Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

‘No, she’s with me, love. Everett, get home.’

  ‘I’m coming. Mum, we should get out of London. Go down to Aunt Stacey’s.’ On Earth 4 Laura’s sister lived in Basingstoke, a place Everett M had always found so boring that it reversed into being weirdly interesting. Right now it was the safest place he could think of. Aliens never invaded Basingstoke. But first they had to get out of London. And that could be the big problem.

  An argument had broken out where the cars had crashed. The window of a charity shop suddenly shattered and collapsed into sugar-glass. The noise aroused the crowd. Car horns blared, drivers tried to manoeuvre their trapped vehicles free. A cyclist clipped a wing mirror as he tried to weave a careful route through the clogged traffic. Another argument broke out. An old lady gave a cry, a woman shouted about her baby, mind her baby! Voices were raised. Unease spread from person to person and suddenly the thousand people on Green Lanes gelled into one thing: a crowd. They wanted out, they wanted away, they wanted home. The mob milled, then surged. Another shop window went in. Through the heads Everett M glimpsed Noomi’s face, scared, trapped by the press of people in the porch of the Mermaid Cafe.

  ‘Mum, I’ll be there in a minute. There’s something I need to do first.’

  ‘Everett …’

  ‘I’ll look after you. Really.’

  Everett M closed his eyes, thought power into his enhancements and in a single bound jumped on to the top of the nearest car.

  ‘Hey!’ the driver of the Peugeot yelled as Everett M leaped lightly from car roof to car roof.

  ‘What the …?’

  ‘What’s he doing, what’s he doing?’

  ‘You can’t do that …’

  But most people were yelling at each other, pushing and shoving and stretching arms between jammed bodies, reaching for … reaching for what? Everett M couldn’t see anything they could seize hold of, grip as a strong anchor. A distraught woman with a double buggy was marooned in a shop doorway, weeping openly, terrified. Green Lanes was littered with shattered glass from shop fronts and car windows.

  Why are they doing this? Everett M thought. There’s an alien cityship in the sky and they’re smashing everything up. He raced from car to car, fast and light and strong on his Thryn enhancements. The Jiju are up in there in whatever that thing is, and we turn on each other. Everyone for her- or himself.

  ‘The kid …’

  ‘Stop the kid …’

  ‘He can’t …’

  Everett M dropped off the roof of a Mini in front of the Mermaid Cafe, pushing people out of the way. A shaven-headed man in a zip-up jacket over a hoodie rounded on him, shoved him hard. Everett M stood firm as a mountain. The man boggled, then tried to push Everett M over. Everett M planted a single hand on his chest and held him off.

  ‘No,’ Everett M said. He fed power to his enhancements and pushed the crowd apart as if they were water.

  ‘Noomi!’

  She looked up at the sound of her name. Everett M arrived in the cafe doorway.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘They all left me,’ she said. Her eyes were wide with shock. ‘My GFs. They just … left me. They just left me.’

  ‘I’ll get you home,’ Everett M said. ‘I promise. Noomi … all those things I said – I had to say them. But they’re not true. I only said them to make you safe.’

  ‘Everett, this is not a good time.’

  The crowd was jammed solid now and descending into panic. Panicked mobs were terrifying things. People could get hurt. People could get killed. The screaming old lady, the scared mother with her twins, how Everett M wished he could help them. But he couldn’t save everyone. That was the other side of power: guilt. For the ones you can’t do anything to help.

  ‘Noomi, put your arms around my neck.’

  She did it without question. Everett M scooped her up in his arms and with a flicker of Thryn technology jumped back up on to the roof of the now-abandoned car.

  Noomi’s eyes were wide with amazement. ‘Everett … you can’t do that. People can’t do that.’

  ‘Hold tight.’

  With Noomi in his arms, Everett M ran from roof to roof, between the surging, scared people, down Green Lanes. The big junction at Newington Green was a mass of clogged traffic and panicked people, surging, pressing, trying to find a way out. As Everett M made a jump to the top of a bus the street lights went out. The screaming started.

  ‘Whoa,’ Everett M Singh said, and, ‘Hold on,’ as he blinked up his Thryn night-vision. He fed power into his leg augments to leap from the bus to a white van to the top of a truck. He ran along the sagging soft top of the truck, dropped down on to the cab, then to the street.

  ‘Albion Road,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, you can put me down now, Everett.’

  Albion Road flickered with the beams of dozens of mobile-phone flashlights. Everett M’s phone played Swedish House Mafia.

  ‘I’m on the M25. There’s another one of them up over Hemel Hempstead. The lights are all out. I’ve got the night-vision gogg—’

  The phone went dead. In Everett M’s Thryn-vision, Noomi’s eyes and teeth glowed. Albion Road was full of infrared ghosts.

  ‘I can see your Mum and Dad. I can take you to them.’

  ‘Everett.’ Noomi punched him lightly on the chest, a kitty-paw punch. ‘Thank you for rescuing me. But, I don’t want to be the girl who needs to be rescued. So: yay! Points. But also, no points.’

  ‘Oh.’ And right there, in the dark, in the madness, in the roar of scared, confused people down on Newington Green, with a Jiju cityship hanging overhead and who knew how many others all over the country, all over Europe, all over the world, Noomi’s words seemed the worst thing.

  ‘Deal, Ev. You rescued me; at some point, maybe not this week, maybe not this year, maybe not running about and jumping and all that, I will rescue you.’ She held out a hand. Her infra-vision face was very serious.

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘One thing: who are you?’

  Everett M swallowed. This was the hard bit.

  ‘Minimum standards: truth, honesty, caring?’

  ‘Minimum standards.’

  ‘Remember that first homework date, when I said I was an alien cyborg double agent from a parallel universe?’

  ‘And you’d replaced the real Everett Singh. Ev … no.’

  ‘Yes. That’s why—’

  She touched a finger to his lips, finding them effortlessly in the dark. ‘I don’t want to believe this but I think I kind of have to.’

  ‘Don’t let anyone know. It’s not safe.’

  Noomi tapped her finger against his lips. ‘Shh.’

  ‘Noomi, those things I said, I’m sorry …’

  ‘I felt the worst ever, Everett.’

  ‘I said terrible things to hurt and push you away …’

  ‘Yes, you did. You’re not completely forgiven. Maybe about seventy per cent. But this isn’t the time, Everett.’

  ‘I’ve got secrets that hurt people. People who get close get hurt.’

  ‘Shh. I knew there was something. Parallel universe. Wow. That’s weird, but no weirder than what’s going on right now. I like this Everett better. I have to go now.’ Noomi lifted her finger from Everett M’s lips. He tasted salt and cherry. The world was ending; this time tomorrow London could be ashes, they could all be dead, but in five words Noomi had filled up Everett M’s universe with heart and hope. I like this Everett better.

  ‘Mum!’ Noomi shouted. ‘Dad!’

  Glowing infra-vision figures turned down Albion Road. Mobile-phone lights danced towards Noomi.

  ‘What about you, Everett?’ Noomi said.

  Truth crashed in around Everett M. His mum, Victory-Rose – they didn’t know where he was, if he was safe, if he was coming back. Get out of London, that was the last thing he had said to her. But the phones were down, and now he could hear sirens in the distance and the roar of aircraft, and the Jiju ship was crackling with blue lightning. He had to get home
.

  ‘My mum,’ Everett M said, and started to run. No holding back. He opened up his Thryn enhancements to the last click of the throttle. Already he could feel the cold tightening its grip around his heart and vital organs. He was burning his own body fat. Everett M pushed every piece of Thryn tech to its limit. He ran faster than any Olympic athlete, leaping cars, hurdling walls like a parkour star, racing down back alleys, navigating by night sight.

  ‘I’m coming!’ Walford Road. Stoke Newington High Street. Across the Common: his old running ground, when he was hunting the Nahn. Roding Road. And there was light, sudden blinding light all around him, that forced Everett M to a skidding halt. Blinding light, painful light. Everett M blinked down his Thryn night vision. The Jiju ship was gone. He looked up into a clear late-afternoon January sky.

  There. A thought turned on Thryn magnification. An airship – a wreck of an airship – in the sky to the north-west. He had told Ryun a lie about the magic airship he could call up when the world was in danger. But it was no lie. There it was. Over White Hart Lane. A Spurs fan. Only one person it could be. And Everett M was in no doubt that his alter had swept the Jiju from the sky.

  We’ll meet another time, Everett M thought. I have more important things to do right now. His mum – no, the other Everett’s mum – Laura: whoever: was standing at the car, hands to her face, weeping in joy at the sight of her boy coming up Roding Road. And whenever we do meet, alter-Everett, it won’t be as enemies.

  ‘Mum,’ he said.

  42

  Charlotte Villiers blinked in the sudden clean, brilliant sunlight. Weak winter sun, but it felt pure and holy on her upturned face. A sky so clear she could see all the way to the edge of space. She had no doubt that the same instant the Jiju capital ship had vanished from over London, every other cityship had disappeared from each one of the Ten Worlds. And she had no doubt who had done it.

  The boy was good. Perhaps as good as her.

  Charlotte Villiers had ridden the stolen pizza-delivery moped into the centre of Stoke Newington Common. She whipped a small, exquisitely tooled Earth 3 monocular from her bag and scanned the sky. Her red lips formed a smile. It had taken her only a moment to find the airship floating over the soccer stadium. It was a wreck, a flying hulk, held aloft by gas and hope.

  You’ll need to get that repaired, Captain Sixsmyth, Charlotte Villiers thought. And I’ll be waiting for you.

  Sirens on Stoke Newington High Street. Blue lights: police, and dark green military vehicles. Helicopters rattled overhead. Charlotte Villiers could smell burning. People were coming out of their houses, off the stalled buses, into their gardens, on to their streets, drifting on to the Common to look up at the sky. They held up their cameras and phones and tablet computers to take pictures of a deep-blue January afternoon.

  Now everything is changed, Charlotte Villiers thought. Your politicians cannot lie and dissemble and obfuscate in the face of a billion home videos, all across the world. The truth that you are one Earth in a Panoply of trillions of parallel Earths can no longer be hidden. The age of the Plenitude has dawned. And in the shock and the awe the Jiju have left behind them, I can extend the influence of the Order and make this world my own. Not just this world, all the Known Worlds. These people have learnt that the multiverse is big, bigger than they can possibly imagine, and their own ten worlds are one tiny corner of a corner of it. For an instant they saw reality. They saw the deep shadows out there. They’re frightened now. Frightened people are easy to control. You saved the Plenitude, Everett Singh, but you are its gravest threat. And so you have handed me the war. I will make sure that there is no home for you in the Ten Worlds. I can turn the Praesidium against you with the slightest application of my power. The Plenitude of Known Worlds will hunt you down all the days and all the nights, without tiring, without sleeping, without pity, without mercy, worlds without end. I have won.

  In the centre of Stoke Newington Common, with the people from the streets moving in around her, Charlotte Villiers lowered her monocular and very slowly, very deliberately, clapped her gloved hands together.

  ‘Bravo!’ she cried. ‘Bravo!’

  The gathering crowd could not understand Charlotte Villiers’s very private applause, but they joined the gesture enthusiastically, clapping and cheering and whooping and waving at the clear sky.

  A distant flash on the skyline. Charlotte Villiers raised the monocular again. The airship was gone. She must get back to Down Street. She had a meeting of the Order to chair, on another world.

  43

  Sen lurked in the latty doorway, teasing her hair into its maximum Afro magnificence with a long-pronged comb. She wore a crop top under her formal ship-jacket and had pulled her gold shorts on over leggings, a look she had picked up from Everett’s world. A gold shush-bag and mint-ice eyeshadow and lipstick completed the look and said, Come out with me, Everett Singh.

  ‘Oh wow,’ Everett said. She was an ice-ghost, hot-cold.

  Sen posed, stuck her butt out, shook her shoulders. ‘I scrubs up bona with a bit of slap.’

  Everett did not want to say that he found Sen in party gear a little intimidating and a lot too grown-up.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ he asked.

  ‘Might be. Bristol’s bona. Not as bona as Hackney, but that’s coz I’s not a Bristol girl, I’s a Hackney polone.’

  In the empty skies over London, E10, Captain Anastasia had given Everett an Earth 3 map reference. Even as the Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters had banked to make a run on this final, lingering alien invader in London airspace, Everett had made the calculations, fired up the jump controller and, with the last power in the batteries, opened a Heisenberg Gate and brought Everness in at three thousand feet over Portishead.

  ‘They’re gone here too,’ Sen had exclaimed, then added, ‘Not that I’s doubting—’

  ‘They’re gone everywhere,’ Everett said. It was true, every way that sentence could be true.

  ‘Take her low, take her slow, take her home,’ Captain Anastasia said. Her voice was very, very tired, her skin grey with fatigue. Sen gently moved the thrust levers: groaning, protesting, loyal; Everness answered. Captain Anastasia guided her ship slowly up the Avon. The Clifton suspension bridge slipped under Everett’s feet. He had been to parallel universes, he had been to the Worldwheel of the Jiju, mighty beyond the comprehension of a human mind, now a glowing disc of red-hot exotic matter, but he had never been further west in England than Leigh Delamere services on the M4. Airships lined the river, moored four to a docking tree. The radio crackled; greetings, repartee from the other airship captains and Sion Hill control. The main channels were still full of bafflement and amazement and merriment at the Jiju invasion and its disappearance – as sudden and total as it began. Where had they come from, what were they, where had they gone? Would they come back again? The Prime Minister would make a statement at seven o’clock that night. On the secret, shushy Airish channels, rumour and speculation ran amok. And in the midst of it, Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth’s return to the Floating Harbour was noted and celebrated and gossiped wide, especially to those who might be able to repair a wrecked ship, on the quiet, for a price. Captains flashed their searchlights, sounded their foghorns like the cries of lonely deep-water creatures unknown to human science.

  ‘You’re going out in that?’ Everett asked.

  Sen rolled her eyes. ‘We’s had this before. Yes, I’s going out in this. No, you’s not my mother.’

  ‘Where is your mother?’

  ‘Visiting her mother.’

  ‘Sharkey and Mchynlyth?’

  ‘Mchynlyth’s cackling engineering with the Portishead omis. Sharkey’s like as not trolling for polone-trade. Come with me, Everett Singh. I’ll show you Bristol. We’ll have fun! You deserve it. You saved the universe. The least I can do is buy you a buvare. You buvare beer? Doesn’t matter. You will. Zhoosh yourself up. Put on some of that clobber I bought you. I’ll take you to Sewards. There’s prizefighting – b
are knuckle. Bonaroo.’

  But Everett could not catch Sen’s party mood. ‘I’m sorry, Sen. You go. I can’t get it out of my head.’

  Sen pulled down the seat in the back of the door and perched on it.

  ‘Get what out of your head, Everett Singh?’

  ‘Get them out of my head. All the Jiju. I would have sent them back, Sen. I would have sent them back to the fire. The Captain stopped me. How could I have done that? What am I like?’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘But I would have. Like a thought. And she was right: that would have made me no different from the Empress of the Sun.’

  ‘The Empress is the bad one. She’s the villain. She killed all those people. I know, Everett. I felt it. It’s fading now, but it’s still in there. I’m a bijou scared it always will be.’

  ‘You say that: she’s the villain. I know that. But am I the hero?’

  ‘We’re here. We’re alive. The ship is here. You have the Infundibulum. The Jiju are gone. I don’t know where, I don’t care where, they’s gone. You beat them, Everett. You’s the hero.’

  ‘I saw things in me I don’t like, Sen. I did things … It’s like – in school, I used to see guys having fights. I was thinking about when Kax killed her rival. They had fights, and they were your mates, but I never saw them the same afterwards.’

  ‘I likes a fight,’ Sen said, then saw Everett’s doubt and vulnerability. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It was like I’d never known them at all. Sen, I think I’m one of them now. I’m a fighter, and nothing can be the same and I don’t know who I am.’

  ‘Everett, you’re always Everett. I’d know.’

  ‘It’s like that other me – my alter. I never could understand where that anger and fight came from. I can understand that now. I’ve done that.’

  ‘I might give you a hug, Everett Singh, but you have to promise not to mess up my riah.’

  Everett held a hand up as Sen opened her arms to him.

  ‘Wow,’ she said, and recoiled.

  ‘I’m not worth it, Sen. I don’t deserve it.’