‘Got it,’ the queen exclaimed, after a few minutes of fiddling with the thing. ‘Unless — confound it, which way’s north?’

Sis shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Can’t you work it out by looking at the sun?’

The queen shook her head. ‘Not here,’ she said. ‘Obviously you haven’t noticed, typically enough, but we don’t have your boring old sequential days and nights here. That sort of thing’s all governed by—’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Sis groaned. ‘Narrative patterns.’

‘Oh, so you do listen sometimes, then. That’s right. Also the seasons, phases of the moon, tides, all that sort of thing. And before you get all scornful and snotty about it, remember who it was who thought feet and inches were a perfectly practicable way of making sense of the world. Wasn’t us.’

‘Before my time,’ Sis replied smugly. ‘So? What’ve you found out?’

The queen twiddled a few more dials, slid the sliding thing up and down the scale a few times, counted to seven on her fingers and grinned. ‘Your brother,’ she said. ‘What did you say his name was?’

‘Carl,’ Sis replied, after a moment’s panic when she couldn’t quite remember. ‘His name’s Carl — you know, it’s the strangest thing, I can only just remember him. I think. It’s almost—’ She stopped and turned pale, with a very slight greenish tinge. ‘It’s almost as if he wasn’t a real person, just someone out of a story.’

‘Yes!’ The queen thumped her fist in the air. ‘Brilliant! Oh, I’m so relieved to hear you say that.’

Sis stared at her. ‘You are? Why?’

‘Because,’ the queen replied, fiddling wildly with the funny brass thing, ‘it means he’s still alive and still here, and he’s trying to sort things out; which is good,’ she added, ‘because he caused all these problems in the first place, so he’s probably best qualified to get them fixed again. Not,’ she added, ‘that the competition’s exactly fierce. Just out of interest, why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why in hell’s name did he bother? What on earth possessed him to go clowning around with the operating system of a dimension he knew nothing about, without any provocation whatsoever?’

Sis shook her head. ‘It’s one of those nerd things, I suppose. You know — because it’s there, and all that. The same reason why they hack into the Pentagon computers and make people think there’s going to be a nuclear war.’

The queen considered this. ‘You mean good-natured fun? Anything’s possible with your lot, given that you’re all completely random, with no narrative patterns to make sense of anything you do. Must be a really horrid way to live, though.’

‘Never mind all that,’ Sis interrupted. ‘What makes you think he’s all right? And where the hell is he?’

‘Look.’ The queen pointed at one of the dials on the Thing. ‘See? It’s reading 3945321.87.’

‘How absolutely fantastic. Ring all the church bells and declare a national holiday.’

‘Don’t be sarcastic, you aren’t very good at it. No, the point is, that’s near as dammit four. Four consecutive versions of reality. What do you call that, then?’

Sis thought for a moment. ‘Dolby?’ she hazarded. ‘I don’t know. It sounds awful.’

‘Oh it is, certainly. But the last time I checked, there were only three. Someone’s set off another one, and that’s the point. There’s the real one, the post cock-up variant, the post cock-up variant modified by someone else who’s trying to run me out of town, and now this one too. Which means,’ she explained, as Sis made a very quiet whimpering noise, ‘there’s now someone else who’s got into the system and is fooling around with it. Someone else who has at least a tiny fragment of an idea how the thing works. Go figure.’

‘You think it’s Carl?’

The queen nodded enthusiastically, her head moving like a tennis ball on a string. ‘I’m sure it is, because you’re having trouble remembering him. You have this strange feeling he’s someone in a story. Which means, God help us all, he’s become part of the system somewhere.’

‘Which means he’s still alive—’

‘Which means,’ the queen said, ‘he’s alive and operational, and he’s using that perverted little brain of his to get into Mirrors. Well,’ she concluded, ‘maybe it’s not exactly optimal, the entire future of this dimension resting in the hands of a recklessly irresponsible adolescent with an anorak and acne—’

‘How did you know that?’

‘Call it intuition. Are you sure it was just a whim on his part? He didn’t get any encouragement from outside before he started all this?’

Sis ransacked her memory, what was left of it after the mice of transdimensional entropic shift had nibbled it threadbare. ‘Well, he kept getting letters from somewhere official, because they had those printed things in the top right-hand corner instead of stamps. And I think he got lots of messages from them through the Internet as well.’

‘Quite possibly,’ the queen said thoughtfully. ‘Once they’d got him hooked, they’d have wanted to keep it all as quiet as possible, and they’ve probably gone back into his system and erased them all now. It’s like that old saying about the e-mail of the specious being deadlier than their mail. And no prizes for guessing,’ she added darkly, ‘who they are.’

‘Really? Who did you have in mind, then? You think it’s all the CIA, or is this just another of those the-Milk-Marketing-Board-murdered-Elvis theories?’

‘Really?’ The queen looked shocked. ‘I never knew that.’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake—’

‘And anyway,’ the queen went on, ‘that can’t be true, because if you’d read last week’s edition of the Dependent On Sunday, you’d know that it’s been incontrovertibly proved that Elvis is the face on the Turin Shroud.’ She hesitated, and frowned. ‘Now how in hell’s name do I know that?’ she asked. ‘Dear God, it must be something that’s leaked through from your dimension.’

Sis’s eyes lit up. ‘Carl!’ she said.

‘It’s possible,’ the queen replied. ‘Though I’d have thought he was a bit young to have heard of Elvis.’

‘I think they did him in History at school,’ Sis replied. ‘Look, is there any way of proving all this, or is it just a theory?’

The queen looked round. ‘There’s always that confounded unicorn,’ she said. ‘Go and see if it’s still there while I check these settings.’

Not long afterwards, Sis returned. The unicorn was with her.

‘Ah,’ said the queen, looking up. ‘You decided to let him go, then?’

The unicorn growled. ‘Let him go, my arse,’ it said. ‘No, this fleet of helicopter gunships flew over and pulled him out. After they’d bombed the whole glade flat and sprinkled napalm all over everything, of course. You ever been strafed from the air by Santa’s little helpers? Not recommended. It’s not so much the cluster-bombs that get to you, it’s the fact that they’re all tastefully wrapped in coloured paper and tied up with silver ribbon.’

Sis and the queen exchanged glances. ‘That sounds like Carl,’ Sis whispered. ‘He loves watching action videos.’

‘You amaze me,’ the queen replied, grinning. ‘Also of interest is the fact that while all this was going on about a hundred yards away, we didn’t see or hear a thing. I think we can safely say your brother’s on the case.’

Sis took a deep breath and let it go again. ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘How very reassuring.’

Julian stopped what he was doing, stared up at the sky and pulled a face. It was hot, he was sweating (appropriately enough) like a pig, and by his calculations it had now been midday for four and a half hours.

Shouldn’t be like this, he said to himself, as he stooped down to pick up another bundle of sticks. Midday should be at twelve o’clock precisely, not for as long as it takes. He didn’t know where any of these strange thoughts came from; why midday should be twelve o’clock, for example. All he knew was that he had them, and they made his head ache.