got broken, which as far as I’m concerned is no great loss, thank you all the same. There was this planet where—”
He stopped short. The look on Pieter’s face had drained all the language out of him. Pieter was scared. “What?” Theo demanded. “Why are you gawping at me like that?”
Pieter did a shut-up gesture with his hands. “Slowly, and try and be coherent, just for me. Your bottle got broken?”
Theo nodded. “Matasuntha—”
“And your sister’s got a bottle, and she kidnapped you.”
“I just said—”
“And presumably she doesn’t know how to use it, because without the user’s manual—”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, my God.”
Some people panic easily. They lose their cool so often and so readily that they’d be well advised to wear it round their neck on a bit of string, like a librarian’s glasses. Pieter, though; Pieter had never, in all the years Theo’d known him, displayed anything remotely resembling anxiety, doubt or fear; not unless you counted the time he’d run out of coffee at 3 a.m. in the middle of the summer vacation, when all his neighbours were away. To see the look on his face right now was like asking God a question and being met with a blank stare and a shrug. “Pieter?”
He’d gone white, and his eyes were huge. It made him look like Gollum on a bad few-remaining-strands-of-hair day. “You do realise what this means.”
“No, of course not. Nobody ever explains anything.”
“It means,” Pieter said, and his voice was high and slightly shrill, “we’re stuck here. Both of us.”
Did not compute. “No, it doesn’t. There’s doughnuts, in the kitchen. There must be. They brought me one, only—”
“They won’t work,” Pieter yelled. “For God’s sake, Theo, didn’t you read the user’s manual?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. Skimmed through it.”
Terror made Pieter look slightly bigger and considerably thinner, for some reason. Also a lot older. “If you’d taken the time to read the manual,” he said, “you’d know that the interface transit retrieval talisman is personalised to each individual module—”
“Excuse me?”
“Each bottle’s made differently,” Pieter translated scornfully. “So that only the registered owner and people in actual physical contact with him can use doughnuts to go backwards and forwards. It’s a security measure.”
Theo would quite like to have told Pieter what he thought of his various security measures, but he decided that the situation was already fraught enough to be going on with. “I see,” he said. “No, actually I don’t. How does that—?”
Pieter sighed. “It was to stop the locals in other realities you happen to be visiting from accidentally straying into ours every time they happened to look through the hole in a doughnut. Otherwise there’d be chaos, obviously, thousands of doughnut eaters from alien realities suddenly materialising on the streets of our major cities. That’s why it’s so vitally important that you only travel through your bottle. Use someone else’s, and the doughnuts won’t work. You’d be stranded.”
When the going gets panic-stricken, the panic-stricken get going. The solution popped neatly into Theo’s mind without him even having to think. “But that’s OK,” he said. “You got here through YouSpace, right? So, you’ve got a bottle. We get a doughnut, I grab hold of you, we both go home. Simple.”
Pieter gave him a long, sad look. “I had a bottle.”
“Yes? And?”
“I left it to you. In my goddamn will. And you broke it.”
Image the hot shower you’d been looking forward to all day turned out to be iced water. “The same—”
“Yes.” Pieter closed his eyes. “As it clearly states in the manual, each unit can be registered with up to three authorised users.” He sighed, and shook his head. “How do you think I got here? Walked? Got the bus?”
“But—” Theo realised he’d finally had enough, even from Pieter van Goyen. “For crying out loud, Pieter, explain. Otherwise—”
“What?”
Theo forced his face into a grim, hard expression. It was like getting your foot into one of your eight-year-old daughter’s shoes. “Otherwise,” he said, “I’m going to go out there and be the best possible pope I can be, and you can spend the rest of your life treating German measles. It wouldn’t be so bad,” he added cheerfully. “Better than cleaning up in the slaughterhouse, anyway.”
“In Australia?”
“Better than the slaughterhouse,” Theo said firmly. “I’ve been thinking for some time I ought to settle down, make something of my life. The Papacy wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but what the hell. I could really make a difference, being pope.”
“So could a ring-tailed possum flying an airliner.