Planesrunner E-Book

Ian McDonald

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

Seitenzahl: 416

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

There is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one among billions of parallel earths. When Everett Singh's scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer: the Infundibulum, the map of all the parallel earths, the most valuable object in the multiverse. There are dark forces in the Plenitude of Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it. They've got power, authority, the might of ten planets—some of them more technologically advanced than our Earth—at their fingertips. He's got wits, intelligence, and a knack for Indian cooking. Everett must trick his way through the Heisenberg Gate that his dad helped build and go on the run in a parallel Earth. But to rescue his dad from Charlotte Villiers and the sinister Order, this Planesrunner's going to need friends. Friends like Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, her adopted daughter, Sen, and the crew of the airship Everness. Can they rescue Everett's father and get the Infundibulum to safety? The game is afoot! Praise for Planesrunner "PLANESRUNNER is chock-full of awesome. Ian McDonald's steampunk London blazes on a vast scale with eye-popping towers, gritty streets, and larger-than-life characters who aren't afraid to fight for each other. The kind of airship-dueling, guns-blazing fantasy that makes me wish I could pop through to the next reality over, join the Airish, and take to the skies." —Paolo Bacigalupi "Science fiction rules in this stellar series opener about a boy who travels to parallel universes. What joy to find science fiction based on real scientific concepts… Shining imagination, pulsing suspense and sparkling writing make this one stand out." —Kirkus (Starred Review) "McDonald writes with scientific and literary sophistication, as well as a wicked sense of humor. Add nonstop action, eccentric characters, and expert universe building, and this first volume of the Everness series is a winner." —Publishers Weekly

Leseprobe

Planesrunner

Copyright © 2011 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 978-1-625673-01-5

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

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Glossary

About the Author

Also by Ian McDonald

1

The car was black. Black body shell, black wheels, black bumpers, black windows. The rain sat on its shiny skin like drops of black oil. A black car on a black night. Everett Singh zipped his jacket up to his chin and flipped up his hood against the cold wind and watched the black car crawl behind his dad, pedalling his bicycle up the Mall.

It was a bad bike night. Tree branches lashed and beat.

Wind is the cyclist’s enemy. The Institute for Contemporary Arts’ non-religious seasonal decorations flapped and rattled. Everett had noticed that every year when Stoke Newington Council put up their Winterval lanterns, a storm would arrive and blow them down again. He had suggested that they put them up a week later. They hadn’t even acknowledged his email. This year the storm blew as it blew every year and the decorations were scattered the length of the high street. Everett Singh noticed things like that: patterns, behaviours, connections and coincidences.

That was how Everett noticed the car. It hadn’t pulled out to skim aggressively past Tejendra on his bike. It kept slow, steady pace behind him. London cars didn’t do that, not with bikes, certainly not on a cold wet Monday night on a rainy Mall ten days before Christmas. His dad wouldn’t have noticed it. Once Tejendra got going on his bike, he didn’t notice anything. Tejendra had started biking after the split with Everett’s mum. He said it was quicker, he had less of a carbon footprint and it kept him fit.

Everett reported this to Divorcedads.com. The site had started as a well-meaning web space where ‘kids could network about the pain of parental split-up.’ The kids arrived and turned it into a forum for swapping embarrassing dad stories. The opinion of the forum was that buying a four-thousand-pound full-suspension mountain bike when the steepest thing you ever rode over was a speed bump was typical of dads when they split up. Slipped-nott wondered why he couldn’t have bought a Porsche like everyone else. Because my dad’s not like everyone else, Everett commented back.

Other dads named their sons after footballers or relatives or people on television. Tejendra named his after a dead scientist. Other dads took their sons to Pizza Express after the football. Tejendra created ‘cuisine nights’ at his new apartment. After every Tottenham home game, he and Everett would cook a feast from a different country.

Tejendra liked cooking Thai. Everett was good at Mexican.

And other dads took their sons to Laser Quest or karting or surf lessons. Tejendra took Everett to lectures at the Institute for Contemporary Arts on nanotechnology and freaky economics and what would happen when the oil ran out. It was cool with Everett Singh. Different was never boring.

Here came Tejendra, pushing up the Mall, head down into the wind and the rain, in full fluorescents and flashers and reflecters and Lycra with the big black German car behind him. Punjabi dads should not wear Lycra, Everett thought. He put up his arm to wave. The glow-tubes he’d knotted through the cuffs traced bright curves in the air.

Tejendra looked up, waved, wobbled. He was a terrible cyclist. He was almost going backwards in the wind howling down from Constitution Hill. Why didn’t the black car go round him? It couldn’t have been doing more than ten kilometres per hour. There it went now. It pulled out with a deep roar then cut in across Tejendra and stopped.

Tejendra veered, braked, almost fell.

‘Dad!’ Everett shouted.

Three men got out of the car. They were dressed in long dark coats. Everett could see Tejendra was about to yell at them. The men were very quick and very sure. One of them wrenched Tejendra’s right arm behind his back. A second bundled him into the back seat. The third man picked up the fallen bicycle, opened the boot and threw it in. Doors slammed shut, the black car pulled back into the traffic. Very quick, very sure. Everett stood stunned, his arm still raised to wave. He was not sure he could believe what he had seen. The black car accelerated towards him. Everett stepped back under the arcade along the front of the ICA. The glow tubes, the stupid glow tubes, were like a lighthouse. Everett pulled out his phone. The car swept past him. Tejendra was a patch of fluorescent yellow behind the darkened windows. Everett stepped out and shot a photograph, two photographs, three, four. He kept shooting until the black car vanished into the traffic wheeling around the Victoria Memorial.

Something. He must do something. But Everett couldn’t move. This must be what shock felt like. Post-traumatic stress. So many actions he could take. He imagined himself running after the black car, running at full pelt up the rainy Mall, tailing the black car through the rush hour.

He could never catch it. It had too much of a lead. The city was too big. He couldn’t run that far, that long, that fast. Maybe he could stop a taxi, tell it to follow that car.

Tejendra had told him once that every taxi driver longed to be told that. Even if he could ever track the black car through the London traffic, what did he think he could do against three big men who had lifted his father as lightly as a kitten? That was comics stuff. There were no superheroes. He could ask the people huddling under umbrellas, collars turned up, arriving for a public talk on nanotechnology: did you see that? Did you? He could ask the door staff in their smart shirts. They were too busy meeting and greeting. They wouldn’t have seen anything. Even if they had, what could they do? So many wrong actions but what was the right thing, the one right thing? In the end there was one right thing to do. He hit three nines on his phone.

‘Hello? Police? My name’s Everett Singh. I’m at the ICA on the Mall. My dad has just been kidnapped.’

2

The police station stank. It had been redecorated and the smell of industrial high-durability silk-finish paint had worked through every part of it from front desk to the interview room. Everett wouldn’t smell anything else for days. Already it was making his head spin. But that might also have been the bad strip-lighting, the too-hot radiator, the deadly dry air-conditioning, the chair that caught him in the back of the knee and cut off his circulation so that his legs were buzzing with pins and needles: any one of the dozens of things about a police station that the police never think might unsettle ordinary people.

‘Could I have some water, please?’

‘Of course, Everett.’

There were two police, a man and a woman. The woman was a Family Liaison Officer and did all the talking. She was meant to be friendly, empathetic, non-threatening.

Everett guessed she was maybe thirty; a little chubby, over-straightened dyed blonde hair that made her face look big. She looks like a male comedian playing a woman police officer, Everett thought. She’d told Everett her name but he’d never been any good at names. Leah, Leanne, Leona something like that. Police shouldn’t give you their first names.

The man who took down notes was the exact opposite of Leah-Leanne-Leona. He had sunken cheeks and a moustache like police wore in cop shows back in the seventies, the kind Tejendra watched on Channel Dave. He looked tired, as if nothing could ever surprise him again but he had to be ready for that time when the world threw something new and hard at him. He was DS Milligan. Everett liked that. Leah-Leanne-Leona answered Everett’s request but Moustache Milligan fetched the water from the cooler in the corner of the room.

‘So, Everett, the Institute of Contemporary Arts?’ Leah-Leanne-Leona made it sound like the freakiest, most perverse place a dad could take a son; bordering on child abuse.

‘It’s his dad’s idea,’ Everett’s mum said. First Everett phoned the police, second he phoned home. It had been bad. At first she wouldn’t believe him. Kidnapped, on the Mall, on a Monday night, in the middle of the rush hour.

He was making it up, attention-seeking, that sort of thing didn’t/couldn’t happen. Not on the Mall. Not ten days before Christmas.

‘Mum, I saw them take him.’

Then he was being malicious, getting at her. I know you blame me for your dad, Everett. He’s not coming back.

We have to get on with it. We have to get the family right, look after ourselves. I know how you feel. Don’t you think I’m feeling things too?

‘No. Mum, listen. It’s not about feeling things. I saw them take him, on the Mall, in a big black Audi. Bike and everything.’

The worst was when he said he was in Belgravia police station. That made her voice go tight. And short. And sharp. The way it did when she wanted to make him feel bad. The shame. Had he no self-respect? He was no different from those Virdi boys. They were never out of police stations. God alone knew where she was going to find a lawyer this time of night. Maybe Milos. He was always good for a favour.

‘Mum. Mum. Listen. I don’t need a lawyer. I’m making a statement. That’s all. They can’t do anything unless you’re there.’

It had taken her an hour and a half to crawl in from Stokie and an hour grumbling about the parking and the congestion charge and having to leave Victory-Rose with Mrs Singh. That old crow Ajeet always put bad ideas into the girl’s head. And this place stank of paint. She found Everett sitting on a bench thumbing through Facebook on his smartphone and eating a Twix from the vending machine. The desk sergeant had bought him a coffee. As Everett had expected, it was bad and weak. Laura Singh sat down beside him and talked very low and fast because she would be ashamed if the desk sergeant overheard. She wanted Everett to know she didn’t blame him. At all.

Typical of his father. Typical to land Everett in trouble and not be there.

‘Mum …’

‘Mrs Singh?’

‘Braiden.’ When had she started calling herself that?

Family Liaison Officer Leah-Leanne-Leona had introduced herself and led them down the corridors that looked as if they had been painted with sweat to the reeking interview room.

‘We go to talks at the ICA,’ Everett said, looking Leah-Leanne-Leona in the eye. His palms were flat on the table.

‘Experimental economics, the coming singularity, nanotechnology. Big ideas. They have Nobel prizewinners.’

Leah-Leanne-Leona’s eyes glazed but Everett saw that Moustache Milligan had spelled nanotechnology correctly in his notes.

‘Okay, Everett. It’s good you still have something you can share with your dad. Guy-stuff is good. So, your dad would meet you outside the ICA after work.’

‘He was coming over from Imperial College.’

‘He’s a scientist,’ Everett’s mum said. Every answer she jumped in ahead of Everett, as if a wrong or careless response from him would be all the evidence the police needed to call social services and take Everett and little sister Victory-Rose into care.

‘He’s a theoretical physicist,’ Everett said. Moustache Milligan raised an eyebrow. Everett had always wished he could do that.

‘What kind of physics?’ Moustache Milligan asked. Leah-Leanne-Leona flared her nostrils. She did the talking here.

‘Quantum theory. The Everett Many Worlds Theory. >Hugh Everett, he developed it. I’m named after him: Everett Singh. The multiverse, parallel universes, all that, you know?’ Everett Singh saw that Moustache Milligan had written Non-nuke on his notepad beside the word physicist?

‘What does that mean?’ Everett asked. ‘Non-nuke.’

Moustache Milligan looked embarrassed.

‘You know what the current security situation’s like. If your dad had been a nuclear physicist, that could be an issue.’

‘You mean, if he could build atom bombs.’

‘We have to consider all kinds of threats.’

‘But if he doesn’t build atom bombs, if he’s just a quantum physicist, then he’s not a threat. He’s not so important.’

‘Everett!’ Laura hissed. But Everett was angry and tired of not being taken seriously. Whether it was Belgravia police station or the IT room of Bourne Green Community Academy, it was always always always the same. Mock the Geek. He hadn’t asked for any of this. All he’d done was go to listen to a lecture with his dad. Everett knew better than to expect the world to be fair, but it might occasionally cut him a break.

‘Do you know what the Many Worlds Theory is?’ Everett said. He leaned forward across the table. Previous occupants had doodled stars and spirals and cubes and the names of football clubs on the peeling plastic. ‘Every time the smallest least tiniest thing happens, the universe branches. There’s a universe where it happened, and a universe where it didn’t. Every second, every microsecond every day, there are new universes splitting off from this one. For every possible event in history, there’s a universe, out there somewhere, right beside this one.’ Everett lifted a finger and drew a line through the air. ‘A billion universes, just there now. Every possible universe is out there somewhere. This isn’t something someone made up, this is a proper physical theory. That what physics means; real, solid, actual. Does that sound not so important to you? It sounds to me like the biggest thing there is. ‘

‘That’s very interesting, Everett.’ Leah-Leanne-Leona’s tea mug had a badly rendered picture of a fat tabby cat on its back waving it paws. I CAN HAZ TEE said the fat cat.

‘Everett, don’t waste their time; they don’t want to know,’ Laura said. ‘It’s not relevant.’

‘Well, they had some reason for kidnapping him,’ Everett said.

‘This is what we’re trying to establish, Everett,’ Leah-Leanne-Leona said. ‘Did anyone else see this car and the three men?’

The power went out of Everett. The policewoman had found the valve to his anger and it had all hissed out of him.

‘No,’ Everett Singh whispered.

‘What was that, Everett?’

‘That was a no.’

He should have asked the ICA staff, the people going in to the talk, the dog walkers and the bad-weather joggers, Did you see that, did you? But you don’t think of things like that when your dad is on his bike one minute and the next lifted off and thrown into the back of a big black Audi.

‘I’ve got photographs on my phone.’ Everett said. ‘Here, I can get them up.’ A few swipes with his finger and he had them. Tippy tap, up they came one at a time. Crazy angles, tail-lights blurred. Unless you knew what you were looking for you wouldn’t recognise them for snapshots of a kidnapping. The police looked unimpressed. Everett halted at one clear, steady shot where the inside of the black car was momentarily lit up by oncoming headlights.

‘See that bit of yellow in the middle of the back window? That’s my dad.’ Everett stroked the picture down to the registration plate. He opened up the magnification. The resolution of these little touchphone cameras was rubbish but at highest magnification there was just enough detail to read the letters and numbers. ‘There’s something you could check.’

‘We could run this through image enhancement,’ Detective Sergeant Milligan said.

‘We’d need to keep your phone,’ Leah-Leanne-Leona said.

‘Just for a day or two.’

‘I don’t want to give it you,’ Everett said.

‘Everett, let them have it,’ Laura said. ‘Just give it to them and then we can go. God knows what Ajeet’s been telling Victory-Rose.’ To Leah-Leanne-Leona she said, adult to adult, ‘Honestly, he spends far too much time on those conspiracy-theory websites. You should do something about those. Get them banned.’

‘I’ll give you the card,’ Everett said. He sprung the tiny memory chip out of its housing with his fingernail. ‘The photographs are on it.’ He set it in the middle of the desk.

No one moved to take it. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’

‘I’ll take care of it, Everett,’ Moustache Milligan said.

He slid the chip into a ziplock plastic bag.

‘There are a few things we’d ask you to do,’ Leah-Leanne-Leona said. ‘Precautions. Just in case. If you really want to help us, keep this to yourselves, okay? Don’t go telling people – and no tweeting it or putting it up on Facebook.

If anyone does get in touch, whether it’s Mr Singh—’

‘Dr Singh,’ Everett interrupted.

‘If you say so, Everett. If it’s Dr Singh himself, or if it’s anyone else, get in touch with us. No matter what they tell you. If he has been kidnapped for a ransom, they always warn you not to get in touch with the police. Don’t do that. Let us know immediately.’

‘Ransom? Oh dear God. What did they pick us for?’

Laura said. ‘We’re not rich, we haven’t two pennies to rub together. We can’t afford a ransom.’

‘“If”,’ Everett said. ‘You said “if” he has been kidnapped for a ransom. What other kinds are there?’

‘Do you want me to list them?’ Moustache Milligan said.

‘I’ll list them for you. I tell you this, it won’t make you feel better. There’s what we call tiger kidnappings. It’s usually a relative of a bank employee gets taken hostage while the manager opens up the vault and removes the cash. Then there are kidnappings for hostage swaps. There are kidnappings for specialist knowledge – doctors get lifted to patch up some hood who’s been shot up in a gang fight. Then there’s express kidnappings. They lift you and every day march you down to the cashpoint to take out the daily limit until the account’s empty. It’s a flourishing business, son, kidnapping. And then there are the people who just disappear. Gone. Missing persons. It’s mostly those, missing persons.’ Moustache Milligan lifted his ballpoint and looked directly at Everett, ‘Now, son, if you want to give me a statement, you and your mum can go home and let us find your dad.’

Everett leaned back his chair and breathed the paint fumes deep inside him.

‘Okay, I came down into London after school to meet my dad …’

3

All the way up the A10, through Dalston and along Stoke Newington High Street, Laura didn’t speak. Not a word.

She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and mumbled mangled bits of lyrics from the smooth-listening MOR radio station until Everett wanted to punch his fist at the radio, punch any button, hit any station with a bit of noise and beat and life. Anything rather than listen to his mum getting the lines wrong.

See that girl, hear her scream, kicking the dancing queen. It’s not that! Everett seethed inside. Clown Control to Mao Tse Tung… Major Tom! Everett wanted to shout. Major Tom Major Tom Major Tom. Get it right. The song was forty years old but Everett knew it better than his mum. There was a word for misheard lyrics. Everett had come across it online: a mondegreen. He’d liked the word. He remembered it.

By the time they got to Evercreech Road to pick up Victory-Rose, Everett understood. This was anger, of a kind he had seen once – only once – before. He’d seen it the day he came back from football practice and found all the lights on in every room and every door open and the radio blaring through the entire house and his mum in the kitchen, mopping the floor, mopping and mopping and mopping. Something kind of ooh ooh, jumping up my tutu, she’d been singing along to Girls Aloud.

‘Mum what are you doing?’

‘This floor is disgusting. It smells. That’s disgusting.

Kitchen floors shouldn’t smell. There’s ground-in disgusting things between the tiles. And I’m not having those things over my nice clean floor.’

She had pointed at Everett’s football boots. He slipped them off. Stocking feet on cold concrete step.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, fine.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Absolutely sure.’

‘You cleaned that bit three times.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Well, what if I did? It needs cleaning. It’s disgusting. This whole place is disgusting. I can’t keep anything nice; why can’t I keep anything nice?’

‘Mum, are you okay?’

‘Yes, I’m okay. Okay? Here’s me saying: I. Am. O. K. Why do you keep asking me? Of course I’m okay, I’m always okay. I have to be okay. Someone has to and that’s always me. Oh shut up shut up shut up; shut up your stupid blabbering …’ Laura had screamed at the radio, slapped at the tuning buttons, then ripped the radio plug from the wall. Everett felt embarrassed, ashamed, scared. This was not a thing he should see. It was like the walls of his safe and predictable world had turned to glass and through them he could glimpse huge, monstrous, threatening shapes.

‘I’m sorry, Everett,’ his mum said. ‘Everett, me and your dad. He’s taking … he’s not coming … Well, we think it might be better if we spent some time apart. I don’t know how long. Maybe quite a long time. Maybe … permanently …’

That was how Everett Singh found out that family life as he had always known it had ended, standing in his sock soles on the cold concrete back step, his school blazer over his goalkeeper kit. Boots in hand. Mum holding a squeegee mop. The radio blaring Girls Aloud. It had ended long before, he had realised. It had been ending for a long time. His parents had been lying to him for years.

He saw The Angry nine months, two weeks, three days ago. He had hoped never to see it again but here it was in the car with him. Granny Singh had taught Victory-Rose a Punjabi song, which she sang loudly and badly as Laura strapped her into the back seat. Laura put on Singalong with Beebles.

‘Shall we sing our song, Vee-Arr? Our favourite song? Shall we? Shall we?’ They sang, loudly and badly, all the up through South Tottenham and Stamford Hill.

I’m not the one to punish, Everett thought. There’s no one to punish. But you need someone to ground your anger, like a lightning rod, so I’ll do. I always do. Everett understood the mondegreen thing now. If his mum could sing her own words, her own interpretation, she had control, even if only over a pop song.

He went back over the details of his police statement in his memory. ‘At approximately 17:45 on December 15th, I was waiting outside the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall,’ Moustache Mulligan had read from the report sheet. ‘I was waiting for my father Dr Tejendra Singh to meet me at six o’clock for a public lecture on trends in nanotechnology. I saw my father proceeding up the Mall from Horseguards on his bicycle. He was coming from his office at Imperial College and was clearly, distinctively and appropriately dressed. I noticed that he was being followed by a black car with darkened windows, of German make, possibly an Audi. I noticed that the car was driving abnormally slowly and that my father seemed oblivious to it. About a hundred metres from me the car abruptly pulled out, overtook my father and pulled in in front of him, causing him to swerve and stop. Three men exited the vehicle …’

‘They got out of the car,’ Everett had said.

‘Three men exited the vehicle,’ Moustache Mulligan had continued. ‘Two of the men seized my father and forced him into the back seat. The third man put the bicycle into the boot. The car then drove off up the Mall in the direction of Constitution Hill. I took a series of photographs on my mobile phone but I did not call out or attempt to alert any other passers-by.’

‘Is that correct?’ Leah-Leanne-Leona had said.

‘Suppose.’ It sounded thin and full of holes. There were no witnesses, no corroboration, only Everett’s own word and a shaky mobile-phone photograph that, if you looked at it cold and hard, could be anything.

‘Is that correct, Everett?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sign here. Press hard, you’re making a couple of copies.’

In his room, in his space, away from the noise, Everett opened up Dr Quantum. Tejendra had given him the tablet computer for his last birthday. It was a good present, the best present. Too much computer for his age – he’d still been a kid then. Laura had immediately forbidden him ever to take it to school, even to show it off. Everett concurred, for once. He had good senses and was fast – faster than anyone would think a Known Geek to be; it was what made him the goalkeeper for Team Red.

Into the mail. Open subject: mall kidnap. A swipe with the finger here, a tap there and it was into his pictures folder. Everett spread his fingers like a bird opening its wings. The photograph opened up to fill the screen. Again, and Everett zoomed in on the tiny scrap of fluorescent yellow in the back seat. Tejendra: that was Tejendra; he could almost read the black Assos logo on the weather-proof jacket.

Rules for twenty-first-century living: never give the police your only photograph.

The doorbell rang. Everett, exploring the photograph pixel by pixel, half heard it. Someone was always ringing the bell, trying to sell something, despite the sign which said, politely, We don’t buy door to door. Then he heard the voice, and shoes on the wooden floor in the hall. Dragging, feet; a low Northern Ireland accent. Paul McCabe. Everett went to the bedroom door, opened it a crack. Paul McCabe stood in the hall, hunched over in his raincoat. No one had worn coats like that for forty years. It made him look like a cheap private detective. He always seemed round-shouldered, skulking, guilty of something. Even in his office at Imperial College he never looked at home, as if he had wandered in one morning in the 1980s and was waiting for the day when someone official would discover he was a fraud and throw him out. His voice, talking to Laura, was soft and hesitating. He always seemed to be apologising in advance. Paul McCabe must have heard the bedroom door open because he turned and looked straight at Everett.

‘Everett. Yes yes yes, are you well? Good good. Terrible affair, terrible. Sincerest good wishes. The police called, everyone at the department is terribly upset, terribly. Colette is distraught, quite distraught.’

No way back now. Everett had grown up a physics brat, running free between lecture halls and labs, whiteboards covered in symbols and high-powered research equipment with exciting yellow warning stickers: Lasers! Radiation!

Nanohazard! The faculty staff were his alternative family but he had always found Paul McCabe, Tejendra’s head of department, too jolly, too much the embarrassing uncle.

Paul McCabe pursed his mouth, as if tasting unpalatable words.

‘Actually, Everett, it’s you I’ve come to see.’

Paul McCabe looked uncomfortable in the living room, seated in the middle of the sofa, hands draped over his knees. He hadn’t taken off his coat. In the kitchen Laura made tea, a thing she normally never did after nine o’clock.

The caffeine kept her awake. Only table lamps were lit and the flickering lights on the Christmas tree cast an insane shine over the scientist.

‘The police called me about your father, Everett.

Incredible, simply incredible. On the Mall. In broad daylight – well, you know what I mean. But it’s incredible, incredible, in modern London, that it’s not been caught on some CCTV camera somewhere. We are the most surveyed nation on Earth.’

‘I got a photograph of the car. I got the registration number.’

Paul McCabe sat up.

‘Did you? Really?’ You look like a meerkat, Everett thought.

‘That’s good work. They should be able to do something with that.’

‘So what did the police ask you about?’

Laura pulled out a side table and set a mug of tea on it. Paul McCabe waved away a KitKat.

‘Thank you, thank you, but chocolate gives me terrible migraine. Terrible. The police? Oh, just the usual procedural stuff. What where when, had your dad been suffering from unusual stress, had we noticed any … uncharacteristic behaviour recently.’

‘Had you?’

Paul McCabe spread his hands apologetically.

‘Everett, you know me. I’m the last person finds out what’s going on in my own department. Though, if you don’t mind, perhaps I could turn your question back on you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Had you noticed your dad behaving … uncharacteristically recently?’

Everett pictured Tejendra in his mind, flicking through moments, memories, Saturday afternoons, Sunday mornings like snapshots. The moments on the Skype calls when Everett found himself talking to dead air, Tejendra distracted, somewhere else. The time on the stand at White Hart Lane when he completely missed a sweet Danny Rose goal because he’d been frowning at a message on his iPhone. The time he’d pedalled straight past Everett outside Tate Modern when they went to the opening night of the Rothko exhibition. Moments, memories, little snapshots when Tejendra seemed in another world entirely.

A common thread held all those moments of strange together.

‘You know the double-slit thing?’

‘What? The experiment?’

‘The classic experiment. That’s what Dad said. The classic experiment that shows that reality is quantum. It starts just asking what light is made of, is it a particle or is it wave, and it’s so simple, just light and shadows. But when you get really close in, really up tight and detailed, it’s not one or the other. It’s both and. Both and neither. He really wanted me to get it, to see how it worked. He’d explain it to me again and again. It’s not the particle going through two slits at the same time, it‘s it going through one slit in this universe, and through the other in another universe.’

‘When was this, Everett?’ Paul McCabe held his mug in two hands, watching Everett over the top of it like a clever bird. He took a sip of tea.

‘Back just after school started again. I mean, we always talked about physics and stuff, but just all of a sudden he really needed me to understand it. Maybe it was going into Year Ten. And you know something? I did understand it. I saw how it worked, I knew what it meant. I understood the Many Worlds Theory.’

‘Now you know what Richard Feynman said, Everett.’

‘“I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.”’ Everett held Paul’s McCabe’s gaze.

The scientist looked away. Nothing was ever direct with Paul McCabe. Everett had been enough times to the department to see how he worked with his staff: a suggestion here, a hint there, a glance. ‘But what if I do?’

‘You’d be the greatest physicist of your generation,’ Paul McCabe said. ‘Or any generation, I think.’ He set the tea mug down on the table without so much as rippling the surface. He slapped his hands decisively on his thighs.

‘Well, I’d best be going. Just to say, this is a dreadful time, dreadful, and everyone at the department wishes you all the best, the very best. It’s not knowing, that’s the worst bit. The worst. I’m sure it’ll all work out all right, Everett.’

He stood up, straightened the coat he had not taken off.

‘Thank you, Laura. If there’s anything any of us can do to help.’

Paul McCabe turned at the front door. Behind him the rain slashed in silver horizontals. The evening’s evil weather had deepened.

‘Oh yes, Everett, one last thing. Your dad, did he give you anything recently?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a memory stick, or a data DVD, or even a file transfer?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’ Everett felt Laura behind him. The cold wind from the street got under the Christmas cards, lifted them, sent them fluttering to the ground.

‘Well, as long as you’re sure.’ Paul McCabe turned up the collar of his coat. ‘Oof. Dirty ould night. Everett, if you do get something from your father, would you be so good as to let me know? It may not make any sense to you, but it might to us. It could help. You will let me know, won’t you? Thanks. Good night, Laura.’

He pulled the door hard against the wind.

‘Well, what was that about?’ Laura asked. ‘I always thought he was a strange little man.’

That was what that was about, Everett thought. Those last two questions. The rest was just polite games.

The visitor had left almost all his tea.

4

How Everett had missed the ping from the drop-box: he had been trying to identify Paul McCabe’s soft voice at the front door. He hadn’t used it much recently anyway: file swapping at school had gone quiet since Aaron Leigh got a threatening letter from Viacom’s lawyers. But there was the button bouncing up and down on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. A file was waiting. A touch took Everett to his drop-box on a server in Iceland.

‘Everett!’ Laura had this way of putting an emphasis on the end of his name and going up in tone when she wanted him to know she was exasperated. Everette. ‘Lights out. School day tomorrow.’

‘Okay, Mum.’ It was nothing to knock off the light and dive under the duvet to read by screen glow. It reminded Everett of when he was a small kid, face lit by screen-shine, the duvet propped up like a tent by his clunky old netbook turned up on its side like a proper book, the display switched to vertical, watching the Doctor Who reruns on iPlayer. It had always been best on winter-storm nights like this, with sleet slashing across the windows and the wind rattling the gutters. Down under the duvet had been another world then. Everett-world.

There was a single folder in the drop-box. Infundibulum.

No sender information in the check box. Date: 8 p.m. this evening, as Everett was sitting across a table from Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan in Belgravia police station. Size: thirty gigabytes. He opened the folder carefully, ready to back out should anything computer-eating spring out. Inside were a data folder, an executable and a note in Notepad. It didn’t look like a scam. Malware liked to disguise itself as a game or an update. Malware disguising itself as anti-malware was as clever as it got.

This just sat there, a big obvious executable. Everett flicked up a clever piece of software he’d traded from Abbas in school. It tracked IP addresses. From that he could identify the sender. Abbas’s software came up blank. The address had been been made anonymous. Something like iPredator, Everett thought, a Swedish site that encrypted IP addresses and kept them safe from prying eyes. This was starting to get exciting.

Nothing else for it. Everett clicked the download button.

There was no save or run option. The executable installed as it downloaded. The screen went crazy with dozens of green timer bars, filling in the blink of an eye, unpacking and unfolding into new icons and menus. Data was downloading from the drop-box as fast as the wireless link and the house broadband could handle it.

‘Whoa, whoa,’ Everett said, trying to click close-boxes.

It was fast, too fast even for him. This was a full metal assault on Dr Quantum.

‘Everett? Are you still on that computer?’

Say nothing. Admit nothing. Everett tried to catch the hurtling installation panes. For every one he hunted down, trapped against the edge of the screen and closed, a new one opened. The screen went dead.

‘No,’ Everett whispered, filled with dread that he had truly killed his computer.

Dr Quantum blinked, then rebooted. There was a new icon on the desktop, front and centre. A single white tulip.

Infundibulum. Everett breathed out, a long, slow sigh.

‘What are you?’ Everett breathed. He tapped the icon twice. The tulip blossom unfolded into digital petals. The screen filled with moving translucent veils of light, folding around each other, merging like slow waves breaking, passing through one another, spilling off sprays of ghostly silver pixels. Everything was movement and change. As soon as Everett began to grasp a pattern the banners of light morphed into something unpredictable and new.

Everett thought of dragonfly wings, eerie jellyfish, translucent flower petals, the clouds of interstellar gas you saw in photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, ghosts of ghosts. He thought of the shimmering, flickering curtains of the Aurora Borealis high above the Arctic night.

Then he saw the scale, a hair-thin cross at the centre of the screen. It drew three dimensions: left to right, down to up, front to back. A small palette of tools hovered at the edge of the window. Everett picked the magnifying glass and zoomed in on the horizontal axis. At each level of magnification the images were the same: veils of light, like wings, or angels, or the glowing tendrils of vast space gods. In and in: the same. It looked no different. Big patterns were made of smaller patterns were made of tiny patterns. It was veils of light all the way down.

He’d seen this before. It was when he was a kid. He’d been on the home computer when he’d opened a program because he’d liked the look of a word: Mathyka. It sounded like a book of spells or a gateway to a magic world. It had opened up a gateway, not into a mystical realm but into forever. Everett now knew that the black beetle-like object at the centre of the screen surrounded by halos and streamers of brilliant colours like lightning bolts was called a Mandelbrot set. He could program one – it was easy.

He’d seen that the bolts of colour that cracked off from the points of the black beetle-thing contained little black specks in them. When he zoomed in one of those specks, it was another little black beetle, complete with coloured haloes and lightnings, complete with specks, that when he zoomed in, were black beetle shapes, with haloes and lightning bolts and specks that became beetles with …

In and in and in and in. He had a scream-dream that night. He was falling through the dark eye at the centre of the Mandelbrot set, falling through a lightning storm of colours and black eyes that opened into whole new Mandelbrot sets, on and on and on.

‘How far does it go?’ he’d asked his dad.

‘All the way. It never ends.’

This wasn’t a Mandelbrot set, though he could see now that it was built from that same Mathyka software that Tejendra used to model his theories of how the universe worked. This was …

‘Infundibular,’ Everett whispered, in the screen-light, under his duvet, with a mid-December storm gusting and howling around the eaves. He remembered where he’d heard that world before.

Tejendra had been a late convert to Doctor Who. He became a fan after he had a place of his own, where he could watch without Laura shaking her head at the geekiness of it all. It was all right for kids, but for grown men … After a Saturday game, or a wander up the Lea Valley, Everett and his dad would sit down and watch the show while their latest culinary creation evolved on the hob. ‘Infundibular,’ Tejendra had said. ‘That thing, that police box. Bigger on the inside than the outside. It’s easy in maths, having things that are much bigger on the inside than the outside. Now, if they were really clever, they’d make it properly infundibular, which is, the further you go in, the bigger it gets. There’d be a smaller box inside that box, but that box would be bigger on the inside than the one containing it, and inside that one, a smaller box that was even bigger inside and so on, all the way down, so that by the time you got to the centre, it would be smaller than an electron but inside it would be bigger than the entire visible universe.’

Infundibulum. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

There was no doubt in Everett’s mind about who had left the anonymous folder in his drop-box. Neither was there any doubt that this was what Paul McCabe had been asking about in his parting question. He had tried to make it sound so off-hand, but it was the only reason he had come to the house. Sudden fear knotted at the base of Everett’s stomach. Paul McCabe knew about this Infundibulum, and it was important to him. Did he know what it was?

To Everett it was eerie mathematical patterns sent by his father to him and him alone. To Paul McCabe it was important enough to drive an hour and a half around the M25 to slide it in as a casual aside. Did he not have access to it? Had Tejendra not wanted him to have it? Had Tejendra not trusted his own department head with it? Was Everett the only one Tejendra could trust with it?

Everett clicked down the silent, swirling hypnotic ghost-patterns. He went back to the drop-box. The file had been uploaded at eight. Tejendra had been driven away in the black Audi at six. Everett was sure that whoever kidnapped him would not have handed him a laptop and said, Sorry, we forgot, go on, please upload that file of abstruse mathematics.

He remembered the attached note. Four words: For you only, Everett. No name, no signature, no greeting or sign off. For you only, Everett.

Thoughts, theories, suspicions swept Everett up like a strong current. He knew this state of mind too well, when he seemed to think without thinking, ideas and connections and possibilities scampering away from him like ferrets escaping from a sack. It was usually when he read a line in a book or on a blog, or the real world surprised him, in the stop-start-stop rhythm of traffic jams up Stoke Newington High Street, or the patterns the starlings made as they flocked and swooped over Hackney Marshes. His thoughts exploded outwards like a firework. He understood something about the way the world worked.

Tejendra must have set the file to automatically upload.

But he couldn’t have known that this was the day he would be kidnapped. He must have set a dead-man’s switch.

If he didn’t enter a code, most likely at a set time every day, the Infundibulum folder would be uploaded. The folder would go to Everett. Not to Laura, or his friend Vinny who had the next season-ticket seat at White Hart Lane, or any of his colleagues or students at the university, not even to Colette. Not to Paul McCabe. To Everett. His dad must have suspected that something like what had happened could happen. He must have suspected that he was in danger. Danger of kidnapping, Everett wondered, or something worse? He wished the thoughts would stop galloping through his head. He wished they would stop whispering things he didn’t want to hear, showing him things he didn’t want to imagine. When had his dad planned this? How long had he lived with the fear of the men following him, the black car? Had it been before he and Laura split up? Parents kept secrets inside secrets, Everett realised.

‘Non-nuke,’ Everett muttered under his breath. ‘He doesn’t build atom bombs so he’s not important. As if.’

The bedroom felt huge and dark and under siege. The glow-tube decorations turned his jacket, hung on the back of the door, into killer attack bot from hell. For the first time since he was a small kid, Everett felt afraid in the dark. Eyes in every corner. Monsters under the bed. There could be a black car outside, remotely scanning the room for every keystroke and tap he made on Dr Quantum’s interface. Sleep would never come this night. Everett waited until the line of light from under his mum’s bedroom door went off, then slipped out from under the duvet and went silently down the landing. He knew the location of every creaking board and noisy stair. He clutched Dr Quantum to his chest. He couldn’t leave it.

He’d never be able to leave it. Even as he opened the fridge to rummage for cheese slices and yoghurt drink, he kept one eye on the tablet on the kitchen table. He hugged it to him as he called up a Modern Warfare Black Ops duel on Xbox Live. He couldn’t concentrate. His reactions were Dad-slow. His ass got kicked again and again, but he kept playing and playing, dying and dying.

In the morning Laura found Everett asleep on the sofa with the Xbox humming and the Christmas-tree lights blazing, Dr Quantum pressed hard against the side of his face.

5

The police came round for breakfast. Victory-Rose was milk-moustached and chocolate-bearded with Coco Pops. Chris Evans was rattling on the radio. Everett was fuzzy and muzzy from bad sleep but he knew it was police at the front door even before they rang the bell, briskly, twice.

Their street-light silhouettes behind the glass were too close together, one tall, one small, one man, one woman.

Police and Mormon missionaries stood like that. Everett scraped the last of the Flora out of the tub and spread it on his toast. Low-fat spread melted strangely, separating into globules of fat and water.

‘Freezing out there,’ DS Milligan said. ‘High pressure must have come in in the night. I’d give yourself a good half-hour extra on the school run. Might even get a white Christmas. Is that coffee? Any chance?’

Everett poured him a Tottenham Hotspur mugful. Leah-Leanne-Leona sat down opposite Everett.

‘Have a seat, why don’t you?’ Everett said. ‘Have you found him?’ Victory-Rose frowned at these big people in their dark coats bringing cold into her home. She might burst into tears at any moment. Laura sat down, positioning herself behind the cereal packets to hide her vest top and shameful saggy trackies.

‘Sorry, Everett,’ Leah-Leanne-Leona said. Everett sized her half-smile, her screwed-up pig-eyes, the little kick of her foot. You really, really hate me, Everett thought.

‘We have had a look at the photographs on that memory card you gave us,’ Moustache Milligan said. Laura turned the radio down. ‘Is there some of that toast going? You couldn’t stick on a couple of slices?’

Laura got up to drop two slices of wholegrain into the toaster.

‘You wouldn’t have white, would you?’ Moustache Milligan asked.

‘This is a high-fibre household,’ Laura said firmly.

‘I’ll need it back,’ Everett said.

‘What?’ Moustache Milligan said through coffee.

‘The memory card.’

Leah-Leanne-Leona slid a transparent vinyl CD sleeve across the table.

‘We’ve got everything we need off it. We had a good look at your photographs on our image enhancement software. Would you like to see the prints?’

She set her briefcase on the breakfast table, making room between the cafetiere and the milk carton. She took out a big glossy high-resolution print of the number plate.

‘We ran a trace on the number. It belongs to a Mr Paul Stefanidis from Hounslow. He supplies Cypriot goods to restaurants and corner stores.’

‘So?’

‘It’s hardly likely your Dad was kidnapped by an eastern-Mediterranean grocer.’

‘They can clone plates. Ringers, all kinds of things like that.’

‘Everett, this is Mr Stefanidis’ car. He drives an Audi. He was driving up the Mall at the time you said – you did photograph his car. He was on his way to a dinner of the London Cyprus Business Forum.’

‘What are you saying? I made this up?’

The toast sprang up. Everyone started at the sudden noise. Laura scooped the two slices on to a plate and set them down in front of DS Milligan.

‘Ah, lovely. Any butter? I know it’s not supposed to be good for you, but that spread stuff just tastes chemically to me.’

‘We’re a polyunsaturate household,’ Laura said. Milligan noisily scraped half-fat spread from the freshly opened tub across his toast.

Leah-Leanne-Leona produced another glossy photograph, set it on the table and turned it around to face Everett.

It was his parting shot of the back window, the three bodies framed in it. Three backs of heads, all dark-haired.

Three upper torsos, all clothed in dark fabric.

‘This isn’t right,’ Everett said. ‘Dad was in his bike gear. He was wearing his high-vis rain jacket. It was bright yellow.’