Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  ‘And in return …’ Everett said.

  ‘We only want to study the Infundibulum,’ said the Empress of the Sun. Everett knew that mild, reasonable tone too well. His mum had always used it just before she asked him for something he did not want to do.

  ‘If they can learn our language before they even meet us, that’s as good as giving it to them,’ Sharkey muttered.

  ‘What do we do?’ Everett whispered back. He could feel the weight of every eye in the Hall of Presence on him.

  ‘Everett, that’s not my decision.’

  ‘You’re the officer in charge here. The adult.’

  ‘The Infundibulum is yours.’

  ‘You were the one would have given it to Charlotte Villiers to save the ship.’

  ‘Yes, I would. I would always act for the good of the ship. And it’s clear to me what the good of the ship is. But the Infundibulum is yours. You must decide. “Choose this day whom ye shall serve.”’

  ‘But if I give them the Infundibulum …’

  ‘No one said it would be easy. Decide, Everett. The Empress is waiting.’

  There was a way of standing, a way of walking off the pitch after you had lost a game, a way of holding yourself, that Everett had learnt. You are small and shrivelled inside, but you focus on every muscle to make you tall and proud. The hall was vast and filled with powerful and dangerous aliens; he was far beyond the edge of all Known Worlds, stranded on the biggest engineering construct in the multi-verse, before the shining throne of a ruler who could make the sun itself dance for her amusement; but by the Dear, he was not going to walk the Walk of Shame.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ Everett said in his loudest, clearest voice, ‘I am honoured to share the Infundibulum with you.’

  21

  The knock on the antechamber door was sharp and clear. Three raps.

  ‘Enter.’ Charlotte Villiers applied the last precise touches to her make-up. Her eyes widened in surprise at the figure that came through the open door. A flicker, no more. The mask of cosmetic perfection betrayed nothing.

  ‘Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting you,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘Have you come to gloat? Schadenfreude is such a grubby little emotion.’

  ‘A dozen deaths are not a thing to gloat about,’ Ibrim Hoj Kerrim said. He was dressed for the Heiden winter: thick gloves, scarf knotted tight around his throat, the collar of his brocaded coat turned up. In his right hand was a heavy cane. Its silver knob had produced the sharp knock on the door. From the solidity of the knob and the obvious weight of the cane, Charlotte Villiers guessed a hidden purpose.

  ‘Swordstick?’ she said. She turned to Ibrim Hoj Kerrim. ‘Do you think I’m that much of a threat to you?’

  ‘We all face a greater threat,’ he said. ‘I come to offer you my support. A full session of the Praesidium must be an intimidating prospect.’

  ‘It’s nothing compared to the Jiju,’ Charlotte Villiers said. She straightened her attire, adjusted the set of her hat. ‘Veil up or down? Up, I think. It shows openness. Your support is welcome, Ibrim.’

  ‘I will back up whatever you tell the Praesidium.’

  ‘I shall tell the Praesidium the truth.’

  ‘Will you tell them how you alone of your entire squad came back from the Worldwheel?’

  ‘Are you accusing me of abandoning my soldiers? Of cowardice, Ibrim?’

  ‘That would be dishonourable. You do, however, have a keen sense of self-preservation. I will say that I sanctioned the operation. I will also swear that the soldiers were an Al Buraqi unit, and not your private Earth 10 army. You have informed the next of kin?’

  ‘McCabe is looking after that,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘What’s your price?’

  ‘My price is the vigilance and security of the Plenitude of Known Worlds, nothing more.’

  ‘Oh come on, man!’ Charlotte Villiers flared with anger. ‘Say it: you want my resignation from the Plenipotentiate and the Security Council.’

  ‘The Praesidium had already suggested that,’ Ibrim Hoj Kerrim said. ‘I persuaded them that you had been a good and faithful servant of the Plenitude. Special threats call for special circumstances. Personally, I want to keep you where I can see you.’ His grip tightened on the sword-stick. ‘God’s mercy on you, Charlotte.’ Ibrim Hoj Kerrim tipped the ferrule of his cane against the jewel of his turban, a farewell gesture. The door closed heavily behind him.

  Do not imagine that pretty sword will save you, Charlotte Villiers thought. Cowardice. She shook with rage. The Villiers did not forgive such insults. How dare that smooth, oily Buraqi suggest that she had abandoned her squad to their deaths to save her own skin. She had made a terrible but correct decision. Someone had to bring the information back. Someone had to warn the Plenitude. How the Plenitude might defend itself was not her concern – her alter Charles was already consulting the Thryn Sentiency on the far side of Earth 4’s moon. Even the Thryn might not be able to withstand a full-assault Jiju invasion of the Ten Worlds. If only she had the Infundibulum. For if it was everything she suspected, even the Jiju were chaff in the wind before its power. Her power. Again she trembled with rage at Ibrim Hoj Kerrim’s presumption. Accusing her of cowardice.

  I will deal with your insult in time. And it will be direct, and it will be personal.

  Another knock at the door, this one discreet and polite.

  ‘Madam Villiers …’ a male voice began.

  ‘… the Praesidium is waiting,’ a second, almost identical male voice finished.

  ‘I am ready.’

  Veil down, she decided. For her entrance at least.

  *

  The twin ushers swung open the double doors. Charlotte Villiers walked between them and up the short flight of wooden steps into the council room. She stood at the centre of a horseshoe of box-pews, banked up tier upon tier like a vertigo-inducing lecture theatre. Every pew was occupied, the twins of Earth 7 pressing close together, the periwigs and quizzing glasses on sticks of Earth 5’s delegates, Earth 2 turbans and lace headpieces, Earth 6 silks and elaborate hairstyles.

  ‘Charlotte Villiers …’ a woman’s voice announced.

  ‘… Earth 3 Plenipotentiary to Accession Applicant Earth 10,’ her twin concluded.

  Charlotte Villiers surveyed the amphitheatre as the last Praesidium members took their places. Yes, the veil was a good idea. She could watch without being watched. She saw Ibrim Hoj Kerrim sit down among his E2 colleagues and slip off his coat and unwind his scarf. He gave her the briefest of nods. Paul McCabe was high up in the Sojourners’ Gallery, among the carved cherubs that squabbled on the ceiling. No sign of the Harte woman. Charlotte Villiers waited until all eyes were on her. This is a theatre, not of dreams, but of nightmares, and I shall give you such drama as you never imagined.

  The silence was total.

  Charlotte Villiers lifted her net veil. She looked up at the rows of faces.

  ‘I come with the worst possible news,’ she said.

  22

  The Rentokil van had sat outside the school for two days before anyone noticed. Then Mr Culshaw had peered through the windows and within half an hour another van had arrived from the company, and shortly after it a police car. By now it was break and a small crowd had gathered.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Noomi declared. ‘Drank his own rat poison. In the back. He was starting to smell. That’s my theory.’

  Everett M had fought Nahn shape-shifters and Victorian zombies, but Noomi’s taste for dark weird stuff still surprised him. They had been on their third Homework Date. No homework had been done, or would ever be done, Everett M suspected, but he was allowed to walk home with Noomi, as long as he wasn’t in school uniform. Or anything she might be embarrassed to be seen with. She had given him a couple of websites to check for fashion if he was too wimpy to go into a real clothes shop. No snog yet. It would come.

  ‘Right you lot, back to your classes,’ Mr Culshaw shouted. ‘The bell’s gone. Nothing to see here.’

&nbs
p; The Rentokil people had forced open the back of the van. Noomi tried to get a look inside before going back to the art room. Ryun and Everett M went to biology.

  ‘Um,’ Ryun said. Everett M had noticed that Ryun had started saying that at the start of every sentence he said to him, as if Ryun was about to apologise, or was uncertain, or had bad news to break. Since the night Everett M told him the lie that was a truth, Ryun had been different with him. It was as if Ryun was watching himself – he was still friendly with Everett M, made jokes, talked about games and movies and comics and football, but it was as if he was checking everything he said, guarding everything he thought. Every word, deed, thought had an ‘um’ in front of it. ‘Um, Ev … is this something to do with you?’

  ‘I didn’t kill a Rentokil man.’

  ‘I know that, just, um … those rats.’

  I have a theory about those rats, Everett M thought. But I don’t want to tell you and you don’t want to know it.

  ‘Not every piece of weird shit is connected to me,’ Everett M said. But this one was. He had been certain of it since the night the rats fled from the alley behind his home at the mere flicker of his Thryn power. The Battle of Abney Park 2 had been just that – a battle. The war against the Nahn was not over.

  ‘Um, are you dating with Noomi again after school?’ Ryun asked.

  ‘It’s homework.’

  ‘It’s so not.’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘Have you, um?’

  ‘Snogged her yet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He wouldn’t. There wouldn’t be a homework date at all, though the thought of not seeing her curled up on a coffee-shop sofa, comfortable and casual in a way he never could be, cutely weird, her hands dancing as she told him things things things, made him feel sick with wanting. This afternoon he would become once again Everett M Singh, cyborg agent of the Plenitude of Known Worlds, and go in search of a missing pest-control man.

  The police were winching the pest-control van on to the back of a tow truck.

  Everett M had a word now for all those ums and hesitations and uncertainties he saw in Ryun.

  Scared.

  *

  Scared.

  It had taken Ryun a sleepless night to identify how his feelings had changed towards his friend.

  Scared.

  The taxi had dropped him home. His mum had believed the lie about going to a friend’s and eating there. Stacey was on the Kinect again with her friends in pink and Dad was out at his Tuesday night D&D game, which, even to Ryun, had always been a geek too far. He hadn’t heard a word anyone had spoken to him, his Facebook page was a jumble of random posts and pictures of people taken at odd angles, the television and radio jabbering with stuff that made no sense. His head was full full full of what Colette Harte had told him. Or rather, what she hadn’t told him. Every one of his buts she had cleverly turned back on him.

  She was scared too.

  Stay away. Here be dragons. Things humanity was never meant to know. Who could resist a Keep Out sign?

  All that night thoughts and imaginings rattled around his head. Each time he reached the edge of sleep, a fresh, darker thought would wake him up with a start. Sometimes I don’t know him at all, he had said to Colette. He’s like a totally different person.

  What if he was?

  The thought jolted Ryun wide awake. His phone read twenty past three.

  Once brought to mind, the idea would not go away. Parallel universes, parallel yous. Everett had gone to a parallel universe, yes, but someone else had come back. An alternative Everett. A cuckoo in the nest. The perfect secret agent. Identical in every way. Not quite every way. The stories didn’t match up. The scars that weren’t there before. The little differences in personality.

  At three thirty in the morning it was the only thing that made sense.

  Another thought jolted him like an electric shock. What had happened to the real Everett?

  Had Colette Harte being trying to warn him that this Everett was a parallel-universe double, an alternative-Everett? Feed him enough doubt to make the guess? There was danger here. If the cuckoo-Everett ever suspected that Ryun knew he was not the real Everett Singh, he was in terrible danger indeed.

  He had to know.

  Since then, scared, and tired. He had never been any good at acting and now, with Everett/not-Everett, Ryun had to pull off the trick of acting on two audiences. Ryun had always hated acting. It had always been obvious to him that it was just some ordinary person dressed up and pretending. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief. Now he had to make someone else believe his act, as if his life depended on it. The first audience was everyone, including his family. He had to pretend that he didn’t know Everett had been to a parallel universe for Christmas and could summon up an inter-dimensional magical airship. The second audience was everyone and cuckoo-Everett. No one could ever see that he suspected this Everett was a parallel-universe doppelgänger and secret agent of one of the Dark Forces that Colette Harte had hinted at. All the time, everything he did, everything he said, acting. It was dishonest and it was never-ending and it was the most exhausting thing Ryun had ever done. And he wasn’t sure he was doing it very well.

  There was a third audience. That was Everett if he really was Everett, his oldest and best friend – not in a BFF way, understand; guys didn’t do that: the real Everett would be puzzled and hurt by his friend going weird and cold and distant on him, when he needed Ryun most.

  Ryun hated acting all the more. His world was simple and honest and open.

  Scared, tired, vigilant. He had decided that night that he would watch Everett. Watch without being watched. It was not so hard now that Everett had been distracted by Noomi Wong. She was quite a distraction. Ryun had always thoughts of girls theoretically: theoretically you were supposed to fancy them, theoretically they fancied you, theoretically you dated them, but in Ryun’s life they had remained just theories, distant, impressive, but unattainable, like amazing super-planets around distant stars. In any other situation he would have been hurt that Everett had so easily dumped him to see Noomi, talk to Noomi, do little dates that weren’t really dates with Noomi, meet up with Noomi, drink Vietnamese coffee whatever that was – sounded disgusting – with Noomi. But it drew his attention, and, ignored, Ryun could go about his mission, finding out the truth about his best friend.

  23

  So dspointd, Ev.

  The text beeped in on Everett M’s phone and he felt ten kinds of guilty. Guilty that Noomi was so excited about meeting him that afternoon. Guilty texting her it would be really good seeing her. Guilty hiding himself away at the end of school so Noomi would not find him. Guilty imagining her waiting and waiting at the Turkish minimarket where they met. Guilty about the excuse he texted her: Srry family thng cum up cant mke it. Guilty at her disappointment. Guilty seeing her and Gothy Emma cross the end of the lane where he was hiding and go off together. Guilty at having to lie to her so early in the relationship – if it even was a relationship. Whatever it was, it was not the kind of thing between two people where they could and should lie. Guilty at having to lie to her at all.

  That was only nine kinds of guilty.

  Ten. Guilty at keeping secrets from her, from Ryun, from Laura, from everyone.

  He lingered in the lane that led to the old bike sheds that no one used any more – everyone came on the school run now, apart from Weird Kid Jasper. The name was enough of a clue. There was a corner that the smokers used. He stood among cigarette ends and opened up his Thryn senses. Once again he dived down between the electromagnetic jabber of Stoke Newington, identifying and screening out the minicab radios and the wireless networks and the police and the dubstep pirates and the delivery trucks. The individual Nahn nanomachines must communicate by radio waves, Everett M had deduced: the buzz he picked up on his Thryn senses was them relaying instructions and information. And there it was: subtle, but there c
ould be no mistaking: the sound of the Nahn thinking.

  Everett M shivered: a sudden stab of fear. The Nahn scared him. Scared him deep, scared him true. Even as he gleefully blasted them to black slime and rotting Victorian bone in Abney Park, he had been afraid. The Nahn took everything you had and everything you were and made it theirs. He couldn’t imagine what would be worse – to know that, or not to know it, to be just a mindless drone with a bulb of throbbing black Nahn-stuff for a brain. And they were clever. Scary clever. Of course his Nahn double on Earth 1 had known he would break his promise to them. The possessed dog, the zombies of Abney Park – they had been Big Obvious Shoot-me Enemies. The real Nahn invasion was taking place in creatures that were everywhere, went everywhere, small and smart and nimble. The rats. ‘You’re never more than ten feet from a rat,’ his dad had said, one day when they were all out for a walk on the Regent’s Canal and a very young Everett M had seen a rat swim across the canal, climb out on to the towpath, look at them while it cleaned its whiskers and then vanish into the long grass. If you’re never more than ten feet from a rat, you’re never more than ten feet from a Nahn.

  He’d though he was smart. Stupid. Stupid.

  He should tell Charlotte Villiers. She could bring the technological might of the Plenitude down on the Nahn. But that would mean confessing to her the deal he had made to bring them to this Earth. It would mean her revealing that she had sent him to quarantined Earth 1. She would agree, she must agree, there were bigger issues here than her plans and schemes. The whole Plenitude was in danger. But what she might do afterwards, to him, to his family, scared him even more than the Nahn.