by Tom Holt
Maybe even victory?
“Oh, look,” said the Science Officer. “She’s brushing her teeth with a bit of stick.”
Mordak looked. “It’ll take her for ever to get them sharp that way.”
“Yes, but she hasn’t got a proper grindstone. I call that initiative.”
“That’s not stick, it’s shin.”
“Whatever.”
Because, Mordak reflected, what’s the defining experience of Evil, taken as a whole, throughout three Ages of recorded history? It loses, that’s what. It gets hammered. It gets the stuffing bashed out of it, every single time. A Dark Lord rises, for a while everything goes swimmingly, vast swathes of territory fall under the Shadow; and then a handful of pointy-ears or a bunch of uppity humans or even a solitary furry-toed, knee-high hooligan stops us dead in our tracks and it’s straight back to square one, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred zlotyl. A wise man, observing this trend, decides not to fight it. He rolls with it instead. He doesn’t get his hopes up. He climbs slowly up the ladder and puts a nice soft cushion under the tail of the snake. He compromises. He’s a realist.
And after a while he gets to thinking; maybe Evil always loses because that’s how it’s meant to be, because Evil shouldn’t win, because Evil is bad. And, following that silvery snail trail of logic to where it seems to want to go, maybe the job of the leader of Evil is to make sure it keeps happening that way. He can do it by overreaching himself, or turning on his allies, by unbelievable stupidity (a firm favourite, that one), or he can do it on purpose, deliberately, controlled failure, designed to reduce the impact of defeat and keep collateral damage to an acceptable minimum.
That, years ago, had been Mordak’s road-to-D’mashkûz moment. To achieve victory, first you have to define what you mean by it. New Evil; if you can lose as advantageously as possible, you’ve won.
There was this little voice in the back of his head. It had a sort of whiny, bleaty tone and it sounded distinctly worried. Perish the thought, it was saying, we’ve been through all this, we decided; Evil isn’t meant to win, see above, Victory, definition of. And if you think this, or anything, is going to make the slightest bit of difference, you’re just another dumb-ass Evil Overlord with dark matter for brains. That thing in there is basically just a Ring of Power 1:2. It’ll take you so far and then dump you in the brown and sticky, and the Elves will sing snide songs about your downfall until all the Realms are sundered. You want that? Really?
Maybe. But the little voice, Mordak couldn’t help but feel, doth protest too much. After all, he didn’t have to make his mind up right away. Let the project run a bit longer, see what we come up with, and then decide.
“Well?” said the Science Officer.
Mordak looked at him. “Well what?”
“What do you think? Do we carry on and let her get absolutely huge, or—?” He did the familiar finger-across-throat gesture. “Up to you.”
Mordak took a moment, but he didn’t have to think too hard. You don’t have to when you already know the answer. “I think she’s kind of cute,” he said.
“You do?”
“Oh yes. A terrible cutie is born. Get on with it, and don’t let her eat too many guards. It’ll stunt her growth.”
It had all started, as so many things tended to do, at a party on Bogdan’s yacht. The regular crowd were all there: oligarchs and their trophy wives, oil sheikhs, an Indian steel magnate or two, a few movie faces and a selection of the finest politicians money could buy. And Ms. Neige La Blanche, of course, pretty in canary yellow and bored out of her exquisitely contoured skull.
And a little roly-poly bald man in a Hawaiian shirt, open sandals and socks, who said his name was George; he was quite obviously nobody, compared to the sleek and the mighty all around him, but people were talking to him and laughing at his jokes, and Ms. La Blanche found the incongruity intriguing. So she asked the maître d’, an old friend and ally.
“Him?” He shrugged. “English.”
“Nobody’s perfect. Why do they all like him so much?”
“He’s rich.”
“English rich?”
The maître d’ shook his head. “Genuinely rich,” he said. “Look, if money was weight, he could sit at one end of the boat and everybody else could be at the other, and his end would sink like a stone.”
“Rich as in?”
The maître d’ frowned. “Property,” he said. “Sort of.”
So, when the opportunity presented itself, she went and sat next to George the Englishman and smiled at him, and he smiled back and offered her a plate of horrid sticky cakes.
“No thanks,” she said sweetly. “I only have to look at a cake and suddenly nothing fits any more.”
“That’s a pity,” he said. “Because these cakes are for looking at, not for eating.”
She assumed that was supposed to be a joke and did the silvery laugh. But George said, “No, seriously. You don’t eat them, you look at them. Or, more precisely, through them.” He grinned and held out his hand. “I’m George,” he said. “And this is what I do for a living.”
“You’re a baker.”
“No. But these are what you might call my stock in trade.”
Going nowhere. “That’s a nice shirt,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“Here.” George picked up a doughnut, his finger and thumb meeting through the hole in the middle. “It’s safer if you hold it like that,” he said. “Just a second, I’ll wrap it for you.” He took a paper napkin, wrapped the doughnut and put it on her knee. “You think I’m stark raving bonkers, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, “but in the nicest possible way.”
He nodded. “The last person I gave one of these doughnuts to paid me fifty thousand quid for it,” he said. “But I like you, you’ve got nice eyes, so this one’s on me. Oh, and you’ll need one of these.” From his top pocket he took a folded piece of paper. “Tells you how it works,” he explained. “Excuse me, I’m going for a pee.”
Some time later, when she was alone in the cabin, she opened her bag and there inside it was the napkin-wrapped doughnut, which she thought she’d thrown over the side of the boat, but clearly she hadn’t. Also the folded bit of paper the mad rich man had given her. She unfolded it and started to read.
Half an hour later some fool came and disturbed her, and she had to go and be nice to people, and it was three in the morning before she had a chance to get some peace and quiet and read it through yet again. It was, of course, entirely crazy and impossible; in exactly the same way as flying in the air was before the Wright brothers came along.
So she found George, who was sitting on deck drying his socks in the sun. “You read it, then?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Suit yourself.”
She sat down next to him, picked up one sock and held it over the side. “Explain it to me,” she said. “Or the sock gets it.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” George said. “Actually, it’s really quite simple.”
And then he told her about the late Professor Pieter van Goyen, of Leiden, who’d spent his life exploring the endlessly fascinating and lethally frustrating field of multiverse theory. Van Goyen started from the premise that there are an infinite number of parallel universes and alternative realities, of which our neck of the spatio-temporal woods is only one, and a pretty drab one at that. But what if someone invented an interface, a device that let you cross over to the alternative version of your choice, at will, just by wanting to go there and doing some simple, painless, inexpensive act? If only, thought Professor van Goyen; and then, why not?
And then he disappeared without trace, shortly before his favourite student Theo Bernstein accidentally blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider and found himself out of a job; and Bernstein took over where van Goyen had left off, and it’s a long story, and let other pens dwell, et cetera. But how would it be (George said) if there really was such an interface, and you could
use it to travel to parallel universes where things are very different, easy as falling off the proverbial log?
“Well,” Ms. La Blanche said, after a long pause for thought, “I imagine you could make a great deal of money.”
George beamed at her. “Done that,” he said. “Care to speculate how?”
“Something to do with property?”
“Sort of,” George said. “Well, you know how there’s a killing to be made buying up derelict old farmhouses in the back end of France and Spain and God knows where else, and flogging them to jaded urban Brits with half-baked dreams of authentic colour-supplement Arcadian living? Fine, only that market’s a bit passé and prices are going up; what’s needed is somewhere completely unspoilt and undiscovered and derelict and dirt-poor, where (allowing for exchange rate fluctuations) the entire GDP wouldn’t buy you a Big Mac and fries in London, and a man with vision and the courage to aspire could make out like a bandit.”
“And is there such a place?” asked Ms. La Blanche.
“Sure there is,” George said, and told her about the Hidden Realms.
She listened carefully, and then asked, “And how did you say you go about getting there?”
“I didn’t. But it’s really very easy. You just need a doughnut.”
“Doughnut?”
He nodded. “The sort with a hole in the middle. Or a bagel, or even a Cheerio. Any sort of circular, centrally perforated foodstuff. That’s the genius of it. The equations are set up to focus the exochronomatic field through the hole, thereby punching a hole through the transmorphic barrier while simultaneously creating a massive Uncertainty effect, and bingo, you’re there. Piece, no pun intended, of—”
“Does it have to be a special doughnut?”
“Any doughnut will do. I tell the punters it’s got to be one of mine, but that’s just bull. Theo Bernstein proved that, bless him, shortly before he disappeared. What they’re actually paying for is attunement to the vast and eye-wateringly expensive Van Goyen Matrix Generator I’ve had built in a disused salt mine in Silesia. But a magic doughnut sounds better. It’s called YouSpace, by the way. Catchy, don’t you think?”
“No. But it really works?”
George pointed at his shoes, beside him on the deck of the yacht. “Dinnington’s of St. James’s,” he said, “hand-made, cost me five grand. It works.”
She knew a pair of Dinnington shoes when she saw one. “And people actually buy—”
George shrugged. “I know,” he said. “Wouldn’t suit me. Uproot yourself and swan off lock, stock and barrel to some faraway place of which you know little, you can’t speak the language and the locals are a load of bloody savages who’d murder you for your earwax. But once you’ve made up your mind to it, Provence or the Hidden Realms, what difference does it make? Except your money goes ever so much further in the Realms. And the locals aren’t so snotty, either.”
“Talking of the locals,” said Ms. La Blanche, “what are they like?”
So George told her; about the proud, supercilious Elves, the industrious and warlike dwarves, the feather-duster-footed halflings, the primitive but noble humans; the trolls, the wraiths, the Dark Elves and, of course, the goblins. “Bloody lunatics, the lot of them,” he concluded, “but I don’t give a stuff, I don’t have to live there.”
“These dwarves,” said Ms. La Blanche. “Are they really rich?”
George laughed. “There’s more to life than just money, pet.”
“Wash your mouth out with soap and water. Well, are they?”
George looked round at his fellow guests on the deck of the yacht and lowered his voice. “Tell you what,” he said. “They could buy and sell this lot and still have change out of their beer money. And a nicer class of person, too. Marginally.”
She looked where he’d just looked, and gave her opinion that that wouldn’t be difficult. “Present company excepted,” she added politely.
George was amused. “Thinking of trying your luck, then?”
“When I left school,” Ms. La Blanche said, “the careers adviser told me, the modern world is crying out for intelligent, capable, dynamic women with solid core values and the will to succeed. I can see now that she was right. She just neglected to specify which world, that’s all. Silly me, I thought she must’ve been talking about this one, but obviously not. Now I know.”
Well, she’d gone away, she’d thought about it, and now here she was. Regrets? A few, but then again, too few to mention—except, had she known, she’d definitely have brought some books to read. The funny little lawyer’s offering was quite hard going (and she’d read On Chesil Beach, so she was no quitter) but it was that or the recipe book, and she saw enough of that when she was working.
She was gently sautéing some liver when the door flew open (dwarvish hinges are half an inch thick and made of heat-treated carbon steel; there’s a reason for that) and King Drain lumbered in, knocking over a pan of chopped leeks and spilling flour all over the kitchen table.
“You’re human,” he said.
She knew that tone of voice. Usually it said, “You’re a woman”, and ended up lumbering her with the task of choosing somebody’s wife’s birthday present. “I know. Why?”
“And you’re not from round here.”
Proceed with caution. “True. Why?”
“What do you make of this?”
He slammed something down on the table in front of her. She looked at it. “Rephrase the question. Ask me what I make with this.”
“All right. What?”
“Soup,” she replied. “Or sauces. Sometimes, if I’m feeling lazy, fruit salad. Where’d you get it?”
“You recognise it.”
“Sure. We have them where I come from.”
“How do you make soup with a small rotary shear?”
She smiled at him. “We open a tin. That’s what it’s for. It’s a tin opener.”
Most of King Drain’s face was beard, but he had very bright pale brown eyes. Almost golden. “It’s not made of tin, and what do you open with it?”
“Tin can. We preserve food by sealing it in little metal tubes. This is how you cut the tops off to get at what’s inside.”
“It’s remarkable,” Drain said. “I’ve been a metalsmith all my life, and my father before me, and his father before him. My great-grandfather, Grain son of Groin son of Grisli, built the Bronze Gates of Thingogram, which weigh five hundred tons each, but a child can push them open. But I’ve never seen work as fine as this.”
She shrugged. “It’s no big deal. Everybody’s got one, back home.”
“Everybody? Even poor people?”
“Mostly.”
Drain thrust the tin opener under her nose. “But look at it. Look at how precisely the gear teeth are cut. I measured them with callipers, there isn’t a thousandth of an inch difference between them. Are you trying to tell me you humans have craftsmen who can do work like this?”
“No idea. But it’s all made by machines.”
For a moment, she thought he must be having a stroke or a coronary. “A machine that can file?”
“I don’t know, that’s all rather specialised. All I know is, we have factories full of machines in a place called China, and they make all kinds of stuff. Everyday things. Cheap.” She peered at him through the beard. He really didn’t look well at all. “Where did you say you got this from?”
“The wizard’s tower, Snorfang. It was lying around in the dirt. I thought it must be a product of dark wizardry.”
She laughed. “Nothing to worry about on that score. It’s just a cheap old tin opener.”
“That’s what I’m so worried about,” Drain said feebly. “Wizards we can cope with. Machines that can file metal to exact tolerances, cheaply, will be the ruin of us all.”
Ah. She really ought to have thought of that, before she blundered along and put her foot right in it. “A very long way away,” she said soothingly. “Ever so far.”
“Really. So ho
w did it get here?”
Through a doughnut, presumably, she didn’t say. “Besides,” she went on, “it’s no threat to you, is it? Nobody can cut you out of the can-opener business, because there isn’t one, because there aren’t any cans. So you’ve got nothing to worry about at all.”
She was drivelling and she knew it. So, she suspected, did King Drain, who didn’t look the least bit reassured. Nor should he be, of course. He might look like a clown with his stumpy bow legs and his ludicrous Afrikaaner-church-elder beard with a tiny point of nose sticking out of it like a carrot out of a snowman; but one thing her years in the profession had taught her was not to judge people by how they looked. She’d known a lot of men who looked even more grotesque than King Drain and who’d made ever such a lot of money in places where money was hard to come by, and a lot of beautiful women (including the one who lived in her mirror) who weren’t nearly as angelic as they looked. And Drain wasn’t to know, because she’d seen fit to withhold the key information from him, just how unlikely it was that the Chinese were poised to flood his domestic market with cheap manufactured goods.
Point: why hadn’t she told him? Because he wouldn’t believe her? Because the technology involved was so advanced it sounded like magic? Magic worked around here; to a limited extent and not particularly usefully, it was true, but it was genuine magic, not just science in fancy dress. How or why it worked she didn’t know and preferred not to speculate; local variations in the laws of physics was her guess, and as an experienced traveller she knew that so long as you observe the local laws and don’t argue the toss, you’re generally all right, so if E chose to equal mc³ rather than mc² in these parts, it was no skin off her nose provided she knew what to expect and looked where she was putting her feet. So, if not for fear of being thought crazy, why hadn’t she said anything about doughnuts and YouSpace and how she’d got there and so forth? Partly, she suspected, because nobody had actually asked—well, you don’t, do you? When was the last time you met a stranger who dresses a bit funny and has an accent you can’t quite place and immediately demanded to know if they come from an alternative reality? You just assume they’re a bit foreign and think no more of it. And partly—face it, she told herself, because the secret of the interface is your edge, your get-out-of-trouble-free card, your ace in the hole should things not go well, and there’d be no point giving that away without a very good reason, in which sector King Drain’s peace of mind doesn’t fall, unfortunately. Tough, but there we go. If he wasn’t worried about that, it’d be something else.
