Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  ‘How long will it be?’ he asked.

  ‘I said, there’s bread and stuff if you’re starving.’

  ‘Just want to do something before dinner.’

  Everett M dashed to his room and quickly pulled on anything that might make him look like one of the runners he had so effortlessly beaten on the way home from school.

  ‘I’m going for a run,’ he announced in the kitchen. Even Victory-Rose stopped daubing fluorescent pink seagulls on the paper sky at that.

  ‘You’re going for a run?’ his mum echoed.

  ‘I’ve got a game tomorrow. I need to get ready for it. And you said I was eating the house out, and like, I have to burn up all that food somehow. Run.’

  ‘You’re going for a run.’

  ‘People do. Like me.’

  ‘Oh …’ Laura said, drawing the word out long. ‘It’s for someone, isn’t it? There’s someone, isn’t there? You’re buffing up for her. That is so sweet, Everett.’

  ‘Mum!’ But Laura’s guess was a perfect cover story, so Everett M worked the lie. ‘I have a game tomorrow. Really.’

  ‘You know, that really is kind of romantic. Buffing up for a girl. Are you going to run past her house? That’s a cute beanie.’

  ‘Mum. I’m gone. The teriyaki. A lot of it.’

  And he was gone. The cold hit him deep. His energy levels were still low and he was ravenous. He should have had one of Laura’s sandwiches, a dozen of them because he knew he would need power, but the image of the Nahn spider hurrying, hurrying on too many legs through the frosty grass was like barbed wire in his brain. He knew what the buzzing in his head was now. When he had been trapped in the Madam Moon battle suit, when he had thought he was going to die the worst death he could imagine, his Nahn alter had said that it would take several months for the Nahn to learn Thryn technology and assimilate it. And on the inside of the suit Madam Moon had whispered that she was analysing and assimilating Nahn nanotechnology. The buzzing was his own implanted Thryn augments responding to the presence of the Nahn. He had his own inbuilt Nahn radar. Everett M turned on to Roding Road and into a slow run and opened up his augmented hearing. His ears opened into the electronic, the electromagnetic. Radio and cell-phone signals deafened him, a hundred satellite channels poured into his head. One by one Everett M screened them out. Next came the chatty buzz of Wi-Fi networks, the shoutiness of Bluetooth, the minicab channels and Tesco home-delivery network. A pirate dubstep station was broadcasting on the edge of an emergency-services frequency. Television and radio and high above, like night birds, the voices of aircraft around London’s airports. The world was a cacophony of silent voices that passed through everyone except those who needed to hear them. Everett M heard them all, every single one, and one by one he tuned them out until he found what he was listening for, the small mosquito whine of the Nahn.

  Everett M followed the Nahn buzz down Roding Road on to Northwold Road. For a moment he lost it in the music of car radios and mobile-phone chitchat. Jogging up and down, breathing out great clouds of steam, Everett M banged his gloved hands together for warmth and skipped over the treacherous extending leads of the dog-walking-service woman. So, she was a feature in this universe as well as his own. There. Faint, but once he picked it out, there was no mistake. The Nahn-thing had dodged the drive-time traffic along Northwold Road and crossed into Stoke Newington Common. The park was a triangle of darkness among the street lights. People, cars, homes, shops were only a few dozen metres away but Everett M felt alone and isolated.

  Movement. Snuffling around the back of a park bench. Everett M flicked up his night vision. Dog: a bull-terrier cross, the kind you could buy for two hundred pounds at the Guinness Trust flats to make you look hard, was rooting around among the discarded fast-food boxes. A bull-cross. On its own. It was trailing a leash.

  Where was the owner?

  The dog looked up from its rummaging. It looked Everett M straight in the eye. Everett M looked the dog straight in the eye. And he saw not big, sad, soft dog eyes, but the hard black speckle of insect eyes. The dog growled. Everett M thought power down his right arm. His palm opened. Metal and clean white Thryn nanoplastic unfolded like a cyborg flower. The dog gave a yelp and fled. In a thought, Everett M was after it. The dog could go through shrubs and railings, but Everett M was faster. The dog burst from Stoke Newington Common and raced up Rectory Road. It zigzagged through the nose-to-tail traffic on Stoke Newington High Street.

  Everett M had encountered the traffic on Stoke Newington High Street before. It had been painful. He still carried its scars.

  ‘Not this time,’ Everett M hissed through his teeth. He opened both EM pulsers and with a burst of power repeated the trick he had played on Fat Jennings’s car. Every engine on the street went dead. Everett M threaded himself through the stationary traffic to see the dog slip through the railings into Abney Park Cemetery. ‘Okay then,’ Everett M said. ‘If that’s what you want. Battle of Abney Park, round two.’

  Forty cars were stranded on Stoke Newington High Street, but the drivers were too busy shouting and phoning people and banging horns that didn’t work and looking under hoods and standing in the cold asking each other, What what what happened there? to notice the teenager in the running gear point a finger and a brief, brilliant spike of laser light cut through the chain locking the gates together.

  And in.

  The cold and dark closed around Everett M like a fist. His night vision showed him the destruction that had been caused when he had fought his alter here. Stone angels were reduced to headless, wingless bodies; cherubs blasted to pairs of legs. Tombstones and Victorian memorial pillars lay in shattered chunks. Tree branches littered the ground. A dumpster stood half full of shattered wood and stone, as if the contractors had given up in despair at the size of the job.

  Everett M wasn’t proud of any of it.

  He tuned his Thryn sense to listen for any traces of Nahn activity. A trace, fainter than a fly’s heartbeat, but enough for Everett M to follow.

  ‘I can see you,’ he said. The trace led him off the main path into the winter-killed brambles and dead bracken. It wove between tombstones and tree trunks choked with ivy to a circle of Victorian grave markers – pillars, cherubs, ornate stone scrolls, weeping angels. The dog lay on its side in the centre of the circle. Everett M opened the pulsers in the palms of his hands and went cautiously up to the animal. It was not breathing. He poked it with the toe of his running shoe. The dog collapsed in on itself. It was an empty shell, sucked dry of life.

  ‘Okay,’ Everett M said, looking around him. He listened again. No contact, no clear trace leading from the dead dog deeper into the graveyard. But there was something, a vague hum, a hiss of activity, with no direction and no centre. Everett M closed his eyes and concentrated. Beneath him. In the ground. He was right above a circle of Nahn activity.

  Everett M’s eyes flew open at the first earth tremor. Water droplets fell from the branches. Again, the ground beneath his feet shook. The Nahn noise was a roar now, and in motion, moving upward through the soil towards him. A tombstone lurched and cracked. Trees shook. Movement. Everett M whirled. The grass in front of the sheared-off pillar gravestone bulged, as if something was punching out from beneath. A hand thrust up through the grass. A long-dead bone hand reached into the night air. Black fibres writhed around the bones, binding them in shiny black sinews. With a titanic heave, a skeleton wrenched itself out of the grave. Nahn muscles bound themselves to rotting Victorian bones. The skull, still wearing a few wisps of hair, turned to Everett M. The empty eye sockets filled with black orbs of insect-eye.

  ‘You have to be joking,’ Everett M said. The earth shook again, hard enough for him to lose his footing. As Everett M went down, the Nahn skeleton lunged at him. Goal-keeper reactions rolled Everett M out of the way, opened his right arm and extruded the laser. He was dangerously cold and hungry but he needed every weapon Madam Moon had installed in him. The laser sliced the skeleton’s head from its
body. Black Nahn tendrils writhed from the severed spine. The headless skeleton kept coming. He took its legs from under it. It crawled towards him, dragging itself along on bone fingers. ‘Oh come on.’ Laser in the right hand, pulser in the left. One EM blast froze the Nahn-stuff infesting the skeleton and shattered it like black ice.

  Now Everett M understood the earth tremors. All around the circle of tombstones the graves had burst open. The dead leapt out. Their bones were strung with Nahn muscle. They were fast and strong. Everett M ducked under outstretched bone hands, rolled and slashed the Nahn corpse in half, top to bottom. The two halves of the body twitched, sending Nahn tendrils reaching towards each other. He EM-pulsed it to nothing, even as a zombie still dressed in the rags of a Victorian mourning dress spat black Nahn-stuff from its fleshless jaws. He beheaded it with one laser blast, counted the seconds until his pulser recharged. Come on, come on, come on! And fire. You’re proper dead now. Everett M spun. A scythe of laser fire toppled Nahn zombies like trees. He hacked them to bits, and as they squirmed and crawled towards him, he took them out, blast by blast.

  All was still. All was quiet. Nothing creeping, nothing crawling. Job done. Zombie invasion taken out quick and neat and early. He stepped over the ring of shattered bone and crystalised Nahn-stuff. And something shot up out of the mash of dirty bones, opened its dead jaws in his face, reached for him with claw hands. A baby – the skeleton of a dead baby, animated by the Nahn. Everett M leaped back in shock before his augmentations took over. The EM pulse caught it mid-air, froze all its Nahn-stuff to black ice. It fell to the ground. The black ice shattered like glass under Everett M’s running shoes. One final scan. Nothing. Planet made safe, and all before dinner.

  ‘It’s teriyaki time.’

  6

  Charlotte Villiers stepped out of the Heisenberg Gate. Her alter Charles was two steps behind her. Her heels rang on the metal ramp. The Earth 7 hosts waited at the foot of the ramp: identical smiles, identical handshakes.

  ‘Welcome, Fro Villiers,’ said Jen Heer to Charlotte Villiers. He was a stout, middle-aged white man, greying early, wearing creased pants and a frock coat over an elaborate brocade shirt.

  ‘Welcome, Her Villiers.’ Heer Fol simultaneously greeted Charles Villiers. He looked and was dressed identically to his counterpart.

  Charlotte Villiers knew the E7 etiquette – only acknowledge, shake hands, speak with the person speaking with you; if your language has a plural form of ‘you’, like French or German or Spanish, use the singular form; don’t be surprised if the other person completes what the first one begins to say; forgive them their moments of unspoken communication. It is twin telepathy.

  Jen Heer Fol were identical twins. Every operative in the Earth 7 jump-room was an identical twin. Every person on Earth 7 was an identical twin. More than identical twins, closer even than clones. They were one mind in two bodies. What one felt, the other felt; what one saw, the other remembered; what one thought, the other heard. They could communicate mind to mind, instantly, silently, completely, no matter how far apart they were. Researchers on many worlds had studied Earth 7’s twins intensely and their best theory was that they were quantum entanglement on the everyday scale.

  To Charlotte Villiers entanglement was one of the most beautiful mysteries of quantum theory. Take two particles and, using a laser, place them in the same quantum state. They become entangled, connected to each other. In some ways they are like one particle in two places. No matter how far you separate the entangled particles, in distance or in time, any effect that takes place on one will be mirrored immediately in the other, whether it is a wavelength of light away or the width of the observable universe. Everything is connected. That truth filled Charlotte Villiers with a sense of wholeness and peace.

  Quantum entanglement was routine on the scale of atoms, not so easy on the scales that registered on human senses. That ghastly little man from Earth 10, Paul McCabe, had told her his team had succeeded in quantum-entangling two bacteria. He had presumably thought she would be impressed by such an achievement. He had yet to meet the E7ers, who achieved quantum entanglement on the scale of brains, and no one knew how it worked, except that it seemed to be a natural phenomenon.

  Whatever the explanation, Earth 7 twins – they disliked that term, Charlotte Villiers remembered – made superlative diplomats, reporters, investigators, secret agents and spies, with an undetectable line of communication across universes. Their only weakness seemed to be that they grew increasingly cranky, bad-tempered and depressed the longer they were apart.

  And there with the Jen Heer Fol twins – with him, Charlotte Villiers reminded herself; E7 twins liked to be referred to as one person in two bodies – was that same ghastly little man, skulking in that scruffy private-detective’s raincoat. Behind him was the Harte woman. Atrocious hair colour. Quite, quite inappropriate for a cross-planes diplomat, but in every other way she was much more capable than her university boss. She couldn’t be trusted – Charlotte Villiers would never forgive her the blow that struck her gun away from Everett Singh, allowing him to escape to Earth 3 and thence to the entire Panoply of all worlds. But Charlotte Villiers would study her closely. The Plenipotentiary practised the old maxim of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. The sooner the arrangement with Earth 10 was taken out of the hands of bumbling scientists and put on a proper diplomatic basis, the better.

  ‘Charlotte!’ Paul McCabe’s handshake was like a dead fish.

  ‘Miss Harte.’ Charlotte Villiers nodded to Colette Harte.

  ‘This is an extraordinary world,’ Paul McCabe said, not at all discouraged by the snub. ‘Extraordinary!’

  ‘Yes, some worlds are more ordinary than others. How do you find Heiden, Colette?’

  ‘It’s very beautiful.’

  You answer carefully, Charlotte Villiers thought. I do not trust you, but you trust me even less.

  Heiden’s beauty, like everything else on Earth 7, was twofold. The first beauty was its location: it stood where three rivers joined. On Earth 3, these would have been the Thames, the Seine and the Rhine. On Earth 3, those rivers ran into the English Channel and the North Sea. On Earth 7, the English Channel and the North Sea were gently rolling chalk downland, cut by the wide and wandering rivers. Britain was not an island, but a peninsula on the western edge of Europe. Where the three waterways joined, Heiden stood on a cluster of rivers and islands and canals, a city of bridges and embankments: gracious squares lined with steep-pitched roofs; church steeples hung with the city’s famous thousand bells; narrow, twisting streets loud with the hum of electric moped-cabs and the horns of tandem bicycles, the thrum of barge engines echoing under the elegant bridges and the swish of taxi boats up and down the three rivers.

  ‘Heiden is the culinary capital of the Plenitude,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘I have a favourite restaurant on Loud-engat in the Vereel Quarter. Bijou and charming.’

  ‘I was at a place in Raandplass last night,’ Paul McCabe said. ‘Good, but the portions were enormous.’

  ‘Yes, they find the concept of cooking for one person disturbing,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

  Brilliant light illuminated the jump-room: a Heisenberg Gate opening. Ibrim Hoj Kerrim descended from the gate. One step had taken him from the strange England-off-the-coast-of-Morocco to this England-not-an-island-at-all. His brocade coat was immaculate, his turban pinned with a silver plume, beard precisely trimmed, nails manicured. He greeted his fellow Plenipotentiaries from the Plenitude and Earth 10, an Accession Candidate.

  ‘Good, we are all here …’ Jen Heer began.

  ‘… so I will show you the Plenipotentiary suites,’ Heer Fol finished.

  Earth 7’s Praesidium buildings occupied the whole of one of the many small islands that lay at the confluence of the three rivers. The building had been a monastery – Heiden’s strange, two-headed saints and angels looked down from pillars and paintings as the Jen Heer Fol duo led the Plenipotentiaries through shaded court
yards and under baroque domes.

  Charlotte Villiers fell into step beside Ibrim Hoj Kerrim.

  ‘I hear you’re thinking of standing for the Primarchy,’ she said.

  ‘Direct as ever, Ms Villiers.’

  ‘I consider it a virtue,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘The Plenitude of Known Worlds would be graced with you as its head.’

  ‘You flatter me.’

  ‘I understood that Al Buraqis value flattery.’

  ‘We like it to be genuine, Ms Villiers.’

  ‘Surely if it’s genuine then it’s not flattery?’

  ‘Exactly so, Ms Villiers.’

  ‘I just want to reassure you that you have my unqualified support, Ibrim,’ Charlotte Villiers said. E7 workers scurried in pairs with trolleys and electric carts, shifting the daunting piles of equipment and documents that accompanied a move of the Praesidium and all its many offices and ministries.

  ‘And your Order?’

  ‘We are concerned only with the security of the Plenitude.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen your concern, Ms Villiers. It cost me forty spahis. Forty men sent through that gate, and nothing ever came back, not even a rumour. They had families, wives, lovers … No, I’ve seen what you’re trying to do on Earth 10. I’ve seen your Order at work. I do not require its support.’

  ‘That’s direct, Ibrim.’

  ‘But not flattering, Ms Villiers.’

  The two of them paused a moment on a covered stone bridge over a canal to allow a group of Plenitude staffers to pass.

  ‘You may not need us as supporters, Ibrim, but you certainly don’t want us enemies,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

  ‘What are you saying, Ms Villiers?’

  Jen Heer Fol and the Earth 10 Plenipotentiaries were waiting at the end of the bridge.

  ‘There is damaging information we can keep to ourselves, Ibrim,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

  ‘This is blackmail.’