Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,31

that, either. The talking bird; the skywriting aircraft; the little man called Help. Stuff like that simply couldn’t happen in real life.

(Yes, but if you had the technology you could have holographic projections doing impossible things in an otherwise perfectly real world. Or, since even the most conservative multiverse theories allow for an infinite number of alternative universes, why not a universe where the laws of physics are different enough to allow for talking birds, skywriting planes that don’t rip their own wings off doing Ws and transphasic portals nestling inside everyday items of patisserie? Shut up, he urged himself, this isn’t helping.)

He licked the ball of his left thumb. Traces of sugar.

Point made: no computer program, however advanced, could deposit traces of icing sugar on your fingers, not without teleportation, which is impossible. Therefore, somewhere over the doughnut, he’d touched a solid sugary sticky thing – a real one. And, if the doughnut had been real, so must the world it came from have been. Sucroferens, ergo est; it’s sticky, therefore it exists, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, working double shifts and funded by a substantial grant from the UN Weirdness Limitation Commission, couldn’t put his comfortable Newtonian world model together again.

Oh boy.

Suddenly an image of Pieter van Goyen floated into his mind, smiling at him, his mute lips forming the words it’s supposed to be fun. True, if Pieter was still alive and within arm’s reach, he’d have strangled him for subjecting him to such a violent dose of Strange. On the other hand, if it really was really real –

Fun, he thought. Fun, for God’s sake. Fun.

And why not?

He screwed his eyes shut, trying to remember what he’d seen written on the sky. The ultimate in reality wish-fulfilment technology. Five default universes, or concoct your own. Suddenly, he felt a desperate need for a detailed, comprehensive user’s manual. A world of your own, for only $49.95.

He leaned forward and grabbed the bottle. It looked pretty much the same as it had done the last time he’d looked at it; a bottle, the label covered in tiny writing: no big deal. A hollow glass cylinder topped with an open-ended truncated cone, conventionally used for storing booze, ships, djinns and messages; just do the math, and immediately it becomes an infinite space containing infinite possibility. He turned it round in his fingers, rotating it like the Earth revolves around its polar axis. You, on the other hand, are going to have a really amazingly good life, thanks to the bottle. Enjoy it, that’s the main thing. Pieter had said that. The wisest man he’d ever known, his friend. And why not?

He heard a rattling noise; someone was turning the handle of the door, not expecting it to be jammed shut. Theo panicked. His only thought was, where can I hide the bottle? “Just a second,” he called out, and plunged the bottle between the pillows. Then he lunged for the door and yanked away the chair.

“The door sticks,” Call-me-Bill said. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem.” Theo realised he was shaking slightly, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. “What can I…?”

“Time for your shift,” Call-me-Bill said.

“Ah, right. I’ll be there directly.”

Call-me-Bill stayed exactly where he was. “If you wouldn’t mind holding the fort till, say, midnight, that’d be grand.”

Thirteen and a half hours. Still, he couldn’t very well refuse. “No problem. I’ll just—”

“Yes?”

He couldn’t think of anything he could just do, to get rid of Call-me-Bill long enough to hide the bottle properly. “Shave,” was all he could come up with.

“Don’t bother, you’re fine,” Call-me-Bill said firmly. “Look, I hate to rush you, but there’s nobody on the desk right now, and it’s a sort of rule, the desk’s got to be covered at all times. Otherwise it invalidates the insurance.”

“Ah, right.”

“So if you wouldn’t mind going down there right away.”

“Sure. I’ll just—” No, he couldn’t think of anything. “Just a second.” He darted back to the bed, shoved his hand between the pillows, grabbed the bottle and crammed it in his pocket, doing his best to conceal it from sight. It was only after he’d done it that he realised he’d used his right hand.

“Look,” said Call-me-Bill from the doorway, “I really don’t want to hassle you, but—”

“On my way.”

He squeezed past Call-me-Bill, who didn’t move, then remembered the manila envelope. “God, sorry, won’t be a moment.” He squeezed past again, snatched up the envelope, and bolted, leaving Call-me-Bill