The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (8 page)

He shivered. His fingertips and toes had gone cold. An unseen hand grabbed a fistful of his intestines and squeezed.

Which means I’ll have to leave Uni and get a
job
.

He whimpered. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Oh no. It was supposed to be: graduate (with first-class honours), then three years’ postgraduate, then another three years as a junior lecturer somewhere, then assistant professor, a fellowship, a nice cosy little corner of research into something so abstruse and obscure that nobody would know enough to tell him he was wrong, and
never having to go to work ever
. That had been the route map of his life for as long as he could remember, and now it was all slipping away from him like the torn scraps of a dream; like being Prince Florizel. All
the cloud-capped mountains and lofty towers had sunk back into the ground with an unearthly shriek, leaving him alone in a desert of suits, ironing shirts, getting up at seven o’clock, buying sandwiches at the station to eat at his desk. Face it, he told himself, your life is
over
. And all because of the rotten, stinking, inconvenient truth.

How long he stood there he didn’t know. Only Salvador Dalí could have designed a watch capable of monitoring the passage of time between the moment when he put the phone down and the click of Uncle’s key in the door.

“All right, where are you?”

“In here.”

One of our greatest failings as a species is our tendency to judge by appearance and first impressions. On that basis, Uncle Gordon didn’t score very high. It was only—

“You bloody idiot,” Uncle Gordon said. “What’ve you gone and done now?”

—when you’d known him a while, say nineteen years, that you came to understand that behind that forbidding exterior was a generous, warm-hearted, extremely patient man who just happened to shout a lot. “Sorry, Uncle,” he said.

“Of course you’re sorry, you’re always sorry, and you know what? It
doesn’t help
. Oh for God’s sake, don’t
loom
like that. Sit
down
.”

“Sorry, Uncle. You said not to touch anything.”

It was nobody’s fault that Benny Gulbenkian was six foot four, and his uncle was five foot three and twice his weight. For some reason, though, Uncle had always taken the height thing as a personal affront, as though Benny was doing it to be cheeky. It hadn’t helped when one of Uncle’s oldest friends, seeing the two of them standing next to each other with Benny wearing a scarf on a windy day, had said they looked just like a quaver. Or that Uncle hadn’t known what a quaver was until Benny told him.

“Now then,” Uncle said, drawing a deep breath as Benny folded himself into a chair, “tell me what you’ve done.”

“Well.” Benny took a moment to compose his thoughts. “I was revising my notes for the exam, and suddenly I realised, loads of this stuff doesn’t work. I mean, it isn’t right.”

“This stuff being—”

“The laws of physics. So I sat down and did the maths, and it turns out I was right. Look, I can show you if you want.”

Uncle’s eyes were like two tiny portholes onto the abyss. “No, that’s fine. Look, are you
sure
?”

“Oh yes. I double-checked.”

“Christ Almighty.”

Later, it occurred to Benny that Uncle hadn’t doubted for one moment that his calculations had been right. Odd, that. In so many other aspects of his life, Uncle assumed as an article of faith that his nephew was an idiot; not unreasonably, it had to be said (and Uncle had said it, eloquently and at length) This time, though, there was no
don’t be stupid, you’ve got it all wrong, as usual
. He’d accepted the statement at face value and moved straight on.

“Have you told anyone about this?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God.”

“You,” Benny clarified. “But that’s all. Really.”

Uncle blinked twice at him and counted to ten under his breath. He did that a lot. “Just me. Nobody else.”

“No. I promise.”

“That’s all right, then.” The words came gushing out, like air from a suddenly depressurised cabin. “No harm done. We’ll just forget all about it and I can get back to my meeting and you can get on with your revision, and—”

“Um.”

Uncle Gordon had that way of freezing, as if he’d just walked into an invisible wall. “Um?”

“I don’t think there’s any point me revising any more, Uncle. I don’t think I can take the exam.”

And now the still, small voice. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t answer the questions if I know they’re wrong. Can I?”

And now the very sad voice. “Why not?”

“Well, it’d be wrong. It’d be lying.”

“Benny.” There were times, usually just before he threw things at the wall, when you could hear the love under all the anger and contempt. “I don’t know who you’ve been listening to lately, but lying isn’t actually all that bad. People do it all the time. Lying is the lubricant without which the machinery of society would seize up and crash. It’s no big deal, really.”

“Yes, but—”

A long sigh, mostly of resignation. “Oh, come on,” Uncle said. “You’ve worked really hard these last three years, Benny, you’ve really knuckled down and got on with it, and for the first time in your otherwise unsatisfactory life you’re on the verge of
achieving
something. And now you’re going to throw it all away just because of some
technicality
. Now, take me.”

“Uncle—”

“
I
never got the chance to go to university.
I
had to leave school when I was sixteen because my dad needed me in the shop, dicing the kidneys, cleaning out the sheep’s heads. When I think what I could’ve been if I’d had the advantages you’ve had—”

Benny pursed his lips. Once, when Uncle had made this speech, he’d pointed out that if Uncle had gone to college and got a degree, he’d probably have got a proper job and ended up in the Civil Service or something, instead of starting his own business and making his first million before he was thirty. For some reason it hadn’t gone down well, so he decided not to say it now. Instead, he sat perfectly still and let
the speech flow over him. The interval gave him time to think–he knew he’d be safe until I-promised-your-poor-mother–and it occurred to him to wonder, not for the first time, what it was that Uncle Gordon actually did. Business, yes, he’d sort of grasped that over the years. But when he’d asked the straight question, the reaction was always a barrage of covering fire, masking an orderly retreat to prepared positions. Now, however, it might well be kind of relevant, because fairly soon they’d be getting on to what-are-you-going-to-
do
-with your life, and—

“Well,” Benny interrupted, “I thought, maybe I could come and work for you.”

Benny was, above all, a peaceful sort of person. Violence alarmed him. He winced at the sound of fireworks, and
The A-Team
gave him nightmares. On this one occasion, however, only military imagery would do. Imagine a tank, barging its way through walls and squashing cars flat under its tracks. That’d be Uncle, in full swing. Now imagine that tank driving over a mine.

“Say what?”

“Come and work for you,” Benny repeated. “By the way, what exactly is it—?”

“You wouldn’t like it,” Uncle said quickly.

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it depends what it is.”

“Accountancy.”

“Oh,
maths
. I like maths.”

“Not the mathsy sort of accountancy,” Uncle Gordon said, and his voice had got slightly higher. “More like management consultancy. Very dry and boring. Lots of meetings. You’d have to wear a suit.”

Benny hesitated, just long enough to make Uncle think he’d won. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

“And a tie.”

“Ties are all right.”

“Early starts most days. Lots of breakfast meetings.”

Benny did his eager-beaver smile. “I’m sure I could get used to that. And it sounds really interesting.”

“Does it?” Uncle’s eyes widened into perfectly round black holes, reminding Benny awkwardly of something he’d seen once, in a doughnut somewhere. “Dear God. You know, I had no idea you thought this way.”

“Joining the family business? You bet. I’m up for that. I mean, you and me working together—”

Little beads of sweat were forming on Uncle’s forehead. “You’d have to start at the bottom, of course.”

“Naturally.”

“But I promised your mother—” Uncle stopped dead, as if he’d suddenly been unplugged. He’s
scared
, Benny suddenly realised; then,
does not compute
, because Uncle Gordon wasn’t afraid of anything. Then Uncle took a deep breath, and it was as though that strange, aberrant moment had never happened. “Believe me,” he said, “you’d hate it, you really would. Besides, I haven’t spent a small fortune in tuition fees so you can flush it all down the toilet in a fit of wild integrity.”

Even so; he couldn’t forget that moment of raw terror. “You think I should take the exam.”

“
Yes
. And you can keep your fingers crossed under the desk while you’re writing, if it’ll make you feel any better.”

“It might,” Benny said, and then realised it was meant as a joke. “But I don’t know, Uncle Gordon. I’ve got this funny feeling that if I pretend like that, it’ll make things very bad. Very bad indeed.”

“Listen.” It was the serious face. “I only want what’s best for you, got that? And I know, if you pack in Uni now and wind up in some dead-end boring job, like accountancy or management consulting, you’ll be unhappy and miserable, and I’ll have let you down. But if you pull yourself together, get stuck in and get a good degree, you can carry on and do
what you want to do, and everything will be just fine. And when you’re a professor somewhere, and people will actually listen to what you’ve got to say,
then
you can go blowing up the foundations of modern science and they’ll probably give you the Nobel Prize for it. You go shooting your mouth off now, they’ll think you’re just some wacko kid and you’ll be finished, you hear me? So, you do the exam, you finish your course, you don’t drop out, you don’t go disproving
anything
until
I
tell you it’s the right time. Got that? Well?”

For a split second, Benny wondered if he ought to tell Uncle Gordon about the YouSpace thing. Because maybe there are such things as coincidences, but if so, this was a pretty monumentally, visible-from-orbit huge one, so it could well have a bearing on the situation, so Uncle ought to know about it so he could factor it into his advice. But the thought of what Uncle would say if Benny confessed he’d been skipping in and out of alternate realities when he should’ve been revising simply didn’t bear thinking about. “Yes, Uncle,” he said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Good boy.” Quite unexpectedly, Uncle Gordon smiled. It wasn’t something that happened very often, roughly on a par with a total solar eclipse; unlike an eclipse, it made the world a very bright place. “I don’t know, you’re a bright kid, Benny, really,
really
bright, but there are times when you can be really,
really
stupid.”

Benny grinned back. “I know,” he said. “Sorry.”

Uncle Gordon sighed deeply and glanced at his watch. “Hellfire,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got sixteen South Korean venture capitalists sitting round a table drumming their fingers waiting for me. I told them I was just nipping out for a piss. See you later, all right?”

Uncle departed in a flurry of clomping feet and mislaid car keys, leaving the usual empty silence behind him; when
he left a room, it tended to be far emptier than it had been before he arrived, as if his exit had drained all the energy from it. But stillness, peace and quiet are what you need when you’re revising, and Benny was (he noticed with a degree of mild surprise) doing just that. At least, he was reading the notes and uploading data into his medium-term memory; but it was coming in hermetically sealed and labelled WARNING–UNRELIABLE, with one of those toxic-waste symbols stencilled on each package. He really wasn’t sure he wanted stuff like that in his head, in case it leaked out and got into something important. So he sealed off the bit of his brain he thought with from the warehouse space, and occupied it with thoughts like—

Well, he was very good about it, really.

Yes, except—

What?

I’m still not entirely sure what he was being very good
about
.

Excuse me?

I mean, it’s not like I’d done anything wrong—

Whoa there, cowboy. You disproved the laws of thermodynamics, for crying out loud.

Yes? So? I mean, if they’re wrong, they’re wrong.

Sure. That’s like saying, Stoke-on-Trent is a pretty horrible place, so let’s burn it to the ground. You can’t do that. People
live
there. At the very least, you’ve got to give them time to get their things and move out. Same with trashing the foundations of accepted knowledge. You can’t just light the fuse and run away. Well, can you?

Actually, I quite like Stoke-on-Trent.

Bull. You’ve never even been there.

I so have. On a train.

Passing through. Looking out the window. That doesn’t count.