But that's by the way. Actually, it's not, it's tangentially relevant; because we did roughly the same with you as we did with her. See, you too were already around when we were setting the project up. Of course you were; you were fighting a duel to the death on Bersa Island with Ricky Wurmtoter. We took you and reincarnated - no, I hate that word, we recycled you into Paul Carpenter. And that accounts for something which I know has been bugging the hell out of you for the last few days: namely, how come Mr Dao says that death has no jurisdiction over you? And why did the other Paul Carpenter who you let in through the door in Benny Shumway's office suddenly vanish when you reached the island?
Second question first. He vanished because, of course, he was already there. Had always been there, for the last thirteen centuries. Creating you wasn't an act of reproduction so much as duplication. If this was science fiction rather than prosaic fact, I'd call it cloning. I made a copy and sent it to live in your mummy's tummy for nine months. Which is why, you see, you can't die, or at least not for any meaningful length of time; because you've been there, done that, been dead for well over thirteen hundred years.
Oh, stop gawping at me like a brain-damaged goldfish and think about it for a moment. You know the answer already, you just haven't made the connection.
Just now, you figured out what should have happened in the Bersa Island duel: King Hroar and King Hring killed each other, and everybody else lived happily ever after. But that was thirteen hundred years ago. Now, that's what should have happened; now, thanks to you, that's what did happen, and history's been put back on the right track. We have the almighty US dollar rather than the almighty Canadian dollar, and that means - yes, you're getting there, slowly but surely like a snail working for the Post Office - that means that you've been dead all that time. One of you, anyway. Which means the other of you - the you you - can't snuff it, since where you're concerned it has been conclusively snuffed for a very long time. Which is what I was banging on about just now when I mentioned fringe benefits. Congratulations, Paul, you can't die. You're an immortal.
That was too much.
'Fuck you,' Paul yelled.
'What?' Mr Laertides actually had the gall to look hurt. 'Sod it, Paul, I thought you'd be pleased.'
'Pleased' Paul could hardly find words. 'You bastard. You just said how really shitty it is being me. Now you tell me I've got to go on being me for ever and bloody ever.'
Mr Laertides laughed. 'Oh, I see,' he said. 'I get your point. Well, it's not like that. You see, that's the good thing about human beings. One of the good things, anyhow. In point of fact, there's four good things about being human, and this one's number three on the list. Human beings change, Paul. They don't have to stay the same. You don't have to go on being a pathetic little creep for ever and ever if you don't want to. No, really. Trust me on this. You can change. You can gradually grow to be less pathetic. You can mature, grow as a person, get a life.' He frowned. 'By my calculations it'd be your third, but we don't begrudge it to you. The labourer is worthy of his hire, and all that.'
Anyway (Mr Laertides said) there we are. We'd created you, and Sophie as well, and programmed you, wound you up like a couple of clockwork mice, ready to be turned loose to do your bit in the struggle against chaos and Theo Van Spee. Everything was set up nicely, the time was right, everything poised like a coiled spring and tickety-boo. Just one last detail remaining. Before I could get any further with fighting Theo, I had to find him first. An essential ingredient, I hope you'll agree.
But not easy. You managed it, of course. You showed me the way, as I knew you would. You flushed out Theo's extra-secret hiding place in Custardspace. But it took a long time, and it was touch and go at times. Ricky Wurmtoter nearly screwed us at one point, as well: when he tricked you into poisoning him so that he could escape to Custardspace, and then very nearly got Sophie to drink the philtre and fall in love with him - in which case, he'd have had the other half of your sword, and the whole deal would've been off. But we got there in the end, thanks to a lot of good luck and good judgement. And thanks to me, mostly. Come on, I deserve some of the credit, after all those centuries of unremitting hard slog.
How can I explain this? All right, think of a computer screen; and somewhere on it there's an icon you can click on to open the program you need. Only it's hidden. It's under something or disguised as something, and you can't find it. So all you can do is go over the screen, millimetre by millimetre, clicking on everything until at last you get lucky and there it is.
That's you, Paul. You were my mouse. And all that really bizarre crap I had you doing, going to weird places and doing really stupid things, buying toothbrushes and standing under trees - well, let's just call it camouflage. What I really needed was for you to be in certain places at certain times, going click, to see what'd happen. Eventually, by trial and error - oh, by the way, did you really think that all that sticking your finger on blown-up photographs was actually prospecting for bauxite? Really? God, you're slow on the uptake. No, you were scrying all right, but not for bauxite. For custard.
Anyhow, by trial and error, I narrowed it down to the right place and time, and then I sent you there. With Sophie, because she had to be there too, to set off the program, as it were.
Unfortunately, you two contrived to piss each other off- a hint for you, Paul: never, ever laugh at a girl who's wound her own hair into a forkful of spaghetti, because, well, it's a female thing and we all know how unbelievably alien and strange their mind-set is, but they just don't like it, okay? You contrived to piss her off, just when the search was coming together nicely, and by some ghastly fluke of really bad luck, when I sent you back to have another try, who did you pick to take with you but the other half of the enemy's living sword, namely, bloody Vicky?
And that was where things started to get a bit screwed.
It was a bit, Paul decided, like being a sock inside a tumble-dryer. All around him the world, his whole life, everything he'd ever assumed or thought he knew, was swirling, spinning, not to mention chucking him about and bashing him into things. He was immortal; he was thirteen hundred years old, or he'd been alive thirteen centuries ago, he wasn't quite sure which; he'd been designed and built, like a barn conversion, to serve some grand design, except that its grandeur consisted of putting right a cock-up caused by a dirty little financial scam. Not just him but Sophie too; and the worst part of it (no, not in the least the worst part, but beyond all question the part that hurt him the most) was that Sophie- Mr Laertides was still blathering on, but Paul tuned out, struggling to build up the scattered Lego bricks of fact into a coherent structure. Sophie was the other half of this stupid sword, so she'd been around thirteen centuries ago too. But it was necessary, for the stupid grand design, for her to be Paul's -his whatever, because he couldn't bring himself to drag even the word for what he felt for her into this disgusting mess; and so she'd been dragged through time, reborn, remodelled, made over like a Victorian end-of-terrace on the Isle of Dogs, so that he'd have no choice but to love her, and she'd have no choice but to love him back- No choice.
And when he thought about how messed up he'd been over her drinking the stupid philtre, because then it could never be the real thing...
If anything ever merited the term obscene, this had to be it. Paul jumped up, and with a degree of speed and agility that he'd conspicuously lacked when he was dangling off the hilt of the stupid magic sword, he reached out and clamped both his hands round Mr Laertides's throat.
As I was saying (Mr Laertides went on, and Paul felt his fingertips meet in thin air) that was when things started to get a bit screwed. Would you mind not doing that, by the way? It doesn't bother me in the least, but if you go on like that you'll hurt yourself. See? Told you.
Right. Now you're sprawling comfortably, I'll continue. It was just as well that I'd taken the precaution of dosing you with the anti-falling-in-love stuff, because otherwise you'd have gone to the pictures with Vicky and you'd have been Cupid's pincushion while they w
ere still showing the trailers. But my foresight and attention to detail won the day - I've already told you, that doesn't work, and don't blame me if you sprain your wrist trying - and we got away with it. Bit of a blow for Vicky, of course. Actually, she's a nice kid, for half a sword. It was a mean trick our Ricky played on her, using Countess Judy's secret Jedi mind techniques to wash out her memory, then turning on the old Wurmtoter charm and nagging her into marrying him. Clever, though; because Ricky - well, he knows as well as anybody that no woman on Earth could be married to him for more than a week without ending up hating him beyond all measure; and if she hated him, then he could never have both halves of Tyrving, his magic sword; and then that'd be a key ingredient missing, and so it'd be impossible to recreate the Bersa Island duel. Neat; only Ricky overreached himself, got careless. It was his feud with Countess Judy, you see. When you got rid of her, it broke the spell that Ricky had put on Vicky. Straight away she was able to figure out what he'd done, and the net effect of all his ingenuity was to get her so mad at him that she was determined that the duel was going to happen. It'd be her way of getting even with him, you see. So, although none of us realised at the time, Vicky was actually on our side all along.
When Ricky realised that, of course, he freaked out completely; which was why he had to try his last and wildest shot, getting you to kill him with the poisoned custard slice. It wasn't real poison, of course; it was custard laced with half an ounce of Van Spee's crystals, the effect of which was to zap him across the interdimensional doobry like a rat up a conduit. Theo helped him, of course; he arranged for the crystals to be put in the custard slice. That was dead clever, actually. But I'm getting ahead of the story.
'You are?' Paul said.
'Yes,' Mr Laertides replied, as Paul tried, without success, to smash in his head with the heel of his left shoe. 'Before we deal with that, let's go back to the night when you came reeling home from the pub, pissed as a battalion of newts. Remember?'
'I was not-'
'You bloody were. You fell over in the kitchen.'
'That,' Paul pointed out, 'was only because all the fuses had blown. You did that, presumably.'
Mr Laertides shook his head. 'Not guilty,' he said. 'That was Theo Van Spee. He'd found out somehow or other that I'd been standing guard over you all along in my aspect or avatar as your fridge. You were getting awkwardly close to becoming a nuisance; but he couldn't attack you at work, because I was there all the time, so it'd have to be at home, where he could neutralise me without being too obvious about it. So he sent a freak power surge down the electric mains and tried to fry me. Nearly worked, too; I really thought I'd had it that time. Which was why I tried, with what I reckoned just might be my dying breath, to explain things to you: the whole deal, Utgarth-Loke and the Great Cow. Only,' he added reproachfully, 'you fell asleep. And then I found I wasn't mortally wounded after all; but I wasn't going to hang about and let Theo have another crack at me, so I tidied the place up a bit and went away. That's why, you may remember, when you woke up there was a brand-new fridge - a Zanussi, no less - and it had fresh milk and eggs and bacon and stuff in it, instead of all the decaying grunge I had to put up with.'
'Fine,' Paul said after a while. 'So we've covered that bit. Get back to when I killed Ricky with the poisoned cake.'
Well (said Mr Laertides, apparently completely unfazed by Paul's fruitless efforts to poke his eyes out with a broken biro) it was really very clever. The custard slice, you see, wasn't poisoned when it left the sandwich-bar place. It was a perfectly good custard slice, I know that because I gave it to you myself- What, you hadn't worked that one out for yourself? All those identical little bald round-headed guys with obscure-sounding names, Mr Palaeologus and Mr Porphyrogenitus and what have you? They were all me. Of course. Who else did you think they were?
I gave it to you myself, in order to make sure you'd overdose on custard and fall through into Custardspace, so you could sniff out Theo's secret lair. But when Ricky bumped into you in the corridor - spilt your coffee, if you recall, all down your front - well, while you were mopping coffee off yourself and generally fussing about and not paying attention, he quietly sneaked the massive dose of crystals into the custard slice, which he then proceeded to beg off you and eat. Now believe me, I hold no brief for the guy, he's - he was, rather - an annoying, pompous little toad most of the time, but you've got to concede, he was resourceful, and he was cool under pressure. He slid neatly out of the wreck of the let's-assassinate-me-and-then-you scenario, and straight into this Plan B, where he escapes to Custardspace and frames you for his murder. Extra cunning, of course, because he had a fair idea that Colin the goblin -remember him? - as soon as Colin the goblin found out that Tanner had you under armed goblin guard in the strongroom pending execution for murder, he'd realise that he had to rescue you or else lose out on any chance of getting his sticky claws on your stash of Van Spee's crystals. And, of course, he knew all about that unfortunate business whereby Colin the goblin and Sophie got linked up. Perfect, as far as he was concerned, because it solved his biggest problem - how to get Sophie into Custardspace too, so that he could dose her with philtre and so neutralise your magic sword and thereby prevent the Bersa
Island rematch. Simple: Colin gets you through, then goes back to collect the crystals so that both of you can escape from Custardspace. But as soon as Colin goes back, Sophie comes through. Bang! All set, everybody exactly where he wanted them to be. Clever boy, that Ricky. Shame he never amounted to anything in the end.
'He's dead, then,' Paul said.
'What, Ricky?' Mr Laertides nodded enthusiastically. 'Oh yes, you betcha. And not just dead but really dead. Right now,' said Mr Laertides, consulting his watch, 'he'll have finished an aerobics class and be just about to start his third session of conversational Esperanto.' He grinned. 'Let you in on a little secret,' he added. 'Your mate Mr Dao doesn't like Ricky very much.'
'I'm sorry,' Paul said, after a moment. 'I'm sorry he's dead. I liked - at least, I thought I liked him, a bit. I thought he was on my side, some of the time.'
'He was,' Mr Laertides said, 'just so long as you were being useful. Like, in the Countess Judy business, he was on your side then, when it suited him, and he probably decided he liked you, because it'd be more convenient that way. But first and foremost he was what he was. You don't get to be management in a firm like ]WW if you aren't what Ricky was.'
'Oh?' Paul said. 'And what would that be?'
'Totally and unalterably self-centred,' Mr Laertides replied. 'Like me, for instance; all I've ever cared about, from the moment I woke up thirty years ago, is getting the job done, nailing Theo, putting history back together again. As a result, I caused you all this grief, and Sophie, and everybody else who had the bad luck to get sucked into the mess. Or like Theo Van Spee. Oh, sure, he wasn't in it for the money, like Tanner or Humph Wells. He was more your sort of Werner von Braun type, he went somewhere he could carry on his work, and screw loyalties and principles and, of course, other people. And Ricky, of course; all he cared about was keeping clear of me. That,' he added, with a sweet smile, 'and money. He liked money a lot.'
'Oh,' Paul said. 'I'm still sorry, though. I killed him.'
Mr Laertides frowned. 'He killed you, though. Twice.'
'So what? I shouldn't have done it; only I had to. But that doesn't make it right.'
Mr Laertides looked at him for an uncomfortably long time. 'You know,' he said eventually, 'when I designed you for this operation, I did a bloody good job. For which,' he added, 'for what little it's worth, I apologise most sincerely. I had to do it, though, same as you. But that didn't make it right.'
Paul was silent for a while, then he shrugged. 'Forget it,' he said. 'I'd probably have turned out a complete mess even if you hadn't-'
'Oh for crying out loud,' Mr Laertides said.
Anyhow (Mr Laertides went on) that's about the long and the short of it. Not the most edifying and uplifting of tales, I grant you. It'd have b
een far better if Theo Van Spee had been some kind of Dark Lord hell-bent on ruling the world, rather than just an obsessive academic with rather twisted priorities; and it'd have been far more satisfying for you if you'd been on a quest, battled the enemy to a standstill and chucked a ring down a crack in a volcano instead of basically just doing as you were told, once you'd finally managed to figure out what it was you were supposed to be doing. But it wasn't like that, I'm afraid. Theo doesn't fit the mould, for one thing. He was never cut out for Dark Lordery, mainly because - well, in this context, dark is usually just another way of saying not very bright, you've got to be as thick as a whole timber-yard of short planks to try that kind of gig, and whatever else Theo was, he wasn't that. And you- 'He's dead too, then,' Paul interrupted.
Mr Laertides grinned. 'Yes,' he said. 'You can take my word for that. I won't nauseate you with the details.'
'Thank you,' Paul said. 'I-'
'Don't tell me,' Mr Laertides groaned. 'You feel guilty about that, as well.'
But Paul just shrugged. 'He was someone I knew. It's always unsettling when someone you know dies. It feels odd, like the engine's been taken to pieces and put back together again, only a bit's been left out and it doesn't quite run right. But guilty,' he added, 'no. Well, not really. Actually, I'd much prefer not to have to think about it at all.'
Good idea (said Mr Laertides). There's a whole lot of stuff in this life that's not nearly as big a pain in the bum as it could be, just so long as you don't think about it. It's there, of course, but if you made a point of fixating on every damn thing that's wrong or bad or unfair in this universe, you'd come to a pretty bad end. You'd turn out all screwed up, bitter and warped and inhuman. Like me, in other words. Not a good idea. Don't go there.
But I was just saying. Theo wasn't an evil overlord type, and Ricky wasn't, either - he was more your basic resourceful idiot -and that just leaves you. The hero. And the bit that nobody's ever got right, not in fifty thousand years of storytelling, is what to do with the hero once the story's over. Oh, there's happily ever after, but you're not a fool, you don't believe in that for one minute. And killing off the hero at the end, that's good from a closure point of view, but we've already established, no go in your case, over you death has no jurisdiction. But you were designed, built, raised and programmed specifically for the purposes of the story, and now it's finished and you're left over at the end. So what do we do with you?
Earth, Air, Fire & Custard Tom Holt Page 40
