by Ian McDonald
“Go three streets down onto Kingsway, turn left, then second left on to Evelyn Street,” the driver at the taxi rank said. There were six drivers, leaning against the tea stall, mugs of tea in their fists. Their taxis were alien, streamlined things, teardrop curves, tyres concealed by fairings, big grilles on the front. Two of them were plugged into a charge point beside the tea stand. “Big flight of steps out front. Can't miss it. Want me to take you there?”
“No money,” Everett said. “Anyway, you said it was just a couple of streets.”
“Go on, you cheeky…,” the taxi driver said, half joking.
If you can't ask a policeman, then a taxi driver will know; that must be a truth in every London. As soon as he had put a safe distance between himself and the airport Missionaries, Everett slowed to a walk to try to make sense of this London in which he found himself. The streets were like canyons, narrow and lightless in the shadows of the great buildings. The racket of an overhead train made him look up. Signal lights changed from red to green through the gantries and tracks. There were stations up there. Above them were swags and runs of power cables. Higher than anything but the airships, angels and classical gods and mythological creatures looked down from their places in the sun. The streets buzzed with traffic. Everett recognised the functions: buses, trucks, taxis, private cars. Trams glided down the middle of the streets, shedding sparks from the overhead wires. But the buses ran on electricity as well, drawing it down from an overhead web of wires through long, flexible antennae that brushed the cables. Some of the trucks and cars had similar pantograph arrangements. Many of the parked cars were plugged into red pillars marked with an embossed coat-of-arms, the way that post-boxes were at home. Everett estimated there was a red charge-pillar every twenty yards. Cars, trucks, buses shared that futuristic-but-old-fashioned look, like the way people in the 1930s imagined the twenty-first century would look. One thing was familiar: there were almost as many bicycles on this Tavistock Place as the Tavistock Place he had come from. But it was quiet. So quiet. Gone was the permanent internal-combustion growl of Everett's London, the shriek of brakes and the gasp of airbrakes. Here things hummed and purred and rumbled on rubber-tyred wheels.
The air smelled. Steamy, smoky, chemical. It caught at the back of Everett's throat. It tasted oily, dirty, greasy on his lips and tongue. He imagined it coating his lungs, breath by breath. Everett had tasted and smelled this once before in Delhi, on a foggy January day, when Tejendra took him to visit his Punjabi relations—hydrocarbon smog. This had a different tang from the exhaust fumes of five million Marutis and autorickshaws. There was a hellish, acrid, sulphurous tang. Coal smoke.
At the corner stood an object Everett recognised. A telephone box. Not the red metal and glass slab that even in Everett's years had started disappearing from the streets; this was an ornate bubble capped with a jaunty little spire, the ironwork wrought like leaves, the lettering organic and decorative. Inside was a metal keyboard, the brass buttons polished by years of fingers, a handset, and a screen the size of a matchbox. Everett found a square magnifying lens on an angle-poise arm and pulled it down over the screen. Words appeared, white on green. Royal British Telecommunications. Please choose a service. Call/Interweb. There was no mouse or trackpad. There was a small brass ball at the bottom of the keyboard.
“Cool OS,” Everett said to himself. He manoeuvred the cursor over the word Interweb. He assumed it was the equivalent of online. Go do. Everett liked that. So much more full of intent than Enter. He hit the key. As he did he noticed the top line of the keyboard. Not QWERTY. It read: PYF. “Oh wow. Dvorak layout as standard.”
New text appeared, white on green: Please insert one shilling or Royal British Telecommunications payment card. Too much to hope it would have been free.
“All right then. Library.” Which was how he came to be asking the taxi drivers drinking tea at the stall. Three streets down onto Kingsway. Turn left. Second left. Great Russell Street. Big flight of steps. The library was built like a Greek temple. Everett tried to recall what stood in this spot in his London, but the street patterns were different and he wasn't sure of his location. He thought it might be just shops. Nothing as magnificent as the Sir John Sloane Library. The pillars that held up the great triangular porch were stone women in marble robes. There was a name for figures holding up a roof, Everett remembered. Caryatids. Each caryatid held an open book, titles carved into the stone covers. Science. Law. Drama. Medicine. Theology. Rhetoric. Everett jogged up the steps between the gazing caryatids. The interior of the library was as massive and intimidating as its exterior. It seemed kilometres to the uniformed commissioner behind his high desk in the centre of the marble lobby. His hat was very elaborate.
“The reference section, please.”
“The Newett Wing,” the commissionaire said. “Straight through periodicals. No eating or drinking. We close at five sharp.”
The Newett Wing was a vast room beneath a glass barrel-vaulted roof. Sunlight poured down on the readers bent over their private reading desks. Shelf stacks ran down each side of the room. Faces looked up, frowning, as Everett passed. A kid in a reference library. Everett had seen the strange people who spent their days in libraries researching genealogies and histories, journeys into the past that must never end because the meaning of their lives would end with them. It was no different in this universe. Libraries give you power, Tejendra had said.
“Excuse me.”
The woman at the desk looked up, eyes wide. She couldn't have looked more shocked had Everett fired a gun beside her head.
“I'm looking for the telephone directory?”
She raised a bony finger and pointed. Everett turned to follow the direction she indicated and saw all the library-pale researcher faces looking up at him. Then—only then—he realised. He hadn't seen a single non-white face since arriving in this world.
On his way to the stack Everett's attention was diverted by the neat, uniform spines of an encyclopaedia. Encyclopaedia Britannia. In these pages he could check out all the theories and hunches and strangenesses about this world. It wouldn't take a moment. Look up the number later. Curiosity now. Volume 22. Oaxaca to Origami. He set the heavy volume on the reading desk and opened it. Oil. See: vegetable oils, subsection rape seed oils, palm oils, olive oils, animal oils: see whale oil, blubber, the South Atlantic whalery. Nothing on mineral oil. Everett flipped pages back and forth. No. No crude oil. No petrochemicals. No oil. Everett's head reeled. A technological civilization without oil. Everett had seen the electric cars and the trains and the charge points and the web of cables weaving London together, and even the wonderful, improbable airships—he'd tasted the coal smoke on the air and felt it catch the back of his throat—and had imagined a post-oil world. It had all run dry. It was more than that. They had never had oil. An entire high-tech civilization had been built without liquid fuel. The coal age never ended.
“Steampunk. Cool,” Everett said, loud enough to earn a glare from an earnest young woman in serious glasses. No, not anything like steampunk. Not now. Post-steampunk. Electropunk. Electricity coursed along the nerves of this London, through every city of this world, as the veins of Everett's home city were clogged with petroleum. Coal of course—he could still feel its fumes scratching the back of his throat—but surely nuclear as well. Hydro, wind-power, anything that could generate electricity.
Everett ran his finger along the spines of encyclopaedias. Earl Marchfold—Emmenthal. Electricity. He greedily scanned down the references. Electricity generation. In 1789 Henry Cavendish explored the relationship between electrical charge and magnetism and in 1790 constructed the Magnetic Rotating Generative Mill, a prototype hand-cranked generator. Cavendish's celebrated insight—that the same device run in reverse would function as a motor—came to him in his infamous dream of the angel of lightning that turned the axis of the Newtonian universe. The first commercial plant was at Bowden's Mill in Manchester in 1799, where a single water wheel-powered generator op
erated sixteen electric power looms….
Everett reeled back as if the page had slapped him. His imagination was spinning, tumbling histories and possibilities over and over. Electric motors invented before steam engines. This Henry Cavendish had done nothing as momentous in Everett's universe. In this universe, he had invented an electrically powered Georgian era. Everett speed-read down the article. Sir Michael Faraday's development of the electrical traction motor in 1819…Alternating-current transmission lines…first all electrical direct-current railway from London to Oxford in 1830….
They had never had an age of steam. The age of electricity began in the eighteenth century. Coal formed the steam that generated the electricity, but not trains or cars or quaint steam-powered buses. No liquid fuel. Everything electrically powered. An idea was coming to Everett, towering and expansive like a tsunami the width of the horizon. Back to the racks. Volumes South Pole—Tennessee and Original Sin—Port Harcourt. Space exploration. Everett ran his thumb down the brief entry. This Earth had never sent men to the moon or rovers to Mars or robots to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn or probes wandering out of the solar system on million-year-long glides to other stars. They had never made it out of Earth orbit.
“No, you went exploring somewhere else, didn't you?”
Everett opened the second volume. Parallel Universes. The physical existence of a multiverse was derived from Edwin Bell Collins's Principles of Multivalence in 1889. Everett flipped pages. The Einstein Gate was theorized in 1912 by German quantum physicist Albert Einstein… In this universe Einstein was a quantum theorist. An American beat him to what sounded like a version of special relativity by twenty-six years. The Einstein of Everett's universe would have hated that. Spooky was how he described quantum theory. He skipped on. Contact was made with the Plane E2 in 1978….
Everett closed the book. His heart was racing. They had opened the Heisenberg Gate on to the multiverse thirty-three years before his world. And everyone knew it. It was in the encyclopaedia on the shelf in the library. One more thing. One last nugget of information about this world before he put the encyclopaedias away and went on to the stack that held the telephone directory, the primary reason he had come to the library. It was even in the same volume. He ran his finger down the thumb-notches.
Plenitude of Known Worlds.
The Plenitude of Known Worlds is an inter-universal supervisory organization overseeing the development, construction, licensing and use of the inter-plane transit device known as the Einstein Gate. It also facilitates cooperation between member planes in areas of inter-universal law, security, trade, development, political and diplomatic representation, exploration and expansion.…
Planes E2, E3, E4 and E5 are the founder members of the Plenitude. Current membership stands at nine worlds.
“You're out of date,” Everett whispered. “It's ten now.”
Each member world holds a rotating Primacy and for the duration of that Primacy the Central Praesidium is based in the Plenitude Headquarters of the Primarch's home world. Earth—E3 by its Official Panoply Identifier Number—headquarters are in the Tyrone Tower, Cleveland Street, Bloomsbury, London.
Everett jabbed his finger down onto the picture of the Tyrone Tower—a spire of buttresses and mullioned windows and turrets and mythological creatures that out-Gothed even the baroque skyscraper Everett had seen from the sky port. “That's where you've got him,” he hissed. “I know it, I know it. Can't be anywhere else.”
“Young sir?”
Everett looked up, startled and guilty that his anger had been overhead. The woman from the main desk leant over him. Reading lights uplit her face, casting sinister shadows.
“Just to let you know, we close in ten minutes. Minutes, ten.”
Everett hadn't noticed the reading light on his desk come on. He had been too engrossed in books to be aware of the sky darkening behind the glass vault of the roof, the long Reference Room empty as the readers and researchers and eccentrics drifted away one by one. All the important stuff ends up in books, Tejendra had once said. Take that out of the Internet and all you have left is opinion.
But: ten minutes! The London Telephone and Business Directory ran to seven volumes. Pawnshops, gold buyers, and precious metals valuers. It might be too late; he didn't know when closing time was in this London. Most of them were just a name, an address, and a telephone number. Some were highlighted in a display box and had a line or two of description. Payday loans. Low rates. Gold and jewellery bought. Keenest prices. Here was one with a half page display. Money too tight to mention? Can't stretch to payday? Instant redemption. No early payment fees. Nevin Financial Services. Late nights….
“Thursday!” Everett clenched his fist in triumph. He jotted down the address. He went down the stacks until he came to Maps and Cartography, found the Henson-Jenson All-Streets Compendium for London, located the address, and took out Dr. Quantum. It looked as alien as a starship in the softly lit, wood-and-leather library. He didn't like using precious battery life before he had worked out the local electricity supply. He took a photograph. The camera click seemed as loud as a book falling from a stop shelf. Earnest Woman looked up, frowned, did a double-take at Dr. Quantum. She was the only other reader in the long quiet room. One last piece of information from Encyclopaedia Britannia: Great Britain's electricity supply is at 110 volts, sixty hertz. Result. No different from the US in his home world. There were two-pin sockets on the reading desks, and Everett had already worked out that it was only ten minutes' work with his multitool to re-engineer his socket adaptor.
“Thank you!” Everett called breezily to the librarian as he left. Outside the streets were dark and cold. A yellow smog was distilling out of the night air. Passersby turned up collars and pulled scarves tight. Everett shivered. He would have loved one of those greatcoats. Maybe when he had money. No, you're going to need every penny. The exercise will keep you warm. And better get going now; it was no short distance.
Nevin Financial Services was Nevin the Pawnbroker. The window on Lambic Lane was a false front, made up to look grander and less seedy than it was. Nevin Financial Services' main office was down a greasy alley, lit only by three neon circles—green, blue, and red—that crackled and dripped fat blue sparks to the cobblestone. The symbol of the pawnbroker was the same in any universe. The window here was filmed with years of grime. Rows and racks and shelves holding hundreds of pledged articles made cleaning the inside of the glass impossible. Everett had heard of pawnbrokers—there was even one in Stokie, off Stamford Hill, but neither he nor anyone he knew had ever seen it. He had to go to a parallel universe to visit one. He knew how they worked—you put up an item of value as security, and if you didn't pay back the loan and a small fee, the pawnbroker kept the item to sell. Here were the items no one had ever redeemed. Devices that looked like radios, or those really old Sonys that played cassette tapes, with their earphones wrapped around them. Things like typewriters with little television tubes where the carriage should be, and magnifiers on swivel arms. Medals set on cardboard. Jewellery: rings, necklaces, carved ivory brooches, and sculpted black jet. Dolls. Ornate lamps. Items that looked antique even to Everett's limited understanding of this world. Collections of stamps. Old records. A small enamelled box with a painting of an airship on it, bordered with Union Jacks and the words, in gold: Excelsior Brand: mint comfits. Everett started at the sight of two eyes looking back at him from between the forfeited items. Nevin the pawnbroker.
The door jingled as Everett entered.
Nevin the pawnbroker took his ancient profession seriously and was dressed in a sharp suit in the wide-lapelled style of this world. He wore a carnation in the buttonhole, a little wilted at this late hour. Everett thought he was the second-most-person-to-look-like-a-complete-crook, after Thug-in-a-Chauffeur-Cap. The office was walled floor to ceiling with gas cases filled with forfeited objects, great and small. Electric motorbikes to comic books. A stuffed bear to a tiny embroidered heart. Everett could feel t
he weight of misery dragging at his heart. Nevin screwed a jeweller's magnifier into his right eye socket and examined Everett's goods.
“Sell or pledge?”
Everett's original thought had been to sell the rings for hard cash. To pledge them was to declare that sometime he would redeem, then put them in a padded envelope and drop them through Mrs. Spinetti's letter box. Everett didn't like to think of himself as a thief, however noble his motivations.
“I'd like to pledge them.”