Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  ‘But you’d die with them …’ Sen said.

  ‘You wouldn’t be here,’ Everett said. ‘You’d be somewhere else. That was the bit that was missing from the Empress’s plan: you’d nowhere to go, no place to hide.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kax said. ‘And now the Empress my mother has what she needs to gain the final victory.’

  ‘The Plenitude,’ Everett said. ‘You’d go there. You’d invade, take over, wait it out for a few centuries or whatever, then jump back when the sun had died down and the whole Worldwheel would be yours.’

  ‘That is the plan.’

  ‘But in like a few centuries, we could learn enough to fight back against you. Maybe even beat you,’ Everett said. ‘You couldn’t risk that.’

  ‘No,’ Kax said simply, and the meaning was clear to all. The Sunlords would exterminate every human from the Ten Worlds. And Everett had given them the weapon to do it.

  No one spoke. There are no words when you have just heard the death sentence on humanity. Everett had given the Sunlords the axe to carry it out. It was too big, too hideous to believe. Kax, announcing the end of the world. It couldn’t be real. But Everett had never believed in belief. The universe didn’t care what people believed.

  Finally Captain Anastasia spoke. ‘Why are you telling us this? What do you think we can do?’

  ‘You have the original Infundibulum,’ Kax said. ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘The sun gun,’ Mchynlyth said, uncurling from his crouch like a street cat. ‘I told ye, I told ye to use it on them Gene-genies! Punch a hole clean through that thing; open up a gate in that there Sun Chamber and let them see what a wee taste of real sun-power’s like. Burn the mother out of the sky!’

  ‘We haven’t got the power,’ Captain Anastasia said quickly. ‘And we’re too close. We’d go up with it.’

  ‘Aye. And maybe that’s the price,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘All of them, for the five of us.’

  But Kax was roused. Her crest rippled, changing from green to purple. ‘Everett, what is this?’

  Everett did not answer.

  ‘Everett, sun gun?’

  Kax stepped close to Everett. She cocked her head to one side.

  ‘Everett, is this some kind of weapon?’

  Everett felt sweat roll along the line of his collar bone, down his ribs. He shot a glance at Captain Anastasia. She shook her head. Kax turned in a circle, facing each crew member in turn.

  ‘Are you keeping something from me? Is this a threat to my mother and my sisters?’ Kax’s halo shimmered silvery black. The halo-bots flashed into hooked blades.

  ‘No!’ Sen yelled. She held the Genequeen battlestaff sideways, two-handed, thrust it forward. The amber sphere sprouted spikes and flew from the head of the staff to hover in front of Kax.

  Kax hissed, dangerous and totally alien.

  ‘Sen,’ Captain Anastasia said, ‘get rid of that thing.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Sen said. ‘It did it itself.’

  ‘Sen …’

  ‘It does what I feel, not what I think!’

  Everness jolted as if it had fallen into a hole in the air. Everyone went reeling across the cargo deck. Everett hit a container cleat hard. A huge thunderclap shook the ship. Blue lightning crackled along the struts and spars.

  ‘Nobody touch anything!’ Mchynlyth shouted. The electrical display vanished. Mchynlyth sprinted to his engineering cubby.

  ‘We’ve lost the bottom half of my power connector!’

  Sharkey was at a porthole, peering through cupped hands.

  ‘We’ve lost more than that.’ His voice was steel-grim. ‘The palace. It’s gone.’

  33

  Starlings swirled in an ever-shifting cloud over Green Park. Low winter sun glinted from the windows of the vehicles on Piccadilly. Charlotte Villiers lifted her short veil and enjoyed the blessing of the sun on her face. People stared at her old-fashioned costume. Take a good look, slovens. See what it is to dress with pride and discipline.

  She turned to the peeling black door in the wall of dull red tile, slipped off a glove and touched her hand to the door. Locks clicked; the door opened inwards without a sound. Charlotte Villiers stepped through, and the door closed and sealed behind her. It would open only to a dozen hands in all the Ten Worlds of the Plenitude.

  A gust of musty, stale air threatened her hat. A train boomed far below, its noise amplified by the tunnels and shafts. Thousands of commuters rattled between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner every hour without realising that they passed through an entire abandoned station, walled up, shut away, forgotten. Down Street station, closed 1932. Reopened eight decades later to house E10’s second Heisenberg Gate.

  The elevator took forever to come. It was a cramped, rickety construction hoist – work was ongoing on old Down Street. The British government had set up base here during the Second Global War of this world’s twentieth century. Charlotte Villiers rode down the old lift shaft. What was it these Earth 10ers had with tunnels and trains? But it was much more handy than that dank hole under the English Channel. And so convenient for Fortnum & Mason.

  The elevator chimed, the safety barrier unlocked. The gate control was housed in a lower level of the shaft. Charlotte Villiers had requisitioned the Gate Command team that had overseen the disastrous mission to the Jiju Worldwheel. Keep one secret, keep a thousand secrets. The Jump Controller – Angharad Price (Charlotte Villiers had made sure to remember her name) – wore her sky-blue Earth 3 Gate Command uniform and forage cap. Her hair was tied back, her face and nails immaculate. Charlotte Villiers thought the look very smart and professional.

  ‘We’re just about to send Ebben Heer Daude back to Earth 7,’ Angharad Price said. ‘Will you be joining him?’

  ‘No, I want to go back to my own London for a while,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘This one dispirits me. It’s so scruffy and mean-spirited.’

  ‘I’ll set up the coordinates,’ Gate Controller Price said.

  ‘You have been invaluable to me, my Heers,’ Charlotte Villiers said. The twin agents gave a bow. ‘Enjoy your time together.’

  ‘We have missed each other …’ began Ebben Heer. ‘… terribly, terribly,’ Heer Daude said. Their voices, their hands, their faces, were drawn and thin and pale. Too much time apart. Worlds apart. Can the loneliness kill you? Charlotte Villiers thought, and for the first time wondered, What happens if one of you dies before the other?

  The control room filled with light. The Heisenberg Gate occupied the entire width of an old access tunnel that led from the lift shaft to the former platforms.

  ‘You are clear to jump, Ebben Heer Daude,’ Gate Controller Price said. The light faded. The Heisenberg Gate opened on to a jump-room in the Praesidium headquarters. The twins walked towards the gate – every footstep lighter, firmer, more eager. The gate opened, the gate closed.

  ‘Locking on to Earth 3 now,’ Angharad Price said. The light from the screens made her face severe and otherworldly. You are otherworldly, Charlotte Villiers thought. Literally. Have you see anything of this Earth, beyond the black door in the red wall? The irony is, it’s a faster commute home for you than for any of those poor fools on the Piccadilly line. Faster, but not shorter.

  Again the old ghost station shook to the pressure wave of a passing train.

  ‘In three, two, one …’ Angharad Price pushed forward the lever. The Heisenberg Gate lit up.

  And flickered.

  And went out.

  And lit again.

  And flickered. Dancing light cast insane shadows across the control room.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Charlotte Villiers said. Fear chilled her. She had never seen a gate do this before.

  Angharad Price’s eyes darted from screen to screen. She punched glowing buttons.

  ‘Something is interfering with the quantum-resonance field,’ she said. ‘This isn’t possible. It’s massive.’

  The Heisenberg Gate went dark. Screens blinked crazy with information.

  �
��I’m picking up a massive quantum displacement,’ Angharad Price said. ‘Something’s coming in. It’s off the scale.’ She looked at Charlotte Villiers. Her eyes were wide. ‘It’s right on top of us!’

  Tens of metres of London lay between Charlotte Villiers and Piccadilly, but she looked up, as if she could see through to whatever was unfolding over London.

  ‘This isn’t possible,’ Angharad Price said again. ‘Multiple Heisenberg events. Ten. Fifty …’ Screen after screen flashed red warnings. ‘Thousands. Thousands. It’s not just here. It’s every single world in the Plenitude. Twenty thousand … One million … Ms Villiers: two and a half billion jump-gates just opened.’

  34

  ‘There’re other aliens?’

  Everett M and Ryun sat on the park bench. Clissold Park was a good place to talk: open, public, easy to see friends who might ask, What you talkin’ about? Serious-faced girls with scraped-back hair jogged along the gravel paths. Middle-aged men in beanie hats flung tennis balls from ball-throwers for their dogs to catch. Single fathers wheeled baby buggies; kids swerved and dodged on BMX bikes.

  ‘They’re super-evolved dinosaurs from a plane where they didn’t get wiped out by an asteroid,’ Everett M said.

  Ryun pulled the collar of his puffa jacket up around his face. It was a cold day but bright, and Stoke Newington was making the most of the sunlight in Clissold Park. The taxi had left the boys outside Bourne Green School but they had kept walking. Mrs Abrahams’s office was on the street side of the campus. Everett M had used the tiniest flicker of enhanced Thryn-sight to check whether she had seen them walking past. She had. Everett M did not doubt that punishment would come. He could hunt down and exterminate nests of Nahn nanovermin, but he was helpless in the face of Saturday detention.

  ‘My life used to be simple,’ Ryun said. ‘Before, when you were, you know. Him. The other one. Do you think you got all the Nahn?’

  ‘I thought I had last time,’ Everett M said, stretching his legs out before him and sinking his chin on to his chest.

  Ryun sat up. His eyes were wide. He pulled a face. ‘I don’t feel good. I’m … I’m going to hurl.’

  He leaped up and went into the rhododendron clump behind the bench. Everett M tried not to listen to the retching. Ryun returned, wiping his mouth with a tissue.

  ‘Oh geez, that was like … green. I think that sushi was off.’

  ‘I don’t think it was the sushi,’ Everett M said. ‘I think it was the people. I used to love sushi.’

  ‘She didn’t actually threaten anyone. She didn’t actually say like, your Mum or Dad, they’re dead.’

  ‘She doesn’t need to. All she needs is that we know she’s absolutely, completely, serious. If she says a thing, nothing will stop her from doing it. She wants us to know there’s nothing we can do.’

  Ryun’s face twitched. ‘It works.’

  ‘She did it to me, Ry. She smashed me to bits and sent those bits to the moon and put them back together the way she wanted, and when it suited her she told me exactly what she had done.’

  Ryun huddled deeper in his quilted coat.

  ‘We’re in shit,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Neck deep,’ Everett M said. ‘Do you know why I hate her most? Because she’s laughing at us, because she knows we can’t touch her. We do anything, and our families get hurt. All these things I can do, but in the end there’s nothing I can do. People get hurt because of me.’

  ‘There is something you can do,’ Ryun said. ‘The real – the other – Everett’s mum and his sister. They need someone to look after them. Me, I walked into this because I’m too nosey, but they don’t know anything. They’re like, innocent.’

  Everett M pulled out his phone and got up from the bench.

  ‘Where you going?’ Ryun asked.

  Everett M was walking away, faster with every step. ‘There’s someone else I need to look after,’ he called back.

  35

  He saw her in the Mermaid Cafe with her friends, legs curled up on the old cracked leather sofa, with her Vietnamese coffee on the table. She was wearing an animal hat but made it look good and was frowning at something one of her girlfriends had said, all of which made her impossibly cute, but hot at the same time. Why did she have to look so cute?

  And I’m going to walk in and nothing will ever be the same, Everett M thought. Her friends made it more difficult but at the same time better. He would have witnesses.

  Aidan the dreadlocked barista nodded as Everett M entered. The bell on the door tinged. Everett M didn’t sit down.

  ‘Oh, Ev. No,’ Noomi said when the girl-chat finished. ‘School clothes. Points off.’

  He was shaking. He couldn’t speak. His heart felt as if it was made of plastic explosive and would blow up at the slightest tap. Nothing had ever been this hard or this scary. Nanotech zombie Victorian skeletons were easy.

  ‘Noomi, can I talk to you?’

  She slapped the cushion beside her.

  ‘Not … here.’

  Her eyes went very wide. She was fantastic and gorgeous and innocent. He was all the evil in all the universes. Everett M gestured for her to come outside. They stood in the glass porch. That was good. Her GFs would see everything.

  ‘You’re weird even for you, Ev.’

  ‘Noomi, I don’t want to go out with you any more.’

  ‘What? Everett? Are you on medication?’

  No, this was wrong: he was letting her answer. If she answered, if she argued, he would weaken. Be quick and cruel and a total enemy. Kill it now, kill it dead.

  ‘No, I’m not. Do I have to be? You just have to decide everything. Like I can’t do anything for myself. Like I have to be on medication. Like I walk in and when you finally decide to talk to me it’s Oh Everett, bad clothes, now be a good boy and sit beside me and talk to me.’

  ‘Can I point out that you wanted to talk to me?’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ Everett M said. ‘For once you say nothing. That’s the problem with you – you’re always saying something, you’ve always got some opinion, and it’s like so important that everyone knows it. Like no one else’s matters but yours always does. And can I point out: points? No points? I don’t need you scoring me.’

  ‘Everett—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Everett M shouted. Noomi flinched. Inside the cafe, Aidan glanced up. Everett M knew all the GFs had heard. ‘It’s always about you you you, and do you know? I didn’t see this for so long, but even that website, that was all about you. Who said you could take pictures of me? Who said you could talk about me? Like you just wanted me like a – doll you could dress up or something. Drag around and show off, like a bangle.’

  Everett M’s brain burned, his heart beat strong and hard. This wasn’t hard at all. This was so easy.

  ‘Everett, what is this?’

  ‘And another thing: you’re fake. Everything about you is fake. Noomi: what kind of name is that? Ooky-cookie girly name. Your real name’s Naomi. Naomi Wong. Fake name, fake clothes, fake fake attitude. Nothing about you is real.’ He spat the words out. There were more behind them: a torrent of words and abuse and spite. Noomi’s friends were all staring.

  ‘Everett. This is vile.’

  ‘You know? I don’t care. It’s you’s vile, with all your games and tricks and things I’m supposed to know and you get upset if I get them wrong but you’ll never ever tell me how to get them right. You’re bad, bad and fake and lame.’

  Her hands covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide in horror.

  ‘And because you always always always have to have the last word, I’m going now,’ Everett M said. ‘I’m gone. Shut up. Go away. Nothing you can say.’

  And he turned and he walked.

  ‘Everett!’ Noomi screamed after him. He kept walking. ‘Everett!’

  Safe. She would never come near him again. And so she would be safe from him, safe from Charlotte Villiers, safe from the Order that could reach across worlds to hurt and harm and kill. He had done ri
ght but he was dying inside: a blackness devouring him like Nahn, eating him from the inside out. He had not done right. He had done the worst thing he had ever done. Bringing the Nahn back from Earth 1 he had no choice. He would have died. And he had made that wrong right. He had tracked them down and exterminated the Nahn infestation. This had gone too far. He had said too much, the vile things had spewed out of him. And what was so unforgivable: they were true. She was all of those things he had accused her of. She was kooky and self-centred and astonishingly selfish and really into how things looked and she loved to play games with people and that pissed him off but at the same time they were the things he really liked about her. They annoyed him, but he adored them. The things that made him smile when he thought about them. The things that turned his heart over.

  The things he wanted more than anything else. Almost he stopped to turn back. He could never do that. He had made sure that she would never forgive him. He had made himself a monster. But she would be safe. Charlotte Villiers would never come near her.

  Everett M walked on. His eyes were like black holes in the sky. His heart was filled with thunder.

  That’s another one I owe you, Charlotte Villiers. That was one name for the darkness. He had another: anger. The darkness filled up his sight. He couldn’t see …

  The darkness was real.

  Everyone on Green Lanes had stopped in their tracks. Every car, every truck, every bike, every bus was stationary. It was afternoon but dark as midnight. Everett M looked up.

  36

  Silence is not an absence, a state of no-sound. Silence is solid, silence is real. Silence can be heard. Charlotte Villiers heard it the moment the elevator motor switched off and she opened the cage. London, totally silent. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever heard.

  The locks opened to her touch. Charlotte Villiers stepped out into the silence. Piccadilly was at a standstill. Not a bus, not a van, not a taxi or car moved. Not a motorbike or bike courier or cyclist. Not an office worker or a shopper or a Chinese tourist or a traffic warden. Every human on Piccadilly, on foot or in a car or bus, was looking up.