by Ian McDonald
He hadn't felt anything like tears in his eyes when he feared she might be dead, but they came when he was certain she was alive. Everett wiped them away on the sleeve of his Baltic jacket. He gulped twice before answering. He didn't want Sen to hear the tears in his voice.
“Pheasant!” he shouted back. His voice croaked with emotion anyway. He thought, you clever, clever girl. One question tells you I'm alive, that it's the real me, and where I am. “Pheasant makhani with saffron rice and naan bread!” And he crouched and ran. He rolled to cover as the missile took out the mausoleum behind which he had been hiding. One more missile wasted, Everett thought.
“I'm armed!” Sen shouted. Everett heard trees snap and crash, followed by the shriek and blast of a missile. Another one gone. Everett picked up still-warm chunks of blasted stonework, made a run, and pelted them as hard as he could at where he calculated his enemy to be. Lasers cut across the shrubbery, leveling bushes. A young holly tree caught and burned. Everett dropped down into cover behind the headstone of a Victorian sugar magnate and heard a whip crack ring out in the freezing air. Sen must have salvaged the monofilament cutting line from the hedgehopper. That was a hell of a weapon. And she seemed to have a good idea of how to use it. Lasers lashed out crazily. Sen was keeping the Anti-Everett down. It was a stalemate, but it couldn't last. Explosions, firefights in Abney Park Cemetery; eventually the police would come, and they were probably on their way already. That might suit this Anti-Everett just fine, Everett thought. He had good reason to suspect that the Anti-Everett had been recruited by Charlotte Villiers. If he and Sen were to fall into the hands of the police, Charlotte Villiers would bring the power of the Order to bear on her political connections, just as she'd done during the police investigation of his dad's kidnapping. Everett needed to get them out, and get them out fast.
Then, crouched behind the stone slab, ankle deep in the snow, he knew what had to be done. It was simple. It was brilliant. It required only the ability to see everyday things in a new way, and it required mathematics. He took out his phone and tapped it on. Signal strength, full bars. When Tejendra had given him Dr. Quantum, the second thing Everett had done was to sync it to his phone. The first thing he had done was take it over to Ryun's to show it off.
“Look, this means I can control it remotely from my phone,” he had said.
“You came over here so I can watch you do some recreational coding,” Ryun had said. “Even for a brother geek, this is deeply boring.”
Not now, Ryun Spinetti. Five taps gave him control of Dr. Quantum, which was on the bridge of the airship hovering over White Hart Lane. He had used the same process to put together his playlist present for Sen—how embarrassing had that been? Now came the tricky part, the bit that required the time to think carefully, time he did not have. He had to open the Infundibulum and access its database of jump points over a slow, expensive, data-limited cell-phone line. The jump point to White Hart Lane was still in the Jump Controller's memory. From that he could work out the jump code for his current location. Everett opened up the GPS. It was horribly hungry for battery power.
Every Heisenberg Gate opened two ways. When he had opened the gate to a street in E2, a scrap of newspaper had blown through from that London. Water had gushed in a torrent from the flooded city of E8. And a Heisenberg Gate didn't have to be big enough to send an entire airship through. It could be as small as two people. It did have to be very precisely fixed though, so that it wasn't ten meters up in the air or three-quarters buried in the ground with the dead Victorians. And fixing the location of the Heisenberg Gate would be tricky, given that Everett would have to do so while hiding from his laser-armed, missile-firing, evil cyborg twin from a parallel universe.
Everett's calculations were interrupted by the cemetery's sudden silence. He looked up. It's too quiet, he thought, suddenly alert the possibility of a sneak attack.
Goalkeeper reflexes. The laser tore a searing line across Everett's cheek as he threw himself away from the dark shape that rose in front of the dark trees. It burned. It burned like hell. He scrabbled to find cover behind a gravestone, scooping up snow to soothe his seared left cheek.
The same goalkeeper reflexes saved the Anti-Everett. It might have been the sound of the line singing out, or he might have sensed the movement of air on his skin. He, too, had to dive for cover when Sen's monofilament cracked like a whip, slicing an arm and half a wing from one of the stone angels. Very slowly the angel's head toppled forward and fell. Again Sen cracked the whip. She took the top ten centimeters clean off the tombstone behind which the Anti-Everett had taken cover. Everett saw a figure in an orange flight suit skip nimbly to a new hiding place just as the Anti-Everett popped up, popped open his arm, and took out the little praying cherub behind which Sen had been sheltering.
“Sen!”
“Everett Singh!”
“Give me cover.”
“I got his lilly dish, Everett Singh.”
Everett pressed his back hard against the cold stone and turned to his phone. His cheek hurt. His cheek hurt like nothing he had known before. He would have a scar there. A real laser burn, not like the fake one Tejendra had claimed. It would forever mark him as different from his double.
He heard whip cracks and missile fire. How many of those things did the Anti-Everett have? But each blast was followed by a whip crack. Everett did not know what he would do if he did not hear that ultrasonic crack of monofilament. Don't try to know, he told himself. Do what you have to do. Do what only you can do.
He went into his Mathika software and was inputting his GPS coordinates when—Output…Output…Output—the signal bars wavered, then died.
“No!” Everett Singh yelled. Lasers turned the branches above him to matchwood. He hunched his shoulders against the rain of smoking wood. Full bars again. Output: a jump-gate destination code. He exited Mathika. So slow, so slow, so slow. And opened the Jump Controller. Inpoint, outpoint, aperture diameter. He dialed in three meters. Duration. His fingers hesitated. How far away was Sen?
“Sen!”
“Omi!”
Flashes lit the night. Was there anything left of Abney Park Cemetery? But now he knew where she was. Everett set the duration to ten seconds.
“Sen, the white light.”
“What?”
Everett hit the Jump button. White light lit up every angel and cherub and weeping child in Abney Park. Everett peeped over the edge of the tombstone. The Heisenberg Gate was a disc of blinding white light standing among the shattered cenotaphs and mausoleums. He saw Sen, a blur of orange, hard to see in the glare. Had she made it through? No time. Everett leaped from his cover and hurled himself at the gate. At the edge of his vision he saw his enemy come out from behind the maimed stone angel, arm raised, fingers pointing. Everett dived into the light…
…And hit Everness's deck hard. He rolled. Laser light burned an arc across the far wall, then the Heisenberg Gate timed out and closed. Everett fetched up hard against Sharkey's communications desk. Sharkey was on his feet, taking a fire extinguisher to the burning line the Anti-Everett's laser had cut in the hull cladding. A monitor dangled, spraying sparks, its angle arm lased through.
“‘Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire,’” Sharkey said, foaming out the blaze.
Captain Anastasia was on her knees beside him. Her eyes were wide with concern. Her hands were strong and soft and knew where the hurt was.
“Sen, medicine chest.”
“No time!” Everett winced at the pain in his ribs, his chest, his cheek. You're alive, that's what that says. “They can follow us through!”
Captain Anastasia frowned. Everett insisted: “Every time we make a jump, we leave a trace. We jumped from Abney Park, straight to here.” Did no one understand? Was everyone shocked, or just stupid? “We have to move the ship!”
White light filled the bridge. A glowing disc hovered a foot from the ground, directly in front of the great
window. Sharkey dropped the fire extinguisher and swung the shotguns from his coattails.
“Sen!” Captain Anastasia shouted. “Full reverse thrust!” Sen's hands were already on the control levers.
The white disc cleared. The ship's crew looked through a circular window into a dark, rock-walled chamber. Desks ringed the gates, lit flickering blue by computer monitors. A squad of men and woman in black, wearing black soft caps, stood at the foot of a metal ramp, weapons sloped. Behind them were figures too familiar to everyone on the bridge: Paul McCabe, scruffy in an ill-fitting suit, and Charlotte Villiers, deadly in sharp-tailored clothing and killer make-up.
“Come on my dorcas!” Sen yelled, her whole, small weight behind the thrust levers. “Come on dolly polone!” Slowly, very slowly, Everness moved. Two hundred meters of nanocarbon hull, cargo holds, batteries, and ballast was heavy inertia to overcome. Slowly, very slowly, the open jump gate began to drift toward the great window. Other way around, Everett thought. The jump gate is staying where it is. It's the ship that's moving away from it. It's all relativity. Charlotte Villiers realized what Everness was doing. Everett heard her yell a command. The soldiers hesitated. The hesitation defeated them. The jump gate passed through the great window and hung out in midair. The squad commander, the blonde woman Everett recognized from his previous skirmishes with Worldgate 10's private army, realized the mistake and dashed up the ramp to the very edge of the portal. For a moment Everett thought she might jump, then the ship separated completely from the gate. Still Sen leaned on the thrust levers, inching Everness away from the open Heisenberg Gate. To Everett it seemed like a group of soldiers standing in midair, ringed in brilliant light.
“We need to jump,” he said.
“You're in no fit state,” Captain Anastasia said.
“You don't understand!” Everett yelled before remembering the look in the captain's eye, the tone in her voice, the last time he had challenged her authority on her own bridge. “Ma'am, with respect, we need to make a Heisenberg jump. They've got someone with my mum and sister. They've got an agent.”
“Him,” Sen said. “It's him. From another plane. Him. Everett. But…zhooshed up. He's got shooty stuff.”
“We have to jump out of here.”
Everett forced his aching bones up from the floor. Captain Anastasia planted a hand on his chest.
“Where would you take my ship, Mr. Singh?”
Everett almost slapped the restraining hand away. Captain Anastasia felt the strength gather inside him and widened her eyes. Everett remembered what Mchynlyth had said, that she had learned French martial arts from the masters of Marseilles. In this universe, the French didn't have martial arts.
“Do you remember when we were caught between Charlotte Villiers and the Royal Oak?” One hundred meters off the prow, the Heisenberg Gate turned to a disc of solid white, shrank into a blinding white dot, then vanished into the clear night air. Captain Anastasia stood up. “Do you remember?” Everett asked again. “I wondered, if the same way that Charlotte Villiers can open a jump gate to the bridge here, because we always leave a trace of where we've been, maybe the jumpgun leaves a trace, too, a memory of all the gates it's opened. And one of those, one of those would open wherever my dad is.” Everett struggled to his feet. He hurt. He hurt worse than he had ever hurt before, even after the toughest football games, when the other team smacked up the goalkeeper when the referee wasn't looking. He felt like he'd been in a war. He was in a war. He was still in a war. He would always be in a war, him and everyone he met and everyone he loved and every life he touched. Fifteen days ago, Tejendra had been lifted from outside the ICA, only fifteen days ago, and Everett was tired, so so tired. What had Sen said when Captain Anastasia had turned up her card The Traveler Hasteth in the Evening? Far to go before I sleep? “I can't do that. Mchynlyth can't do that. I need to take the jumpgun back to the place that made it.”
“Where is that, Mr. Singh?”
“It has to come from one of the nine worlds of the Plenitude.”
Captain Anastasia nodded.
“I don't know for certain.”
Captain Anastasia raised an eyebrow.
“I think…I believe…I believe, completely and absolutely, that it comes from the plane you call E1.”
Shock: it's not everyone gasping at once or reeling back in horror or throwing their hands up; shock is a thing you sense like electricity, a thing you smell like a change in the weather. Shock is a chemical thing.
“E1 is embargoed, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said. “Completely, absolutely.”
“We have to go there.”
“From the ghouls and the frights and the dreads of our nights, the Dear and his dorcas deliver us,” Sen said. She clutched the Everness tarot tight in her hand, pressed against her heart. At the same time, Sharkey said, “‘So will I send upon you famine and evil beasts, and they shall bereave thee: and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee; and I will bring the sword upon thee.’”
“All inter-plane traffic to E1 was closed down fifteen years ago,” Captain Anastasia said. “The Heisenberg Gates were sealed. No one knows what for. But I would hazard it's mighty dread to quarantine an entire world. And you propose to take my ship and my crew and my daughter there.”
“Yes,” Everett Singh said. There was no other answer. So many requests he had made of Captain Anastasia and her ship, so many demands and dangers, and he could see no end to them. And as he thought that, he knew that she had come to the same conclusion, that the only way to end this was to go through it, wherever it led, all the way.
“Well, I know we can't stay in this world very much longer,” Captain Anastasia said. “Mr. Singh, take us out of here.” She found an undamaged microphone. “Mr. Mchynlyth, power to the jump gate. In your own time, Mr. Singh.”
Everett opened up the Infundibulum. It was a simple matter to find the point in E1 that corresponded to this position over White Hart Lane football ground. He slid it into the Jump Controller. The board lit green. He hit the button.
Voom, went Everett Singh.
Silence in the streets of London. On Clapton Common and Park Manor, only the sound of crows insulting each other. From Wingate Estate came the scream of cats fighting, loud as gunfire in the still air. Pigeons hooted. In the distance dogs howled, their voices strong with the wolf within. No thud of subwoofer bass from the boy racers on Sterling Way, no shriek of jets inbound for Heathrow and Silvertown. The dawn sky was clear, hard blue, pure January. Not a jet trail scored it. Nothing moved in the air or on the Earth.
Sen swiveled the brass track ball and sent the little survey drone diving down Stamford Hill. Buddleia ran rampant in the gutters and on the flat roofs, a forest of skeletal branches and twigs and the dry brown brushes of last summer's purple flowers. Grass sprouted in thick clumps from the curbstones and cracks in pavement. Tree roots had pushed up the paving slabs. Debris from fallen shop fronts littered the pavements: shards of cracked plastic shop signs, piles of broken glass. The windowless shop fronts were like the empty eye sockets of skulls. A few cars stood abandoned at the roadside. Their windows crumbled sugar glass. Their upholstery was mottled green and sprouting with moss and weeds.
Sen gave a little cry and put the drone into hover. Everyone saw what had made her stop, a glimpse of a pale limb. She turned the cameras. A doll, lying like a murder victim on the street, one arm outstretched. Her plastic hair was matted thick by the elements. Her eyes were the worst; black emptiness.
You were loved once, Everett thought.
Plane to plane, world to world, point to point. Everness arrived at the same geographical coordinates from which she had departed Everett's world: one hundred meters over White Hart Lane. The two stadiums could hardly have been more different. These roofs sagged, and in places they had collapsed altogether. One of the floodlight towers had fallen. The pitch was a jungle of weeds, shrubby growth, and choking buddleia bushes through which traces of white lines and markings could be glim
psed. The goal nets were tattered. Crows perched on the crossbars. This was a dead stadium in a dead city.
“Calling London, calling London,” Sharkey had repeated over and over, one headphone pressed to his ear. “‘Then said I, “Lord, how long?” And he answered, “Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate.”’”
Captain Anastasia had gone to the great window. She had clasped her hands behind her back and looked a long time out over the desolation. Empty streets, empty cars, and empty houses. An empty city.
“Tomorrow,” Captain Anastasia had ordered. “No one's looking for us here, so let's get what sleep we can. We're going to need it, I think. Latties and hammocks. Tomorrow we solve mysteries.”
Everett swung in his hammock for long sleepless hours. So much, too much. So many worlds, so much running and fighting. His head reeled: another him. A doppelganger. A ringer. A cuckoo in his nest. Of all the things Charlotte Villiers had done, this was the sharpest and cruelest. He did not doubt he would find his dad, out there somewhere in the Panoply of worlds. But to take another him and turn him into…what? Some cyborg killing machine? To think that that was staying in his house, sleeping in his bed, living with his mum, and with Victory-Rose…
No one can sleep in a dead city. The silence was louder than any traffic roar or storm.
In the morning, Everett scrambled the last of the eggs for breakfast. The crew devoured them on the bridge while they looked for signs of life in the dead city and answers to the mystery of what had killed it.
“Captain,” Sharkey said, and the tone in his voice made Everett tear his eyes away from the scene outside the window. The fork paused halfway to his mouth. “Aft cameras.” Sharkey flicked the image to the monitors. Everyone pulled down a magnifier in front of the tiny display tube. Everett felt his stomach freeze in a moment of insane dread, the dread of seeing something so different, so strange, so wrong that your mind is incapable of processing it, and the only safe thing is to fear it.