Empress of the Sun E-Book

Ian McDonald

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

Seitenzahl: 416

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The airship Everness makes a Heisenberg Jump to an alternate Earth unlike any her crew has ever seen. Everett, Sen, and the crew find themselves above a plain that goes on forever in every direction without any horizon. They've arrived on an Alderson Disc, an astronomical megastructure of incredibly strong material reaching from the orbit of Mercury to the orbit of Jupiter. Who could have built such a thing? The Jiju, the dominant species on a plane where the dinosaurs didn't die out. They evolved, diversified, and have a twenty-five million year technology head-start on humanity. If they ever get off their plane, and into the worlds of the Plenitude... Everness has jumped right into the midst of a faction fight between rival nations, but can anyone be safe among the warring Jiju, and what is the price of their help? The crew of the Everness is divided in a very alien world, a world fast approaching the point of apocalypse. And back in the Plenitude of Known Worlds, Charlotte Villiers gathers allies and works her way deep into the corridors of power. Praise for Empress of the Sun "YA or not, the Everness series may be the most enjoyable ongoing series that SF currently has to offer." —Locus "The marvelous Everness series takes readers to a world with highly evolved dinosaurs in this third voyage through parallel universes... McDonald lets his imagination run rampant without abandoning credibility, tackling real scientific concepts such as confirmation bias, a feature lacking in far too much science fiction… Endlessly fascinating and fun." —Kirkus (Starred Review) "With strong characters covering all ages and genders, fine action sequences, and enough cool SF concepts that could fill a volume twice its size, EMPRESS OF THE SUN is an excellent entry in one of my favorite SF series." —SF Signal

Leseprobe

Empress of the Sun

Copyright © 2014 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 978-1-625673-03-9

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

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

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Glossary

About the Author

Also by Ian McDonald

1

A dot of brilliant light. In an instant the dot exploded into a disc. The disc of light turned to a circle of blackness: a night sky. Out of the perfect circle of night sky came the airship, slow, huge, magnificent. Impeller engines hummed. The Heisenberg Gate flickered and closed behind it.

‘Voom,’ Everett Singh whispered, blinking in the daylight of a new Earth. He lifted his finger from the Infundibulum’s touchscreen. Another Heisenberg Jump, another universe.

The bridge of the airship Everness shrieked with alarms.

Yellow lights flashed. Horns blared. Balls rang, klaxons shrieked. Impact warning, impact warning, thundered a mechanical voice. Everett’s vision cleared at the same instant as that of the rest of the crew. He saw …

‘Atlanta, Dundee and sweet Saint Pio,’ whispered Miles O’Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey, the airship’s weighmaster. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, was his usual source of quotes. He had a verse for every occasion. When he called on the saints of his old Confederation home, it was serious.

… trees. Trees before them. Trees beneath them. Trees in their faces. Trees reaching their deadly, killing branches towards them. Trees everywhere. And Everness powering nose down into them.

‘This is … This shouldn’t be happening,’ Everett said, paralysed with shock at his station on the bridge. ‘The jump … I calculated …’

‘Sen!’ Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth bellowed. One moment she had been at the great window, striking her customary pose, in her riding breeches and boots, her blouse with the collar turned up, her hands clasped behind her back, above her the soft velvet stars of Earth 1. The next, staring airship-wreck full in the face. ‘Take us up!’

‘I’s on it,’ her adopted daughter shouted. Sen Sixsmyth was as slight as a whippet, pale as a blizzard, but she was pilot of the airship Everness and she threw every gram of her small weight on the thrust levers. Everett felt Everness shudder as the impeller pods swivelled into vertical lift. But airships are big and long and lumbering and it takes time, a lot of time, too much time, to make them change their courses. ‘Come on, my dilly dorcas … come on, my lover …’

Impact warning, impact warning, the alarm shouted. It had a Hackney Airish accent.

‘Belay that racket!’ Captain Anastasia thundered. Sharkey killed the alarms, but the warning lights still filled the bridge with flashing yellow madness.

We’re not going to make it, Everett thought. We’re not going to make it. Strange how he felt so calm about it. When it’s inevitable, you stop fighting and accept it.

‘Ma’am … Ma … I can’t get her head up,’ Sen shouted.

Captain Anastasia turned to Everett Singh. The great window was green, red. A universe of red-green.

‘Mr Singh, Heisenberg Jump.’

Everett tore his eyes from the hypnotic, killing green outside the window to the jump-control display on Dr Quantum, his iPad. The figures made no sense. No sense.

He was frozen. IQ the size of a planet, as his dad had once said, and he didn’t know what to do. Scared and unable to do anything about it.

‘I … I … need to calculate—’

‘No time, Mr Singh.’

‘A random jump could take us anywhere!’

‘Get us out of here!’

Sharkey glanced up at the monitors.

‘Captain, we’re grounding.’

The bridge shook as if shaken by the hand of a god.

Everett clung to the jump-station. Captain Anastasia reeled hard into a bulkhead. She went down, winded. Sen clung to the steering yoke like a drowning rat to driftwood. Everness screamed, her nanocarbon skeleton twisted to its limits.

Shipskin tore with ripping shrieks. Everett heard spars snap one by one, like bones. Tree branches shattered in small explosions. The hull shuddered to a crashing boom.

‘We’ve lost an engine,’ Sharkey shouted, hanging on to his monitor screens. He sounded as if he had lost his own arm.

Everness drove into the thousand branches of the forest canopy. Green loomed in the great window. The glass exploded. Branches speared into the bridge. Captain Anastasia rolled away as a splintered shaft of wood stabbed towards her. Sen ducked under a branch ramming straight for her head. The bridge was filled with twigs and leaves.

‘I’m giving her reverse thrust!’ Sen yelled. Everett grabbed hold of the wooden rail of his jump-station as Everness shuddered right down to her spine. There was an enormous wrenching, grating groan. The impaling branches shifted a metre, no more. The vibration shook Everett to the fillings in his teeth.

‘I can’t move her!’ Sen shouted.

‘Leave her – you’ll burn out the impellers!’ Captain Anastasia cried.

‘If we have any left,’ Sharkey said.

Captain Anastasia relieved her daughter at the helm. ‘Mr Singh, take us back to Earth 1. On my word. Everyone else, stand by. This will either cure or kill.’

‘No!’ Sen yelled as she saw her mother’s hand raised above the flush-ballast button.

‘Come on, you high and shining ones,’ Captain Anastasia whispered. ‘Just once.’ She brought her hand down hard on the red button. Everness lurched as hundreds of tons of ballast water jetted from scupper valves. The airship strained.

Her skeleton groaned like a living thing. Tree branches bent and snapped. A jolt upwards. Everett could hear the water thundering from the valves. It must look like a dozen waterfalls. Everness gave a massive creak and lurched upwards again. The branches tore free from the bridge in a shower of leaves. The airship was lifting. There was a crunching shriek of metal strained beyond its limits. Everness rolled to one side, then righted. All the power went dead. Screens, monitors, controls, lights, navigation, helm, communications. Dr Quantum flickered and went dark.

Captain Anastasia took her hand off the flush button.

The water jets closed. The silence was total and eerie.

‘“And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house … and I only am escaped alone to tell thee,”’ Sharkey quoted.

‘I’d prefer a report on our status, Mr Sharkey,’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘Status?’ a voice bellowed from the spiral staircase outside. ‘I’ll give you our status!’ Mchynlyth, ship’s engineer, burst on to the bridge. His brown face was flushed with emotion. ‘We’re buggered. You know those big munchety-crunchety noises? Well, those were our engines coming off. That’s why we’ve nae power. Circuit-breakers cut in. And I near got half a tree up my jaxy. I’m sitting there down there looking down at dead air in six different places. Our status, Captain? How about buggered, bolloxed and utterly banjaxed?’

Everness creaked, dropped two metres and came to a final rest. Brilliant rainbow birds clattered up from roosts. They weren’t birds, Everett realised. Those bright colours weren’t feathers.

‘Where are we?’ he said.

Captain Anastasia whirled. Her black face was dark with anger. Her eyes shone hard. She flared her nostrils, chewed her lip. Waiting for the anger to subside enough to be able to speak civilly.

‘I thought you knew, Mr Singh. I thought you knew everything.’

Everett’s face burned with shame. He felt tight, choked, sick in his stomach. Burning behind his eyes, in his head, in his ears. Shame, but anger too. This was not fair. It hadn’t been his fault. He had calculated perfectly. Perfectly. He didn’t make mistakes like that. He didn’t make mistakes.

There was something wrong with this world. That was the only explanation. He wanted to shout back at her that he didn’t make mistakes, that she was as much to blame. He shook with anger. The words burned hot and hard in him.

Captain Anastasia turned away to the rest of her crew.

‘Let’s get her lashed down and back to airship-shape and Hackney-fashion.’

2

The crew harnessed up in the cargo hold. Captain Anastasia tugged Everett’s harness, checked the fastenings and buckles. Everett couldn’t meet her eye. The damage was all around them. The skin had been pierced in half a dozen places, splintered branches like wooden spears. There was an entire crown of a tree in Mchynlyth’s engineering bay, a giant Christmas tree rammed up through the hull.

Except the leaves were red, and smelled of something spicy, rich, that Everett knew but could not place. He could see ground through the hole. It was a very long way down. Everness’s nanocarbon skeleton was mighty, but even it could not take such an impact unharmed. Struts had shattered, spars cracked and flaked layers of nanocarbon; an entire cross-member had sheared through and creaked ominously above Everett’s head. The spine was intact. If the ship had broken her back, there would have been no option but to abandon her.

Everness had lost three of her six impellers in the impact.

Engine struts had snapped, command lines and power cables ripped like severed nerves. Number-two impeller had torn free, pylon and all, leaving a hideous wound in the ship’s skin. Everness’s mad descent through the treetops had strewn the engine pods across several kilometres of deep, alien forest. Captain Anastasia was mounting a search-and-recovery mission to the forest floor, three hundred metres below. The trees were taller, and his feet felt less firmly glued to this world than on any Earth Everett had visited.

Weaker gravity? How did that work? And then there was the sun. It wasn’t moving right …

‘Sen!’ Captain Anastasia bellowed.

Sen’s voice came from above. ‘Just getting some togs on.’

She rode the drop-line down from the spine walkway to the hold floor. That’s an entrance, Everett thought. Everness had jumped from Earth 1 Oxford winter to tropical warmth and humidity and everyone had dressed appropriately: Mchynlyth had peeled off the top of his orange coveralls and tied the arms round his waist. His singlet showed impressive abs and a lot of pink scars on his brown skin.

Sharkey had ditched his coat for a sleeveless white shirt. He wore the twin shotguns in holsters across his back. Captain Anastasia was lean and muscular in capri tights and a tank top. Everett remained smothered in winter layers. They covered up his guilt. He had no right to show his body, expose his skin to the sun.

Sen’s warm-weather togs were as little as she could get away with. Grippy-sole ship boots, rugby socks, work gloves, gold short-shorts, a boob tube and a headband to keep her wild white afro under control.

‘Go and put some clothes on!’ Captain Anastasia bellowed. Sen sashayed past her adoptive mother with a defiant flick of her head. Mchynlyth was chewing his face from the inside out, trying to keep the laughter in. As Sen strapped into her harness she flashed the briefest smile at Everett. It was sun on his face. It said, I’s all right, you’s allright, omi, friends forever.

‘So, we get these engines or what?’ Then Sen stepped off the edge of the loading bay, hit the lift control on her wrist and vanished with a whoop into the deep red foliage below.

‘Sen, we don’t know …’ Captain Anastasia roared.

‘Bloody girl.’ She leaped after her daughter. Mchynlyth, then Sharkey, followed, winch reels screaming. Everett watched them drop down through the branches until he could no longer see them through the foliage. It would be all right. That was what Sen’s little private smile to him had said. Everett stepped off the platform and felt the sudden tug as the winches took the strain.

Red leaves and a chaos of branches beneath him. Above him, the hulk of Everness. Everett let out a small cry of pain and shame. When he was a kid he had seen an old film of a whale, hunted, killed, dragged on to a factory ship and peeled of its blubber. He had cried himself to sleep and cried himself awake again. His mum had talked him through it, told him it was an old, old film; no one did that kind of thing any more. The great whales were safe. Everness was like that whale: a beautiful thing hauled out of its natural element, speared and harpooned and spiked, tied down, its skin ripped open. Hunted, helpless. Hideously wounded.

Everett knocked painfully into a branch. Look where you’re going. He hadn’t, that was the problem. Every Heisenberg Jump was calculated guesswork. He made assumptions. But for some reason there was a forest where there shouldn’t have been. How? Why? He’d plotted a straight point-to-point jump, from one set of coordinates on Earth 1 to a set on the world where the Panopticon had recorded a jumpgun trace. Simple spherical geometry. Simple for him. The only way it could be different. Was. If. The … geometry of the world was different.

‘No,’ Everett whispered. Then, through the leaves beneath his feet, he spotted the crew clustered around a massive, strange cylindrical object wedged in a fork of a tree. Torn branches, splintered limbs: it took Everett a moment to identify what he was seeing – one of Everness’s impeller pods, come to rest a hundred metres above the ground.

Leaves brushed his face, and now he knew the musky, rich perfume. Hash. Resin. The forest smelled like the mother of all sixteen-year-olds’ parties.

‘Tharbyloo!’ came the voice from up among the branches.

Moments later the forest rang to a splintering crack and a branch pierced the dapple of deep red foliage, aimed straight at Sharkey’s chest. At the last second he stepped to one side. The branch drove deep into the soft, fragrant forest leaf mould. Sharkey nonchalantly adjusted the trim of his hat.

Power tools shrieked, chainsaws screamed up in the canopy. Sawdust and woodchips fell on the anxious crew.

‘I got her!’

Once the ground base was set up, Sen had been sent up on a line with chainsaws, nanofilament cutting lines, pry-bars and lube-gun to free number-three impeller. Everett had questioned the wisdom but Mchynlyth had quickly put him in his place. Sen was small, agile and could get into tight places no adult could.

He wished she was down on the ground. The forest floor was sweltering and steamy but the atmosphere was frigid.

Sharkey would not speak to him. Mchynlyth had let him know that it would be a long time – a very long time – before he forgave Everett for what he had done. Captain Anastasia gave off such an air of personal hurt that Everett could not bear even to look at her.

‘Lowering!’ Sen shouted, a voice among the leaves.

Mchynlyth hit a button on his wrist control. The groaning creak was so loud Everett feared the whole tree was coming down on top of him, all three hundred metres of it. Then the rounded belly of the impeller pod pushed the leaves and smaller branches apart. Down it came, in a web of lines.

Sen rode it like a bronco.

‘Mah baby, mah poor baby!’ Mchynlyth embraced the engine like a friend. ‘What have they done to ye?’ Clever tools opened panels. Mchynlyth and Captain Anastasia were bent over the hatch. Everett ached with guilt.

‘Is there something I can do … ?’

Mchynlyth and Captain Anastasia turned at the same time. The looks on their faces froze him solid. He died, there, then, in a clearing in an alien rainforest in a world that didn’t make sense in a parallel universe. Died in his heart. He stepped back.

He had never been hated before. It was an emotion as strong and pure as love, and as rare. It was the opposite of everything love felt, except the passion. He wanted to die.

‘By your leave, ma’am, I’ve never had a skill for fixin’,’ Sharkey shouted. ‘“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith,” as the word of the Dear teaches, but sometimes a man hunkers for a chunk of stalled ox. I’m going to see what our neighbourhood offers the aggressive carnivore.’

‘I’ll …’ Everett began, but Sharkey whirled away, whipped the shotguns from his holsters and stalked out of the clearing into the hooting, whistling, chirruping, singing forest shadows.

‘Sen …’

She had tied her hair back and pulled her goggles down.

She was steampunk funk queen and Everett’s heart broke looking at her at work in the hatch, skinny as a whippet, sweaty, grease-smudged, totally absorbed in repairing her ship, her home. Her family.

He had never felt so alone, not even when he had hijacked Paul McCabe’s Heisenberg Gate and sent himself to Earth 3.

There he was an adventurer. Here he was a survivor. There he had a plan. Here all his plans were impaled upon tree branches. And everyone hated him.

Everett tried to think of the people who loved him, his friends, his family. He froze when he realised he couldn’t see his mum’s face any more. He could see her hands, her clothes, her shoes, but not her face. He couldn’t see Victory-Rose either, or Bebe Ajeet, or his many Punjabi aunts and uncles; he could hardly remember friends like Ryun and Colette. All that remained of her were her Doc Marten boots and hair –both shocking pink. He had only been away from them for a few weeks, but so many worlds and people and so much fear and excitement and strangeness had come between Everett and the people he loved that it was a screen like frosted glass, that showed shapes and outlines but hid details. The only face he could see was his dad’s, in that moment on the twenty-second floor of the Tyrone Tower when Charlotte Villiers turned the jumpgun on him.

He saw that too clearly. It was as if the sharpness and brightness of that final glance washed out all the other faces.

He had never felt more alone.

He couldn’t stop tears. They were the simple and most natural and right thing to come, but he would die rather than let the people working on the engine see them. He turned and ran into the jungle.

The river stopped Everett. The trees ended abruptly and the bank gave way so suddenly and steeply he went skidding down between boulders and exposed tree roots. He had let his body carry him without any conscious thought. Just running. Just hurdling branches and huge tree roots. He could have run on and on until he couldn’t find his way back. Here, at the river’s edge, he could faintly hear the sound of Airish power tools and lifting tackle. There was a way back. There was always a way back.

Trees taller and grander than any on Earth soared above Everett. He could see the sky. A small fall of water between two boulders had hollowed out a pool. The water was deep and clear, cool and calling. Sun and water touched the hurt and guilt and loneliness. In a moment he was kicking off boots, wriggling out of ship togs. He splashed into the pool, lolled back. Cool deep water rose up over his chest. Everett took his feet off the bottom, kept himself upright with tiny movements of his hands and feet.

The water blessed him. He was alone, but not lonely. He had never been skinny-dipping before. He loved the sensual feel of wild water touching every part of his body. I have swum like this before, he realised, before I was born, naked, in the waters inside my mum.

It was a bit of a freaky thought.

Everett paddled round to where a ray of sunlight shone through a gap in the canopy of red leaves. Sun fell on his face. He closed his eyes. Opened them with a shock.

The sun.

There was something wrong with the sun. It was still full in his face. It shouldn’t be. It should have moved across the sky. It hadn’t. It was lower, closer to the lower edge of the gap in the branches, but still full in his face. The sun didn’t move on an arc from east to west. It was moving straight up and down.

His calculations. He had calculated for a jump from a spherical planet to another spherical planet. The geometry of the world …

‘No way!’ Everett shouted, surging straight up out of the water. Winged things burst upwards in panic from the trees. ‘No! This is insane.’ But the numbers were running in his head, connecting with other numbers, with theories and physical laws, painting a picture of the world that fitted – that was the only explanation – with the facts at hand.

He had to get back to the crew. They would listen to him when he told them what he had worked out about this world. They had to listen to him. He waded to the riverbank.

His clothes. Where were his clothes? He’d left them on this rock, neatly folded, weighted down with his boots in case the wind got up.

Everett heard a noise. There, behind that root buttress. A rustle. A movement. A … giggle? Everett cupped his hands over his groin. Water streamed from him.

‘Sen?’

It was a giggle.

‘Sen! Have you got my togs?’

No answer. No movement.

‘Don’t mess around! There’s something important you need to know. Mega.’

‘Come and get them!’

‘Sen!’

She could wait all day for him to come out of the water.

‘Okay then, since you think it’s so funny …’ Everett waded out of the river. He let go his covering hands. He heard a whoop from behind the tree root. Everett imagined himself from Sen’s point of view. He looked okay. Better than okay; he looked pretty good.

‘Remember I dressed you at Bona Togs?’ Sen shouted.

‘Well, I’s going to dress you again.’ A hand draped two socks over the sloping root. ‘Come and get ’em!’

‘I will,’ said Everett Singh. He heard a squealing shriek of delight and laughter, then a flurry of moving foliage. He pulled on the socks: heavy knit, thick rib top, like the ones Sen wore. He felt dumb in just socks.

‘Come on!’ Sen shouted from behind a brake of silvery cane. She waved his boots at him, one on each hand.

‘Sen, this is important. This world – it’s …’

‘That scar’s really healing up good,’ Sen called from deeper in the forest.

Everett had almost forgotten about the scar his alter’s laser had scorched across his side at the Battle of Abney Park Cemetery. Sen’s careless comment knocked him back into the pain and humiliation. He had been badly beaten.

He would wear the mark of his enemy for the rest of his life.

Everett had unfinished business with alter-Everett.

Now Sen hung his ship shorts from a low branch.

‘Sen! Don’t mess around!’ Everett shouted as he struggled to get feet through legs.

‘You wear too many clothes!’ Sen called from a new hiding place. ‘It’s bad for you.’ She draped his T-shirt over a spiny shrub. She had cut the sleeves off and shortened it. It was not quite her crop-top level, but shorter than any straight E10 omi would be seen in. Bare-chested, Everett strode to retrieve it.

Something splintered softly under his left boot, and his ankle went deep into something soft and wet and sticky. A waft of rot and sickness wafted up. Everett looked down.

His heart jolted, he almost puked in shock. His left foot was embedded in the ribs of a mouldering human corpse.

Empty eye sockets stared up at him from a skull clothed with rags of skin. Vile liquids and rotting organs leaked from the blackened, burst skin. Everett tried to extricate his foot. Decaying things glooped and sucked.

‘Sen!’ he yelled. ‘Sen!’

‘Uh-uh, Everett Singh, you come and get it.’

‘Sen!’ His voice said, No jokes any more.

She came running, hurdling lightly over roots and fallen branches.

‘Everett, what is it? Oh the Dear.’

Everett had followed the trace truly and accurately.

Someone had been banished to this world by the jumpgun.

Sen held two hands out to Everett.

‘I’s got you, omi. Walk towards me. Come on, Everett Singh.’

He took her hands and pulled his foot out of the dead thing. He could feel gross corpse stuff on his skin. He would never be able to get it clean again. But that was not the true horror. The horrible, terrible, all-devouring fear was who that corpse might be.

‘Sen, can you look at it? Is it?’

Sen understood at once. ‘It’s not him. Do you hear me? It’s not him.’

Everett shook with released tension. He thought he might throw up now, not from the vile rotting nausea of the corpse, but from relief at who the corpse was not. His dad. He heard Sen mumble something in Palari. He knew it pretty well now, but Sen spoke so low and fast, with so many dialect words, he could not make her out.

‘Sen, what is it?’

‘He’s dressed Airish style. I think I knows it. I think it’s ’Appening Ed.’

At first Everett could not place the name, then he remembered. Charlotte Villiers had led her Sharpies into Hackney Great Port to try to seize the Infundibulum by force. She had been met by a mob of roused, anarchic Airish, who had no truck with police on their territory. They had been led by a short, angry man – ’Appening Ed. Charlotte Villiers had pulled a gun and made him disappear. It had been the first time Everett had seen what a jumpgun could do. So this was where he had been sent. And something in this red rainforest had killed him. This red rainforest, in this world where the sun didn’t obey normal physics, and even the world didn’t obey proper, spherical geometry.

‘Sen, we need to get back to the crew. There’s something you need to know about this world. Something really important.’

3

Charlotte Villiers drew on tight calfskin gloves as she surveyed London from the twenty-second floor window of the Tyrone Tower. Snow crowned the angels that stood atop the Gothic skyscrapers and draped cloaks and capes and stoles around the shoulders of the crouching lions and griffons and mythological beasts that gazed down from the tower-tops on to the bustling streets. Snow sheeted from the hulls of the airships as they cast off from the great iron tower of Sadler’s Wells skyport and turned on to their flightpaths.

Snow on train roofs made them winding snakes, slinking along their elevated lines. Snow piled in drifts and banks at the sides of the streets far, far below, burying bicycles and rubbish bins and electricity charge points that would not return until a thaw. Snow trodden to treacherous ice-slicks on the walkways, citizens sliding and tottering in tiny nervous steps, coat collars turned up and hats pulled down, breath steaming.

‘I’m sick of winter. Could we not for once move the Praesidium somewhere warm?’

Charles Villiers, Charlotte Villiers’s alter and Plenipotentiary from Earth 4, lifted a forefinger to Charlotte Villiers’s cigarette in its ivory holder. A flame lit from his fingertip and she winced in distaste. Thryn technology, of course, but the Thryn would never have designed anything so crass.

Restrained. Poised. Enigmatic. Charlotte Villiers admired the Thryn much more than the humans of E4, her alter included. Earth 4 had glutted itself on Thryn technology so greedily that its people had not developed a technology or made a scientific discovery of their own in thirty years.

They were addicts. Charlotte Villiers despised addiction. It was a vile weakness, whether alcohol, narcotics, sex, power, or alien technology.

‘E8 is pleasant in its northern hemisphere at this time of year, my cora.’

‘Earth 8 is an ecological wreck with runaway greenhouse effect,’ Charlotte Villiers snapped. ‘I do not suit favela chic.’

She pulled the fur stole tight around her neck, not because of the cold beyond the window but at her alter’s use of the word ‘cora’. Earth 5 had given the Plenitude the terms of familiarity and endearment between alters – a twin in a parallel universe, closer than a sibling or a lover; you, but so very deeply, completely not you. Hearing the word on her alter’s lips made Charlotte Villiers shiver. She frequently wondered how Charles could be her alter at all. He was in no way her intellectual equal. And so childishly simple to manipulate.

He was her coro in name only. Out of all her fellow Plenipotentiaries, she respected only the Earth 7 conjoint Jen Heer Fol and Ibrim Hoj Kerrim. The Earth 2 Plenipotentiary might not possess her sheer edge of cold intellect, but he was a consummate diplomat and politician, in a world where those qualities so often contradicted each other. She had almost betrayed her hand to him once, in the heat of action, when she had seen that Everett Singh intended to send himself through the E10 Heisenberg Gate and she had pulled a gun on him. She had talked her way out of the incident, but Ibrim Hoj Kerrim was wily, graceful and completely incorruptible. It would require her very sharpest, cleanest, most deadly plan to neutralise him in the Praesidium. But she had no doubt that she would succeed. Her only equal, the only one to best her, time and again, was her enemy, Everett Singh. Her enemy, her prey. In the end you will give me what I desire, with your own hand. Let us match my will to your wits, Everett Singh. Charlotte Villiers took a draw on her cigarette, breathed a coil of smoke into the air.

‘At least the food’s decent on Earth 7.’

A knock at the door.

‘Enter.’

A bellboy in the high-collared embroidered jacket of the Service Corps entered and clicked his heels respectfully.

‘These are diplomatic boxes you want transported, Excellency?’

‘They are, Lewis,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

‘Shall I move them all or are there any you wish to take personally?’

‘I trust you, Lewis. I will be carrying personal effects only.’

‘We will have everything prepared for you.’

‘Thank you, Lewis.’

Every six months the Praesidium of the Plenitude of Known Worlds rotated to a new parallel Earth. The theory was to promote equality and democracy. Charlotte Villiers considered it a sop to political correctness. She would have been quite happy to have a permanent headquarters on Earth 2 – the weather was good, the shopping excellent, the clothing and cuisine outstanding – or even Earth 5: those horses and carriages and the elegant, well-proportioned architecture and fashion were graceful and picturesque. The settling-in was tedious and disruptive, even if she could commute home to Earth 3 by Heisenberg Gate.

Charlotte Villiers had endured four moves since ascending to the Plenipotentiate and it still seemed that no sooner were all the files unzipped and shelved than it was time to zip them, box them and ship them on again.

‘I shall have to brush up my Anglische,’ she said. ‘It’s such an ugly language. It sounds like retching.’

‘You want one of these, cora,’ Charles Villiers said. He opened his hand to show a thumbnail-sized chip. ‘It comes with a special frame; you wear it like a pair of glasses. Beams the language into the back of your eye. Brilliant.’

‘Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer not to have a language burned into my forebrain by some memory chip,’ Charlotte Villiers said. The idea of someone else’s voice, words, thoughts in her head filled her with disgust. Charlotte Villiers’s brain was guarded, untouchable, entirely her own. Dark secrets were locked within. ‘Anything from the tracker?’ She had sent her agent, Everett Singh’s E4 alter, on a highly illegal Heisenberg Jump to the forbidden plane of Earth 1 to plant a quantum tracking device on the airship Everness. He had gone with one of the Thryn Sentiency’s most powerful personal-combat units. He had come back with nothing but a suit liner and a backpack.

Charles Villiers checked his mobile phone. ‘No data yet.’

‘Are you sure it’s working?’

‘It’s Thryn,’ her alter said. ‘It’s infallible.’

Charlotte Villiers raised an eyebrow. Earth 4ers were so trusting of their technology. Charlotte Villiers preferred to work with people. Especially people she could manipulate or threaten. Scared people were trustworthy.

‘Has he even planted the thing?’ He could have ditched everything – Thryn battle suit, hedgehoppers, tracker – and run for home at the first sight of the Nahn. Charlotte Villiers knew enough of the nanotech plague that had engulfed Earth 1 to have doubts about her own bravery in the face of the Nahn. Invading you, dissolving you, incorporating you, taking your body, your mind, smelting them into an alloy of all the others it had absorbed: the Nahn was the same horror as the Earth 2 language implants, a thousand times magnified. The Nahn was violation.

‘He says he has,’ Charles Villiers said.

‘There are liars, gross liars and fourteen-year-old boys,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘But I still have his family. His real family.’

4

Overnight the snow had melted into the endless wet grey of January. Everett M Singh looked out at the procession of car headlights in the morning gloom as the Roding Road school run began. Car exhausts steamed in the chill. He still didn’t understand the logic of running a transport system on liquid-fuel/internal-combustion engines.

On the windowsill the Nahn buzzed in its glass prison.

Everett M bent down to peer at the thing in the jar. Laura had almost caught him last night. He had stayed awake, the Nahn spider clutched tight in his hand, until all the lights went off and the noise of television and radio and teeth being cleaned came to an end. He had gone quietly downstairs. The new Thryn implants meant he could move quickly and quietly. Not quickly and quietly enough. Laura came downstairs, woken by the noise, to find Everett M two-thirds of the way down the jar of peanut butter.

‘Everett, I know guys your age are always starving, but I mean, spooning it into you …’

Everett M had grinned sheepishly and tightened his grip on the Nahn spider in his left hand.

‘You know, since you came back there’s been no filling you. Did they give you a pair of hollow legs or something? And there’s not a pick of weight on you. Put the light out when you’re finished.’

The peanut butter went some way to filling the cold gnawing hunger that never went away, but what Everett had really wanted was the jar. He rinsed it out and, before the Nahn spider could make a break for freedom, clapped his hand over the opening and shook the nano-device inside. In an instant the lid was on. That was the reason for the peanut butter. It was farmer’s market organic Fairtrade crunchy peanut butter (it had been pretty good by the spoonful) and it had a metal lid. Every other jar in the kitchen had a plastic lid. The Nahn would have been able to feed on that plastic; grow and escape.

The Nahn spider was aware of him. It scuttled around the jar to turn what passed for a face his way. Sensor-eyes the size of pinpoints opened up to analyse him. The spider-thing scrabbled at the sides of the jar, but not even Nahn technology could get a grip on the smooth glass.

‘I should have done this last night,’ Everett M said. One thought and his right arm opened and unfolded an EM pulser. The electromagnetic pulse would fry every modem and wireless router and mobile phone on this side of Roding Road, but it would kill the Nahn stone dead. Kill dead something that was never properly alive. He would make this world safe. It wasn’t his world, but he would be its hero.

They would never know. Everyone on the planet would owe him, Everett M Singh, and they would never know.

He shaped the thought that would send the pulse of energy from the Thryn power cells. And stopped. There were memories in his head. Hyde Park in the snow, with the shattered shapes of Nahn hellhounds and death-birds in a ring around him. Himself – his nanotech Earth 1 alter: how the oily black of the Nahn shifted into the brown of his own face. The eyes. They couldn’t fake the eyes. The eyes of the Earth 1 alter were insect eyes, shimmering and multifaceted. Everett M almost cried out as he remembered the Nahn tentacles snaking out of the ground faster than he could blast him, tangling the legs of his Thryn battle suit, wrapping him and binding him and smothering him a metre deep inside a mound of heaving Nahn-stuff. He had come close, so close to something worse than death.

He remembered the deal he had offered to save his life and get out of the hell-plane of Earth 1. Give the Nahn a way of escape, a way past the quarantine the Plenitude had put on that plane.

All the Nahn wanted to do was survive, like him.

‘Did you put that thought there?’ Everett M whispered at the spider-thing scrabbling at the jar. He had carried the Nahn spore off Earth 1 to the Thryn citadel on the far side of the moon and then to Earth 10, hidden inside his own body. Had part of it remained there? Was it already sending nanotech tendrils and feelers through his brain? ‘Are you still inside me?’

‘Everett!’ The shout and the sudden bang on the door made him jump. He knocked against the peanut-butter jar.

It fell towards the floor. Only Everett M’s Thryn reflexes stopped it shattering. ‘Going now. Not ten minutes, not five minutes, not one minute: now!’

Shaking, Everett M set the jar back on the shelf. Grey sleety rain fell beyond the window.

‘Coming!’ Everett M pulled on his waterproof and his Tottenham Hotspur backpack. He turned to the spider in the jar and whispered, ‘I’ll kill you later.’

The gates to Abney Park Cemetery were still locked and draped with yellow warning tape. The official story was gangs of youths, cheap cider and cheaper glue. It wouldn’t stand up to even a moment’s examination – the explosions, the clean cuts of lasers and whatever weapon that Earth girl had been using, the tree branches. Sixteen-year-olds off their tits on white cider and glue just smashed things. But the local newspapers and radio were so short of staff they just repeated whatever press release the police fed them. Charlotte Villiers’s cover story would never be questioned.

Everett M’s shortcut through the cemetery was closed and the detour made him ten minutes late for school.

‘Don’t often see you getting one of these,’ said Mrs Yadav, the school secretary in charge of the late slips. She swapped it for his note of absence. ‘Social services?’ She looked pityingly at Everett M.

No, I’ve been in a parallel universe battling nanotech horrors and my alter, Everett M thought. And I have the end of your world in an empty peanut butter jar on my bedroom windowsill.

‘It’s just routine.’ Another part of Charlotte Villiers’s deception.

‘Social services is never just routine,’ the secretary said.

‘Does Mrs Packham know about this?’

‘Yeah, she does,’ Everett M lied.

‘I’ll drop her an email,’ Mrs Yadav said.

As he took books from his locker Everett M felt the metal door vibrate under his fingers, a dull buzzing. He stepped back. No, not the locker; all Bourne Green School was humming, as if the steel girders that held it up were vibrating like the strings of a guitar. Everett M dared to open up his Thryn sense for a moment. He listened deep, opening his eyes to electrical and magnetic fields. Nothing. The hum, the vibration, was in his head. He knew what it was now: the buzz of the Nahn in its glass prison. Buzzing. Buzzing in the jar, buzzing in his head. Buzzing in the corridors of Bourne Green. Buzzing in maths class.

‘Mr Singh, are you with us or are you just visiting this planet?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

Buzzing at the Coke machine at break. Chesney Jennings and Karl Derbyshire came up on either side of him.

In Everett M’s world they had been second-rate bullies and enemies. Persecutors of the geek.

‘Social services, then.’

So, no different on this plane.

‘So what is it – they take you away because your Mum’s a paedo or what?’

The buzzing became a deafening roar. Everett M felt energy channel into his lasers. Cold clutched him, the Thryn technology drawing on his own body’s reserves.

Against his will, the panels in his forearms were opening.

It took every last drop of will to force them shut.

‘Leave it,’ Everett M said.

‘What if I don’t want to?’

Everett M thought power into his right hand. He snatched Karl Derbyshire’s unopened Coke can from his hand. He put his thumb underneath the bottom, his little finger on the lid. He squeezed. Seals popped, aluminium crumpled and split, the drink exploded all over Derbyshire and Jennings.

They jumped back. Their white school shirts were speckled with brown.

‘You shouldn’t have had a go at my mum,’ Everett M said. He dropped the flat disc of crushed metal into the trash.

By lunch the word was all around the school: by SMS, Facebook, BBM, word of mouth. Even the cool kids, the ones who never seemed to do anything, but did that nothing in the most stylish way possible, looked at him. Just a look, for a moment, maybe a tilt of the chin, but acknowledgement.

‘Did you do that with your bare hands?’ Nilesh Virdi, a friend in both universes, asked.

‘No, I’m an alien cyborg who’s taken over Everett’s body,’ Everett M said. ‘How do you think I did it?’

‘Have you been buffing up?’ Gothy Emma, queen of the emo girls, asked.

Her lieutenant Noomi handed Everett M a Coke can. ‘Can you do it with Diet?’ she asked. She got out her phone. ‘This is so going up on YouTube. Like twenty million hits.’

Everett M handed it back to her.

‘I don’t do tricks.’

‘We’ll come and see you in goal!’ Noomi shouted after him as he walked away.

If the word had reached all the school, it had reached Mrs Packham. She popped her head into Mr Boateng’s English class.

‘Everett, can I have a quick word? In my office.’

Mrs Packham’s office smelled of windows and sandal-wood. A jar of aromatic oil with little dipsticks lancing out of it sat on the window ledge. The room was painted a golden yellow, and with the perfume and the light it seemed like a little warm haven in the dour grey winter.

That was part of the plan, Everett M calculated. As was the box of tissues on her desk.

‘Did Mrs Yadav tell you?’ Everett M asked. This was the lesson he had learnt from the Battle of Abney Park Cemetery, and the fight against the Nahn. Strike first.

‘Before everything else, Bourne Green is a caring community,’ Mrs Packham said. ‘We’re a family. So it’s natural for us to look after each other, to let each other know if something isn’t exactly right. So if we hear that Social Services are involved, that involves us too. There are synergies here. Would you like a cup of tea, Everett?’

‘I’d prefer coffee.’

‘I’ve only decaf.’

‘I’ll leave it.’

‘You’ve been through a lot recently, Everett, and we haven’t really dealt with it, have we? First your dad going missing, and the police involvement – that’s never a nice experience, Everett. And then, well, over Christmas when you went off. You’ve never really talked about it. I know, I blame myself partly, and it did happen at a bad time …’

‘When would have been a good time?’ Everett M said.

Mrs Packham ignored the snark. Everett M guessed she was in her mid-thirties, though to him everyone over twenty-three looked the same. To mark herself as separate from the teaching staff she wore loose clothing in bright colours.

‘That’s all right, Everett. This is a safe place where you can talk about anything. No one will judge you.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Okay then. I am not really Everett Singh. I’m a cyborg double from a parallel universe. I’m a secret agent sent by a group of politicians from the Plenitude of Known Worlds. What happened in Abney Park … ? That thing in the news … ? That was me. I could level this entire school if I wanted.’

Mrs Packham stared at Everett M for the space of two slow blinks.

‘When I say anything, I meant anything about how you feel. I hear what you’re saying, but how does that make you feel?’

‘How do you think a cyborg double from a parallel universe feels?’

Mrs Packham’s mouth twitched. She leafed through a plastic folder.

‘I heard about your stunt at break time. It’s not just the physical aggression that’s making me concerned; there’s verbal aggression as well. What you just said to me, for example. I mean, do you think that maybe what you said there, and you disappearing over Christmas – how can I put this? You’re the oldest in your family, by quite a long way. Your sister – what is she, three, four? In a sense, you’re like the only child. And now you’re the only man in the family. You were very close to your father. I’d like you to explore the thought that maybe you’re looking for other ways to get the attention he used to give you.’

‘I thought you said no one would judge me here.’

‘Now you’re being defensive, Everett. And as well as the defensiveness, I’ve been hearing reports of inattention in class. That’s not you, Everett.’

‘Is everyone spying on me?’ Everett M shouted.

‘No one’s spying on you, Everett. Why? Do you think people are?’

Careful, Everett M said to himself. Make too much trouble,say too much, or even too little, and she might send you to the doctor. And you can’t have doctors working all over you, outside and inside.

‘No, I don’t. I don’t … I just …’ But he had to keep her sweet. Then he knew what to do. And it was obvious and easy, and the words came out straight and true. He talked about his dad, his real dad. His dad who had died in a bike accident on the way to work, suddenly and stupidly and without any hope of appeal or a second chance. He talked about anger. He remembered being angry that his dad had died without thinking of any of them, just leaving them with no idea and no plan for what to do. He talked about pleading. He remembered going over and over in his head all the tiny things Everett M or his mum or Vickie-Rose could have done that would have meant his dad hadn’t been at that place on that bike at that moment the Sainsbury’s truck turned left. He talked about abandonment. He remembered the realisation that dead was forever, that his dad would never come back, never be there, never be. He talked about pretending. He remembered the exaggerated normality of life after Dad had died, everyone doing all the little everyday things in a big way so that there could be no moment, no crack in the busyness of everyday life, where the awfulness could well up like dark water under ice. He said and remembered all these feelings, but he made them about the other Everett’s dad. He wasn’t dead, but the feelings would be the same. And Everett M understood that other Everett Singh.

Then Mrs Packham was glancing at her watch and saying, ‘I’m afraid we’re out of time for today.’ When Everett M stood up he found he was breathing more deeply and easily than he had since the Accident, and the air in his lungs tasted clean and pure. For the hour he had been in Mrs Packham’s room, he hadn’t heard the buzzing of the Nahn.

In the corridor it returned louder than ever.

Everett M knew what he had to do now.

‘Everett!’

He glanced over his shoulder. School out: schoolkids pressing towards the gates and the waiting cars. Breath steaming. Loud chatter and ringtones. A face looking at him: the geek guy Ryun. The other Everett’s friend. Everett M ought to stop, say something. Ryun’s suspicions had been raised by the text message and Everett M’s unconvincing lie that he had lost his phone. The message had tipped Everett M off that the other Everett was on this world and had led to the Battle of Abney Park Cemetery. The message, and the viral video everyone had passed round of the airship over White Hart Lane football stadium. Everett M had joked that it was obviously a commercial cargo airship from a parallel universe, but now he wondered if he had been too clever: had Ryun guessed that the joke was in fact the truth? How much did he know from the other Everett? How much did he suspect about Everett M? Get clever. Stay clever.

‘We’re going out,’ Everett M shouted back. ‘Catch you tomorrow!’

‘I’ll be on chat!’ Ryun shouted back.

‘Maybe!’