beyond the atmosphere, we could blow up our own planet in the time it takes to blow your nose; there’s practically nothing we can’t do, except choose our relatives. Everything else: no bother, piece of cake. But the one thing that’d do more to alleviate stress and grief and give us a head start in the pursuit of happiness is entirely beyond us, further than the Andromeda galaxy, more elusive than the Higgs-Boson. No wonder there isn’t a Nobel prize for putting up with your family. They wouldn’t be able to find anyone to give it to.
He was here, presumably, because he’d been dreaming about being made pope; his subconscious mind must’ve instructed a YouSpace device to find a reality in which that could happen, and the bottle had sent him here. From that it followed that Janine had such a thing; also, that she didn’t know how to use it, or she’d have sent him directly to the Disney planet. One disturbing factor was the doctor’s prohibition on doughnuts, bagels and Polo mints. That suggested to him that someone was determined not to allow him to escape before he’d completed his mission – finding Max – and logic required that that person should be Janine. But if she could program in such a sophisticated element as no-doughnuts-or-bagels, why couldn’t she work the YouTube bottle herself? That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of course, Janine’s actions had never been exactly rational. How many Janines does it take to change a light bulb? Three: one to rip the socket and flex out of the ceiling, one to burn down the house to punish it for popping a bulb, and one to complain that the other two are out to get her. Even so. Curious.
Meanwhile, there was the small matter of how he was going to get out of here and back to where he belonged. He closed his eyes and pictured the doughnut he’d been so close to grabbing. It proved that there were doughnuts in this reality, in this building; the question was, how to get his hands on one. Unless –
Ten seconds later, a promising hypothesis went down in flames. The hole in the middle of a toilet seat didn’t work –
“Um, Your Holiness.”
Nev the acolyte was standing in the doorway. Theo could see him quite clearly, through the hole in the toilet seat. “Yes?”
“Doctor O’Shaugnessy’s here,” said Nev. “If you’d like to follow me.”
“Sure.” Theo got up, closed the lid, straightened his robes and followed Nev into the throne room. There was a man standing with his back to them both, gazing out through the picture window at the magnificent view; a short, bald man with shoulders so sloping and dandruff-flaked you could’ve used them to stage the Winter Olympics.
“Thanks, Nev,” the man said. “You can leave us to it. I’ll shout if I need you for anything.”
Nev only took a second and a bit to walk to the door, open it and close it again after him. For Theo, it felt like an eternity: long enough to grow stalactites from the ceiling and hold a glacier race right around the Equator. Eventually, though, the man turned round to face him.
“Hello, Theo,” he said.
“Pieter?”
Pieter van Goyen smiled at him; the same twinkly-hippo smile he remembered from – what was it? A thousand years ago? – when his most desperate problem was how to explain why the assignment he was supposed to be handing in somehow hadn’t got started yet. “I never realised you wanted to be the Pope,” he said. “Is this a new direction for you, or something you’ve always aspired to?”
“You’re dead.”
Pieter grinned. “No, I’m not,” he said.
“You’re dead. I saw it. They shot you with a ray gun. You disintegrated.”
“Ah.” Pieter did that hands-raised-fingers-spread gesture. “That.”
“Yes, that.”
“Your trouble is,” Pieter said kindly, “you don’t think. You assume. I hoped I’d cured you of that back in your second year, but obviously not.”
“Pieter…”
Pieter looked round, located a chair and sat in it. There was a faint creaking noise, but somehow the chair held, banishing any doubt that they were in a wholly different universe. “You visited one of my default realities, yes?”
“If you say so. Look—”
“Not a particularly attractive place,” Pieter went on. “Bizarrely improbable aliens in a setting all too obviously derived from the cantina at Mos Eisley. Did it occur to you to ask yourself why I’d choose to make something like that a default? No,” he went on, as Theo started