The Good, the Bad and the Smug

by Tom Holt

  With me so far? Oh good.

  The Law of Conservation of All Sorts of Things states that there’s only a finite quantity of any amount of stuff, and that finite amount can’t increase or decrease. Matter’s one of them, for sure, but there are others. There’s Energy, and Time, which are pretty much self-evident, and then there’s other, rather more nebulous forces and agents and so on, such as Optimism—

  Yes, of course, Optimism is a classic. There’s only so much of it in the Multiverse, and it never dies, it just gets moved around. Give you a for-instance: for a week or so you’re really optimistic that you’ll get the vacant deputy assistant manager’s job, but then it becomes painfully obvious that your boss wants to give it to the smarmy cow in the Harrogate office; you therefore lose optimism, and the smarmy cow acquires it. The net quantity stays constant, but it’s redistributed. It’s just like Happiness. In fact, unless you’ve got a good working knowledge of the operation of the Law of Conservation of Happiness, I really can’t see how you could possibly begin to understand the first thing about sentient life. I mean, it’d make no sense at all.

  But where the Laws of Conservation really matter is when you get on to Good and Evil. Yes, them too. Especially them.

  All right, don’t believe it if you don’t want to, but it’s true. There’s a precisely quantified and absolutely limited quantity of both Good and Evil in every single reality in the Multiverse. It’s not optional, and it’s no good bringing in a note from your mother. There’s x Good and y Evil, and that’s that. Now in some realities, such as this one, you get what we call the Water Effect. Yes, I was just about to tell you. You’ve got hydrogen, and you’ve got oxygen; two very dissimilar substances, as I’m sure you’ll agree—

  Gases. They’re gases. Sort of flavoured air.

  All right, fine. All you need to know is that in nine realities out of ten, hydrogen and oxygen, though tending to disagree about a lot of things at a pretty fundamental level, nevertheless tend to combine to form the substance we call water; sort of like a coalition, but without all the point-scoring. Likewise, in this reality and quite a few others, low levels of Good and Evil combine to form the entity we know as human nature. In some people it’s two atoms of Good to one of Evil, in others it’s the other way about, but generally speaking it’s a pretty even and consistent mix. Consequently, the overall reserves of Good and Evil in this reality are widely distributed at a pretty low concentration, and it means the overwhelming majority of people aren’t particularly nice or conspicuously nasty. They’re just ordinary folks like you and me. Well, like me.

  In other realities, though, such as the one you come from, the Water Effect doesn’t apply. Instead of being spread all over the place in tiny quantities, Evil and Good gather separately in massive concentrations; result, you get whole communities who are purely Good, like the Wise and the princes of the West, and entire species of rotters, such as your lot.

  No offence, by the way.

  Anyhow, on the whole it all sorts itself out, and so long as the balance isn’t interfered with, everything chugs quietly along and nothing suddenly breaks down or goes horribly wrong. Mostly this is because each reality is a sealed, self-contained unit, in which the Law of Conservation of All Sorts of Things can cheerfully apply without fear of anything getting in or getting out. Situation normal, everything fine. Quite.

  Naturally, though, you can’t take all that for granted. Well, you can, but only because there are people like me. Which brings us back to your original question, who am I? Right. I am this reality’s Deputy Chief Curator of the Equilibrium. My team and I fight ceaselessly to ensure that the Laws of Conservation are rigidly obeyed and enforced. My highly trained and intensely motivated Rangers are the first and last line of defence against imbalance, chaos and the abyss, and together, we hold the line against the unthinkable.

  Actually, it’s not a bit like that, in fact normally it’s a total skive, the sort of job you get because your uncle plays golf with the chairman. Because, you see, in a closed, sealed reality–which all of them are–nothing gets in, nothing gets out. No exits or entrances, no possible risk whatever to the equilibrium. The Laws take care of everything, and we just draw our salaries and our eye-wateringly generous bonuses. Exactly how it should be in a well-ordered cosmology.

  Until—

  “You’ve gone ever such a funny colour,” Archie said. “Are you feeling all right?”

  The Curator nodded weakly. “Just thinking about it makes me so mad,” he said. “Everything was for the most ordinary in the most ordinary of all possible worlds, and then he had to come along. And then everything was suddenly—”

  “Yes?”

  “Difficult. Complicated.” The Curator practically spat the word. “We actually had to start doing things. It was a terrible shock to the system, believe me. Office hours. Sandwiches at my desk for lunch. For the first time in my life, I actually had to go out and buy an alarm clock.” He shook his head sadly. “Where’s it all going to end, that’s what I want to know.”

  Archie waited for as long as he could bear. Then he said, “What happened?”

  “He did,” the Curator said, and if it were possible to kill someone with the letter H, there’d have been blood on the floor. “Theo Bernstein, late Principal Technical Officer with the Very Very Large Hadron Collider project, and inventor of the YouSpace device. Bastard,” he paraphrased. “He ruined everything, and it’s all his fault.”

  “Who?”

  The Curator sighed. “It’s a long story,” he said. “All you need to know is that when you’re inside the parameters of a functional coherent YouSpace field, you can move from one reality to another via a simple visual interface. And to make it even easier, you don’t need special equipment or anything like that. All you need is a simple, ordinary, everyday doughnut.”

  Archie looked at him for a moment. “Can I go now, please?”

  “Or a bagel. Basically, any kind of food that’s got a hole in it. Bernstein figured that complicated electronic circuitry isn’t always available in some of the more primitive realities, but nearly everywhere’s got food, and practically every food-using culture has some form of deliberately perforated cereal-derivative. Therefore, wherever you go, you’re never more than a few minutes away from a YouSpace interface portal that’ll take you back home, or wherever you want to go next, in the blink of an eye. God, I hate that man.”

  In his mind’s eye Archie could see a brown, glistening circle set in a cliff face, red early morning light flashing in the facets of the crystals set into the smooth curved fabric. “Really? A doughnut”

  “Would I make something like that up? Oh, you can see the logic behind it. Quite well thought out, really. I mean, you can imagine some scenarios. Like, have you got a last request before we cut your heart out and offer it to the Snake-God? Yes please, I’d like a doughnut. It takes a special sort of mind to think of something like that.”

  “And that’s how I got here,” Archie said. “But I still don’t get it. What does this Bernstein want me for?”

  The Curator laughed. “Oh, bloody Bernstein faded out of the picture a long time ago. Waltzed off to be a god somewhere, left his nasty little invention behind. There were supposed to be safeguards, naturally. Enough said. Whether there’s someone out there retro-engineering the bloody things, or whether Bernstein was just criminally careless and left a warehouse full of YouSpace generators with the key under the mat we just don’t know. What we do know is, there’s at least five, possibly six, fully functional YouSpace portals in operation right now, and unless we can find them and shut them down—” He stopped, fumbled in his top pocket and produced a small brown bottle of pills, one of which he swallowed with a loud gasp. “Marvellous things, those,” he said. “Cure-anything tablets. Not actually from this reality, but a rotten job like mine, there’s got to be a few perks. Where was I?”

  “Unless you can find—”

  “Oh God, yes, don’t remind me.” The Curator m
assaged his temples with his fingertips. “I haven’t slept for weeks–well, not properly. Gone right off my food, can’t remember the last time I was able to snatch five minutes for a round of golf. All this work,” he added bitterly. “It really eats into your spare time.”

  He looked so sad that Archie could feel a lump in his throat. “Getting back to me,” he said gently, “how do I fit in to all this? I’m nobody special, God knows.”

  “True,” the Curator said, “very true. As an individual, you’re utterly insignificant and of no account—”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. No, it’s not who you are, it’s what you are.” He paused, and there was a worried look on his face, as if he was trying to make a decision. “I shouldn’t really tell you this. In fact, I shouldn’t have told you anything. It’s not like you knowing would help at all. But I guess it’s all right. After all, who would ever believe you?”

  “Very true. You were about to—”

  “Oh yes.” The Curator sat up a bit straighter. “A while back, you don’t need to know when exactly, there was a massive unauthorised transfer of,” he lowered his voice, “a certain commodity out of this reality into another one. Actually, the one you came from. Because this transfer was a flagrant and potentially disastrous breach of the Law of Conservation of All Sorts of Things, my colleagues and I were forced to initiate a programme of clandestine counter-transfers, of a certain commodity, from your reality into ours. And it was at the weekend, too.”

  Archie’s head felt like it was being eaten from the inside by leeches. “A certain commodity,” he said.

  “Yes. A huge, enormous quantity of this commodity was smuggled out through a doughnut. The result–well, it simply doesn’t bear thinking about. Fortunately, there’s a time-lag before the worst of the effects take hold. That means we had a brief window for saving the universe. We had to act quickly and decisively—”

  “At a weekend.”

  “At a weekend,” agreed the Curator. “My wife had asked people over, she had to ring and cancel, God only knows what she told them. Anyway, once we’d reviewed the situation, it was obvious what we had to do. We had no choice. We had to transfer an equal quantum of this commodity from your reality over to ours. To maintain the balance, you understand. But the problem was, the sheer scale of the thing. There was absolutely no way we could make up the shortfall all in one go, so we’d have to do it a bit at a time. Ones and twos here and there, sort of thing. And that’s what you are. You’re a one.”

  “Ah.”

  “Which is what I meant by you not being important as you,” the Curator went on. “All that matters is, you’re a goblin. Any old goblin would’ve done just as well.”

  “That’s nice to know.”

  “Don’t mention it. Also, you’re just a drop in the ocean. We actually need about four thousand of you, and so far we’ve only managed to scrape together about nine hundred. So,” the Curator added bitterly, “I might as well sell the Miami beach house, and probably the lodge at Interlaken as well, because it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any spare time at all any time soon. I wouldn’t mind so much,” he added bitterly, “if it was just me that was affected. But it’s been sheer hell for my wife. She’s hardly seen anything of me at all for months.”

  “Heartbreaking for her,” Archie said. “Um, so what’s going to happen to me? You said, a certain quantity of some commodity—”

  The Curator laughed. “Oh, it’s all right,” he said, “there’s nothing to worry about. You’re not going to get boiled down or dissolved in acid or anything. We just need you over here, being a goblin.”

  “But I’m not a goblin,” Archie pointed out. “Not a proper one, anyway.”

  “The monkey-suit, you mean? Oh, that doesn’t matter. It’s your inner essence, that’s what’s important. At heart, you’re still goblin, no real indications of going native. We’ve proved that.”

  “Have we?”

  The Curator nodded. “Thanks to Flubenoriel. That’s the she-Elf, the one you’ve been conducting your ludicrous pseudo-romance with. Only, the human body she got issued with when she came over is seriously, seriously—But you simply didn’t notice, did you? Just another self-propelled ready meal as far as you’re concerned. No signs of incipient human behaviour there whatsoever.”

  “Ah.”

  “Absolutely clean bill of health,” the Curator said. “Which means you’re cleared for processing and onward transmission to Long-Term Storage.”

  “Gosh,” Archie said. “That’s a weight off my mind. What’s Long-Term Storage?”

  “Uh-huh.” The Curator shook his head. “You don’t need to know that.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “Security,” the Curator said owlishly. “Crucially important in a sensitive operation like this.”

  “I suppose it would be, yes,” Archie said. “But nothing horrible’s going to happen to me, is it? You can tell me that, surely.”

  “I don’t see why not,” the Curator said. “Nothing horrible, you have my word.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. As far as you’re concerned, it’ll be just like a nice, long rest. Nothing to do all day but lie peacefully and doze.”

  Archie frowned. “Not in the sun, is it? I don’t like bright sunlight.”

  “Of course you don’t, you’re a goblin. If you liked the sunshine, we’d know you’d gone wrong.”

  “Ah. Only, a lot of the humans, they like lying in the sun. It’s what they do for pleasure.”

  “Have no fears on that score, my friend,” the Curator said. “You’ll be indoors. No sunlight whatsoever.”

  “That’s a relief,” Archie said.

  “Below ground, in fact. In a tunnel.”

  “I’d like that. It’d be like home.”

  “Quite a lot like home,” the Curator said, “only better. No work. Nobody yelling at you telling you what to do. Just perfect peace and quiet, underground, in a tunnel. Well, more of a vault, actually, but it’s the same principle.”

  “Vaults are okay,” Archie agreed. “Like treasure-vaults.”

  “Very similar,” the Curator said reassuringly.

  “And not too hot? Or too cold?”

  “The temperature will be just right. We’re incredibly careful about that.”

  Archie thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “it sounds better than New Zealand, anyway.”

  “Much, much better than New Zealand.”

  “Good. I was getting a bit fed up with all the sitting around in silly costumes.”

  “You won’t have to wear a silly costume. Or sit.”

  “And the food was pretty boring, too. Same thing every day.”

  “You won’t have to eat boring, monotonous food. Guaranteed.”

  Archie remembered the assistant director. “And no idiot humans asking silly questions?”

  “You won’t have to talk to a single human the entire time you’re there.”

  “Cool,” Archie said. “So, what do I actually have to do?”

  “You don’t do anything.”

  “Won’t I get bored?”

  “No chance of that. None whatsoever.”

  “Really?” Archie frowned. “I must say, it all sounds too good to be true.”

  The Curator smiled. “I promise you, you’re going to love it. Are you familiar at all with the term ‘cryogenic suspension’?”

  “No.”

  “Not to worry,” the Curator replied. “You’ll be so happy, the time will simply fly by. And you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re making a tiny but significant contribution to maintaining the equilibrium.”

  “That’s nice. Do I get paid?”

  “No.”

  Archie shrugged. “Ah well,” he said. “Can’t have everything, I suppose.”

  “You won’t be needing money. Everything’s provided.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything you could possibly want or need,
yes. The rest of your life will be one long, happy dream.”

  “That’s all right, then.” Archie smiled. “When do I start?”

  Twenty minutes on his hands and knees, grubbing around in the long grass and nettles. Eventually he found it, by the effective but painful expedient of kneeling on it; one three-quarter-inch steel crank pivot retaining nut, which had skipped out of his hand as he was putting the spinning-wheel back together again after replacing a worn-out drive belt. A stupid little bit of metal, but the wheel wouldn’t run without it. Two hours’ production wasted, and he was already behind the clock. He sighed and rubbed his knee. The things I do for other people, he thought.

  Grovelling around on the ground, he hadn’t noticed that he was no longer alone, not until the newcomer cleared his throat. “Lost something?”

  “Found it,” the little man replied. “Oh, you’re back. Sorry, it’s not ready. Try again a week Thursday.”

  “Actually…”

  Prince Valentine, from the fifth kingdom on the left as you come over the Apricot Mountains. Tall, blond, athletic, not even the faintest trace of a chin. Singularly gormless, even for a prince. One of his regulars. “Actually what?”

  Prince Valentine sat down on the only stool available. He simply hadn’t noticed that it was the only one. Princes don’t. “Actually,” he said, “I was wondering…”

  “Of course you were. Anything in particular, or simply general gratuitous thought?”

  To do him credit, the prince did try and translate that into something he could understand. Two seconds later, he gave up. “I was wondering,” he said. “The straw into gold thing. Does it work the other way round?”

  “Say what?”

  “What I mean is,” Valentine said, looking over the little man’s shoulder, “can you sort of, well, spin gold into straw?”

  The little man blinked twice. “You know, nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

  “Really? Ah. But can you? Spin gold into straw, I mean.”