Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  The three Jiju passed their staffs over Sen’s body. Their voices were like a conversation of birds.

  ‘The DNA is alien to us,’ Jekajek said. ‘There are limits to what we can do.’

  ‘Ma?’ Sen whimpered.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘Why, making her better,’ Jekajek said, blinking her eye-membranes. The staff tips unwound into streamers of golden dust that twined over Sen’s face, settling lower and lower until they flowed over her features like rivulets of liquid light.

  ‘What? No …’ They were up her nose, in her ears. Sen blinked as they wormed into her tear ducts. A gasp, and they were down her throat. She choked and sucked them into her lungs, gagged and they slipped into her stomach. After the moment of panic, of the horror of being invaded, there was no pain. Waves of warm pleasure pulsed out through her body, like the ripples meeting when many stones were dropped into clear water. ‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘Ah. Uh! Oh! Oh! Oh … !’ From her lungs down through her body, her kiki, down her thighs and out through her toes. Up through her heart, each valve pulsing glowing heat, like a steam engine; into her throat like the warm, warm brandy Sharkey gave her from his hip flask on the cold Baltic runs. Down her arms, like strength in every muscle. Her fingers tingled. She felt like she could play a piano.

  ‘Oh the Dear oh my word oh …’

  Spasms of warmth inside. The Jiju stood upright and the streamers of gold snaked out of the orifices of her body and wound around the staff heads to once again form amber spheres.

  Sen felt drunk. There was no pain. No pain at all.

  ‘Oh wow.’ She tried to get to her feet, wobbled. Captain Anastasia caught her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sen was still woozy from the treatment. Then, ‘No!’ The cough came up from the very bottom of her lungs, a wracking, retching heave that dragged up all the clogged buried stuff deep down and wrapped it into a ball of vile phlegm. ‘It’s black!’ Sen yelped at the gob that came up from her lungs on to the deck.

  ‘I’m no cleaning that up,’ Mchynlyth protested. ‘Just so as you know.’

  ‘Your respiratory system was badly congested with carbon soot,’ Jekajek said. Years of flying through the Smoke Ring, the circle of coal-fired power plants that fed London’s burning addiction for electricity. Smogs and soots and smokes and vapours. Sen gulped, once, twice.

  ‘I can taste the air!’ She licked her lips. ‘It’s like … douce, bona, clean. Now I knows what Everett Singh was cackling on about.’

  ‘We also found a congenital deformity in one of your heart valves,’ Jekajek said. ‘It could have limited your life in later years. We repaired it. However, there was an imbalance we did not heal – the levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin in your brain that were causing irrational behaviour. We believe they are connected with human emotions of attraction and attachment to the young male Everett Singh. If you want, we can remove them.’

  What were they saying about her heart, and Everett? Didn’t matter: beyond the great window was something amazing: steel tentacles. Sen rested her hands on the glass. Everness was clasped in the embrace of three large flying devices – her mind went first to the word machine, but no machine ever moved so gracefully, with so much life. Armoured tentacles studded with suckers held the hull firm. Jiju images flashed through Sen’s brain, of lashing tentacles in a vast vat of dark, oily liquid: the Genequeens built machines that were half alive, living creatures that were half machine. But in her head cries rang out: those tentacles thrashed in pain. It hurts, don’t it? Sen thought, looking out at the huge armoured body of the flying machine/creature. Every day, every hour, every minute. It never stops.

  And she hurt in a place Jiju medical technology could never touch. But Charlotte Villiers had touched it; Charlotte Villiers had stabbed a fist into the heart of it. Her violence had told Sen: you are nothing, no one, you have no value, you are just a thing and I crush you under my foot. Sen knew she would go on hurting there, every day, every hour, every minute. It would never stop. Until I cut your heart out, Sen whispered under her breath. And that’s an amriya, polone.

  20

  The cities went on forever.

  Everett had lost all sense of distance and time, leaning against the observation bubble at the front of the flyer’s left hull, hypnotised by the view unrolling beneath him. From the vantage of Everness, caught in the high branches, Everett had not been able to see any end to Crechewood, but now he saw that it was only a park – a city square, even – in endless farmlands punctured by mile-high towers of glass and metal and monstrous stepped pyramids the size of entire Earth cities, so tall their summits reached outside Diskworld’s atmosphere. Aircraft in their hundreds darted like swarms of flies. The Alderson disk could hold a billion such cities and still be mostly wilderness and empty space. The Sunlord royal yacht had accelerated smoothly to supersonic speed, but the dull sameness of the farm, pyramid-city, farm, pyramid-city made Everett feel like he was moving but standing still at the same time.

  He had never felt so far from home.

  ‘That was fun. Not as much fun as having a rectal boil lanced, but close.’

  Everett had not heard Sharkey come up behind him. For a tall man, the American was light on his feet. He had been engaged in the corner of the yacht that the crew used as their toilet facilities. The Jiju did not share human ickiness about bodily functions. As long as it was hygienic, it did not matter that it was in full view of the pilots’ station. Everett worried about that. Everett worried also about what they would get to eat. Everett worried every second about everything.

  ‘I think they must do it with electromagnetic forces,’ Everett said. ‘I mean, this thing is about as aerodynamic as a brick, but what speed is it doing? Well over supersonic, but you don’t feel a thing. There must be something around us, making us more streamlined, that we can’t see. Some kind of force-field thing and if they can do that, maybe they can also use it to fly with, or maybe like magnets: if they had room-temperature superconducting magnets, they could do almost anything with that: magnetic levitation and everything, and if they can draw power through the ground – if there’s like a superconducting network through the whole Diskworld …’ Everett broke off. ‘I’m talking really fast, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yup,’ Sharkey said. ‘And a lot.’

  You don’t have to try to explain everything, Captain Anastasia had said when he came upon her repairing the wreckage of the High Mess. He knew his mouth got fast and full of ideas when he was scared. It was the one thing he could control, the science.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just, everything. Everyone. The Captain, and Sen … and Dad. I feel like … I should be doing something, and I don’t know what. I don’t know what to do, Sharkey.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t have to do anything, Everett,’ Sharkey said. ‘Maybe this time all you have to do is trust that other people can get themselves out of trouble without you. Sen, Mchynlyth, the Captain – the Jiju have got themselves a passel of trouble there. They’ll be fine and dandy, Everett. The Captain looks after her own. Let me tell you a yarn.

  ‘I believe I’ve intimated to you that I am a no-good sixth son of a sixth son – it’s a Southern superstition: seventh sons of seventh sons have an angel in them, but sixth sons of sixth sons are marked for hell. The sixth son of a sixth son of a sixth son, should such a being ever exist, well, he’d be the Antichrist himself.’

  ‘The number of the beast,’ Everett said.

  ‘Correct, Mr Singh. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.” You would do well to heed the word of the Dear. Me, I quote it but I don’t practise it. Don’t even much believe it, truth be told. I was in Stamboul when the Captain found me, down and out in Eminönü with five thousand Ottoman lira on my head. It’s a fine city, Stamboul, a true navel of the world, but it’s no place to be when every hand has a k
nife in it. I’d been carrying out contract work for the Sublime Porte. The kind best done by foreigners who can be got out of the country discreetly. Except that my employer decided that it was cheaper just to issue another contract – on me. They came close, in an alley in Sultanahmet. I saw the knife in time. I sent that one to the bottom of the Golden Horn. God is great, but I knew I wouldn’t get a second chance. And I was tired … I shipped over to Haydarpasha – you’ll never have seen the airships over the hills on the Asian side of the Bosporus all shimmer and gold in the dawn light. There is no sight like it. From the little I’ve seen of your world, Everett, it seems a poor place. Flavourless. Pastel-coloured. Passionless. No offence.

  ‘The Captain knew what I was the moment I walked into the bar, but she never said a word. Never raised an eyebrow. I’d heard she was looking for a weighmaster and I’d worked enough on the Atlanta–Mejico lines to convince her I knew what I was doing. She took me in and weighed me, just like I weighed you up, sir. Decided I was worth my weight in ballast water. And do you know, we cast off and ran out over the Bosporus and the minarets of the mosques with the winter light on them and Asia at my back and my face set to Europe, and I cried, Mr Singh. I cried like an infant. And I cried like a man – and that’s some deep crying, like something tearing inside you – because I realised I had been sick, heartsick, of all the things I had done, and the man I had become. Sick of myself. Sick for a long, long time. Cried like a little tiny child, Everett. The ship gave me a new family.

  ‘But those Ottomans take their contracts serious and collect their dues. I had made the Baltic run a dozen times, sailed the Atlantic to the three Americas, to Iceland, St Petersburg, High Deutschland, and I got used to the work, I got comfortable. I got lazy. I didn’t see them. I never thought … The knife was within an inch of my kidneys when the Captain jumped them. She fought like a lion, sir, a lion. Four of them, and me laid low and bloody, but she beat them down. She put them to the dirt and ground them in. The fight was all but over by the time Mchynlyth arrived; he is quite insane – sometimes that works for us, sometimes it works against us.’

  ‘He seems very angry,’ Everett said. ‘He has what we call anger-management issues.’

  ‘He has reason,’ Sharkey said. ‘But this is the point. I picked myself up and wiped off the blood and the Captain never said a word. Not a question about who these people were and why they wanted to extract my liver with a hooked Ottoman blade. She knew. She’d known from the moment I’d arrived in the Hezarfen Celebi Bar spinning her my little lies. Maybe that’s why she took me in – she’s always had a soft spot for waifs and vagabonds. She took you in.’

  Everett shivered, remembering how poorly he had repaid that trust.

  ‘Sen, Mchynlyth – he’d been her chief engineer long before I trolled along … me.’

  ‘Mchynlyth was in the navy, right? I remember him saying he was an engineer on the Royal Oak. Why did he leave?’

  ‘Love,’ Sharkey said. ‘Why else does anyone leave? But it was love His Majesty’s Royal Air Navy didn’t recognise. Nor the Word of the Dear, for that matter. They gave him a choice: give up the person he loved or be cashiered. He chose love.’

  ‘Why would the navy—’

  ‘Think about it, Everett.’

  ‘Oh,’ Everett said. And: ‘Ah.’

  ‘We’re a ship of lost souls,’ Sharkey said. ‘Every omi and polone of us an orphan of some kind. And I’m including the Captain. She saw a ship die, burn up right there in the sky.’

  ‘She told me about the Fairchild.’

  ‘She never stops seeing that. No, the Captain has an amriya with herself, and that’s never give up on anyone who needs her. Which is me saying she didn’t give up on me, and I’m the vilest of sinners: a liar and an assassin. And she won’t give up on you. You don’t need to make everything right to look good to her.’

  ‘Mchynlyth,’ Everett said. ‘Wow. I never thought, he was, you know …’

  ‘You’re still saying too much, Everett,’ Sharkey said. ‘You don’t need to talk. “A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.”’

  But silence is scary, Everett thought. Things get in where the words aren’t. Memories fountain up. Throwing the shotgun to Kax. The suddenness with which the battle of the princesses turned to killing. Real killing. Everness ploughing into the forest, pierced again and again. The brigadier hitting him hard in the stomach, hitting him like an adult. Opening up the sun gun on Imperial University, feeling power and joy so dark it hurt. The look on the face of that other Tejendra as the Nahn tentacle punched through him and he knew he was worse than dead. His enemy, his alter, the anti-Everett coming towards him through the snow of Abney Park Cemetery. His dad pushing him out of the way of the jumpgun. The look on his face – a moment then gone. Thing upon thing upon thing. One hammer blow after another. No time to recover, to be able to do anything but react. No end to it. Thing after thing after thing. Hurt after hurt after hurt. Pain after pain after pain.

  ‘I hate this!’ And this was the time to speak. The Jiju at the helm looked up, blinked their eyelids. Kax in her princess finery glanced over from the opposite hull. ‘I want my dad back! I want Sen here. I want the Captain safe, I want the ship back, I want my mum and Victory-Rose. I want home. I didn’t ask for any of this. All I did was look for my dad. I didn’t ask him to give me the Infundibulum. I didn’t ask him to build a Heisenberg Gate and discover all … you. I could have lived my life without you, any of you. I didn’t ask for any of this. I’m tired and I don’t know what to do and I’m scared all the time. All the time. Every second every day. I wake up in the morning and there’s two seconds when I’m warm and I think I’m home and then it crashes down on me and I’m so scared it’s like being sick. I am so tired of being scared.’

  ‘Me too, Everett,’ Sharkey said. ‘Me too.’

  And for a moment there was silence, where no one needed to say anything. Then Everett saw Sharkey’s mouth twitch and his eyes harden and Everett knew Sharkey had seen the next thing they would have to cope with. He followed the weighmaster’s gaze and his heart sank. Their resources would be used to the very last drop.

  A huge oval of darkness lay over the endless city of the Jiju. The skymaran raced at full speed towards it. The narrow oval shape was foreshortening; as it drew closer it opened into a circle: a hole in the world. Everett made a grid out of his fingers and held them to the glass. He guessed it was twenty, twenty-five kilometres across.

  No, not a hole in the world, Everett realised. A hole through the world, from one side of the Alderson disk to the other.

  The skymaran dropped to weave between the pyramid-cities. The hole was like a storm front, a storm from beneath, coming up out of the world. Then the skymaran flashed over the edge and plunged into the hole. Everett braced himself against the glass. The speed was thrilling, terrifying. Beneath his feet the walls flashed past, studded with balconies and terraces, walkways and windows, lit by a long arc of sunlight which Everett could see visibly moving up the wall as the distant sun dropped through the hole at the centre of the world. In front of him, darkness. He was seeing the night sky of the other side of the world. Down in the darkness, at the centre of the cylinder, was a stationary thunderstorm, four bolts of lightning arcing from the wall, meeting in a blazing knot around something at the centre of the hole. Something huge. Something like a floating mountain, with another upside-down mountain fused to its base. A floating double mountain from the dreams of some mad Gothic architect: by the flickering lightning Everett saw fantastical turrets and spires, soaring vaults and arches and buttresses; pinnacles and minarets and orioles thrust out over the bottomless drop. A Gothic castle, over a kilometre across, floating at the centre of a never-ending lightning storm.

  ‘That’s so Warhammer 40K,’ Everett breathed. Whistling in the dark. Somewhere, guys were painting armies of orcs and space marines and that comforted him. He saw Sharkey nod, sharing in the wonder, and the fear, t
hough he could not possibly have understood the reference. Looking at Sharkey, his face lit by lightning flickers far below, Everett understood that it was the same for the American. It was the same for everyone on the ship. Scared all the time, with every breath. It made him feel not better, but equal. Brothers in fear. The skymaran screamed into the bottomless pit. Everett felt off centre, disconnected, as if gravity was holding him less strongly. Of course. The centre of the pit was like the centre of the Earth; the masses above and below balanced each other. Gravitational attractions cancelled each other out. The dark castle floated in freefall. The skymaran swooped in around filigree tower tops, spires that looked spun from the finest ebony spider silk and Everett felt his feet leave the floor. He glanced over at Kax. The lightning cast her face in shadows and angles he had not seen before. This is as new to you as it is to me, Everett thought. Her halo flickered with reflected glimmers. It gives you the knowledge, but that’s not experience. This is you finding a new home.

  Narrow bridges, thin as knife blades, bound the city-mountain to the wall of the cylinder. The skymaran looped under and around the bridges; Everett saw Jiju bustling along them, crowding and pushing and quite oblivious to the absence of safety railings. But if you fell, you wouldn’t fall very far. Gravity would pull you one way, then the other. You would bob up and down, in the same way as the sun bobbed up and down through the hole at the centre of Diskworld, until you came to rest beside the same bridge from which you had fallen.

  The Sunlord pilots brought the skymaran up and folded it into landing configuration. It dropped lightly on to the end of the slender stone buttress that arced out from the main body of the castle over the void. Everett made the mistake of glancing down as he stepped from the aircraft. Down, down, way down, the bottom of the world was filled with stars. He felt Sharkey’s hand firm on his arm.