by Tom Holt
“Excuse me,” he said, with a very faint East Midlands accent, “but is this the Realms of Transcendent Bliss?”
The Club stayed exactly where it was. “Norman,” hissed Derek. “Do something.”
But Norman didn’t seem to have heard him. He was preoccupied. It’s notoriously hard, of course, for someone to know what he really looks like; but Norman had a horrible feeling that the young man standing on the bench bore a striking resemblance to himself, about forty years ago, but with even worse dress sense. As if in a dream, he stared at the stranger and said, “Who are you?”
“Um,” the stranger replied. “Only, you see, I was trying to get to the Blessed Realms but I don’t actually know what they look like, so I don’t know if I’m actually there—” He registered the expressions on the Club’s faces, and his shoulders slumped a little. “I’m not, am I?”
“I don’t know,” said Clive. “You’re seven miles from Gainsborough on the A361 if that’s any help.” He paused, then added, “Are you a goblin?”
“Um.” The young man was gazing round the room again, and Norman suddenly realised he was looking for a door. “Stop him,” he yelled, but a split second too late. The young man dropped the weapons, flexed his knees, then launched himself off the bench in the direction of the doorway. Clearly he’d overestimated the power of his legs, because he landed on the concrete floor halfway to the door with a terrific crash. George made a distinctly half-hearted attempt at grabbing hold of him, which came nowhere close; then he scrambled to his feet, bolted through the door and slammed it behind him.
The Club stood for a while, listening as the sound of running flip-flops died away down the corridor outside. Then there was dead silence for a while. Then Clive said, “You know what?”
Norman turned and looked at him. “What?”
“I think we may have been going at this entirely the wrong way,” Clive said. “Look, instead of all this faffing around, why don’t we just replace the entire cylinder head assembly, bang in a new clutch, and have done with it?”
Norman was looking at the bench where the young man had first appeared. There were eight parallel lines scored in the varnish, almost like claw-marks, at the place where whatever-it-was had first appeared. He looked away with an effort and nodded twice. “I think you could be on to something there,” he said.
The next day the laboratory was boarded up, some men came to put up a twelve-foot razor-wire fence all round the perimeter, and Clive found a Norton cylinder head and clutch assembly on eBay for only £325 plus shipping. So that was all right.
He ran until he could run no more, then dragged himself into the middle of a dense thorn hedge, closed his eyes, and passed out.
When he came to it was pitch dark, and he found to his horror that he could barely see. For a moment he thought it must be a side-effect of the magic, until he realised that he had human eyes now, and humans have notoriously dreadful night vision. Also pathetic flabby little legs, ridiculously thin skin and absolutely no stamina. He moaned softly, and pulled thorns out of the palms of his hands.
“I am not a human,” he told himself. It was vitally important to remind himself of this, because the human body seemed determined to override his memory. “I am not a human. I’m a goblin.”
The ears that heard him say it didn’t seem terribly convinced. They were human ears, rounded, hairless, floppy; to begin with, it had felt like they were stuffed with bog-cotton, until he realised that that was as good as human hearing got, and they patently didn’t want to listen to what he had to say about his identity. Don’t be silly, they seemed to be telling him. Goblin? The very idea.
“I’m a goblin,” he repeated stubbornly. “My name is Ozork, I was spawned in Number Seven vat in the Consolidated Central Hatchery on the—” He froze. He couldn’t even remember his hatchday. Either the magic was stronger than he’d been led to believe, or he’d overdone it badly. That’s what you get, he reflected bitterly, for using black market spells bought from a stranger in a tavern. And if this really was the Realms of Transcendent Bliss, you could stick them where the Horrible Yellow Face doesn’t shine.
Never mind, he told himself. I don’t know where I am, and I appear to have morphed into a human, but at least I’m out of Goblinland. He clung to that thought for a moment, and it gave him strength. Then, using every remaining shred of his mental clarity, he tried to figure out what he could about where he was and what had happened.
A human district, evidently. Furthermore, he was inclined to believe, a district where they didn’t get many goblins. The looks on their faces hadn’t been the sort he was used to; no hatred, not really very much fear, more a kind of stunned bewilderment, and one of them had said, Are you a goblin? in a manner that suggested that he’d never seen one before, didn’t believe they existed, still wasn’t entirely sure even though he’d seen one. A remote human district, then, probably a very long way away from the Mountains–come to think of it, he hadn’t seen them on the skyline while he was running away; he’d never been anywhere where the Mountains didn’t dominate the skyline. A very remote human district, then, presumably far out in the east or the west of the Realms; a place where humans built huge stone houses with hard black roads, and wore outlandish clothes, and could look at a goblin without wetting themselves and reaching for the nearest weapon.
At this point it occurred to him that being back in Goblinland wouldn’t be such a terrible thing after all.
Which was a pity, because as far as he knew it was strictly a one-way magic. Look through the middle of the peculiar circular bun, said the man in the tavern, and make a wish, and there you’ll be. Nothing in the instructions about coming back. Which, at the time, hadn’t bothered him in the least, because all he’d wanted was to journey to the Realms of Transcendent Bliss, or at any rate as far from Goblinland as he could get. A good idea at the time, in other words.
All the while, his pitifully inefficient human ears were straining for any sound that might herald the approach of large carnivorous animals. He hadn’t heard any yet, but given his new hardware handicap, that didn’t mean anything. What he could hear was a low but constant background hum, like the noise of a terrifyingly large swarm of bees. He tried to pin down which direction it was coming from, but as far as he could tell it was coming from all sides–surrounded by millions and millions of bees, he thought, and chances were that the human immune system was as rubbishy as all its other functions; one sting from a bee, he’d probably go down like a felled tree. The magic will change you so that you blend in perfectly with your surroundings, said the man in the pub. At the time, he’d regarded that as a major point in its favour. Idiot.
Even so, he told himself; remember why you did this. You can still remember that, can’t you?
Those horrible bees. What sort of bee swarmed in the middle of the night?
The irony was, of course, that it was his dissatisfaction with goblins and Goblinkind that had driven him to this–dissatisfaction, what a feeble word, but perhaps it was the strongest that this useless human brain could process. Irony, or you could see it as a kind of savage justice. Was that possible? Couldn’t you be a better kind of goblin without degenerating into a human? Because that was all he’d wanted; to get away from the crassness, the coarseness, the stupidity of his fellow goblins, to a place where he’d be free of all that, free to be himself, to evolve as he knew he could, if only—
Something sharp was sticking into his leg. He shifted a bit, which only made it worse. How could anyone be expected to put up with this hateful, humiliating frailty? Everything hurt; he could barely see, hear or smell, it was liking having a really bad cold, the brain was wired all wrong so that he had to struggle to call up basic words and simple concepts, and this bundle of junk was supposed to be his home and his toolkit as he faced an unknown and inexplicable new world. He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand; no tusks, for crying out loud, how was he supposed to defend himself or crunch up bones? As for
his claws, they appeared to have shrunk down into little paper-thin decorations on the ends of his feeble, naked fingers–five fingers, two missing, oh my God, I’ve been mutilated. He felt something wet dribble down his face and traced its course with a fingertip back to his eye-socket; his eyes were leaking, he’d go blind. And then he remembered that stupid human thing, tears. The shame of it, as though he’d wet himself; which, in a very real sense, he had.
He wriggled on to his side and closed his loathsome, soggy eyes, which would be useless until the Horrible Yellow Face rose and soaked the world in nasty, dazzling light.
He woke up with a start, opened his eyes and froze. Something was nibbling his foot.
He looked at it and relaxed slightly, though not much. It was probably a cow. It was cow-shaped, and it had stupid cow eyes, and it shrank back like a cow when he moved, but it was huge; also patchy black and white, like a runny chessboard, which was just perverse. It licked its nose with a vast pink tongue and gazed at him. “Piss off,” he said. It blinked, and swished its tail.
Human or not, he told himself, I am not afraid of bloody cows. He scrambled about for a moment, spiking his putty-soft skin on the thorns, and dragged himself out of the hedge and upright. The cow bounded away a few yards, stopped and gazed at him reproachfully. He found a stone and threw it. Missed. Hand-eye co-ordination definitely on a par with all other systems.
His human neck had a crick in it, his human back ached and he’d got pins and needles in both tiny clawless feet. He looked round. The Horrible Yellow Face was high in the sky–bright and cloudless, but instead of wincing under its vicious glare he felt pleasantly warm (contradiction in terms, surely) and not at all dazzled; in fact, he could see almost as well in the light as he used to be able to in the dark. He was in a flat green field with maybe two dozen giant cows; not a building in sight. Oh, and another thing. He was hungry.
Actually, that wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Hunger for a goblin is an all-consuming desire that overrides every other consideration; can’t think straight, can’t think of anything else until you feel the bones splinter between your tusks and taste the glory of the marrow. For a human, apparently, it’s a gentle throat-clearing reminder that at some point it might not be such a bad idea to eat something, if it’s convenient and not too much trouble. He considered the possibilities. There were about two dozen of them, black and white and enormous. Fine. Your cow is relatively easy prey, under normal circumstances, which these weren’t. Without tusks, claws or proper legs, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be up to running one down and killing it, not even a normal-sized cow, let alone one of these monsters. Even if he could, a contest between cowhide and these silly little clawlets would be one-sided and probably quite painful, and in any event, how the hell are you supposed to eat anything if you have no tusks?
Ah, he remembered, but humans don’t eat normal food. They eat bread and rubbish like that. Not they, of course. We. We eat rubbish like that.
He sat down on the grass and buried his head in his hands. It’s no good, he said to himself. I’m done for.
Something nudged his foot. That bloody cow again–he opened one baleful eye, then did a sitting jump backwards. It was a human—
No it wasn’t, or at least if it was, it was a subspecies he’d never encountered or heard about. The back of his neck tickled where his hackles should have been (phantom hackle syndrome; oh please!) and he growled softly in the back of his throat.
“Hello,” said the human.
He gazed at it–it, because it was too vague and blurry to make out gender distinctions, and its voice seemed to be speaking to him from inside his own head. “You,” he said. “Why are you all shiny?”
“New updates available,” said the human. “Preparing to install.”
“Get away from me, you—”
But the human was too quick for him. A glowing blue arm shot out and its hand enveloped his face. A blue thumb and forefinger pressed into his eyes–he saw them pass through his retinas, into his brain, while another blue finger filled his mouth until he began to choke. He tried to fight, only to find that nothing worked. He was completely paralysed. There was no pain, but he knew that was only because the bits of stuff that he felt pain with weren’t working either. The blue light flooded his head, submerging, drowning—
“Configuring updates.”
And then, gradually, steadily, he began to understand. He was–now he knew who he was, what he was, where he was; this is Lincolnshire, England, and seven miles or so down that main road over there is Gainsborough, a nice enough place if you don’t mind miserable. And England is a country in Western Europe, which is the bundle of bits and pieces up in the top left-hand corner. And today is a Thursday, and a pint of milk in Tesco costs—
“Configuration complete. Closing down.”
“Here, just a—” he said, and died.
Don’t you hate it when that happens? Just as you reach a climax of total enlightenment, you know everything, understand everything, even all the stuff they’ve been keeping from you all these years, you die. The last bus leaves without you, and there you are.
Oh well, he thought. It can’t have been all that important anyway. And then the human said, “Restarting,” his eyes snapped open, and he looked up into the human’s pale brown eyes.
She wasn’t shiny and flickering any more. Instead, he was about fifty-six, with a salt-and-pepper beard and his hair drawn back tightly in a ponytail under a tall, conical hat. He was holding a mirror.
“Oh my God,” he said. “What am I wearing?”
He took the mirror away. “Starting YouSpace,” he said. “Hello.”
“You what?”
“Space. I am the YouSpace orientation wizard. Beta version,” he added, just a trifle self-consciously. “I’m an upgrade designed to make your YouSpace transition as easy and comfortable as possible. You may uninstall me if you wish.”
“What? No, that’s fine. What’s—?”
The wizard smiled. “The magic that brought you here,” he said. “Only here, remember, don’t call it magic. No such thing in this reality.”
A tiny voice in the back of his head sniggered and whispered, That’s what you think. He stamped on it with the boot of self-control. “This isn’t the Realms of—”
“No,” said the wizard. “Sorry about that. By a fluke malfunction you were caught up in the nexus of another YouSpace transaction and dragged here in its slipstream. We are checking to see if anything can be done to rectify this problem. Check complete. Nothing can be done to rectify this problem. We apologise for any inconvenience.”
“Hang on,” he said. “You just told me, there’s no magic here. But you also said you’re a wizard.”
The wizard nodded, with a sheepish grin. “This is a funny old place,” he said. “There’s no magic, and they know that, but they like to pretend that there is. They don’t believe it, but they pretend. Humans,” he explained.
“Ah. Did you really have to put me to death like that? I didn’t like it a bit.”
“We apologise for any inconvenience. What would you like to do today?”
He frowned. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” he said. “I cast my spell, but someone else was casting another spell at that very same moment, and my spell sort of got sucked in to his, and now I’m stuck here, not where I wanted to be, and I can’t do anything about it?”
“Checking. Confirmed. We apologise for any inconvenience. What would you like to do today?”
“Bloody hell.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?”
“Checking. You can try contacting your local YouSpace users support group. Updating data. There is no YouSpace users support group in this local area. We apol—”
The wizard broke off, maybe because he’d made a grab for its windpipe. But his fingers just passed through the wizard’s neck and came out the other side, feeling strangely tingly. “For any inconvenie
nce,” the wizard said reproachfully. “Attempts to kill the YouSpace orientation wizard (beta version) may invalidate your warranty and render you ineligible for further support.”
“I can’t kill you, you’re not even real,” he muttered angrily. “All right, I’m stuck here and there’s no way out of it. What do I do now?”
“Sorry, that information is not available. Off the record,” the wizard went on, lowering its voice, “I’d make the best of it if I were you. After all, it’s not like you’re the only one of your lot over here.”
His eyes opened wide. “I’m not?”
“Sorry, that information is not available. Are you serious? There’s dozens of you.”
“Define you.”
“Searching. Sorry, et cetera. People from your reality,” the wizard said. “Tourists, refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, gastarbeiter, a few who got out one step ahead of their local law enforcement, the usual mix. Ever since YouSpace went online, there’s been a fairly steady stream. Even a few of, you know, your lot.” The wizard mimed tusks and claws, not very well. “Film extras, mostly. Compared with the cost of top-class CGI, it’s so much cheaper to use the real thing. It only gets awkward when they start eating the cast.”
“My lot. You mean gob—”
“That information,” the wizard said pointedly, “is not available. Not so loud, all right? Actually, you could do worse, though it’s a shame you opted for the camouflage job, they’d have to rig you up with prosthetics. Still, they do that anyway. Apparently, genuine tusks and claws don’t come out right on film, they look sort of plastic. It’s the grunting and the funny walk they want you for. Apparently that’s really hard to do on a computer.”