by Ian McDonald
Everett M opened the closet. The shirts were hung on the left, the pants on the right. Neat, of course. Shoes in the bottom. Everett M lifted a football boot. It sat in the palm of his hand. Clean—of course—but this Everett had missed some tiny flecks of mud and blades of grass stuck to the studs. A friend gone and a dirty football boot. That was all the difference.
Everett M threw the boot at the poster of Gareth Bale. The studs tore a small hole in his face. Everett M took the torn edge and ripped it down, ripped the stupid, grinning picture of the tall Spurs striker off the wall. Then he turned to Roman Pavyluchenko and Danny Rose, tore them down, tore strips from the wallpaper where the Blu-tack stuck to the wall, tore those faces into shreds. The bands, the games, the movie stars, the science prints: torn from the wall, torn to pieces. He couldn't stand the sight of them. He hated them for being the bands he loved, whose music moved him, rocked him, kept him close like a friend, and also for being all those things to him. The books, the comics: he kicked the piles of comics and sent them flying like dry leaves; he overturned the bookcase and spilled the bright spines of the paperbacks onto the carpet. He couldn't look at their covers. Each would be a love betrayed. He stamped on their spines, snapping them, like breaking the back of a poisoned, dying seagull. Finally he took the laptop and smashed it across the edge of the drawers, smashed it and smashed and smashed it until it snapped, two halves dangling from a web of colored wiring and broken circuit boards.
Then the rage failed and he saw himself standing ankle deep in the wreck of that other Everett's life. Precious things, valuable things, good and useful things that could never be made whole again. Things that he loved. He remembered when his dad had taught him about entropy. A broken egg never unbroke itself. A burned book never went back from ashes to being paper and print again. A torn face of Gareth Bale never stitched itself back together again and jumped back onto the wall. But that impossibility of going into reverse was what made the universe work: water ran from high to low and never low to high, heat from hot to cold and never the other way. The universe was running down, very slowly but very surely, like a clock. In the end, there would be no high, no lows, no hot or cold, no difference that would allow a thing to flow from one to another: equilibrium. Then time would stop, because there would be no difference between before and after, because there could be no before or after, no change, ever. Entropy was the name physicists had for this quality. It was a huge and terrible truth of physics: entropy allowed life to happen, but only on the promise that everything would go cold and die. Every universe, known and unknown, would end up indistinguishable from all the others. And because there were no differences between them, they would become one.
Everett M stood among entropy in his alter's room. He wished, he wished, he wished he hadn't done so much damage. But it could not be undone, and so he must live with it.
Laura stood at the door.
“Everett?”
She looked scared. He hated to see her scared. She didn't deserve to be scared.
“Sorry.”
“It's all right, Everett. It will be all right.”
“I'm so cold.”
“Paris?”
“About forty miles Nor'nor-west,” Sharkey said. “’Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?’”
“I thought you didn't do Shakespeare,” Everett said. He had studied Henry V the previous term. His English class had gone to see it in the round “O” of the Globe Theatre. The girls had adored it. All the way back on the tube and train they'd been pouty and theatrical. Everett had thought it sort of wrong to see a play in daylight, half outdoors.
“Never said that, sir,” Sharkey said. “What I did say was that psychos, freaks, and sociopaths quote Shakespeare. Take your pick of them.”
Everness's crew crowded around the magnifier lens pulled over the green display screen on the radar binnacle. Outside, the great clouds tinged with the pink and yellow of snow ran on a wind from the north. Everness ran with them, her power exhausted, only enough power in the batteries to operate the bridge controls and hold her on a stable heading.
“Can I see a map?” Everett said. Sharkey raised an eyebrow; Captain Anastasia lifted her chin: do as he asks. The charts were stowed in tubes on a vertical conveyor belt. Sharkey pulled the chain and drew the loop of maps down and around. He unrolled the chart on the map desk, clipping the ends under brass rods.
“Where are we?”
Sharkey placed an emphatic finger. The names, the cities were the same, the features were very different. This map showed a smoke ring of power plants surrounding Paris, just as one encircled London. Beyond that wall of chimneys and cooling towers, furnaces and steam turbines, train lines and coal conveyor belts, the map depicted a landscape that was gouged apart with mines. Opencast mines the size of towns had been scooped out of the plain that ran from Paris to Belgium and Germany in Everett's world—High Deutschland on this map. Hills had been turned into pits; forests into ash-colored craters. This was a land stripped to the bone for coal. Everett tried to compare the outer Paris shown on the map with his memory of outer Paris, the time Tejendra had decided to take everyone in the car through the Channel Tunnel shuttle to Disney Paris. Tejendra and Laura had been fighting before they even got out of the Eurotunnel terminal at Sangatte. It had been one of those we-have-a-long-way-to-go-with-the-kids-in-the-back-listening kind of arguments, composed mostly of sullen silences.
“I think we're right in the middle of the flight path into CDG,” Everett said.
“Your acronym Mr. Singh?” Captain Anastasia asked.
“CDG. Charles de Gaulle. Europe's second busiest airport. Between Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, this is the highest density of aircraft movements in Europe. In fact, with the wind in this quarter, it'll take us right over the main runway.”
“How do you know this?” Sen asked.
“I'm interested in this sort of thing.”
“Aircraft movements?” Sen had a variation on a look, a very slight tilt of the head, that turned puzzlement into complete incomprehension, as if she were looking at something dragged up from the thickest silt at the bottom of the darkest lake in the deepest cave.
“I do know that we'll be setting radars off from here to Berlin,” Everett said. Captain Anastasia's eyes widened.
“Mr. Sharkey!”
He was at the radar monitor before the final syllable of his name was spoken.
“The sky is full of metal,” Sharkey said with wonder. “It's like a storm made of flying tin.” In the same instant the communications board came alive. A dozen voices hailed Everness. Everett had never been good at French, but he could hear the anger.
“Belay that racket Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia commanded. “I can imagine what they're saying.” She pulled down a microphone and thumbed for engineering. “Mr. Mchynlyth, any chance of motive power?”
“I havnae the power to make a cup of tea, let alone gallivant us all over the sky,” came the voice from the speaker. “That jump drained the batteries, or do you no remember that wee detail? I can just about keep our head in this wind.”
“I'll take that as a no.”
Stupid, Everett thought. I forgot that the ship had moved. I plotted a straight point-to-point jump, identical locations in different universes. I should have thought, should have taken the time, should have made the calculations right.
He felt a warm touch brush the back of his hand, which rested atop the map spread out before him. It was fast, it was fleeting, it was gone before anyone else could register it.
“You got us away,” Sen said. “We was dead back there.”
Can you read my mind? Everett thought. It was not the first time Sen had said exactly what he needed to hear without asking what he was feeling. Everett believed in an ordered and predictable universe. Sen and her insights and her comments and her cards that spoke to no one but her upset that calm and rational universe.
“French air traffic control is asking us to identi
fy ourselves,” Sharkey said.
“Tell them we are an advertising blimp for an international circus,” Captain Anastasia said. “We've slipped our moorings and are drifting on the wind. Advise them to warn all aircraft.”
“Cirque du Soleil,” Everett said. “It's a real circus in my world. This world. I mean, here.”
Sharkey raised an eyebrow. Captain Anastasia nodded: make it so. Sharkey's French was fast and good. Had he picked that up on his adventuring, or was it the heritage of the Lafayette part of his family? Everett was less sure than ever about how much of Sharkey's legend was true, and about how much he could trust the man who spun it.
“French air traffic control again,” Sharkey said. “Didn't wash. They telephoned your Cirque du Soleil or whatever you call ’em. They ain't even in the country, let alone missing a blimp. The military is launching fighters.”
“Shit,” Captain Anastasia whispered. “We need answers here.”
And it came to Everett in a flash, a rush, an instant, whole and complete and needing no working out, no testing, no evaluation, just like the night he had seen the shape of the Infundibulum floating in seven-dimensional space in his mind and all he had needed to do was to take the reality in his hands and shape it to his imagination.
“Ma’am, I have an idea.”
“If it's anything like your last one—” Sharkey said.
“Enough, Mr. Sharkey,” Captain Anastasia cut in.
“‘The wise shall inherit glory: but shame shall be the promotion of fools,’” Sharkey muttered.
“I can hide us in plain sight,” Everett said. “Right under their noses.” He was bristling with excitement. Listen, he wanted to say, this is brilliant, this is simple, this will work. “But first I need to make a Heisenberg jump.”
“I don't want to go back to that ice universe,” Sen said.
“We're not going to another universe,” Everett said. “Don't you see? If I can open up a gate between universes, I can open one up inside a universe. It's all just coordinates in the Infundibulum.”
Captain Anastasia raised an eyebrow.
“I have multiple contacts,” Sharkey said. “Flying tin, on intercept courses.”
“Continue, Mr. Singh.”
“That's it. I can jump us out of here to somewhere no one will even look twice at us.”
“I'm not hearing any other feasible plans,” Captain Anastasia said.
“Well, sorry to piss on your chips, but maybe it's just that you're deaf rather than dumb.” Mchynlyth's voice rattled from the speakers. “We dinnae have the power. Shall I say that again, more slowly and a hell of a lot more loudly? We dinnae have the power.”
“What I do know, Mr. Mchynlyth, is that we can't stay here.”
Everett's mind whirled. Ideas churned and boiled like a storm cloud. Storm. Captain Anastasia had told him how she came to be Sen's adopted mother. It had been the result of a storm that had sent the airship Fairchild falling, burning like a cursed angel from the sky. They had tried to steal lightning. She'd implied that all ships could do this. Everett again remembered his family's trip to Disneyland Paris. They had camped—another money-saving strategy. The second night, the mother of thunderstorms had ripped the sky open and dumped a month's rain on the northwest suburbs of Paris in thirty minutes. When a flash flood of dirty, frothy water washed their folding chairs into the tent, Tejendra had scooped up sleeping bags, bubble mats, and Victory-Rose and bundled everything into the car. Dripping water onto the foyer carpet, Team Singh had booked the last family room at Hotel Cheyenne. That had been August. This was January, as far from lightning season as you could get. Think, Everett. If Everness could steal the heart of a thunderstorm, where else could she draw power from? Power lines. Of course. If only he had a map, a map of this world. The revelation was like a physical impact. They'd arrived in his home universe, so he would be able to call up a map on his cell phone. There was once again a world of information at his fingertips.
The on button on the smartphone felt like an old friend. The screen lit. Icons appeared across the top of the screen: mobile network, data network, 3G. An SMS: You are connected to SFR. You are now roaming. Your data limit is 5 megabytes per day. Everett tapped into the apps and opened up Google Maps. He flexed his fingers, expanded the screen, again and again. It was slow, so slow. Paris: the banlieus, that ring of dismal suburbs that was the only thing darker and more gloomy than the smoke ring of coal-burning power stations that surrounded that other Paris shown on Everness's maps. Now, exact location. He flicked on the GPS. Everett imagined signals bouncing up to the ring of satellites orbiting and back again. An icon appeared. This was him. This was his home world, with him on the bridge of an alien airship. Here. If he were to drag his finger across the screen, he would be able to look down on his own home, in Roding Road, see the blue circle of Victory-Rose's trampoline in the back garden, the patio furniture on the deck, the chiminea and the gas barbecue; he would be able to see everything as though it had been perfectly preserved on that clear August Sunday afternoon when the satellite had rolled through the sky and snapped its photograph. A time before panoplies and plenitudes and planesrunners, before the Infundibulum and the Order.
The idea came so sharp and sudden it was like a needle in his heart: call home. He had the number up on speed dial. His thumb hesitated. They'll be listening. They had to be listening. He would betray the entire plan. Everett flicked the number away and it was physical pain. But he had to call someone, send some message, let someone know what had happened to him, that he was alive and well out there in the Panoply of worlds. Colette. She was an ally—he knew that in the same way that he knew that the elegant and subtle Ibrim Hoj Kerrim was an enemy of Charlotte Villiers and her Order. But she was too close to Paul McCabe and his faction—she had saved him once, when Charlotte Villiers pulled a gun to try to stop him from fleeing through the Heisenberg Gate to E3. They would be watching her—if she was still on the Heisenberg Gate project. If she was still at Imperial. If she was still alive. Ryun. Ryun Spinetti. Best mate. He'd seen those other worlds on the video on the memory stick Colette had given him that night in the Japanese restaurant. Everett tapped up an SMS. His fingers hesitated over the touch keys. What to say in 160 characters?
Get this 2 Mum: am OK. Dad okay. CU soon. What else to say? What else did he need to say?
“French air traffic control is calling us again,” Sharkey said. “Charles de Gaulle airport is warning us not to enter their control space.”
“Mr. Singh?”
Send. Everett's phone gave a small beep. Gone, for good or for ill. Then he summoned up the Google Earth image, zoomed in on the little star that gave Everness's current location, and worked it forward along the direction in which the wind was blowing.
“Yes!”
Every head turned. Everett went to the great window and pulled down a magnifier. He dialed up the image size. Captain Anastasia stood at his shoulder. Everett passed the magnifier to her and pointed. The lenses hid her eyes, but Everett saw her lips open a fraction and heard a soft echo of his own yes.
“Mr. Singh, you may have saved us.” Captain Anastasia tapped the edge of the frame, locking in the coordinates. She lifted the lens array off the swing arm, took it to Sen's navigation board, and swiped the code into Sen's comptator.
“Take us there, Sen, and keep us there.”
“What's there, Ma?”
“Power.”
“Inch her forward a wee hair!” Mchynlyth's voice called up through the song of wind in wires. “I don't want some stray gust catching me and crossing the lines. I'm no tasty crispy fried.” The ship's engineer swung at the end of the power connector, a pendulum weighted with a life. Fifty meters above, Everett looked down at him through the open hatch. Below Mchynlyth were the four hundred thousand volt power lines, and fifty meters below them, the hard surface of northern France. He let go of his left-hand grip on the stanchion and took the microphone from its mount. He kept his right hand on the winch c
ontrols. The rising wind eddied up through the open hatch and tugged at his loose shorts. “Don't look down,” Sen had said when she took him running over the rooftops of Hackney Great Port. But what if you have to look down? Everett felt queasy for a moment. The world lurched. Keep it cool, man. Remember when you jumped from the capsized Arthur P to Everness's boarding ramp when you defeated the Bromley's? You hadn't even been able to see the ground at all then, the weather was so foul. That was the thing: if you can't see the ground you can also believe it isn't there at all. It's when you see how far you have to fall and what's at the bottom of it that you get the sweating, panicky fear.
“Sen, take her forward. Easy, dead easy.”
“Bonaroo.”
Her touch on the controls was light and precise, but the sudden motion was enough to send Everett reeling toward the drop. He almost took his hand from the winch control. Almost. The power connector cable amplified the ship's power and sent Mchynlyth swinging across the sky. He was coming very, very close to the power lines. If the cable from the ship touched two lines at the same time, they would short circuit. Twenty-five kilovolts would turn you to ash so fast you wouldn't even know it, let alone feel any pain. But if he let Sen carry Mchynlyth too far, he might miss the power line entirely.
“Dead stop, Sen.” There were no brakes on airships. Sen could only bring Everness to a halt by applying reverse thrust, and that took distance and time. Distance and time were things Everett could work with. It was all relativity. Everett looked down between his feet through the hatch. Mchynlyth's wild swinging was dying down. Everett knew the physics: simple harmonic motion. A pendulum swing always took the same time: long and fast at the start, short and slow when it wound down. A simple, basic principle—the story Tejendra had told him was that in the sixteenth century Galileo had watched a lamp swinging on its chain in Pisa cathedral, measured it against his own pulse, and shown that the period was constant. Everett had never thought he'd see the principle demonstrated using a man on the end of a power cable swinging from the belly of an electrically powered post-steampunk airship.