The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (16 page)

The clock on Mr Greenlander’s office wall read 2:47 and thirteen seconds. He checked to make sure Mr Greenlander was motionless and holding his breath, then he reached out and held the doughnut perfectly equidistant between them. Through the hole, their eyes met. And then—

“What the hell?” Mr Greenlander said

He was sitting on a tree stump − at least, he was in the same sitting position he’d been in a moment ago, but his trousers weren’t actually in contact with the wood. He was, in fact, floating just above it. His left trouser leg was embarrassingly wet, and a huge three-headed dog was standing over him, sniffing his crotch.

Gordon stood up and the dog bolted. “Don’t mind him,” Gordon said. “He’s quite harmless. Actually, I’ve got seven hundred and forty more like him answering phones for a leading airline. Come on,” he added with a smile, reaching
out a hand and hauling Mr Greenlander to his feet. “Time’s a-wasting.”

Gordon didn’t look quite the same. Instead of his charcoal-grey lounge suit, so nondescript you had to make a conscious effort to notice it, he was wearing a long powder-blue robe with the signs of the zodiac embroidered on it in gold thread, and a blue hat like an upturned ice-cream cone. “Right,” he said, looking around and nodding. “We’ve landed on the edge of the Idyllic Pastures, so Peaceful Village ought to be about three minutes’ walk that way. I thought we might check out the monastery, and then the stirrer plant.”

The grass was green, short and weed-free, like a lawn. Birds sang, impossibly loud and clear; and they weren’t just making tweet-whistle sounds, they were
singing
. The sun was a white ball in a cloudless blue sky, and at regular intervals (every five yards or so) there was either a rose bush in full bloom or a cute, floppy-eared rabbit. In spite of himself, Mr Greenlander felt the anxiety and bewilderment fade from his mind like breath on glass. He inhaled the sweet, pure air and caught himself thinking,
I know this place, I’ve been here before
. Which was nonsense, since he’d been born in Pittsburgh and hadn’t seen an acre of grass that didn’t have baseball players on it until he was fifteen years old. In spite of that, a voice inside him was telling him that he was finally back home, in the place he belonged, which he ought never to have left—

“Our preliminary survey suggests that directly under where we are now there’s a vast deposit of premium-grade bauxite,” Gordon said. “Just perfect for open-cast strip mining. Soon as I find a buyer, someone’s going to get seriously rich.”

Mr Greenlander shuddered, but didn’t say anything. A squirrel with a fat, fluffy tail scampered in front of him, stopped, turned back, smiled at him and flolloped away. “What did you say we’re going to see?” he asked.

“The monastery,” Gordon replied. “See that glade over there? That’s where we’re headed.”

They walked in silence for a while − it was hard to gauge exactly how long; time seemed different here, measured in moments rather than seconds, minutes and hours, and the length of a moment (Mr Greenlander suspected) would depend on how long you
wanted
it to last. A perfect moment could be practically forever. Mr Greenlander thought about that. This moment (the sunshine, the sweet air, the green grass, the wildlife, the absence of people yelling at him down telephones) maybe wasn’t quite perfect, but it was very nearly close enough for jazz. It occurred to him that if it was any more perfect, perhaps it really would last forever, in which case he’d be stuck here, unable to get home, for all eternity. The thought made him whimper, at which Gordon turned and smiled at him. “Yes,” he said.

“What?”

“Sorry, I was reading your mind. Bad habit of mine. Over here, you see,” he explained, “I’m a wizard, I can do that kind of stuff. Don’t ask,” he added, as Mr Greenlander opened his mouth, “it’s complicated, and you don’t need to know. But you’re quite right about the time thing. It’s vitally important while you’re over here not to let the moment get too perfect. There’s always got to be something spoiling it. So you’ll be just fine,” he added cheerfully, “so long as you’re with me.”

Mr Greenlander decided he didn’t want any of that stuff in his mind, so he shooed it out and said, “The monastery?”

“You’ll see,” Gordon said brightly. “Ah, we’re here. Now, before we go any further, you’ll need to put this on.” He opened his briefcase and produced something that looked like a silver net curtain. “Invisibility cloak,” he explained.

“You what?”

“Makes you invisible,” Gordon translated helpfully. “The
thing of it is, the locals are used to me, but seeing you might freak them out a bit. There you are, it goes on over your head like
this
, and—”

Mr Greenlander had leaned his head forward so the cloak could go over it; he’d been looking at his feet. But they weren’t there any more.

“Yes they are,” Uncle Gordon said cheerfully. “And they still work and everything. You just can’t see them, is all.”

“You bastard,” Mr Greenlander wailed. “What have you done—?”

“Shh,” Gordon said. “Quiet as a little mouse from now on, OK?”

A glade of weeping willows, which quite definitely hadn’t been there a moment ago, reared up at them out of the short grass. Mr Greenlander could just make out the faint echo of plainsong. “One of my best ideas,” Gordon was saying, “though I do say so myself. There, look.”

So well hidden among the trees that Mr Greenlander had to look twice to see it was a high stone wall, surrounding a large rectangular building with a domed green copper roof. The music, a low hum like bees, was definitely coming from there. “Come on,” Gordon said, “there’s nothing to be scared of. If we’re lucky, we’ll be just in time for Evensong.”

Before long they’d joined a well-trodden path that snaked between the trees to a low, small door in the wall. Above it hung a tarnished brass bell, with a bit of string dangling down. Gordon yanked the string a couple of times, and after a while a panel in the door shot back, and a beady blue eye peered at him for a moment. Then the door opened.

“Bless you, my son,” said Gordon. “Just a social call.”

The monk (shaven head, brown habit, rope belt, sandals,
no socks) who’d opened the door stepped aside to let him pass. He was mumbling under his breath, with the fierce concentration of the reluctant multi-tasker. Mr Greenlander couldn’t quite make out what he was saying; it sounded curiously like
one zero zero zero one zero
, or words to that effect.

They followed the monk along an ancient cloister, the pale yellow stone of the pavement worn smooth by the passage of countless sandalled feet. The walls were plain and bare, but the roof timbers were beautifully carved with a repeating dot-dash motif that was both strikingly simple and enticingly sophisticated. At the end of the cloister, a great grey oak door, unimaginably old, stood in a high wall. The monk, still mumbling, opened it for them, and they went through.

“Oh—” Mr Greenlander started to say, but Gordon trod on his foot and he cut the expression of wonder off short and contented himself with gazing, upwards, side to side. Mr Greenlander loved to travel, and at one time or another he’d visited all the great cathedrals of the world, but he’d never seen anything like this. It made St Mark’s in Venice look like a gas station.

It was also packed. From where they were standing, they could see thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of brown-habited monks kneeling in prayer. The soft purr of their chanting rolled and echoed off the gloriously frescoed walls and around the vaulted hammer-beam roof, creating swirls and eddies of sound that made Mr Greenlander’s head swim. It was only when he followed Gordon down the main central aisle towards the high altar (a disappointing plain black rectangular box, though mounted on a stunning cruciform pedestal carved from a single block of rose alabaster) that he realised there was something very strange about the chanting. The monks weren’t all reciting the same words. In fact–he had to concentrate and strain his hearing to differentiate–he could have sworn that each monk was saying
something different. Some of them seemed to be reciting scientific or historical tracts, some of them were mumbling about special two-for-one internet-only deals, most of them were just repeating sequences of ones and zeros. From a distance, the sound had blended into a tranquil blur. Close up, it was the stuff of nightmares.

Gordon stopped and made a perfunctory nod towards the black box, then turned and went back the way he’d come. When they were back in the cloister and the great door had shut behind them, Mr Greenlander could bear it no longer. “What
was
that?” he hissed.

“Ssh,” Gordon replied. “Tell you in a minute.”

Three monks were walking towards them, heads lowered, hands in sleeves, chanting softly. Then, quite suddenly, one of them dropped to the ground. The other two walked on, as though nothing had happened, while the fallen monk writhed and twisted on the ground for perhaps three seconds, and then lay perfectly still—

“
No
,” Gordon hissed under his breath, before Mr Greenlander could move. “Leave it.”

“But—”

“
Shh
.”

They had to step over the fallen monk. He was lying on his back, his eyes and mouth wide open, absolutely motionless. Mr Greenlander tried to stop, but Gordon held his arm in a grip like a mole-wrench and hustled him towards the small door they’d come in through.

Once they were outside, back in the forest glade, Mr Greenlander tugged the invisibility cloak off over his head and threw it on the ground. “That monk—”

“It’s fine,” Gordon snapped at him, “don’t worry about it. Now put the cloak back on right now, or I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

He said it so grimly that Mr Greenlander reluctantly
obeyed. “Look,” he whimpered as his head disappeared, “what
is
that place? It’s—”

“It’s a computer server,” Gordon said. “Come on, this way. I know a short cut to the stirrer plant.”

He set off walking so briskly that Mr Greenlander had to trot to keep up. “A what?”

Gordon smiled. “Think about it,” he said. “What’s the biggest headache of the IT revolution? Servers, right? You need a huge great building full of really expensive, temperamental machinery, which pumps out kilowatts and kilowatts of heat, so you’ve got to spend a fortune on sophisticated ventilation systems; the capacity is never enough and the electricity bill’s a killer. Result; overheads so far over your head they’re halfway to Alpha Centauri.”

Mr Greenlander couldn’t help wincing; sore subject. “Yes, but—”

“So instead,” Gordon went on, “why not adopt an organic approach? Instead of all that technology, simply download all those bits and megabytes of information into the brains of a bunch of monks?” He smiled proudly. “You don’t need me to remind you about the staggering storage and retrieval capabilities of the human brain. I’ve got twelve thousand monks in there, that’s all, and between them they can handle the entire output of five major home shopping networks, a leading search engine and a Latin American government. And,” he added, his voice close to breaking from emotion, “it doesn’t cost me a nickel.”

“It–what did you just say?”

Gordon shrugged. “They do it for free,” he said. “They think the voices in their heads are the word of God, they don’t want
paying
. And the pious locals give them food and stuff, so that’s all covered. Which means I can undercut the competition out of existence and still get a quite satisfactory return. It’s perfect. I’ve got ninety-six more like this one
scattered about, and I’m planning on building another two hundred by this time next year.”

Mr Greenlander could no longer feel his fingers and toes. “That’s—”

“Yes,” Gordon said simply. “Isn’t it?”

“But that monk, the one we saw—”

“Oh, he just crashed, it happens all the time.” Gordon dismissed him with a vague gesture. “They overload, they freeze solid for a while, and then they’re right as rain. Usually it’s just a touch of software incompatibility, it doesn’t hurt them. Humans are amazingly resilient, you know. But when that happens to a
machine
, you’ve got outages that last for hours, and all the traffic lights go crazy in seventeen states.”