Tom Holt

by 4 Ye Gods!

  Someone, somewhere, somehow was taking advantage of him to get things done which ought not to be done; and if only he were in full possession of the facts, he wouldn't have any part of it. It was as if there was this little voice in the back of his head which sometimes asked him, as he was washing off the blood or scoring another notch on the gunstock, whether that had really felt right. If it did, said the voice, that's just great, I'm very happy for you. If not...

  The voice had this really aggravating habit of rounding off its remarks with three dots, and Jason was inclined to regard that as something of a cop-out. To which the voice replied that if that was how he felt, that was fine, really it was, but ... Sometimes, Jason considered, the little voice got right up his nose. However...

  Jason's brow furrowed, and he looked around for the Centaurs. No Centaurs. Funny. The Dream had implied that good, thoroughbred Centaurs were getting a bit scarce these days, and anybody who had any pretensions to being constellation material would be a fool to turn down the chance of kicking the shit out of the ten hand-picked guaranteed genuine specimens who would just happen to be passing through the Caucasus later on this afternoon. Chance of a lifetime. Go for it.

  Perhaps, Jason said to himself, they saw me coming and ran for it. That, he knew, would be the sensible course, and the mortal part of him told him that if he was a Thessalian Centaur and got word that a semi-divine headbanger was in the area and would be along as soon as he'd finished lopping the head off an Erymanthian Hydra, he'd be off out of it as fast as his hooves could carry him. But Centaurs, of course, aren't like that. Probably explains why they're getting so rare.

  Unless...

  Not you again, said Jason to the back of his head. Look, either finish the bloody sentence or shut up, will you? Not for the first time, he felt that the back of his head was becoming a pain in the neck..

  Perhaps, Jason said to himself, I'm lost. But if I were lost, there'd be George with the golf buggy; and George was nowhere to be seen. So I can't be lost, therefore I must be here. Funny.

  Jason looked round once more, but he could see nothing except mountains, and from what he could remember of his Theory lessons, there weren't any merit points to be gained by getting heavy with the geography. He scratched his head, sat down on a rock and waited for something to happen.

  He was hungry.

  It had been a long time since he'd had that apple, and there was nothing more edible than a small oak-tree for as far as he could see. That puzzled him, too. Food, like transport, is generally laid on for Heroes by the Management --when was the last time you saw a Hero breaking off in mid-pursuit for a quarter-pounder and a chocolate shake? -- and Jason had come to take it for granted. Actually, the food was pretty terrible but Jason's mother had been one of those women who think boiled potatoes are the staff of life and so he didn't know any better. Army catering had come as a pleasant surprise to him.

  Time passed. The sun -- when Apollo called it a day the contract for solar services had been put out to tender, and a consortium of Australian entrepreneurs had made the winning bid -- rolled slowly across the sky. A mild breeze ruffled Jason's hair, reminding him that he'd left his hat behind when he'd parachuted out of the doomed Hercules. He was still hungry. If anything, hungrier.

  He stood up, filled his lungs with air, and shouted.

  'George!' he called. 'Where's my dinner?'

  Nothing. Not so much as a fruit pastille. Jason's monumental jaw set in a firm line, and he gripped the Sword of Whatever-it-was with grim determination. Then he remembered something and drew a small, crumpled card from the top pocket of his battledress.

  PIZZA TO GO, it read. WE DELIVER -- ANYTIME, ANYWHERE.

  That solved that, then. All he needed now was a callbox.

  Jason stopped, swore and threw the Sword of Thingy on the ground. He had had enough. It was just as well for the Thessalian Centaurs that they were nowhere in sight, or they'd have been lunch.

  After four hours of searching, Jason had failed to find a single phone booth in the Caucasus mountains. Well, there had been one; but it only took Phonecards.

  Nor had he found any food. The few stringy tufts of grass that clung to the rock were inedible, the leather of his boots was stale and the stones were off. He was starving.

  Pretty soon, he thought, I'm going to start seeing things. My brain will start playing tricks on me, and I'll have visions of huge cheeseburgers.

  I said, he repeated to himself, I'll have visions of huge cheeseburgers.

  Cheeseburgers...?

  Ah, so you're still there, are you? Yes, cheeseburgers with a large fries, banana shake and an apple fritter. Chop chop. Now.

  Jason listened hard, but all he could hear was the distant sound of three dots laughing. He gave up, retrieved the sword, and plodded on towards the far summit of the mountain.

  Then, from nowhere, a huge eagle appeared. It hung in the air just long enough for Jason to see the paper bag and styrofoam cup clutched in its talons, then launched itself into a thermal and whirled away before he had time to pick up a stone and let fly. He stood motionless and watched it recede, until it was barely discernible among the rocky crags.

  Then it started to grow larger. It was circling. It was coming back.

  Jason muttered under his breath, grabbed an aerodynamic stone and started to run. The force of wind pressure had probably turned the chips stone cold by now, but -that didn't seem to matter.

  The eagle seemed to sense that it was almost in range, for it wheeled sharply, lifted and soared away. A single chip spilled out of the- bag and floated, sycamore-seed like and mocking, down to the ground. Jason ate it. Then he sprinted away after the eagle.

  Just when he'd given up all hope, the eagle turned a third time. This time, it dived. It came at Jason like a Rapier missile, low and exceedingly fast. He raised the stone and let fly, but his senses were weak from hunger and he missed, albeit by a fraction of an inch. As the eagle swept past him, Jason fancied that it gave him a filthy look. He ignored it and stooped for another stone, but too late. The eagle had gone again, this time for good.

  'Hell!' Jason said. Then he licked his thumb, just in case there had been some vinegar on the chip.

  And then it was back again; this time, hanging absolutely still in the air, just out of range, watching him coldly from round yellow eyes. It's waiting for me to give up, Jason thought. Bugger that. He lurched to his feet, wavered for a moment as his weary knees protested, and launched himself at the eagle.

  The eagle waited for a moment, then changed position ever so slightly. A chip wafted down, and Jason sprang on it like a tiger.

  Then the eagle moved again. Another chip descended. Then another movement, and another chip. Jason realised that he was being led, step by step, chip by agonisingly weary chip, towards the summit of the tallest mountain.

  He didn't care. He didn't care that his body was no longer his own, that he was being manipulated by a large bird, just so long as there was salt and vinegar on the manipulations. The eagle seemed to sense its triumph, for a small slice of tomato and a sliver of lettuce drifted out of the sky and settled on the grey stone.

  Jason did a quick calculation and worked out that at this rate he'd be in Istanbul before he got a square meal. But that didn't matter. All that mattered was the next chip. He gave in.

  Then the eagle fluttered down, pitched beside him and dropped the paper bag and the milk shake onto the ground.

  'Have a nice day; said the eagle.

  The explanation is as follows.

  Every choice, every seemingly irrevocable act - the white shirt rather than the blue one, Jane rather than Paula, dying and so on -- is not an end but a beginning. The alternative is not sealed off; instead, reality is bifurcated and forks off at that particular point. At the critical moment, what was formerly one world becomes two, one a carbon copy of the other. In the one world, marmalade is spread on the slice of toast; in the other, honey.

  Thus, although there is only one pl
anet Earth, and it is the only one in the galaxy capable of sustaining life, there are innumerable Earths each with its own subtle variations. The variations are not, of course, infinite, as there have been a finite number of event horizons calling a new Earth into existence. There are, however, an awful lot of them, and to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how things work out, each Earth has all of us on it. Thus there is somewhere -- or was, at any rate -- an Earth on which there are still dinosaurs, an Earth on which Napoleon captured Moscow, an Earth where all the videos are Betamax.

  There are, however, such things as the Laws of Possibility; and it is also universally acknowledged that everything in the world has an effect, direct or indirect, on everything else. On what we might call the Betamax worlds, therefore, the lesser or incorrect choice generally sets in motion a chain of causalities which eventually results in the Laws being infringed and the entire world slowly fading away into a tiny point of light, which then goes out.

  Only one of the Betamax worlds has yet to fade away completely, and this is because some extremely powerful forces are being exerted to keep it in existence. This is the world on which Prometheus, on that fateful night, tried telling the caveman the one about the Englishman, the Pole and the Corcyraean, thereby completely failing to communicate the divine spark of humour to the human race.

  Of course, the gods aren't consciously keeping it going, because they know that this would be impossible. Any interference by the gods in the alternative-world process is strictly forbidden by the Laws -- in particular, Section 45 (a) (ii) of the Possibility Act and Schedule 8, Article 57 of the Monkeying About With Time (Prohibition) Act, as amended -- and the only thing the gods can truly be said to be afraid of is the Possibility Police; who, it is well known, have an innate bias against anyone who regularly flies without wings and walks on water, and have been waiting for a chance to catch the gods out of line ever since the Primeval Dawn. Subconsciously, however, the gods find it impossible to sever the final link between themselves and their counterparts in what they cannot help feeling were the Good Old Days; and some of them, who understand about such things, have recently taken to messing about with the thin dividing line between the conscious and the subconscious. They realise that, as things stand, it can only be a matter of time before affairs on the Betamax world get so completely out of synch that they will have to let go, and therefore if there is ever to be a chance of going back, undoing Prometheus's betrayal and snatching the Joke back from the human race, something will have to be done fairly quickly.

  The eagle dropped the last chip, wheeled in a dizzying spiral, and dived. As Jason lunged forward and caught the descending chip, he saw that the eagle had pitched on something, folded its wings and was sitting there, looking at him sideways.

  The thing looked remarkably like a telephone booth.

  Forgetting that he'd just had a quarter-pounder with cheese, large fries and a banana shake (albeit by instalments) Jason summed up his last remaining dregs of strength, hauled open the door and fell inside.

  He lifted the receiver to his ear. Against all his expectations, he heard the familiar bored-cat noise and searched in his pocket for some change. He had some. It fitted in the slot. He dialled the number on the crumpled card, and waited.

  'Hello,' said a voice, 'this is Pizza To Go. Sorry there's no-one here to take your call right now, but if you'd like to leave a message after the tone...'

  Jason got no further than 'thoughtless, stupid bastards' before the pips went, taking with them his last coin. He slumped against the booth wall and replaced the receiver feebly.

  Then the phone rang.

  Odd, the way one can never resist the summons of a telephone ringing. There is, in fact, a reason for this. Purely by chance, the telephone engineers have chosen for the dialling tone the exact notes of the Last Summons, by which the Judges of the Dead will call up the souls of the departed to the final tribunal. Of course, the Last Summons will be considerably louder, since the dead are notoriously hard of hearing. However, some ghosts are sharper-eared than others, and the ringing of the telephone occasionally attracts them from the Asphodel Plains. This accounts for the phenomenon known to students of the paranormal as the Crossed line.

  Anyway, Jason picked up the receiver.

  'Yes?' he said. 'What?'

  There was a silence at the other end of the line, as if whoever it was wasn't used to being talked to like that. Jason, however, was past caring.

  'Well?' he said.

  'Well what?' It was an elderly, rather querulous voice, high and dry. That, at any rate, was all Jason could deduce from the small sample he had been given - not, frankly, that he was all that bothered.

  'Well yourself,' he said. 'Who is this, anyway?'

  Another thing about telephones is that every unknown voice on the end of a telephone line always wants to talk to Carol. Is Carol there, they ask. Could I speak to Carol, please? There is either some enormous conspiracy going on, or else Carol is getting a hell of a lot of calls from people wanting to leave an order with the Chinese Takeaway.

  'Am I speaking to' -- the voice hesitated, as if it was reading something off a piece of paper -- 'to Jason Derry?'

  'Yes,' said Jason.

  'Then please replace the receiver -- not yet, of course --and walk five hundred yards due west, turn through seventy-five degrees and walk a further two hundred yards due north. Then turn through ninety degrees. Please replace the receiver now.'

  The line went dead, and Jason shrugged. Being a Hero he didn't know the meaning of fear, just as the average person doesn't know the meaning of the word foumart.* The fact that there had been a voice giving him directions might well mean that if he followed the directions he would meet the owner of the voice. The owner of the voice might have some food. If the worst came to the worst, he could always eat him.

  Jason sighed and opened the door of the phone booth. As he did so, the eagle spread its wings and soared away. Jason checked with his compass; the eagle was going due west.

  He paced out five hundred yards -- difficult, since the terrain was uneven -- made a guess at seventy-five degrees and turned. The eagle banked and set off in the direction he had just decided on. Pretty shrewd guess, huh?

  Hundred and ninety-seven, hundred and ninety-eight, hundred and ninety-nine, and turn...

  Jason opened his eyes and blinked.

  He was looking up at a hillside, far away in the distance. Chained -- yes, they were chains -- to the rocks was the body of a huge man, lying face downwards. There was a raw scab roughly the size of a steel works, on the small of his back, over which the eagle was standing. The eagle had got bigger too. Very much bigger. There was blood all over its beak, and its eyes were huge yellow globes. Jason may still not have known the meaning of fear, but he would have been prepared to hazard a guess.

  *polecat

  'Punctuality,' said the giant, in a voice like the sea, 'is the politeness of princes. But not, apparently, Heroes. If you look under the small rock by your left foot, you will find a packet of sandwiches.'

  Jason looked.

  'Where?' he said.

  'Under the small rock by your...'

  'What small rock?'

  'The small rock by your... Just a moment, please.' The giant made an expressive gesture with his left ear, and the eagle hopped over and stood by his head. They whispered together for a moment.

  'Did I say two hundred paces north?' said the giant. 'I'm sorry. Try going ten paces further.'

  Jason uprooted his legs and advanced.

  'Right,' he said, 'got the small rock. No sandwiches, though.'

  'Ah.' The giant wiggled his ear again. The eagle hopped forward.

  'Is it a squarish brown rock?' asked the giant.

  'I don't know,' Jason replied. 'It's hard to say with rocks. They all look the ...'

  'Try going back a bit.'

  'Ah,' said Jason, 'got that. Small, squarish brown rock. Sandwiches. Yes.'

  'Oh good,' said the
giant. 'Now perhaps we can get down to business.'

  'Fire away,' Jason said, with his mouth full.

  'Allow me to introduce myself; said the giant. 'My name is...'

  'There wouldn't be any mustard, would there?'

  'No,' said the giant.

  'Pity.'

  'My name,' said the giant, 'is...'

  'Pickle?'

  There was a long silence. Jason guessed that there probably wasn't any pickle.

  'My name,' said the giant, and then paused, as if waiting for a further interruption. 'There is,' he said, 'no piccalilli. And my name is Prometheus.'

  'Prometheus?'

  'Prometheus, yes. Nor is there any salt.'

  Jason chewed thoughtfully. 'I've heard of you,' he said. 'I think.'

  'Have you really?' said the giant. 'I'm so thrilled. Now...'

  'My dad,' Jason said, 'says you're a traitor to your class and you sold us all down the river. My dad says...'

  'No doubt he does; said the giant. 'That's just the sort of thing I would expect your father to say. What of it?' 'Nothing,' Jason replied. 'Which river?'

  'I expect he was speaking metaphorically,' said the giant.

  'I think he was simply trying to express his disapproval of me. You should be able to gather from what you can see that your father disapproves of me.'

  'The chains and the eagle and everything?'

  'Well,' said the giant, 'it could be that I'm sunbathing and the chains are here to prevent me getting blown away by a freak gust of wind, but that wouldn't really explain away the eagle, now would it? Yes, your father has a pretty low opinion of me, all things considered. And I,' added the giant proudly, 'have an even lower opinion of him. And what do you think of that?'

  'How do you mean?' Jason said, chewing.

  'Let me put it another way,' said the giant. 'On the one hand, you owe your father filial respect, love and obedience. On the other hand, I happen to know the whereabouts of a packet of chocolate biscuits and a can of diet Pepsi. The decision, of course, must rest with you. Only you can...'