by Ian McDonald
“My dad found all this?”
“Your dad's been working on this for a lot longer than you think.”
Everett remembered summer. It seemed so far away from the dark and cold of the year's end. Another world. School holidays and university holidays matched pretty well. The access agreement meant he had whole weeks at his dad's new apartment over in Kentish Town. Evenings they'd walk up over Hampstead Heath to Parliament Hill, and there among the kite fliers and the joggers they would look at London and it seemed to Everett as if Tejendra were seeing a different city, an alien city fallen from another universe. Walking back through the twilit streets his dad had talked, words bubbling out of him, tumbling over each other. He had talked about other worlds, as close to you as the breath in your lungs but farther than the farthest star. Worlds so like this one that a Tejendra Singh and an Everett Singh were walking down through Highgate only a shade different, so that it was Russell Brand in that house, not Ricky Gervais; some so different that life, the Earth, stars, even matter had never formed. He had talked about them so powerfully and convincingly that Everett had turned around, certain he had heard those other Everetts whisper his name.
“I knew,” Everett said. “I knew.”
“He told me more than once that he thought you were more gifted than him,” Colette said. “He had to work at it; you could see it. There it is, Everett. He gave it to you. The multiverse, on your iPad. The problem is, we don't know what to do with it. That's just what we call the wave function graphs. It's like trying to explore London and all you've got is a phone directory with just names and addresses of people and their phone numbers. There are Singhs of 43 Roding Road and Singhs at Ormonde Place and Singhs at Queen Elizabeth Way, but you can't tell from the phone book where they are in London—east, west, north of the river, south of the river—to get there. You've got their home address, but you don't know what it's like—whether it's a footballer's mansion or a crackhouse. You get my drift, Everett?”
“We're Braidens now, not Singhs,” Everett said. “My mum says.”
“No you're not.”
“I'm not. Never was, never will be.”
“I should buy you a beer, Everett.”
“I like Kirin better than Sapporo.”
“I was joking, Everett. Eat your sushi.”
He ate the nigiri. The rice was properly vinegared, the grains round, and the texture just right—not too sticky, not falling apart. Colette pushed her pickled ginger around her plate. She laid her chopsticks down crossed.
“Everett, did your dad ever mention something called a ‘Heisenberg Gate'?”
“It's a theoretical point where parallel universes touch and open on to each other. Like a wormhole between worlds.”
“What if it's not theoretical?”
The waiter brought a tiny cast iron kettle and poured tea, hot and clear and fragrant. The restaurant, the decor, the booth, the scalding tea were finally driving heat into Everett's chilled bones. Colette slid a memory stick across the table.
“God forgive me, if they found out about this, they'd throw the key away. Take this, Everett. Watch it all. Then call me.”
Everett slid the memory stick into an inside pocket, next to his heart. He zipped the pocket shut, but he felt as if everyone could see the memory stick, glowing through the fabric, betraying him. He drank down the rest of his tea while Colette paid the bill. It didn't taste quite right anymore. The golden Maneki Neko cat waved its paw up and down, up and down while Everett laced on his football boots. His studs went clack-clatter out into the threatening night.
The front door of 43 Roding Road stood wide.
“Mum?” She might have stepped out a moment; something down at the shop, or nipping next door to the McCulloughs to borrow a stapler or a knife sharpener or to drop in a parcel. But since Dad had gone, Laura had been extra careful about locking the door, even for a step down the road. And Tuesdays was always KidSwim down at the leisure centre with Victory-Rose. They were never back before eight. Tuesdays Everett let himself in and rattled something up from the kitchen; that was the rule. Leaflets from pizza companies and plastic window companies had been blown around the hall, and the runner of carpet was soaked by rain. The door had been open for hours.
Not Mum, then. A core of ice ran from the pit of Everett's belly to his heart, but he edged into the hall. The living room door was open. There could still be someone in the house. He peeped around the edge of the door frame. The room had been shredded. Every drawer had been pulled from the chest and tipped out, every DVD taken from the rack, opened, the disks skimmed across the floor. Magazines lay like broken-backed birds. Sofa and chairs were overturned, facedown to the floor, cushions scattered, covers unzipped. The Christmas tree lay on its side. The lights flickered and pulsed like insanity. Feet had ground the fragile glass decorations into the carpet. Every single present had been ripped out of its wrapping and torn open. Everett tapped up his smartphone and called the police. Then he called Laura. For a long moment he thought she wouldn't answer.
“Everett, love, there's cold chilli chicken in the tub in the fridge…”
“Mum. If you're on the way back, I think you should leave Victory-Rose off with Bebe Ajeet.”
“Everett, what is it? What's wrong?”
“Someone's been in the house.”
She arrived as the police were going through the crime site. They were local police, in uniforms, but they still drove a Skoda. She stood in the living room door with her hands to her mouth in horror as the policewoman tried to ask questions. The policewoman followed Laura up the stairs to her bedroom. His mum gave a small moan that was like nothing Everett had ever heard from a human throat.
“Oh my God oh no, oh God. It'll never feel clean again. I can't sleep in there, I can't, I just can't. It's dirty. They've been through it. We'll have to move.”
Everett looked at the wreckage of his room and understood. Filthy. Everything felt filthy. Clothes boots bedclothes books boxes of cables and old toys and cars and football magazines and posters ripped off the wall. Everything. They had been into everything, and run their fingers through it and left their smear and stink all over it. He felt sick.
“It's all going out, all of it, I can't have any of it near me,” Laura said. “Why us? What have we got?”
Not “us,” not what have we got, Everett thought. Me. What have I got? He hugged his backpack to his chest, Dr. Quantum hidden inside, the Infundibulum hidden within that. It was imagination, but the pen drive Colette had given him felt warm.
The policeman joined them on the landing.
“They've given this place a right seeing to. They were definitely looking for something. Usually it's just in and out, a couple of kids, grab the first thing that's lying around and scarper before anyone notices. No, this was a piece of work, all right. The lock on the front door was picked, and I don't know what they did to the alarm but it's flashing numbers and letters. They took their time.”
The policewoman had her arm around Laura's shoulders.
“Is there someone you can stay with tonight, love?”
“My mother-in-law, she's looking after my daughter.”
“Mum, I'll stay with Ryun.”
“Everett…”
“He's got a spare bed; Bebe Ajeet doesn't have enough room for us all. Ryun's mum will be cool about it.”
“Are you sure?”
He had only made the decision a moment ago, but he was sure, sure as sunrise, because he was also sure who would call tonight at Grandmother Ajeet's door, with his shy, shuffling way, and his softly threatening accent and his sincere sympathies and his offer of Is there anything we can do to help? Oh, and another thing, has anything come through from your dad, like a package or an email, or something? Are you sure?
“It'll be cool. I'll get Ryun's mum to call. I'll call you anyway. Go on. I'll be okay.”
The police waited for Laura to call a locksmith to secure the house and salvage a bagful of overnight for her and
Victory-Rose from the strewn mess of the bedrooms, then dropped him round to Ryun's. As he suspected, Skodas were rubbish cop cars.
Ryun's mum's kitchen was everything Everett's mum's wasn't: clean, ordered, bright, warm, with a dad in it. Everett had known Ryun Spinetti since primary school, and down all those years his memory of Mr. Spinetti was of him constantly laughing. He found huge, gut-shaking laughs in everything. Everett had seen him crying with laughter at the Spinetti cats, one in a cardboard box he had placed in the centre of the kitchen floor, the other prowling around it, dabbing paws at each other. Fun with Tejendra always seemed deliberate, thought out, never free-flowing and spontaneous. Even John Spinetti couldn't find it in him to laugh at Everett's ransacked home.
“You stay as long as you need. Open house here.”
“If your mum needs any help, Everett…” Ryun's mum shouted from the distances of the vast kitchen. “Anything at all. Horrible, just horrible. God save us it never happens to us.” She crossed herself and kissed her knuckles.
“Ryun, have you got that high-def monitor set up?” Everett asked.
In Year Five Everett Singh and Ryun Spinetti had recognised each other by a line from Transformers and realised they were not alone in the world. The geek of the earth are a tribe, and they are mighty. They had built a friendship in front of a screen.
“It's all set up.”
“There's something I want to take a look at.”
They took tea and Mrs. Spinetti's legendary M&M cookies up to Ryun's room. Since moving to Bourne Green school Everett and Ryun had found their interests drifting from the virtual to the physical: specifically into football. But the desk was still cluttered with old screens and USB ports and media readers, pushed aside by the new monitor, the size of a tabletop. Ryun closed down Facebook and a World of Warcraft screen. Everett unzipped the memory stick and pushed it into an empty USB slot.
“What is this?” Ryun asked.
“I don't know.”
Everett opened the folders. Video files, in a format unfamiliar to Ryun's computer. Everett went online, found a player that could handle them and installed it.
“Hey, that could be full of disgusting Russian viruses….”
Everett opened the first video clip. The time-code in the corner said that it had been shot on January 16th, 11:12 a.m.
“That's your dad.”
And Colette, and Paul McCabe, and some from the faculty Everett recognised, and some he did not recognise at all. This was a place he had never seen in the university: a long, windowless, low-ceilinged room. Bare metal pillars held up the roof. Fluorescent tubes were arrayed in precise lines across the ceiling; every third one was lit, casting a wan, grey, sick light. It looked like an underground car park, or a bunker. Was it even in the university at all? Desks laden with laptops and flatscreen monitors were arranged in a wide circle. Halogen desk lamps cast pools of illumination that caught the hands on the keyboards, the faces looking at the screens. In the outer shadows were bulky, boxy objects, person-tall. Everett wished he could move the camera, pan, and focus on those dark masses. Cables, gaffer-taped to the floor, ran through careful gaps in the circle of desks to the object toward which all the screens and faces were turned. At the centre of the circle stood a metal slab. Everett guessed it to be three metres tall, maybe one and a half wide. The camera gave little sense of depth, but he guessed its front to back dimension was the length of his forearm. Every square centimetre of the slab's surface was covered in circuitry cables, wiring and pipes. Yellow Caution: laser triangles were stuck next to cryohazard warnings. Superhot to supercold. In the centre of the slab was a hole. It was not a very big hole. Everett thought he could have thrown a tennis ball through it, nothing bigger. The edges of the hole smoked with vapour from supercooled liquid gasses.
“That must be a ring of superconducting ceramic,” Everett said.
Ryun understood these things. “Cool,” he said.
“Very.”
Parabolic radio dishes stood around the slab. One of the technicians Everett did not recognise moved among them, focusing them on the hole in the slab. The cables from the dishes led to what looked like a hi-fi radio receiver. An amplifier powered a bank of floor-standing speakers.
Tejendra spoke. His voice sounded tinny and artificial on the video. He said, “Okay this is radio frequency communication experiment eight. Can I have a twenty-second count on the gate? On my mark. Three, two, one. Count.” Screens sprang to life around the circle of desks. Digits counted down from 00:20. 00:19. The experimenters stared intently at their screens.
“Power is at one hundred percent,” Colette said. Paul McCabe pulled on a call-centre telephone headset. 00:08. He tapped the microphone. 00:05. The numbers flicked down. 00:00. And the empty circle at the heart of the slab of technology became a disc of white light.
“Oh, wow,” Ryun breathed. The white disc was bright enough to outshine any other light source in the room. It threw long shadows among the pillars. The faces of the watchers were bleached out.
“The Heisenberg Gate is open,” said Colette. “We are in inter-universal contact with E2. Professor McCabe?”
Paul McCabe cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was thin and shaking.
“Hello, this is Imperial College London, Department of Physics.” The speakers hissed static. “E2 E2, this is Imperial College London, Department of Physics.” Paul McCabe's voice was stronger, more certain. Static. Everett could feel the tension in the room as if he were there, then. A third time Paul McCabe spoke. “E2, E2, this is Imperial College London.”
The speakers crackled; then a voice spoke. A man's voice, heavily accented, speaking words Everett did not understand but were at times on the edge of familiar. Was that Spanish, Portuguese? But those sounds were definitely not European; they were more like the Punjabi in which Bebe Ajeet would chatter away with her son, his dad. Or Arabic? He heard no more because the room erupted. Whooping, cheering, applause. High-fives and air-punches. Colette crushed Tejendra in a huge bear hug; Tejendra shook hands enthusiastically with Paul McCabe. The two men clapped each other on the back. Champagne corks popped. Glasses were raised against the light shining from the hole in the universe. The clip ended.
“What was that, what did we just see, who was talking?” Ryun asked.
Everett had already opened clip two. Setup: the same. The room, the laptops and screens, the radio dishes, the speakers, the pierced slab smoking with the vapours of liquid nitrogen. Date: one week after the first clip. The same people. Except…
“Is that David Cameron?”
“And that other guy's the minister for Employment and Learning,” Everett said. He couldn't remember his name. They changed so often, and they all looked the same.
“We've arranged a radio link with E2,” Paul McCabe said. His voice was oily with deference to the politicians. “Tejendra, could we have a countdown please?”
Tejendra silently punched up twenty seconds on the screens. Everett could see the resentment in the way his dad followed orders. When his dad was tense or angry or upset he went deadly quiet and moved slowly, as if he were in deep waters and any noise, any movement, might draw sharks. Everett understood his anger. This had gone from science to politics. It had been taken out of his hands. 00:00. Again the light from another universe flooded the room.
“Hello E2, hello E2. This is Professor Paul McCabe from Imperial College London calling.”
At once a voice came back; the same voice Everett had heard in the first clip, but speaking English with a strange, half-familiar accent.
“Hello Paul, hello Imperial; this is Ibrim Hoj Kerrim of the Chamber of a Thousand Worlds.”
“Ibrim, it's great to hear from you. I'm honoured today to have our prime minister, Mr. Cameron, with me.”
“The gift honours the giver. With me is Saide Husaen Eltebir, pre-eminence of the Pavilion of Felicities of Al Burak.”
“What's he talking about?” Ryun asked.
“I think h
e's their prime minister,” Everett whispered.
“Who's they?” Ryun whispered.
Everett watched the prime minister put on a headset.
“Hello?” he said uncertainly. “Hello? Mr. Eltebir?”
“If I may make so bold,” said the strange, singsong voice beyond the disc of light, “His Pre-eminence has not received the language implants. With your permission, I will translate.”
A new voice spoke, deeper toned, in that same language Everett had heard on the first clip. Ibrim Hoj Kerrim translated simultaneously.
“His Pre-eminence greets and salutes his esteemed trans-universal counterpart and extends the welcome of the many peoples of the Plenitude of Known Worlds.”
Prime Minister Cameron looked flustered for a moment, then started, “Thank you for your gracious words, Pre-eminence—”
The clip ended abruptly.
“Is this some kind of movie or something?” Ryun asked. “Was that really the prime minister or a lookie-likie?”
“It was the real prime minister. This isn't a movie. This is real.”
“Real what?” Ryun asked, but Everett had already clicked open clip three. They gasped simultaneously.
They were high over a city. Sun dazzled from domes, domes high and low, domes of white alabaster, domes covered in red terracotta, domes patterned with colourful ceramic tiles, domes of silver, domes sheathed in pure gold; dome after dome after dome, arcades of tiny domes arranged in lines and squares, domes a hundred metres across and a hundred metres tall topped with shining golden crescent moons, cascades of domes like waterfalls, domes shallow as saucers, bulbous onion domes. From between the domes rose towers; pencil-slim minarets and kilometre-high skyscrapers more like sculptures than buildings. They seemed crocheted from titanium and glass, too thin and delicate to support their own weight, but they stood in clusters and clumps like trees in a forest. The camera shifted. It must be on some kind of aerial drone, Everett thought. Now he looked down on wide avenues and boulevards shady with trees. The camera dived down between rows of tall apartment blocks, each level overhanging the one beneath. Deep arcades lined each side of the streets, shelter from a sun that was brighter than any that had ever shone on Stoke Newington. The camera only caught fleeting glimpses of the citizens of this other city, walking in the shade of the cool arcades. Everett saw men in elegantly cut, Indian-style round-collared suits, women in brightly coloured, dazzlingly patterned full dresses with puffy upper sleeves. Headgear was the norm: round caps and coloured fezzes and a wild range of turbans for the men, thin veils of white lace for the women, piled high on headpieces clipped into the hair so that they looked almost like halos. All in a glimpse before the camera drone swooped back up past the wrought-iron balconies and out from under the overhanging, shade-casting roofs. The apartment blocks enclosed private courtyards and gardens. Everett saw ponds, fountains, lush green spray-wet ferns and ornamental trees, the glitter of water-wet tiles. Then the camera wheeled across the sky. Clouds and cityscape. Everett thought he saw an aeroplane coming in to land; then there was a silver flash of water and the camera came to rest on a massive port complex on the bank of the river opposite the city. On the water hydrofoils and small fast ferries darted between tankers and bulk carriers the size of city blocks. Tugs manoeuvred the big ships into dock. The camera drifted over canals and wharves, cranes and container yards. It made a turn over a petrochemical works, tanks and pipes and fuelling piers. Everett tried to read the words painted tens of metres tall on the sides of the tanks, but they were in an alphabet unfamiliar to him. The curves and loops reminded him of Arabic. As the camera wheeled away he looked again at the oil plant. This was not an oil refinery. This was a loading terminal. The big tankers at the fuelling jetties were filling their tanks with crude. This was oil country. Then as the camera wheeled high above the bustling river, Everett saw the pattern. The slow turn in from the south, the long east-west reach, the sharp loop to the south that turned abruptly north around the narrow peninsula of green. He recognised this river-scape.