Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  Theo gave him a terrible smile. “It means it keeps switching,” he said. “From base ten to base four to base sixteen, sometimes in the same line. Which means two and two could equal four, or ten, or eleven, and you’ve got no way of knowing which base you’re in from one moment to the next. Presumably there’s a reason for it, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

  Call-me-Bill frowned, then smiled at him. “Very good,” he said. “Carry on.”

  So on he carried, by the simple expedient of ignoring the problem and believing. This didn’t come easily. When two and two made five, all his instincts yelled at him to stop, go back, find the error and correct it. Instead, he forced himself to have faith, so that if two and two made five, that was all right because Pieter said so. Once he’d trained himself to do this, a thin, frail thread of understanding began to stretch itself, like a spider’s web in sub-zero temperatures, from one page to the next. The variable bases, he discovered, were necessary because each line of maths might well be operating in two or three or more alternative realities at the same time. In a bizarre way, though, that actually helped, after a while. Outbreaks of base six, for example, indicated activity in the primary default alternate reality – the one where he’d jumped in just after the horrible bar fight, presumably – while the cowboy-saloon reality seemed to happen mostly in base nineteen. After three weeks of battling with this garbage he was beginning to have a shadowy idea of what Pieter had been trying to do, but still no clear picture of how he’d done it, or which sheets of single-spaced mathematical symbols represented Pieter’s working notes towards writing a user’s manual.

  “It’s like this,” he explained to Call-me-Bill, after a particularly fraught progress meeting. “Suppose I’m a single-cell amoeba and you want me to evolve into Einstein. Well, at the rate I’m going, in a year’s time, with a lot of luck, I might just be a sea cucumber.”

  Call-me-Bill gave him an agonised look. “That’s not good enough,” he said. “The money—”

  Theo said something intemperate about the money and what Call-me-Bill might like to do with it. “It’s useless,” he went on. “God only knows how long it took Pieter to do all this stuff. And he knew what he was doing, and he was a genius.”

  Call-me-Bill looked at him. “So, how long—?”

  “Fifty years. Maybe. If I manage to keep this pace up without turning my brain to glue, which,” he added with a scowl, “doesn’t seem very likely. If you ask me, your best bet would be to cut your losses and turn this place into a hotel. You could make good money if you could get a slice of the conference trade.”

  Somehow, Call-me-Bill didn’t find that idea very appealing, so it was back to the printouts and the calculator for another excruciating week, at the end of which Theo realised there was something else at work in there, something he hadn’t identified yet, without understanding which he was simply wasting his time; at which point he kicked off his shoes, smashed the chair against the wall until there wasn’t a big enough bit left to hold on to, and spent the next eight hours folding sheets of printout into paper aeroplanes.

  And then it hit him, suddenly and without warning. So simple. So utterly and completely deranged, but so very simple.

  “Think about it,” he urged Call-me-Bill, who was looking at him nervously, as though expecting to have to defend himself with a chair at any moment. “In an infinite multiverse, there’s got to be some reality somewhere where all this shit is actually perfectly normal and as clear as a bell. So; we go there, we do the maths, we reconstruct the user’s manual, we use it to get home. What could possibly go wrong?”

  Call-me-Bill was trying to avoid sudden movements. “Fine,” he said, “in principle. So, how precisely do you figure on finding this other reality and getting there?”

  Theo beamed at him, which for some reason made him even more nervous. “Leave it with me,” he said. “I expect I’ll think of something.”

  And think of something he most certainly did. Sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, with paper aeroplanes floating lazily past his head and fluttering gently to the ground, he thought of many things; the gentle chatter of a brook in spring, the patter of rain on rooftops, the breathtaking fractal beauty of birdsong and apple cores, and the many and complicated things he’d like to do to a wide variety of people, starting with his parents and working bloodily and methodically through the cast list of his life until he got to Matasuntha and Call-me-Bill. It helped, but not nearly enough.

  Maybe he drifted into some sort of sleep; not the refreshing kind that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care and makes you such a trial to your hungover fellow workers, not quite the accidental doze you slide into on train journeys or during earnest films with subtitles; his body was at some kind of rest but his mind must’ve been redlining, because when he snapped out of it, he knew exactly what he was going to do next. He was dimly aware that the conclusion he’d reached was a culmination of a long and painstaking internal debate, which he’d missed out on because he’d been asleep. Not that it mattered. He was perfectly happy to take it on trust, because it seemed so obvious.

  I’ll ask Max, he told himself. Max will know.

  He went from sitting on the floor to lying on a bed, in a darkened room. A faint blade of orange light shone through a crack in the curtains, enough for him to see that he wasn’t alone.

  Whoever she was, she was lying with her back to him. A glimmer of light from the window shone on an unruly sea of golden hair. He remembered what Pieter had said about the way he liked his YouSpace visits to start. Well, he thought.

  She sighed softly and wriggled round to face him, and for the first time in a long time he found himself thinking that Pieter hadn’t been such a bad guy after all. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  “Fancy a doughnut?” she said.

  For some reason, he found it hard to speak. “A—”

  “You do like doughnuts, don’t you?”

  “Love ’em,” he whispered hoarsely. She grinned, hopped off the bed and returned with – why was he mildly disappointed? – a plate of doughnuts, golden brown and sugar-frosted. He picked one up and held it; then she kissed him, and it sort of slipped his mind.

  “So,” she said. “I think that settles it, we are going to be friends. It’s so important, isn’t it, to be on good terms with the people you’re going to be working with?”

  “Absolutely,” he whimpered. “All the latest studies on workplace interaction stress the value of a warm and cooperative ambience.”

  She picked up a doughnut and nibbled the rim with her small, white teeth. “When they told me I was going to be working with Professor Pieter van Goyen – the Pieter van Goyen, the guy who designed the Quite Ridiculously Huge Hadron Collider, I thought, wow, this’ll be awesome. And then I thought, what if he’s some stuffy, flaky old guy who only cares about the project? I thought, that won’t be a lot of fun.”

  “And?”

  She laughed and bit a chunk out of the doughnut. “Let’s say you’ve set my mind at rest on that score, Professor.”

  Her eyes were the colour of mint leaves. “Excellent,” he said. “So, um, what’s your overview of where the project’s at right now?”

  She giggled and tried to stuff doughnut in his mouth. He dodged, and she kissed him instead. “I think it’s coming along just fine,” she said. “Particularly now that Max has fixed that thing with the Heisenberg collimator.”

  “Max—”

  “Yes, I know.” She gave him a sympathetic grin. “He’s a pain in the ass, but you’ve got to admit, he’s good at what he does. And so long as he carries on doing it,” she added, with a faintly feral glint in her eye, “that means we get some time to relax and, um, pursue other interests. Don’t know about you, but that suits me just fine.”

  She reached out and put her hand on the back of his head, drawing him towards her. He didn’t exactly resist, but she stopped and looked at him. “What?”

  “Max,” he said. “I don’t know
anything about him. Do you—?”

  She shrugged. “What’s there to know? He’s a workaholic and a flake, with below average social skills and personal hygiene issues. But you know that, for Christ’s sake. You taught him for five years.”

  “That was some time ago,” Theo managed to say. “People change.”

  She shook her head. “Not Maxie. But hey, who gives a damn? And anyhow, from what I hear, compared to his brother, he’s Prince frigging Charming. Just be glad we got the lesser of two assholes.”

  “His brother,” Theo said quietly.

  “You know, Theo. The clown who blew up the—”

  “Oh, right. Him.”

  Thanks, Pieter. She was looking at him a little oddly.

  “Didn’t you teach him too?”

  “Yes, but I prefer not to dwell on it.”

  She laughed. “Don’t blame you. I seem to remember meeting him once, at the Leipzig conference. Little bleary-eyed guy with a stammer and a runny nose. I can’t understand how you managed to put up with him for five years.”

  “Ah well,” Theo said, having first ungritted his teeth. “Time, the great healer. Anyhow, let’s not talk about him.”

  “Let’s not talk at all.”

  He was sitting on something. The doughnut. “I need to see Max,” he said. “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yup. I’ve just thought of something that won’t wait. Where do you think he’d be at this time?”

  She gave him a long, cool look. “In bed with a glass of milk and a learned journal,” she replied. “Not like you. Why, is that what you’d rather be doing?”

  He managed to squeeze her out a smile. “You wouldn’t happen to have his address and phone number?”

  She sighed. “Wait there,” she said, got up and left the room. A shame, he thought, a great big shame, but what the hell. Business before pleasure. Exactly why business had to come before pleasure, especially given that linear time wasn’t passing as far as he was concerned, he was at a loss to say.

  “Here.” She threw a cellphone in his lap, and dictated a number. The phone rang. Max, he thought. My God. Max.

  “Hello?” But it was a woman’s voice.

  “Um, is Max there, please?”

  Pause. “No.”

  It had been the sort of pause you get when the person answering the phone turns away and mouths are you here? and the person you want to talk to pulls a face and shakes his head. He frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “Course I’m sure. It’s not exactly a grey area.”

  “Sorry, of course. Um, when’s he likely to be back?”

  “Couldn’t say. Who is this?”

  His tongue was between his teeth, shaping the th of Theo. “Pieter van Goyen.”

  “What? Sorry, Pete, didn’t recognise your voice there. It’s Marge.”

  “Ah. Look, can you give him a message, please? To call me, ASAP.”

  “Sure. Where are you?”

  Excellent question, referring back to an earlier question, your place or mine, which he hadn’t been there for. “This number,” he said, ignoring the ferocious scowl that earned him from whatever her name was, whose phone he was presumably using. Oh well, never mind.

  “I’ll be sure to tell him. Ciao, Pete.”

  He killed the call. She was glaring at him.

  “Sorry,” he said, handing her the phone. “But it’s important.”

  “In that case,” she said, pulling on a robe, “you should’ve said to call you back at home, because that’s where you’re going. Right now.”

  In the background he could hear the faint, mocking crackle of burning bridges. Oh well. “Yes, right, I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

  “For crying out loud, Pete. It’s hardly rocket science.”

  “Pity. I’m good at that.”

  He headed for the door. She cleared her throat. “Far be it from me,” she said, “but aren’t you going to put some clothes on?”

  “What? Oh, right.” He looked round, and the dim amber light picked out a tangle of discarded garments, at least some of which must be his, in a heap by the window. Burning with the special embarrassment that only happens when you’re dressing on suffrance before getting thrown out, he fumbled for the other sock, decided he could probably do without it, and dragged his pants on. Probably, he told himself, this wasn’t how the scenario played out for Pieter. Still, he’d had the manual, even if it was only inside his head.

  The phone rang.

  She scowled at him. “You’d better answer it,” she said.

  He grabbed it from her outstretched hand. “Hello?”

  “Pieter?”

  Max’s voice. For God’s sake.

  He straightened up fast. “Max?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  She was still glaring, so he turned away, facing the window. He looked up and saw the sky. It was dark blue, with a round fat full moon. “Max, it’s me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s me, dammit. It’s—”

  And then his voice jammed in his throat and he couldn’t breathe or move. Something horrible was happening to him. He could feel his face stretching, as though his nose and mouth were plastic and they’d melted, and someone was drawing them out like strings of fondue. His ears were changing too, the skin around them was being squeezed like a toothpaste tube into a strange, inappropriate shape. He wanted to yell, but his tongue was swelling in his mouth and, for some unfathomable reason, he couldn’t take his eyes off the moon.

  “Pieter?” There was terror in her voice. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Then he did yell, because something was bending his knees the wrong way, but inexplicably the bones didn’t snap under the intolerable pressure, and now, instead of hinging forwards, they hinged back –

  “Pieter!”

  His eyes still fixed on the moon, he raised his hand (his visible right hand) until he could see it, on the edge of his field of vision. It was covered in thick grey hair, which doubled in length as he watched. Suddenly the blockage in his throat cleared; he breathed in, and the shock of a million new smells, all overwhelmingly rich and detailed and crammed with information, made his head swim. He gasped and, as he closed his automatically opened mouth, he felt long, sharp teeth digging into what had been his lower lip.

  He heard her scream, but she needn’t have bothered; the smell of her fear was so much more informative, and it made his mouth water. He watched her back away; she was clear when she moved, but when she stood still she was just a blur. He felt a strange twisting movement just above his bottom, and realised with a deep pang of embarrassment and shame that it was his tail, wagging.

  A werewolf, for crying out loud. Pieter –

  Meanwhile, though, the poor woman was clearly terrified out of her wits, and he couldn’t allow that to continue. He decided against a reassuring smile, because when a man opens his mouth and displays all his teeth, that’s fine, but when a wolf does it, the message thereby sent isn’t quite the same. Never mind; a few reassuring words would have to do instead.

  He said: Don’t worry, it’s perfectly all right, I won’t bite you. What came out from between his teeth, however, was a clear, high-pitched howl that scared the life out of him until he realised it was him doing it. She, meanwhile, was scrabbling at the door handle, too paralysed with fear to make it turn. All in all, he couldn’t help thinking, not an improvement.

  (And all the while, a nagging little sub-routine in the back of his mind was asking; why a werewolf, Pieter, where the hell’s the fun in that? A vampire, maybe; it’s just possible to understand the kick to be got from the dapper clothes, the swirly cloak, the subdued lighting, the necks of swooning girls. But you’d have to be profoundly weird to want to spend your leisure time moonlighting, so to speak, as a part-time dog.)

  “Hello? Hello? What the hell’s going on there?”

  The phone was now lying on the floor, with Max’s voice bleating tinnily out of it. He grabbed for it, but he had no
thing to grab with; his fingers had gone, and all he had was stupid little stubs with claws sticking out of them; sensational for ripping and tearing flesh, not so great for holding stuff with. Max, he shouted into the mouthpiece, don’t hang up, it’s me. But that wasn’t what came out. His howl blended with the woman’s scream in an unintentional form of counterpoint; then she managed to get the door open, and scrambled through it.

  He rolled on his back and thrashed his head backwards and forwards until he could feel the phone under his ear. It was making the long drone that tells you the call is over. He whimpered, squirmed and kicked until he was on his feet – four of them, goddammit – and tried to figure out what to do.

  Leave, you idiot. Get out, now. Fine. A slight twitch of his nose told him exactly where the doughnut was; also what it was made from, how old it was, who had baked it and when they’d last had sex – it was on the bed, slightly squashed but still in one piece. Wonderful. All he had to do was lift it up and look through the hole –

  Um.

  Making the wolf body do what he wanted wasn’t easy. It was a bit like trying to fly a plane for the first time, blindfolded, with large jellyfish superglued to each fingertip. It wasn’t like crawling on hands and knees, because his hind legs were convinced he was standing upright, and trying to make them walk in a straight line was like the first time you try and reverse a car with a trailer. He could smell the doughnut to within a thousandth of an inch, but because it wasn’t moving he couldn’t see it, only a vague pixillated area, like people’s faces on TV when they don’t want to be recognised. He tried to jump up on the bed, but the wolf’s hindquarters were far more powerful than he’d anticipated, and he found himself sailing through the air and splatting himself against the opposite wall.

  Come on, he ordered himself, you’re a top physicist, you can do this. He sat (good boy, sit!) and tried to work out the geometry of the problem, but it proved to be harder than he’d thought. Something to do with a different degree of depth perception; distances were different, somehow, and the pre-loaded wolf software in his head kept telling him to forget about looking for the doughnut, just smell it and pounce. He tried that and ended up in the corner of the room, in the wreckage of a small table, with a lamp flex tangled round his neck like spaghetti on a fork.