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?”