The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (35 page)

“Noted,” Gordon said; and then a grim-faced warder
came in with two servings of peach and mango trifle, with whipped cream, passion fruit and dried coconut sprinkles. By the time Gordon had finished, the pilot had burned seven-eighths of the way through the rope. He hadn’t touched his pudding. Gordon looked at it, and thought, Um.

“Well,” the pilot said, as he broke the last strands of the tether. “It’s now or never. You ready?”

Gordon looked at him, then at the trifle. He thought; well, young Benny can look after himself, apparently, and I never really
liked
doing it, if I’m perfectly honest with myself. And if I can’t sweet-talk these buffoons into making me a god or something, I’m not half the man I thought I was. And the food…

“Tell you what,” he said. “You go on. I’ll catch you up.”

Charlie Hopkinson

T
OM
H
OLT
was born in London in 1961. At Oxford he studied bar billiards, ancient Greek agriculture and the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines; interests which led him, perhaps inevitably, to qualify as a solicitor and emigrate to Somerset, where he specialised in death and taxes for seven years before going straight in 1995. Now a full-time writer, he lives in Chard, Somerset, with his wife, one daughter and the unmistakable scent of blood, wafting in on the breeze from the local meat-packing plant.

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If you enjoyed

THE OUTSORCERER’S APPRENTICE,

look out for

DOUGHNUT

by Tom Holt

The doughnut is a thing of beauty. A circle of fried, doughy perfection. A source of comfort in trying times, perhaps. For Theo Bernstein, however, it is far, far more.

Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he’s unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn’t have any money.

Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.

By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions. A journey that will rewrite the laws of physics. A battle to save humanity itself.

This is the tale of a man who had nothing and gave it all up to find his destiny—and a doughnut.

“One mistake,” Theo said sadly, “one silly little mistake, and now look at me.”

The Human Resources manager stared at him with fascination. “Not that little,” she said breathlessly. “You blew up—”

“A mountain, yes.” He shrugged. “And the Very Very Large Hadron Collider, and very nearly Switzerland. Like I said, one mistake. I moved the decimal point one place left instead of one place right. Could’ve happened to anyone.”

The Human Resources manager wasn’t so sure about that, but she didn’t want to spoil the flow. She brushed the hair out of her eyes and smiled encouragingly. “Go on,” she said.

“Well,” Theo replied, leaning back a little in his chair, “that was just the beginning. After that, things really started to get ugly.”

“Um.”

“First,” Theo said, “my wife left me. You can’t blame her, of course. People nudging each other and looking at her wherever she went, there goes the woman whose husband blew up the VVLHC, that sort of thing—”

“Excuse me,” the Human Resources manager interrupted. “This would be your third wife?”

“Fourth. Oh, sorry, forgot. Pauline dumped me for her personal fitness trainer while I was still at CalTech. It was Amanda who left me after the explosion.”

“Ah, right. Go on.”

“Anyway,” Theo said, “there I was, alone, no job, no chance of anyone ever wanting to hire me ever again, but at least I still had the twenty million dollars my father left me. I mean, money isn’t everything—”

“Um.”

“But at least I knew I wasn’t going to starve, not so long as I had Dad’s money. And it was invested really safely.”

“Yes?”

“In Schliemann Brothers,” Theo said mournfully, “the world’s biggest private equity fund. No way it could ever go bust, they said.” He smiled. “Ah well.”

“You lost—”

“The lot, yes. Of course, the blow was cushioned slightly by the fact that Amanda would’ve had most of it, when the divorce went through. But instead, all she got was the house, the ranch, the ski resort and the Caribbean island. She was mad as hell about that,” Theo added with a faint grin, “but what can you do?”

The Human Resources manager was twisting a strand of her hair round her finger. “And?”

“Anyhow,” Theo went on, “it’s been pretty much downhill all the way since then. After I lost the house, I stayed with friends for a while, only it turned out they weren’t friends after all, not after all the money had gone. Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t just that, it was the blowing-up-the-VVLHC thing. You see, most of my friends were physicists working on the project, so they were all suddenly out of work too, and they tried not to blame me, but it’s quite hard not blaming someone when it actually is their fault.” He grinned sadly, then shrugged. “So I moved into this sort of hostel place, where they’re supposed to help you get back on your feet.”

The pressure of the coiled hair around her finger was stopping her blood from flowing. She let go. “Yes? And?”

“I got asked to leave,” Theo said sadly. “Apparently, technically I counted as an arsonist, and the rules said no arsonists, because of the insurance. They told me, if I’d killed a bunch of people in the explosion it’d have been OK, because their project mission statement specifically includes murderers. But, since nobody got hurt in the blast, I had to go. So I’ve been sort of camping out in the subway, places like that. Which is why,” he added, sitting up straight and looking her in the eye, “I really need this job. I mean, it’ll help me put my life back together, get me on my feet again. Well? How about it?”

The Human Resources manager looked away. “If it was up to me—”

“Oh, come on.” Theo gave her his best dying spaniel look. “You can’t say I haven’t got qualifications. Two doctorates in quantum physics—”

“Not relevant qualifications,” the Human Resources manager said. “Not relevant to the field of flipping burgers. I’m sorry.” She did look genuinely sad, he had to give her that. “You’re overqualified. With a résumé like that, you’re bound to get a better offer almost immediately, so where’s the point in us hiring you?”

“Oh, come on,” Theo said again. “After what I’ve done? Nobody’s going to want me. I’m unemployable.”

“Yes.” She smiled sympathetically. “You are. Also, you’re a bit old—”

“I’m thirty-one.”

“Most of our entry-level staff are considerably younger than that,” she said. “I’m not sure we could find a uniform to fit you.” He could see she was struggling with something, and it
wasn’t his inside-leg measurement. He betted he could guess what it would be. “And there’s the hand.”

Won his bet. He gave her a cold stare. “You do know it’s against the law to discriminate on grounds of physical disability.”

“Yes, but—” She gave him a helpless look. “Frankly, I think the company would be prepared to take a stand on this one. We’ve got our customers to think about, and—”

He nodded slowly. He could see her point. Last thing you want when you’re buying your burger, fries and shake is to see them floating towards you through the air. It was an attitude he’d learned to live with, ever since the accident had left his right arm invisible up to the elbow. He wished now he’d lied about it, but the man at the outreach centre had told him to be absolutely honest. “Fine,” he said. “Well, thanks for listening, anyhow.”

“I really am sorry.”

“Of course you are.”

“And anyway,” she added brightly, “a guy like you, with all those degrees and doctorates. You wouldn’t be happy flipping burgers in a fast-food joint.”

“Wouldn’t I?” He gave her a gentle smile. “It’d have been nice to find out. Goodbye.”

Outside, the sun was shining; a trifle brighter than it would otherwise have done, thanks to him, but he preferred not to dwell on that. He had enough guilt to lug around without contemplating the effect his mishap had had on the ozone layer. Cheer up, he ordered himself; one more interview to go to, and who knows? This time–

“Worked in a slaughterhouse before, have you?” the man asked.

“Um, no.”

“Doesn’t matter. What you got to do is,” he said, pointing down the dark corridor, “wheel that trolley full of guts from that hatch there to that skip there, empty the guts into the skip, go back, fill another trolley, wheel it to the skip, empty it, go back and fill it again. And so on. Reckon you can do that?”

“I think so.”

The man nodded. “Most of ’em stick it out three weeks,” he said. “You, I’m guessing, maybe two. Still, if you want the job—”

“Oh yes,” Theo said. “Please.”

The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. Couldn’t do it myself, and I’ve been in the slaughtering forty years, but—” He paused and frowned. “What’s the matter with your arm?”

Theo sensed that the man probably didn’t need to hear about the quantum slipstream effect of the implosion of the VVLHC. “Lost it. Bitten off by a shark.”

“Too bad. Won’t that make it awkward, loading the guts?”

“Oh, I’ll have a stab at it, see how I get on.”

“That’s the spirit,” the man said absently. “OK, you start tomorrow.”

In the beginning was the Word.

Not, perhaps, the most auspicious start for a cosmos; because once you have a Word, sooner or later you find you’ve also got an annoying Paperclip, and little wriggly red lines like tapeworms under all the proper nouns, and then everything freezes solid and dies. This last stage is known to geologists as the Ice Age, and one can’t help thinking that it could’ve been avoided if only the multiverse had been thoroughly debugged before it was released.

But things change; that’s how it works. You can see Time as a coral reef of seconds and minutes, growing into a chalk island sitting on top of an infinite coal seam studded with diamonds the size of oil tankers; and each second is a cell dividing, two, three or a million roads-not-travelled-by every time your heart beats and the silicone pulses; and every division is a new start, the beginning of another version of the story–versions in which the Red Sea didn’t part or Lee Harvey Oswald missed or Hamlet stayed in Wittenberg and got a job.

So; in the beginning was the Word, but ten nanoseconds later there was a twelve-volume dictionary, and ten nanoseconds after that a Library of Congress, with 90 per cent of the books in foreign languages. It’s probably not possible after such a lapse of time to find out what the original Word was. Given the consequences, however, it could well have been oops.

The first week wasn’t so bad. Well, it was; but at least he found the work so shatteringly exhausting that all he could do at the end of his shift was stagger home, stuff a pie or a sandwich in his face (for some reason, since he’d been working at the slaughterhouse he seemed to have lost his appetite), roll into bed and sleep like a corpse until it was time to get up and go to work. This suited him fine.

By the second week, however, he found he was coping with the exertion of gut-hauling rather better, which meant that he had enough stamina to allow him to sit staring aimlessly at the walls of his room for an hour before falling asleep. By the end of the fourth week, he could manage three hours of aimless staring with no bother at all. This wasn’t good. Staring at the walls proved to be a primitive form of meditation, in the course
of which he analysed his life so far, and ended up reaching the conclusion that it hadn’t been going so well lately. Alone, all the money gone, living in a ghastly little shoebox and spending all day loading still-warm intestines into a galvanised box on wheels; it wasn’t, he couldn’t help thinking, the sort of life he’d quite reasonably anticipated five years before, when he was appointed as the youngest ever Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits professor of multiphasic quantum dynamics at the University of Leiden.