Planesrunner (Everness Book One)

by Ian McDonald

  “Mr. Singh, that is damn fine chocolate. What's the little suspicion of heat?”

  “Chilli,” Everett said. “A pinch. I once had it in this coffee place in Seattle.”

  “Mission for you, Mr. Singh. Christmas is coming and we must have bona manjarry. Does your Punjabi granny have any recipes for turkey? Away down to Ridley Road Market and see what you can rustle up. Get plenty of vegetables. Sen would eat nothing but meat and carbo if I gave her the chance.”

  “I would not,” Sen protested. “I like veg. Sort of.”

  “Fresh, green, and seasonal, Mr. Singh.” Captain Anastasia counted a wad of pounds from her wallet, which was a marvellous magician's box of a thing, folding this way, that way, turn it over and it opened a third way, revealing new layers and levels and flaps and pockets, more and more the farther in you went. Infundibular. “If it comes to more than that, my credit is good with all the retailers in Hackney, but I'd prefer you kept to the budget. Do you know what the first law of the Airish is?”

  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be?” Everett said.

  “No, Mr. Singh, though that is a wise saying. Much more prosaic than that. Cash is king.”

  Leeks, long and straight and dusty blue-green. Italian kale, its leaves so dark a green they looked almost black. Potatoes—waxy ones, which were better as part of a dish with other vegetables, rather than floury ones for roasting. Already he was developing a cooking plan. Onions—cooking was inconceivable without them. He picked over a dozen types of onion, from ones as flat as a turban to tiny pickling onions the size of his thumb. Everett settled for two pounds of small, dark-skinned Polish onions that he could smell through the paper bag.

  “These are bigger for the same price,” Sen said, holding up a pale-skinned Spanish onion the size of her fist.

  “Too big. They're all water. No flavour. Big isn't always best.”

  “It is with me.”

  Garlic. Lots of it. Root ginger. Everything was available at Ridley Road Market. Every day, every hour there was something new to discover about this Hackney. Ridley Road Market—go past the boarded-up Knights of the Air pub, go through the tangle of pipes and valves and gas-cylinders where the Gas Office stored its helium—was one of the bigger discoveries. Not because it was a market, but because it was a market in both the universes that Everett knew. In his home London it had been a street and a half of mostly Caribbean stalls and lock-ups opposite Dalston Station. In this London it was a bazaar of ethnicities and skin colours tucked into the arches and culverts and narrow alleys of a complex railway exchange. Laneways led to tunnels to vaults and church-sized halls built inside red-brick railway viaducts. Food and clothing and books and dodgy electrical goods, ironmongery and kitchen ware and suspiciously cheap tools. Crockery and household goods. Toys hung like a mass execution from the fronts of stalls; bolts of cloth stacked high, the lower ones flattened by the weight of those above them. Women drinking tea at stalls beneath high brickwork domes. The trains that passed regularly overhead shook the market to its core, shook the cups and tea sets on the china stalls, shook drips of rainwater that formed at the tips of the stalactites leached from the arches' cement joints, dripping down on the heads of the shoppers. Here Hackney Great Port and greater London met and mingled and haggled. City fashion mixed with the most piratical Airish dress; standard English, in a dozen accents, with palari. Everett went from stall to stall, asking, sniffing, holding in his hand, checking for blemishes, haggling, passing on.

  “Hows can you tell the difference? It's all just spuds and onions,” Sen complained. She was restless and bored.

  “Well, it's all just lip gloss and makeup, but that doesn't stop you taking the lid off every single one.”

  “That's different. That's shopping.”

  “So what's this?”

  “This is buying.” Sen thought for a moment. “Do all the omis in your world know how to cook?”

  “I think the question is the other way round; do none of the omis in your world know how to cook? My dad taught me.”

  “Your dad.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. Just. Well. You people are weird.”

  “It's a basic life skill. Are you going to starve to death in the middle of a market like this because you don't know what to do with basic ingredients?”

  “Not me,” Sen said. “I has grace and charm. That's what everyone says. Tell me about your dad, Everett Singh. We's supposed to be rescuing him and all I know is he's a scientist and bad guys want him and he supports some fruity-sounding team called Tottenham Hotspur. Oh, and he taught you how to cook.”

  “My dad's called Tejendra.”

  “See? You didn't even tell me that.”

  “You haven't told me your dad's name,” Everett said. Or anything else about him or any of your family, or if they are alive or dead.

  “Uh uh. This is your dad we're talking about.” Sen didn't miss a beat as they walked on, stall by stall, into the depths of this Earth's Ridley Road Market. “You see, if I'm supposed to be helping you rescue him, I's entitled to know a bit about what I's rescuing.”

  “It's a Punjabi name. Singh means lion. It's a really common name in the Punjab. Punjab means ‘five rivers': it's up in northwest India; in my world it's split between India and Pakistan. A lot of people died when they split Pakistan from India. Millions. It was a bad time; the worst time. I don't know what India's like in your world. My dad's family comes from a village right at the centre of the five rivers. Right in the middle. They all moved to Ludhiana before my dad was born—he was born in India, but he moved before he was five so he doesn't really have the accent—well, you can hear a bit of it when he gets excited about stuff. He had three brothers and two sisters, and they grew up over an Asian supermarket in Walthamstow. So that was eight of the immediate family, then a couple of unmarried aunts and an uncle who'd just got married, all in this one house. You see, the Punjabis are like the Airish of India. They're always shouting and rowing and making up and celebrating and fighting. They all live with the volume up at eleven. Now, if you met my dad you wouldn't know right away he's Punjabi, because he's not big and noisy and he thinks about things, but you should see him at White Hart Lane at the North London Derby. And when he talks about physics, when he talks about those things that no one else understands but mean so much to him, you can see it in him like fire.

  “How could I make you understand my dad's side of the family? Okay: I'll show you how my bebe and my other uncles and aunts would celebrate Christmas—which they all do even though they're not Christians, because Punjabis like nothing better than a good party. You wouldn't be sitting down to dry old turkey. No no, that's not proper manjarry for a feast. It'd be something for a real celebration, like royalty was coming. Always entertain as if you entertained princes, my bebe Ajeet says.” Everett looked around the meat and poultry stalls; the turkeys plump and round as buttocks, the geese with their heads tucked under their long bony wings, the rounds of spiced beef filling the air with the scent of cinnamon, the clove-studded hams. His eyes lit on the pheasants hanging by the neck, male and female in pairs, from the game stall.

  “How long have your pheasants been hanging?”

  “In this weather, about nine days,” said the stall holder, a square-built man, cheerful with salt-and-pepper hair cut into a stiff brush. Everett lifted a cock pheasant and sniffed it. “We get them from Lord Abercrombie's estate,” the stallholder added.

  “How much for four?”

  The stallholder named a price. Everett haggled him down, parted with some of Captain Anastasia's banknotes and left with two paper bags with long, beautiful tail feathers sticking out of them.

  “My bebe, she'd be thinking now, what's the most luxurious, wintery thing I can do with pheasants, what's royal and extravagant, and I'd be thinking, like murgh makhani, but with pheasant: pheasant makhani, with maybe a bit of edible gold leaf over the top; and she'd be thinking that's kind of goldy red and I'd need something green wit
h that to show it up but I already have my leeks and my kale; and you'd need rice, a pillau that's so rich it has jewels in it, and bread because there's no Punjabi meal without bread; and then she'd be thinking, oh, let's eat sweet and talk sweet, so she'd be looking for things like sesame seeds and cardamoms and rosewater and clarified butter…”

  As he talked, Everett moved through the market, filling the bags ingredient by ingredient, haggle by haggle, moving out from the subterranean stores into the alleys that opened on to Dalston Lane. Here were the clothing and fabric stalls, the hats and bandanas and scarves for winter, the bolts and bales of print cottons and chiffons and worsteds and taffetas.

  “There's one last detail,” Everett said, looking up and down the lines of stalls, their owners muffled up in coats and scarves and hats and fingerless gloves, huddling over mugs of tea. “You can't serve a meal for a prince on a table for a beggar, so I'd need to dress the table. But I'd know that everything on an airship has to justify its weight, so I'd be looking for something that's beautiful but light as a feather. Like that.”

  The sari shop was at the Cecilia Road end of Ridley Road Market, where the market's interzone became Hackney Great Port proper. The owner was an elderly, bird-thin Tamil lady. She wore one of her own saris, with a heavy Icelandic-style knitted cardigan over and fleece boots under. She put her hands together in a namaste. Everett returned the greeting.

  “Bona,” Sen said. The stall owner flicked out sari after sari, the feather-light fabric unfurling like a banner before settling over Everett's arm for him to inspect. Sen picked up a sheer white sari trimmed with gold and held it up against herself. The Tamil woman showed her how to turn and drape and fold and tuck it around herself. Sari-clad, Sen posed and pouted in the full-length mirror. “Bonaroo.” Everett decided on a black sari patterned with silver. In the bag it went. The Christmas shopping was complete. Pheasants, kale, spices and ghee, a sari, and basmati rice. There were still fifteen shillings left from Captain Anastasia's purse.

  “You're wondering what a Punjabi Christmas dinner has to do with my dad,” Everett said. “This is him. This is me. You've never met him, but you might think he was quiet and geeky, and I know you don't think I'm a proper omi, whatever a proper omi is, but my people, well, we just can't help doing the big things, whether it's Christmas dinner, or multiverse physics. And that's why I'm here, in your world. Because I couldn't stay away. Every drop of my blood made me come here.”

  For once Sen had no smart, slangy answer. She stood chewing her lip, twisting one foot in the discarded orange peel and handbills for a Christmas variety show in the Hackney Empire. She couldn't look at him. Then she hugged Everett in an embrace of grey wool and musk and kissed him hard on the cheek.

  “You are a proper omi, Everett Singh. You are so so.” Sen pushed him away. She had felt Everett tighten against her. “What's with you? Don't you like me?”

  “It's the Iddler.” Over his days among the peoples of Hackney Great Port Everett had glimpsed the godfather figure sufficient times to recognise him. He didn't doubt that the Iddler, with or without his minders, on his rounds of Hackney Great Port, had glimpsed him and Sen in return. The incident with Sharkey had taken the edge off his aggression—word passed quicker than influenza around the port—and he had lurked and skulked for a time. He did not lurk or skulk now. He was open and bold. It was because of the woman beside him. “He's not alone.”

  “They're a joke.”

  “It's not Evans and Van Vliet.” Everett had learned the names of Guttural Man and the Dutchman at the same time he learned his enemy's face. “Move!” Sen looked behind her.

  “Oh the dear…”

  Beside the Iddler, tall and magnificent in silver fox fur, high-heeled boots, dove-grey gloves, her lips vampire red in her winter-cold face, was Charlotte Villiers. Nothing could have made the Iddler look more like a squat, hopping toad in a bad suit. At her killer heel were ten uniformed Missionaries. Their helmets looked a joke on Hackney's streets; the riot sticks in their hands did not. Charlotte Villiers strode down Cecilia Street as if no force in the universe could swerve her. People cleared from her path as they would from a tidal wave.

  “You're going to tell me to come on,” Everett said.

  “I am. Come on.” Sen darted behind the sari stall and into the archway where the stall owner kept her stock and equipment. Everett, bags of pheasants and Christmas groceries in his hands, was two steps behind her. He saw the Missionaries break into a run. Charlotte Villiers kept the same steady, implacable, heel-clicking pace. Sen led him between metal racks stacked to the arch-top with sweet-smelling cottons and silks. A door at the back led to a corridor, washrooms, a tearoom where chilly-looking women sat looking up at a tiny television with a huge magnifying screen on a swivel arm set high on a wall. They ran along the backs of the other stall-holder lock-ups on Sandringham Road. “These all connect,” Sen said. “They'll never find us here.” She dived through a lock-up full of cones of hairy, dusty, itchy knitting wool and out into the street.

  “Piece of piss,” Sen crowed. They had come out on the small square where Amhurst Road met Dalston Wharf on the Lea Valley Navigation. Water behind them. More Missionaries between them and Andre Street. At the head of this detachment was Charlotte Villiers's mysterious clone; the more her double in every detail under the low winter sun slanting in across the electrical yards on Amhurst Road. “I hate sharpies!” Sen yelled in defiance. “Okay. Up now.”

  She must know the location of every fire escape and its release switch in the East End, Everett thought. The staircase swung down from the third-floor gallery of the warehouse that enclosed the three sides of the canal basin. She stopped halfway up the metal stairs.

  “What are you carrying them for?” she yelled. “Leave ‘em down!”

  “I'm not going to get four pheasants for four pounds again,” Everett said. He held up the shopping bags. Sen shook her huge mop of bleached curls. They ran on. Two sharpies followed gingerly, the old iron creaking under the weight of grown men. The rest of the squad, led by the man Everett thought of as Charles Villiers, followed at ground level.

  “It's a pity you don't have a website called TV Tropes,” Everett panted, clanging along in Sen's footsteps.

  “Wasting ‘is breath on shopping and now palari-ing,” Sen said.

  “It's about plot devices in stories and movies and comics that get used over and over again. There's one called ‘Treed.' It's where the good guys on the run go up onto a roof and then all the bad guys have to do is sit around and wait for them to come down, like a cat up a tree.”

  Even Sen could see Charlotte Villiers with her Missionaries come round the corner of the warehouse on the far side of the dock. The Iddler was nowhere to be seen. His job was done. He had led the police faithfully; the one person who knew Hackney Great Port as well as Sen. Charlotte Villiers spoke into her fur collar and three sharpies took up position at the other swing-ladder, by the Andre Street end of the wharf.

  “Cat up a tree, Mr. TV Tropes? Well, follow this polone.” She hopped up onto the railing next to the wall, then scrabbled up over the guttering onto the roof slates. One bag clenched in his teeth, the other slung over his elbow, Everett followed her up. Sen pointed out over the roofscape, squeezed between the railway viaducts of Ridley Road Market, to some scaffolding erected against the side of the canal warehouse. “Come on.” It was inevitable, Everett supposed. The scaffolding was a roofer's elevator, a simple platform on a winch. Escape.

  “How did you know?” Everett asked.

  “Airish always look up. Ground-pounders never do. That's our secret.”

  The winch creaked loudly. The platform jolted. Sen ran, but the elevator had descended out of reach by the time she reached the scaffolding. She looked down at the Iddler. He winked up at her and tipped his forelock.

  “TV Tropes?” Everett said and immediately felt petty and mean. Don't snark and snipe. Think. There is always a way out. Always. Charlotte Villiers and her sharpies
arrived at the foot of the scaffold tower.

  “Have the good manners to come down,” she commanded. “I'm not risking a heel going up to get you.”

  “How did she know to come to Airish town?” Sen whispered.

  “She saw you, remember?” Everett said. “In the Tyrone Tower. The jacket, the leggings, the boots, and my phone. She doesn't need to be a genius to work that out.”

  “Will you come down, Mr. Singh?” Charlotte Villiers called again.

  “Sorry, Everett,” Sen whispered. Then Everett heard the noise. He heard it at the precise moment it changed from disorder into order; from dozens, scores, hundreds of Airish leaving their business and going into the street to their feet falling into rhythm and step. People. Marching. The sound echoed from the viaduct walls, rolled around the piers and stone barge basins of Dalston Wharf. Marching. This was Hackney. This was Airishtown. This was where City and Civil and Customs law ended. This was where people lived by their own laws and justice, harsher and more immediate than the laws of police and courts and excise, but no less effective and no less just. The agreement had been made generations before, when the air-freighters first built a port on the edge of polite London, among the roughs and the toughs and the scofflaws, between the two justice systems. It was a handshake agreement, a gentleman's contract, but strictly and successfully observed for the century that the airships had been arriving over the great bazaar of Hackney. Ridley Road Market was a buffer zone where Londoners and Airish mingled, each observing their own laws and customs. Either side, the border was sharp as broken glass. Charlotte Villiers and her metropolis police had broken the unwritten law, and Hackney was rising to defend itself.