by Ian McDonald
Mchynlyth grinned up at Everett. His orange-gloved hand gave a thumbs-up, then he pointed down. Lower away. Everett worked the winch, never taking his eyes off Mchynlyth. The engineer was not harnessed directly to the power converter; he rode a drop line that ran with the main cable. He would hook the converter to the line, then ride the drop line back up through the hatch and complete the circuit. Everett's job was to get him within arm's length of the power line without crossing the lines. The hand kept waving, patting air: lower, lower. The wind was treacherous, gusting, blowing Mchynlyth far out of reach, then heart-stoppingly close. Lower, lower—the orange thumb went up. Cease lowering. Everett hit the stop button hard. Now Mchynlyth reached around to unfasten the hooked stick from his utility belt. It was fumbling, clumsy work in his heavy, insulated gloves. One mistake, one slip, and he would drop the stick—the hotstick, as it was known among the Airish—and he would have to run the risk of a sizable shock, bonding on to the line himself. Everett understood the physics too well. The circuit was not complete. It would be complete, allowing electricity to flow, only when the earthing cable was dropped, but both the power line and Everness had picked up different charges of static electricity, just from the movement of air over the wires, or the movement of a two-hundred-meter-long airship through the air. But those static charges were different, and when Mchynlyth connected ship to line, they would equalize. Equalize spectacularly, Everett thought. He held his breath. Mchynlyth lunged with the hook and missed. Well short. Again; again a miss. A third time, and little lightnings ran along the hotstick and cracked between hook and power line.
“Oh the Dear!” Sen exclaimed over the intercom. “He's burning, he's burning! Everett, help him!” Up on the bridge, she, Captain Anastasia, and Sharkey had been keeping one eye on the feed from the hull cameras. The other they kept on Sharkey's radar screen. And the interceptor jets scrambled by the French Air Force were seconds away.
“He's all right, he's all right.” Everett shouted into the intercom. “It's part of the process.” Mchynlyth had hooked securely onto the line and was hauling himself in. He clipped a carabiner to the power line. He was hooked to the four hundred kilovolts. Everett understood Sen's fear. She had lost one ship, one home, one family to the lightning when the captain of the doomed Fairchild had tried to rekindle its batteries from an unorthodox source. Now Mchynlyth was wrestling the power connector over the cable, hitting the clamps that locked the contacts to the live line. Close to half a million volts are running through that, Everett thought. Mchynlyth was safe, they were all safe. It was the reason birds could perch on power lines. Everything was safe as long as it was connected to earth. Electricity was flow, high potential to low potential, charge to ground.
Captain Anastasia came on the intercom.
“Are we near charging yet? I can see those airoplans on Sharkey's screen and they're a little too close for my liking.”
Everett heard the distant thunder of military jet engines. He glanced down between his feet into the dizzy drop. Mchynlyth had swung from the cable on his drop line. Two thumbs up. Everett hit the button on the drop line. Mchynlyth was jerked away from the power connector, clamped like a brass leech to the line, up into the air. He shot up through the tiny hatch, hit the harness release, and dropped off the line to land light and agile, one foot on either side of the rectangle of empty air. One mistake and he would have tumbled straight down to the ground, screaming all the way. Everett had been a great goalkeeper, and he could think in three dimensions and more, but it would take him years to learn the Airish way, which was to live in many dimensions.
Years.
He didn't intend to spend years among the Airish to learn that skill.
“I thoroughly recommend that as a life experience,” Mchynlyth said. “Bein’ that close to power lines gives ye a wee tingle all over. Right. Come on. This'll be worth seeing.”
With a crook of his finger Mchynlyth beckoned Everett across the hull. They ran, crouched in the cramped access ways between the battery stacks, beneath the low ceiling of the cargo deck. They flickered on the edge of death, Sen drawing the last watts of power out of them to hold Everness over the power line. On the far side of the hull was a second hatch in the ship's belly, near where the other half of the power connector was stored. When Everness was in port, the charging arm ran underneath her and she was connected by two cables, one the live, the other the ground, allowing the power to run through the charging circuitry. The ship was effectively a giant plug. The ground line hung above Everett and Mchynlyth's heads.
“Before I press any buttons, tell me. Yer sure about this?” Mchynlyth said.
“The standard high-tension voltage in France is 400 kilovolts. I looked it up. Online.” That expression was unknown in Mchynlyth's world. “The interweb,” said Everett, and Mchynlyth nodded understanding. “The rest was easy, just basic mathematics.”
“Aye, you see, it's that last wee bit I'm nervous about, the basic mathematics.”
“From what you told me, the step-down transformer should be able to handle it.”
“Oh, that's dolly. If we go up like a Catherine wheel, it's all my fault.”
Everett was about to protest that the equations were never wrong, but only as good as the numbers they were given. Then the fighters went over. The noise knocked the words, the breath, and all thoughts from him. Everett had never been so close to turbojets before. They sounded like the sky ripping right down the middle, from the edge of space right through the heart of Everness to the earth below.
“Right then!” Mchynlyth bawled over the diminishing roar of the French Air Force jets. “That makes our minds up for us.” He punched the release button. The hatch opened. The earth connector dropped. Mchynlyth and Everett both craned over the aperture. “Keep your eyes peeled,” Mchynlyth said. “This'll be quite a show.” The cable unreeled with a hissing shriek from the spool. Then the connector end, falling to earth, erupted in a blaze of lighting. Thunder rocked Everness. The railing, the cable, every centimeter of metal and nanocarbon crawled with glowing ghosts. St. Elmo's fire, Everett recalled. A name like that you remember. Electricity was arcing across the air gap between the falling cable and the earth. That meant current was flowing. Batteries were charging.
“Aye, you get yer dish up to the bridge and work whatever dally magic you do with thon machine,” Mchynlyth shouted. He pulled his goggles down against the hard blue arc light. Everett scuttled back through the maze of access ways to the main staircase. The battery casings seemed to thrum and glow with power. He could feel the energy prickling against his skin, like tiny electric spiders. He could smell the thrilling ozone tang of electricity. It always made him think of fairgrounds and summer. Everything was alive. Everness seemed to stretch, as if waking from a long, cold sleep.
“We've blacked out most of Northwest Paris,” Sharkey said as Everett arrived on the bridge. The American sounded impressed. Captain Anastasia did not turn from her place at the window.
“Do you think we could manage it this time without a last-minute, cliff-hanger, hairs-breadth escape, Mr. Singh?” she asked. Everett took up his station and opened the Infundibulum. Sen nodded. Her concentration was total, her fingers playing the controls like a musical instrument, her eyes flicking from monitor to monitor, holding Everness over the power line. Everett saw a bead of sweat on her lip. He wanted to dab it away with a fingertip. He shook the image out of his head.
“There's some mathematics to do,” Everett said. “It's not a simple point-to-point transition, the same set of coordinates in different universes.” He did not want to say how tricky the math really was. It involved a Fourier transform. His maths teacher hadn't even known what a Fourier transform was. A mathematical operation that transforms one complex-valued function of a real variable into another. There was no way to understand it other than technically.
“They're coming back,” Sharkey said. Everett glanced up as the Mathika software, the program he had used to calculate the many-dimen
sional folds of the Infundibulum, opened on the screen. He saw silver wings flash out there in the winter sky, aircraft turning to make a second pass over the airship. “We're being targeted.”
“I'm on it,” Everett said. A Fourier transform on non-Euclidean space. He entered Everness's present coordinates in this universe. The process was instantaneous, but the results needed interpretation. He had to match the location code with that for the place where he intended to jump the ship, and that involved things like the curvature of the Earth. Get it wrong one way and they might jump in at a height way above Everness's operational ceiling, with the ship over-pressurized, and explode. Get it wrong the other way…. Don't think about that, Everett told himself. You're good. Like you said to Mchynlyth, the mathematics is always perfect. He reopened the Infundibulum and called up a search menu. In went the output from the Fourier transform. The veils and clouds of Panoply codes whirled and swirled, the camera plunged through glowing walls of jump points. There. Everett highlighted it, copied it. He pulled up the Jump Controller and dropped the code into the window. The board lit green.
“Heisenberg jump is ready.”
“’He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in heaven,’” Sharkey murmured.
Captain Anastasia thumbed the intercom.
“Status, Mr. Mchynlyth?”
“We can jump and we can fly.”
“Mr. Singh—”
“Now hold on one wee moment,” Mchynlyth shouted from the speaker. “I'm going to need my power cables back.”
Captain Anastasia bit back a curse.
“How long?”
“Two minutes.”
“Make it so. Sen, hold our position. Mr. Singh, on my mark. Mr. Sharkey, how far away are those airoplans?”
“They're here, now,” Sharkey said, and the ship shook as three dazzling deadly fighters speared out of nowhere, engines a howl of speed and aggression. Everett ducked. Captain Anastasia stood boldly at the great window.
“Oh, but you are beautiful,” she whispered as they knifed over the top of the ship.
“We're being hailed again,” Sharkey said. “If we do not land immediately we will be fired upon.”
“Cables stowed,” Mchynlyth reported. “We can leave any time you want.”
“Everett, at your convenience.”
Everett touched the jump button. There should be sound effects, he thought. There should be a noise like engines powering up. There should be some Babylon 5 kind of schwummm noise, like when the starships came out of hyperspace, or even that Doctor Who sound, like a dinosaur in pain, when the TARDIS dematerialized. All there was in a Heisenberg jump was white…
…and then somewhere else.
“Did you say something, Everett Singh?” Sen asked.
“No,” Everett said.
“‘Funny, cos I's sure I heard you say something.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“Well, maybes not so much say something as make a sound.”
“A sound? What like?”
“Well, sort of like…voom.”
“What?”
“Voom,” Sen said. “Only long. Vooooom.”
“I did not go voom.”
“Yes you did you did you did.”
“The Heisenberg jump's done something to your hearing,” Everett said, but it was a lie. He had made a noise. He had gone voom. Vooooom. The kind of noise an airship jumping between parallel universes through a Heisenberg Gate should make. Sen pouted at him in annoyance, but out of the corner of his eye he caught Captain Anastasia smiling.
Voom! she mouthed silently.
Snow had fallen on the city. For a moment Everett did not recognize his London, his Tottenham. Then the shadows and shapes and slumpings of slush and melted snow made a pattern, a pattern he knew. That must be the curve of Northumberland Road, there were the tracks and platforms at Angel Road Station. That dark body of water, like a dead eye, could only be Lockwood Reservoir. There was the plaza off the High Road. He and his dad had walked up that road so many Saturdays. Everett pulled down a monitor and clicked up the belly cameras. Directly beneath the hull were the snow-covered stands and the rectangle of grass between them.
“Yes,” Everett whispered. His calculations had been perfect. He had jumped Everness right over the stadium.
“Where are we?” Sen asked.
“White Hart Lane,” Everett said. He felt powerful, he felt victorious, he felt like he had scored a goal right between the posts on that pitch down there. When Sen looked puzzled, he explained, “Tottenham Hotspur. The one place they won't look twice at an airship. They park them over the stadium for advertising all the time. Hiding in plain sight. By the time they work out that we shouldn't be here, we'll not be here.”
“And why are we here, Mr. Singh?” Captain Anastasia asked.
“Because it's where my family is,” Everett said. “And I'm going to get them back.”
There ought to be a rule. If it snows on the first day of the term, school will be cancelled. No ifs, no buts, no questions. Automatically. An extra day's holiday. A snow day.
Everett M had been awake long before the strange light that always says snow on the ground began to glow through the curtains. He couldn't sleep in this bed. It was hollow in the same places, comfortable on the same side, yielded and was hard in the same way, but it wasn't his. So he lay staring at the ceiling, or at the glowing display of the digital radio, until the curtains became a plane of yellow grey. Light like this is as much reflected up from the ground as it is shining from the sky, Everett M knew. He went to the window and saw the garden, the hedge, the roofs covered with pure untrodden snow. While he'd lain awake in this alien bed in an alien world, it had fallen silent, unseen, deep, snow on snow.
He shivered.
By the time he left for school, the purity of the snow had been broken. Footprints drew paths from gate to gate, car tires had pressed grey, icy tracks into the road. The snow made everyone's destinations and intentions visible. On Stoke Newington High Street the school-run SUVs were nose to tail, windows misted, tailpipes making smog, wheels mushing the snow into greasy black slush. A trail of paw prints across Abney Park Cemetery ended in a red stain and a few feathers. Snow had settled around the shoulders and heads of the stone angels like robes and crowns.
The snowballs hit him as he emerged from the Dogs Delight. Two on the back and one on the side of the head. He whirled, surprised and furious. The fury fueled the technology inside him. Everett M felt the thrilling burn of the lasers charging up. Lines appeared in the backs of his fingers. He willed them shut. Everett M had fantasies of power. Everyone did, imagining that they had superpowers and could avenge every slight and offense and injustice. Bullies would crumble, sarcastic adults melt. But no one ever could. There were no superpowers. There were no super heroes. But now there was a superhero. He imagined scooping up handfuls of snow, squeezing them so hard in his enhanced grip that they turned to ice. He could run at them so fast that, try as they might to flee, they would never be able to get away from him. They might try pelting him with snowballs to slow him down, but he saw himself opening up his finger lasers, each one tracking and vaporizing a snowball in the blink of an eye. Zap zap zap zap. No matter which way they tried to run, he would hunt them down and throw the ice balls so hard and accurate that they would hurt, really hurt. He would leave a message not to mess with Everett M. Singh. Word would spread around the school: You know that geeky guy, the goalkeeper? Did you hear what he did?
No. He could never do that. The first rule of superheroes is always protect your real identity.
Jeers and shouts from the bushes.
“Hey, Everett…”
“So where did you get to over Christmas?”
“Should have stayed there; better than this hole.”
“I'm okay,” Everett shouted into the snowscape. “Really.” No answer, of course, but it was all right. It was better than all right. It was a welcome back. Not everyone on this
world is your enemy.
Everett M had been trying to avoid the boy all morning. At assembly, where Mrs. Abrahams—same assembly hall, same head teacher—welcomed everyone back to a new term and got sighs and groans when she announced that the school had heating oil enough for three weeks of snow and therefore would not be closing, he disappeared into the crowd. He hurried out of classes, using his Thryn senses to put as many people as possible between he and the boy. He found ways to avoid having to go past the lockers. He hid in the library at break, telling himself that he was just reading the papers, learning what was going on in this world that made it different from his own. The prime minister was Mr. Cameron, not Mr. Portillo. The economy was in bad shape. Spurs were three places further down the league standings. The number one singer was still the crappy winner from The X-Factor. In none of the pages in any of the papers could Everett M find any evidence that anyone knew of the Plenitude, or even had any idea that they occupied one of many parallel universes. The bell rang. Everett M turned on his Thryn senses and skulked through the corridors of Bourne Green school. But at lunch there was no escape, shivering and exposed out on the snowy playground. Black on white like an exclamation mark on a page: there was no going unseen. Ryun Spinetti cut a line of footprints across the snow.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I'm good. Good.”
“Well, that's good.” They stood, hands in pockets, not looking at each other. “So is everything, like, all right now?”
“There's still some things I don't remember properly.”
“Whoa, that's like…. Like what?”