Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

by Tom Holt

“Mr Mayer is quite right,” Mr Gogerty said, which shut both of them up straight away. “There was a competition. It’s quite well documented, though very few details survive. We don’t know who organised it, for example, and up till now the rules have been a matter of wild conjecture. But we do know what the prize was, and that it was never claimed.”

  “Prize?” Don repeated eagerly. “What is it? What did I win?”

  Mr Gogerty looked him in the eyes. “You should bear in mind,” he said slowly, “that the competition was set a very long time ago. Also, I have no idea how you’d go about collecting it.”

  “What is it?” Don snarled. “Well?”

  Mr Gogerty broke eye contact. “Five hundred pounds,” he said.

  “What?” Don looked as though he’d just been kissed by a giant squid. “Is that all? Five hundred rotten bloody—”

  “It was a great deal of money back in the fourteenth century,” Mr Gogerty said. “You could’ve bought a large estate or built a castle. Unfortunately—”

  Don made a rather vulgar noise and turned away. “I don’t suppose there’s a second prize, is there?” he said. “A golden throne or fifty acres of prime real estate in the City of London.”

  Mr Gogerty shook his head. “If you consider the nature of the challenge,” he said.

  “Ah well.” Don shrugged. Then a bolt of lightning lit up the inside of his head. “What about interest?” he said. “Compound interest, seven hundred years…”

  “Impossible,” Mr Gogerty said. “There were laws against usury in the fourteenth century.”

  “Oh.” Don wilted. “So that’s it, then. Five hundred quid.”

  Mr Gogerty coughed softly. “There’s also the matter of my fee,” he said. “For the consultation. As a matter of fact, it comes to precisely—”

  Don laughed out loud. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Five hundred pounds.”

  “No,” Mr Gogerty said. “Five hundred and six pounds and fourteen pence. No hurry,” he added pleasantly. “Any time within the next seven days.”

  Don shook his head. “Fine,” he said. “Polly will write you a cheque. Can we get back to…?”

  “Of course.” Mr Gogerty straightened his back. “There was a competition – you were quite right about that. And it does seem to follow that somebody tried to cheat.”

  “Which was the whole point,” Polly interrupted.

  “Agreed. But he didn’t succeed.” Mr Gogerty looked thoughtful. “Almost, I would suggest, but not quite. And I believe I know what form his attempt took.”

  He had their undivided attention, so he paused to shuffle his thoughts.

  “I believe he used a transdimensional hub. That’s a fairly straightforward piece of technology,” he added, as three blank stares turned towards him. “It uses multiverse theory. Essentially, it’s based on the premise that a universe exists for every possibility. In practice, it can turn things into other things.” He stopped and shook his head. “That’s actually not true,” he said, “but the effect is almost the same. It’s to do with the disruption in morphic resonance fields that takes place when time and space are folded along a six-axis seam.”

  “Turns things into other things,” Polly said firmly. “Got you. Do please go on.”

  Mr Gogerty smiled. “The cheater decided to cheat by creating chickens that were not born from eggs. You can’t create life out of nothing – that’s not possible – so the only way he could do it was to change some other life forms – humans, because they’re easy to transform – into chickens. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. In order to do it, you have to fold across the dimensions, so that humans from Reality A are delivered into Reality B, in which it’s possible. Sort of like changing the signs in algebra.”

  “Never got the hang of that,” Don muttered. “I think I was off sick the day they did it in class, and I never quite caught up.”

  Mr Gogerty nodded gravely. “The technology – the transdimensional hub – is clearly the key to the mystery. I believe this is it.” He held out his hand and opened it. “The last time you saw this, it was a pencil sharpener. Mr Huos,” he went on, “you’re sure you recognise this ring?”

  Mr Huos grinned sadly. “Oh yes,” he said. “I’d know it anywhere.” He looked up with spaniel eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance—”

  “No,” Mr Gogerty said, not unkindly. “You put me on the right lines when you mentioned that it kept changing shape inside its box. A hub would do that if it was kept isolated in a strong containment field. If the box is a containment capsule, and there’s nothing else in there with it, the hub will change itself because there’s nothing else for it to work on. Once I knew it was a hub, the fact that you had it with you when you were found was highly significant.”

  “Was it?”

  “Oh yes.” Mr Gogerty frowned a little. “It suggested that the shape you are now couldn’t be the shape you were originally born with. I had no idea what you might be, but I knew you almost certainly weren’t human.”

  “You keep saying that,” Mr Huos said, slightly vexed. “I wish you’d stop beating about the bush and—”

  But Mr Gogerty raised his hand. “All in good time,” he said. “You had this thing in your possession for quite some time,” he went on, “and you made the connection between its habit of changing shape and the extraordinary ability you found you had to bend and shape the world around you. I assume you labelled it ‘magic’ and left it at that. You’re a practical man, Mr Huos, not an intellectual. A magic ring, you thought, how useful, and proceeded to use your superhuman powers to make money – in a remarkably ethical way, I may add. You took care to hurt nobody, as far as you were aware, for which you deserve some credit.”

  “Thank you so much, you patronising git,” Mr Huos growled. “By the way, you’re fired too.”

  “Other men in your position would not have been so conscientious,” Mr Gogerty said gravely. “The fact remains that you were using technology you didn’t understand, and that’s always dangerous. In particular, you never grasped the crucial point that the containment field, the little wooden box you kept the ring in, is in fact the pocket reality in which the cheater’s experiment takes place. The two are a set, you see; neither works properly without the other. Inside the box is where you built all those houses. Your office is in there too, which is why you could have people working for you simultaneously, in time and space layered like filo pastry. Things started to go wrong not because you lost the ring-and-box, but because the ring got out of the box.” He shook his head. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’m jumping ahead again.”

  He opened his palm and studied the ring for a moment. “The cheater,” he said, “set out to turn humans into chickens. Naturally, he had to be discreet. He wouldn’t want the competition judges to find out what he was up to, and you can be sure they’d have eyes everywhere. He chose a perfectly ordinary, nondescript farm, just the sort of place where nobody knows from one minute to the next precisely how many chickens are running about the place. He needed some way of installing his technology so it wouldn’t be noticed, and proverbially the best place to hide something is in plain sight. The installation would have to look like part of the everyday life of the farm.” He turned the ring over, to expose the worn side. “That was what gave me the clue I needed,” he went on. “That, and the name you were found with.”

  Mr Huos raised his eyebrows. “Huos?”

  “Greek for pig,” Mr Gogerty replied. “And Greek is the mother tongue of my profession, just like Latin and the law. He hid the transdimensional hub in the nose of a pig – either the brood sow or the stud boar, I’d say, because they’re what you might call the permanent staff, not likely to be shipped off to be turned into sausages. He’d have taken the precaution of encoding the hub so it wouldn’t be activated until it entered the containment field; in other words, the ring wouldn’t start working until it was put in the box for the first time. And that, presumably,” he added, swinging round and pointing, “i
s the containment field, right there.”

  They looked where he was pointing. “What, that?” Polly said. “It’s just a—”

  Mr Gogerty nodded. “A horsebox,” he said. “But it’s also a transdimensional portal, as you yourself proved just now, when you came in through it. Thank you, by the way, for clearing that up for me. It makes perfect sense, of course. Think about it. The experiment is set up to begin as soon as the ring enters the horsebox, which will only happen when the brood sow or the boar comes to the end of its working life and gets shipped off to the abattoir. You can call it a built-in timing device. And the joy of it is, the cheater would be miles away when it happened, with a perfect alibi; nothing to connect him to what would subsequently happen here in the eyes of the competition judges.” He smiled. “As soon as the ring entered the box, it’d trigger the experiment. A human being somewhere in the world at large would disappear; one extra chicken would materialise in this farmyard, to be collected by the cheater at his leisure. He’d then take it to the judges and say, ‘Here’s a chicken I took at random from a farmyard. Examine it, and you’ll find it’s never seen the inside of an eggshell. Therefore, the chicken came first.’”

  Don pulled a face. “That’d never work, surely.”

  “Why not?” Mr Gogerty said with a grin. “The chicken would be totally, absolutely, 100-per-cent authentic. There’d be no way anybody, even the judges, could tell it apart from any other chicken. The judges would use their powers of insight to see into its past. They’d find that its personal history began when it suddenly appeared out of nowhere, fully grown. No eggs were harmed in the making of this rooster. That would be enough. The cheat’s won.”

  Mr Gogerty fell silent for a while, not noticing the way all the chickens in the yard were looking straight at him. Then he snapped out of his reverie and went on: “But it didn’t happen like that. Something went wrong.”

  Nobody spoke for some time. Then Mr Huos said, “Are you saying I’m a pig?”

  Mr Gogerty nodded. “My guess is,” he said, “that the pig with the hub in its nose must’ve got out of its pen and into the horsebox, way ahead of time, before the rest of the cheat’s preparations were in place. I don’t know the details, obviously, but I’d hazard a guess that he hadn’t yet chosen a human to be turned into a chicken, and so the hub hadn’t been targeted on a particular individual. Before the cheat’s had a chance to perform that particular chore, suddenly the hub vanishes and passes beyond his control. The hub enters the containment field and becomes active. The only thing beside itself inside the field is the pig, so it transforms it. The pig vanishes, and at precisely that moment a previously unrecorded human being materialises thousands of miles away on a mountainside in Georgia, a man with no history but in possession of a brass ring, with steel earrings where the galvanised ear tags used to be, and with the Greek word for pig written on the back of his left hand.”

  Something odd happened to time, but it had nothing to do with magic. Eventually, Mr Huos broke the silence. “Oh,” he said.

  Mr Gogerty shrugged. “Well,” he said, “you did ask me to find out where you came from. I can’t help it if you don’t like it.”

  “Hang on,” Mr Huos said. “What about the hundred thousand dollars?”

  Mr Gogerty nodded eagerly. “That puzzled me too,” he said. “But I think I can explain. The pig had a value; all the livestock on a farm has a value, after all. In your case it was how much you were worth to the farm: your weight in sausages, basically. The hub transformed that too. I have no idea how it came up with a hundred thousand US dollars, but that’s what you must be worth.” He smiled weakly. “In sausages.”

  Polly shuffled awkwardly. Part of her was in the process of being purged by wonder, pity and terror. The rest of her, the part that was used to turning up for work in the mornings, wanted to explode in a Krakatoa of giggles. She was a humane, compassionate person, but she was also an office worker, and this man, or this pig, was her boss. “So what happened?” she asked.

  “Chaos,” Mr Gogerty replied succinctly. “Mr Huos started using the hub. It, meanwhile, naturally obeyed its fundamental programming and started turning people into chickens. I imagine the first victim was a female member of Mr Huos’ legal department, whose brother just happened to be a musician. Presumably Mr Huos quite innocently did something which led the hub to think she was the chosen transformee. The hub did its work, but wasn’t immediately deactivated, which was what should have happened. So it carried on transforming people. The logical explanation is that it stored the template of its first victim – female lawyer with a brother who plays music – and every time it encountered someone who fitted it transformed her. At some stage, by the look of it, the hub broadened the template to include the brothers as well, which is how Mr Briggs got here.”

  “Kevin Briggs?” Don interrupted sharply. “The man I—”

  “No, you didn’t,” Mr Gogerty said. “You just happened to be on the spot and thinking harsh thoughts about him when he was taken, but it would’ve happened anyway.”

  “Thank God for that,” Don said. “I was so worried; I thought I’d killed him.” Then he frowned and said, “Hold on a moment, though. How come I got caught up in it at all?”

  Mr Gogerty looked grave. “My assumption is that Ms Mayer here was to be the hub’s next victim. It had, so to speak, already noticed her, and therefore you as well. Before the transformation took place, however, something happened that changed everything. Mr Huos took his coat to be cleaned. He forgot to take the box out of his pocket. The cleaners found the box in his coat and took it out. They must have opened the box and removed the ring from it. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, they put the ring and the box in the pocket of someone else’s coat.” Mr Gogerty shuddered. “Yours.”

  His mind suddenly flooded with horrible images of what could have happened, but, as if from a long way away, he heard Don saying, “But I never saw the box. It definitely wasn’t in my coat when I—”

  Mr Gogerty sighed. Why couldn’t people ever listen? “The hub transformed it,” he said. “I have no idea what it turned it into, but whatever it was, it ended up inside your fridge, so I’m guessing you must’ve put it there. You wouldn’t have recognised it as a box, most probably, because the hub would’ve transformed it.”

  Don shut his eyes, the way you do when you realise you’ve forgotten something. “I went food shopping just before I went to the cleaners,” he said. “When I got home, I just shoved all the stuff in the fridge.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Mr Gogerty said, with the slightest feather of impatience on the edge of his voice. “Glad we got that sorted out. Do you want to hear the rest of it or not?”

  All three of them looked at him, but it was Polly who spoke. “There’s more?”

  He explained it to them, slowly and patiently. He told them about Mr and Mrs Williams, who ran a small-time dry cleaning business in Clevedon Road. He explained that without the hub inside it the box couldn’t function the way it was supposed to. When the Williamses went through the pockets of Mr Huos’ coat, as they always did, to make sure nothing had been left in them, they inadvertently separated the hub and the box. In that short interval of separation the box discovered that it was empty and activated its emergency backup procedure, extending the containment field around the building it was in at the time. It must (Mr Gogerty speculated) have proved too much for the box’s programming and overloaded its artificial intelligence, causing it to dislocate the entire shop from its native reality – in practice, sending it whirling off unpiloted in both space and time. It went backwards in time, so that the dislocation effect was backdated, the timeline was violently adjusted, and the Williamses had been living their nomadic life for years and years by the time Don Mayer first walked into their shop.

  “I think,” Mr Gogerty said, “that Mr or Mrs Williams must have taken the ring out of the box in the downstairs toilet, because that’s where the field coalesced to form a temporal wormhole
, joining the toilet to the hub’s final anticipated destination, the ruined abbey Mr Mayer here told us about, the place where the competition judges were to be found. Hence, at a set time each day, the toilet became a portal back to the abbey. When everything started going wrong…”

  He explained about that too. When Mr Huos no longer controlled the hub, everything he’d done with it started to fall apart, gradually at first, but gathering pace as the consequences impacted on each other. Polly started to realise that someone had been drinking her coffee. The chickens began remembering they’d been human. Norton St Edgar, or the part of it Mr Huos had built on, separated from the rest of the world and sealed itself off, so that the only access in and out of it was through the portal. The same effect drew the Williamses’ shop there. From the fact that Don had found it deserted, Mr Gogerty deduced that Mr and Mrs Williams had left it and couldn’t get back in. It was just as well, he said, that Mr Huos had closed down the office and scrupulously unpicked every deal he’d ever made. That had at least restricted the spread of the chaos brought about by the separation of the ring and the box. It probably meant that no more lady solicitors would be turned into barnyard fowls.

  “Probably?” Polly repeated, shocked.

  “Probably,” Mr Gogerty said. “The fact that you’re still human suggests it’s stopped. You’ll remember, you were the next on the list. Of course, it may have bypassed you and moved on.”

  “The Briggs woman,” Polly remembered with a shiver. “She vanished while I was talking to her.”

  Mr Huos started. “What, Rachel Briggs, who works for me? Oh,” he added, as he remembered who he was talking to. “You won’t know her, of course. She’s—”

  “She’s been drinking my coffee,” Polly said. “But I did meet her, as it happens. And she disappeared into thin air. Does that mean…?”

  Mr Gogerty nodded in the direction of the flock of chickens presently crowded round Polly’s mobile trying to send a text message to the Pentagon. “She’s probably over there right now,” he said.