Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,74
up the bottle. “Now, then—”
“Wha—?”
“Take care,” she said (and her voice came from a long way away, filtered through a lot of thick soggy mist, which swirled inside his head.) “And no hard feelings, OK?”
In the beginning was the Word.
Hardly likely, is it? In order for it to be a word, it would’ve had to belong to a language; otherwise it’d just have been a random, meaningless noise – zwwgmf, prblwbl, bweeeg. You can’t have a one-word language; words need context. Therefore, of all the things that could possibly exist in isolation at the Beginning, a word is the least plausible. All right, back-burnerise the Word for now, let’s try something else.
In the beginning was (say) the Mouse; fine, except that unless some primeval crumbs happened along pretty soon thereafter, it’d quickly have become first a hungry, then a dead mouse, and the universe would’ve fizzled out almost immediately.
In the beginning was the Lump of Inert Rock; better, except that everything we know about rock tells us that it’s the end of a process rather than the beginning. It’s cold lava or dried, compressed mud, or the shells of a billion tiny shellfish squashed up tight. In the beginning was the Lump of Inert Rock is like saying the empty packet came before the breakfast cereal.
In the beginning was the Ball of Burning Gas; now perhaps we’re getting somewhere, because you might argue that bits of that ball exist to this day, in the form of stars, scattered about the place like a teenager’s possessions, and that could be taken as some kind of corroborative evidence of something, even if it’s just that God is eternally fifteen years old.
It’s still a hell of an ask, though. Since nobody was around to see it, how can anyone really know? Walk into any courtroom and listen to the witnesses, and you’ll soon learn how very, very difficult it is to prove anything, even with the help of the time-burnished machinery of the law and half a dozen extremely well-trained and well-paid lawyers. The ball-of-burning-gas idea, like the lump-of-rock, mouse and word hypotheses, basically relies on blind faith; and, if you’re going to believe in something, the word is a far more elegant and intellectually pleasing choice than a boulder or a fireball.
Even more elegant, not to mention more democratic and egalitarian, would be to say that they’re all true. If we posit a multiverse rather than a mere universe, it’s not only possible but logically inevitable. In multiverse theory, everything exists (somewhere, over the rainbow, presumably, but the best academic authorities have yet to tackle the issue); the only limitation on perfect clarity is our limited ability to imagine. But, just because we can’t conceive of a functional word – or mouse-originated universe, that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t out there somewhere, six degrees up and three left from the indigo band. That’d be like saying that a black cat in a coal cellar doesn’t exist until we turn the light on.
He woke up on a rocky plateau overlooking a dark blue lake. Overhead, a white sun blazed in a cloudless sky. For some reason he was wearing what looked like a pilot’s flight suit. His head hurt.
He stood up, felt dizzy and sat down again. That bloody woman, he thought. Drink up your coffee before it gets cold.
Standing up was a little bit easier the second time. He looked around, but there was nothing to see except blue water on one side and brown rock on the other. No doughnut vendors anywhere.
Why the hell had she done it? Payback, because he’d left her stranded on the beach with Amanda? A plausible enough hypothesis, except she wouldn’t have had time, surely; she’d only been gone a few minutes, to refill the coffee pot. Long enough, he decided. And there was no need to speculate in depth about her motivation in marooning him, because he’d done precisely the same thing to her, not so long ago. A spectacularly dumb move on his part, he couldn’t help thinking, except that at the time he’d been so angry –
In the distance he could just hear a faint sound of voices. So that was all right, then. In a moment, when he’d caught his breath and finished thinking murderous thoughts about Matasuntha (he didn’t want to have to rush that part) he could stroll over and find the statutory doughnut seller, and then he could leave. No problem.
That was, of course, the difference. He knew