Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  Pieter hesitated, then nodded.

  “And then you remembered me.”

  Pieter closed his eyes. “Yes.”

  Max was obviously dying of repressed curiosity, but, before he could say anything, Theo went on, “I can’t be bothered to tell you a whole lot of stuff you already know, so here’s the bottom line. It worked. I’m back. I did it.” He paused for effect. “I created YouSpace.”

  “You what?”

  “YouSpace. That’s what it’s called.”

  Pieter frowned, then shook his head. “Don’t like it. We’ll need a snappier name than that if we want it to really take off.”

  “Tough,” Theo said firmly, “because that’s what I’ve called it. I created the YouSpace device. Not you. Me.”

  Max said timidly. “What’s YouSpace?”

  “Ah.” Theo smiled and turned to him. “Here’s where you’re just about to get involved. On 15 August ’07, Pieter’s only just got the germ of the idea. Suddenly, out of the blue, who should turn up on his doorstep but his prodigal pupil Max Bernstein. Help me, pleads Max, they’re after me, I need a place to hide, you’re the only one I can really trust. Odd you should say that, Pieter replies, because it so happens I’ve got a really ace hiding place, I just need someone to try it out for me. Oh, and some poor fool to take the blame, of course.”

  Pieter looked away. Max just looked terminally vague.

  Theo held up his two visible hands. “YouSpace,” he said. “Really good idea, shame it won’t work. You know why? Because, in order to access all the possibilities of all the alternate realities in the multiverse, you’d have to go back to the one point in time when all those possibilities were still gathered up together in one place, in one primordial glob of protomatter, right at the Beginning, before the Big Bang. It’d be like going to the central bus station; from there, you can get a bus direct to anywhere. Well? Am I right?”

  “Theo—”

  “Not now, Pieter, I’m on a roll.” Theo smiled joyfully, and reached across the table to pick up a newspaper. He flicked through and found the page he wanted. “Top Scientists Warn VVLHC Project Could End Universe,” he read out. “Of course, there’s bound to be scaremongers, flat-earthers, fruitcakes with sandwich boards saying the end is nigh. But there’s always a tiny grain of truth in the pearl of tabloid lunacy. If the VVLHC did go wrong and blow up, in a certain very specific and improbable way, it could do really weird stuff. It could rip a hole right through the fabric of space and time. Couldn’t it, Pieter?”

  “I guess.”

  “And so it did.” Theo dipped his head in a respectful salute. “Really great bit of science, by the way, figuring out exactly how to sabotage it so it’d make a hole you could navigate through. But like I said, I’ll come back to that in just a moment.” He turned to Max. “Well, we all know what you’ve been up to. Want to hear about what I’ve been doing?”

  Max shrugged. “Not particularly.”

  “What the hell. Here goes, anyway.” This time, he drank the sherry. When the burning feeling had passed, he gave them a brief summary of his career, from the explosion at the VVLHC up to the point where he’d watched Max open the walnut jar and vanish—

  “You’re crazy,” Max said. “Nuts.”

  Theo nodded slowly. “Look at my hands,” he said. “You can see them? Both of them?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course you can. I guess,” he went on, putting his hands behind his head, “I should’ve figured it out much earlier; when I landed in a succession of alternate realities that’d been hit by some sort of catastrophic disaster. The Disney planet, the Australian pope planet, the global warming planet, the Venice-in-the-sky place, all had something in common. Some clown had done some catastrophic thing, and pretty much trashed a huge chunk of the planet. At the very least I should’ve tumbled to it when the Venice-in-the-air people recognised me. What I should’ve realised was, in all of them the same thing had happened. The VVLHC had blown up. It’s the one and only event that’s common to all realities, every single reality in the multiverse. Or at least,” he added, giving Pieter a good, solid stare, “it is now.”

  Long silence, then Pieter shrugged. “Good call,” he said. “Just like you said. A hole I could navigate through.”

  “Which you made,” Theo said, his voice suddenly cold, “deliberately, so you could move from one to the other. YouSpace. With a little help from me.”

  Pieter’s head lifted, then dropped. The movements were linked, and deliberate.

  “Thank you,” Theo said solemnly. “I’ll take that as a confession. And we’ll come back to it in a minute. Before that, I’d just like you to confirm my hypothesis. After all, we’re scientists, aren’t we?”

  Pieter drew a long breath. “When I sabotaged the Collider, you were still inside the building. You survived the blast only because you were projected into the rift I’d made in the fabric of the multiverse. Satisfied?”

  “Go on.”

  “The moment I saw that amazing calculation you did in your first year I knew you’d already been to an alternate reality. The technology to do that didn’t exist. Therefore, you’d travelled in time as well. There was a temporal paradox. You’d been there, but you hadn’t been yet. But” – Pieter pulled out a huge white handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead – “that didn’t seem to matter. The experience was somehow retrospective.” He folded the handkerchief neatly and dropped it on the floor. “Like you being here now, I guess.”

  “You guess. Good guesser, aren’t you?”

  “You’d been there,” Pieter said furiously, “it’d already happened. So, I knew, when I shot you into the rift, I knew you’d survive, and come back. And then—”

  “In order to get back, I’d have to either discover or invent YouSpace.”

  Pieter lifted his head defiantly. “Which you’ve done,” he said. “Obviously.”

  “You cheated!” All the anger came rushing out, like the crowd at the end of a big game. “You couldn’t figure it out, so you cheated. You stole my work which I hadn’t even done yet. Call yourself a scientist? You’re a phoney.”

  “Let’s call it a collaboration,” Pieter said. “Naturally, it’s more usual to tell your collaborator first, but I know you too well, you’d have got stroppy about—”

  “About blasting an enormous hole in the structure of reality. Yes, just a tad.”

  Pieter looked at him. “But I didn’t,” he said. “Not really. You know that. I just—”

  “We’ll come back to that in a minute,” Theo said icily.

  “It’s been well over a minute,” Pieter replied. “But I don’t need to say it, do I? You know.”

  “I don’t,” said Max.

  “Shut up, Max,” Theo and Pieter said simultaneously. Then they looked at each other. Theo nodded his head slowly. “You know what this means,” he said. “You and me—”

  “Yes,” Pieter said. “Hell of a thing, but someone had to do it.”

  “We’re God.” Theo scowled horribly. “And, to be canonically correct, there really ought to be three of us, but I’m damned if I’m going to be part of a Trinity with him.”

  Pieter shrugged. “Holy Ghost,” he said. “Well, he’s legally dead. And besides,” he went on, “isn’t that what all scientists really want to do, deep down? Play God?”

  But Theo shook his head. “I don’t believe in God,” he said. “Not in the ordinary run of things, and especially when he turns out to be me.”

  “Your choice,” Pieter said. “I prefer to see it as a duck scenario.”

  “A—?”

  “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. After all,” he said with a grin, “now you can be anywhere you like, any time you like, and to you all things are possible. As far as eternal life goes, there’s this Clubhouse thing you mentioned. Seems to me there’s only one divine attribute you’re lacking, even if it is rather an important one.”

  “Really? What’s that?”

 
Pieter grinned. “Forgiveness.”

  Theo thought about it for five seconds. “Nah,” he said. “To forgive is divine, and I’m not. Sorry. Ask the Holy Ghost there, he’ll forgive anybody anything for a handful of pickled walnuts.”

  “I don’t know why you’re both picking on me,” Max said. “I haven’t done anything.”

  After he’d stormed out of Pieter’s room he walked for a while, just walking, going from rather than going to. Eventually, he found himself on a high bridge over a river. It was just starting to get dark, and the white and yellow lights of the city sparkled in the water. Theo stared at them balefully. No point in jumping, he’d just wind up in the Clubhouse again. He might just possibly have the courage to launch himself off a bridge – been there, after all, done that – but walking through the glowing blue door would be something else entirely. He’d never be able to do that.

  “Wonderful,” said a voice beside him, “you’ve finally stopped. What are you doing here?”

  He looked round and saw Matasuntha. She looked exactly the same as when he’d seen her last. That was, of course, all wrong.

  “You can’t be here,” he said. “You’re fifteen.”

  “Fourteen and a bit, actually.” She dabbed a stray strand of hair out of her face. “Right now, I’m probably at home, in my room, with my headphones on, listening to a Lizard-Headed Women CD. How about you?”

  “New York,” Theo replied. “Seminar. Or, more likely, in the bar. How did you get here?”

  She smiled. “I got bored waiting,” she said. “So I thought I’d come and find you.”

  “Untrue.”

  Shrug. “All right,” she said. “I was waiting for you to come back, and suddenly Max appeared.”

  “Ah.”

  “With his mouth full of pickled walnuts.”

  “I was wondering where they’d got to. And?”

  “And he said, Hi, babe, gave me a peck on the cheek, borrowed a thousand dollars and bolted. So then I thought I’d come and find you.”

  Theo nodded slowly. “How?” he said. “The bottle smashed, remember?”

  “I’m not sure.” She frowned. “I was down in the wine cellar, looking on the off chance that there’d be a bottle that’d take you to find your own true love—”

  “Why? I thought you said you were looking for me.”

  “When suddenly,” she went on, giving him a foul look, “there I was, standing in a draughty corridor in front of a big old oak door. And I could hear voices, and yours was one of them. Also,” she added, “Max.”

  “You eavesdropped.”

  “Naturally. It helped that I was still holding the wineglass I’d brought in case I found a suitable bottle in the cellar.” She looked at him. “I think I understand,” she said.

  “Good for you. Maybe you can explain it to me some time.”

  “But if I’m right,” she went on, “then surely I don’t exist.”

  Theo sighed. “What we need,” he said, “is an all-night café and cake shop opposite the Candelaria in Rio.”

  She looked at him. “Can we—?”

  “Oh yes.”

  There was just such a café, also selling cakes. The bay was empty, half the city was derelict and the sky glowed an ominous shade of green, but Theo was getting used to that sort of thing. They ordered coffee and sticky buns and sat down at a table in the far corner.

  “And that’s about it, basically,” Theo concluded. “Nobody ever invented YouSpace, as such. I got shot into a universe where it already existed, found out how it worked, more by luck than judgement—”

  “Hang on,” she interrupted. “The powder compact… “

  He shook his head. “Garbage,” he said. “Smoke screen. The operating system is, there is no operating system. You just think what you want to happen, and it happens. In the reality I got booted into, Pieter neglected to tell me that. Instead, he left me a fake user’s manual setting out a totally bogus operating system.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “So I’d make a point of finding him,” Theo said with a grin. “Whereupon, he’d be able to take possession of a fully operational YouSpace; job done. Only,” Theo went on, “he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did.”

  She frowned. “I don’t—”

  “He assumed,” Theo went on, “that as soon as I learned that this thing existed, all I’d want to do is get it working and play with it. My desire, conscious and subconscious, would program YouSpace to do just that; meanwhile, the fake OS in the powder compact would take me straight to Pieter.”

  “Ah. Well, no, actually, I still don’t—”

  “Instead,” Theo went on, “what I really wanted – deep down, where even I couldn’t see it – was, first, to know if my poor dead brother Max was still alive somewhere and if so, to find him; second, to find my mother, who abandoned us when we were kids; third, to fall in love and live happily ever after. Playing with some toy was way down the list. So, you see, it all screwed up.”

  She shook her head. “Your mother.”

  “Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz.”

  “What? You’re kidding.”

  Theo beamed at her. “Actually,” he said, “it was her who put me on the right track, figuring it all out. Like, at one point she said she was staying at her daughter’s house. When I got there, it proved to be my sister Janine’s place.”

  “So she really is your—”

  “She also said, about Pieter, he’s really smart, my brother.”

  Her eyes were round as full moons. “So she’s your mother and Pieter’s sister? That’s so—”

  Theo was shaking his head. “Too much of a coincidence? Of course it is,” he said, “in this reality. Wildly implausible. Real Darth-Vader-is-Luke’s-dad stuff. But, in an infinite multiverse—”

  “Ah.”

  “Somewhere,” Theo went on, “there’s a reality in which she is my mother; right there in front of my nose for me to find, at a point when finding her is my number two priority. Just what I asked for, in fact. And that,” Theo said, “is when I started looking at my hands.”

  “Your—”

  “Yes.” He reached out with one of them and took a piece of sticky bun. “Enormous hint, which went right over my head like a GPS satellite. When did my hand vanish? When the VVLHC blew up. What really happened when the VVLHC blew up? I moved from my native universe into a different, highly speculative reality absolutely riddled with temporal paradoxes and causality loops. The invisible hand was Nature’s way of telling me that the place I was in was all wrong, but I was too dumb to realise.”

  Matasuntha nodded slowly. “So Mrs Duchene—”

  “Pieter’s sister. But not my mother. I went back and checked. After she left my dad, my mother married the senior partner of a firm of actuaries in Canada somewhere. To the best of my knowledge, she’s perfectly happy. In my native reality, of course. Here—” He looked out of the window at the green afterglow of the sunset. “God only knows. Actually, no He doesn’t. Sorry, private joke.”

  Matasuntha looked like she was doing mental arithmetic. “So the version of reality you were in after the explosion,” she said. “It’s what you really wanted.”

  “Apparently.” Theo shrugged. “Only goes to show. In spite of really intense competition for the job, I’m still my own worst enemy.”

  “The version of reality with me in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Designed to carry out your third priority.” “Yes, but let’s not go there.”

  “In which you fall in love with me, but I’m already in love with Max—”

  “You see? Even when fulfilling my wildest fantasies, deep down I’m a realist.”

  She was trying not to laugh. “So really, you wanted to lose all your money. And your wife.”

  “I suppose I must’ve.”

  “And you wanted a job shovelling guts in a slaughterhouse? That’s icky.”

  “I think that was just part of a package deal.” He looked straight at her.
“If you want to yell at me, that’s fine. I deserve it.”

  “Probably. Why?”

  “Why? I’ve been—” Pieter’s phrase. “Playing God with your life. I dreamed up the reality you’ve got to live in. You, not the kid with the headphones on. The one you’re stuck in.”

  “You so didn’t. I was born there. I’ve always lived there. You didn’t invent it, you just turned up one day. So don’t go thinking you had anything to do with it. Who do you think you are, anyway?”

  Theo smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile, and the joke it proceeded from was pretty dark humour. “Actually,” he said.

  She was staring at him, and he couldn’t help thinking, she’s smart, she’s getting there without my help. On the other hand, he really needed to tell someone; mostly because, if he’d got it all wrong and there was a glaring mistake in his logic, he desperately wanted to hear about it.

  “What does that mean?” she said.

  He took a deep breath. “Here goes,” he said. “All right. Pieter van Goyen blew up the VVLHC.”

  “Yes.”

  “In order to make a hole – more than that, a tunnel. A wormhole. Yes, that’s a good word. If ever there was a worm, it’s Pieter.”

  “Yes.”

  “So far, so appalling. It gets worse.” He paused, trying to structure what had to come next. “Have you ever wondered,” he said, “about the Big Bang?”

  “Well. Not often, I have to say.”

  “I have. When I was a kid, I used to lie awake at night thinking about it.”

  “You did? That’s—”

  “Yes. And what I asked myself was, if in the Beginning there was a big explosion that blew up a lot of stuff, where did the stuff that got blown up come from?”

  “A fair question,” she said charitably.

  “And all I could come up with,” Theo went on, “is that the multiverse must be a circle, not a straight line. If the multiverse is curved, not linear, and Time is a loop—”

  “There’s no beginning.”

  He shook his head. “That’s one way of looking at it, but not helpful. I preferred to think that any point on a circle can be the beginning. Or the end. Or both.”