The Outsorcerer's Apprentice

by Tom Holt

  The conductor tapped his baton against his music stand, and the musicians came to attention. As he lifted the baton for the first weird sounding notes, Yglaine noticed out of the corner of her eye that there was a woman standing next to him, and she wasn’t holding any sort of musical instrument. Odd; but maybe she was there to turn the maestro’s pages for him. No time to speculate about that now, though. She touched catgut to catgut, and began to play.

  Maybe she struggled just a little to begin with, what with the music being so unfamiliar and strange, not to mention the pressure of the occasion, but within a few dozen bars she’d managed to let go of all outside concerns and immerse herself soul-deep in her performance. The violin became a living thing in her hands, and the music–actually not so bad once you got used to it–unfolded before her, guiding her along enchanted paths of mathematical intervals and progressions to its inevitable, cathartic conclusion. When the last note had died away, she sighed softly, laid down her violin and took the score from her music stand—

  They were all looking at her. Sheepishly, trying desperately not to blush, she put it back.

  A few moments of perfect quiet and stillness, and then the conductor tapped the stand and raised his baton. And then they played it all again.

  Well, she told herself, obviously it wasn’t right the first time, and after all, this is the Youth Ensemble, where perfection is simply a starting point. She let the music envelop her, and before she was aware of any time having passed, they’d reached the end. This time, she didn’t move. After a few moments of perfect quiet and stillness, the conductor tapped the stand and raised his baton, and they played it again. And again. And again—

  At some point (the sixth, or maybe the seventh time), it occurred to her to wonder what the woman standing next to the conductor was actually there for. She didn’t turn pages. She just stood. Also, what was the function of the large brown circular thing with a hole in the middle, like a wheel with an extremely fat rim and no spokes, that hung from the lowest branch of the nearest miramar tree? Not that it was her place to question anything, but—

  A strident brr-brr noise, loud as a shout, cut across the music. Immediately, the conductor lifted his baton for silence. Yglaine froze in mid-note. Brr-brr again; then a click, and then the woman next to the conductor seemed to come to life. Her eyes opened, and, in the most beautiful voice Yglaine had ever heard, she said, “Thank you for calling Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits. There’s no one here to take your call right now, please hold.” And then the conductor’s baton came down with a swish, and everybody started playing again, exactly where they’d left off.

  Just a moment, she thought.

  The current of the music was still pulling her along, driving her aching hands (she’d never played so many notes in one day before), but her mind was floating free or, more accurately, drowning. What did it mean? Was it avant-garde and experimental? There was nothing in the score to indicate vocals—

  That brr-brr again. The baton lifted and froze; dead silence. And the woman said, “Your call is important to us, please hold,” and then they all carried on, this time right through to the end, after which they played it again. Exactly the same, or almost exactly; three interruptions this time, and in different places.

  Ten hours later, numb-fingered, exhausted and horribly bewildered, Yglaine set off homewards through the darkling wood. The music was still playing–a night shift had taken over, though the woman with the beautiful voice had stayed at her post, grey-lipped with fatigue but motionless, like a mighty oak–and Yglaine could hear it in the distance for quite some time. Even when she could no longer distinguish the music from the soft sigh of the wind in the treetops, it seemed to be repeating over and over again in her head.

  What did it mean? The second message wasn’t so bad. You could interpret it as the composer’s apostrophe to Lintuvuviel, Goddess of Music, the Arts and Literary Criticism; your call, that fateful summons to join the lonely, exalted few, is important to us, please hold − hold what? The line against the darkness of egalitarian barbarism, presumably, something like that. But the first message–there’s no one here to take your call right now. It scanned, she noted, a perfect iambic pentameter, so maybe it was a quotation; a searing comment on the new philistinism rampant in Elvenhome, perhaps, ever since the High Council had slashed subsidies to the Arts down to a pitiful 86 per cent of GDP. Fair enough. But who was Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, and why had she never heard of Her before?

  Still, she’d made her debut with the Youth Ensemble, and she’d done all right. That should have been enough, more than enough, the proudest day of her life; and here she was, fretting herself to death on account of some abstruse allusion that had gone over her head. And nobody had said, “Don’t bother coming back tomorrow.” So she’d definitely got the job; which meant security, tenure, a job for life. There wasn’t a single Elf in the Forest who wouldn’t give her ear-points for an outcome like that.

  For life; and, since Elves are practically immortal, that was likely to be a long, long time. Would they be playing something different tomorrow? She sincerely hoped so, logic demanded that they would, but nobody had said anything, let alone handed her a score to read through overnight. What if–the very idea was absurd, but what if she was now committed to spending the rest of practically Eternity playing the first movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in an endless loop, interrupted only by the brr-brr noise and the motionless woman’s beautiful voice?

  Gosh, she thought. Lucky me. But—

  Don’t be silly, she rebuked herself. Think about it. After all, what purpose would endlessly repeating music possibly serve?

  Quite.

  There was another slight earthquake as she walked the last mile to her home in the high branches of the third marshmallorn tree from the left in Exquisite Row, but she ignored it.

  There was a small ante-room just behind the Royal Throne in the great Hall of the palace, and Florizel had claimed it as his own. He’d had to fight like crazy. The Master of the Rolls had been using it to store Rolls in, and no sooner had Florizel won the long, savage battle to get him to put them somewhere else than the housekeeper swooped and filled it with buckets and mops. When, after a war that made the primordial strife of dwarf and goblin seem like a free and frank exchange of views, he’d got rid of all her clutter, the high priest had started carpet-bombing him with hints about what a nice little chancel it’d make, with its perfectly square proportions and north-facing windows. He’d finally resolved that by painting a sign reading DANGER–STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND and hanging it on the doorknob. Endearingly, the inhabitants of the palace tended to believe what they read, so that was all right.

  It had been worth all the aggravation, because Florizel needed that room. It was the only confined space in the whole thirty-acre complex with a door with a bolt on the inside.

  Having shot the bolt, and wedged a chair under it just to be on the safe side, Florizel walked across the otherwise empty floor to the only piece of furniture in the room; a small, plain table, on which rested a small, plain wooden box. Its lid was fastened with a tiny silver padlock and hasp, and from his pocket Florizel drew a tiny silver key on a fine silver chain. The lock opened with a soft click, and he lifted the lid.

  Inside was a doughnut.

  The box was made of cedarwood, which is supposed to keep things fresh. It doesn’t work with doughnuts. This particular example was so stale that if it got dropped on the floor, it would probably shatter like glass. But that was all right, because the doughnut wasn’t for eating. It was the way home.

  Also, strictly speaking, it didn’t exist; at least, its existence in that quadrifurcated sub-version of reality (see under “multiverse theory”, passim) was problematic, to say the least. It had come a very long way to end up in the cedarwood box. It had originally been baked in a factory on the outskirts of south London, and supplied to a catering outlet on the platform of Paddington station. The Royal Palace had a map-room two hundred yar
ds square, on whose shelves you could find a copy of every map, chart and atlas ever drawn, but you wouldn’t find Paddington or London marked on any of them. The doughnut, like Florizel himself, was from Somewhere Else.

  He lifted it carefully out of the box, using only his fingertips. He wasn’t sure what would happen if any harm came to it. He reassured himself with the thought that he could always cajole the royal kitchens into making him a replica–they had doughnuts over here, but only the solid kind, with jam, not the jamless hole-in-the-middle sort; still, how hard could it be? Even so, there lurked at the back of his mind the dreadful thought that a locally sourced version might not work, and then where would he be?

  Answer; here. For ever and ever. Eek.

  Carefully, therefore, he lifted the doughnut until it was more or less level with his nose. He took a moment to clear his mind of extraneous thoughts, then stared earnestly into the hole in the middle of the doughnut. For a split second, nothing happened; and then—

  As Nietzsche would have put it; if you gaze too long into the hole in the middle of a doughnut, the hole in the middle of a doughnut gazes into you. He felt its single black eye upon him, looking past the outward show of his appearance, the transitory illusions of the flesh, deep into his soul, his inner being, that small part of him that was eternal and true. Ah, it seemed to say, there you are. And what are you doing here?

  And then he wasn’t; not there, at any rate. The bare stone walls of the ante-room vanished, and he found himself in another place, exactly the same but totally different. The room was square, the walls were bare stone, the only furniture was a table with a box on it and a chair, wedged against the bolted door. But he knew this room. It was the room above his Uncle Gordon’s garage, and he was home.

  He put the doughnut carefully down and glanced at his watch: seventeen minutes past eleven, on Friday 16 April. When he’d last looked into the doughnut–six months ago, his time-lagged brain shrieked at him, but he ignored the poor, sad thing–it had been fourteen minutes past eleven, on Friday 16 April. He frowned. He’d lost two minutes. That shouldn’t have happened.

  Ah well. He made a mental note to fret about it later. Meanwhile, he had other things to think about. Already, as he locked the doughnut away in the old tin deed-box and pocketed the key, the other place and being Florizel were evaporating from his mind like spilt petrol on a warm forecourt. He felt the urge to fight, to cling on, but it was no use; like trying to snatch a sodden piece of paper out of someone’s hand. Besides, he decided, it probably wasn’t healthy to hold on, now that he was back home. He’d had his fun. Duty called.

  He clattered down the stairs out onto the lawn and remembered, just too late, that it was pouring with rain. He ran to the back door, shook rain out of his hair like a dog and scuttled into the living room. His revision notes were exactly where he’d left them, five minutes earlier. To judge from the respective sizes of the piles of notes, To Do and Done, he was making excellent progress and nicely on schedule. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember a damn thing about whatever it was he was supposed to be revising—

  He looked at the nearest sheet of paper. Ah yes, physics; the branch of natural philosophy that deals with observed phenomena, as distinct from alchemy, which is mixing things together until they explode. Um. He had an idea that there was rather more to it than that.

  He sat down and picked up a sheaf of paper. In two weeks, he’d be sitting his final exams at Uni, and right now, with his state of mind, he’d have difficulty getting his head around the notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun. So maybe using YouSpace as a means of mid-revision relaxation hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

  He blinked, and when he opened his eyes something was different. He looked at the notes. Can the dual resonance model be used to explain strong interactions in particle physics? Discuss, with reference to Witten, Hawking, Maldacena and Suskind. He smiled. Piece of cake. It was all coming back.

  He yawned. He was hungry. Reasonably enough; he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. More to the point, his body in this continuum hadn’t eaten anything for six months. He took a moment to consider that, identified at least two paradoxes that he’d have to give some serious thought to when he had five minutes, and shrugged them away, as if slipping out of a soaking wet coat. First some food, then revision, and then maybe, if he still had the energy, he could think about stuff like that.

  He wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. It’s a curious thing about youth, the incredible resilience of its innate ability to suspend disbelief. Its natural credulity fades, but only gradually, and only where the harsh light of evidence and peer review manages to penetrate. Thus it was that, although it was now over ten years since he’d stopped believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, a part of him was still convinced that there was some supernatural agency responsible for keeping the fridge well stocked with nibbles, and that if he opened the door and found nothing in there except milk and lettuce, it was someone else’s fault. True, it didn’t help that he’d just spent the last six months/two minutes in a place where the buttery was always replete with Simnel cakes and cold roast partridge, but even so.

  Eventually, after a certain amount of archaeology in the kitchen cupboards, he found a tin of Ambrosia rice pudding and, more eventually still, a tin-opener. Hardly what he’d become accustomed to, but it’d have to do. He went back to the living room, grabbed a fistful of notes, propped his feet up on the sofa and began to read.

  Maybe it was because of his holiday; the break, the radical shift in perspective, the degree to which his mind’s eye had become acclimatised to the light of a very different sun. Whatever it was, he quickly became aware that there was something wrong with his notes. They didn’t make sense. A great deal of the stuff in them was simply untrue. He put the notes down, closed his eyes, counted to ten, looked at them again. No, still wrong. Take, for example, all this guff about E equalling mc2. Or the inane witterings of the man Heisenberg–he checked his watch just to make sure, but there was no mistake; April Fool’s had been fifteen days ago, so it couldn’t be that. For crying out loud, he thought, as he considered the idiotic ramblings of Jordan, Hilbert and Bose, I could disprove the whole lot of this in two minutes with the back of an envelope and a pencil.

  Three minutes later, he had. Then he sat and squinted at what he’d written. Um, he thought.

  The thing of it is, equations can’t lie. Unlike humans, with their complex and subtle structures of periphrasis and euphemism, they can’t make you believe one thing while presenting something quite other as unassailable fact. X either equals Y or it doesn’t. So; if his maths was right (and he checked it twice, and it was), no other conclusion was tenable but that everything he’d been taught over the past three years, everything that everyone else believed, everything he was about to be examined on in a fortnight’s time was basically wrong. No nuances to pull over anyone’s eyes, no comfy grey areas to hide in. Newton, Einstein and Hawking had got it wrong. They couldn’t have been more deluded if they’d believed the world was a flat dish where babies are delivered by storks. And he could prove it. And—

  But it was true.

  Indeed. And whoever said the truth shall set you free had clearly never had a live, toxic, radioactive, ticking-with-the-pin-out truth dumped in his lap. Right now, the truth was an arm round his windpipe, pinning him to his chair, unable to move. In two weeks, he’d have to sit down in an examination hall and either scribble out a whole load of lies or demonstrate in a few cogent lines of calculus that the examiners were gullible idiots. And wouldn’t they just love him for that. Oh yes.

  Fine, he thought, I’ll lie. After all, presidents and prime ministers do it, so it must be all right, mustn’t it? And then, after I’ve got my bit of paper from the vice-chancellor, I’ll tell the truth to the world, and everybody will say how clever I am. Meanwhile—

  It was no good. He had to tell someone. The sheer magnitude of the discovery was so vast
that unless he communicated it out of his head, it’d bust his skull open like a volcano. He ran through his various lecturers and tutors; brilliant men and women all of them, but open-minded and receptive to new ideas? Well, maybe not. All right, then, how about his friends? A much shorter list to consider; and besides, they wouldn’t do, it had to be a grown-up or it wouldn’t count. Put like that, the decision was simple. It’d have to be Uncle Gordon.

  Oh well. He felt in his pocket for his phone, but it wasn’t there. Strange. But he didn’t have time to worry about that now. He used the land line, and dialled the number.

  Uncle was a long time picking up; presumably he was in a business meeting or something. Some people have no consideration. Eventually, there was a click and a familiar voice said, “Yes?”

  “Oh, hi, Uncle Gordon, it’s me.”

  “Of course it is. What do you want?”

  “Well, it’s like this. I think I may have disproved the laws of thermodynamics.”

  Slight pause. “Say again.”

  “The laws of thermodynamics. Also the general theory of relativity, the law of conservation of matter-oblique-energy, Hooke’s Law, Boyle’s Law—”

  “All right. I’ll—”

  “Bell’s theorem, Ehrenfest’s theorem, Dalton’s law of partial pressure, Gauss’s principle of least restraint—”

  “All right. I’ll be right there. Don’t touch anything.”