Sparks (22 page)

“Delicate balance?” said Sparks, finding some insect grit on the end of his cigar and flicking it off.

Jeff shook his head. “He’s trying not to say ‘delicate’ twice,” explained Duncan.

“These worlds exist in a complex state of equilibrium,” said Jeff.

“Well done!” said Duncan.

“And,” said Jeff, looking pained and triumphant at the same time like a dictator with piles, “if anything should happen to throw these worlds out of kilter…”

“Off balance,” explained Duncan.

“Then that fabric, the fabric of the universe, that I mentioned before, would be ripped,” said Jeff. “The universe would be irreparably harmed.”

“You can’t mend a broken egg,” said Duncan.

“And that’s what’s about to happen,” Jeff said.

“Someone’s going to mend an egg?” said Sparks.

“No,” said Jeff. “Remember this sentence? ‘The fabric of the universe is about to be screwed up by one man’. That’s what I have been talking about for the last two minutes.”

“Hang on,” said Sparks. “I’m still not up to speed on this.”

“Bloody hell,” said Jeff. “I wish we’d brought a dog. At least you can train a dog. Look. Someone is messing about with the – I can’t believe I’m going to say this again – the fabric of the universe. On this world. Here. And this is going to affect not just this world but others too. I can’t explain how but it is.”

“No,” said Sparks. “I got that. That was easy. What I don’t get – and don’t roll your eyes at me, please – what I don’t get is when we first met, when I beat you up and all that, you told me that this couldn’t happen.”

“What?” said Jeff.

“When I beat you up,” said Sparks, enjoying the reiteration no end. “You told me all that thing about someone stepping on a butterfly and changing history was nonsense.”

“No I didn’t!” said Jeff.

“Yes you did. You said all you got if you did that was butterfly on your shoe. In fact,” said Sparks, “you said you did it.”

“He’s right,” said Duncan. “He’s absolutely right, you know.”

“Shut up,” Jeff said. “All right,” he added after a moment, “I might have said that.”

“You did say that,” said Sparks.

“I did say that,” said Jeff. “But it’s different.”

“Why?” said Sparks. “Because I was beating you up?”

“Stop saying that,” said Jeff. “No, it’s different because – oh, you tell him.” Jeff turned to Duncan. “If I have to say ‘fabric of the universe’ again, I’ll split down the middle.”

“All right,” said Duncan affably. “I don’t mind. Right,” he said. “What Jeff means is that if you do something in a world that’s… that’s of that world, it’s OK. But if you do something in a world that’s not of that world, it’s not. OK.”

“Oh,” said Sparks. “No, I don’t get it.”

“Flaming gumboils,” said Jeff, a little heatedly. “Listen, you twit, it’s really simple.”

He leaned in towards Sparks, his thin nostrils flaring alarmingly. He breathed heavily and spoke slowly.

“Me go to world,” said Jeff. “Me see world. Me see local flora and fauna. Me tread on local flora and fauna. No harm. But! Me am local flora and fauna. Me see me. Me go mad, tell everyone, ‘Look! Thin man from other world!’ Fabric of universe collapse.”

“But I saw you,” said Sparks. “I saw you, and I beat you up, and the fabric of the blah didn’t change.”

“Because you didn’t tell anyone,” said Duncan. “Because you didn’t seem to care very much.”

“You are a moronic exception,” said Jeff. “No offence.”

“What?” said Sparks.

“For generations, we’ve been taught, don’t let the locals find out there’s such a thing as the Society, don’t go round telling them you come from another world, all that. And why? Because the theory is once the locals find out, they’ll want to join in. They’ll all be noncing about an infinite amount of worlds, muddying the waters and making the search for God’s Perfect World impossible,” said Jeff. “And what if some fool stumbles on God’s Perfect World, and messes it up?”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” said Duncan.

“But instead, we meet you,” said Jeff. “And while you’re a pain in the arse, trolling round like a drunk in a barrel making a fool of yourself, you haven’t told anyone what you’re doing.”

“I told Alison,” said Sparks. “In the bear world. And I told my mum, in the world where they thought I was a serial killer.”

“Anyone important,” said Jeff, caustically.

“Oh,” said Sparks.

“So, you’re a sap. You’re like some kind of homeless person of the universe, going from world to world not making much sense and definitely not having any impact.”

“Thanks,” said Sparks. He didn’t mean it.

“Not at all,” said Jeff. “I mean, it’s almost an achievement. Discovering a way to travel between different realities, involving yourself in those realities, and having absolutely no effect on those worlds. It’s like building an atom bomb and then forgetting where you left it.”

“Which actually happened on one world,” said Duncan. “You see…”

“Be quiet,” said Jeff. “So there you are, Mr Useless. We had to stop you, of course, because that’s part of our job, but you were pretty low on our damage limitation list.”

“Have we got a damage limitation list?” said Duncan.

“Yes,” said Jeff. “I expect. Anyway, you’re not the issue. You’re not the problem. You’re an idiot. Someone else is the problem.”

“Who?” said Sparks, disappointed to learn that he wasn’t the problem.

“Someone who isn’t an idiot,” said Jeff. “Someone who’s very close to working it all out. And someone who’s more dangerous because he’s going mad.”

“Are you sure it’s not me?” said Sparks, hopefully.

“Dear Lord,” said Jeff, rubbing his eyes. “Listen, I’ve got a migraine and I’m knackered. Also I don’t think your mind can take in too much information in one go, so we’re going to take you up to a luxury hotel room and lock you in. Then we’ll do the rest of the explaining.”

“Will there be…”

“Yes,” said Jeff. “There’ll be a movie channel in the hotel. And a mini bar. And room service.”

He turned to Duncan and sighed. “These people, they’re so predictable.”

Ha!
thought Sparks,
‘will there be a phone?’ is what I meant
. He felt he had achieved a small victory.

Good news about the mini bar and the movie channel, though, he added to himself.

Joseph Kaye went to the library. He was going to spend an hour looking on the library index system for subjects which could in no way be connected to cockroaches or bugs or even things with more than four legs.

He walked into the library, nodded at the head librarian, who instinctively ducked, as though Kaye’s forehead was firing brain-mulching rays at him, and went into the reference section. The reference section was in many ways the beating heart of the library. It was also in many other ways a really boring place. Built at a time when library architects were clearly despotic figures with an imperial bent, the room was a huge copy of some sort of Roman palace, all decked out in wood and marble, with a huge clock over the atlas section. As the clock was rather noisy, the hands had been removed, giving the room a literally timeless flavour. Time, Kaye decided, did not so much stand still in this room as lie on its back with its legs sticking up in the air.

Rows and rows of, inevitably, bookshelves surrounded the room; the cases were heavy and glass-covered and contained no book that was not leather-bound and embossed in gilt. Even books that had never been leather-bound and embossed in gilt, like
The World Guide To Plumbing
and
World War I Made Simple
, had been rebound so as not to stand out. Kaye hated this room. It was like a court run by books, juries of books lining the room, a public gallery of non-fiction behind him and in front of him a really attractive girl.

The really attractive girl didn’t fit into Kaye’s simile of a court made of books, largely because Kaye had never seen her in the library before. She was sitting down with an enormous book on the desk in front of her, flicking through its giant pages with some difficulty and frowning. Kaye was intrigued; he affected to saunter past and look over her shoulder. As he sauntered ineptly up to the girl – difficult in a library, where the atmosphere dampens sauntering like a bursting dam on a cotton swab – she must have heard him, because she closed the book and turned round, and looked shocked.

“Oh!” said Alison. “It’s you.”

Kaye stopped sauntering and stood, awkwardly and confused.

“Pardon?” he said.

“I… I’ve seen you before,” said Alison. “In the, in the... somewhere else.”

“In the somewhere else?” said Kaye. “What a nice expression. Is it Canadian?”

Immediately he said it, Kaye knew it wasn’t Canadian, and wished he hadn’t spoken.

“Yes, it is,” said Alison quickly. “No. No, it’s not. No, I saw you somewhere and didn’t want to say where, in case you were embarrassed.”

“Oh,” said Kaye, desperately trying not to say anything stupid again. “Where – no, you already said you didn’t want to say where.”

Something occurred to him.

“It was in the park, wasn’t it?” he said. “When I was…”

“Speaking,” said Alison.

“Being arrested,” said Kaye. “But it’s all right. I was in a mental hospital. But it’s fine. I was cured. I am cured.”

“I never thought you were mad,” Alison said, sliding her book under a newspaper.

“I did,” said Kaye. “I thought I was mad. Now I don’t mind either way.”

“I think people who don’t mind if they’re mad are generally not mad,” said Alison, and immediately looked surprised. She had never actually had an opinion on the subject before, but now suddenly she did.

Kaye was looking at her in a thoughtful way.

“Yes,” he said. “You may be right.”

Now Alison was looking at Kaye in a thoughtful way.

“Is there an unpleasant cafeteria attached to this place that we can go to?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” said Kaye. “I know just the one.”

The cafeteria was incredibly unpleasant, perhaps because it had something to do with the government. It was a windowless room on the third floor of the library building. No one was entirely sure why a room on the third floor should have no windows, unless it was to stop diners seeing people outside eating nice food, running pell-mell out of the building and grabbing the sandwiches out of their very mouths. Instead of windows, there was a mural on one side of a very big pie, painted by someone who had clearly never seen a pie before, and believed pies were cylindrical and had PIE carved on them to aid identification. This mural had cracked and peeled over the years, making the pie look as though it was made of flaky paint pastry, and sometimes bits of it would fall into the actual pies on the counter, where it made no difference to the taste. (“Probably improve it,” said diners, knowing that it didn’t).

The other wall was even worse. It was an enormous tropical fish tank. This might in another venue have been a thoughtful and elegant addition to the decor, but here, in this grim cafeteria, it wasn’t, basically. The tank, dimly lit in an already dimly lit room, was filled with miniature ruined castles and galleons, round which really miserable-looking fish swam like finny depressives. The effect was of some horrible marine graveyard prowled by unhappy giant fish, most of whom could actually see bigger, dead fish behind the cafeteria counter. Some of them had possibly made the connection between themselves and the dead fish, and imagined themselves in hell.

These were, at any rate, the chipper thoughts that normally kept a smile away from Joseph Kaye’s face as he queued for dead fish or pie with bits of paint in it. But today he found the fish tank attractive and even cute. The pie mural looked almost accurate, for a cylinder. And the staff, who normally looked as though they had been conscripted into a terrible army of filthy caterers who would live and die in the cafeteria, looked like a jolly bunch who loved their work.

They weren’t, of course. Nor was anything in the cafeteria remotely pleasant. However, Kaye felt otherwise, and the cause of this, he suddenly realised, was standing next to him, holding a tray and saying, “What’s wrong with that mural?”

Kaye was disconcerted. He had rarely felt attracted to someone before, and if he had, he had never been this strongly affected by their presence. He found everything Alison said incredibly interesting, he found her clothes deeply fascinating, and there was something about her wrists that was so astonishingly appealing that he was surprised the whole cafeteria wasn’t crowded round Alison shouting, “Hey! Look at these wrists! Someone bring a camera! No, wait – cancel that! Someone bring a sculptor! We’ve got to get these wrists immortalised!”

Kaye wanted to tell Alison all of these things, although he suspected she might be a bit alarmed by the wrist part. Instead, he smiled and said, “It’s meant to be a pie.”

Kaye and Alison sat down. They looked at their fish, then at the fish tank and looked at each other instead.

After some time, Alison said, “Tell me about yourself.” Then she looked embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said. “I know you’ve had a difficult time, what with being…”

“Put inside a mental hospital,” said Kaye, without rancour.

“Put inside a mental hospital,” agreed Alison. There was some silence.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I know,” said Kaye, trying to sound jolly, and realising that sounding jolly meant sounding like Santa Claus, so he stopped, and sounded pleasant instead. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Alison leapt at this suggestion as though it recast the whole concept of originality.

“Well,” she said, enthusiastically. “My name is Alison, I live locally… I don’t have a job… my boyfriend was killed by a bus.”

She fell silent again, and looked at her fish.

“Oh dear,” she said. “What a cheerful conversation.”

But Joseph Kaye was looking extremely cheerful.

“Can you use a computer?” he said.

The job interview was an unusual one. It took place in a pub, 200 yards away from the library, and consisted entirely of the following searching interrogation.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Yes please. Can I have a gin and tonic?”