Be My Enemy E-Book

Ian McDonald

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: Everness
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Everett Singh has escaped with the Infundibulum from Charlotte Villiers but at a terrible price. His father is lost, banished to one of the billions of parallel universes of the Panoply of All World, and Everett and the crew of the airship Everness have taken a wild Heisenberg Jump to a frozen earth far beyond the Plenitude of Known Worlds, he plans to rescue his family. It's deadly chase from the frozen wastes of iceball earth; to Earth 4 (like ours, except that the alien Thryn Sentiency occupied the moon in 1964); to the dead London of the forbidden plane of Earth 1, where the remnants of humanity battle a terrifying nanotechnology run wild. Everett has the love and support of Sen, Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, and the rest of the crew of Everness, but will that be enough when your deadliest enemy isn't the Order or the world-devouring nanotech Nahn—it's yourself. Because the villainous Charlotte Villiers is always one step ahead. Praise for Be My Enemy "Absolutely triumphant sequel… tremendous action scenes, cunning escapes, genius attacks on the ways that multidimensional travel might be weaponized, horrific glimpses of shadowy powers and sinister technologies… a gifted ear for poesie that makes the English language sing, the unapologetic presumption of the reader's ability to understand what's going on without a lot of hand-holding, and a technological mysticism that never explicitly says when the literal stops and the fantasy starts..." —Boing Boing "Smart, clever and abundantly original, with suspense that grabs your eyeballs, this is real science fiction for all ages. More! More!" —Kirkus "WA blast from start to finish. As far as I'm concerned, Ian McDonald could write another dozen or so of these Everness novels, and I'd happily read them all." —SF Signal

Leseprobe

Be My Enemy

Copyright © 2012 by Ian McDonaldAll rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2018 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

Cover design by Dirk Berger

ISBN 978-1-625673-02-2

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Enid, As Ever

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Glossary

About the Author

Also by Ian McDonald

1

The car came out of nowhere. He thought it might have been black in the split second that he saw it. Black and big and expensive, maybe German, with darkened windows and rain drops like oil on its polished skin. All in the moment, the moment before the impact.

School had finished for Christmas. Games in the morning, then a half day. Rain with an edge of sleet mixed in had been blowing diagonally across the football pitch. Sometimes it had been so heavy that he had to squint to see the action at the other end of the pitch. The rain had driven the cold deep into him. He was all alone on the goal line, banging his gloves together and jumping up and down to try to keep the cold from reaching all the way in to his bones. The pitch was like a plowed field. The players were so muddy he could hardly tell Team Gold from Team Red. He hadn’t had to make a save since the twenty-fifth minute and the ball hadn’t been in his half of the pitch for ten minutes. Figures moved across each other, a whistle blew, arms went up, cheers, high fives. He squinted through the rain. Goal. Team Gold’s goalkeeper picked the ball out of the back of the net and kicked it up the field, but her heart wasn’t in it and the wind caught the ball and swerved it right across the pitch and over the side line. Mr. Armstrong blew his referee’s whistle three times. Game over. Team Red and Team Gold, whose players looked like members of Team Mud, trudged off to the changing rooms. Three nil for Team Red over their only serious rivals in the Bourne Green Year Ten League was a crushing victory, but he was tired and wanted to be off for the holidays, and he wondered whose dumb idea it had been to hold a match on the last morning of the term, but most of all he was cold cold cold. The hot showers couldn’t drive out the cold. The festival lights for Christmas and Diwali and Hanukkah couldn’t warm him. Mrs. Abrahams, the head teacher called everyone into the stifling heat of the assembly hall and wished them a Happy Holiday and See You All In The New Year, but he was too bone cold to appreciate the heat. He had forgotten what it was like to be warm.

After school, he trudged, head down against the stinging sleet, along the alley known as Dog’s Delight, dodging the turds. Not all of the turds had been left behind by dogs. He continued across Abney Park Cemetery. The Victorian headstones and monuments were glossy with rain. The stone angels wore small, lacy collars of frozen sleet. Trees branches lashed wildly in the wind, and clouds, low and dark, raced across the sky.

One more Christmas present to get, and it was the hardest. It was a guy thing; none of his friends at Bourne Green had any idea what to get their Mum’s either. Vouchers were popular and easy: a couple of clicks and you could print them out at home. Spa treat-ments, things to put in your bath, and general pampering goodies all rated with the guys. Mums loved those kinds of things. He considered those lazy gifts. This year, Laura needed something special, something chosen by him, for her, with thought and care. The last time he had been in the city to do sushi with Colette he’d passed a new yoga shop. The window was full of mats and exercise balls and healing tea and pale cotton stretchy stuff. He hadn’t been thinking Christmas presents then. He hadn’t been thinking at all. You don’t think when someone who has been the pillar of your life dies. You react, slowly, painfully.

The bike had cost four thousand pounds. It was a forty-first birthday present that his father had given to himself. Tejendra had shown him all the engineering details: the lightweight carbon-fibre frame, the Campagnolo gear train, the aluminium and chrome headset. But it hadn’t looked worth the money Tejendra had paid.

Laura’s eyes had widened at the cost, which would have been enough to cover a family holiday in Turkey. Tejendra had assured her that it was at the bottom end of the carbon-frame range. They went up to eight thousand. Laura’s eye widened even further when she saw Tejendra roll out on to the public roads in tights and hi-viz yellow. MAMIL: Middle-Aged Man In Lycra.

“You’re going all the way into college on that?” she’d asked.

“And back again.”

And he did, for five months, all through the spring and summer, and even Laura had to admit that her husband started to look trimmer and slept better and had more energy. Tejendra announced that he was even thinking of the hundred-mile Thames Valley Sportive; the physics department was entering a small team.

Then, three days before sportive Sunday, Tejendra came up on the inside of a Sainsbury truck at the traffic lights on Kingsland Road. The truck turned left and knocked Tejendra under the wheels.

He had placed himself in the driver’s blind spot. Tejendra, a reputable fine physicist and a brilliant man, had forgotten about something as simple as that, and it had killed him. “I couldn’t see him,” the truck driver said over and over and over. “I couldn’t see him.”

The bike’s carbon-fibre frame had shattered like bones. Tejendra had died instantly, in his helmet and yellow hi-viz and bike shorts. It took the ambulance half an hour to make it through the morning rush-hour traffic. Not even the Moon could save him. Up there they could send probes between stars and open gates to parallel universes, but they could not bring humans back from the dead. Maybe they could; maybe they just didn’t care about humans enough.

“Up there you can step from one universe to another,” Tejendra had said. “Makes you wonder if there’s any physics left for us to do.” From one universe to another. From world to world. From alive to dead. One step, one moment, was all that separated them.

There was no warning, no reason, and absolutely no arguing with it. Dad to no Dad.

He’d been sent to Mrs. Packham, the school counselor. He played head games with her. One session he would be angry, the next remote, the next sulky, the next plain insane. He knew she knew he was playing games. He didn’t want to be an official victim, a Bereaved Pupil. The truth, the things he felt in his heart, the sense of disbelief, the slow understanding that death was forever, that what had happened to Tejendra was insane, an offense against the worldview his Dad had nurtured in him—that the universe was a rational, organized place that followed unbreakable laws—all these he told to Colette. She had been Dad’s research colleague and a family friend almost as long as he could remember. An unofficial aunt. She listened, she said nothing, she offered no advice and no judgements. She bought him good sushi and Japanese tea so hot it scalded the taste buds off his tongue.

Dad had died three months ago. The seasons had turned, a new school year had begun, and now Christmas hung over the end of the year like a great shining chandelier, all glints and lights. At the top of the year they would start again. In the long night of the short days, they would move on.

So, he needed to buy presents, good ones. Through the cemetery gates he could see a huddle of people at the bus stop, pressed together out of the rain. He pulled out his phone. The number 73 bus was due at the stop in thirty-eight seconds. Rain smeared the screen. He waved his hand. A map appeared showing the bus as a little animated character ambling along Northwold Road to the terminus. He could see it, one of the new double-deckers looming over the little scuttling cars and the white vans, shouldering its way into the bus lane. The traffic was so quiet since the new fast-charge, high-capacity batteries had come down from the Moon and made electric vehicles cheap, quick, reliable, and must-have. Stoke Newington High Street purred where once it had growled. A double baby buggy crossed his path. He skidded, almost went down. The woman, short and stocky, with dark, lank hair, glared at him.

“Sorry. Okay? Sorry.”

For once there was no one parked illegally in the bus lane, and the bus was swinging along. He had to get it. Timing was everything. Miss this one bus and he would miss the shops. The crossing was a hundred meters up the road, but there was a gap in the traffic.

It was all about judging relative velocities. Like goalkeeping: ball, goal line, body. The traffic opened. He darted out between the parked Citroen MPV and the old gasoline-powered builder’s van.

So he never saw the car come out of nowhere. And when he did see it—black car, black raindrops on its polished nose—it was far too late: it hit him harder than he had ever been hit in his life, hit him up into the air. The car kept moving, and he came down on the top of it, and this second impact now was the hardest he had ever been hit in his life, so hard it knocked everything but sight and conscious-ness out of him. The car continued forward, sending him tumbling into the street, and that was the hardest of all; it knocked every last sight and thought out of him. Black car, black rain. Black.

Black into white. Pure cold white. He smashed up through the white with a cry, like a diver coming up for air. He was in a white bed in a white room, beneath a white sheet, staring up at a white, glowing ceiling. He sat up, gasping. Since Dad had died, he had been waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where he was, what house, what room, what bed, even what body he was in.

After a moment his mind would catch up with his senses. Safe.

Warm. At home. This was not one of those moments. If he went back to sleep again, he would not wake up in his bed in Roding Road. This was real. He was here. He hugged himself. He was freezing. The cold was embedded in the hollows of his bones.

Opposite the bed was a window. It was the width of the room.

It was black, scattered with lights. The view was like being in a skyscraper at night, looking across at another city skyscraper, a huge skyscraper that filled the entire width of the window. It seemed to curve toward him at the edges. A white object, fast, hard, and shiny, dropped past the window, almost too quickly for his numb brain to process the movement. It looked like an insect. A plastic and metal insect, with windows in it. It was huge, the size of a Boeing at least.

Alarmed, he dived out of the bed. Instead of crashing to the floor, the sudden movement took him up and all the way across the room in a slow-motion dive to bang hard on the window. He dropped slowly, softly to the soft white floor tiles. His memory flashed back, from white to black, from soft floor to hard street, from strange white flying machine to the hard nose of a black car, the raindrops quivering.

“Where is this?” He stood up. The action carried him half a meter into the air. Again he settled slowly and softly. “Whoa.” An experiment. Be scientific about this. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, white like everything else in this perfect room. He pulled off the tee, balled it up, held it out at arm’s length, and let go. It dropped as slowly as a feather. “Low gravity. Okay.” He went to the window and pressed his hands to the glass. His head reeled again.

He was not in a skyscraper. This room was on the inside of an immense, dark cylinder. The windows curved away on either side of him. The cylinder must be a kilometer across, he estimated. He looked up. The windows rose up, ring upon ring. Far, far above was a black disk. He made a circle out of his thumb and forefinger and held it up against the disk. He was that far down. Now he looked down. The rings went down. He lost count after forty levels, and still they went down. He could see no end to them. “A bottomless pit,” he whispered. “No. Can’t be. It’s logically impossible. This is engineering.” And he knew where he was. A second white insect machine was rising out of the depths of the pit. “I’m on the …”

The cold rushed into him. The strength drained out of him. His knees buckled. He put out his hands to steady himself against the glass. And his arms and hands opened. Rectangular patches on the backs of his hands lifted up on plastic struts. Long hatches opened on his upper and lower forearms. The back of each first finger joint flipped up. There were things inside. There were things inside…moving. Things not his flesh. Things not quite living but not quite machine. Things unfolding and extending and changing shape. He saw dark empty spaces inside him full of aliens, pincers and grippers and manipulators and scanners reaching out of his body.

He screamed.

“Peace.” A little old woman stood in the middle of the floor. She closed her right hand in a fist and the panels and hatches in his skin closed. There was no sight of a seam or a scar. “I am sorry,” the little old woman said. He hadn’t seen her arrive. He suspected no one ever saw her arrive. She had a round face, her hair was pulled back and tied in a bun, and the creases at the corners of her eyes and her mouth made her look as if she were smiling. She wasn’t smiling. Neither was she as old as she looked. Her skin was a pale grey with a pearl sheen; she seemed to shimmer. She wore a plain dress and very sensible shoes.

Her hands were now folded one over the other, like a new kind of praying. She looked like his Bebe Singh, but this was the most famous little old woman in the world. This was the Manifestation of the Thryn Sentience, Avatar Gracious Interlocutor for the Felicitous Communion of Sentients. Known to the world as Madam Moon.

“Greetings, Everett M. Singh,” she said. She spoke with a distinct sing-song accent, maddeningly familiar but unlike any accent of his world. “It is the eighth day of Christmas and you are on the dark side of the Moon.”

2

The fat little cherub rode the dragon like he was in a rodeo, one arm in the air, the other holding tight to the dragon’s mane.

This was a Chinese dragon, as lithe as a stoat, capering in the air over a city of crystal skyscrapers. The cherub’s fat little face was wild with glee. The card spun in the air, end over end, fluttering down through the cathedral-sized space of LTA Everness’s interior. It looked like a single flake of snow. Bent over Dr. Quantum, Everett Singh glimpsed the movement out of the corner of his eye. He reached up and caught the card. A chubby angel on a luck dragon. Yubileo.

“What does it mean?” he shouted up into the vaults between the gas cells. “Yubileo?” An object detached itself from the industrial grey nanocarbon engineering and hurtled toward him. Sen Sixsmyth plunged headfirst down a drop line from the high catwalk. Her head was tilted back, her arms were pulled in like falcon wings. The line shrilled through her drop harness pulleys. She was an unlikely grinning angel. She came to a halt a meter above Everett’s upturned face.

She looked down at him.

“Yubileo. Jubilee! Jubila! Jubilation! Rejoice rejoice!” Her breath steamed in the air.

“Aren’t you cold?”

Sen was dressed in a clingy grey knitted top, ribbed tights, a pale fur gilet, and pixie boots and seemed perfectly comfortable in the freezing air. Everett had on two T-shirts, two pairs of leggings, and two pairs of socks under his dock shorts, and an old Air Navy great coat Mchynlyth had liberated from his time on His Majesty’s Air Ship Royal Oak. Still, Everett was pale, anxious, and growing stupid with the cold. He had cut the ends of the fingers off his knitted woollen gloves. The cold seeped into them through the icy screen of Dr. Quantum. After half an hour of coding, each keystroke was as painful as a hammer blow. He kept missing the keys, mis-coding, making mistake after mistake, worrying that he was too thick with the cold slowly seeping through the airship’s hull to know that he had made a mistake.

“Me? I’s never cold. That’s cause I’s always moving, always doing something. Cold ain’t got the time to catch up with Sen. Sit-down work, brain work, that makes you cold. All the blood rushes to your head. That’s a well-known fact. All work and no play makes Everett a dull boy. And a cold one. Yubileo! Let the bona temps roll!”

Everett held up the card. Sen snatched it away and, upside down, folded it into her tarot deck one-handed. Her agility astonished Everett. He could think in multiple dimensions, but she could move in them. As a goalkeeper, he had been cat-quick, but she was like wind and lightning. Someday he would ask her to teach him the ways of the ropes and lines and pulleys. Someday when he wasn’t busy saving the Everness and all who flew in her. Sen twisted and tumbled upright in one graceful twist and landed lightly on the deck. A flick of her fingers and the Yubileo card was between them.

She slid in under the shoulder strap of Everett’s borrowed greatcoat.

He understood that the cards were an extra language to her—her third language, after English and the palari dialect of the Airish, the airship people. There were things only the Everness Tarot could say.

She talked through them, and she talked to them. Everett had heard her whispering to the cards, in the big, echoing spaces of the Everness. There were plenty of places in an airship where you could imagine you were alone. He had seen her kiss the deck of cards with fast-flashing joy, then again with the slow love of a lifelong friend.

They were sisters and friends, she and her face book of wolves and travelers, angels and queens and cherubs on dragons. And planesrunners. She had made a card for him: a boy stepping from a gateway, juggling worlds. She made new cards when she sensed the pack needed them. But she hadn’t incorporated the Planesrunner card into the deck. It was his, to use when he needed it most. The card, not Everett, would know when it was the right time.

“You need a break.”

“I got us into this. I have to get us out.”

“How you going to do that if you’s seeing all them bijou letters double? Take a break with Sen.”

Everett had to admit that he needed a break. He had been up long before the dawn turned the great ice red, even before Ship’s Engineer Mchynlyth, a famous bright and early riser. He had brought Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth her breakfast in her latty.

When he knocked, she answered with bleary eyes, muffled up in three cardigans and bedsocks, frowning. For once she hadn’t seemed overjoyed to see a plate of his cooking. Everett might be planesrunner, head coder, and the only way of getting Everness and her crew off this random parallel Earth, wherever in the Panoply of the multiverse it might be, but he was also ship’s cook. The Airish, Captain Anastasia constantly reminded him, were a people of appetite.

“Mchynlyth’s got the snipships to work. Wanna take a varda?”

Sen asked.

Everett wanted very much to take a look at the drones. When he had pulled the trigger on the stolen jumpgun and dropped Everness out from under the guns and fighters of Charlotte Villiers and the Royal Air Navy into a random parallel Earth, everything inside the Heisenberg field had gone with them. Including two state-of-the-art Royal Air Navy remote drones—snipships connected by an invisibly thin but incredibly strong nanocarbon filament. Moving as a team they could use the nanocarbon monofilament line like a cheese wire to slice off Everness’s impeller pods and carve her up like a Christmas goose nineteen different ways. Cut off from their mother ship in another universe, they had gone into automatic hover mode. For the first two days, Everness’s crew had been too busy working out where they were to notice what else had come through the Heisenberg gate with them.

“Well, I’m not leaving good Royal Navy technology sitting out there dish deep in snow for whoever comes trolling along,” Mchynlyth declared. Until he said that, no one had thought that there could be a “whoever,” out there. He had trudged out with First Officer Sharkey through the shrieking, scurrying snow. The cold was so intense that his fingertips flash-froze to the metal. In the six days they had been in Engineering, Mchynlyth had taken them apart and rebuilt them to his own specifications.

Sen was already halfway to the central staircase. She looked over her shoulder.

“You coming, omi?”

Everness trembled. Sen seized the handrail. Everett pushed his technology to the safe side of the table. The vibration was deep and huge; every part of the ship and everyone on her was shaken to the core.

“I hates it when it does that,” Sen declared. Since tying down in its mooring, the ship had been shaken by irregular but deep tremors.

Not from Everness herself, but from deep in the ice. “What’s doing it?”

“How would I know?” Everett said.

“You’s the scientist.”

“Yes, but …” There was no arguing with Sen. “Let’s go.”

“I bets its some big ice monster, deep down there,” Sen said.

Everett thought a moment about explaining how scientifically unlikely it was that a giant monster could exist in the ice. Pointless.

At least there might be some heat in Mchynlyth’s dim, electricity-smelling, junk-stuffed cubbyhole.

It was the eighth day of Christmas, on the great ice that in another universe was the North Sea, twenty aerial miles from the airspace of High Deutschland. In the Airish version of the song, on that day my true love gave to me “eight breezes blowing.” Wind, hard, unceasing, and icy, had been a constant since Everett had triggered the Heisenberg jump into this white world. Wind shrilling over the hull with a hiss like knives. Wind drawing long moans like the songs of alien whales from the guy lines. Wind pulling and tugging and worrying at every rough or protruding feature, ice fingers seeking for something they could hold on to, work at, tear free, and strew across the ice. Wind shaking Everness like a dog with a rat as Captain Anastasia navigated her away from the jump point. If Everett’s theory was correct—that every Heisenberg jump left a trail behind it—she didn’t want special forces dispatched by the Order arriving on top of them, or even inside the ship. E3’s Heisenberg Gate technology was sophisticated enough to follow that trail and open a jump point right on the bridge. The wind shrieked over the hull as Everett made Christmas dinner up in the galley, every pan and pot and piece of cutlery rattling as he skinned and gutted the pheasants and made naan dough.

Everness held her nanocarbon skin close and tight against the icy wind. Captain Anastasia had brought her down to a handful of meters above the great ice. Mooring lines, driven hard into thirty thousand years of ice, held the airship against the titanic draft of air rushing down out of the north. Everness creaked and strained and shivered at her anchors, but the anchors held.

“Now,” Captain Anastasia declared, “we eat.”

Everett carried the red gold and green saris he had bought from Ridley Road Market back in Hackney Great Port to the tiny galley table and spread them out. He lit little candles in empty jars. Sharkey gave a long and magnificent grace in the thunderous language of the Old Testament. Then Everett served: pheasant makhani with saffron rice and naan bread, which he puffed up on the end of a fork over a naked gas flame in a piece of kitchen theatre. To follow was his festive halva—Captain Anastasia’s favorite—and his signature hot chocolate with a spark of chili. The tiny cabin was bright and fragrant with Punjabi cooking, but the spicy dishes could not win over the mood of the crew. Everyone ate elbow to ribs, knee to knee, in silence, looking up at every creak of the ribs, every change in the shirr of wind-whipped ice across the ship’s skin. Snow piled in the porthole window. Everett looked out of the frosted porthole and thought, my dad is out there. When Tejendra had pushed Everett away from Charlotte Villiers’s jumpgun the weapon had fired him into a random parallel universe. Everett had done the same thing when he jumped Everness out from under the guns and fighters of the Royal Air Navy.

There was a chance that Tejendra and Everett had been jumped to the same universe. There was always a chance. Everett understood probability, he could work out odds. Flick a pencil up into the air: what are the odds that it will come down on its point and balance upright?

There’s a chance, a very small one. Now, do that a hundred times in a row. That was the probability that father and son had been jumped to the same universe. And even if that slim possibility had come to pass, no one could survive unprotected out there for more than minutes. The last time Everett had seen his dad, he’d been wearing Can-terbury track bottoms and a T-shirt. But he was out there, somewhere. Tell yourself that. Don’t think that he was on the forty-second floor of the Tyrone Tower when Charlotte Villiers banished him to the same point in another universe. Reality is marvelous, that was one of the first lessons Tejendra had taught him. They had been camping in the Dordogne in Southwest France. One still, clear night Tejendra had roused Everett from his bed and taken him out into the dark. “What are we looking at?” Everett, aged almost six, had asked. His dad had just pointed up. Far from the light and roads, the sky blazed with more stars than Everett had ever seen in his life. They were beautiful. They were brilliant. They were terrifying. He looked up into infinity. It called him, it touched him, it changed him. “I wanted you to see this,” Tejendra said. “We used to get skies like this in Bathwala when I was your age. You look up, and keep looking. This is the heart of all science: wonder.” Tejendra was out there. Everett would find him. It was Christmas all across the multiverse. He watched the snow pile up against the porthole, flake by flake.

Blue electric lightning flashlit the interior of Mchynlyth’s engineering bay. Sen banged on the wall.

“Is it safe?”

“My engineering keeps your ass in the air and you’re worried about a few wee sparks?” a Glasgow voice bellowed from within.

“Come into my parlor. Dinnae touch anything. Live cables.” As Everett had hoped, the room was warm. It smelled of overstrained wiring oil and Mchynlyth, mostly Mchynlyth. Captain Anastasia had shut off the water to the showers, partly to stop the pipes from freezing, partly to conserve dwindling supplies. After eight days on the ice, everyone was getting stinky. Sen masked it with ever-larger dashes of her unique, musky-sweet perfume. Mchynlyth pushed his welding goggles up onto his brown forehead to frown at Everett.

“Should you not be getting our sorry dishes out of here?”

“Omi needs a break,” Sen pleaded. “One mistake and that could be us, kablooey. Bits everywhere.”

You’re closer to the truth than you know, Everett thought. Scary close.

The deeper he delved into the mathematics of the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel worlds of the Panoply—the more complexity and delicacy he saw. His dad had worked a staggering piece of mathematics. It was as fine and intricate as jewellery. The further in he went, the bigger it got. Everett felt he was swinging around with a sledgehammer among these shimmering walls of finely worked code.

One mistake, one slip in transcribing the code, and the next Heisenberg jump could send each and every atom of Everness and her crew to different, separate universes. They would all die instantly.

“Should you not be building that power supply?” Everett threw back at Mchynlyth. The idea was simple. Simplicity was a funda-mental of physics, like mass and charge and spin. The more simple a thing is, the more likely it is to be true, Tejendra had once said.

The jumpgun was a pocket-sized Heisenberg Gate. The Infundibulum was a control mechanism. All that was needed to turn them into a fully programmable go-anywhere machine was a way of hooking them together. Everett could hack the operating system in his tab computer to interface with the jumpgun—Mchynlyth had even custom built cables and connectors—but the jumpgun spoke a language unlike anything he had ever seen before. Deep down, it was the same—it must always be the same, a universal computer language of ones and zeroes—but getting the devices to talk to each other meant going down into the code and rewriting every line, digit by digit. Code by code, Everett was turning Dr. Quantum into a translator between two computer languages that were so different that they might have come from alien worlds. Everett suspected they had. What it meant was slow, painstaking labor, with the cold seeping through the ship’s skin into his fingers, his bones, his brain.

Mchynlyth grinned.

“All done and dusted. I just need some power to hook it to. But tell me, what do you think of these beauties?”

The two drones hung from cables hooked to the engineering bay’s grid roof. They swayed slightly as Everness shifted in the wind. They were white bug machines, four propulsion fans held out like dragonfly wings above a stubby body holding sensor pods, communications, and power. Mchynlyth had rigged a drop line harness under each one, and he’d welded long handlebars to the propulsion-fan mountings. To operate the machines, the pilot would sit in the harness and grab the handlebars that reach down on either side to steer.

“I can see what you’re thinking Mr. Singh. It’s look a wee touch brute force engineering. Weld a bit of pig iron on and have done with it. It works. It’s simple. Let go and the thing will go into hover. Simple. Safe.”

“Bonaroo,” Sen said. She ran her fingers over the metal, dewed with condensation. “Can I have a go?”

Mchynlyth slapped her hand away.

“Dinnae touch what ye cannae afford. If we havenae the power for a hot shower, we certainly haven’t enough to send you gallivanting all over the sky, wee polone.”

Sen thought about looking hurt and sulky and realized this would cut no ice with the ship’s engineer.

“How fast?” she asked brightly.

“Well, I had to rejig the power-to-weight ratios,” Mchynlyth said. “They were never designed to carry lard arses like you.”

Everett thought, I would have asked about the battery life. That was the difference between him and Sen. One of many, many differences.

“I’m going to call them bumblebees,” Sen declared.

Mchynlyth stared at her in horror.

“Hedgehoppers,” Everett said. He didn’t know where the name had come from or where he had heard the expression; it was just there on his tongue. It felt right. Mchynlyth nodded, weighing the name in his head. It was sticky, it clicked. Everett could see that it had even stuck and clicked with Sen. She glared at Everett.

“Shouldn’t you be working on getting my dolly dish out of here?” she said fiercely and snatched the Yubileo card out of Everett’s shoulder strap.

Alarms bells sang out the length of Everness’s two hundred meter hull. Mchynlyth threw down his welding gun and bolted from the cubby. Sen was on his heels.

“What is it?” Everett shouted over the din of a dozen competing alarms.

“Call to quarters!” Sen shouted over her shoulder. “Come on come on.”

“There’s only one thing’ll get Sharkey pealing the bells like that,” Mchynlyth shouted. “Something’s come through the Heisenberg Gate.”

3

He could see no end to the white. There were no sharp angles, no clear joins between floor and wall, wall and ceiling. The light came from everywhere. It even seemed to shine from his own white clothing, a simple, soft sleeveless T-shirt and baggy cotton track pants. He held his hand up. His skin looked very dark in the white glow that came from everywhere. He thought he could just make out the lines in his hand and on his forearm where he had been put back together again. There was no pain. But the cold was still there, coiled inside him. He knew it would always be there. The old lady beside him saw what he was doing and turned to look at him. She said nothing. She might have been smiling. He found her emotions hard to read. His skin, the grey lady, and the upright black circle in the center of the room were the only things that weren’t white. The white robbed the room of any sense of size. It could be kilometers across or he might be able to reach out and touch the opposite wall. But he sensed that the black ring was big, bigger than human sized.

The center of the ring suddenly blazed with light, whiter than white, painfully bright. Two men in dark suits stepped out of the light. The first was a sharp-faced white man with fair, curly hair. The second was the prime minister. Their steps, begun on another world, carried them a long way in the Moon’s low gravity. The prime minister lost his footing for a moment but recovered with dignity. Madam Moon stepped forward to meet them. A nod indicated that he should do the same. He had worked out a way of walking on the Moon that didn’t send him bounding into the air looking stupid. It was a kind of low shuffling. It was not very elegant, but it kept him on the floor. The fair-haired man had the trick of it but the prime minister did not.

Every stride took him up into the air and down again.

The fair-haired man bowed to Madam Moon. She cupped her pearl-grey hands together in a gesture that was half prayer, half Indian namaste. Then he shook hands with Everett M.

“Mr. Singh, I am E4 Plenipotentiary to the Plenitude of Known Worlds. My name is Charles Villiers.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

Then it was the prime minister. His handshake was firm and his look direct.

“Everett. Good to see you.”

“Thank you Mr. Portillo.”

“The prime minister would like a few words with you in private,” Charles Villiers said.

Madam Moon dipped her head. The slightest turn of a hand opened a door in the white. Beyond it was a small conversation room. A padded white bench ran the length of the circular wall. He followed the prime minister through the door and his breath caught in his throat. The little room was roofed with a transparent dome.

Above the dome was the black of space. Hanging in the center of it, huge and impossibly blue, and so close he felt he could reach up and pluck it like fruit, was the Earth. One step had taken him right through the center of the Moon. The prime minister looked up for a long moment at the shining Earth.

“The mind rebels,” he said. “We can’t trust what we see any more. It’s all Photoshop and Hollywood special effects. The mind rebels, but the body believes. My body says, this is lunar gravity and I believe what I feel. The body doesn’t lie.” Again he looked up at the full Earth. “They say that people who see the Earth like this, so far away you could blot it out with your hand, never see it the same way again. They see it as small and very beautiful and fragile. They see it as one thing, one world.” He sat down across the conversation pit from Everett M. “Extraordinary. The car takes me to the Shard, I take the lift to the Plenitude Embassy on the sixty-fifth floor. There’s London Bridge, there’s London Bridge Station, and the Tate Modern, St. Paul’s. You can see for forty miles, up there. I step through the Heisenberg Gate and I am on the Moon, looking up at the Earth, and I can see for two hundred and fifty thousand miles. They’re everyday miracles now. Your generation grew up with them, Everett. For you, there has always been a Woman in the Moon. I was ten when they came.”

No, Everett M thought. I’m the generation that never had a “What Were You Doing When?” moment. His mum always told him that if he hadn’t been so comfortable and lazy inside her he would have been born on the day Princess Diana died. As he was, he waited until after the funeral to come into the world, which meant that Laura had been able to watch the national grief unroll across the BBC News uninterrupted for days on end. When the news had broken that the fast German car had crashed under Paris, that the Queen of Hearts was dead, the women in the maternity ward had all gathered together around the television in the day room, though they each had their own pay-TV screens. It had been a shared thing, a “What Were You Doing When?” thing. What was Laura Singh doing the day Diana died? Having you, Everett M.

It seemed to Everett M that prior the arrival of the Thryn, history had consisted of shared “What Were You Doing When?” moments. What were you doing when President Kennedy was assassinated? What were you doing when they landed on the Moon?

What were you doing when John Lennon was murdered? What were you doing when the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island exploded?

What were you doing when Margaret Thatcher was blown up by an IRA bomb? What were you doing when the secretary general of the United Nations announced that Earth had been in contact with alien intelligence? That it had been in contact with it for twenty years?

That the aliens weren’t thousands of light years away in space but right next door, on the Moon? That NASA had sent men to the Moon partly to make physical contact with these aliens? That the aliens had arrived in the Earth/Moon system in 1963, three months before the assassination of President Kennedy?

That, Everett M thought, gave older people big problems: making a “What Were You Doing When?” moment out of something that had been kept secret for twenty years. August 27, 1963: What were you doing? Anything to mark that date as different or extraordinary? Was it your birthday, a first date, a bank holiday?

Was it the last good day of a great summer before you had to go back to school? Or was the day the aliens came just a day like any other?

You went to school, to work, to the shops while at the back of the Moon the Thryn ship came out of sleep after thirty thousand years of travel and turned its senses on the blue world beneath it.

The size of a coffee can: that was what everyone knew about the Thryn probe. The size and shape of a coffee can. Coffee hadn’t come in cans for years; now more people knew what a Thryn star-seed looked like than a coffee can. It was kind of small for a spaceship carrying aliens, but it was as big as it needed to be: the spaceship was the alien. Long before the probe had started its journey, the Thryn had passed from biological intelligence to a machine intelligence.

The star from which the probe came—Epsilon Eridani—was not even the Thryn home world. They no longer had a home world. The probes were seeds, blown between the stars like dandelion down.

Each contained all that was necessary to build a new Thryn Sentiency.

Some fell on fertile worlds and sprouted and took root and grew a civilization. Some fell forever between the stars and never felt the tug of a sun’s gravity to wake them up. Seeds were cheap and plentiful. But the seed waking up in the Earth/Moon system and searching for raw materials to convert into another Thryn Sentiency discovered a thing no Thryn seed-ship ever had before. It reached out with its intelligence and touched another intelligence. An intelligence that was not Thryn. This was something other, an alien intelligence.

The world of 1963 was a world on armed watch, of rival superpowers with daggers half drawn from sheathes. The United States and the Soviet Union eyed each other with spy planes and satellites and early warning radars, each wired to a hair trigger that could launch enough nuclear warheads to smelt the surface of the planet to glowing glass. The Thryn probe’s sensor sweep triggered alarms in both American and Russian early warning radars. It looked to each like the other was launching a strike. Panic cascaded upward. In the White House and the Kremlin fingers hovered over “launch” buttons. The world came within a breath of nuclear war. Then both the US and the USSR learned, like the Thryn, that this was something other.

Out at the Moon, the Thryn Sentiency saw what it had triggered, and hesitated. The Thryn Sentiency pondered. The Thryn Sentiency deliberated. The Thryn Sentiency thought deep and hard and long— long for a machine intelligence. In human terms, it was something in the region of three minutes. The Thryn Sentiency spoke.

The world of 1963 was nervous, paranoid, bad tempered—adoles-cent. It would have broken at the revelation that alien intelligence had arrived. The USSR, the USA, and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council made a deal with the Thryn Sentiency. Six years later, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the Moon, what the camera did not show was the figure waiting there to meet them, the figure of a little lady with kind eyes and grey skin. She wore no heavy space suit, her skin was bare to vacuum.

Madam Moon, a construct of the Thryn Sentiency. She watched them plant the stars and stripes and salute it, but the Moon was not theirs.

In the six years since the agreement, the Thryn coffee can had unfolded into replicators and fabricators and constructors and had dug deep into the dark side of the Moon, sending tendrils of Thryn technology down through the rock like a fungus. Solar collectors opened like mushrooms on an autumn morning all across the South Pole–Aitken Basin.

By 1983, the agreed date for the conspiracy to end, the Thryn Sentiency had converted the entire far half of the moon into a terrifying warren of spires and pits and webs and fans that looked a little bit like a science fiction movie city and a little bit like a dead, white coral reef, but most of all like nothing anyone had ever seen or even imagined before. All the way down to the Moon’s cold, dead core.

Laura and Tejendra had not been born when the Thryn star-seed arrived. In 1983 Laura had been in Year 9 at Rectory Road Compre-hensive, writing Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet on her pencil case in felt marker. Tejendra had been choosing his A-Levels for Oxford while his mum and dad begged him to go to Imperial because it meant he wouldn’t have to live away from home. August 27, 1983, twenty years to the minute after the Thryn seed-ship sensors almost touched off a nuclear war, that was the “What Were You Doing When?” moment. The great deception was exposed. There were protests and riots and outcries, but they died down, as they always do, and people realized that the alien was on the dark side of the Moon and quickly forgot about it. Out of sight was out of mind.

And the occasional piece of Thryn tech that made it down and onto the streets made up for looking up at a huge harvest moon and never quite seeing it the same way. History stopped. There were no more “What Were You Doing When?” moments.

No, Everett M thought. There are no more big moments like that, when everyone shares history. But there are small ones, private ones. What were you doing when your dad was killed in a stupid, needless traffic accident?

“It’s always been like this for me, sir,” Everett M said.

“You don’t need to call me sir,” the prime minister said. He paused. He seemed to chew over the words he was about to speak, as if they had an unpleasant taste. “Is there any pain at all?”

“I just feel cold all the time.”

“They—Madam Moon—has done an extraordinary job.”

“She told me I should be dead. She rebuilt almost every part of me.” Everett M turned his face up into the Earthshine. There was no warmth in it. “Mr. Portillo, why couldn’t they save my dad?”

“I know what happened, Everett. I don’t know why Madam Moon couldn’t save him. The Thryn Sentiency can work wonders, but it can’t work miracles. It can’t bring back the dead.” Again, he chewed bitter words. “Everett, the man who came with me is very powerful. You know what a Plenipotentiary is?”

“It’s an ambassador of our entire planet to the Plenitude of Known Worlds.”

“That’s right. He’s much more powerful than I am—but don’t let him think that. He’ll be talking to you soon. He will ask you to do a thing for him. It’s a big thing, but only you can do it. Everett, I need you to do what he asks. Everyone needs you. It will sound strange, but he wouldn’t ask you if there was any other way. And I want to tell you, Everett, that I, and the whole government, we will support you. We will look after your mum and your sister, your dad’s family—don’t worry about any of those. Mr. Villiers is going to ask you to be a hero. Not just for the country, not even for the whole world, but for all the Known Worlds. Can you do it, Everett? Will you do it? For all of us?”

Everett M felt a touch of air on the back of his neck. He turned his head to see that the door back to the gate room was open. Madam Moon and Charles Villiers stood side by side, waiting for him. Prime Minister Portillo lightly touched Everett M on the shoulder as he let him go first through the door.

“Good man,” he whispered. “I know you can do it.”

“There is not one world,” Charles Villiers said.

“There are many worlds. Yeah, I know,” Everett M said. They stood on a balcony overlooking the great pit that Everett M had seen through the window of the room when he first woke up on the Moon. Madam Moon had opened another of her jump doors and walked through with them onto this high ledge.

Charles Villiers’s face was soft, his skin soft, his voice soft, and Everett did not believe any of it. “I am Plenipotentiary from our world to the recently contacted plane E10. Have you heard about it, seen anything online?” he said.

“My dad worked in multiverse research.”

“Of course. Forgive me, Everett. Then you’ll know that it is very similar to our plane, with the major exception of the Thryn Sentiency.”

“I heard that.” He looked over at Madam Moon, standing by the wall where she had opened the jump door. Always smiling, hands folded just so. Was it the same little old lady who had met Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon forty-two years before, the frail little old lady who could stand the hard vacuum and a sleet of harder radiation? Was it even the same little old lady who had come to him when he woke in a panic as his body opened up and expanded? Were there many Madam Moons? Did the Thryn Sentiency create and annihilate its manifestations as it required?

“They’re talented,” Charles Villiers continued. “They developed Heisenberg Gate technology without Thryn assistance. We might possibly have done that ourselves, but they’ve gone one step further. They’ve done what no one else in the Plenitude has done. They have a working map of the Panoply. You know what the Panoply is?”

“All the worlds, not just the ones we know about.” Everett M’s dad had been working on exactly that project in this world.

Working was not a strong enough word. There must be a word for work that is incredibly hard and at the same time filled with joy, work that tests the best of you and strains you to your limits but so fills your mind that everything else seems pointless by comparison.

Work that drives you without pity, but that you love with all your heart. Work that you can’t do, no one can do, but that you absolutely must do. That was the kind of work Tejendra had been doing all last summer. His adventures on the Middle-Aged Man bike had been part of the same rush of energy. At the end of the summer term, in the quiet after the students went, he had made a breakthrough. Not a solution, but a way to a solution. Thinking about how to think about the problem. Then, the random meeting with a Sainsbury truck turning left at a traffic signal.