Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  For a while, she was almost satisfied with that. Not, however, for long. As she reflected on it, she realised that the power required to convert the piglets into a coherent stream of data and energy was far beyond the capacity of the men from the farm. Even if they’d worked out how to tame the potential of matter/antimatter collision (the only means she could think of whereby enough power could be generated; though, she was humble enough to admit, she was only a pig, so what did she know?), the vast array of plant and machinery required would fill the yard ten times over; no way it could all be fitted inside the little tin box on wheels and still leave room for a dozen piglets. Reluctantly, she abandoned the teleportation hypothesis, and went back to rubbing her neck against the corner of the sty.

  Twice, science had failed her. Clearly, then, she wasn’t looking at it the right way. She was being too narrow-minded, too conventional and linear in her approach. She cleared her mind, ate a couple of turnips to help herself focus, and began to reevaluate the basic world model on which all her assumptions had been based.

  What if, she thought, what if this world, this universe that we perceive, is not the be all and end all of things? What if it’s only one of a number, an infinite number of such worlds, such universes; not a universe in fact but one small facet of a multiverse, an infinite number of alternative realities all simultaneously occupying the same coordinates in space and time? And suppose the trailer was an access point to some kind of portal or vortex, whereby one could pass from one alternative into another, seeming in the process to disappear but in fact merely phasing into another dimension, another version of the story?

  Over the next month or so she thought about that a lot, and even made some progress towards constructing a viable mathematical model of the phase shift process. Before she could complete the model, however, she was struck by a sudden, blinding moment of pure insight, as happens with pigs more often than you would think.

  The men, she reasoned, look after the pigs, and the cows and the sheep and the turkeys and the chickens. That was a fact of everyday life; but why did they do it? Such a simple question, so easy to overlook. Once she’d formulated the question, however, the answer came with the force of complete inevitability. The men looked after the animals because they were part of a greater mechanism, a process or series of functions that ordered the entire universe, or multiverse. The men looked after the pigs because that was what they were for, and in that case it stood to reason that there existed in the hierarchy of functionality a greater force that looked after the men, fed them, watered them, mucked them out, replaced their straw, healed them when they were sick, ear-tagged them when the Ministry came to inspect; and it was that higher agency, that supremely powerful and benevolent entity, to whom all things must surely be possible, who descended on the trailer after the piglets had gone in and took them away, presumably to exist on some higher plane of being, in a moment of supreme rapture.

  As soon as the thought had taken shape in her mind, she was certain she’d at last found the answer. Both logically and intuitively, she knew. There could be no other explanation. Once she’d reached that piercing instant of clarity, however, there was no going back. She barely slept or ate. She stopped rubbing her back against the rough edge of the breeze blocks, and could scarcely be bothered to kick over her water trough when the farmer’s wife filled it each morning. Every molecule of her being was filled to bursting with the desire to get inside the trailer and experience the sublime perfection of the transfer.

  And then, quite unexpectedly, she got her chance. The farmer’s wife went away for a day or so, leaving her teenage daughter to look after the sow. The daughter, completely absorbed with talking to the little rectangle of plastic pressed to her ear, failed to shut the sty properly. The old sow waited until the daughter had gone away and seized her chance. Nudging the sty door open with her mighty nose, she charged out into the yard and trundled as fast as her legs could carry her towards the trailer. As she did so, she realised that she had no means of lowering the ramp but, incredibly, when she got there she noticed that the retaining pegs that locked it in place were loose, practically hanging out of their sockets. One precisely aimed blow of her snout, at just the right angle applied with just the right degree of force, would be enough to bounce them out, whereupon gravity would cause the ramp to swivel on its hinge and fall to the ground.

  Feverishly, forcing herself to concentrate, she did the maths, calculating the angles in two planes, applying Sow’s Constant (mass times velocity squared) to quantify exactly the force needed. At the last moment she closed her eyes and appealed to the Supreme Agency itself: If I am worthy, let the ramp come down.

  She headbutted. The ramp came down. She lifted her head and, shaken but filled with wonder, walked slowly up the ramp.

  Inside the trailer she stopped. For an instant she was flooded with disappointment, an agony of existential isolation and despair. The trailer was just a box: four metal walls, a metal roof, a wooden plank floor, a lingering smell of disinfectant. Then, as she lowered her head, a dazzling blue light exploded all around her, so that for a moment or so she was bathed from snout to tail in shimmering blue fire. And then the back wall of the trailer seemed to melt away, as though its atoms and molecules were the morning fog over the river, and beyond it she saw a flickering archway of golden light, and running under it a road that led to green pastures, softly rolling valleys and the distant cloud-blurred shape of purple hills.

  “Oink,” murmured the sow and walked through the arch, and was never seen in this dimension again.

  Returning to her office after a swift visit to the lavatory, Polly found to her disgust that someone had drunk her coffee.

  She picked up the mug and frowned at it, tilted it slightly towards her (just in case a quarter of a pint of coffee had found somewhere down the bottom of the mug to hide?), raised both eyebrows and put it down again. Odd and annoying. Not the first time, either.

  Just to be sure, she replayed the sequence of events in her mind. Polly is working. Polly is thirsty. Polly reaches the point where thirst and caffeine addiction are screwing up her concentration. Polly gets up from her chair, leaves her office, walks down the corridor, through the printer room, up the half-flight of stairs, into the kitchen. Polly makes herself a coffee and takes it back to her desk. Coffee (black, no sugar) too hot to drink. Polly feels the call of nature, leaves her coffee, does the necessary. Polly comes back. Coffee gone.

  Ridiculous, she decided. For starters, why bother? As she’d just demonstrated by experiment, getting hold of a coffee in the offices of Blue Remembered Hills Developments plc wasn’t exactly difficult; the management offered all the hot drinks you could get down yourself, free of charge, any time of the working day. Besides, who’d want second-hand coffee, with the attendant risk of contamination from the previous owner’s lipstick and drool?

  She sat down and pulled a blue folder off the top of the pile. Sale of Plot 97, Attractive Drive, Norton St Edgar, Worcs. She yawned.

  Two hypotheses.

  One, she had an enemy. She dismissed that as unlikely. True, BRHD was an office like any other, saturated with petty suspicions, resentments, slights real and imaginary, and generating enough internal politics every week to keep a faculty of historians busy for a decade. But she’d only been there a month, and in that time she’d gone out of her way to be nice to everybody, or at least as nice as she could manage during office hours. She tried to think of anybody who’d displayed any material level of hostility, and failed.

  Two, she had an admirer. Slightly more probable, and she could sort of get her head around the motivation, though she regretted letting that particular train of thought into her mind; but no, she didn’t believe it for a moment. She shrugged and shooed the whole aggravating mystery out of her mind.

  A month already. It hadn’t, she cheerfully admitted to herself, seemed that long. Mostly, she guessed, because they’d kept her busy. Back at Enguerrand & Symes, where business had been slow, t
here’d been the endless, souls-in-torment afternoons when there’d been nothing to do, and she’d sat at her place in the vast, hangar-like conveyancing room, trying to pretend she was productively occupied, surrounded by two dozen others just like her – bored to death, scared stiff of being caught not working by one of the partners. The thought of it made her shudder, and she glanced round, just to make sure it was still there; an office all to herself, with a door. When she thought about it in those terms, the occasional stolen coffee was nothing.

  She finished off the transfer on 97 Attractive Drive and opened the next file down the pile, 208 Green and Pleasant Crescent. She riffled through the tagged-up sheaf of papers, trying to gather exactly what still needed doing, but as far as she could tell it was complete: Land Registry forms, completion statement, PDs, the lot. She shrugged. Apparently her predecessor had been a bit slack about closing files when the job was done, because this wasn’t the first such file she’d come across. She’d never have got away with that at Enguerrands, where failure to close completed files was a court-martial offence.

  Next folder, routine pre-contract enquiries. As she worked her way through them, her mind began to drift, like a carelessly unmoored boat on a swift river. Attractive Drive, she thought, Green and Pleasant Crescent. She’d never seen an actual example of the houses BRHD built; she’d never been anywhere near the slab of Worcestershire in question. At the rate they were going, it wouldn’t be long before the whole county was buried under BRHD concrete, aggregates and specially imported Polish garden topsoil, and the Norton St Edgar conurbation joined Los Angeles in having the dubious distinction of being visible from planetary orbit. Presumably when that happened, it’d be a good thing. After all, people had to live somewhere, and BRHD houses appeared to be quite good value for money. A lot of people thought so, anyway. None of her business, in other words. What mattered was that she had a job at a time when an alarming percentage of the bright, ambitious young people she’d been at law school with were flipping burgers, washing cars, answering phones in call centres or working for the Crown Prosecution Service. Gift horses’ teeth, she thought. My goodness, gift horse, what great big teeth you’ve got. All the better to bite you with, my dear.

  It was curious, she thought, that none of the world’s major religions had ever adopted conveyancing as a spiritual exercise. Prayer, meditation, ganja, transcendental yoga are all very well, but it’s only through the unparalleled tedium of conveyancing that you can attain the sublime separation of mind and body, allowing you to exist for a while as a creature of pure thought, no longer hawsered to earth by the distractions of the physical. The trick, of course, was to be able to maintain control, to surf the wave-tops of boredom-induced death of self and make them take you where you wanted to go. She had to admit she hadn’t quite mastered it yet, but with thirty-two years to go before she retired…

  So, who in their right mind would wander into someone else’s office and drink their coffee? It made no sense. It offended her at the very core of her rational being. As an act of spite it was pretty low key. Someone who had it in for her would have poured the coffee over her keyboard or drenched a file with it. A caffeine addict who couldn’t hold out long enough to get to the kitchen? In her mind’s eye she mapped the floor plan. All but two of the offices on her floor were closer to the kitchen than she was; of those two, one belonged to Barry Tape, who only ever drank tea, and the other housed timid, cow-eyed Velma Hewitt, who jumped out of her skin if you coughed. All right then, someone with a warped sense of humour. But nobody on the second floor had any kind of sense of humour whatsoever.

  Instinctively, she banked and wheeled away from the question, for fear that it might weigh her down and break the trance. The essence of a conveyancing high is its tentative fragility. You’re a leaf floating in the wind, not a 747 battering its way through heavy turbulence over the north Atlantic. Pausing only to glance down at the sheet of paper on the desk in front of her (“Has the property ever been the subject of a Section 44 Order under the Domestic Properties Act 1972?” No, she answered. She had no idea what a Section 44 Order was. As far as she knew, nobody did. But they’d told her at law school that the correct answer to the question was No, so that’s what she wrote) she launched herself back into the network of mental thermals and allowed them to take her weight.

  All right, she told herself, so it was in-house. In-house lawyers, she knew, are basically inferior. Though all her friends had been terribly nice and understanding about it, there was still the unavoidable sense that she’d let herself down; that it was demeaning for a lawyer to work for mere civilians, shambling low-caste creatures without qualifications, who wouldn’t know the rule in Rylands v. Fletcher if it sat on the end of their beds and glowed with a pale blue light. An in-house lawyer can never be an equity partner, a great tawny lion roaring in the long grass. She’d allowed herself to be fitted with a collar with a bell on it, issued with a bowl of milk and a blanket to sleep on – voluntary servitude in return for a little paltry security. Also rather shameful was how little she cared. Quite possibly she wasn’t the great roaring tawny lion type. True, her job here was mindless slog, as fulfilling and socially useful as a hamburger box, but what the hell, it was only work, annoying stuff that had to be got through so she could…

  Could what?

  She pulled up out of that one in a hurry, before the spin turned into a nosedive. Not all conveyancing trips are good experiences. There’s always the danger that you’ll find yourself face to face with something scary or depressing, such as a mirror.

  Now, she thought, would be a good time for the phone to ring. And, much to her surprise, it did.

  The caller was a solicitor in Evesham, and for a moment her heart crumpled with envy. Evesham, garden of England, apple blossom and golden stone soaked for centuries in pale autumn sunlight – not that she’d ever been there, but she’d seen it once on the Antiques Roadshow, a programme she heartily loathed – but, she thought, he’s just a solicitor like me. A mile from his office there may be orchards in bloom, but he spends his days doing this shit, same as I do. “Hello,” she said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

  It was all to do with some piece of paper, a damp-proof course inspection certificate or some such garbage. “You promised me you’d let me have it by the sixteenth,” he said (his voice was high, reedy and annoying; she pictured him as five feet four and looking a bit like William Hague). “Sorry to make a fuss about it, but I do need it before I can get back to the mortgagee.”

  Well, fair enough. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll get it in the post to you tonight.” And then she thought, Hold on. You promised me, but I’ve never heard of you before in my life.

  “All right,” he was saying. “But this time do please make sure. I’m in a chain here.”

  No, she thought, I’m not having that. “Just a moment,” she said.

  Not that she was after an apology, as such. But no, he insisted. He was adamant. He’d spoken to her the day before yesterday; no, not the receptionist, not a message while she was away from her desk. He had a note of the conversation on the file in front of him; Phoned BRHD, re dpc inspection cert. He distinctly recalled speaking to her.

  “But that’s not possible,” she repeated. “I’m sure I’ve never talked to you before.”

  “Yes, you have. On Tuesday. You promised me that certificate. I know it was you. I remember your voice.”

  Her eyebrows shot up like ducks off a dew pond. “Really? Why?”

  “It’s a nice voice.”

  Which shut her up like a clam for the next four seconds, a very long time in that context. “Thank you,” she mumble-squeaked. “But honestly, I don’t remember…”

  Her voice (her nice voice) tailed away and died, and there was another silence, long enough for both of them to grow prize entries for the Chelsea Stalactite Show, and then she said, “I’ll make sure it’s in tonight’s post,” and he said, “Look, if you could possibly see your way to getting it in
tonight’s post,” simultaneously. Then a slightly shorter pause, and she asked, “Anyway, how is Evesham? I mean, is it nice?” and he said it was all right, and somehow, by a gigantic joint effort of will, they managed to kill the phone call off before it could do any more damage.

  Well, she thought, misunderstandings, misunderstandings. Obviously she hadn’t talked to the wretched man; she’d have remembered his voice sure enough, it was what you’d get if Dr Dolittle taught air brakes how to speak. On the other hand, her nice voice. So, logically, she had spoken to him and then forgotten all about it. That was, she supposed, mildly worrying, or she could make it so if she tried hard enough. She could convince herself that it was the early stages of short-term memory loss, or, if this was a movie, it’d be a clue to alert her to a missing day, leading to a storyline involving drug-induced amnesia and the CIA. At other times she might have been tempted, but today she lacked the mental energy and couldn’t be bothered. And anyway, she added to herself, I have got a nice voice, which is probably why people who meet me in the flesh for the first time always look so disappointed.

  Even the best pre-contract enquiries can’t be made to last for ever. She slung the finished form in her out tray and reached for the next file.

  Maybe it was her nice voice (she thought, as she floated through Requisitions on Title on 12 Where the Heart Is Terrace) that had got her the job in the first place. Hard to think what else it could have been. Sure, she was competent, she could do the work. Being able to do the work wasn’t the most stringent of criteria. But she knew for a fact that she’d been up against two dozen other applicants for the job, times being hard in the lawyering biz these days, and the specimens she’d met in the waiting room when she came in for interview had been vastly more impressive than her, at least in her opinion. Of course, a nice voice is a valuable asset. It can take you a long way – in radio, say, or when it comes to marrying a blind millionaire. True, a lot of her work was done over the phone, so it was probably just as well that the Voice of BRHD didn’t sound like a ferret in a blender. She weighed the argument and found it wanting. Another mystery; and that was the Recs on Title done, and that’s how we get through the day.