by Tom Holt
This time the professor frowned, as though what Paul had just said didn’t make sense. ‘But I already have,’ he said, inclining his head in the direction of the patch of wall where the door had once been. ‘Further action would therefore be superfluous, and a pointless waste of resources. However,’ he added sternly, ‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to leave this place. Your presence is frankly disruptive, and as you must by now appreciate, matters are coming to a head. You do not know where to go, of course, and I must confess that I cannot help you to reach a decision. However, it is of little importance, all things considered, either to you or to me.’ He paused and looked at Paul with a curious blend of annoyance and compassion. ‘You do not understand,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it would be a kindness to explain, after all. I have not done so before on the grounds that the parts of the story that concern you would cause you undue alarm, and the parts that do not are none of your concern. However, in spite of everything I am and always have been primarily a scientist; intellectual curiosity is my besetting sin, and I find it hard to deny it in others. If you wish to hear the whole story, Mr Carpenter, I will tell it to you. Then you must leave. Is that acceptable to you?’
Paul shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But tell me, anyway.’
The professor smiled. ‘You only wish to learn in the hope that the knowledge will better equip you to fight,’ he said. ‘If you were not involved, you would prefer not to know. But nevertheless, I will tell you. Perhaps it will make me feel better if I tell you. On balance, I believe that is the true reason. No matter.’ He blinked, and a deep, snug-looking armchair appeared out of nowhere. Rather to his surprise, Paul discovered that he was sitting in it.
‘You are sitting comfortably,’ the professor said. ‘I shall begin.’
In the beginning (said Professor Van Spee) there was darkness and emptiness and confusion. The creator of all things brought light and order and understanding, and the universe began. He divided everything into four elements: earth, air, fire and water. He held them in place by the force of his will, arranged them in time so that one thing followed another, confined them in space so that each of them had form and structure and was separate from the rest. That is how it was meant to be, and it was a satisfactory arrangement. Unfortunately, I saw fit to interfere. With hindsight I regret having done so. However, I had very little choice, as you will see.
As I mentioned a moment ago, I am a scientist. All I ever wanted to do was to understand how things worked, what made the universe behave as it does, the properties of materials, the effect of processes, the nature of time. Accordingly I studied long and hard, and eventually I learned everything, the answers to all the questions that I have just referred to. I knew and I understood, and there was nothing left to find out.
I was, therefore, at something of a loss. When, as a young man, I had set myself to my task, I had assumed, perhaps foolishly, that it was impossible, that I must inevitably die before I could complete it. But, in the course of my researches, I discovered simple techniques for the unlimited extension of life, the arrest of entropy and decay; death no longer applied to me, neither did sickness or disability. I had also assumed that my frail human intellect would not be able to grasp the vastness of the concepts that I had set myself to address. In that, too, I was wrong. In due course, therefore, I reached the point where I had accomplished the purpose of my existence, but in doing so I had made it impossible for that existence to come to a natural end. I could only cease to exist if I took steps - difficult, complicated steps involving lengthy and tedious procedures - to destroy myself. Quite apart from an instinctive reluctance, I felt that to destroy such a complete and unique work of scholarship as I had become would be the most unpardonable act of vandalism. I could not do it. But I had no purpose. I had nothing to do.
I was bored.
It then occurred to me that, since I had complete and perfect knowledge of the universe as it existed, I might find a worthwhile occupation for my time in creating another universe, an artificial one if you wish to call it that. Compared to my original task, this would be a trivial matter, an amusement, a diversion; I couldn’t hope to learn anything from it, since by its very nature it would contain nothing that I didn’t already know and understand. But you must appreciate that hitherto, I had been passive, a mere consumer of pre-existing information. It would make a pleasant change, I felt, to be active, to create rather than merely to observe. And, as I have said, I had nothing better to do with my time.
Immediately I found that my choices were restricted by the nature of the materials available to me. There are, as I have told you, only four elements from which the universe is made up. At once, I took a fierce delight in the challenge; the contrariness of my nature rejoiced to find something that apparently I could not do, and I was grimly determined to do it, for that very reason. I resolved to create - more accurately, to synthesise - a completely new element. And, in my arrogance, I made up my mind that it should not only be new, but better than the original four. I would create my new element, and my entire self-made universe would be built from it alone. By virtue of that, it would be different, to a greater or lesser extent, from the natural universe. In those differences might lie new things to learn, new mysteries to explore. You might say that I was in the position of a detective who, having solved all the crimes in the world, must resort to committing new crimes of his own in order to have something to investigate. The analogy is, of course, imperfect, but I offer it for what it is worth.
In order to create my new element, therefore, I stole the Great Cow of Heaven—
‘You what?’ Paul interrupted.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Did you just say,’ Paul elucidated, ‘the Great Cow of Heaven?’
‘Correct. Her name is Audumla, and from her milk the Creator of all things—’
‘Fuck a stoat sideways up a palm tree,’ Paul said. ‘Sorry, I interrupted. You were saying.’
I stole the Great Cow of Heaven (continued Professor Van Spee) and drew off a sufficient quantity of her milk into a standard opaque Mortensen chamber. Having skimmed the milk in the usual way I added cornflour, eggs and a small quantity of the material commonly known, I believe, as Van Spee’s crystals - precisely the same material, I may add, as the sample you have in a twist of paper in your top pocket. I then subjected the resultant compound to intense bombardment with zeta-six radiation - I believe you would call it alchemical fire, although it is not properly speaking fire in the sense that you would use the term - until it was completely denatured, whereupon I froze it in a medium of transubstantiated gold alloyed with mercury and a pinch of baking soda. The result was a glutinous yellow semiliquid with a slightly sweet taste, bearing a striking resemblance to ordinary confectioner’s custard. When subjected to all the standard tests, however, the substance satisfied all the criteria of a new element. It also, as I subsequently discovered, had some remarkable and unexpected properties.
Although an element in itself, it could both permeate and penetrate the other four; and in doing so, inevitably, it moulded itself to the shape of any given object, so as in effect to create an apparently identical copy of it, existing in parallel to it both in time and space. I will say that again, in case you have failed to appreciate its significance. When brought into contact with any inanimate object made up of earth, air, fire or water, a quantity of the element will form itself into an exact but detached replica. I was not able to find a way to duplicate living matter: organic matter once dead could be replicated as easily as stone or plastic, but nothing alive. To date, in all the projects I have attempted, this has been my only failure. I regret it bitterly, but then, nobody is perfect. And I still have time.
Initially, I was held back by the problem of access. Although I could prove beyond any question the existence of my replicas, I couldn’t actually get to them; nor could I see, touch, hear, taste or smell them. I was forced to conclude, therefore, that they existed in a separate, dedicated dimension
- they had, in effect, slid through the object they were copying and out the other side into what I could only describe as Somewhere Else. This problem naturally reduced the usefulness of my creation somewhat, since all I could do with it was to enjoy the intellectual satisfaction of knowing it was there. My solution, elegant in its simplicity, was the artefact you know as the Acme Portable Door. A surprisingly basic mechanism, it allows travel backwards and forwards through time and space at will, including access to my synthetic universe. However, I soon realised that, although an efficient solution, it carried with it certain highly undesirable possibilities. In essence, it meant that I was no longer supreme ruler and sole inhabitant of my creation. Anybody coming into possession of a Portable Door could enter or leave my universe without difficulty. Naturally, that was unacceptable. Accordingly, I recalled and destroyed ten of the dozen Doors that I had constructed. One I retained for my own use; one, regrettably, went missing, and I have only recently discovered what became of it. Suffice to say that it should no longer pose a threat; it was in the possession of Mr Tanner’s mother when I sealed up the closed-file store just now.
In my search for a substitute for the Door, I now at any rate had a lead that was previously not available to me. Using the one remaining Door I could, in effect, conduct my search on both sides of the interdimensional barrier; and sure enough, it was on the other side, in the synthetic universe, that I found the answer. Quite simply, Van Spee’s crystals will, if taken internally, pull you back from the synthetic universe to the natural one. Once you have made that transition, ingestion of crystals will enable you to cross between the dimensions at will. Provided that your first crystal-facilitated crossing is from synthetic to natural, in other words, the process is as simple as blinking. It was then a simple matter of travelling to the synthetic universe through the Door and coming back by means of the crystals. Once I had done that, I was able to lock the Door away in a vault in the Bank of the Dead, whence it could never be removed without my express permission, and use crystals exclusively in order to commute between universes.
(Now there, Paul thought, is a coincidence. Or maybe just logic; after all, the only sane thing to do with something as massively dangerous as the Portable Door would be to stick it somewhere nobody could ever get at it. Hardly rocket science; so maybe it wasn’t such a big deal that he’d had the same thought as the professor. It also meant, of course, that killing the professor extremely dead, a not unattractive idea if it turned out to be actually feasible, wouldn’t really achieve a great deal, since he could use his Door to escape, just as Paul had. Bummer.)
I have been telling you all this (the professor continued) as if you were a fellow scientist, someone who understands the trials and frustrations of the academic life. I doubt whether that is the case. You simply don’t know. In order to carry out research, one must have equipment, facilities, time; in other words, money. In theory, that is what governments are for, to provide support for learning and achievement, because what other possible justification could there be for them? In practice, of course, one must find one’s funding where one can. Throughout my researches, I financed my work as all scientists must, if they lack sufficient private means. I invented things, spin-offs from my real work, and I sold them. Fatuous trifles, all of them; you can judge for yourself from the fact that my most lucrative single invention, for which I am best known in the world at large, is the portable car-parking space, which you can fold up and put in your pocket when not in use. It is, of course, merely a little piece of my synthetic universe - twelve feet by seven of my personal space, endlessly duplicated and sold over and over again, a tragic prostitution of my work but necessary nonetheless. It has paid for most of my greatest achievements. That is, of course, the way of things. Nobody will pay you money for defining the universe, and the patentee of the Black and Decker Workmate gets more in a year in royalties than the combined lifetime earnings of Newton and Archimedes. When I first invented it, needless to say, there was no call for it: no cars, no tarmac roads, in fact hardly any cities. But I foresaw that one day there would be a demand, particularly if I took steps to create one. It’s ironic, don’t you think, that I laid all the foundations for the invention of the internal combustion engine, indeed the whole Industrial Revolution itself, simply in order to create urban gridlock, a shortage of car-parking spaces, and a lucrative demand for what I had to sell. Transmitting the profits back in time through a series of offshore, off-world and off-dimension intermediaries was a simple enough matter, a diversion for a rainy afternoon. As always, I was in control. I knew what I was doing.
But the scope of the synthetic-universe project meant that I had to keep on inventing, making money; accordingly I resigned my academic post and joined this firm of money-grubbers. Here I could pursue my research in quiet and peace, interrupted only by the undemanding requirement of my partners that I should make them unimaginably rich. This I have done. Trifling jobs of work were assigned to me, and I dealt with them. One such insignificant little job led to all this trouble, and threatens everything I have worked for, everything I have achieved and become. That is perhaps the greatest tragedy and the greatest irony of all.
It was, on the face of, it an entirely undemanding commission. About thirty years ago a Canadian banking cartel, unhappy with changes in the corporate taxation system, decided to do something about it. They looked into the feasibility of overthrowing the government by armed force, but concluded that it wouldn’t be cost-efficient. Then they consulted me. It had occurred to them that, if in 1776 the Canadian colonies had joined in the Revolutionary War, they would now be trading under American law and paying American taxes, which would save them a significant amount of money. Could I, therefore, adjust history accordingly?
Having considered the matter, I told them that such a rearrangement was entirely feasible, but that they had made several grave errors in their calculations, and that if I did as they asked, they would turn out to have been unable to compete with the US banking sector in the 1950s and been forced out of business by 1962. They were, understandably, rather disappointed, and asked me (as of course they should have done in the beginning) if I could recommend a better course of action. I did some simple arithmetic, and explained to them that if Canada had been successfully settled by Europeans in the early Middle Ages, a sufficiently powerful Canadian banking industry would have been in place by, say, 1917 to enable them to see off any threat from the US banks in the second half of the century and go on to establish a highly lucrative monopoly of the entire American continent by 1999. They were delighted by this prospect, as you can imagine, and instructed me to proceed without delay - a rather fatuous enjoinder, given the circumstances, but that’s businessmen for you.
It was easy enough to pinpoint the decisive moment in history at which the fate of the earliest European settlement in Canada failed. As you may know, Vikings from Norway and Iceland under the leadership of Leif Ericson established a small colony on the coast of Labrador around the year AD 1000. History attributes their failure partly to harsh weather, crop failure and the hostility of the indigenous Amerindian population, but mostly to the sheer extent of their lines of communication and supply. They were, quite simply, too far from home to be supported, given the technological and cultural status of Viking Scandinavia. In order for the colony to have succeeded, therefore, I had to advance the civilisation of tenth-century Norway and Iceland by several centuries, so that they would be capable of maintaining a colony across three thousand miles of open sea. Once I had established that that was the prerequisite, I was able to search for and locate my hinge, my turning point; and in due course, I found it.
The precise moment when the world changed was 17 August AD 722, on a small island off the coast of Norway’s Ranrike province. There, two petty chieftains fought a duel to decide which of them would rule south central Norway. In the event, King Hring of Rogaland defeated and killed King Hroar of Vestfold - you have no idea where Rogaland and Vestfold are, but it makes
no difference whatsoever - and the consequences ensuing from that victory are what we know as history. Had King Hroar been the winner, however, things would have been quite different. Hroar, a visionary and social reformer, would have gone on to weld the whole of Scandinavia into a single monolithic nation, dominant in Europe for the next five centuries. The heirs of King Hroar would have possessed both the resources and the will to make a success of the Norse discovery of the New World. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Canada would have seized its independence; by the fourteenth, it would have grown to be the second most powerful Western nation, after France. There would have followed the usual round of religious and social conflicts, culminating in a bitter civil war somewhere around 1972, during which my client’s bank would have sided with the winning faction, thereby ensuring their financial supremacy in the New World until the sun eventually goes cold and the planet ceases to be habitable. Beyond that I did not care to speculate, since the extinction of all sentient life on the planet introduces variables into the calculations that I cannot reliably extrapolate from. All I had to do, therefore, was to ensure that Hroar, not Hring, came back alive from the duel on Bersa Island in the early evening of 17 August 722.
I need not overtax your limited concentration span with technical details. It was a fairly simple matter to go back in time, using the Portable Door, and engineer a chance meeting with the two combatants en route to the island. Very occasionally, I enjoy disguises, dressing up, a little amateur acting. I played the part of an old peasant hedge-wizard living in a miserable hovel on the shores of the fjord. By the simple expedient of permitting King Hroar to save me from drowning - it did not occur to him that it was extremely unlikely that a seventy-year-old man who’d lived beside the water all his life would be unable to swim; Hroar had many sterling qualities, but intelligence was not one of them - I was able to gain his unquestioning trust. He was a basically good-hearted man, stupid, egotistical and emotionally immature but highly appreciative of what he believed was the sincere gratitude of a simple old man saved from a watery grave. Accordingly, when I offered him a gift of enormous value as a token of thanks, he accepted it without question. A wiser, more cynical man might have been suspicious, particularly since the gift was a sword. Only a fool would undertake to use a sword that he’d never handled before in a crucial and politically significant duel, a weapon given to him by a perfect stranger under circumstances of extreme melodrama. Fortunately, for me and for him, Hroar was just such a fool, since the sword I gave him was Skofnung, the most powerful of all the nine Living Blades forged by Weyland himself, a weapon that effectively guaranteed victory to anyone who wielded it. I had already been to some trouble to locate and acquire Skofnung; I eventually tracked it down in the vaults of the Petersen Collection in Oslo. That, however, was the easy part. Considerably more difficult was the task of locating the young woman who constitutes the sword’s other half, without whom Skofnung is simply three feet of laminated steel. How I found her, and how I induced her to assist me, is another matter entirely, and something that I would prefer not to go into at this time.
