Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  He hadn’t noticed it slip from his chopsticks.

  Colette smiled. ‘Yes, me. This morning I had breakfast in a cafe on Earth 7. The Plenitude is moving its headquarters from Earth 3 …’

  ‘That’s where Everett was!’ Ryun exclaimed. ‘The one with no oil.’

  ‘And with airships,’ Colette continued. ‘Wonderful airships. The Plenitude is moving offices from Earth 3 to Earth 7. I only got back on this world at lunchtime. I was just back in my office when you called. The Plenitude is big and it’s powerful, but it’s just a handful of worlds among the billions and billions of the Panoply. That’s the multiverse, Ryun, the whole shebang. All the parallel worlds. And there are worlds – forces, powers, species – that are a threat to the Plenitude – and to our world as well. But the Plenitude has its factions and groups and parties, and they don’t always work together. And some of them are powerful and dangerous. And some of them want what Everett’s dad has and what he gave to Everett.’

  ‘The map of all the worlds.’

  ‘The Infundibulum. It’s a very powerful weapon in the wrong hands. We have to keep it safe. Everett is in danger, his dad is in danger, I’m in danger. If I told you everything, you’d be in danger too. The fewer people who know, the better, Ryun. Ignorance is safety.’

  This wasn’t right. Wasn’t right. Maybe it was a stupid, naive thing, to go asking big questions without thinking about whether he could take the answers. Maybe he trusted people too much and assumed everyone was a Good Guy. But her answers had answered precisely nothing. Colette had just turned his questions back on him. Trust me, it’s for your own good was never an answer.

  ‘But he’s a mate. He’s my friend.’

  Colette laid her hand gently on his.

  ‘Be a mate.’ She gripped his hand gently but firmly.

  ‘Be there with him. Don’t push him. All those “buts” you have – don’t say them to him. Keep them to yourself. But look out for him. Be a friend.’

  The bill arrived, immaculately folded. Colette slipped a card on to the little lacquered tray.

  ‘Are you a friend, Colette?’

  Ryun looked her in the eyes. He never felt comfortable doing that, but what he saw in her eyes he could believe.

  ‘He doesn’t know it yet, but I am. I always have been. Ryun, you can call me. If you see anything strange, if you get worried about him, call me. Be my eyes, would you?’

  Ryun nodded. Colette tapped the screen of her phone.

  ‘I’ll get you a taxi home. It’s a long way back to Stokie.’

  ‘Thank you. And for the sushi.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Ryun slipped on his shoes and waited on the bench seat by the door for the minicab to arrive. Colette slipped out into the night. He watched her purple hair disappear into the crowd of muffled-up winter pedestrians. She had told him nothing, but he had learnt a thing. He had been concerned before. Now he was afraid. Terribly afraid.

  *

  She didn’t hear him. She didn’t see him. A cold wind, gusting sprays of piercing rain, had blown up in the Georgian streets and squares of Fitzrovia. Colette pulled up her collar and put her head down and so she did not see the man get up from his table in the window of the Cypriot cafe opposite and step out into the street. He kept six pedestrians between him and her. He was careful to look as cold and angry with the weather as everyone else but she would not look behind her. She was an amateur at this and he was a professional. She turned on to Tottenham Court Road. He kept his distance but did not let her out of his sight. She swiped her Oyster card through the gate of Warren Street tube station and she didn’t see, didn’t hear, didn’t suspect the follower seven bodies behind her. He passed his hand over the scanner and the clever little chip embedded in his fingertip fooled the computer and let him through.

  Cold winds also blew sleet through the alleys and canals of the elegant city of Heiden, on Earth 7, and a man sat back in his comfortable leather chair by a coal fire, closed his eyes and watched his twin a universe away stalk Colette Harte across London.

  18

  Charlotte Villiers snapped the revolver on to the figure flying up into the folds of Everness’s gas cells. Snapped it away. The bridge lay before her, and the prize. She had a finer revenge for Anastasia Sixsmyth, when her squad armed the demolition charges and blew Captain Anastasia’s ludicrous gasbag to rags and scraps of shipskin around her.

  The Jiju. They had not been part of the plan. That they were here could only mean one thing: they sought the same prize she did. Ibrim Hoj Kerrim’s nightmare: the Jiju, a trillion of them, with a sixty-five-million year head start on humanity, and a million open doors into the Plenitude. Worlds would burn.

  Beams of light slashed across the airship’s gloomy interior from above, from left and right, stabbing up from below. The Jiju were opening holes in the hull. Cries. Screams. Human voices. Her squad was engaging the Jiju and losing. The Infundibulum was everything. Revolver in hand, Charlotte Villiers ran for the head of the ship. Would no one shut those alarms off?

  ‘Ma’am, ma’am, they’re coming through the walls!’ Sorensen’s panicked voice in the earpiece. ‘They’re everywhere!’ A stutter of automatic fire, on the radio and from deep down in the belly of the ship. A cry, quickly cut off. In the edges of her vision, Charlotte Villiers saw the darting, dancing movement of Jiju warriors. The Dear, they were fast. Again the ship lurched and threw her against the railing, almost toppling her over. A falling object hit the walkway with a hard crunch. A head. A human head. Charlotte Villiers fought down the reflex gag. The headless body lay on the edge of the topmost catwalk. Blood dripped through the mesh. No time for horror. Only a few metres more to the companionway down to the bridge.

  ‘Sorensen!’ Dead air on the radio. ‘Zaitsev! Report!’

  ‘I’m on my own. They’re cutting us apart.’

  ‘McClelland, Akauola, Chambers?’

  ‘Gone.’

  For the first time Charlotte Villiers knew the cold helplessness of panic. She did not know what to do. No. Command is command: give an order. It doesn’t matter whether it is right or wrong, good or bad. Do something. She thumbed the communicator bar on her collar.

  ‘Everyone to the forward companionway. We will rendezvous, take the Infundibulum and get the hell out of here.’

  *

  ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you.’

  Flashes. Flying: lift cells like big full moons above her. Arms locked around her. Loud noises, bangs, shots. A hard landing that made her cry out.

  ‘Come on, Sen. Come on, my love.’

  Holes opening the skin. Light pouring in: and more than light. Flashes. That crying sound: it’s her own voice. But over under inside more than everything: hurt. Hurt outside: every inch of skin and muscle a wall of pain. Hurt inside: things broken there. Hurt in the heart: the Villiers polone had smashed her like a cockroach. Hurt everywhere, so big the only place to get away from it would be to die.

  Flashing in and out of black. A voice: ‘Come on, my love, my dilly, my dorcas. We’re almost there.’

  World shaking. Nothing to hold. Tumbling down stairs: hurt on hurt. Crying with pain. Black is good. Black is warm. Black is no pain.

  ‘Come on, my love, stay with me! Sen, stay with me!’

  Black/no black. Black/no black. Don’t go to the black. Don’t go. Don’t!

  Door banging open. ‘Mchynlyth! Mchynlyth! First aid!’

  And silence. So sudden, so sharp she forced herself up out of black. Forced eyes open. Great window. Out there. Out there. Tentacles. Living/machine. Twisting/twining. The ship in its grasp.

  Black.

  And out. She hurt, so she was alive. On her back on the deck. Looking up into Mchynlyth’s brown face. Hiss, spray. Cool … and no pain.

  ‘Easy, easy. Jesus Krishna; that bitch, if I ever catch her …’

  The ship shook again. Behind Mchynlyth, the tentacles opened. At the centre, a steel squid.

  ‘What …’
<
br />   ‘Shhh.’ Shots. Figures running along the tentacles. ‘This’ll hurt a wee bit.’ Mchynlyth’s hands on her shoulder, then a wrench and more pain than the universe could hold. Black.

  Into Ma’s black face,

  ‘Sun. Gun. Sungun.’

  ‘Sen, don’t say anything. You’re hurt bad.’

  ‘Sungun. Earth 1. The black things …’

  ‘Captain.’ Mchynlyth’s voice. ‘That thing Everett did. It could get those bastards away from the ship. Sen, polone, can you work it?’

  ‘Saw what he did.’

  ‘Sen, no. Mchynlyth, help her.’

  ‘It’s the ship!’ Mchynlyth’s voice blazed with anger.

  ‘Mr Mchynlyth, control your anger.’ Captain Anastasia’s voice was as cold as Mchynlyth’s was hot. ‘It’s my ship. And I will save my ship. But right now, my daughter needs me more. Help her, Mr Mchynlyth.’

  A pause, a hiss of defeated rage.

  ‘Aye, ma’am.’

  A crash so huge it jolted her out of the warm black. The bridge door was down, smoking. Jiju on the bridge. The deck beneath her lurched. The ship was moving. Mchynlyth was shouting. Ma was shouting. The Jiju were singing. But loudest of all was the black, and she answered it, and went deep down into it and let it cover her over.

  *

  Charlotte Villiers saw the soldier die in front of her. He clattered down the companionway to arrive breathless on the platform at the end of the main spine, gun covering the angles. Then the air between him and her curdled like heat-haze, and three Jiju were there. Each held a staff in her hand. One spread her long fingers wide and stabbed them towards the soldier. The globe at the tip of the staff dissolved into a dozen flying metal shafts that ran the soldier through and through. The Jiju curled her hand and the shafts vanished and reappeared on her staff.

  The Jiju turned towards Charlotte Villiers.

  She held the gun steady. She was the Empire Games Small Arms gold medallist, but even she could never take all of them.

  Time slowed to a crawl. Every moment was frozen. This was what death was like, time frozen, one final moment that lasted forever.

  A Jiju extended her staff towards Charlotte Villiers.

  Behind the Jiju, Zaitsev pounded up the companionway.

  It was all over.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Charlotte Villiers said. She held Zaitsev’s eyes as she hit the relay on her arm. The Einstein Gate opened. She could still see the look on his face – betrayed, abandoned, left to die – as she dived into the white light.

  19

  The Sunlord ship turned in the air over the slash in Crechewood. There was no mistaking the site of Everness’s crash-landing – she had torn a path of snapped wood, torn branches, headless trees through over a kilometre of forest canopy. Everness herself: not a sign. She had vanished.

  Looking down into the empty space from the observation bubble in the left hull of the Sunlord sky-catamaran, Everett was gripped by a terrible fear. Everness gone cleanly, completely, without a trace or a mark: exactly how it would look if she had made a Heisenberg Jump.

  Sen had watched everything he did. She was observant, smart, a clever copycat. She didn’t need to understand how to calculate jump points; all she had to do was pull them out of the Infundibulum’s memory and hit JUMP. Marooned on Diskworld. She would never do that. Not Sen. Captain Anastasia would never order it. Unless the ship was faced with something so terrible, so total, that the only option was to make a Heisenberg Jump. ‘Unless’: such a sneaky, mean little word.

  *

  Crechewood had shaken to a boom high in the air. Sharkey reached by instinct for his guns. That’s a sonic boom, Everett thought, but you won’t ever have heard one. Sharkey’s world had no jets, no rockets, no missiles, nothing that travelled faster than the speed of sound. Moments later the Sunlord skymaran arrived over the clearing. It was as nimble as a dragonfly. Everett could not tell what made it fly. Nothing as ordinary as lift gas or wings or jet engines. There’s some physical principle at work here, Everett thought. It’s not sci-fi magic keeping it up. Not antigravity either. That was just another kind of magic, one pretending to be science. Like time machines and transporter beams. But it was impressive, the way the machine folded up like an origami bird to descend down the shaft between the trees.

  Kax’s halo was rippling silver-green: excitement, Everett guessed. The skymaran touched down light as a kiss. Two Jiju descended the ramp between the twin hulls. At the sight of the humans their crests rose, their haloes snapped into a ring of spikes. Kax sang a short song; the Jiju folded their hands together in a gesture that, to human eyes, looked half-prayer, half-worry: to Kax, then to Everett and Sharkey. Sharkey stowed his guns and returned the greeting with a bow. Everett had never learnt any lessons in reptile etiquette.

  ‘We will go and find out what has happened to your ship,’ Kax said. The Jiju stood aside to let her and the humans board the skymaran.

  These are the first adult Jiju you’ve ever seen, Everett thought as Kax stalked proudly past. This is as new to you as it is to me. But it’s all in your halo: the wisdom of all your hatch, and the wisdom of all the Jiju.

  ‘This is some bona kit,’ Sharkey whispered as the flyer lifted. Through the port-side viewing blister Everett could see shy scavengers sneak out of the forest to pick and tear at the carcass of the dead Jiju. So end princesses, he thought. Above the trees the skymaran unfolded into flight mode. Kax took a proud position in the transparent bubble at the front of the starboard hull. At the centre of the craft, where the hulls joined, the Jiju crew moved their hands over a hovering projection of Crechewood. A gesture sent the skymaran over the forest canopy. It came to a halt over the Everness crash site without any discernible shift in acceleration.

  ‘“Thou art a stranger, and also an exile,”’ Sharkey whispered. Everett stared at the empty space where the airship had lain. He did not know what to do. He was out of ideas. His cleverness had come to an end.

  The Jiju pilot sang something. Kax was in the other hull but her voice came clear to Everett and Sharkey.

  ‘We’ve picked up four contacts on our scanners: three skyqueens of the Genequeens and one human airship.’

  ‘Everness,’ Everett whispered. He hadn’t been abandoned. He wasn’t alone, marooned. The ship was still here, and the people he cared about. It had been taken by the Genequeens, but that was a solvable problem. He would think of something. He felt sick with relief. In the opposite pod Kax heard him whisper and glanced over. Everett hardly recognised her. Physically she was the same Kax, minus a few centimetres of crest, plus a few cuts and scars, but everything was different. It had been the same for the guys who had been in fights at school. Before, they had been his friends, his school-mates; after, it was as if the fighting had stained their skins. There was violence on them. They seemed less human to Everett.

  ‘Well, let’s get after them and visit some righteous wrath on their reptile asses, begging your pardon, ma’am,’ Sharkey said. ‘I mean, Your Highness.’

  ‘This is a Sunlord royal yacht,’ Kax said. ‘Those are three well-armed skyqueens. They would cut the bones out of our bodies.’

  ‘We can’t leave them!’ Everett shouted. The Jiju pilots’ crests shot up.

  ‘I won’t,’ Kax said. ‘I owe you, Everett. But for you, I would be me dead in the crechewood. Instead, I am a princess.’ Kax held out her hands. The deck opened, machine arms reached out, unfolded, draped Kax’s body in a richly worked tunic and a heavy jewelled collar. ‘Clothes do make the woman,’ Kax said, admiring herself. ‘One needs to be properly dressed to visit my mother.’

  *

  Jiju faces. Nostrils flickering, eye-membranes blinking. Close enough to feel their breath against her cheek and taste its sweet, musky smell on her tongue. Sen cried out and surged up, hands slapping, beating them away. The Jiju reeled back, fluting in alarm.

  ‘Easy, easy.’ Hands on her shoulders. Jolting pain. She remembered Mchynlyth taking the shoulder in his
hands. He swore constantly, softly, deeply, angry beyond any anger at what Charlotte Villiers had done. ‘This will hurt.’ He did something to her shoulder so painful it had been bliss to drop back into unconsciousness. She had put it out, broken it, done something. No, she’d done nothing. That polone, that Villiers, she had done it to her. Sen felt dirty, abused, violated. Someone else’s hands had worked their will on her body.

  The middle one of the three Jiju lowered her staff towards Sen’s face.

  ‘You get your witchy shite away from that wee polone!’ Mchynlyth yelled. His face was tight with rage, the spit flying from his mouth.

  ‘Easy, easy.’ Ma’s voice.

  The staff ended in an amber sphere the size of a fist. The sphere touched her forehead. And Sen saw …

  Cities woven from forests. Skyscrapers made from living trees. Vehicles, factories, flying machines that weren’t completely machine, but half living. Wooden temples pouring out torrents of water and Jiju hatchlings. Prairies grazed by rainbow-coloured bird-dinosaurs the size of houses. Huge ocean waves that were sea creatures. Living clouds. All to a million voices singing and piping in her head.

  ‘Ah!’ Sen gasped. ‘Oh!’

  Then the amber globe was lifted away from her forehead. The visions died, the song ended.

  ‘Are you well?’ the central Jiju said.

  ‘Aye, she’s only got cracked ribs, internal bruising and a dislocated shoulder,’ Mchynlyth growled. ‘And concussion. She’s as right as ninepence.’ The Jiju ignored him.

  ‘You stole my language!’ Sen said. ‘Like …’ Like Kax, she had almost said. Sen shut herself up.

  ‘Like?’ The three Jiju cocked their heads to one side. Also like Kax.

  ‘Like magic,’ Sen said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her ma smile.

  ‘I’m Jekajek Rasteem Besheshkek,’ the middle Jiju said. It had her voice, her accent, her way of speaking. ‘This is Deddeshren Seveyamat Besheshkek …’ The Jiju on her right pursed fingers together and dipped its head – ‘… and Kelakavaka Hinreyu Besheshkek.’ The Jiju on her left repeated the gesture. ‘You are under the protection of Her Exaltation the Marquise of Harhada. Hold still, polone.’