by Tom Holt
“Jar, yes.” Theo folded his arms and scowled. The blue door glowed and faded. “Thank you,” Theo said. “Sorry, right. When it’s a jar. Hey presto, a jar.”
“Pickled walnuts.”
“Probably just a random selection.”
“I like pickled walnuts.”
“Then it could be your subconscious mind affecting the otherwise random choice of contents, that’s not the point. It’s meaningless. It’s a stupid, boring old joke, that’s all. That’s the point.”
Max yawned. “In that case, maybe it’s part of the entertainment and leisure facilities,” he said. “Actually, that wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”
“It’s got to mean something,” Theo persisted. “Otherwise, what’s it doing here?”
Max leaned forward. “If you’re right,” he said thoughtfully, “and if the pickled walnuts are just random contents, possibly influenced by my subconscious—”
“Yes?”
“Then it won’t matter if I eat them, will it?”
Theo growled, then shook his head. “Go ahead,” he said. “Be my guest.”
“Thanks.” Max vaulted over the end of the sofa, jumped across the room and grabbed the jar. “Oh,” he said. “Shit.”
“What?”
“They’re out of date.”
“Max.”
“But you’re not supposed to—”
“Think about it, will you? Where we are? Time has no meaning here.”
Max turned the jar round slowly in his hand. “So you reckon they’re probably OK?”
“Time has no meaning.” Theo hadn’t meant to shout, particularly not a phrase that made him sound like one of those strange men who preach on street corners. He lowered his voice a little. “So,” he went on, “if we’re in, effectively, a time-free zone, why is there a date on the label?”
“It’s the law. Trading standards.”
“The jar came from somewhere else.” He rubbed his forehead with his hands as though he was trying to cold-start it. “Let’s think about this,” he said. “That stuff on the TV. You can get in here if you’re a registered YouSpace user.”
“Are there any?”
“Me. Or I was. Don’t know if I still am since the bottle got broken. Pieter, I guess, but he’s stuck on the Beach Boys planet.” He scowled ferociously; he was missing something, something really quite obvious. When is a door…?
Blue flicker, again. He ignored it and sat bolt upright. “When it’s a jar.”
“What?”
“The joke. It’s a clue.”
Max drew a deep, sad sigh. “You know,” he said, “I never could see the attraction in leaving cryptic clues. If it’s important, you run a very real risk of nobody getting it. If it’s not important, why the hell bother? Much safer just to say what you want to say; the treasure’s up in the roof, George killed me, I didn’t actually write this stuff—”
“Max.”
“All right, it’s a fucking clue. What does it mean?”
“I think—” Theo was staring at the wall where the door-that-wasn’t had been. “It’s – well, one of those things we don’t talk about. But when it’s not one of those things we don’t talk about, it’s a jar.” Suddenly he sprang to his feet, crossed the room in three giant strides and snatched the jar out of Max’s hands. “You know what this is?”
“Don’t you start.”
“I think,” Theo said, “that this isn’t a jar. It’s a bottle.”
Max frowned. “Nah. Neck’s too wide.”
“I think it’s a YouSpace bottle,” Theo said, in a high, brittle voice. “Because where does it actually say they’ve got to be bottles? They could be jars. Well, couldn’t they?”
“You’re doing it again, Theo. It’s not kind, you know. Do please make an effort not to talk drivel.”
Theo wasn’t listening. “It’s a glass container, open at one end. That’s all it is.”
“Full of walnuts,” Max pointed out. “Does that make a difference?”
“The wine bottles were full of wine.”
“So I should hope.”
“So it shouldn’t matter.” Theo’s fingers closed around the lid, but he couldn’t seem to find the strength to twist it off. “Here,” he said. “You do it.”
“Me? Why me?”
“I don’t know.” Theo gazed at him blankly. “I guess it’s the thought of maybe just possibly getting out of here, after six years. I can’t actually bring myself to do it.”
“You’re scared.”
“Yes, maybe I am. So are you.”
“Ah,” Max said sagely, “but in my case, fear is an essential function of my finely honed survival instinct. You’re just chicken.”
“I’m afraid it might not work.”
Max looked at him for quite some time. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If I open it, and it’s not what you think it is, I get to eat all the walnuts. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Slowly, Theo passed the jar over to Max, who snatched it, took a lingering look of pure desire at the walnuts, and tightened his hands around the lid like a finalist in the World Strangling Championships. “Doesn’t want to budge,” he muttered, “how about we just break it?”
“No!”
“Yes, but – hang on, I’m there.” There was a faint pop as the seal broke, and Max lifted off the lid. “It’s open.”
“Good. Give it to me.”
“No chance,” Max said. “Not until I’ve—”
And then he vanished.
Theo sat for a while, staring at the place where his brother had been, now occupied by an empty jar.
Empty. The walnuts had vanished at the same moment as Max. Did that mean something?
Maybe. Maybe it meant that, wherever Max was now, he was just starting to feel the first pangs of indigestion that inevitably follow if you scoff a whole jar of pickles. Or maybe it was the crucial point which made all the –
Stop, he ordered himself. Think. Before we go any further, it’s time for a Universal Theory of Everything. That’s what a scientist would do. Besides, the easiest way of finding a path through a minefield is not necessarily the safest. Think.
He thought.
A tune he’d heard recently was playing in a loop in his head, over and over. If everybody had an ocean; that was as far as it went, nine notes. He shut it out and tried to assemble the data from which he was to draw his inferences.
Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz – well, more about her later, but she’d said it was Pieter who’d blown up the VVLHC, just so as to test a component.
He’d been thinking about the maths; also, the eternal question, why me? The two were kind of linked:
– The maths didn’t work; that was the little something about them that had been nagging away at him all along. He, Theo Bernstein, could make them work, but maybe that was the point.
He thought back to his days as Pieter’s student, the set of problems he’d been given which had first caught Pieter’s attention. According to Pieter, the way he’d set about solving them had been unique, revolutionary, totally original. It had also, of course, been wrong. The answers, as written down on a sheet of paper, had been incorrect. And yet Pieter had been astonished, riveted, captivated when he’d read them. Now, then. What exactly was it that Pieter had seen in those answers?
If everybody had an ocean
He ran a finger round the rim of the empty jar. What Pieter had seen – it came to him slowly and opaquely, as if viewed through frosted glass – was a different sort of mathematics; maths from another reality. One in which two plus two really does make six.
Pieter was looking for a way into other realities. Suddenly, in a routine dollop of homework, he recognises the mark of someone who’s been there – like Columbus, roaming the streets of Madrid dreaming of a new world, bumping into a stranger wearing an I Love New York baseball cap.
But, Pieter reasoned, this man, this kid, can’t have been there, because as yet no bridge exists.
Therefore, Pieter reasoned, it’s simply a matter of time. He will go there, he will acquire the baseball cap, and then he’ll come back.
But, Pieter reasoned, travelling from the future to the past is impossible.
In, Pieter reasoned, this reality it’s impossible. Not where he’s been. Not where he got the cap. Where he’s been, time must be different. Time must have no meaning.
At which point, Theo conjectured, a bright light would’ve lit up inside Pieter’s head, and he’d have reasoned something like this –
There is a multiverse where everything is possible.
In some place in that multiverse, what I’m trying to do is possible. Here, it’s not possible. There, it is. Now, if only I could go to there, what I’m trying to do would be possible. My problem is, not that I can’t get where I’m going, but I can’t get there from here.
But, Pieter reasoned, if only –
Theo snatched his hand away from the rim of the jar as if it was red hot. If everybody had an ocean. Well, yes; the ocean is a reasonably convenient metaphor. It’s an element that both separates and connects the land masses. Everybody, every reality, does indeed have an ocean, namely the barrier that keeps each different reality separate from the others. What everybody doesn’t have, what everybody needs –
(He closed his eyes.)
– is a boat.
Put it another way. What do you do if you know what you want the answer to be, but you can’t make the maths come out that way? You cheat.
And Pieter had cheated. But that sort of behaviour always comes with a price tag. The trick is, if you want to come out on top, to get someone else to pay.
Theo took the jar in his two equally visible hands.
Free access to the Clubhouse is available to all registered members. They can come, and they can go. They can also, if they feel so inclined, import pickled walnuts, to enjoy as a savoury snack between exits and entrances. What they do with the empty jar after they’ve finished with it is a matter between them and their ecological sensibilities. If they choose to leave their trash behind them, so be it.
Theo looked into the jar. He had an odd feeling that the jar was looking back at him, but that was probably just because he’d read Nietzsche and had a vivid imagination.
The operating system of YouSpace, he decided, is that it doesn’t have one. You just say what you want. Of course, if nobody bothers to tell you that, or if they leave you a set of completely false and misleading instructions, you can get yourself into all sorts of bother. But if you know the truth, it’s so very, very simple.
I want to go home.
But, to make it interesting, he went the long way round.
Also, he stopped at various points on the journey, to test his newly minted hypothesis and establish a few facts. He stopped, for example, at his parents’ house, approximately a week after he’d been born. He paid a flying visit to Pieter van Goyen’s rooms at the university, back when he’d been a student there. He dropped in on the Very Very Large Hadron Collider, half an hour before it blew up. Once he’d got the hang of it, it was a bit like being a bird flying over both time and space. Provided you kept your head, didn’t lose your way and stayed well clear of falcons and cats, it was a piece of cake. It was fun.
One last circuit – from the Beginning to the End, in a low, lazy, circling sweep – and then he banked into the flow to slow down, selected a point on which to land, swooped, deliberately stalled and dropped (just like a bird landing on a twig) into the time and place of his choosing. It was all right, he thought, just before he got there. It’s just like a faculty party. I don’t have to stay here if I don’t like it.
He knocked on the ancient oak door and waited. Pieter’s voice called, “Come in.”
Pieter, sitting in front of a roaring log fire with a glass of sherry in his hand, was much younger, of course. You don’t notice so much how people age if you see them regularly; and then you happen to find an old photograph, and suddenly it’s painfully obvious. In Pieter’s case, the change wasn’t so much downhill as sideways; the straggly hair over his ears was a sort of smoker’s fingers tawny yellow. Also, the wrinkles he had yet to acquire had suited him, made him a bit more grave and wise looking, a bit less like an elephant seal in glasses.
“Hello, Pieter,” Theo said. “Max.”
Max just looked like Max. His hair was longer and he hadn’t shaved in a while – sheer affectation, of course, because even when he’d been on the run from the bloodthirsty gamblers he’d owed money to, he hadn’t exactly been sleeping in ditches, and would’ve had ample opportunities for shaving and combing his hair. But that was Max for you. If he’s on the run, he has to look like a fugitive. Correction; he has to look like What The Well-Dressed Fugitive Is Wearing This Season.
“Theo,” Pieter said, frowning slightly, “shouldn’t you be in New York?”
“Should I?” Theo tried to remember. “Oh yes,” he said, “of course I should. You sent me to some damnfool seminar on isotonic wave diffraction. I wondered why at the time. Now I know.”
Max shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Theo beamed at him.
“You’re looking well, Max,” he said. “Death suits you.”
Max glowered at him. “That’s nice,” he said. “I’d have thought you’d be pleased I’m still alive.”
“I was,” Theo said, “when I found out. Well, not pleased. That’s not really the word. Torn between impossible hope and desperate reservations. It’s all right,” he added, as Max pulled a bemused face, “I’ve had time to get used to your continued existence. You don’t know it, but we just spent six years banged up in a tiny apartment together, playing Ludo. Pieter,” he went on, before Max could reply, “why on earth did you ever give your students sherry? You hate the stuff and nobody under the age of seventy drinks it any more. Is it just tradition, or is it written into the university’s charter somewhere?”
Pieter raised both eyebrows. “Would you like a drink?” he said.
“Love one,” Theo replied. “I haven’t had a drink for six years.”
Pieter shrugged and poured him a sherry, which Theo slung back in one frantic gulp. “Another?”
“Oh yes.”
He made the next one last a whole second. “I expect you’re wondering,” he said, “what I’m doing here.”
“Just a bit,” Pieter said, “since you’re supposed to be in New York. Did you miss the plane or something?”
Theo shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “I caught the plane, got there safely and on time, spent four days sitting through a whole bunch of very dull lectures and presentations, then came home when it was all over. And to this day I don’t know what isotonic wave diffraction is. Not that it seems to have made much difference.”
“You can’t have spent four days,” Max put in. “The seminar only started yesterday.”
But Pieter was looking straight at him. “Shut up, Max,” he said. “Theo—”
“Yes?”
“I can explain.”
“Excellent. That means I won’t feel the need to kick your head in.” He smiled and put the empty glass down. “First, though, I need to ask you something. Who’s Dolly Duchene-Wilamowicz?”
Pieter looked startled. “Dolly? She’s my sister. Why? You’ve never met her, have you?”
“That’s fine, Pieter. Good answer. Now, then.” He sat down and put his feet up on Pieter’s Louis Quinze card table. Pieter winced but didn’t say anything. “I’m going to tell you what you want to know, and then you’re going to explain, and then I may just murder both of you. It’ll depend on what sort of a mood I’m in when we get there.”
“Theo—”
“I say murder,” Theo went on, “but I don’t imagine any jury would convict. Not homicide but pesticide, they’d say, and they’d be quite right. I’ll have another sherry, Pieter, since you’re offering. It tastes like stale
diesel, but I’m getting to like it. Thank you.” He looked down into the glass, thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Maybe not. All right, where shall I begin?”
– But that was such a good joke that he couldn’t stop himself from laughing, which he did for quite some time, until Pieter said, “Theo!” quite sharply. That did the trick. Theo sat up straight, cleared his throat, and said, “At the beginning, I guess. Well, there was this enormous explosion. The Big Bang. With me so far?”
Max was giving him a scornful glare, but Pieter had gone very pale. “We can skip that, don’t you think?” he said.
Theo frowned. “All right,” he conceded, “but we’ll come back to it later.” That was another really good joke, but this time he kept a straight face. He looked down at his hands, as if to reassure himself of something, and went on, “Fast forward,” he said. “What’s today’s date?”
Max looked at his watch. “18 August 2007. Why?”
“Just checking. A few other salient facts. Max, you’ve just been declared officially dead. Pieter, you’ve just proposed my name for the shortlist to run the proposed Very Very Large Hadron Collider project. Yes?”
Pieter nodded. “You’re not supposed to know that,” he said. “But, yes, I’ve recommended you. I think you deserve it.”
Theo gave him a horrible look. “I’ll pretend you never said that,” he said. “Also, Pieter, you’re looking for financial backers for a really weird, far-out new product that’ll revolutionise the entertainment industry.”
Pieter nodded slowly.
“Not that it matters a lot,” Theo went on, “but your principal backers are your sister, who married a billionaire—”
“Otto Duchene-Wilamowicz,” Pieter said. “He was ninety-one, she was twenty-seven. They warned him, marrying a girl that age might prove fatal. You know what he said? If she dies, she dies.”
“Whatever. Also, someone called Bill, with a daughter called Matasuntha.”
Pieter’s eyebrows shot up. “How did you—?”
“Coming to that. The trouble is,” he continued, snuggling into his chair as far back as he could go, “you’ve done all the maths, and realised it won’t work. What you have in mind isn’t possible.”