by Ian McDonald
“It's the Thames,” Everett breathed. “It's the River Thames. This is London, or something like London, but in a parallel universe.”
Now the camera drifted toward the long tongue of the Isle of Dogs. In this London it was a green parkland, glittering with formal pools and fountains. Canals and water channels traced silver geometric lines between the precise parades of trees and clipped hedges. Domed pavilions and open-sided halls shaded by seashell roofs stood in open courts among the trees and hedging. At the centre of these pavilioned gardens, rising from the centre of an artificial lake, was a sprawling palace of courts and arcades rising up, dome upon dome, to a huge central dome sheeted in gold. From it rose a single enormous flag, plain white, bearing two red crescents back to back.
An edit, a jerky jump-cut to the dingy, pillared room. The two watchers gasped simultaneously. The slab with the hole into other universes at its centre was gone. In its place was a thick metal ring, draped in cables and warning signs, three metres in diameter. Everett sensed more and new machinery in the recesses of the room. Screen-glare suddenly hurt his eyes. The hole at the centre of the ring was a disc of white light. Out of the light came a spindly insect silhouette, hovering against the painful glare. The glow from the border between the universes went out. It was a moment or two before the camera adjusted to the ambient light; then Everett and Ryun saw a white plastic aerial reconnaissance drone holding position on its four ducted fans before unfolding landing gear and settling to the ground in front of the big ring.
“They sent it through,” Ryun said. “There. Whatever there is.”
“Freeze that,” Everett ordered. The camera had been laid down, left on, aimlessly filming one of the computer screens. Ryun was quick with the mouse. “Look at the window.” Everett tapped the screen. “Look at what's in it.” At first glance it was a conventional Google Earth satellite shot; mainland Europe, the great peninsula of Scandinavia, the jut of France, the isolated square of Portugal and Spain. “That's Ireland, but where's Britain?”
There was Denmark and the Netherlands; there in the Atlantic was Ireland. Empty water lay between. A thousand miles to the south lay Britain, a hundred kilometres off the coasts of Portugal and Morocco, moored in the mouth of the Mediterranean.
“That's England?” Ryun said. Yes, and we've seen its capital, Everett thought. And from those shots—obviously from the drone that he had seen return through from this parallel Earth, but so carefully placed before that scene, and this oh-so-casual setting down of the camera, that accidentally happened to be left running accidentally pointing at this screen, he could guess at its general history. The Romans had come to this island at the edge of the known world. They had conquered; they had brought their language and culture; they had left. Then had come the Moors, the armies of Islam, who had stayed and built a strong and powerful country and an enduring civilization. There never was an England here. Al Burak, the radio voice had said. Was that the name of this other Britain? Everett could guess another thing from the unsubtle editing, the just-so placing of the camera: who had taken this, and why.
“What's the time code?”
“Oh five twelve; 14:32.”
Eleven days ago. Ten days before Tejendra was kidnapped on the Mall. He had intended Everett to see this, the same as he had intended Everett to have the Infundibulum. He had been preparing his legacy. He had known he was in danger.
The final clip. Everett clicked it open. A camera veered and came to rest looking down at a well-polished brown lace-up shoe. The lace was undone. Hands came into the shot and tied a bow. Brown, elegant hands, with a white scar nicked across the second joint of the little finger of the right hand. The clip ended.
“What?” Ryun said. “Show me that again.” Everett clicked the clip. “A dude tying his shoe.”
Except it's not a dude, Everett thought. I know that scar. An electric carving knife put it there three Diwali festivals ago, though the man who owns it tells people it was a laser because it sounds cooler. That scar, those long brown hands, those well-kept shoes belong to my dad. But why make this the last clip? Why include it at all? A dude tying his shoelace.
The suddenly opening door, the plane of light that cut across the screen-lit room, made both Everett and Ryun start.
“That's two guilty consciences if ever I saw them,” Ryun's mum said. “Whatever are you looking at? Ryun, if you've found a way around those safety locks again, that's it, no more internets. Have you finished with those plates and mugs? I'll throw them in the dishwasher overnight—I've found mugs in here with an inch of mould in the bottom, Ryun Spinetti.”
They handed her the crockery in silence. When the door closed again, they breathed.
“This is real,” Ryun said.
“This is the most real thing there is,” Everett said.
Everett called from the old telephone box at the bottom of Ryun's street. He no longer trusted his own phone. The world was full of listeners. There were watchers behind every door and wall and in every car. The telephone screen had been smeared with something red and sticky, and the box smelled of urine and something he couldn't identify
“Colette, I watched it.” He didn't mention Ryun. Simpler not to. Already, the lies were spreading. “We need to meet.”
The Piazza at Covent Garden was grey, rain-swept, and gusty with an umbrella-wrecking wind, but it was open and even on a foul morning there were people about. The rain had driven the street performers from the Piazza, but London shoppers were tougher. They huddled under umbrellas, pulled up hoods, turned up collars, dashed through the rain, hands busy with umbrella handles and paper carrier bags in Christmas colours. Christmas. I've seen a London where it doesn't rain like this, where there are no tattered decorations and last-minute dashes to the shops, Everett thought, looking across the Piazza to two women safe and dry in Costa coffee sipping cappuccinos. Are you in that other world too? Do you go out to drink coffee, are you friends, what kind of lives do you lead? He blew on the froth of his own cappuccino at the table under the glass roof of the Market Hall.
“We've opened Heisenberg Gates to nine other parallel universes,” Colette Harte said, taking a spoonful of the foam from the top of her coffee. “Our term for them is ‘planes.' The first one we made contact with is the plane we call E2. That's the one you saw in the clips, Islamic Britain at the end of the Med. It's the one most of the other planes contact first—it's about seventy-five to a hundred years ahead of us technologically. Gate technology is a mature science there. The problem is, they only had one other plane they could gate into; a plane we call E3, another early adopter of Heisenberg Gate technology.
“E2 and E3 were contacted back in 1995 by another plane that independently developed gate technology, E4. E2 and E3 are very different earths from ours; E4's almost identical to our plane. They have a theory on E2 that E4 and us—E10—are part of a cluster of similar parallel universes that split off recently. You could gate into E4 and not even know you were on a parallel earth. This would look the same—they might even be having the same weather. You're there, I'm there. But there are some differences: Al Gore is in his second term as US President, there wasn't a 9/11, the prime minister is Michael Portillo. Oh, and something happened to the moon, something they haven't told us about.”
“So; my dad?” Everett said.
Colette grimaced.
“Let's start with the three P's. Planes you know about. There are two more P's to get your head around: Plenitude and Panoply. Plenitude—the Plenitude, the Plenitude of Known Worlds—is an alliance of planes in contact with each other. There are nine known worlds; ours is number 10. Things are moving fast, Everett, and I'm not central to it anymore—the politicians have taken over—but there are diplomats and negotiators coming through from the Plenitude. You heard Ibrim Hoj Kerrim from E2 on the audio recordings—he's part of the team. There's a woman from E3 and her counterpart from E4, who's a man. Like I said, I don't know what's going on anymore; it's politicians talking. We've appoin
ted a government minister, there's an EU representative and a US envoy. The Russians are there, the Chinese, India. Think of the Plenitude as a United Nations for parallel universes.”
“Ten worlds,” Everett said. “That's not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of it all. Not even a hair's-breadth.”
“The rest—all the other parallel universes—is the Panoply. The multiverse; the whole shebang. There's room out there. Other planes, other worlds. Other Plenitudes. Maybe bigger. Maybe less friendly. Maybe a lot less friendly. I've heard a rumour that there's a group inside the Plenitude that wants it to be a little less of a UN and a little more of a defence pact.”
“We're E10; E2, E3 and E4 have had the Heisenberg Gate for a long time,” Everett said. “What about E1?”
“That is the question. No one's saying—or maybe just not to me.”
“Is my dad still on this world?” Everett asked. Colette was taken aback by his abruptness.
“I don't know, Everett. I think he may not be.”
Everett knew what question he had to ask next.
“Did he go through the gate because he wanted to, or did someone take him?”
Colette took a deep breath. She laid her hands flat on the table.
“Okay. Before he disappeared, he said he'd found something.”
“In the Infundibulum.”
“The way it's worked so far is that all the Known Worlds in the Plenitude found each other because they developed Heisenberg Gates. It's like radio stations tuning into each other. There was a definite destination at the other end. But the thing about the gates is they can open a portal into any plane of the Panoply. Any one of billions of parallel universes. The problem is, you don't know where you're opening that gate. You could step out five miles underground, fifty thousand feet up in the air, or halfway through a wall; you could arrive right in front of a hungry saber-tooth or a pissed off T-Rex, or whatever they become with a few hundred million years of extra evolution, or a world that's been blasted to radioactive glass. You don't know. It's like GPS coordinates, when what you need is a map to see where you're going.”
“He found the map.”
“He found something. He told me.”
“When?”
“Three days before he disappeared.”
Everett remembered that Friday. He'd called. They'd planned where to meet before the game, and what they might cook on their cuisine night. Oh, and there was a good lecture on Monday at the ICA. Nanotechnology and how it was going to change everything. And all that time, as they sat next to Vinny in their season ticket seats, as Everett made his special chilli with chocolate, Tejendra had opened gates to parallel universes, talked to scientists and prime ministers from other Earths, found the key to ten to the power of eighty worlds.
“Did he tell anyone else?”
“Yes.”
“Paul McCabe,” Everett said.
“Yes.”
Everett shivered. The cold was settling into his bones again; a deep cold, seeping in from the spaces between the universes. A cold world where no one could be trusted. Those shoppers dashing through the cold, driving rain; those street entertainers bravely setting up their show on the Piazza; they could be spies, they could be enemies, they could be doubles slipped in from another world. In just three days Everett's world had been shaken to its core, expanded to a billion worlds, smashed to atoms of fear and mistrust. He feared he would never feel warm again.
“They took him because they thought he had the Infundibulum.”
“Who controls the Infundibulum controls the Plenitude and the Panoply. It could be not ten worlds, it could be ten thousand worlds. Ten million worlds. It could be an empire.”
“But he doesn't have the Infundibulum.”
“No.”
“I do.”
“Yes. And I wish your dad had never given it to you. Everett, you'll never be safe. You, your mum, your sister, your grandparents, your uncles and aunts and your cousins whether they're in Britain or India; your friends. Me. They will do anything to get it. They will never go away. You're in possession of the most important artefact in the multiverse.”
The street performers had set up their act. Defying the weather, they rocked back and forth on the wet cobbles on unicycles, juggling blazing torches between them.
The timer on the oven in Ryun's kitchen read 03:45. Everett's mum had never been able to set any device with a clock in it. Every time Everett put them right for her she would do something and knock it wrong, sometimes within the hour. Mrs. Spinetti kept strict time: hob, oven, digital radio, microwave, all perfectly synchronised. The hum of the refrigerator pump seemed loud enough to rouse the entire house. Everett had tripped and banged and creaked his way out of the bedroom and down the stairs, but the Spinettis, being loud and noise-loving, heard nothing and slept soundly. Everett helped himself to juice from the fridge and by the light of a dozen digital clocks opened up Dr. Quantum.
Everett brought his finger down on the Infundibulum icon. A flick would send it to the trash. Deleted. Erased from all the universes. He didn't doubt that this was the original, the one, the only. He had a theory now. His dad had seen something in the glowing clouds of data. He had turned it into a key that would open the gate to any world in the Panoply, safely, precisely. He had been kidnapped for what he knew. He'd feared that. So he'd made sure they took his insight, but hid the thing that insight applied to. How did he think they would fall for that? Colette was right. Everett would never be safe—none of his family and his friends would ever be safe—while the Infundibulum existed. Get rid of it. Everett's finger hovered over the touchscreen.
He should delete it. He ought to delete it. He must delete it.
Everett tapped the icon twice. Dr. Quantum filled with the glowing aura-veils of the multiverse. Tejendra could have deleted it himself. That would have been safe. But he sent it to Everett knowing it would put his family in danger. Tejendra was first and always a Punjabi dad. Family was everything. There must be something more in the dataset. Something hiding in the clouds of light that were the worlds of the Panoply.
Everett felt the planes flock around him like winter starlings. Ghostworlds; other kitchens in other Londons. Only in this one did Everett Singh hold the key to all those other worlds. He reached out his hand, opened up the Infundibulum and grabbed a handful of universes. Everett turned the clouds of digits to the left, to the right, set them spinning, wove glowing ribbons of code together and parted them; he opened up a rift in reality and threw himself into an endless crevasse of light. Universes above him, universes beneath him, universes before and behind him and to each side. What did you see in there, Dad?
Endless, endless numbers, universes. You could spin through it for centuries and never notice the thing that tied one code to another.
Tied.
A pair of hands. A pair of polished brown shoes. Tejendra had always taken good care of his shoes. A pair of straggling laces. Hands tying them in a bow. Tying. Why show me this? Everett had wondered in Ryun's bedroom. Vistas of parallel Earths, alien cityscapes, alternative geographies, then a man tying his shoelaces. Because it's a message.
A knot. An object looped through itself in three dimensions. That was topology: the mathematics of shapes and surfaces and how seemingly different objects could be transformed into each other. Three dimensions was the least number you could make a knot in. One dimension was a straight line. There was no space to loop a line round and pull it back through itself. Forward and back, that was one dimension. A circle, that was two dimensional. Curve the line round and connect one end to the other. But you still could not tie a knot, because there was no way you could make the line cross over itself. Forward and back, left and right, but no up or down. Three dimensions—up, down, forward, back, left and right—were the least number you needed to be able to tie a knot. But you could tie them in a lot more. You always needed that higher space, that extra dimension, to reach in from.