by Ian McDonald
“And what then?” Sen asked.
“I take us all somewhere far, far beyond the reach of the Order, and we'll never think about the Infundibulum or the Heisenberg Gates or the Plenitudes and Panoplies. We'll live happily ever after in one world and one world only.”
“Yes, Everett Singh, but I meant, what about us? What happens to us? The ship, and Mchynlyth and Sharkey, and Annie and me. Where do we go?”
The brilliance flickered. Everett's confidence wavered. His cheeks burned, not with cold, but with embarrassment.
“I…I don't know,” Everett said.
“And, ‘scuse me for saying, but I think there's a bijou flaw in your scenario. If every jump leaves a trace, wherever you go, they can follow you. Just an observation, like…”
She was right. Sen had struck the brilliant plan at its weakest point and it had shattered. The sun vanished from the uppermost part of the cross on top of the cathedral. It didn't look like gold any more. The twilight had come and Everett was very cold.
“But I know you, Everett Singh,” Sen said, as if she knew the hurt she had dealt out so casually. “You'll think of something, and it'll be brilliant.”
In two sentences, Sen restored him. He would think of something. He recognized then that what he had felt as confidence had been overconfidence. His enemies were powerful and had the resources of ten worlds behind them. But he had one advantage. The Order—whatever it was, whatever its plans and fears—could follow him, but it could never preempt him. Everett would always be one jump ahead. That was enough of an advantage to be brilliant. He was the goalkeeper who always knew which way the ball was coming.
“So, what do you think of my London?” Everett said.
“I think it's magic, Everett Singh.”
“Sen, I, uh…you know the way you gave me the tarot card?”
Instantly she was defensive.
“What have you done with it? Have you lost it? If you've lost it—”
“No no no no…” Everett patted his chest. “It's in there.”
“Next to your heart. Dally.”
“Well, I made something for you…Here, put these on.”
Sen frowned at the ear buds but hooked them in.
“I made you a mix.” Everett tapped up the playlist. “I can't really give it to you because it won't play on any of your technology, but, well, I just…” He stroked the play button. Everett had been working on it for days. It had been a welcome distraction from the hours of coding and freezing as Everness shut down more and more systems to conserve power. Mathematics and music use similar parts of the brain, Everett knew. Richard Feynman, the physicist, and one of Everett's geek heroes, had been a world-class bongo player. So making a playlist for Sen had been a rest from coding without letting that part of his brain freeze solid. From what he had heard booming out of the Airish pubs along Mare Street, or blasting from Sen's latty—”it doesn't use that much power,” she had complained, “and anyway, music's a right, like air and water”—Everett had picked up an eighties, electro, danceable vibe. Electronic without being techno. Crunching rhythm guitars. Slap or synth bass right at the front of the mix. Horn sections, but none of the sax solos that made Everett wince at 90 percent of his dad's embarrassingly fat collection of eighties music. Foursquare rhythms, without being thud thud thud. Not a hint of any kinds of anything beat based, like hip-hop, trip hop, drum'n' bass, or grime. It was very white music. There was music on his player that hit those same groove buttons. And he found, as the days wore on and the temperature dropped and lines of code seemed to sway like tangled snakes, that he looked forward more and more to those moments of careful choosing.
On top of St. Paul's Cathedral, like a lord of London, Everett Singh watched Sen smile and nod to the rhythm in her ears. Then her face clouded. She pulled out the ear buds. Everett thought he saw tears in her eyes.
“I'll listen to it later.”
“I'm sorry, I just thought you'd like it…”
“Oh I likes it, Everett Singh. I likes it too much. That's why I can't listen to it, not right now. It sounds like home…but it's not home, savvy? Like this city, it's magic, your London, but it's not home. And I sees this all, and I hears this, and I thinks, I can't have that, not ever again. It's gone. I asked you, Everett Singh, what happens to us? What does happen to us? Does I get to live happy ever after too?”
All that remained of the day was a glow of red along the west of the world. Everett stood at the center of a web of light, streets and traffic and railways. With the shapes of buildings lost in the deepening darkness, with London reduced to glowing bones, it could be any city, anywhere, any world. This was not his home anymore. Sen and he were outcasts, exiles together. His stomach turned, his breath caught in his throat. The city at his feet wasn't his anymore.
Everett pulled on the safety line and hauled the hedgehopper down from where he had parked it, hovering up among the seagulls and impertinent pigeons. He buckled the flight harness around him.
“I'm sorry Sen.”
“Look, it's not your music…”
“I know it's not the music. It's everything. That's what I'm sorry for.”
“Don't be.” Sen's voice was suddenly fierce. Her emotional weather, always changeable, had grown stormy. “I can live with it. We all can live with it. It's our way. We take what we're given and we live it the best we can. That's what Annie says, and she's right.” She reached up and hauled down her own hedgehopper. “Go on then, Everett Singh. I'll be right behind you.” Everett held her eyes for a long moment, saw truth there, then pulled on the throttle cable and stepped off the high lintel into the clear, cold night air.
They descended out of the deep blue twilight to land on the path between the Victorian tombstones. Everett had circled the landing zone twice to make sure it was clear of dog walkers. They wouldn't look up. No one with a dog on a lead ever looked up. He landed lightly on the trodden snow, Sen behind him. Stone angels stood around them, heads bowed, hands folded. They wore halos of snow.
“Let's get these out of sight.”
They towed the hedgehoppers to the back of the chapel. Snow had covered the old condoms and cigarette butts and needles that always pile up around the backs of remote, disused Victorian buildings. Someone had built a smiling snowman, given him a snow arm, and plonked an empty beer can in it.
“Okay,” Everett said. “Here's the plan. I go and I get Mum and Victory-Rose. I call the ship. By the time I get them back here, Everness will be over the extraction zone.” He'd picked up the expression from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. “The captain picks us up and I jump us out of here. We're in another universe before anyone notices. Simple.”
“Can I say something? Your plan is good but there's one thing wrong in it.”
“What?”
“You said, I go.”
“That's what I said.”
“What do I do?”
“You stay and keep an eye on the hedgehoppers.”
“You'll need me.”
Everett bit back his exasperation. “This is Hackney.”
“This is your Hackney.”
“In my Hackney, if you don't nail a thing to the ground, someone will steal it.”
Sen scowled.
“Don't like it,” she growled. “But all right.” Then, without word or warning, she grabbed Everett by the shoulders and kissed him hard on the lips. A head shorter than Everett, Sen had to go up on her tiptoes to reach him. Before Everett could react, before he even properly realized what was happening, she broke. “For luck. And love.”
Sen looked very small and lost, a smudge of grey in the snow, part of winter herself. She held up a hand in blessing. Everett's lips still tasted of her—honey, apricots, her strange Sen musk—as he hiked off down the cemetery road beneath the bone-finger branches of the trees.
Home drew Everett. He broke into a fast walk, a run. Stupid and treacherous in snow, but Everett's feet knew every pebble and crack in these paths. He had never been afraid in th
is graveyard. Ghosts, vampires, undead rising—Everett considered these superstitions to be so stupid as to be unthinkable. The Victorian dead slept deep and very, very sound. They made good, peaceful company. Through the main gate, across High Street, over the railway bridge, along the common, and into Roding Road. He could run the whole way. The Traveler Hasteth in the Evening—one of Sen's cards, picture of a determined man in eighteenth-century breeches and hat striding along a path that wound away out of sight. The traveler hasteth because his journey has been longer and has taken him further than anyone can imagine, but home is close, very close. He saw himself at the end of Roding Road, he saw himself at the house. Would he ring the bell or just go round back like he always did? Open the door and just walk in. His mum would be singing the wrong words to songs on the radio. Victory-Rose would be having her dinner. What would he say? Stop what you're doing and come with me. Get your coats, take some jewellery and some small, portable, valuable stuff you can sell. No you won't need a passport or a phone or money. Come on. You're in terrible, terrible danger.
Why should they move even a muscle?
Because he'd come back. That was enough. I can explain everything, if you'll just come with me.
Everett's breath hung in great, warm clouds as he ran along the central path between the snow-hooded tombstones. Then he saw the figure between him and the gate that opened to Stoke Newington High Street and he stopped. The figure was little more than a dark silhouette against the yellow backdrop of streetlights, but the size, the shape, the way it stood, its clothes: everything about it said be afraid now. The dark figure stepped into a pool of light from the security floodlights Hackney Council had put up. In a flash Everett understood everything.
“No,” he whispered. He turned. He ran. After only a few steps, Everett yelped in pain, clapped a hand to his left shoulder. Something had stung him like a hornet. He smelled burned fibre, burned flesh. Without breaking stride, Everett glanced over his shoulder. The other him, the enemy, the Anti-Everett was following him calmly, deliberately along the path. He aimed his finger like a gun. Everett dived and rolled by instinct alone. Snow is not a soft landing. Snow does not cushion a fall. Snow hides hard things, sharp edges in it. Everett cried out as his ribs hit hard against an edge of broken tombstone. He saw a thread of red light flicker in the dark. A physicist's son knows a laser when he sees one. The beam wavered, then slashed toward him like the blade of a sword. Everett rolled to safety behind the plinth of a Victorian funeral angel. Tree branches fell to the path, precision severed. That first beam had winged him. If it had struck home, it would have burned a hole clean through him, cutting him in two.
A laser couldn't cut through solid stone. Could it? Everett decided not to hang around for the result of that experiment. He scrabbled in the treacherous snow, trying to find his footing. His side ached. He'd have an incredible bruise there. He hoped that was all he would have. Go. Go. Keep your head lower than the height of the tombstones, if you want to keep it at all.
“I can see you!”
His voice, calling him. Taunting him. His own voice. On what world had they found him, this other Everett? What had they told him? What had they promised him? What had they done to him?
Everett ducked as the tortured air shrieked behind him. Something streaked over his head, then a blast of white, an explosion, kicked the wind out of him, deafened him, and sent him staggering. Stone splinters ripped the side of his Everness Baltic jacket. The stone angel was shattered and smoking. Only the feet, toes still buried in snow, remained.
Go. Go.
Lasers fanned across the sky. Branches and twigs fell in cascades of glittering snow all around Everett. He put his arms up to ward off the debris and kept running.
“I can take this whole place down to the ground,” the voice called.
Think. Think. Thinking is what will save you. Nothing else. He is me. Everything I know, he knows. And everything he knows, I know. That's an advantage. A small one, the only one. Everett knew he could never defeat his double in open combat. He had to neutralize those weapons, get him onto the street, in public, where he couldn't be seen to use them. Everett moved deeper between the trees, slipping from tombstone to tombstone, taking the long, sneaky way around to the main gates and the bright lights and busy traffic of Stoke Newington High Street.
Missiles streaked in. Everett ducked behind a mausoleum. Through the iron grating that protected the Victorian dead he saw a line of explosions light up the night. Trees were burning. Tombstones were toppled like dominoes.
“Don't think so,” the Anti-Everett shouted. Everett saw his enemy advancing through the glowing smoke and mist. What you think, he thinks. What does he want? He wants the Infundibulum. That means he can't kill me. He can't risk damaging Dr. Quantum. He doesn't know if I have it on me or not. That's his disadvantage. That's my advantage. And I have another advantage. He doesn't know that I'm not alone.
Slowly, silently, Everett crept away from the cover of the mausoleum.
At the first explosion Sen cried out. Then she saw the red beams sparkle among the treetops and heard wood splinter and fall. She fidgeted and skipped in nervous frustration. Was that Everett's voice? What was he shouting? When the trees lit up with flashes and clouds of glowing smoke rose against the sky, she could wait no longer. She slipped into the hedgehopper harness and snapped it shut. The power meter stood at 20 percent. Plenty enough for flight and for fight. One last thing before she pulled the throttle cable. Sen unzipped the top of her Baltic suit and took out the Everness tarot. She kissed the deck and then, with long-practiced ease, cut the deck one handed and turned up the top card. Two knights, one in black armor and one in white armor, faced each other with shields and spiked maces. Be My Enemy.
The greatest enemy, the final enemy you face, is yourself.
Then she opened the throttle, pushed forward the steering bar, and went swooping up around the red-brick spire of the Abney Park chapel. From above the cemetery's treetops Sen took a bearing on the fighting. It was dark down there, with close-packed trees and jagged stone monuments. No problem. She had flown a two-hundred-meter-long airship in tougher conditions than this. Lasers stabbed between the trees. Sen pulled back on the steering bar and dived the hedgehopper down toward the cloud of laser-heated steam.
“Everett!” He stood where paths crossed. Sen pushed the hedgehopper into a hover. “Is you all right?”
Why was he standing in the open? Why was there no destruction around him? Why was he wearing different clothes? Why did he have his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up in the middle of winter?
Wrong here. Very, very wrong. Sen slammed the steering bar hard right as Everett aimed at her. His right forearm opened. Fire leaped toward her. With one hand Sen grabbed the red handle of the monofilament line. In the slowed-down time of ultimate crisis, her racing mind said find a weapon. And get out. She assessed the situation in the split second before the missile impacted. She hit the harness release and fell toward the bank of ploughed-up snow as the hedgehopper exploded.
Hope it's not hiding anything…
Hard…
Nothing could have been that painful. There must have been a curbstone or a plinth in that pile of slush. But she had to move. And quick. Sen came up into a crouch. The missile had not struck the hedgehopper dead center. The left fans had been blasted away; the remaining two had sent it into a crazy death spiral. Everett—no, the other Everett, the white-knight Everett to the black knight who was her Everett, watched the wrecked aircraft come down in a cluster of grave markers. For a moment his back was turned. Gritting her teeth against the pain in her side, Sen unlocked the monofilament line. She cracked it like a whip.
The other Everett whirled at the sound and movement. Tree branches fell around him, sliced through by the monofilament. Sen cracked the whip again before the other Everett, the Un-Everett, could turn one of his weird, scary weapons on her. A neat row of birch saplings planted along the edge of the path toppled, felled two
meters from the ground. A telegraph pole slid apart, its severed upper third held up by the lines. Sen reeled the line back in and spun it above her head. Branches fell in a circle around her. The Un-Everett ducked under the spinning death line. He pointed a finger. Sen dived behind a tombstone. The laser sizzled into the snowy woodland. She peeked up and sent her line cracking toward the Un-Everett again. He was fast, as fast and agile as her Everett, her black-knight Everett. She saw the Un-Everett's arm open. Sen leaped for fresh cover as the missile blasted the tombstone to stone splinters.
“Everett Singh!” she yelled. “Everett Singh! What did you have for Christmas dinner?”
Everett saw the hedgehopper flash between the trees like a white stone angel raised from a tomb. Then he saw the brief yellow stab of the missile trail and heard the explosion. He saw the remains of the hedgehopper spiral and yaw crazily before crashing down into the tombs. He almost cried out. Almost leaped up and ran to help. Almost. Everett forced his head down. He forced down the awful sick shock in his stomach and the horror in his heart. Keep down, stay down. He had glimpsed something fall from the hedgehopper in the moment before the blast. He had seen that. He had. Sen was all right; Sen had to be all right. So he forced his head down and peered through the rusted iron bars of the mausoleum, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sen, even though he was almost certain no one could survive that fall.
Then he saw tree branches fall. He saw saplings topple and a telegraph pole slump and bounce on its wires. He saw the lasers sparkle in the shed snow. He saw the flash and felt the blast of a missile strike. Everett ground the numbers in his mind, estimating size, storage capacity, trying to work out how many missiles the Anti-Everett had left. And then he heard the voice call his name twice and ask: What did you have for Christmas dinner?