by Tom Holt
“That’s perfectly all right,” Theo said. “When you’re quite ready.”
“Where are we going, exactly?”
“The car,” Theo said.
“Sorry?”
“The car.”
“Right, yes. You want me to drive?”
“Yes. No. You sit in the back and stay absolutely still and quiet. Got that?”
“Loud and clear, Mr Bernstein.”
The house was huge. He’d felt twinges of agoraphobia the first time he’d been shown round the VVLHC site (the echoing man-made caverns, the vast, perspective-twisting white-tiled tunnels), but that was nothing compared to this place. God could’ve played hide-and-seek there and had a really boring time. What made it ever so slightly worse was the décor: pink, white and pale blue, with satin tiebacks on every curtain and enough scatter-cushions to fill the Mariana Trench. There was only one person in the world with taste that bad, and he’d known her all his life.
“Nearly there. Mr Bernstein,” the old man wheezed, as they clattered down a grand pink-marble staircase into a sitting room the size of Syntagma Square. “We can get out through the french windows and on to the drive, then round the side and we’re there. Mr Bernstein?”
Theo had come to a dead stop. He wanted to get out of there, in roughly the same way a bullet is anxious to leave the barrel of a gun, but there was a noise coming from the other side of a door, and somehow he couldn’t move past it without confirming his suspicions. He knew that noise. Only one thing had ever sounded quite like that.
“No, Mr Bernstein, you really don’t want to—”
But Mr Bernstein really did. He opened the door, and saw –
It all made sense, now he saw it. The whole house had been built around it, leaving a huge space in the middle, in which stood – well, you’d have to call it the Very Very Very Very Large Hadron Collider, or maybe even the Ridiculously Big Hadron Collider’s Big Brother. He was standing on the outer circumference of a circular room, looking up at the underside of a dome. Every surface was panelled with mirror-polished titanium alloy plating, and around the curved walls coiled a glowing blue transparent tube, spiralling upwards like a compressed spring. Far away in the dead centre of the chamber stood a glass and steel tower, glowing Mordor-green, partially masked by a swirling cloud of dry ice. The hum came from under the floor, ran up through the soles of his feet and out into his fingertips and the ends of his hair. In the distance, a machine voice was counting down: a million and thirty-six, a million and thirty-five. Ten feet away from him stood a small aluminium trolley, on which rested a laptop, some diagnostic equipment, a pair of lead gloves and an empty coffee mug marked World’s Best Dad.
He looked down at his hands. One was invisible. The other was slightly translucent.
That wasn’t good. With what little self-control he had left he pulled himself together, turned round and headed for the door, only to find that he wasn’t alone. Five more or less human shapes in dull grey metallic suits were lumbering towards him, their faces indistinguishable behind the visors of their goldfish-bowl helmets. He had a feeling they weren’t there to sell him souvenirs.
The cell was small the way the collision chamber had been big. He could stand up if he ducked his head, but why bother? Instead, he sat on the concrete bench and stared at the door, which was lead-lined and a metre thick. There wasn’t a window or even a light bulb, but he didn’t need one. He could see perfectly well by his own pale blue glow.
There are worse ways to die than massive radiation poisoning. Four of them; and they’re no fun, either. Right now, he didn’t feel too bad. In fact, he felt perfectly fine, apart from the cramp, hunger and a pressing need to go to the toilet. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the first symptoms made themselves felt, and then that’d be it. Meanwhile, if he was really lucky, he might have just enough time to try and make sense of it all and fail miserably. Better, on the whole, not to bother. Let’s just sit here and think about nothing at all.
He was just getting the hang of thinking of nothing at all when the door opened and the goldfish-bowl-heads bustled in. They grabbed him, put him on a gurney, stuck a bag over his head and took him for a long ride.
“Really, Mr Bernstein. What are we going to do with you?”
What a question. “I’m not sure,” he replied into the darkness. “You could try a really thick lead coffin and dumping me at the bottom of the sea, but that’d be a bit harsh on the local fishermen. Other than that, it’s a problem. Luckily, not mine.”
Something tugged at the back of his head, and he was blinded by a star going supernova. It turned out to be a single low-wattage light bulb. “Hello, Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here, you know.”
“You idiot,” she said. “You were told not to go in there, and what did you do?”
I know who you are, he thought. But there’s no point going into all that now. “Look who’s talking,” he said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m glowing blue all over. The surgeon general has determined that glowing-blue people are bad for your health.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’m touched by your concern.”
“Oh, you know what they say. Thicker than water. In my case right now, of course, maybe not.”
She nodded slowly. “You’ve figured it out, then.”
He was mildly offended. “I should damn well think so,” he said. “You haven’t exactly made it difficult. More a case of saturation bombing with bloody great hints. I have to say,” he went on, “as far as I’m concerned, this isn’t a joyous experience.”
She shrugged. “Too late to do anything about it now,” she said. “Anyhow, let’s get on with it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going back to the Disney planet,” she said. “To save Max.”
Theo grinned. “No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you—” She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly. “Let me spell it out for you,” she said. “You’ve been exposed to a lethal dose of van Goyen’s radiation—”
“Good name,” Theo said. “Classy.”
“Your only hope of survival,” she went grimly on, “is purging the radiotoxins by means of quantum displacement via the YouSpace device. As you’re now aware, we’ve reconstructed the YouSpace technology here in this building. We’ve reverse-engineered the guidance system software from our analysis of the single-use bottles. All we’re lacking is an understanding of how to operate the software.”
“The user’s manual.”
“If you like, yes. The only person with that knowledge, apart from Pieter van Goyen, is you.”
“Not quite,” Theo interrupted. “Matasuntha—”
“Very well, the only person apart from her. The point is, we have the car but you’ve got the keys. And if you don’t go now, you’re going to die, thanks to your idiotic—”
“Right, thanks, I get the point.” Theo shook his head sadly. “Where’s the bottle?”
“Bottle?”
“The YouSpace bottle. You said you’d made one.”
Exasperated hissing-kettle noise. “I said we’d built a van Goyen Accelerator,” she said. “You saw it. The big shiny thing that made you sick. That’s it.”
Theo gave her a horrified look. “I can’t use that,” he said. “All I know about is using the bottle Pieter left me. The one that got broken. Without it, the user’s manual won’t work.”
“Try it.”
“I can’t,” Theo snapped at her. “It’d be like trying to steer a car with a rudder. It can’t be done.”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz narrowed her eyes. “Wing it,” she hissed.
“Fine.” Theo shrugged. “In that case, I’ll need a piece of paper and a pencil.”
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz nodded, and a goldfish bowl produced the back of an envelope and a biro. “Now push off,” Theo said. “I need to concentrate.”
Mrs Duchene-Wilam
owicz hesitated, then made a shooing gesture. The goldfish bowls withdrew. “You too,” Theo said. “I can’t think with you peering over my shoulder.”
“Try.”
“No, really. It’s not something I can do with people watching. I promise I won’t run away.”
She gave him a look as long and cold as a Canadian winter. “Please yourself,” she said. “I’m warning you, though. Don’t mess with me. I want Max back, alive, in one piece. Once you’ve done that, I really don’t give a damn what happens to you. Understood?”
Theo smiled. “Perfectly. Goodbye.”
She looked at him, frowned, shook her head and left the room. Theo spent the next twenty seconds flushing her out of his head. Then he looked down at the piece of paper.
I can do this, he told himself. After all, Pieter did it. And I think I know how.
He closed his eyes, took the pen in his invisible hand and rested it lightly on the paper. Suppose, he told himself, just suppose I’m Pieter van Goyen. I want to do something, but I know for a fact that it’s impossible. Well, yes; impossible in this reality, because it breaks all the local laws of physics. But the multiverse is infinite. Therefore, every possibility, however impossible, exists somewhere within it. Therefore, somewhere, there’s a parallel reality where the rules are completely different, and this thing I want to do is as easy as sneezing in a pepper factory.
What I want to do is travel from one version of reality to another. Can’t be done; not here. There, it’s a piece of cake. I’m not there, I’m here. But if I was there, it’d be ludicrously simple for me to travel from there to here, and back again. And if, while I was at it, I happened to collect myself and give myself a lift back to there, it’d save me all the effort, pain and frustration of doing all the maths and stuff here, only to find that what I’m seeking to do can’t be done.
The multiverse is infinite. Therefore, somewhere, there’s a version of reality where (a) the rules are completely different, and (b) reality-hopping is as straightforward as climbing aboard a bus, and (c) I’m already there. Being me, I know that I desperately want to be collected and given a lift. True, in so doing I’ll create a spatio-temporal paradox resulting in a feedback loop and possibly endangering the entire quantum continuum, but what the hell. Like I give a damn. After all, didn’t I blow up the VVLHC and dump the blame on my poor, long-suffering former student just so I could test out a theory? When you’re me, none of the rules apply.
In which case –
He looked down. The pen and the envelope had vanished. In their place lay a small green bottle. Tightly curled and stuck in the mouth was a scrap of yellow paper. He teased it out, unrolled it and read –
Hello, you.
Fine. The Disney planet, he thought, and closed his eyes.
In the beginning was the Word.
To understand the operation of the multiverse, we have to know what that Word was; because everything thereafter came from, was posited on, relied on, followed on from it. Without the Word, the rest of the Sentence can’t possibly make any sense. For example, if the rest of it is shut the door, we can’t do anything until we know whether the Word was please or don’t.
Finally, thanks to extensive research by a dedicated team of scholars in a reality long ago and far away, we now know what the Word was. We even have the primordial punctuation that goes with it.
The Word was Help!
He opened them again.
Then he closed them, mumbled “Oooh”, and groped wildly for the handrail he’d briefly glimpsed before the view got too much for him. A gust of wind made him stagger, and he screamed.
Then he opened his eyes and looked sideways. Not down, because he didn’t want to have to think about what he was standing on, which appeared to be nothing at all, or what was under nothing-at-all, which was a very distant prospect of royal-blue sea. The sideways view wasn’t much better. He could see blue sky, a fat white fluffy cloud, and what looked like a very large quantity of matchsticks, arranged vertically, under a massive bank of red and white balloons.
He shifted his feet just a little. Nothing-at-all was solid and smooth. Very carefully, he lifted his left foot and lowered it again, clipping nothing-at-all with his heel and making a noise like a minimalist tap-dancer. Glass. He was standing on glass.
Standing on glass, and there was a wooden handrail, which he was holding on to with two solid, visible hands. Tightening his grip until his tendons started to hurt, he leaned his head back and looked up, at the underside of a balloon.
He opened his mouth and yelled “Doughnut!”, but he couldn’t hear his own voice. Besides, he remembered, doughnuts wouldn’t work. They’d been specific to Pieter’s bottle, which was broken.
The balloon, he noticed, was connected to the glass floor by four ropes; correction, four cables or hawsers. Allowing for perspective, he guessed they were roughly as thick as his waist. A floor (albeit glass), a handrail and a balloon no smaller than the dome of the Kremlin. He tried to find that reassuring, but another gust of wind made the whole structure sway.
When it settled again, he looked down through the floor. That and a distinct feeling of giddiness (altitude sickness) led him to estimate his height above royal-blue sea level at approximately twenty thousand feet. Christ!
Moving very slowly and deliberately, he wrapped his arms round the handrail and clasped his hands together. The rail felt reasonably solid; some kind of wood, planed and varnished. He felt as though he’d just run ten miles uphill wearing a rucksack full of bricks.
Someone was coming. A tiny figure was making its way along a row of matchsticks – correction, a far-away glass floor – heading in his direction. Whoever it was, the figure seemed to be walking at a perfectly normal pace, the way people walk on the ground. He shouted “Help!” at the top of his voice a couple of times, but he might as well have been starring in a silent movie. The distant figure gradually drew closer. It was wearing a duffel coat, a scarf and a red bobble hat.
Deep breaths, he told himself. Deep, slow breaths, and for crying out loud, don’t let go. He tried to move his feet, but they skidded on the glass, lost traction and slid out from under him, leaving him hanging from the handrail by his elbow. Something warm trickled slowly down the inside of his right trouser leg. The best he could say for it was that it probably wasn’t blood.
Hello.
He looked up, and saw a face. Part of a face; not very much, sandwiched between the scarf and the bobble hat. He could see a small pointy nose and two bright blue eyes. The voice was inside his head.
“Help,” he whimpered. Mute button still on, no sound.
Are you all right?
The voice in his head was female. He had no idea how he knew that, because the words were feeding directly into his brain without any sound at all. Also, he couldn’t see a mouth, but the scarf hadn’t moved. Te-
Lepathy, yes. You’re not from around here, are you?
Concentrating very hard, he tried to think: HELP. GET ME DOWN. The eyes narrowed, implying a puzzled frown. You what?
I SAID HELP. HELP. GET ME DOWN.
My God. You’re a –
(Bizarre feeling of someone groping about inside his head for the right word)
– not-telepath. Well?
He nodded.
Seriously? You can’t –
He swung his head slowly from side to side.
Really?
Numerous studies, including Ostrogorsky (2006), Baumann and Stern (2009) and Denkowicz and Chang (2012) have concluded that telepathy is impossible. In our universe, at any rate. Theo nodded until he felt a definite twinge in his neck. The eyebrows shot up and vanished into the red wool of the hat. All right. Let’s see. Um. OK, try this. Don’t try and do words. Just think.
He thought: Think?
Think.
Think. Think think think.
No, think.
I am thinking, you stupid woman.
Ah, got something. Irritation. You’re annoyed about somethin
g.
Suddenly, Theo felt very, very tired. Nevertheless, he ushered everything else out of his mind and imagined –
Himself. Himself, falling. Not all that difficult to do, actually. Himself, letting go of the handrail and slipping through the gap between the rail and the floor he couldn’t actually see, and falling, arms flailing, legs kicking –
Oh for heaven’s sake. It’s all right. You’re perfectly safe.
Head swivelling helplessly from side to side, mouth wide open in a wordless, silent scream –
Don’t be such a baby. Come on. Let go of the rail and take my hand.
He looked at her. She wasn’t holding on to the rail. Instead, she was leaning forward slightly, holding out her pink-woolly-mittened hand. On her feet she wore grey sheepskin boots, standing (apparently) on thin air poised twenty thousand feet over an unspecified ocean.
I haven’t got all day, you know.
Ah, the great leap of faith. The ones you get to hear about, of course, are the ones that don’t end in long drops and messy landings. History tends to skate over those: the aeronautical pioneers who proved that it’s not possible to fly simply by jumping off tall buildings flapping your arms like a bird. For every Wright Brother there are ten thousand equally earnest believers who got scooped up and buried in jars, and whose memories weren’t preserved by succeeding generations, because nobody wants to admit they’re descended from an idiot. On the other hand, it was painfully obvious that he couldn’t stay where he was indefinitely: his fingers were getting numb from continuous feverish gripping, and he had cramp in both legs from hanging at an awkward angle. Oh well, he thought. He let go, grabbed wildly with his left hand and closed it tight around a full set of slim, wool-covered fingers.
Good boy. Now stand up. There, now. What was so difficult about that?
It’s a million miles to the ground and I’m standing on a thin sheet of glass, and – Well. Now she came to mention it, nothing, really. Simple. Straightforward. Easy as falling off a –
Whoa. Steady.
Easy, and let’s not mess with images of falling off anything. Instead, he equalised his weight on both feet, straightened his back and imagined himself saying, Thank you.