by Ian McDonald
“Don't serve Airish, you mean,” Sen said.
“You'll have to leave,” the waiter said.
“No, this is not right,” Everett insisted. “This is racism. You're a racist. I want to speak to your manager.”
“It would be better if you didn't make a scene,” the waiter said. The rest of the waiting staff had drifted away from their positions into a vague semicircle, only a click of the fingers away. Some of them were big men. To be physically thrown out would be humiliating. Worse, it would draw attention.
“Don't matter what you call it,” Sen said. “I won't stay where I'm not welcome. Come on, Everett Singh.” Everett tucked Dr. Quantum under his arm. He thought about pulling off the tablecloth, sending the silver creamer and sugar bowl and rose vase and cutlery embossed with Rumbold and Sachs's crest ringing to the floor, toppling the so-neat Christmas trees with their twinkling blue lights. That would be petty. That would certainly draw attention to him. But every step out of the tearoom blazed with humiliation and rage. He could feel every eye on him. Airish.
“It's all right, it happens all the time,” Sen said, with a fine, final toss of her head to the two penguin-suited waiters on the door.
“It's not all right,” Everett said tightly.
“So, it's not, but we're not the ones to change it.”
“Why not? We've changed things in my world.”
“Have you? I's impressed.”
“Did you see his face?”
“He had a naff ‘tache.”
“His face was the same colour as mine.”
“So it was.” Sen's surprise was genuine. She recognised the similarity, then let it fall from her attention. You couldn't do that in my world, Everett thought. “Come on, Everett Singh. There's a self-service caff up on the third. I'm sure the view's as good. They won't care who drinks their tea there.” She fluffed up her hair, stood tall, and put on a swagger. “I may be dirt, but I's class dirt.”
So for two days Everett and Sen had occupied the table behind the pillar in the third-floor cafeteria and not a soul had disturbed them apart from the waitress who came around every hour to clear away the cups and cutlery, and the robot sweeper, like a cross between a trilobite and a rat, that scurried around the tables feeding on fallen cake crumbs. It was a machine, so it didn't count as a soul.
Sen set a mug of tea and plate with two Viennese whirls on the table. “I got you one anyway.” She took a slurp of tea, then ate the pale, crumbly pastry with both hands and wiped her mouth. She had the sweetest tooth of anyone Everett had ever known. He had hardly been able to keep Sen supplied with Indian sweetmeats over the last three days. She looked at the remaining Viennese whirl. “Do you want that other one?” Everett waved it away.
“I think I've got almost enough photos now.” Everett tapped up the images he had loaded into Dr. Quantum. First up: Charlotte Villiers, ten shots over two days and a morning, all time-tagged. She was dressed for winter: fur stoles, fur hats, gloves, brocade coats. He ran the pictures as a slideshow. “This is Charlotte Villiers. Do you recognise her?”
“Bona hats,” Sen said.
“She's plenipotentiary from E3 to my world. I believe she had my dad kidnapped. She wants to get her hands on the Infundibulum. She's clever—very clever. She took one look at Dr. Quantum and almost worked it all out there and then. But I don't think she's operating on her own. Colette said my dad thought there was a group inside the Plenitude, working to their own plan. I don't know who they are yet, or what they want, but when I met her, I also met this man.” Everett flicked up a photograph of Ibrim Hoj Kerrim getting out of a sleek black electric car. He had a leather briefcase in his hand and wore an elegant jewel on his headgear. He looked hurried and worried. An aide in E3-style clothing held the door open for him. “This is Ibrim Hoj Kerrim. He's the plenipotentiary from E2 to my world. I don't think he's with Charlotte Villiers. I don't know why I think that. I just get the feeling he can be trusted.”
Everett pulled up another picture, of a fair-haired man in the type of business suit familiar to him from his own world.
“I don't know who this is.”
Sen scowled. “Could be your world, or E4, or E8. Any number of Es. Not everyone dresses as good as us.”
“Look at this.” Everett opened up one of the images of Charlotte Villiers and slid it alongside the picture of the unknown man. “Take away the hair and the hat. Do you think they look kind of alike?”
Sen peered closer at the screen.
“I suppose.”
“Suppose? They're like twins. But much closer than twins. I think he is her, from another universe. Or she's him. Or they're different versions of the same person.”
Sen looked again at the picture. Her mouth twisted in distaste.
“Nah…”
“Why not?”
“That's wrong. Wouldn't they, like, explode if they met each other?”
“No, no reason at all why that should happen. I might be out there, for all I know.”
“In Hackney? In Stokie? I'd know, Everett Singh.”
Everett added four more photographs and slid them into a circle. Two women, two men.
“These are the ones who have been in and out most; the same number of times as Charlotte Villiers and Charles Villiers.”
“Is that his name?”
“It is for me. I think these six are all working together. I think they're the group behind my dad's kidnapping.”
“That's very good,” Sen said. She sounded unconvinced. “And so?”
“And so, phase two. This is a bit more tricky. I need to see inside.”
“Oh now, Everett Singh, you can't be doing that. They knows you're here, that posh palone has sharpies out looking for you, and you'd go strolling in through the front door? They'd have you in there with your dad quicker'n you could say ‘knife.'”
“I've got the maps and the general layout of the place from the library this morning.”
“Oh, so that's what you were doing.”
In the aftermath of their expulsion from the Sweet Afton tearoom, Everett understood the librarian's cold stare at him, chillier by far than her glare at his first visit. Everett had grown up in multiracial, multicultural Hackney, the child of mixed-race parentage, and he had never known the prejudice he attracted as an Airish. Everett went to the architecture section and called up the database of plans. Sen sat flicking through fashion magazines, rocking back on her chair and humming to herself loudly enough to attract attention, not so loud as to get them thrown out. He had photographed the floor plans and elevations of the Tyrone Tower exhaustively. The huge Gothic spike, thrust into the heart of Bloomsbury, was only twenty years old. They liked their gods and gargoyles in E3.
Everett swept away the circle of conspirators and called up the plans. He stacked them one on top of the other, called up an image-manipulation application and took away the paper, leaving wire-frame floor plans: the Tyrone Tower in cross-section.
“Bona,” Sen said.
A few transformations and Everett had a three-dimensional model of the Tyrone Tower. He dragged a finger across the screen and flew through the wire-frame corridors.
“The problem is…”
“They're just pretty patterns,” Sen said. “You don't know what they mean. That there room could be where they got the Ein…Heisenberg Gate, or it could be the gents' carsey.”
“That why I need to see—”
Everett started in surprise as Sen touched a finger to his lips.
“Ssh Everett Singh. All you need to do is see…. I'll go.”
“But you're—”
“What, Everett Singh?” She had a tilt of the head and a sideways smile and a way of looking out from under her mop of white hair that turned her words into armour-piercing missiles. She was simply irresistible. “You mean I's Airish?” She slapped her leather satchel—her shush-bag as she called it. “Parcel for Mr. Hoojamaflip. We runs special deliveries—courier services, documents, body parts for hosp
itals—all the time. I'll not be the first of us in that there tower. Some people values us, you know. Special delivery! Oh, and I needs a signature.”
“But what if you get caught?”
“Everett Singh, they don't know me from Aunt Nell.”
“I need pictures.”
“I needs some of your tech.”
Everett opened up the phone and set up the camera and the bluetooth. He handed it to Sen. She took it as if it were a living creature that might die if she dropped it.
“This'll stream pictures back to me through a radio link. The best thing to do is start it when you get in and leave it running.”
Sen mounted the camera on the strap of her shush-bag.
“It's a bit obvious,” Everett said.
“Not half as obvious as me flashing it round all over the place. You forget, Everett Singh, people here ain't ever seen anything like this, so they don't know what they's looking for. So, what is I looking for?”
“Someone who looks like this.” Everett turned Dr. Quantum to Sen. The photograph was of him and Tejendra in their Spurs shirts, in the North Stand, pies in their hands, mouths open to take a bite. Everett remembered Vinny taking it after the 3 to 1 defeat of Inter Milan in the Champions League. The prickle in the corners of his eyes, the catch in the back of his throat took him by surprise. “Anything, really. Get as far in as you can.”
“I can be very persuasive,” Sen said. “Okay.” She shivered. “Oooh. Exciting. Well, I's offski.” But she hesitated a moment. You're scared, Everett thought. You jumped up and said I'll do it because you're the kind of person who wants to be first to do anything and now you realise that this isn't a game, this isn't a chase across the rooftops with Sharkey and his shotguns to save you if it goes a bit wrong. You are on your own and you are scared. But anyone would be scared. Anyone should be scared. “Everett Singh, pick a card.” She fanned out the Everness Tarot, facedown. Everett half pulled out a card. Sen turned it up. The old man on crutches stepping through a stone gate in a stone wall into darkness. “Death's Door. Lovely.”
“Maybe it's not death,” Everett said. “Maybe it's a door into another universe.”
“Kiss for luck, Everett Singh.” Sen leaned forward, expecting. Everett brushed her lightly, shyly on the cheek. Her silly, wonderful hair got in his eye. Her skin was very warm. What was that perfume that reminded him of so many things?
“That'll do, Everett Singh.” And she was gone. Everett took his seat by the window. He poured some coffee. It had lost its heat and freshness. No one did good coffee in this universe. He checked Dr. Quantum's batteries. They were good. He opened the bluetooth. Nothing. Too early. He looked down at the traffic on foot and on wheel hurrying past the intimidatingly grand entrance of the Tyrone Tower. A deep, clear cold had set in over London after the rain and the wind. The shoppers pouring out from Rumbold and Sachs's revolving doors with their hands full of liveried paper bags seemed to relish it. Proper Christmas weather. Breath steaming, faces bright, collars up, scarves pulled tight.
As he watched, high above the people and quiet cars rolling along the street, Everett became aware of a knot, huge and hard as a fist, twisting in the pit of his stomach. It felt as if the bottom were dropping out of his life. It felt like old poison. It took him a moment to name it. Loneliness. His Christmas, his shopping, his present-buying should have happened in another world. He should have been piling bags into the back of the car at Brent Cross Mall, going to the school Christmas dance, getting something for his dad—whatever Divorcedads.com suggested was the ideal present for a first-time-post-breakup Christmas present. He tried to think of his mum and Victory-Rose doing all those things without him. He couldn't. They wouldn't. He had killed Christmas. First his dad, then him: vanished without a whisper. He hadn't thought of the ones he left behind. All he had thought of was his plan, the insane plan that was the most sane of all the possibilities Everett could think of. He had been looking at the moment he got them all back together again, safe, somewhere else. He hadn't thought of the moment he didn't come back from the school, the moment she had called his phone and left a message, and left a message and left a message, then called his friends, then the family, then last of all the police. He hadn't thought of her in another police station filling in another missing persons report, of Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan in her kitchen again drinking her tea and eating her toast and offering their sympathy. He hadn't thought of her alone and scared and crying and not knowing what was happening, who would disappear next.
He thought of it now and it was like a fist in a glove of frozen iron tearing out his heart.
“I'm sorry,” he whispered. A movement in the corner of his eye: Sen, dashing between the traffic with her usual lack of heed and respect. As she went up the long flight of steps, between the stone lions and the pillars that supported the portico—big enough to play a football match under—he saw her touch the little device hooked onto the strap across her shoulder. Don't look back, Everett thought at her. You're too smart to look back.
She went in through the massive revolving doors. Dr. Quantum came to life. The picture was grainy from the poor camera lens, jerky from the slow bluetooth link, lurching in time to Sen's footsteps. Random people moved through the shot: phone cameras were wideangle by default; the lobby seemed kilometres across.
Stand still, will you? Everett thought at the screen. As if she had heard him telepathically, Sen stopped. She turned very slowly. Everett took screen grabs of her panorama. The lobby of the Plenitude tower was built to awe, on the scale of the ancient world:
Karnak, Petra, the Pantheon of Greece, the ruins of Imperial Rome. He could not see the tops of the pillars. They were as massive and tall as redwood trees. The black marble floor was wide as a dark ocean. At a vast distance was a bank of reception desks. Behind them hung a banner. It must be thirty metres on a side, Everett guessed; black as the marble floor, bearing nine silver stars. A star for each world of the Plenitude. You're going to have to change that, Everett thought. It's ten worlds now.
“Seen enough?” Everett started at the voice from Dr. Quantum's speakers. Sen had worked out how to use the audio.
“Bona polone!” Everett shouted. The patient maid, on her rounds clearing tables, looked up.
“I'm going in now.”
“Wait,” Everett said. He'd seen a low fence across the lobby, a gate, two big men in uniforms. Beyond reception was another layer of security. He couldn't risk Sen getting caught. But she couldn't hear him. The stream started to jerk as she walked towards the desk. Wait. Everett called up a messaging app. Sen, if you get this, say okay, he tapped. Send. Notice the buzz. Notice the buzz on your breast-bone where the phone sits in your shush-bag strap. Notice and look. He re-sent the SMS. Sen, if you get this, say okay. Sen, if you get this, say okay. Sen, if you get this, say okay.
“Okay.”
We're in contact, Everett texted. Then he saw a motion in the street that distracted him from the tension in the lobby. A long line of children was walking down the street, past the facade of the Tyrone Tower, up the steps, under the porch towards the revolving door. Everett estimated there were forty, fifty of them, a big train, adults every ten kids, all muffled up for winter. It could only be an end-of-term school trip. A school trip to the Plenitude. Why not? Everett had been on school trips to the Houses of Parliament and Greenwich Observatory. The United Nations in New York took school parties. NASA showed school trips their rockets. This was E3's equivalent of both: exploration and administration. To the schoolchildren it was a mildly interesting afternoon out—the high-light would be if they actually saw someone go through the Heisenberg Gate—with souvenir eraser and pencils in the gift shop and home early. To Everett, it was opportunity.
Big crowd kids coming in, Everett texted.
“See ‘em,” Sen said.
Join them. The picture jogged again. Faces flushed with winter filled the screen, hats and scarves and hoods and gloves. Don't get too close.
“Trust me, Everett Singh.” The group moved past the camera towards the reception.
Doing? ? ?
“They're getting tags.”
Danger, Everett thought. One of the teachers would spot Sen as an intruder. But no tag, no entrance. Can U get close to tag? he texted. Sen mingled with the milling mass of school kids as they fitted guest passes to their coat lapels and pockets. Everett hissed through his teeth in concentration as he tried to drop the screen-grab frame onto a clear, solid shot of a tag. They were moving too quickly. A badge drifted into frame. Everett dragged the frame around it, tapped. Got it. It took Everett thirty seconds on the image-processing app to sharpen the photo, resize it, and change the name.
Picture 4u. And it was through the bluetooth link and onto the screen of his smartphone on Sen's chest-strap. It wouldn't survive even a moment of detailed scrutiny, but for a back-marker in a crowd of noisy, restless, bored early-teens it would pass a glance. Sen dawdled along at the back of the tour group as it approached the uniformed security men. And through without even a nod. The camera showed Everett a woman with a clipboard and a tag and a very sharp suit and shoes. He guessed she was the tour guide. Better and better. Everett waited until the tour had left the lobby before buzzing Sen with a message.
Get close enuf 2 hear guide.
This was a last-day-before-Christmas-holiday tour. The guide was as bored and distracted as the schoolchildren. But she was gold to Everett. This is the Chamber of the Council of Worlds. Each world sends twenty councillors. The presidency rotates between the members of the Plenitude. Up this escalator. Please keep shoelaces and straps away from the edge of the treads. On these levels are the embassies of the Nine Known Worlds. One embassy per floor. Please hold the handrail. This level is currently being refurbished to be the Embassy of World 10. Sen turned the camera to the left, to the right, and Everett went snap snap snap snap. He almost laughed aloud with glee. Everything, she was giving him everything. He tagged the images as he dropped them into his wire-frame model. Council chamber. E2 Embassy. E4 Embassy. E5 Embassy. The Hall of Plenipotentiaries—a circular pit of ten leather-backed seats facing each other across a round table. Recessed lighting threw shadows up into the wooden ceiling. It looked like a set from a James Bond movie.