—”
“I write note. She not read. She never read note. I write anyhow, is vaste of time. I write note.”
Pieter was making faint mewing noises, like a sick cat. “Can you please tell me the phone number?”
“Vas?”
“The number. The phone number I’m calling on right now?”
“Vy you ask? You know number. You calling on number. Vot you ask me for?”
“Please?”
“I not know number. I chust vurk here. Is lousy job. I cut grass, vosh vindows, take out trash, I not gottdamn social secretary. You get off ze line now. I go.”
“Please tell her,” Theo said desperately. “Theo called. About Max. Urgent. Really, really urgent.”
“I write note. Vaste of paper. She not read. I go now.”
The click, and then the whirr. Theo slowly put the phone down. “She’s out,” he said. “I left a message.”
“That’s it, then,” Pieter said. “We’re screwed. We’re going to be stuck here for the rest of our lives. In Australia.”
“No we aren’t.” Theo said firmly. “Janine will get my message and call us back, and then—” He gave up. “You’re right,” he said. “We’re screwed. Oh well.”
“Oh well?”
“It’s not so bad,” Theo said. “At least it’s the twenty-first century and the people are human. Think about it. We could be stuck where Max is.”
Pieter shrugged. “That’s not so bad, either. There’s humans living on the southern continent. They’re all princesses. No men, just a load of rich, lonely young women in sparkly dresses. There are definitely worse places, trust me.”
“Yes, well. Max isn’t there, is he? He’s stuck in a cave surrounded by furry animals with automatic weapons.”
“In accordance with the fundamental human right to keep and arm bears. Yes, I know. Old but gold. He’ll be all right, don’t worry. Besides, I thought you didn’t give a damn.”
Theo shook his head. “I don’t like him but I don’t want him killed. He’s my brother.” He sighed. “It’s a very special relationship, you know? No, I don’t suppose you do.”
“Actually, that’s how I feel about my sister. Two parts a sort of mystical union of souls, three parts constant unbearable irritation. Also, I never know what to get her for her birthday.” Pieter sat down on the papal throne and relit his cigar for the third time. “You could knock through that partition wall there and turn this whole wing into a bowling alley.”
“She’ll call us,” Theo said. “I mean, she wants me to find Max, she’ll be on that phone any moment now. Not that she gives a damn about me, but where Max is concerned—”
“Theo,” Pieter said, “forget it. We aren’t going anywhere. Did I tell you about the time-decay thing?”
“The what?”
“Ah.” Pieter nodded slowly. “Key piece of information. It’s in the manual, of course, but since you couldn’t be bothered to read it—”
“Pieter.”
“Fine, right. As you should’ve figured out for yourself, the YouSpace acceleration effect subjects organic matter to extreme prototachyonic inversion stress. That’s fine so long as you’re inside the bottle’s ambient baryon field, and returning to your reality of origin purges all the prototachyons out of your system, so it’s no bother at all once you’re home. But if you leave the baryon field, which happens if, to take an example purely at random, you’re stranded because the bottle’s got busted, the build-up of antiprototachyonic radiation in your body tissue quickly leads to cellular degradation resulting in nucleotide dysfunction and catastrophic failure of protein cohesion.” He paused, took in Theo’s blank stare and translated, “You go all runny, then you fall to bits. Or at least,” he added with a slight shudder, “that’s what’s in store for me. You’re probably OK. As far as we know, the bottle that brought you here is intact.”
Theo stared at him. “You’re going to—”
“Yup. In about a hundred and forty hours. They’ll have to bury me in an ice-cream carton. Same goes for Max, of course. Hence,” he added, blowing out a dense blue cloud, “my apparently flippant and devil-may-care demeanour, imperfectly concealing a very real sense of shit-scaredness and existential terror.”
“Pieter,” Theo whimpered, “we’ve got to do something.”
Pieter smiled. “I am doing something,” he said. “I’m sitting on the Throne of St Peter smoking a good cigar. It won’t help any, but neither would anything else, so why the hell not?”
“Janine—”
“Is not going to call,” Pieter said firmly. “Stop torturing yourself with false hopes and accept the situation. Prepare yourself for the inevitable. And you might start looking round for a bucket or something. I’d hate for my mortal remains to soak away into the carpet.”
The phone rang.
“It’s her,” Pieter screamed. “Out of the way!” He launched himself out of the throne, shouldered past Theo, grabbed the phone and yelled, “Yes?”
Theo tried to take the phone from him, and got a hand in his face. “What?” Pieter was saying. “What? No. Who is this? No, sorry, but – no. Get off the fucking line, Your Majesty, we’re expecting an important call. Yeah, and yours too.” Slam.
“That wasn’t Janine, then,” Theo said.
“No.” Pieter hobbled back to the throne and sat down heavily. “Just the Tsar, about some idiotic treaty. I told you, didn’t I? She’s not going to come through for us. So stop deluding yourself and… ”
Ring. Ring.
This time, Theo beat him to it by a clear thousandth of a second. “Hello? Janine?”
“Hi. This is a free message. Right across the country, thousands of people just like you are paying too much for their personal loans. Call us now for a really great deal on—”
Dimly, Theo was aware of movement, and a hand gripping his wrist. “Don’t throw the phone,” Pieter was shouting at him. “We may still need it. Don’t throw the phone.”
“What?�
�� The red mist that had covered his eyes started to dissipate, and he let Pieter take the phone away from him. “That wasn’t Janine,” he said.
“I’d kind of gathered.”
“She’s not going to call, is she?”
“No.”
“And now we can’t call her back, because she’s not the most recent caller any more.” Suddenly he felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders; he’d been let off having to hope, and now he could relax into despair. “We’re screwed. You’re going to die. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Mister Tactful,” Pieter said. “I wonder, though.”
Hope is a bit like bindweed, or Russian vine. Just when you think you’ve killed off the last root, there it is, back again. “What?”
“Do you think they’ve got any booze around here? They must have. I wonder how we go about getting hold of some.”
“Pieter.”
“Well, why the hell not? What can a person do in a hundred and forty hours? He can watch the whole of Star Trek Voyager on DVD, or he can get really, really, really stonked.”
“Pieter—”
“True, both options would leave you regarding death as a merciful release, but—”
“Pieter!” He hadn’t meant to shout. “Pull yourself together, for crying out loud. Think of something. You’re a Nobel Laureate, aren’t you? You invented this horrible thing. You can’t just crawl away and get drunk. It’s—”
“What?”
“It’s what Max would do.”
“Ah.” Pieter grinned. “Great minds.” He picked up the little silver bell and shook it ferociously. A moment later, Nev appeared. “We want a drink,” Pieter thundered at him. “For medicinal purposes. Now.”
Nev looked at Theo, who hesitated, then nodded. “Right,” Pieter said. “What’ve you got?”
“Would Your Holiness like to see the wine-cellar inventory?”
“The hell with wine,” Pieter said, but Theo shushed him. Three little words. “Wine cellar inventory?”
“Yes, Your Holiness. It’s very extensive. In excess of ten thousand bottles.”
Theo smiled. “Fetch,” he said.
“That’s not the way to go about it,” Pieter protested, as Nev withdrew. “Wine’s all very well for polite social occasions, but for the genuine, all-out, peel-back-a-million-years-of-evolution experience, you need the hard stuff.”
“Hush,” Theo said gently. “Ah,” he went on, as Nev reappeared with a large loose-leaf folder, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” He looked up and down the columns of names and dates, but nothing rang a bell. Not to worry. “I think we’ll try the Château Cheval Blanc 1961. Thank you, Nev. Go in peace.”
“I don’t know what’s got into you,” Pieter growled, as Nev scuttled away. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want fruitiness, body, a faint tang of woodsmoke and a great nose. I want to get drunk.”
Theo gave him a sweet and gentle smile. “Trust me.”
“Trust you? The man who blew up the VVLHC?”
The smile died instantly. “You please yourself,” Theo said. “You can stay here, get smashed, practise medicine, turn into soup, do what the hell you like. I plan on going home. You don’t have to come. In fact, right now I’d rather you didn’t.”
“But—” What happened then was really rather fascinating. Pieter’s lips continued to move for a second or so, presumably carrying on with the protests and the abuse, but no sound came out. Then he frowned. “You don’t think—”
Theo nodded. “Yes.”
“But what possible reason can you have for believing…?”
Theo shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Intuition. Instinct. A pattern gradually beginning to emerge. Anyhow,” he added, “it’s worth a try. And if I’m wrong, the worst that can happen is we get to share a bottle of nice wine.”
“But—”
“Put it this way,” Theo said. “A piece of string has two ends. Otherwise, it’s not a piece of string. OK?”
“What’s string got to do with anything, for crying out loud?”
Theo knew that if he was proved wrong he was going to regret this moment. But what the hell? It’s not every day you get to be intolerably smug to a Nobel prizewinner. “String’s got to do with everything,” he said. “I’d have thought you’d have known that, being a professor. And put that horrible cigar out, it’s giving me a headache.”
Pieter glared at him, then ground out the butt on the arm of the throne. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Theo turned his back, walked to the window and gazed out at the view: the sea, the soaring buildings, the impossibly blue sky. True, it was a world in which Russia was still ruled by a Tsar and the Vatican stood where the Sydney Quay Deli ought to be; also, if Pieter had been telling the truth, the Internet hadn’t happened and Europe was still ruled by the Caesars. Even so, from up here it looked habitable and survivable, if he didn’t melt down to the consistency of thick minestrone over the next few days. Compared with how the world had looked the day after the VVLHC, the other Big Bang, it wasn’t so bad. And, if he stayed here, he’d be free of YouSpace, that nasty little room where he’d bashed his brains out trying to do impossible maths, Max, Janine, Matasuntha’s Uncle Bill, not to mention Matasuntha herself –
Yes. Well.
– Max, Janine, Matasuntha’s Uncle Bill and the entire scientific community who reckoned he should’ve been coated in honey and pegged down over an anthill because of the harm he’d done to the popular conception of the sciences. That was an awful lot of bad stuff to leave behind in one go. Catastrophic change can sometimes have its good side. Having all your teeth pulled out at once isn’t so bad if all of them were giving you toothache.
Nev was back, with a cobwebby bottle, a corkscrew and two glasses. Theo looked at the bottle for some time, then said, “I don’t know how you do this.”
“Simple,” Pieter replied. “Pull the cork. If it’s a single-use spatio-temporal dislocation module, the vortex effect automatically engages, and you’re drawn into the dysperistaltic field, and there you are. If it’s not, you tilt the bottle to roughly thirty degrees to the horizontal and aim the booze at a glass.”
Theo went to get the bottle, but his hand was shaking. “You do it.”
“If you like. If it’s corked, though, we send it back. Agreed?”
Pieter slit the foil, drove in the corkscrew, wound it and pulled. There was a soft pop. Nothing happened. They looked at each other, then Pieter bent over the bottle and stared down into the neck. “Shit,” he said, “it’s just wi—”
Somewhere, far away down the beach, a radio was playing. The tune was familiar, but the words were slightly different:
Now everybody’s got an ocean
Across the USA
Because of global warming,
The floods are here to stay.
They went and melted both the ice caps;
Stupid USA.
Oh, Theo thought. Not promising.
For some reason, Pieter seemed to have got there earlier; he was sitting in a striped blue and white canvas chair under a huge red umbrella, sipping a margarita. He was tanned, with blobs of white zinc cream on his nose and chin, and his feet were bare. He looked up, scowled and shouted, “Theo? Where the hell did you get to?”
“I just got here. Where is this?”
Pieter’s wrath evaporated instantly. “Minneapolis,” he replied. “Merry Christmas, by the way.”
“Huh?”
“It’s 25 December,” Pieter said. “You’re just in time for the hog roast.”
“Minneapolis?”
Pieter nodded. Above his head, the sun was a white disc in a kingfisher-blue sky. Theo felt a drop of sweat roll down his nose, and wiped his forehead. “Ah,” he said.
“Exactly. Christmas Day in Minneapolis, and it’s ninety-two in the shade on the beach. Give you three guesses what’s different about this reality.”
“Yo
u sure it’s not just the future?”
Pieter shook his head. “Time travel is impossible,” he said confidently. “Trust me, I’m a physicist. Not here, though. Here, I’m Honest Pete Tomasek, joint owner of the Minneapolis Yacht Marina and Country Club.” He frowned again. “You’re my business partner. Which reminds me: there’s a raft of cheques and stuff for you to sign. You’d better see to it ASAP.”
“What the hell,” Theo demanded, “are we doing in Minneapolis?”
Pieter yawned, twiddled the little wooden stick in his drink, drew it out and licked it. “You were right about the bottles in the Vatican cellar being single-use spatio-temporal dislocation modules. God only knows how you knew, but you knew. Where you went wrong was your choice of vintage. Still, on balance, this is better than where we just came from.”
Little wheels were turning in Theo’s head. “How long have you been here?”
“Three weeks,” Pieter replied. “Just long enough to settle in and learn the ropes. I like it here.”
“Three weeks. Shouldn’t you be cream-of-physicist soup by now?”
Pieter beamed at him. “Yes. And I’m not. Which suggests there’s something about this place that counteracts the degradation effect. Personally, I’m guessing it’s to do with the damage to the ozone layer. Massive exposure to unfiltered UV light.” He shrugged. “It’d probably be a good idea if I steered clear of Kryptonite while I’m here, but otherwise I can’t really see a problem. Hence,” he added, “the cheerful outlook and jovial demeanour. Have a drink. They mix the sneakiest margarita.”
“Pieter,” Theo glanced up at the sky. “We can’t stay here. It’s a dying planet.”
For that he got a don’t-be-a-fusspot gesture. “It’s not that bad. They’ve got at least ninety years before the ambient radiation quotient reaches lethal. Also,” he added cheerfully, “they’ve got me. If I invent some brilliant fix for the climate change thing, I can save the planet and really clean up financially. Or I could just sit here and veg out in peace. Don’t you love it when you’ve got options?”
Theo looked at him. I’m not the only one who’s changed, he thought. Or maybe it’s just that rose-tinted spectacles don’t work properly in an atmosphere saturated with the wrong kind of light. “Pieter.”