Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,130

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?