Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,100
Pieter said. “What’ve you got?”
“Would Your Holiness like to see the wine-cellar inventory?”
“The hell with wine,” Pieter said, but Theo shushed him. Three little words. “Wine cellar inventory?”
“Yes, Your Holiness. It’s very extensive. In excess of ten thousand bottles.”
Theo smiled. “Fetch,” he said.
“That’s not the way to go about it,” Pieter protested, as Nev withdrew. “Wine’s all very well for polite social occasions, but for the genuine, all-out, peel-back-a-million-years-of-evolution experience, you need the hard stuff.”
“Hush,” Theo said gently. “Ah,” he went on, as Nev reappeared with a large loose-leaf folder, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” He looked up and down the columns of names and dates, but nothing rang a bell. Not to worry. “I think we’ll try the Château Cheval Blanc 1961. Thank you, Nev. Go in peace.”
“I don’t know what’s got into you,” Pieter growled, as Nev scuttled away. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want fruitiness, body, a faint tang of woodsmoke and a great nose. I want to get drunk.”
Theo gave him a sweet and gentle smile. “Trust me.”
“Trust you? The man who blew up the VVLHC?”
The smile died instantly. “You please yourself,” Theo said. “You can stay here, get smashed, practise medicine, turn into soup, do what the hell you like. I plan on going home. You don’t have to come. In fact, right now I’d rather you didn’t.”
“But—” What happened then was really rather fascinating. Pieter’s lips continued to move for a second or so, presumably carrying on with the protests and the abuse, but no sound came out. Then he frowned. “You don’t think—”
Theo nodded. “Yes.”
“But what possible reason can you have for believing…?”
Theo shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Intuition. Instinct. A pattern gradually beginning to emerge. Anyhow,” he added, “it’s worth a try. And if I’m wrong, the worst that can happen is we get to share a bottle of nice wine.”
“But—”
“Put it this way,” Theo said. “A piece of string has two ends. Otherwise, it’s not a piece of string. OK?”
“What’s string got to do with anything, for crying out loud?”
Theo knew that if he was proved wrong he was going to regret this moment. But what the hell? It’s not every day you get to be intolerably smug to a Nobel prizewinner. “String’s got to do with everything,” he said. “I’d have thought you’d have known that, being a professor. And put that horrible cigar out, it’s giving me a headache.”
Pieter glared at him, then ground out the butt on the arm of the throne. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Theo turned his back, walked to the window and gazed out at the view: the sea, the soaring buildings, the impossibly blue sky. True, it was a world in which Russia was still ruled by a Tsar and the Vatican stood where the Sydney Quay Deli ought to be; also, if Pieter had been telling the truth, the Internet hadn’t happened and Europe was still ruled by the Caesars. Even so, from up here it looked habitable and survivable, if he didn’t melt down to the consistency of thick minestrone over the next few days. Compared with how the world had looked the day after the VVLHC, the other Big Bang, it wasn’t so bad. And, if he stayed here, he’d be free of YouSpace, that nasty little room where he’d bashed his brains out trying to do impossible maths, Max, Janine, Matasuntha’s Uncle Bill, not to mention Matasuntha herself –
Yes. Well.
– Max, Janine, Matasuntha’s Uncle Bill and the entire scientific community who reckoned he should’ve been coated in honey and pegged down over an anthill because of the harm he’d done to the popular conception of the sciences. That was an awful lot of bad stuff to leave behind in one go. Catastrophic change can sometimes have its good side. Having all your teeth pulled out at once isn’t so bad if all of them were giving you toothache.
Nev was back, with a cobwebby bottle, a corkscrew and two glasses. Theo looked at the bottle for some time, then said, “I don’t know how you do this.”
“Simple,” Pieter replied. “Pull the cork. If it’s a single-use spatio-temporal dislocation module, the vortex effect automatically engages, and you’re drawn into the dysperistaltic field, and there you are. If it’s not, you tilt the bottle to roughly thirty degrees to the horizontal and aim the booze at a glass.”
Theo went to get the bottle, but his hand was shaking. “You do it.”
“If you like. If it’s corked, though, we send it back.