by Ian McDonald
“Nano assassins that hide behind your eyes.” It was Sen who whispered the comment this time.
“The Nahn is all of those and worse,” Empress Woman continued. “Now do you understand why this world is closed, completely and permanently? We cannot ever let the Nahn off this world. Out among the Nine Worlds, it could never be contained.”
“So we're concerned when an Earth 3 cargo airship turns up out of thin air over what used to be Hackney,” Captain Skinny said.
“It would seem your quarantine isn't as tight as you think it is,” Captain Anastasia said, lightly. Her words fell like stones through water. Every eye behind the High Table fixed her. There was a silence that could intimidate even Anastasia Sixsmyth.
“It wasn't enough just to seal the jump gates,” Captain Skinny said. “We practice complete planetary hygiene. We have a code override on all our gate addresses. Anything trying to jump out of—or jump into—any of our Heisenberg Gates hits an automatic redirect. Instead of arriving at its destination gate, it gets rerouted to a jump point in the convective zone of the sun. Our sun, in another universe. Positions in space are different. Five million degrees should take care of any Nahn infestation. Or anything else for that matter.” The officer let the implication of his words sink in. “So, Captain, tell me, why aren't you wisps of ash inside the sun?”
Everett saw Sharkey glance at Captain Anastasia. Her head gave the smallest of nods. It said, trust me, I'm the Captain. Trust me like you trusted me when I challenged Ma Bromley to hand-to-hand combat on the bridge of her airship over the evil sands of Goodwin.
“We stole a jumpgun,” Captain Anastasia said with simple, direct honesty.
“This one?” Captain Skinny took the jumpgun from a concealed drawer in the back of the high table and set it on scarred, polished oak in front of him.
“You know fine well it is, sir,” Captain Anastasia said.
“You stole this, you say?”
“I did, sir. I stole it from a Plenipotentiary of the Plenitude of the Ten Known Worlds,” Captain Anastasia said. A murmur of amazement went along the line of officers and officials.
“Why didn't you lie,” Sen hissed, so loud Everett feared they would be overheard.
“What's the point? They know everything,” Everett whispered back.
“The point is, it's the Airish way. Ground-pounders don't deserve the truth.”
But she did tell a lie, Everett thought. It wasn't Captain Anastasia who had taken the jumpgun from Charlotte Villiers. It had been him, Everett Singh.
“Perhaps the question, sir, is how a Plenipotentiary came to have one in the first place,” Captain Anastasia said mildly. “The Plenitude has come to a pretty sorry pass when its diplomats must go armed.”
“For a commercial airship captain you're very well versed in interplane politics,” Captain Skinny said.
“My people value education,” Captain Anastasia said.
“Madam, you're hardly in a position for flippancy,” Captain Skinny snapped. Empress Woman lifted her hand.
“Enough, Brigadier,” Empress Woman ordered. So, Everett thought, Brigadier Skinny.
Empress Woman turned her attention back to Captain Anastasia: “Ten Known Worlds, you say?”
Everett could not see Captain Anastasia's face, but he knew she was smiling. Sen clenched a fist: a small victory there.
“Earth 10 made contact independently with Earth 2 earlier this year,” Captain Anastasia said. “The Plenitude has sent a diplomatic mission to open accession negotiations.”
A new voice spoke now, one Everett recognized. It tore long strips from his heart.
“That might explain this device.”
Everett edged closer to the railing, straining to hear, fearful that the scrape of a boot or a pigeon feather dislodged from the ledge would attract attention. Tejendra set Dr. Quantum on the long, scarred oak table. He wore a simple dark suit and a collarless shirt buttoned up to the neck.
“Explain please, Dr. Singh,” the Brigadier said.
“It's a portable computer, fairly sophisticated by the standards of the other Known Worlds, but it's nowhere near our level of technology.”
“I don't see how—” Brigadier Skinny said. His voice held an edge of irritation. Everett had the impression that his dad enjoyed needling the military. No, not my dad, Everett thought, never my dad. But this Dr. Singh appeared to be doing the same thing that Everett's dad would have done in the same situation.
“The point about the jumpgun is that it's a random parallel plane.” Dr. Singh said, cutting the officer off in midsentence. Still, his voice was milder than the Tejendra Everett knew, his tone more apologetic. “The odds of arriving in this universe, out of all the other possible universes, is so small as to be mathematically insignificant.”
“Your point?” the Brigadier snapped. Everett thought he saw Dr. Singh flinch at the whip-crack voice.
“This was a directed jump.”
“Using this…device?”
Again the woman held up her hand to silence the Brigadier.
“You're saying they've solved the navigation problem?”
“I believe so, Agister. The coding language is different from ours, but the interface is quite straightforward. It's a seven-dimensional topological manifold of the quantum-field matrices for several billion networked parallel universes.”
The elderly woman turned to Dr. Singh and raised an eyebrow.
The Brigadier was visibly annoyed now, sucking in his upper lip. “Will someone—”
“Let Dr. Singh finish, Brigadier.”
“Of course, Agister.” He almost spat out the final word.
“I believe…I have no experimental evidence, but I believe that this device, properly constituted, would enable a Heisenberg Gate to open a jump point anywhere. Not just at another Heisenberg Gate. At any point in any parallel universe. The whole of the Panoply. Not just the nine…sorry, ten, worlds of the Plenitude.”
“My God,” Lieutenant Kastinidis whispered.
“‘I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight,’” Sharkey said.
“Captain, is this true?” the Agister said to Captain Anastasia.
“It is, ma'am.” Captain Anastasia spoke plainly and simply, one woman of authority to another.
“How did you come to be in the possession of this device?”
Everett held his breath. Would she lie? Dare she tell the truth?
“We have a word among my people: Gafferiya. It means the tradition of giving haven and shelter to lost and stranded travelers. But we can be…flexible. A young man came to us. He was a refugee. His whole world was hunting him because he had that machine you hold in your hands, Dr. Singh.” There was nothing in Captain Anastasia's voice, the way she carried herself, that betrayed that she recognized this alter Tejendra. Everett could see part of Sharkey's profile and it, too, was stone. “He was alone, far from home, in a strange world with no one soul he could trust. What other choice had I?”
“Now I's crying, Everett Singh,” Sen murmured.
“Sen.”
“What?”
“You shut up.”
The Brigadier would have cut in, but the Agister again raised her hand.
“Your…singular guest. We would have words with him.”
“He's fourteen years old, ma'am,” Captain Anastasia said.
“You expect me to believe that the only working map of the Panoply is in the hands of a teenage boy? God help us all.”
“My word, ma'am. Whether you believe it depends on whether those stories about what an Airishwoman's word is worth have made it as far as this world.”
“I know a story that's just fanciful enough to be persuasive.”
The Brigadier would be restrained no longer.
“Agister, with respect, this is now a security matter.”
“Brigadier—”
“I have assessed the risks and I have no choice
but to invoke Defense Protocol 4.”
“What's that?” Sen whispered.
“How would I know?” Everett saw Dr. Singh draw a sudden breath and sit up, as if something cold had crawled on the back of his neck. Lieutenant Kastinidis shot an uneasy glance at her superior officer. “But I don't think it's good.”
“Lieutenant, escort the captain and her first officer into custody.”
Heavy chair legs scraped on medieval wooden floorboards. Sen searched inside her jacket for the Everness tarot. She slipped a card from the deck, flipped it through her fingers, and dropped it carefully, oh so carefully, through a gap in the gallery's floorboards. It turned over and over in a fall that seemed to last forever. Then it struck the floor and time restarted. Moments later, the toe of Sharkey's boot came down toward it and at the last moment veered to one side. Quick as anything, Sharkey stopped, scooped up the card, and flicked it up the sleeve of his voluminous caped coat. He glanced up and winked.
“And you, too, Dr. Singh,” the Brigadier said. Tejendra's alter sent a worried glance to the Agister. She nodded. “Leave the device,” the Brigadier called out.
“Sen,” Everett whispered, “give me the drop-line control. I'm going after Da…Dr. Singh.”
Everett peered cautiously out of the window. Weather had moved in while he and Sen had spied from their hidden place. A light, fine snow was sifting down from the sky. The Airish, with their military escort, had reached the shelter of a college staircase. Tejendra's alter was crossing the quad, the collar of his coat turned up against the unexpected snow. Sen slipped off the control and deftly slid it around Everett's wrist.
“You mind yourself with that, omi. I's staying ‘ere. I ain't lettin’ that comptator out of my sight. I trusts that sharpy cove about as far as I could shit him.”
The snow swirled around Everett as he followed the scientist across the college garden, bare and blasted by winter. The Oxford defense field flickered above Caiaphas College's steep roofs and turrets.
“Dr. Singh.”
The scientist stopped in the shadow-filled arch to the staircase.
“Yes?” He peered through the flying snow at the figure that had called his name. “You're not as old as I thought. You're off the airship, aren't you? From Earth 3.”
“No,” Everett said. “Not Earth 3.”
Tejendra's alter took a step away from the gloom of the stone staircase into the light from the iron wall bracket. For the first time Everett saw him clearly. It was the Tejendra Singh of this universe. Like his dad in every part and feature, yet at the same time different. Life and experience had weighed on his body differently, had laid different lines on his face and had salted grey in his hair and in the loop of beard and moustache. Him, not him. Dr. Tejendra Singh frowned at Everett. Fine powder snow flurried across the cone of light from the suspended lantern. Then Tejendra recognized what stood before him.
“Oh my dear God.” His hands flew to his mouth in shock and horror. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. Maybe you have, Everett thought, from another world. Maybe that's what ghosts are, flickers from a parallel world breaking into this one.
“I am Everett Singh,” Everett said.
“Oh my boy, you are, yes you are,” Dr Singh stammered. “This can't be right. This isn't right…You can't be…You are…”
“My father is Dr. Tejendra Singh of—”
“The Department of Multiversal Physics, Imperial University, London,” Dr. Singh finished.
“The Department of Quantum Physics, Imperial College, London,” Everett corrected.
Snow eddied around them.
“Come in, come in,” Dr. Singh said suddenly. “I need to…I've questions…Just come in. You'll freeze out there.” He stepped into the shelter of the staircase and opened the heavy wooden door to his ground floor rooms.
“I shouldn't be here. They think I'm safely locked up,” Everett said.
Tejendra Singh smiled, and Everett's heart turned over in his chest. It was his father's smile, rare and carefully portioned out, but when it came it transformed his entire face.
“The military think they run this base,” Tejendra said. “I take every opportunity I can for minor acts of rebellion.”
The room was like the one Everett had escaped: uneven floors, cold radiating from the stone window frames, walls wood paneled, the ceiling low and timbered with dark, warped beams. In an old stone fireplace, blackened by generations of smoke, a wood fire glowed behind a wire mesh guard. On either side of it two tall, wingback chairs faced each other. A screen glowed on the top of a small round side table. Everett could see no tablet computer, no laptop.
“Holographics,” Dr Singh said, noticing where Everett's eyes rested. “Make yourself at home.”
Everett let himself carefully slide into the chair. The leather creaked. It made him feel very adult. That was the way his dad had always treated him, like a fellow civilized human male. He caught the alter Tejendra staring at him. Dr. Singh tore his gaze away.
“I'm sorry. It's…scary. You look like…her. How old are you?”
“Fourteen. Fifteen in May.”
Dr. Singh closed his eyes. Everett saw old, deep hurt.
“May. Nineteen ninety-seven. I remember May 1997. I was on the last squadron of tilt jets to make it out of Birmingham before the Nahn assimilated the city. Get the scientists out. The scientists and the politicians. Everyone else was expendable. The Nahn was coming at us out of everywhere on that convoy to the airport: everywhere. In the sewers, up from the gutters, out of the sky…That's how they got through London so fast; the rats and pigeons. Assimilate those, and you've got the whole sewer system, the U-ground, the power system…If you're never more than ten feet from a rat, you're never more than ten feet from the Nahn. Under the earth and in the skies. It was after the Nelson Square Massacre that we realized what we were up against and that we couldn't hope to win. Fight the birds, the rats? We call it a massacre—but can you have a massacre when no one dies? But they did die, all those people who went down to Nelson Square to see the lions and stick their feet in the fountains and look at Nelson in his memorial and take pictures of each other feeding the pigeons. The Nahn-infected pigeons. They stopped being human. That's dying.”
Dr. Singh paused. He looked directly at Everett.
“But how could you know anything about this? You weren't there. You weren't born. You never were born. Nelson Square, then the attack on the London U-ground. Every single person on the subway that day just vanished. Assimilated by the Nahn and sucked into pipes and the tubes and the wires. They found the entire inside of the tunnels coated in black slime. That was the people. Dozens of kilometers of them. It seemed an unimaginable number of casualties, incalculable. Now it's just a statistical blip. The government drew up plans to evacuate London. Then the spire began to grow out of the Isle of Dogs.”
Once Everett had seen a David Attenborough wildlife series on the BBC. In one scene, a rain forest became infected by a fungus. That had seemed pretty creepy to nine-year-old Everett, watching on a Sunday night. What happened next would stay with him forever. The fungus worked its way into the ant's brain. It turned the ant into a zombie, sent it climbing up to the top of the plant, where it locked its jaws into the stem, never to move again. Now the true horror began. The ant's carapace shrank and collapsed in on itself as the fungus consumed it from within. Then, under time-lapse photography, the ant's head split down the middle and a tendril wiggled out: the fungus's fruiting body. It wiggled and grew and grew and grew until it was ten times the ant's body length. A spine, a spire. At the very end, it burst, shedding spores. Spores drifting like smoke on the wind to infect new ants. Nine-year-old Everett found a thing out about the universe. It wasn't sweet and it wasn't kind, and it didn't have morals or pity. There was nothing human about it. It was. It was the scariest kind of horror because it was real. Then Everett saw the spire of nanotechnology, thrusting out of what in his world was Docklands, fed by the hollowed-out bodies of the peop
le of London.
“That was when we knew we were out of time,” Dr. Singh continued. “We had to move right away. Eight million people, all at once. It was chaos. Roads were clogged for miles. The railway system broke down. No one dared use the U-ground. The police couldn't move. The army was trying to ferry troops around by helicopter to organize the evacuation. It couldn't work. It was never expected to work. If anyone got out it would be a bonus. What was expected was that we'd lose the entire population of London. I had priority clearance because of the university—they sent a helicopter to get Laura out of East London to meet me in Birmingham. It was scientists and their families.”
“Laura,” Everett said. “My mum.”
“Your mum. My wife. I was based in Imperial—we were sleeping under the desks, trying to develop something we could use against the Nahn. She was still in Stoke Newington.”
“Roding Road,” Everett said.
“Number 43. We'd just bought it. Hell of a mortgage. Like that matters now. The police were picking up everyone on the priority list and taking them to an evac point up in Finsbury Park. Evac point. Spend enough time around the military and you end up talking like them. I heard later from one of the soldiers what happened. From Hyde Park to Hackney Wick, every street was gridlocked. Nothing moved, nothing could move, nothing could hope to move. I could hear the car horns from Imperial. It was people trying to take things with them. Pile it in the back, load up the trailer, throw it up on the roof, wedge it in around the passengers; they wouldn't go without their stuff. You'd think if it were your life or your stuff, there'd be no decision to make? Wrong. Their stuff was their life. There was nothing moving on Stamford Hill. The soldier said he'd never seen anything like it. They were jammed right up to the shop doors. When I saw what it was like in Central London I tried to call her, tell her to get up high, get up to a roof or something. She was wearing the color of the day—all the ones on the list had been told to wear yellow—they would have seen her and picked her up. The networks were all overloaded. The helicopter was coming in to the evac when the soldier saw what he thought was the biggest flock of starlings he had ever seen. It was like a cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon. Couldn't be, he thought. There aren't that many starlings in the country, let alone London.