Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,131
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