The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy Page 4

  “Oh come on,” said Anderson. “It is the duty of every modern artist to improve on the past. Only by constant revision can a work of art eventually achieve perfection. Do you think you are the first person to use a time machine? They give us the opportunity to realise perfection even after the artist’s death. To realise perfection with the benefit of modern enlightened viewpoints.”

  “Anderson. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m going back again to complete my reconstruction of The Blue Magnolia. Emerald Rainbow will be with me.”

  “Listen . . .” I shouted, but it was too late. He’d hung up. I held my head in my hands. Suzie rubbed my shoulders sympathetically. She had been sitting eating peanuts on my sofa for over an hour now, time machine at the ready.

  The Blue Magnolia showed on channel 17W at forty-six. It was unbelievable.

  “You’ve got to choose.” Hepburn’s dark eyes, full of tears. The camera begins to pan . . .

  Grant. Hepburn. Bogart. Me. Bamboo screen hiding two buffoons. Bogart by the door.

  “Hell. I can’t find my hat.”

  “It’s – Gmmph.” That was me thumping Anderson, just out of shot.

  “We’ll mail it.” Cary Grant, of course.

  “Don’t go like this. I . . . I can explain.”

  Hepburn’s brown eyes are filled with tears of despair. She looks so lost, so unsure. She’s probably wondering why Anderson’s pet Labrador has just walked across the room, wagging its tail.

  “No need,” says Bogart, kicking at the dog. “Why explain things to a man who’s not there?” There is a noise off camera as Emerald Rainbow hits me.

  “I guess a man who lives his life alone is never really a part of the world,” says Bogart. Anderson appears in the shot.

  “Me and the wife are going by the airport, Mr Bogart,” he says. “We’ll give you a lift.”

  “There’s no need,” says Bogart.

  “That’s okay, it’s not a problem,” smiles Emerald Rainbow.

  “Yes, it is,” says Bogart through gritted teeth.

  “Just ignore him,” says Anderson. “He’s bound to be in a bad mood, considering.”

  “I am not in a fucking bad mood,” shouts Bogart. He stomps out of the room. Anderson and Emerald Rainbow follow him.

  You can see me sitting at a table crying softly to myself when Anderson reappears. He grins at the room sheepishly.

  “I just came to get the hat,” he explains. “He’s forgotten it again.”

  Me and Anderson slugged it out for a few more days, but my heart wasn’t in it. The film was ruined and, no matter what I tried, it couldn’t be fixed. It’s been moved to the back of the schedules, to the most distant channels. No one wants to know any more.

  Anderson insists he’s not to blame, that these things happen all the time. He says everything is in a constant state of flux since the invention of the reality re-integrators. (I think he means the time machines.) All I understand is that I’m trapped in a timeline where The Blue Magnolia is ruined. Suzie tells me not to despair, there is a near infinite number of timelines where the film goes on as normal. Then again, I haven’t the money to reach them, unfortunately.

  Still, at least I get to see Suzie now, which is some consolation.

  And as for Anderson, well. Have you seen Star Wars? You know that bit at the end when they fly down the trench on the Death Star? If you look closely you can see my car driving along the bottom. If you look very closely you might be able to see Anderson running along in front of it.

  COLQUITT’S HIGH-ENERGY TROUSERS

  Steven Pirie

  Dean Withers tossed darts at Colquitt’s photograph pinned to the back of his office door. Colquitt did things with quarks. Unwholesome things, the dean said; things that left a ring of scum around the high-energy building’s bathtub and caused the bristles of the dean’s toilet brush to glow sunset pink. He’d done odd, entropic things to the dean’s best rubber duck so that now it floated lop-sided in the water. He’d forced relativistic effects upon the dean’s slippers until the dean could only walk in circles in them. Now, the rumour was that Colquitt’s high-energy trousers were an offence to common decency.

  The dean aimed. He was deadly with a dart where Colquitt’s picture was concerned. He hardly ever spiked Maureen’s features smiling pictorially at Colquitt’s side.

  Tap . . . tap. “There was, um, something you wanted, Dean Withers?”

  “Ah, Colquitt.” The dean fought the urge to fling the last of his darts at the lithe figure framed by the doorway. Colquitt’s teeth were dangerously straight, and his manly jaw far too jutting for the dean’s comfort. “Come in. Sit, sit.”

  The dean drew a calming breath against the unsettling effect of the trousers. Sparks leapt from Colquitt’s inside leg. The hair on the dean’s scalp lifted and fell. Trickles of current electrified his fillings. The air smelled of fire and soot and singed fabric. “I see you’ve not managed to remove the trousers, Mr Colquitt.”

  Colquitt coughed. “No, Dean.”

  The dean leaned forward across his desk and wagged an accusing finger. “There have been complaints, Mr Colquitt. Your trousers are interfering with Miss Rogers’ attempts at radio astronomy. Mr Ling keeps thinking he’s discovered new gamma ray bursts every time you pass his window. You’re doing unpleasant things to Professor Hedge’s pacemaker.”

  “I’m trying all I can to control my trousers, sir.”

  “Do you have a theory yet as to what happened to them?”

  Colquitt toyed with his perfect hair. “I think there was a fault with the particle accelerator. Mrs Hopkins believes we’re drawing dark energy from a fifth dimension. She thinks we’ve entangled the protons of the trousers’ fabric with some exotic matter.”

  The dean glanced sharply to the bulge in the pocket of his overcoat hung upon its peg below Maureen and Colquitt’s dart-riddled photograph. He nodded, though nobody truly understands such a thing as quantum entanglement. The dean wondered what the denizens of other dimensions would think of having Mr Colquitt’s legs thrust upon them. He’d seen Colquitt’s legs at the university sports day. As far as he could tell, they were not nice legs, even in four dimensions. It was a mystery why the typing pool girls talked so fondly of them.

  And drawing off the other dimension’s energy would likely make their light bulbs flicker and annoy them. It was the stuff of wars.

  “And you’ve tried simply removing the trousers?”

  “Mrs Carson tried to pull them off.” Colquitt looked uncomfortable. “She’s, um, recovering, Dean, and should walk again, given time. Mr Beecham suggested poking them with a copper earthing rod, and I believe I’m still providing power to the west wing. Personally, I think we should . . .”

  Colquitt’s words trailed away. Dean Withers frowned. Being dean, he had dealt a lot with trailing words in his time. He knew that following such trails was apt to lead to an unhappy end. Usually, extra funding was involved – the purchase of special, intrinsically safe hammers for the geologists, or lead safety underwear for the hot-plasma scientists, or trips to exotic locations where the science often seemed secondary to the investigation of women in grass skirts or of olive-skinned, thick-muscled men named Carlos.

  “Go on,” said the dean, slowly.

  “Well, Dean, it seems to me that if my trousers really are in quantum entanglement with matter from other dimensions, then we have a golden opportunity to test all manner of current theories – teleportation, faster-than-light communication, time travel, quantum gravity.”

  The dean was not convinced. “You think your trousers may reveal such mysteries?”

  Colquitt crossed his legs and the dean’s table lamp dimmed. “I’ve learned not to underestimate high-energy trousers, Dean. They’re, um, very pinching in, um, tender places. Besides, it’s hard to walk when one has the energy of the sun in one’s pants.”

  “Then we should proceed at once, Colquitt.”

  “Indeed, sir.” Colqu
itt loosened his collar. “I have pressing biological needs to get the damned things off as soon as possible, Dean. Today, if we may.”

  The dean grinned. Of course, proceed at once could be such a relative term should he want it to be. “It might take weeks, Colquitt.”

  “But I’ve a date with Maureen, tonight. She’ll not like her candlelit dinner spoiled by the wattage from my trousers, sir.”

  “No, Colquitt, Maureen won’t.” The dean sighed. His thoughts wandered amongst clandestine, candlelit encounters, heady with the hint of indiscretion and the thrill that would surely follow the pudding course. He’d heard Maureen did a fine “Death by Chocolate”. And that she was very inventive with whipped cream. “Very well, in the morning, then. I shall instruct Mrs Hopkins to cancel all reservations of the accelerator and we shall see what we can do about removing your trousers.”

  The following morning, Colquitt was strapped to a makeshift target at the far end of the particle accelerator tunnel. Using the words strap and target in conjunction with Colquitt brightened the dean’s mood considerably.

  “The trousers seem particularly active this morning, Mrs Hopkins,” said the dean, watching as Mr Colquitt’s trousers flared in the monitor upon the high-energy control panel. On a second monitor, lines traced the spiralling dance of subatomic debris flung from the hotter regions around Colquitt’s thighs. A nearby Geiger counter counted a frenzy of Geigers.

  Mrs Hopkins spun her chair around to face the dean. “Aye, and the funny thing is we’ve not switched on the beam yet, Dean Withers. Mr Colquitt’s trousers appear to be disobeying the laws of cause and effect. They’re decaying before their time.”

  The dean often felt like that, decaying before his time. It was a thankless task being dean of the high-energy physics department. People were distrustful of folk who claimed to spend their day delving in ten dimensions. He was never invited to the best parties. Unlike Rogers of Chemistry who could synthesise Viagra from a couple of teabags and half a doughnut; or Evans of Biology who had a full set of Joy of Sex videos; or even Morris of Geology who could chip ice cubes into rude shapes with his trusty hammer. Physics was so often the study of the unfeasibly small or the unimaginably large, and folk who held parties with Viagra, sex videos, and rude ice cubes weren’t interested in that sort of thing. Only Colquitt went to those kinds of parties, because things happened to Colquitt; interesting things like high-energy trousers.

  The dean smiled. “Are you saying there’s even more damage to be done if we turn the beam on?”

  Mrs Hopkins hesitated. “Surely not, Dean? It might be hard to control the collisions. We could strip off Mr Colquitt’s electrons. We could turn him into a Bose-Einstein condensate, or a soup of Buckminsterfullerines, or even into a singularity.”

  “I want some of your pointiest protons turning on right away, Hopkins. There’s science to be done.” The dean rubbed his hands together. “And get some more magnets around Colquitt’s pants. I want that beam focussed.”

  “Is that ethical, Dean?”

  “Don’t talk to me of ethics, Hopkins. The bugger ruined my slippers.”

  Soon, Colquitt’s face was twisted upon the monitor screen. His voice wavered over the loudspeaker. “I, um, think the trousers are unravelling, Dean. And I can’t feel my legs. Or rather, I can.”

  The dean waved a hand that Mrs Hopkins should turn the power knob further. “Talk sense, Colquitt,” he said. “What do you mean you can’t but you can?”

  “I think my legs are in two places at once, Dean, and neither of them starts at my bum. I think I’m being interfered with. It feels like there’re a couple of Higgs bosons in my pocket. I think my nether regions are experiencing wave-particle duality on a macroscopic scale.”

  This subject unsettled the dean. The girls in the typing pool had talked admiringly of Colquitt’s nether regions just that morning and the dean had felt insecure. No one ever mentioned his regions. Certainly not in the way the typing pool girls did Colquitt’s. The dean’s were regions of unexplored country. The only woman ever to stand at his frontier was Maureen, and she did so only until Colquitt came by with his teeth and jaw and swagger and style and interesting things. Whisked away before his hormones, she’d been, and the dean had sworn . . . what . . . vengeance? Science? A tinkering with the particle accelerator that might render somebody into a person with high-energy trousers?

  “We’re going up to full power, Mr Colquitt,” said the dean. “Perhaps you should keep a tight hold on your bosons.”

  Smoke billowed from Colquitt’s trousers. Mrs Hopkins rose from her seat as if to protest, her mouth open, her hands covering her ears as the whine of the accelerator grew. The dean shook a fist at the monitor. He felt the flush of madness upon his cheeks. “That’ll teach him,” he raged. “That’ll teach the womaniser to run off with my Maureen.”

  It was a quiet morn, the following day, as the dean sat pensive at his desk. The high-energy trousers had been found in Aberdeen. Seven hundred and three miles, they’d flown; a streak of fire that had outshone the sun. No one knew how far Colquitt had gone.

  Tap . . . tap.

  “Yes, Mrs Hopkins?”

  “I thought you might like to know they’ve found one of Mr Colquitt’s shoes, Dean.”

  “Oh?”

  “In Norway.”

  “Ah.”

  “And Mr Pike the builder thinks he can repair the high-energy building’s roof, though he’s refusing to go anywhere near the black hole that’s fizzing about in the accelerator tunnel.”

  The dean shuddered. Had he really allowed his emotions to unleash such retribution upon Colquitt? Surely such a thing was beyond a cold, analytical, scientific mind? Now, bathed by the bright, morning sunlight that angled through the office windows, the dean wasn’t even sure if Colquitt was the problem. He, Dean Withers, was no different. A large part of the plan was that he, Dean Withers, would be different with Colquitt out of the way. And thus far Maureen had not swung open the door and leapt naked into his arms. Thus far the typing pool girls had not swooned as he’d passed by. All they talked about was the missing Colquitt, squirming in their seats as if fond reminiscence of his libido alone were potent enough to transcend black holes, as if he could give them multiple orgasms even from other universes.

  “And the gravity waves?”

  Mrs Hopkins shook her head. “Mr Ling has nailed down everything that moves, but the west wing of the university is still edging toward the east wing at three inches per hour. He thinks Chemistry and Earth Sciences will collide in days.”

  “Won’t the buildings collapse before then?”

  “Time and space are warping, Dean, and Mr Ling thinks the world itself will probably collapse before the west wing. The university survived Hitler’s best efforts, so Mr Ling reckons it will stand an amble across the cloisters.”

  The dean shuddered once more. Maureen was in Earth Sciences – as tender a goddess as ever chipped away at an igneous intrusion – what would she do if the louts of Chemistry were forced upon her? And who could know that the world was such a fragile thing?

  “Then I’ve ruined everything,” said the dean. He stood and took his coat from the peg behind the door. Colquitt’s face smiled back at him under its barrage of darts. The dean felt for the bulge in his coat pocket. “There’s something I must do, Mrs Hopkins. I may be some time in doing it.”

  The black hole swirled. It was grey, in reality, because contrary to the dean’s prior beliefs stuff did escape from its event horizon. It wouldn’t be noticed, otherwise, and a fundamental law of the universe is that the things in it want to be noticed. It fizzled and crackled as he neared its rim. The gravity gradient between the front and back of his head was bringing on an awful headache. The dean cupped his hands about his mouth. “Colquitt?” he called into the singularity’s depths.

  He listened.

  Colquitt’s reply came faint and stretched. “Dean? Is that you?”

  “It’s poor science to disappear up one
’s own black hole, Colquitt.”

  “Yes, Dean, though I think perhaps you had something to do with it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your screaming of Maureen’s name as I slipped beyond made me wonder.”

  “Ah.”

  “Still, never mind, sir, it was fun science whilst it lasted.”

  The dean sighed. Even stuffing the bastard into a black hole didn’t ruffle him. And the shame was that so much else was connected – the gravitating of the various university wings, for example. It was as if duelling a rival, in particle physics, was apt to take along the bloke who counted out the paces before the turn and fire, too. And the podium upon which he stood. And the forest clearing, and half the castle wall beyond, and . . . ultimately, the world.

  “Then I suppose I should get you out of there, Mr Colquitt,” said the Dean.

  “Surely that’s impossible, Dean?”

  The dean patted the bulge in his coat pocket. He reached in and removed a jam jar. A fog swirled within its glass. “Not when I have the protons you were entangled with.”

  “Um, teleportation, sir?”

  “Shut up, Mr Colquitt, and brace yourself.”

  The west wing didn’t collide with the east wing. Even the universe couldn’t befriend chemist and geologist. Without Colquitt leaching dark energy from the fifth dimension, the black hole in the basement fizzled out. Maureen, it turned out, was not unresponsive to the odd playful threesome now and then, and so the dean’s hatred of Colquitt diminished, particularly when Colquitt presented him with a new pair of non-relativistic slippers. Sadly, the rubber duck imploded before help could arrive.

  But it was on the day the dean overheard the typing pool girls talking fondly about his nether regions that he realised fully the subtle changes that had taken place when matter and energy were flinging about near the black hole. He had, of course, wondered at his newly found confidence, particularly where the fairer sex was concerned. Rumours about the campus suggested he was about to be promoted to Chancellor, and that opened up to him the kind of parties that Colquitt could only dream of. He felt different. Vibrant. Alive.