Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

‘You saw Colette? Man, I wish you hadn’t done that.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me anything. She said it would be dangerous.’

  ‘It is. I am.’

  ‘I know.’ Everett M had explained the politics of Plenitude and the Order and Charlotte Villiers and her alter Charles and who their agents were on this world and who could be trusted and who couldn’t, but it wouldn’t all fit in Ryun’s head. He reckoned Everett M didn’t fully understand it himself.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ Everett M said suddenly.

  ‘You got the Nahn,’ Ryun said.

  ‘Yes. No. Maybe. Not the Nahn. Yes, the Nahn. Do I tell Charlotte Villiers? If I do, what happens? She’s got my mum – my real mum, back there. And what about my mum here? What about Noomi? You. Us. I don’t know what to do!’

  For all his powers, Everett M was powerless, Ryun realised. It’s the superhero problem. You can blast the energy of the sun from your hands, but that doesn’t battle starvation. You can throw skyscrapers into orbit, but that won’t beat creeping corruption. You can read the innermost feelings and desires, but that’s no good against homophobia. Superpowers make everything personal. Batman versus Joker. Fantastic Four versus Galactus. The Big G might be the Devourer of Worlds, but in the end he’s just a dude. Beat him and the problem goes away. But the real problems aren’t like that. You can’t solve them by hitting them. The real supervillains were the ones who had smashed Everett apart and rebuilt him and taken him away from everyone he knew and loved and sent him here and expected him to be their warrior. He had no power against them. They were people in suits who met in rooms and decided things. Destroy one and another would take her place.

  ‘I want it to stop!’ Everett M shouted.

  ‘Shh, Ev, keep it down, my folks …’

  ‘I don’t want all these things inside me,’ Everett M whispered. ‘I look at them and I hate them. They make me want to throw up. They filled me with … dirt. I never feel clean. I never feel warm. I never feel safe. I want me back. I want this all to end and I want to go home!’

  ‘Everett, Ev … it’s all right.’

  ‘I don’t have anyone. Do you understand that? There’s not anyone who knows, understands. I hate him, that other me, your friend. I’m here, I’m all this, because of him. But I can’t hate him … he’s me. I don’t have anyone. Every day, I’m alone. I can’t do anything, I can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Everett, I know.’

  ‘No, you don’t. No one knows. No one can know.’

  ‘I know about you. I know you.’

  When he had suspected this Everett was an alter, Ryun had looked for every possible difference from his Everett. Now that he knew the truth, Ryun saw the similarities. They were both clever but kept it hidden, both shy around other people, both brave when they had to be. But knowing that his Thryn tech gave him the power to do almost anything he wanted gave this Everett a flicker of arrogance and confidence. Ryun liked that. The other Everett would never have had the balls to take Noomi up on her Homework Date. The other Everett would have found a way to hack the Everett’s Hot Ass page and take it down rather than endure everyone rating his cute butt. The other Everett went home after football rather than sharing the shower with the guys. And the flipside of that confidence and arrogance was anger. Anger was the fuel that powered this Everett. Every time he opened those alien hatches in his body, every time he used his weapons, that anger boiled out of him.

  Ryun knew what he had to do. He had never done it before. It scared him. But now that the thought was in his head, it was the only thing to do. He shyly put a hand on his friend’s arm. Everett M tensed but didn’t move away. Ryun took a deep breath, then leaned in and put his arm around his friend. Everett M’s body was hard, and tight, and cold, and Ryun felt him stiffen and tighten further, then relax. Cold. So cold. The room was stifling but Ryun shivered. He felt Everett M shake.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Ryun said. ‘It’s okay.’

  30

  Charlotte Villiers had made herself comfortable in a chair in Mrs Abrahams’s office. Her bag was on the principle’s desk, her hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed demurely at the ankles.

  ‘Ms Villiers is taking you out of school,’ Mrs Abrahams said in the tone of someone whose authority has been simply and efficiently overruled, in her own office, at her own desk.

  ‘I’ll return him as soon as my business is done,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘Everett?’

  ‘Can I go to the bathroom first?’

  ‘I’d prefer if he used yours,’ Charlotte Villiers said to Mrs Abrahams with a small smile. ‘Security.’ The final victory. Abuse of the executive washroom.

  Everett M locked the door and whipped out his phone. Message: contacts: NOOMI: CANT DO CAFE – MSSNG DAD STUFF. COPS. Truth, honesty, caring: he hit all of Noomi’s points. Sort of.

  Message: contacts: RYUN: CV GOT ME. GPS ME. FOLLOW. His thumb hovered over the send button. What if Charlotte Villiers was monitoring his phone. She could do that. She should do that. If she was, then she knew about Ryun anyway. It got complicated when other people were involved: Ryun, Noomi. Laura, Victory-Rose. What did she want with him? Was it another off-world mission? He needed a witness, someone to notice, someone who knew.

  Send.

  A taxi waited at the school gate.

  ‘Where’s the Merc?’ Everett M asked.

  ‘I lost my driver,’ Charlotte Villiers said. She studied her face in the mirror of her make-up compact. Everett M noticed the wicked little gun in her handbag. He was meant to.

  ‘I thought we’d get some lunch,’ Charlotte Villiers continued. ‘Are you hungry? A decent lunch puts the day in proper order.’ The taxi driver negotiated the lunch-time traffic of Stoke Newington Church Street down on to Albion Road. Everett M glanced up at the front of Noomi’s house. ‘At least I no longer have to drag myself all the way up from that dank hole in the ground in Kent every time I need a chat with you. We’ve built a new gate, a little closer to the centres of power.’

  This world was Charlotte Villiers’ First Contact, but she had heard from the Accession Team that had brought Earth 9 into the Plenitude that politicians were surprisingly easy to manipulate. Bring them to the Heisenberg Gate and let them look through to what lay beyond. The realisation that their concerns and ambitions were less than an atom of relevance in the vastness of the multiverse gave them a proper sense of perspective – and their own importance.

  Charlotte Villiers snapped her compact shut. ‘The Plenitude is in peril.’

  That made Everett M stop slouching. She knows about the Nahn.

  ‘Your alter has betrayed us all,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

  Everett M’s heart started again. Your alter. Not him. Not him.

  Charlotte Villiers went on: ‘Your own world, my world – even this world. Every soul in the Ten Worlds is in clear and present danger. You’re intelligent so I don’t need to spell out much more than the bare bones. In our worlds, the dinosaurs became extinct tens of millions of years ago. Imagine a universe where that didn’t happen. Now imagine sixty-five million years of evolution. What are the implications of that?’

  Everett M’s head was reeling from the realisation that it wasn’t the Nahn. Thought was difficult. There was another threat out there? Bigger than the Nahn. What was she saying? Super-evolved dinosaurs? ‘They have a sixty-five-million-year head start on us.’

  ‘Correct. Twenty times the entire existence of humanity as a species. This is Big Time.’

  Traffic was stop-start, stop-start down Essex Road and along Upper Street.

  ‘Wait a moment though,’ Everett M said. ‘If they’re that advanced, why aren’t they here already?’

  ‘Good boy. Because they are aggressive and vicious – and divided. They are factional and warlike. Every time one of their factions gains an advantage, the others band together for a short time to destroy them before they are destroyed. Jiju civilisation has been built up and knocked down again thousa
nds of times. Tens of thousands of times.’

  ‘Jiju?’

  ‘I need to tell you a bit of secret Plenitude history. In the early days of the Plenitude – before there was a formal Plenitude and before the great quarantine – when there was only Earth 1 and Earth 2, E1 sent probes on a series of random exploration jumps. They mapped several hundred planes. One of them was the plane of the Jiju. We had to destroy that probe before the Jiju learnt too much from it, but we got enough information back to make sure that we never went near that plane again. Your alter’s search for his father took him there. And he has let the Infundibulum fall into the hands of the Jiju.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that if he had a choice,’ Everett M said.

  ‘Where has this sympathy for your alter come from?’ Charlotte Villiers asked.

  ‘He is my alter. I’m him, he’s me. I would never do that. Not unless it was life and death.’

  ‘As you say, you are his alter.’

  On to Pentonville Road, through heavy traffic. A cyclist in yellow high-vis came up on the taxi’s inside as the traffic lights at King’s Cross turned red.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘For lunch. The Praesidium is on high alert, though what we could do should the Jiju decide to invade, I don’t know.’

  ‘The Thryn.’ As he said the word, Everett M felt his implants strange and alien inside him, separate from his own flesh. ‘Madam Moon could stop them.’

  ‘We’re investigating that.’

  The full implication hit Everett M. Madam Moon, Earth 4, his home: ‘My mum, Vicky-Rose … Bebe Singh, Gramma Braiden!’

  ‘We will protect them as best we can, Everett. Have no fears about that.’

  Everett M would have jumped out of the cab in an instant, in a burn of fear and anger; run somewhere, anywhere, nowhere; shouted aloud what he felt to no one. But the little red door lights were on. The doors were sealed. He was locked in with Charlotte Villiers.

  ‘It’s imperative you stay here, Everett. If the Jiju invade, the real …’ Charlotte Villiers caught her slip. ‘The other Everett will come for his family. We need you to be ready for that.’

  ‘Mum, Vicky-Rose,’ Everett M said again.

  ‘The Order will do its best.’

  The cyclist pulled up on to the pavement and dodged pedestrians down to Gray’s Inn Road. A fleet of buses pulled in at the stop outside King’s Cross station. After days of snow and sleet, the sky was clear, a brisk wind drying the streets and sidewalks. Light glinted from the glass annexe to King’s Cross and the gaudy plastic signs of cheap Bangladeshi restaurants. St Pancras was like a little bit of Gotham dropped into north-east London. Everett M tried to imagine that blue sky filled with invaders: airships, star-ships, motherships, second moons, Death Stars; millions of shooty spacefighters. Tripod fighting machines. Giant city-stomping Godzillas. What did super-intelligent dinosaurs drive?

  ‘This isn’t real.’

  ‘It’s the most real thing there is, Everett. He will come. Whatever happens, be ready for him. No mistakes this time.’

  The taxi lurched on to Euston Road, turned left on to Gower Street.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Do you like Japanese food?’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘Your friend Ryun does.’ The taxi pulled up outside a small Japanese restaurant. A maneki-neko cat waved from a small window beside the door. ‘In fact, he should … ah, there he is.’

  The door opened. Ryun stepped out. He was in his school uniform. He looked small and pale and frightened. A man stepped into the doorway behind Ryun. He was short, a little chubby, his hair slicked down. He did not look comfortable.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Everett M asked.

  ‘We’re having lunch,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘With friends. We need to get a few things straightened out. Your friend Ryun is very loyal, but he’s let his curiosity get the better of him. He’s not very good at following people. He never thinks that someone might be following him. Not much of a detective. Pandora’s box can’t ever be closed again. That’s a pity. At least you’ve been discreet with your girlfriend – Noomi’s not her real name, surely – that says a lot about boys and who they trust, don’t you think? You see, I need to know that I can trust the people I work with. You, your friend Ryun, your girlfriend, Colette Harte – he’s been talking to Colette Harte. I’d advise against that. You see, we can offer protection, or we can withdraw it.’

  ‘You go near Noomi, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘You won’t, Everett. Don’t bluster. Do you see my colleague Heer Daude? He is an Earth 7 twin. I’m sure you learnt about them in school. Everything he sees and hears, everything he feels and thinks, is shared by his Earth 7 twin, Ebben Heer. Except Ebben Heer isn’t on Earth 7. Ebben Heer is on Earth 4, in north-east London. Roding Road, Stoke Newington. Number 43. You’re fast, Everett, but you’re not faster than quantum entanglement. Now, we know where we stand. Sushi.’

  31

  The Sunlords turned Everett and Sen into superstars.

  WELCOME OUR GUESTS FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE!

  They rode in a gossamer howdah on the back of a huge, ambling sauropod along the ten-kilometre royal road that spiralled down the inside of one of the enormous black ziggurats that Everett had seen from the flight in to Palatakahapa on the Sunlord royal yacht. Hundreds of thousands of Jiju lined the way, raising their crests in a synchronised Mexican wave of purple flashing into red into orange. Kax rode an ornate jewelled saddle far up the sauropod’s long neck, just behind the head. She raised a hand and her crest to the adoring thousands. It took hours to make the procession. Everett and Sen fell asleep against each other, curled up like kittens.

  OUR PLANESRUNNING ALIEN FRIENDS CELEBRATE MATCH DAY!

  They were given the royal box at the arena for some sporting event that played like basketball with ten hoops all around the court. Everett threw in the ball. A dozen hands rose to meet it. Body slammed and crunched against Jiju body. Kax went through a dozen changes of skin colour and sang an entire opera in twittering Jiju in her excitement, but Everett could not understand what was going on. He thought about the family seats in the North Stand at White Hart Lane, and talking about the game with his dad on his way back to the flat to try something new for Cuisine Night.

  THE MASTER OF THE MULTIVERSE AND HIS FEMALE COMPANION ENJOY CULTURAL ACTIVITIES OF GREAT SUNLORD PEOPLE!

  Ten thousand Jiju performed a long, elegant, intricate dance involving multicoloured fans, massive puppets on sticks and glowing auras of light among the great trees of a park at the base of the ziggurat city of Palapahedra. Each pyramid was a single building that was also an entire city – and they extended much further beneath the ground than they did above. Self-contained, self-maintained and self-powering, each housed one hundred million Sunlord Jiju. On the slow flight to Palatakahapa in the heavily damaged Everness, Everett had lost count of the number of black pyramid-cities in the horizon-less landscape. ‘Female companion, huh!’ Sen complained.

  APE-PEOPLE GO SAFARI!

  They went out on wave-skimming sky-sleds over a sea that was wider than any ocean on any Earth. Sen pinned her great hair back and wore her welding goggles and clung to the edge of the little raft with wild glee. Lower, faster, closer! she urged the pilot. The pilot spoke no English but understood her excitement. This small landlocked sea – by Worldwheel standards – was a reserve for a rare species of marine wildlife. Everett had seen computer simulations of sea creatures from the age of the dinosaurs – snapping jaws, long snake-neck, powerful flippers – but these dwarfed any of those monsters, dwarfed even the great whales of Earth, the largest creatures that had ever lived on those worlds. Flying animals, half-bird, half-pterodactyl, circled, hunting fish, when Everett saw dark shadows rise up below the surface. The water exploded in white foam and monster heads on long necks burst from the waves and snatched mouthfuls of ptero-bird. The pilot sent the sky-sled weaving in and out of the necks. Sen shrieked in delight.

  ALIENS MARVEL
AT POWER OF SUNLORDS!

  They were in a chamber in a chamber in a chamber at the very heart of the palace of the Empress of the Sun. Everett and Sen were guided along corridors and through locks and doors; each room they entered seemed larger than the one that contained it. Infundibular, Everett thought. Like a Tardis. In the centre chamber, at the very heart of the place, which seemed the biggest chamber of all, was a model of the Jiju universe. They stepped out on to a floating disc – gravity was so weak here every step took Everett a dozen metres – at the centre of which blazed a model sun. Around the edge of the disc stood Sunlord technicians at floating consoles. The technicians dialled down the sun-blaze until the humans could see the other objects at the hollow centre of the ring: a circle of hovering rectangular plates – each in reality must have been the size of Earth, Everett calculated – upright to the sun; and over the sun’s north and south poles, complex mechanisms in ghostly silver. Nothing physical could have existed more than an instant so close to the boiling surface of the sun: Everett reckoned they must use the same force-field technology that made their aircraft and palaces fly. The jets that move the sun, Kax explained, and Everett sensed her pride and power. This was her inheritance: the ability to make a star dance to her will. But I’ve done that too, Everett thought. He had punched a Heisenberg Gate into the heart of a sun and emptied its energy on to the Nahn nest in Imperial University in Earth 1’s London. He knew that what he was seeing was more than a model; it was a control system. A touch on one of those control pads could fire the star-jets and make the sun itself move. Geek-Everett should have been thrilled to the roots of each hair on his head. In that head was the knowledge that the Jiju were reverse-engineering the Infundibulum – his Infundibulum, the Infundibulum his dad had entrusted to him. Him alone. For you only, Everett. I’m sorry, Dad. I had to give it to them.

  Kax led them back out through the doors in the nested chambers, along the corridors. Everett moved close to Sen and whispered, ‘Can we stop this? I hate this.’