Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  ‘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 depressing 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 Custardspace, 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 hu
man; 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 swordfighting 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 Ern 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’ve 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 so 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?

  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?