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