“Not particularly.” He played back how he’d said that in his mind, and added, “Thanks for offering, but I don’t think it’d help.”
“He left the number. He wants you to call him back.”
“I doubt it.” He could feel his temper slipping away from him, like the last glimpse of land before it sinks below the horizon. “I think someone’s been to a parallel universe where he’s still alive. He’s got Max to tell him about the Star Trek thing, and now he’s playing mind games with me.”
“Why would anyone—?”
“I don’t know, do I?” The bump and wrench, like a tooth being pulled from an anaesthetised gum, had been his temper finally letting go. He didn’t particularly want to be angry right now, but it seemed he had little choice in the matter. “It’s a hypothesis,” he said. “That’s what scientists do. They think up something that sort of fits the facts, and then they see if they can prove it. If they can be bothered. I’m not sure I can, to be honest.”
“He’s your brother.”
“Was my brother. And you know what? I never liked him much.” He paused. It had never occurred to him to wonder why, until now, when the answer suddenly turned up on his mental doorstep. “He cheated.”
“What?”
“He always cheated,” Theo said. “At everything. Even when we were playing Star Trek. There was a bit where you had to throw a dice, and his always seemed to roll off the table on to the floor, and he’d pick it up and say it was a six before I had a chance to look.” He listened to what he’d just said, and laughed. “Not just that. He cheated at every damn thing, and he still always lost.”
“Sounds like he’s trying to cheat at being dead.”
“He’ll lose. He always loses. You know, if sometimes he won, I could’ve forgiven the cheating.”
There was a pause; then she said, “None of this would matter if it’s really just someone pretending to be him.”
“That’s cheating too,” Theo said furiously. “Like when he paid some guy to pretend to be him in an exam. Now he’s getting someone to do his living for him.”
“Did he pass the exam?”
“No. The guy he paid didn’t know spit about higher maths. Got sixteen per cent.”
Matasuntha was nodding slowly. “I can see how you’d lose patience with someone like that. Still.” She shook her hair out of her eyes. Amanda used to do that, but not quite the same way. On balance, he preferred how Matasuntha did it. “He’s dead. That’s final. Nothing can change that.”
There are moments in every great scientist’s life when a light comes on, illuminating shapes previously indistinguishable in the dark. Sometimes there’s apples and bathwater and tramcars to give a little nudge, though they usually miss out on the glory; when did you last see a copy of The General Theory of Relativity, by A. Einstein and A. Tramcar? Theo wasn’t like that. “What did you just say?”
“What? Well, just that your brother’s dead, and nothing can—”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
She gave him a sweet and simple smile. “Right,” she said. “He’s not dead. Instead, he’s emigrated to the Isle of Avalon, along with Elvis and JFK and Princess Di, and every now and again he pops over to Caracas to make annoying phone calls. Next he’ll be talking to you from your microwave. Come on, Theo. They found an actual body.”
“No, they didn’t. All they found was one tooth.”
She frowned at him. “I’d forgotten that. You think—”
“He was mixed up with some nasty people,” Theo said. “And he was Pieter’s ex-student. And Pieter was ridiculously kind-hearted sometimes and a lousy judge of character. He liked some really useless people.”
“You mean your brother?”
Theo nodded. “I never could understand why. I mean, Max never did any work, he spent his whole time boozing and doing drugs and demonstrating a totally unreconstructed attitude towards sexual politics. Basically, all he did was buy drinks for people and have a good time.”
“And you can’t see why Pieter liked him.”
“No, it’s a complete mystery. But…” Theo closed his eyes for a moment. “Consider this. Max is at the end of his rope, he needs to get far, far away and make himself very hard to find. Pieter, meanwhile, is at a crucial point in his experiments with alternative universes. He needs to send someone over there, to see if it works. Like putting a monkey in a spaceship and blasting it