The Outsorcerer's Apprentice

by Tom Holt

  She shook her head, because nothing is entirely perfect. Some things, though, and some moments come pretty damn close. But there was one thing she had to ask, before she let her heart fly away. “Food,” she said.

  “What? Oh, yes, good idea, I’m starved. Do you know anywhere round here that’s good and not too—?”

  “You don’t like strange food, do you?” she asked.

  “Strange like how, exactly?”

  She fought the blush and the blush won. “Sort of, oh I don’t know, unusual things with onions?”

  He frowned, then shook his head. “I’m more a bread-cheese-and-porridge sort of man myself,” he said. “Of course, you eat what you can get when you’re on the road all the time.”

  That was enough. She gave him a smile you could’ve sunbathed in and tucked her arm round his. “The Blue Boar, in the village,” she said decisively, “and it’s Wednesday, so it’s buy-one-get-one-free on pease pottage with bits of leftover sausage.” She looked up into his eyes. “Show you the way there if you like.”

  Walk a mile in another man’s shoes, the saying goes, and you’ll understand him. Not true. If it was, Benny reflected sadly as his fingers combed the leaf mould, I’d understand Uncle Gordon better than anyone, and I don’t.

  Benny had walked many a mile in his uncle’s footwear, mostly because he and Uncle happened to take the same shoe size, and Benny didn’t really care about what he put on his feet so long as they didn’t hurt and he didn’t have to pay money for them. Besides, Uncle had dozens of pairs of shoes, many of which he’d only ever worn once. You wouldn’t think to look at him that Uncle Gordon was a shoe addict, but he was; not in the Imelda Marcos league, perhaps, but not a hell of a long way short of it. Benny had no idea why, though maybe it was because Uncle was a short man with huge feet. In any event, it was a useful eccentricity, most of the time.

  His fingers closed on something; about the right size, and sort of rectangular. He scrabbled like a dog and came up with a flat, squareish stone. He swore and threw it into the bushes.

  Maybe, Benny reflected sourly, it’s all God’s way of punishing me for borrowing Uncle’s shoes without asking; because it was in a shoe box, wedged in along with all the others at the bottom of a wardrobe, that Benny had found the YouSpace stuff. And if he hadn’t been snooping where he had no business to be, he wouldn’t be stuck here now.

  The contents of the box, jammed into the far corner of his uncle’s closet, couldn’t have been more unpromising if they’d tried. An empty beer bottle, and a wodge of printouts stapled together in the top right-hand corner, and that was all—

  Congratulations!

  He could so easily have put the lid back on the box and the box back where he’d found it, and gone on to lead a normal, happy life. But it hadn’t worked out like that. He’d happened to catch sight of a familiar name on the first page of the printout; Professor Pieter van Goyen, the greatest particle physicist since Meitner, Bethe and Hahn, who’d vanished in unexplained circumstances a few years ago. Van Goyen was one of his heroes, and seeing his name on a sheet of paper found in a shoebox had snagged his curiosity, so he’d read on.

  Congratulations! You’re now the proud, incredibly privileged owner of the YouSpace XP3000 personal multiverse interface and home entertainment centre. Your new YouSpace XP3000 will unlock the gateway to an infinity of impossibly exciting and stimulating experiences. The only limit is your imagination.

  Yes. Well.

  The YouSpace XP3000, designed by Professor Pieter van Goyen of Leiden,

  Ah.

  … is an omniphasic Multiverse portal, capable of transporting you to any or all of the alternate realities that make up the Multiverse. Intuitive targeting software and state-of-the-art Heisenberg compensators mean that all you have to do is think of where you’d like to go, and you’re instantly there. It’s as simple as that.

  All you’ll need to operate your YouSpace XP3000 personal multiverse interface is a dream–and a doughnut.

  Oink?

  Simply lift the doughnut (which in this context acts as a Sonderberg phase-base converter/condenser lens) flat side on, until you’re looking straight through the hole in the middle. Visualise, as precisely as possible, the alternate universe you would like to visit. Before you know it, you’ll be there!

  The YouSpace XP3000 isn’t a virtual reality experience–it’s real reality. When you arrive at your chosen destination, you’ll actually be there, in a guaranteed 100% genuine functional alternate universe, every bit as real as the one you’ve just come from. That’s what makes the YouSpace experience so intense and so unique. Real goblins; real space aliens; real fairy princesses. It’s the best possible way to discover the real you. By crossing through the hyperdimensional interface between the infinite number of potential spatio-temporal divergency streams, your dreams really will come true. And remember; in an infinite multiverse, everything is possible!

  WARNING—

  He’d skipped that bit, because everyone knows that the stuff headed WARNING in users’ manuals is just a load of guff put in there by the lawyers–always wear safety glasses, consult your doctor, don’t drive or operate heavy machinery, may contain traces of carbon/silicon/hydrogen/oxygen/nuts, never attempt to use this hammer to drive in nails, the surgeon general has determined that decapitation may be injurious to health, all that garbage. He carried on reading the next section, headed Where Would YOU Like To Go?; and that, no question about it, had been his undoing.

  Even now, he wasn’t entirely sure that the YouSpace device was Van Goyen’s invention, as the brochure had claimed. On the one hand, the concept behind it bore all the hallmarks of Van Goyen’s anarchic, chaotic, lightning-bolt genius. On the other hand, if it really had been a Van Goyen artefact, he couldn’t help thinking it would’ve worked a bit better—

  No, be fair. It worked perfectly. Once you’d charged up the bottle with a static supersymmetric dark matter field (simple-to-follow instructions on here and here of the printout) and popped into the baker’s for a doughnut, the YouSpace 2.1 Home Entertainment Center did exactly what it promised to do. Simply hold the doughnut up to your eye and look through it, and the YouSpace effect would transport you to the alternative reality of your choice, where you could relax and engage in a wide range of invigorating leisure activities before doughnutting back in exactly the same way you’d arrived, to find that while you’d been away, real time had stood still. Thus, you could spend a year as the only male in a universe of gullible, short-sighted nymphomaniacs and be back before the kettle you put on just before you left had had a chance to boil. Or, if you were just the right sort of idiot, you could escape into a universe of myth and magic, to act out your fantasies and make your wildest dreams come true—

  And get stuck there. Oh boy.

  Not for the first time, he cursed himself for not taking better precautions beforehand. Whoever designed YouSpace 2.1 had chosen doughnuts, bagels, Cheerios, fried onion rings and other perforated foodstuffs as transdimensional portals because they were omnicultural; go wherever and whenever you choose in the Multiverse and the one thing you can rely on getting hold of easily and without fuss, in practically every permutation of reality, is food with a hole in it. It’s a fundamental law of sociophysics, apparently, holding true in 99.969 per cent of environments capable of supporting carbon-based, oxygen-breathing life. You’d have to be really, really unlucky—

  Yes. Well.

  He looked up, and the branches of the odd-shaped tree cast dappled shadows on his face. This was quite definitely the place where he’d dropped his phone, and he’d searched it with infinite care. Therefore, if the phone wasn’t still here, it had to be because someone (or something; remember where you are) had picked it up. And if it hadn’t been the girl—

  Unless she had picked it up and not made the connection in her mind between the alien object and the man she’d been talking to; in which case, she must have it somewhere, unless she’d simply thrown it away, or sold it
in the market as a curio. There was nothing for it. He’d have to find her again and ask her, straight out; and if she came out swinging, at least this time he’d be prepared, and could try and get out of the way.

  99.969 per cent. There, now.

  He stood up and brushed decomposing leaves off his trouser knees. There remained the question of what the fateful shoebox had been doing in Uncle Gordon’s wardrobe in the first place. He’d given it a fair amount of thought, and had formed various hypotheses, not all of them equally satisfactory. For example, there was straightforward statistical analysis. Such a large proportion of the world’s shoeboxes had made their way to Uncle’s closet, so why not this one? Answer, because it didn’t contain shoes. Uncle had acquired the YouSpace device, and hidden it away where nobody, no sane person, would go looking for it. But − Uncle Gordon day-tripping in Fantasyland? The other one, when pulled, is a campanological delight. Someone had put it there as a trap–some enemy, wishing to harm Uncle Gordon and unwilling, on ethical or legal grounds, to use a simple bomb. But who’d want to hurt Uncle? Someone had hidden it there, one shoebox among so very many, intending to return and collect it later. But the perimeter of Uncle’s house was better alarmed and fortified than the White House, so that wasn’t very likely. Finally; Uncle had bought the horrible thing as a present for Benny’s birthday. It was the most likely explanation, and if true, it had been a sweet thought, but on balance, he’d have preferred socks. You can’t have too many socks, and a sock, if used responsibly, is unlikely to strand you in an existential no-man’s-land with no hope of escape.

  Something rustled in the bushes nearby, and he whimpered. The narrative-dynamic operating system that ran this place could easily have decided that this would be a good time for Prince Florizel to have a thrilling adventure with a terrifying mythical beast, whose head he could cut off and bear home in triumph to impress the chicks with. That was the way it thought, apparently, and he was sick of it. His hand crept unwillingly to the hilt of the sword that dangled from his waist, undrawn, ever since he’d got here; it was a bloody nuisance, banging against his ankle and tripping him up, and for two pins he’d have binned it long ago, if there were any bins in this godforsaken place, which there weren’t. Now, he reflected wretchedly, it might well be the only thing between him and an untimely death. In which case, he was probably screwed—

  The bushes parted, and out trotted a unicorn.

  They aren’t really horses. Genetically, they are in fact considerably closer to zebras, as goblin scientists discovered as part of their enquiries into the recent processed meat scandal, following on from the discovery of unicorn DNA in products branded as 100 per cent horse. But they’re pure white, and they have a golden horn sticking out of their noses, and they’re almost unbearably cute, and almost Elflike in their pickiness about who they condescend to associate with. This one had little blue eyes under ridiculously long eyelashes, and was chewing a nettle. It looked at Benny, ears back, then ears forward. It swished its tail appealingly, and its jaws worked in that characteristic rotary motion. It didn’t seem the least bit frightened.

  Benny looked at it and decided that it was probably not going to attack, although that didn’t mean there was no cause for concern. One careless move with that big golden spike and he’d be kebabbed beyond medical help. “There now,” he said, in a strained talking-to-kids-and-animals voice. “Nice, um.”

  The unicorn took a few dainty steps towards him, then sat down, carefully folding its knees, and rolled over onto its side, the epitome of love and trust. That reminded Benny of one of the things everybody knows about unicorns, and he thought; yes, thank you, no need to rub it in, and in any case it’s none of your damn—

  A twig cracked. The unicorn lifted its head, but stayed where it was, curled up at Benny’s feet. Three men dressed all in green came out onto the road. Two had spears, and one was carrying a crossbow. They looked at the unicorn, then at Benny.

  “Oops,” said the crossbowman. “Sorry, didn’t see you there, Your Highness.”

  They were grinning. One of them sniggered. “That’s perfectly all right,” Benny said, with all the dignity he could muster. “You’re, um, huntsmen, right?”

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “That must be a very interesting job.”

  “Has its moments, Your Highness.” And this, to judge by the smirks on their faces, was one of them. Benny breathed out hard through his nose and forced a smile. “Well, don’t let me hinder you,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve got lots to do, somewhere else.”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” said the huntsman, backing away. “Come on, lads, nothing to see here.” He bowed, then stepped back into the undergrowth, followed by his two companions. A little later, Benny heard one of them say, “But that means he must be a—”, followed by the cracking of a large twig.

  Benny looked at the unicorn. Then he picked up a stone and threw it. He missed. The unicorn gazed at him adoringly. He swore, and sat down on the ground with his head in his hands. Act out your wildest fantasies. Yeah, right.

  99.969 per cent. Someone up there must really hate me.

  Or–the thought hit him like a meteorite, digging a huge crater in his world view and exterminating the dinosaurs of certainty–someone up there must really like me a lot; enough to want to keep me here, possibly for ever and ever. Enough to go to all the trouble and expense of inculcating into the heads of the locals a superstitious dread of food with a hole in the middle. He thought about that. How, unless it had been deliberately introduced, would a taboo like that get started in the first place? But as a snare, or a security measure—He suddenly thought about the hawk that had snatched his precious doughnut. Did hawks usually do stuff like that? Seagulls, yes, and dogs, and some cats. But hawks? If only he had his phone, Wikipedia would tell him in a flash. As it was—

  He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the idea out through his ear. Impossible. For one thing, that sort of manipulation takes time, you’d need generations to implant a superstition that deeply. True, but to a YouSpace user, time spent Somewhere Else doesn’t pass back home; you could doughnut in, spend a thousand years building a culture and a civilisation from scratch, and be back where you started from before your coffee went cold. Yes, but who would bother? Who might possibly have that much of a vested interest in—?

  The unicorn stood up. It was looking at him out of those great big gormless blue eyes. “Not now,” he snapped, “I’m thinking,” but the unicorn continued to stare, making rational thought impossible. He sighed, turned to face it and said, “What?”

  The unicorn fluttered its ridiculous eyelashes. Then, with the tip of its delicate hoof, it pawed at the ground.

  “What?” Benny demanded. “You want to go toilet?”

  The unicorn pawed again; and this time, Benny could see that it had traced a pattern in the leaf mould. A circle; no, two concentric circles, a big one with a little one inside. The shape of a—

  “Oh come on,” Benny said. The unicorn tossed its head, so that for a moment its mane floated like sea spray; then it shuffled over a bit to a fresh patch of leaf mould and started again; first a big circle, then a smaller one inside. It gave the impression that it was prepared to go on doing it all day, if necessary.

  I should be excited, Benny thought. I should be filled with fragile hope and wild joy. Instead–he ran a quick analysis protocol, and the result came back; insulted. Yes, quite. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though he was awash with alternative courses of action. He cleared his throat.

  “Hello, unicorn,” he said.

  Flutter, flutter, went the eyelashes. Bat, bat.

  He pointed at the circles in the mould. “Doughnut.”

  Bat, bat, flutter. Dear God, he thought. No wonder Barbie loves these creatures. “You know where I can find a doughnut.”

  Flutter, flutter, bat, flutter. “Got you. Right, can you take me there?”

  Flutter. Bat.

  “Is that a yes or a no?” />
  Flut.

  Shouting won’t help, he told himself. There’s no need to shout. “Hey!” he shouted. The unicorn opened its eyes wide and backed away a step or two; and that’s me told, Benny reflected. “Nice unicorn,” he said, and tried to find a smile from somewhere. That made the unicorn back away further, and he could see its point. “Nice unicorn. Take me to your doughnut. Please?”

  The unicorn tossed its mane again, and swished its tail. It was deciding whether to forgive him, which was so unfair. Never mind. If it took him to a doughnut, and the doughnut took him home, none of it would matter; he could get on with his revision, take his exam, tell the necessary lies and get his first-class honours degree, and never have to think about Prince Florizel or unicorns or anything of the sort ever again. So: “Nice unicorn. I’m sorry I shouted, and I think your mane looks really pretty, and please can you show me where the doughnut is? Please?”

  Slowly the unicorn arched its neck, then solemnly lowered its head in an unmistakable nod. Yes!, Danny thought, and took a slow step forward—

  Which was just as well, because if he’d stayed where he was, the arrow that snaked through the air and buried itself up to the socket in a tree would have hit him, and that would have been that. As it was, he felt a blast of air like you get from one of those pocket electric fans, and found himself staring at a quivering arrowshaft, about four inches from his nose. By the time he’d snapped out of it, the unicorn had bolted.

  “Hey!” he yelled, and was about to run after it when the bushes rustled and out jumped six goblins. He froze.

  “Oops,” grunted the lead goblin, in the act of nocking an arrow on his bowstring. “Sorry, squire, didn’t see you there.”

  The goblin was about five feet tall, hunchbacked, NFL-shouldered, its huge head attached to its massive chest by the shortest neck ever. It had curly tusks at the corners of its mouth, ears like fried eggs and no perceptible nose; and the old joke, so how does it smell? Terrible, was no more than a statement of fact. Benny tried to say something, but his jaw had gone numb.