by Ian McDonald
The gloom brightened. He was in a dank, damp chamber. The Heisenberg Gate stood at the center of a ring of workstations, and beneath his feet was a metal grating. Above him was a rough rock roof, lined with runs of power cable and studded with light brackets. He faced a line of soldiers in black. Soft caps and hard guns. Their guns were aimed at him. What did they think he was going to do? Everett M stepped on the ramp. The guns twitched but remained trained on his heart.
White light washed out their faces. The Heisenberg Gate had opened. Everett M's Thryn senses learned fast: do a thing once and they never forgot. The image enhancement circuits moderated the light to a comfortable level. Charlotte Villiers stepped out of the gate and the white light vanished.
“At ease,” she said. The soldiers sloped their weapons. A man stepped through the ring of soldiers, a shabby man, with thinning hair, in a raincoat and a suit that didn't look right. His tie wasn't straight.
“Welcome to Earth 10, Everett.” The man extended a hand, but he hesitated when Everett M reached out to grasp it. “Goodness. How extraordinary. I'm sorry…I never imagined…”
“For God's sake Paul, it's only an alter,” Charlotte Villiers snapped.
“I know, oh I know,” the dowdy man said. “It's just…I'm sorry Everett, I knew—know—your alter so well, all his life. I was—am—a close family friend, almost an unofficial uncle.”
“I don't know you at all,” Everett M said. “Maybe you didn't work with my dad in my world. Maybe you weren't at Imperial.” Maybe you never even existed.
The dowdy man came to the same conclusion. He mumbled his name—Paul McCabe—and shook hands limply, but Everett M could see that he was shaken. Then Everett M saw the second civilian, behind the ring of soldiers, and it was his turn to be shaken.
“Colette?”
She heard his voice say her name and she winced. Everett watched an array of emotions play across her face as she looked at him, emotions that did not belong together. Recognition and confusion. Memory and betrayal. Affection and horror.
“So you want me to hunt him,” Everett M had said at the gate from his own world.
“No no no Everett,” Charles Villiers had replied. “We want you to be him.”
“Come along Everett,” Charlotte Villiers said now. Her heels rang from the metal flooring. “Don't stare.” The soldiers parted. Paul McCabe visibly cringed away from her. Everett M followed. Beyond a heavy security door was a long rock-cut tunnel, lit with bulkhead lights and flickering fluorescents. Nothing could have been further from the white, slick, Thryn-built jump rooms of Everett M's world.
“Where are we?”
“Worldgate One,” Paul McCabe said. Everett M tried to place his accent: yes, Northern Ireland. You hate me now because I've told you that in my world you're nothing. “We paid a branding company quite a lot of money to come up with the name. Rubbish, isn't it? You're in the old Channel Tunnel test drilling from the 1970s. You have the Channel Tunnel in your world?”
“We have three,” Everett M said. “All maglev.” Stop trying to sound like you are still my unofficial uncle, he thought. Everett M glanced over his shoulder. Colette Harte walked behind him. She caught Everett's eye. I see hate there, he thought. But it's not for me. You didn't hate him so you can't hate me. It's for her, Charlotte Villiers, and him, Paul McCabe, but most of all for yourself. They've made you do something, become something you hate more than anything.
A black car waited at the end of the tunnel, in front of a colossal set of metal doors. It gleamed like liquid in the harsh fluorescent light. Everett M had seen that glint before, from the polished hood of another black car, the moment before it hit him and knocked him into another life. The Everett M from before the collision and the Everett M he'd become were so different that they might as well be separate people. In a way it had killed him, that other black car. He shivered.
“Are you cold, Everett?” Paul McCabe asked.
“I'm always cold.”
Charlotte Villiers sat beside Everett M in the back of the car. Paul McCabe rode up front. The driver was a big, shaved-headed man in a suit. He looked more like a movie thug than anyone Everett had ever seen. But I can own you, Everett M thought. Colette Harte had remained at the facility. She had not spoken one word to Everett M in his short transit through Worldgate One, but he felt that her emotions had gone from revulsion to suspicion to sympathy. He felt sure that he could count on her to be an ally.
Winter sleet was clearing from the sky over the South Downs as if swept from the sky by a giant, impatient hand. Low winter sun was breaking, turning the wet road to a glaring blade of light. The black car whisked Everett M past long lines of trucks bound for the Channel Tunnel. It was all so familiar. It was all so strange.
“We need an agent on his world,” Charles Villiers had said under the white lights of the Panoply training facility a universe away. “We need someone who can get up close, into his friends, into his family.”
“Someone like me,” Everett M had said.
“We took terrible liberties,” Charles Villiers had said. “We did things to you without your permission, Everett. But we couldn't pass on an opportunity like that.”
“What, I'm supposed to be grateful for you turning me into RoboEverett?”
“Everett, Everett, so cynical. You would have died. We saved you.”
And so I owe you, Everett M thought now, as the black car merged into the never-ending wheel of traffic on the London Orbital motorway.
“We need you to be him, Everett. We're going to put you into his family. We've written a cover story, it'll stand up. We've a dossier on his school, his friends, his family. A lot of it overlaps, of course. The people on E2 have put it onto a memory implant, but there will still be holes, so the story is you suffered a brief fugue state. The trauma of your father's disappearance made you have a bit of a personality breakdown.”
“My father's dead,” Everett had said.
“Yes, yes, of course. Sorry Everett. Your alter's father. The story: you had a personality breakdown, you went missing, the police missing person's unit found you. You're still suffering from memory loss. Your mother—his mother—has been notified, the police will bring you back.”
Everett M peered out the window now. Paul McCabe had stopped trying to make conversation with him. Charlotte Villiers had not even attempted to talk. She sat neatly and properly. From time to time she checked her make-up in her compact mirror. Everett M studied this world into which he had been pushed. The differences were in the details. The cars looked the same, but in this world they burned oil products. Same with the power station at Dartford: the smoke stacks spat out the exhaust from hydrocarbon fuel. So different from the clean hydrogen fusion plants that powered Everett M's world. But these people had developed the Heisenberg Gate—and the Infundibulum, the gateway to the entire Panoply of universes, which no one else in the Known Worlds had done. No. Not these people. His father.
“He'll come back. He'll come back for his Mum and his sister.”
“Laura and Victoria-Rose,” Everett M had said.
“Victory-Rose,” Charles Villiers had corrected. “In this world, your little sister is Victory-Rose. He'll come back, and we need you to be there when he does.”
“What do you do when he does?”
Charles Villiers had looked genuinely astonished.
“Why, take the Infundibulum from him.”
“And these weapons?”
“He travels with a crew of pirates,” Charles Villiers had said. “Villains—bad people, they wouldn't hesitate to cut down anyone who gets in their way…”
For the first time in the mission briefing, Charlotte Villiers had spoken.
“Oh, for God's sake Charles, this is not a theme park ride. Everett, he is your enemy. He doesn't know it, but he is. He doesn't know what he has, the damage he can do without even thinking. For all our sakes—and the sake of your mother and sister, and even his mother and sister, we must have the Infundibul
um. There are forces out there that are a threat to all of us. If they get the Infundibulum before us, it will be the end of everything we know, on all of the Ten Worlds. We must have security.”
Remembering those words, Everett M looked over at Charlotte Villiers beside him. Her lips were thin but vampire red beneath the veil of her hat. The threat, you say, Everett M thought, the threat that will destroy everything we know. You never say what it is. But the threat to Mum and Vickie-Rose, I know what that is. It's you.
He knew by heart the landmarks they passed now, the buildings and places that mapped his life. The chimney of the Lea Valley incinerator, the Olympic stadium, White Hart Lane. Everett M looked around. These shop signs, he recognized them, The Egg Stores. Konoc Polish Supermarket. Sofa King. This was Stamford Hill. There was the gate to Abney Park Cemetery. Where it had happened. Even the bus stop was in the same place.
“Stop here.” Paul McCabe looked round, startled by Charlotte Villiers's voice after so long a silence. The Obvious Thug driver pulled the black car in without comment or question. He opened the door for Charlotte Villiers. She stepped onto the pavement.
“Careful in the traffic, Everett,” she said as he got out in the road. “We wouldn't want history repeating itself.”
“Why have you brought me here?” Everett M asked. Stokie was bright with hard January sunshine. He shivered with cold. Charlotte Villiers took a pair of round-eye sunglasses from her bag and put them on under her veil.
“I want to tell you about your enemy, Everett. He's your alter, but he's not you. He's smarter than you. He's a lot smarter than you. His Dad may have discovered the Infundibulum, but this Everett turned it into a working map. He's the important one. You, well, you're the raw materials we had at hand.
“There are no accidents, Everett. There are no coincidences. It wasn't your bad luck you were run down by a car on this spot in your own Hackney. We arranged it. It's easier if we make it look like an accident. We would still have had to take you apart and have Madam Moon put you back together again. So much simpler than a kidnapping. Kidnapping, I've found, does attract the wrong attention. A carefully rehearsed accident, a cover story to your family, it's all so much less fuss.
“So, don't flatter yourself, Everett. It's not about you. It's never been about you. It's about him. Because of him, everything that happened to you happened. Because of him we put Thryn machinery into your body. Because of him, you're here. Not because of you, because of him. Remember that when you see him. You're just the alter.”
She raised a gloved hand. The driver opened the door for her. Everett M stood blinded by the low winter sun. He felt as if the black car had hit him a second time. Everything was knocked out of him. Home, family, friends, his entire world, his sense of self, his dawning teenage sense that he was unique and special: all smashed to pieces and left lying on the side of the road. The Thryn technology inside him felt vile, like ashes in his blood. He wanted it out, he wanted to claw the hatches open and rip out the circuitry that was half machine, half living flesh.
Charlotte Villiers took off her dark glasses and stowed them in her bag. I saved your life, Everett M thought. But that doesn't mean anything to you. Nothing about me means anything to you, except that I'm his alter. I'm just a body draped around these things you put inside me. An avatar. Against his will, Everett M felt the Thryn weapons systems powering up inside him, drawing on his horror and rage. He wanted to slash the black car into glowing chunks with his lasers, melt those chunks with his missiles, blast everything to burning slag. But he would still be in this world, and his mum and Vickie-Rose would be in his world, and between them, the people Charlotte Villiers worked for. He clenched his fists, forced the hatches to stay closed, powered down his weapons.
“Come along Everett,” Charlotte Villiers said. “God, this is a ghastly little world.”
The first policeman was a detective sergeant called Milligan. He had a moustache. Sergeant Tache, Everett M thought. The other was a family liaison officer, whatever that was, and her name was Leah or Leanne or Leona. Leelee. Everett M had always made up his own names for things and people.
No matter what you've done, or haven't done, if you ride in a police car you will always feel like a criminal. Skoda: he'd never heard of that make of car. Everett M had never been in a gasoline-powered vehicle before. It smelled funny, spicy and dizzy, and a little dangerous. The fumes caught him at the back of his throat. He'd noticed that people on this world were always coughing and clearing their throats. How could they live in this reek?
It would be a left onto Northwold Road. Roding Road was the second left. On cue, the Skoda turned left. There was something in Everett M's stomach that the Thryn had not put there. The houses were the same color, had the same aerials and satellite dishes, the same cypress trees and paving in front, the same trampolines sheathed in safety netting at the back. Only the cars were different. There was the house, his house. The door was open. His mother, Laura, Mum, was on the front step, looking down the street. Not my mum, Everett thought. His mum. Not my mum. But she dressed like his mum in a sweater dress and black leggings, and she wore his mum's big beady necklace and bangles, and her face had the lines of worry and frustration like his mum's, and she twisted her left foot on its toe because she was impatient in the same way that his mum did. Then Everett M's understanding turned on its head. It was not this Laura Singh who was wrong, not this street, or this world; it was him. He was the fake, the alien. He felt sick. He wanted to throw up everything wrong with him, every piece of alien technology that had been put into him.
Now she saw the police car. She put her hands up to her mouth. For a moment she didn't know what to do. Then she started to run. And Everett M knew what he had to do. He hated doing it more than anything he had hated before, but he had to play the role.
“Stop the car!” he shouted. “Stop the car!”
Sergeant Tache pulled in, startled. Everett M jumped out even before the car had stopped. He ran toward the running woman. She was waving her hands in astonishment and joy and relief, and Everett M ran toward her and felt none of those. She fell on him and wrapped him in her arms, her hair, her smell, her warmth. All of them Everett M knew. They raked his heart. Her it was her. No, it's not her.
“Oh, my Everett, oh my boy,” Laura said. She was crying. Her cheek was wet against his. All the doors on Roding Road were open, those neighbors at home were on their doorsteps, smiling and applauding and dabbing tissues to their eyes. Everett M knew them all. Every single one of them.
“I'm sorry,” he said. It was part of the script.
Sergeant Tache and Leelee had got out of the car. Leelee looked sniffy. Sergeant Tache looked like there were official things he was meant to say but would say later.
“Oh, everyone's looking, and me without a dab of slap on me,” Laura said. “Come in, come in.”
The hall was decked with Christmas cards, standing on parade on every flat surface, those that weren't occupied by tea-light holders. It even smelled the same: coffee and garlic and a permanent undertone of pine toilet cleaner from the downstairs lav. In the front room the sofa and the chairs were in the same place—the front room, the good room, not the den room with the old leather sofas and the books and the flatscreen television and the games consoles. This version of it carried the same vague smell that Everett M had never been able to place in his own universe but always thought of as vacuum cleaner. The Christmas tree stood in the same place in the bay window that it did in Everett M's world. It looked bare and spare of ornaments and random collected things that people hung on real Christmas trees. Everett M's mum—his real mum—almost hadn't put a tree up this year at all. “What's the point, love?” she'd said. “He always used to do it. Physicist and he could never get the lights to work.” Everett M wondered what the excuse was in this world.
“I cleaned up as much as I could,” Laura said. “I kept the presents—what was left of them.”
“Mum, would you mind?” He wanted ou
t of this room. It was a shrine to two kinds of loss: in this world, and in his world.
“What? Oh, sorry…”
“No. I'm sorry.” He wasn't. From the top of the stairs he called down, “Where's Vickie…Victory-Rose?”
“At her Bebe Ajeet's. She's bringing her over tonight, when it's a bit quieter. She's so happy you're home.”
She's so happy at anything, Everett M thought, if she's in the least bit like my Vickie-Rose. A plastic bag rattling in a tree, a postman wearing shorts, a dog with its head out a car window. Anything.
He opened the door to his room. His room. Tottenham Hotspur hit him from every wall. Delphic, Enter Shikari. Megan Fox in cutoffs. Marcus Fenix from Gears of War. Hubble Space Telescope images. Exactly the same, in exactly the same places. The books on the bookshelves, the comics, the video games—everything he liked in all the same places. Everett M opened up the laptop on the desk. A password prompt came up. Everett M entered his own password, a complex string of numbers and letters, upper case and lower, that no one but he could even begin to remember. It worked. Straight in. There has to be something between us, Everett M thought. Some atom of difference. Something that makes him the genius ten worlds want to get their hands on and me just the body double.
E-mail password, Facebook password: both the same. There was a hole in the postings. It was the same length as the gap in his own entries. Of course. Some of the postings and comments were different, but that didn't matter. It was just social stuff. Ryun Spinetti. Everett M knew the name from Bourne Green. He had been on the football team, not a bad striker though he'd never got anything but a penalty past Everett M. He'd moved away—family broke up, something like that. They were never close, certainly not best friends like him and this world's Everett.