the wall until there wasn’t a big enough bit left to hold on to, and spent the next eight hours folding sheets of printout into paper aeroplanes.
And then it hit him, suddenly and without warning. So simple. So utterly and completely deranged, but so very simple.
“Think about it,” he urged Call-me-Bill, who was looking at him nervously, as though expecting to have to defend himself with a chair at any moment. “In an infinite multiverse, there’s got to be some reality somewhere where all this shit is actually perfectly normal and as clear as a bell. So; we go there, we do the maths, we reconstruct the user’s manual, we use it to get home. What could possibly go wrong?”
Call-me-Bill was trying to avoid sudden movements. “Fine,” he said, “in principle. So, how precisely do you figure on finding this other reality and getting there?”
Theo beamed at him, which for some reason made him even more nervous. “Leave it with me,” he said. “I expect I’ll think of something.”
And think of something he most certainly did. Sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, with paper aeroplanes floating lazily past his head and fluttering gently to the ground, he thought of many things; the gentle chatter of a brook in spring, the patter of rain on rooftops, the breathtaking fractal beauty of birdsong and apple cores, and the many and complicated things he’d like to do to a wide variety of people, starting with his parents and working bloodily and methodically through the cast list of his life until he got to Matasuntha and Call-me-Bill. It helped, but not nearly enough.
Maybe he drifted into some sort of sleep; not the refreshing kind that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care and makes you such a trial to your hungover fellow workers, not quite the accidental doze you slide into on train journeys or during earnest films with subtitles; his body was at some kind of rest but his mind must’ve been redlining, because when he snapped out of it, he knew exactly what he was going to do next. He was dimly aware that the conclusion he’d reached was a culmination of a long and painstaking internal debate, which he’d missed out on because he’d been asleep. Not that it mattered. He was perfectly happy to take it on trust, because it seemed so obvious.
I’ll ask Max, he told himself. Max will know.
He went from sitting on the floor to lying on a bed, in a darkened room. A faint blade of orange light shone through a crack in the curtains, enough for him to see that he wasn’t alone.
Whoever she was, she was lying with her back to him. A glimmer of light from the window shone on an unruly sea of golden hair. He remembered what Pieter had said about the way he liked his YouSpace visits to start. Well, he thought.
She sighed softly and wriggled round to face him, and for the first time in a long time he found himself thinking that Pieter hadn’t been such a bad guy after all. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.
“Fancy a doughnut?” she said.
For some reason, he found it hard to speak. “A—”
“You do like doughnuts, don’t you?”
“Love ’em,” he whispered hoarsely. She grinned, hopped off the bed and returned with – why was he mildly disappointed? – a plate of doughnuts, golden brown and sugar-frosted. He picked one up and held it; then she kissed him, and it sort of slipped his mind.
“So,” she said. “I think that settles it, we are going to be friends. It’s so important, isn’t it, to be on good terms with the people you’re going to be working with?”
“Absolutely,” he whimpered. “All the latest studies on workplace interaction stress the value of a warm and cooperative ambience.”
She picked up a doughnut and nibbled the rim with her small, white teeth. “When they told me I was going to be working with Professor Pieter van Goyen – the Pieter van Goyen, the guy who designed the Quite Ridiculously Huge Hadron Collider, I thought, wow, this’ll be awesome. And then I thought, what if he’s some stuffy, flaky old guy who only cares about the project? I thought, that won’t be a lot of fun.”
“And?”
She laughed and bit a chunk out of the doughnut. “Let’s say you’ve set my mind at rest on that score, Professor.”
Her eyes were the colour of mint leaves. “Excellent,” he said. “So, um, what’s your