Earth, Air, Fire & Custard Tom Holt

by Earth, Air, Fire

  Paul grinned feebly into the darkness. 'Not any more,' he tried to say, but it came out in italics, without the quotation marks. Not that I was ever a great fan of the central nervous system. Pain, for one thing. Hell of a lot of grief just to tell you not to do something. A little flashing light'd do just as well, and no -Mr Dao wasn't amused. Mr Dao also wasn't there; Paul couldn't see his broad, calm face, or hear his deep, refined voice. Instead, the words passed through Paul's mind, out of nowhere, going nowhere. 'I thought I told you,' Mr Dao said, 'don't you ever come back. But here you are.'

  Yes.

  'Marvellous. And this time-' A deep sigh; and because Paul couldn't hear it, or see the accompanying facial expression, it was somehow even more poignant, pure grief and frustration and annoyance without the ice cubes and slice of lemon. 'What did I tell you? I said, death has no jurisdiction over you.'

  Ah, well. Everybody makes mistakes.

  'Not me. That's the whole point. Infallible. Me and taxes.' Actually, that's inevitable, not infall- 'Infallible.' Mr Dao clicked his tongue. 'Until now. So,' he added grimly. 'Here we are again. Only this time-'

  I know. And I'll come quietly. You'd better show me where I'm supposed to sit, and what it is you actually do. Presumably you've got to sort of poke one bit of stick in and out of the other bits.

  'What?'

  Basket-weaving. And isn't there some tool called a rapping-iron? Is that for patting down the bits of stick so they lie straight?

  'Basket-weaving?'

  That's right. And contract bridge, and conversational Spanish. I'm all ready, and I promise I'll join in and not stand about sulking like I used to do at the other kids' birthday parties. I know it's for keeps this time, because the only way we could end the duel was we both died. There wasn't any other choice. A nasty thought struck Paul; highly unlikely, but you never knew. Ricky is here, isn't he? He did die?

  'Wurmtoter?' Mr Dao laughed icily. 'Oh, he's here all right. Beat you down here by a fifty-thousandth of a second. I can only put it down to his instinctive competitive streak, always got to win at everything. But you-'

  Born loser, Paul said. Always have been. I remember one Sports Day, the teacher saying- 'You aren't dead.'

  Time had no meaning there, so it must've just felt like a very long, awkward silence. Excuse me?

  'You aren't dead. No basket-weaving for you, sunshine. Like I keep telling you but will you bloody listen? Over you, death has no jurisdiction.' Mr Dao sighed again, raw emotion, unbearably bitter and sad. 'Either of you,' he added.

  You what? Only this time Paul could hear himself saying it. 'You what?'

  'I mean,' Mr Dao replied, suddenly visible, 'one of you's not enough, oh no. Now I've got two of you cluttering up the place, unsettling the other guests, monopolising my time-which-has-no-meaning-here when there's a million and one things I ought to be doing. Over there, look.' Mr Dao nodded into the surrounding darkness. 'Just sitting there, like an overgrown doorstop. Sulking.'

  Paul peered, but no dice. 'Where? I can't see him.'

  'What, are you blind as well as annoying? Over there. Talking to Theo Van Spee.'

  Oink? Paul thought. 'What did you just say?'

  'Theo Van Spee,' Mr Dao repeated. 'He showed up a second or so after you two. You three,' he added wretchedly, 'though of course in real time, that was thirty-odd years earlier. But screw the details, death's too short.'

  Not the time, Paul felt, to go wandering off the point. 'Professor Van Spee is dead?'

  'Oh yes.' Mr Dao laughed grimly. 'Quite definitively, after what that Frank Laertides did to him. Thunderbolt,' he explained casually. 'Right on the spot, too. Zap, aargh, and a bit of a burning smell. No, he won't be going anywhere, ever again.'

  'Oh.' Paul felt a shudder running up his spine. 'Well, I suppose-'

  'He had it coming, too right. Custardspace won't help him now. Not that Frank wasn't doing him a favour, in a sense, because at least it was very, very quick. I'd have hated to have been in Van Spee's shoes when the Canadians caught up with him.'

  Paul looked in the general direction where he thought Mr Dao had been pointing, but he couldn't see anything. It took him a moment to realise that that, of course, was the point. In the Land of the Dead, you can't see the dead people, just as you can't see individual raindrops in the ocean.

  'Oh,' he said.

  'Anyway.' Mr Dao was letting bygones go by, though it was clearly costing him an infinity of effort. 'There you are, all sorted. I expect you'll be wanting to go home now,' he added, with the subtlety of a pink elephant.

  'Will I? I mean, yes. Yes, please.' Paul struggled to find the question he knew he needed to ask, but it was like trying to tickle trout with numb fingers. 'Um, how do I-?'

  'Oh, for pity's sake,' Mr Dao said -

  - And Paul opened his eyes, and saw the most beautiful thing he could possibly imagine. It was white, it was sort of rectangular, and it hummed very softly. He got up from the floor, crossed the lino and opened its door. Inside he found a pint of needled milk, a bit of translucent yellow cheese rind with green bits on it, two vintage yogurts and a very, very old carrot.

  'Hello, fridge,' he said.

  The fridge didn't say anything back, but it beamed clean white light at him, like a smile.

  Paul backed away and looked round. He was in his kitchen, back at the flat. Through the window he could see the street: the street lamps, parked cars, the sad, dead plane tree installed some time ago by the government with a view to turning Outer London into a green and pleasant land. Carefully, he opened a cupboard door; to his overwhelming joy, he found washing-up liquid, a packet of Daz, some cans of soup, but no short cut to the existential void.

  'Well,' he quoted, 'I'm back.'

  But -

  Temporal paradoxes or no temporal paradoxes, Paul hadn't been born yesterday. He went back to the fridge and looked at it for a while, waiting for it to make the first move. Then he folded his arms and said, 'I know you're in there.'

  The fridge made a sort of clanking noise, and turned into Mr Laertides.

  'Hello yourself,' he said. His left arm was stuck out at an angle, just as the fridge door had been. He lowered it. 'Any chance of a cup of tea?'

  Paul shrugged. 'If you like,' he said. 'I wouldn't have thought that you drank tea.'

  'I don't,' Mr Laertides replied. 'Actually, I don't drink anything, except to be sociable. However, in human society the sharing of hot, milky drinks creates a relaxed ambience conducive to better understanding. Bung the kettle on.'

  'All right,' Paul said. 'And then you can start at the beginning.'

  'Sure,' replied Mr Laertides. 'If that's what you really-'

  'At the beginning,' Paul repeated firmly. 'Even if it means the Great Cow of Heaven.'

  Mr Laertides perched on the edge of the kitchen table. 'Milk and two sugars,' he said. 'You ready?'

  'As I'll ever be.'

  'Then I'll begin.'

  In the beginning (said Mr Laertides) was me.

  'Let me stop you there for just a second,' Paul interrupted.

  'Sure,' Mr Laertides replied, sipping at the tea that Paul had just handed him and pulling a face. 'Milk's off,' he said.

  Paul scowled. 'Whose fault is that?'

  'Sorry.' Mr Laertides grinned. 'Guess I had other things on my mind than being the best fridge I could possibly be. Which is understandable but not acceptable. Here.' He reached into the top pocket of his jacket and produced a two-litre plastic carton of milk.

  'Thanks,' Paul said, adding some to his own tea. 'But what you just said. In the beginning was you.'

  'That's right,' Mr Laertides said. 'And pretty dull it was too, waiting around for the others to show up. When you're floating around in the presubstantial void, playing "I Spy" doesn't help much, either. Something beginning with N.'

  Paul shuddered. 'Been there,' he said.

  'Ah.' Mr Laertides nodded. 'But that's the void at the end, which is rather different. Also very dull, but also rather de
pressing and sad. The void at the beginning is just - well, boring, really. So I decided to fill it up with stuff.'

  Paul narrowed his eyes. 'Bang?'

  'Big bang, yes,' Mr Laertides said, with a chuckle. 'I suppose it's the childish side of my nature, but I've always had a thing about loud noises, explosions and so on.'

  'So that makes you-'

  'I had help, of course,' Mr Laertides continued smoothly.

  'From Audumla, the Great Cow of Heaven. Where she turned up from I have no idea, but suddenly there she was, big cow eyes, going Moo. Nice to have on your side, though. Anyhow, that was all pretty straightforward. Now I'd like to fast-forward a bit -'

  A few hundred million years, give or take (Mr Laertides went on). Can't be more precise than that. Time really does fly when you're having fun. Which, in my case, consists of delegating responsibility, taking on more of a consultancy role, putting my feet up and managing not to get involved. Let them get on with it, I said to myself. After all, they're only humans, how much damage can they actually manage to do?

  Silly me.

  Enter your friend Theo Van Spee. He wasn't calling himself that back then, of course, because a name like that'd have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb in the primeval Dark Ages. So he said his name was Utgarth-Loke, and he was there to do a bit of routine maintenance to the structure of time and space; and since he was wearing overalls and carrying a toolbox and a clipboard, everybody believed him.

  Of course, it's easy with hindsight. But I wasn't around, in fact I was fast asleep; and back then, thirteen centuries ago, nobody'd heard of time travel or alternative realities or transdimensional shift. Instead, they had gods; and if a bloke turns up who looks like a god and acts like a god and starts jacking acroprops under the Sun and unscrewing the stars, you aren't inclined to ask for any ID. Not if you're sensible.

  We know better, you and me. We know Theo Van Spee had gone back in time, using his stupid bloody Custardspace, to cheat history by making King Hring - or is it King Hroar, I get them muddled up - win the duel, so the Canadians could inherit the Earth.

  Like I just said, I was fast asleep at the time. Actually, that's a bit misleading, because it makes me sound bone idle and uncaring. But you've bumped into the Fey; so when I tell you I was asleep and dreaming, you'll know that I was hard at it, busy-busy, creating new worlds and new civilisations, populating them with truly unpleasant people like the late Countess Judy di Castel' Bianco, boldly zizzing where no man had zizzed before. Not a good thing, in retrospect, but then, quite a lot of what I've done over the years has turned out to be good ideas at the time. Anyhow, the first I knew about Theo Van Spee's scam was when I woke up - and I'm not a morning person, I freely admit that - in my office at 70 St Mary Axe, in the guise of Frank Laertides.

  I hate it when that happens. I only exist, you see, where I'm needed. Sort of goes with the territory. It cuts out a lot of the hanging around in between jobs, but it means you have to get into the habit of hitting the ground running. Anyhow, I woke up; and as soon as I opened my eyes, I knew there had to have been a major fuck-up somewhere and somewhen in the vicinity, because otherwise why would I be there? That was just over thirty years ago, and Theo Van Spee had just activated Custardspace for the first time.

  Unfortunately, by the time I kicked down the door of his office and barged in, it was too late. He wasn't there, and I was just in time to see his stupid Portable Door thing closing behind him and vanishing. I knew something was badly wrong, I could feel it in my bones, but at that time I didn't know exactly what it was, so I couldn't take the appropriate action. I had to go back through history, year by year, event by event, every damn thing from wars and plagues and the elections of popes down to minor cart accidents and butterflies flapping their wings in the rain-forest, till I figured out what had gone wrong. By then, of course, Theo Van Spee had done his worst, and I was screwed. It was up to me to put it all right, but Van Spee was safely hidden away in his special secret hiding-place in the heart of Custard-space, where nobody could get at him, not even me. So I had to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, and figure out a cunning plan.

  Which is where you came in.

  'Me?' Paul objected. 'But I wasn't even born thirty years ago.'

  Mr Laertides grinned. 'Of course not,' he said. 'It takes time setting these things up. First I had to fix it for your mum to meet your dad: dinner, flowers, all that sort of thing. Then the whole wedding to arrange. You have no idea how much planning goes into one of those things. In comparison, creating the universe was a piece of cake.'

  Paul breathed in slowly, then out again. 'You arranged for me to be born.'

  Mr Laertides nodded. 'That's right,' he said. 'Me and your Uncle Ernie, actually, on the two-birds-one-stone principle. He needed someone to stop Countess Judy, I needed someone to bring down Theo Van Spee. It stood to reason that anybody called into existence to be used, basically, as a weapon was going to have a pretty sad, confusing and miserable life; so we thought, hey, why make two people unhappy? And so we created you.'

  'I see,' Paul said. 'Right.'

  'Don't look at me like that,' Mr Laertides said. 'I mean, millions of people are born into sad, confusing, miserable lives every day, and they don't have heroic destinies to make sense of it, they've just got to bash on with nobody to blame but themselves. You, on the other hand, have the satisfaction of knowing that the thoroughly shitty time you've been having all these years has served a noble and worthwhile purpose. Not to mention the fringe benefits, which I'll come to later.'

  'Why not now?' Paul asked.

  'Later,' Mr Laertides repeated. 'Otherwise I'll lose my thread. We created you-'

  We created you (Mr Laertides went on); and, as you know, Ernie had his own agenda and I had mine. Now, as a rule, creating a human being from the ground up is a really difficult, messy, rather dangerous business - no, scratch that. Creating a human being is fatally easy, a couple of careless teenagers can knock one up, so to speak, behind the bike sheds in five minutes, or five minutes and nine months. Easy if you're human; but I'm not. I had to do it the other way. Because if you do what comes naturally, sure enough you get a human being; but you get one at random, if you follow me. I wanted a specific human being. I wanted you.

  You're giving me that half-witted stare again. Come on, you should be happy. Finally, after all these years of being a redundant loser on the fringes, suddenly you find out you're practically the Chosen One. Hey, screw practically, you are the Chosen One, because I chose you. I designed you, and since I'm damn good at everything I do, you came out perfect, a hundred per cent up to specification. You see, you had to have various essential qualities. You had to be able to do magic, you had to be able to walk in dreams, for the Countess Judy thing, you had to be a fearless warrior who'd willingly give his life for the cause of right - I said a fearless warrior, Paul, and that's what you are, you just proved that. You don't have to be any good at sword-fighting to be fearless. Anyhow, more than all of that, you had to have just the right combination of personality defects, neuroses and insecurities to drive you along the path we'd mapped out for you, as precisely as a champion lab rat with a connoisseur's nose for the right cheese. You had to be a complete fuck-up; not just that, you had to be a fuck-up in exactly the right way. Because we needed you like that. We had to put, if you like, the mess in the Messiah. And didn't we do well, your Uncle Ernie and me? Goes without saying, we're really proud of you. Well, I am, anyhow. I think Em got a bit ticked off with you when you condemned him to death everlasting, but he always was prone to be judgemental.

  So there you go. If ever you've stared wretchedly into a mirror - and of course you must 'ye done, every day of your life - and wondered, why oh why couldn't I have been just a bit less of a total and unmitigated disaster area; well, now you know. Even then, we had to be on our toes every minute of every day while you were growing up. Luckily we had help. Like Miss Hook, for instance, at your school. She let us hex you into a trance s
o that you'd be staring gormlessly out of the window whenever the rest of the class was learning the really important stuff, the things we couldn't allow you to know. Have you ever wondered about that? Thought you had. You're thick, see, but not that thick. I mean, you couldn't be that thick, or you'd never be able to remember to breathe.

  Now at this juncture I expect you may be feeling just a trifle resentful and upset, on the grounds that you've never had a proper life, you've been used and manipulated and it's just not fair. To which, Paul, all I can say is yes, you have. Sorry about that, but it's basically an omelettes-and-eggs situation. And, if it makes you feel any better, you aren't the only one. See, all along, ever since you were born - here's a clue. When is Sophie's birthday?

  Paul opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated.

  'I don't know,' he said. 'That is, she did tell me once - several times, actually - but I kept forgetting. Then she'd get all quiet and hurt about it and it was obviously not a good subject, so I didn't go there.'

  Mr Laertides grinned infuriatingly. 'You forgot,' he said. 'Actually, you have a better than average memory, it's just that I keep punching holes in it. Paul, Sophie was born at the same time on the same day in the same year as you were, and that's not a coincidence. So, you see, the two of you have something in common. Like, if I was an artist and signed my work, you'd both have the same scrawly writing on the small of your backs.'

  Paul gazed at him for quite some time without speaking. 'Oh,' he said eventually.

  'Oh' is right (Mr Laertides continued). I created her too, or at least I manipulated her. But she already existed, because she was the other half of Skofnung, the living sword. My job was to reincarnate her, for want of a better word, as your counterpart and prospective soulmate. Which was bloody rough on her, as you can appreciate; in fact, she's probably had an even rougher deal than you have. Just think: being engineered from the moment of reconception to be the only girl in the world for you. Ghastly, or what?