Art is a man who has spent his whole life being the wrong thing in the wrong place, too artistic for science, too scientific for art, too imaginative for his family, not bold enough to commit to his own talent. 

His "big farewell" has gone disastrously wrong, every escape route is closed, and the only door left open leads to a different universe entirely.      

She'd first seen him in the library, sitting alone at a desk, a sketchbook open alongside a book on game theory. She introduced herself. He was surprised anyone had noticed him.

And now he was on the run. If he were to leave the college, something irreplaceable would go with him. If only there were somewhere else where they could meet.

Jack is everything Art is not: the physicist, the NASA astronaut, the apple of their father’s eye. It’s hard for Art to ignore his brother’s success; even the college science block has been named after him.

But, thanks to Side Carr’s ineptitude with the stick, a cosmic event causes Jack to step out of the airlock on the Space Station and disappear, experiencing three universes in the blink of an eye, and leaving a man-sized hole over each one he passes through.

In another world entirely but unexpectedly close by, Side Carr, a six-legged mutant who used to be a butler, was trying to leaf through a very large book, named ‘Detail of All that Abounds’, that acted as a sort of user manual for the whole universe, when he was surprised by a very large dog dragging a nightwatchman on a long chain. Desperate to make his escape, he grabbed the first thing he could lay his hands on. 

The flying machine landed neatly between the river and the lower barn, and a tall, smart gent climbed out of the fuselage. “Hello there, I’m Lucias Skim. Pleased to meet you.” He walked towards them with an outstretched hand, and Dick and Dirk had to put down their weapons to shake it.
“I wonder if your lord and master might be available?” Skim had the good looks of a gentleman thief and that unlimited confidence that only money can buy. “I have a proposition I’d like to put to Mr… Mantra, is it?”

Kydd was not an imposing figure; had you seen him in a crowd, you might have thought he was on the lookout for watches to steal. Yet he was a dark horse, a creator of worlds. To him, digital code was like a train set spread out for his amusement.

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