Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  ‘It is.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You don’t want to join the Order, that’s fine. But don’t interfere with my – our – work.’

  ‘Are you all right, Fro Villiers …’ Jen Heer began.

  ‘… Her Kerrim?’ Heer Fol finished.

  ‘Just catching up,’ Charlotte Villiers said. The party moved on through the labyrinth of the Praesidium palace.

  Jen Heer Fol stopped abruptly at a pair of vast, ornate doors.

  ‘I thought …’ Jen Heer began, swinging open one half of the doors.

  ‘… the Ambersaal,’ Heer Fol concluded, opening the other door.

  The room beyond took away even Charlotte Villiers’s breath. Every centimetre of wall was covered in amber. Decorative panels showed the miracles of angels in inlaid amber, from palest yellow to darkest brown. January light poured through window panels of translucent amber and turned it to gold. Everything was golden. It was like drowning in honey.

  ‘Exquisite!’ Charlotte Villiers said. As the other Plenipotentiaries gazed up in amazement at the delicate tracery of the roof vaults, all carved from paper-thin sheets of amber, her alter slipped in alongside Charlotte Villiers. ‘He’s not with us,’ Charlotte Villiers whispered. ‘But he’s not against us.’

  7

  ‘Flat?’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘We’re on the surface of a disc,’ Everett said. ‘It could be upper or lower – I’d need to see the stars. To be honest it doesn’t really matter.’

  Mchynlyth left off fastening the lifting cables to the impeller pod in its lowered position on the forest floor. He looked in stern disbelief at Everett and took a rotor disc from his pocket. He put his finger through the hole at the centre.

  ‘You’re telling me that my wee finger is the sun?’

  ‘Well, the hole would be a lot bigger, and the sun would be a lot smaller, but yes, that’s what I’m saying,’ Everett said. ‘We’re on an Alderson disk.’

  ‘Explain please, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Slowly and clearly, if you please.’

  Everett read the faces around the impeller pod. Sen tried to look interested to please Everett. Mchynlyth was surly and disbelieving; everything Everett said was a challenge to him. Sharkey was still out hunting. But Captain Anastasia’s face asked the most from him: will this help or hurt my ship and my family?

  ‘An Alderson disk is a mega-structure,’ Everett said. ‘It’s a solid disc of material that surrounds the sun, I’d guess from inside the orbit of Venus to just beyond the orbit of Mars. Or it would if those planets existed in this universe. Say ninety million miles from inside to outside, and an outer circumference of half a billion miles. That’s a lot of surface area.’

  ‘And I’ll just bet you’ve worked it all out,’ Mchynlyth said.

  Snark if you like, but you’re paying attention to me now, Everett thought.

  ‘I’ve done some mental arithmetic,’ Everett Singh. ‘It’s about a billion Earths. Both sides are habitable, you see. An Alderson disk could support a population of one thousand trillion people. With a thickness of two thousand miles, it would have about two-thirds Earth-normal gravity – you might have noticed that you don’t feel quite as firmly connected to the ground as usual.’

  ‘But the sun’s at the centre, right?’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘So how would you get night and day? The world turns – our world, I mean – to and away from the sun. But if the sun’s always at the centre …’

  ‘You move the sun,’ Everett said. This was the insight that had come to him in the pool. This world must be this way, because it was the only way to make sense of what he had observed. The words – the ideas – sounded insane, but the numbers said there could be no other way. They had crash-landed on a massive artificial disc, like a giant DVD, that surrounded its sun. And the sun was moving. ‘It’s actually easier to move the star than it is to move the disc. In fact, the sun’s how I worked it out. I saw that the shadows were getting longer but the sun wasn’t moving across the sky. The sun was setting, but it was vertical. Straight up and down. And the only way you can get that is if the sun is moving. The maths is quite straightforward; it’s a form of simple harmonic motion, like a pendulum. The sun bobs up and down. The mass of the disc—’

  ‘I think our minds are sufficiently boggled, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘So a day here is about thirty hours. And once you know that we’re on a disc with the sun at the centre, you start to notice other things too. The trees, the branches, all lean in the direction of the sun. All the leaves are tilted at the same angle. And I know why we crashed too. It’s because we went from a rotating sphere to a stationary flat disc.’

  ‘Is there any way this … Alderson disk … could be a natural phenomenon?’ Captain Anastasia interrupted.

  ‘No way,’ Everett said.

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that. How would you go about building something like this?’

  ‘It would take a technology millions of years in advance of ours. Maybe tens of millions of years.’

  ‘Well, then they should be able to give us a wee helping hand with our terribly old-fashioned, totally bolloxed airship,’ Mchynlyth said.

  ‘Tens of millions of years,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘So: not us. Not … humans.’

  ‘No. Humans haven’t been around long enough,’ Everett said.

  ‘People – things – that can build something like this,’ Captain Anastasia said, ‘do we really want to meet them?’

  A shout from the edge of the clearing: ‘Scarper! Get on your lally-tappers and scarper!’ Sharkey burst from the trees. His guns were slung in their holsters on his back. Draped around his chest was a dead creature, the quarry of his hunt. Everett only got a glimpse of it because Sharkey was running for his life: long, lithe, lizard-like, rainbow-coloured, with small eyes and sharp claws. Behind him, flowing and leaping and bounding over roots and logs and branches, came a living tsunami of creatures identical to the one he wore around his neck. Very, very alive. Very, very angry.

  ‘Drop-lines!’ Captain Anastasia shouted. ‘Quick’s the word, sharp’s the action!’ Sen and Mchynlyth buckled and in an instant were up into the branches. Everett fumbled with his harness.

  ‘Mr Sharkey!’ Captain Anastasia bellowed. Both she and Everett could see on his face that Sharkey knew he would never make it. Get to the empty harness, buckle in: impossible.

  ‘Sharkey!’ Everett yelled. He extended a hand. Sharkey grabbed his hand, hauled himself forward and seized fistfuls of Everett’s harness. The forest erupted in a stampede of hurtling bodies, long necks, darting heads, iridescent rainbow skins, raking clawed feet. Then Everett hit the button. High above the winch screamed, then jerked him and Sharkey into the air. Captain Anastasia was a split second behind. Lizard-things leaped and snapped at Sharkey’s heels until the drop-line took them up out of range. The herd broke over the impromptu camp, snapping and surging over the impeller.

  ‘Mah engine!’ Mchynlyth shouted from high above. Captain Anastasia tapped her wrist control. Lizard-things slid from the pod’s slick skin and fell into the swarm of surging bodies as the winches bit and hauled the impeller into the air.

  Sharkey clung for life to Everett’s harness. They spun slowly as the winch lifted them higher. Their faces were centimetres apart.

  ‘Indebted, Mr Singh,’ Sharkey said. Everett grimaced at the dead creature pressed up close against his body. The animal was the length of Everett’s arm, four-legged, long-tailed, with yellow reptile eyes with a vertical slit of a pupil. Lithe as a weasel. Ears were tiny holes far back on the long, curved skull. Pointed teeth were bared. The front paws had five digits, and the pale skin was as smooth and creased as a baby’s hand. The fingers were long. The skin was smooth, but arcs of rainbow colour, like oil on water, ran across it. Peering close, Everett saw that the smoothness was an illusion. The creature was covered in scales; smaller and smoother even than snakeskin. The spectrum colours came f
rom the play of light along the edges of the scales. There was something in that skin that made Everett not want to touch it, and a shadow in its open eye he did not like, something too knowing.

  ‘What is that thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Supper,’ Sharkey said. ‘“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat.”’

  ‘Nae offence,’ Mchynlyth said, ‘but I’ll take the vegetarian option.’

  He passed the dish to Captain Anastasia. The crew sat elbow to elbow around the small table in the cramped galley. The smell of onions, garlic, cumin, chilli, curry leaves and coconut milk could not quite mask the smell of the meat. Captain Anastasia looked into the bowl and passed it to Sen. Sen gagged back a little sick in the back of her throat. Everett passed it straight to Sharkey. Sharkey had skinned, gutted and cleaned the creature, taken off its head and tail but left it to Everett to turn it into dinner. Everett had barely been able to touch the flesh. Its thin bones cracked and splintered under his knife. He scooped the meat into the onions and frying masala paste, poured on coconut milk and clapped the lid on. Even after an hour it was still rubbery when he prodded it with a fork.

  Every eye was on Sharkey. He spooned out a large serving and took a mouthful. He chewed. He chewed for a long time.

  ‘Bona manjarry. Nothing wrong with it. Kinda textured. Tastes like alligator.’

  ‘Is that naan?’ Mchynlyth said. ‘Gie us a whack of that.’

  Everett passed the bread, still hot from the oven.

  ‘I stuck it on a stick and held it over the hotplate to puff it up,’ Everett said.

  ‘My gran used to do that with the coal fire,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘Just a wee show of the heat. Bugger all tandoori ovens in Govan. I’d take some of your dhal, Mr Singh.’

  Everett passed the bowl of lentil curry. He was being forgiven. Not fully, not immediately, but the process had begun. They were all together on a wrecked ship on a world more alien than they could possibly imagine, with death and danger beneath their feet. They were family.

  ‘My bebe gave me her halva recipe,’ Everett said. ‘Any sort of special occasion, she’d make halva.’

  ‘Oh aye, it was the same when I was a wain,’ Mchynlyth answered. ‘Holi, Christmas, good exam grades, dog has puppies, third cousin twice removed gets engaged; lash round the halva. Hers was different from yours; she made it from besan flour so it was more like fudge, and it was green, and it had this kind of herb taste. It was only after she died I found out she made it with bhang – that’s cannabis to you goras. No wonder all those wains were rolling around grinning – they were off their tits.’

  ‘I didn’t know your family were from Govan,’ Captain Anastasia said.

  ‘Aye, well, there’s things I tell you and things you never ask about,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘I must have been the only Desi boy in Govan couldn’t cook. Always a matter of some regret.’

  Everett thought, I could teach you, but he did not say it. Mchynlyth had his own world of engines and electrics and there he was master. He would not go back to being an apprentice in another world.

  ‘Mr Mchynlyth, I notice you have your shush-bag with you,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Any chance of a bijou tune?’

  Mchynlyth opened the elaborate brass clasps of the cracked leather case and took out a set of bagpipes. The galley was too small to deploy all the pipes so he stepped on to the catwalk, blew up the bag and adjusted the drones comfortably against his shoulder. Then he blasted into ‘Scotland the Brave’ at a volume that rattled plates in their racks and cups on their hooks. He followed with ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ and ‘The Tangle of the Isles’. Captain Anastasia thumped her fist on the table in time to the music.

  ‘Tune, sir, tune!’ she said.

  ‘I used to pipe the Master and Commander of the Royal Oak in to formal dinners,’ Mchynlyth said to Everett. ‘And none o’ them “Och Aye the Noo” music-hall tunes: proper pipe music – pibrochs and everything.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Mchynlyth,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Sen, the floor is yours.’

  Sen leaned over the table to Everett. ‘Is you watching closely?’ she asked.

  She held the fingers of her right hand in front of Everett’s face and snapped them. An Everness tarot card appeared in them: a man in a striped circus costume on a unicycle, juggling planets. Sen held up a finger on her left hand. When Everett looked back the card had vanished from her right hand.

  ‘You’ll bring it back,’ he said. ‘It’s only half the trick, making it disappear. The clever bit is bringing it back again. The prestige. I saw the movie. See? I’s watching closely.’

  Sen snapped her right hand. She produced not the card, but Everett’s phone.

  ‘Not closely enough, Everett Singh.’ The rest of the crew applauded. Sharkey looked pale and in pain. ‘But you’re right. It has to come back again. Look in your pocket.’

  Everett grinned – Sen had fooled him completely and brilliantly – and from the pocket of his ship shorts produced the card. Everyone applauded. Sen curtsied. ‘That’s for the Hackney train,’ she whispered to Everett as she went back to her seat. ‘If I’d really wanted, I would have had your dilly comptator and you would never have known. Prestige that.’

  ‘Mr Singh?’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘The floor is yours. Entertain us.’

  Everett got to his feet. From the moment Mchynlyth picked up his bagpipes he had been dreading this moment. He could make the funniest joke sound like a term report, had people peeping through their fingers if he danced, could clear a room if he sang. But Captain Anastasia’s stern expression said that Everness Expected Every Omi and Polone to zhoosh up and let the bona temps roll. It was part of the forgiving. Captain Anastasia had orchestrated this whole dinner complete with party pieces to bring everyone together, knit them back together again. Disunity could kill. But what to do? Apart from cooking, there was one thing, two things he was good at. And he had an idea.

  Everett swapped places in the corridor with Mchynlyth. He stripped off the T-shirt Sen had mutilated. He tied it into a soft, firm ball, like the ones he had seen kids play with in his father’s village in India.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Count with me.’ And he flipped the T-shirt ball into the air, caught it on his knee, bounced it into the air again, flipped it up with his foot, catch flip catch flip catch flip. Ten eleven twelve thirteen … Keepy-uppy. Twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five. ‘Now someone ask me to multiply two numbers. Big numbers.’

  ‘Twenty-four and fifty-three!’ Sen shouted.

  ‘Big numbers. Like three thousand two hundred and twenty-seven.’ He caught the ball on the right side of his head, flipped it over to the left.

  ‘Five thousand and three!’ Sen said.

  ‘Sixteen million, one hundred and fourteen thousand, six hundred and eighty one,’ Everett said.

  ‘You just made that up,’ Sen accused.

  ‘No, it’s the right answer,’ Everett said.

  He flipped the ball on to the back of his neck, caught it there, dropped it into his hand. Mchynlyth was writing furiously in a small notebook.

  ‘Just a wee minute … Aye. He’s right.’

  ‘How did you do it?’ Sen asked.

  ‘There’s tricks to it,’ Everett said. ‘Like rounding things up and rounding things down. Five thousand is a lot easier to multiply by than five thousand and three … then I just add three times the first number at the end. And three thousand two hundred and twenty-seven is just over three thousand two hundred and twenty-five. Fives are easy to multiply. Lots of tricks, but mostly I’m just good with numbers.’

  ‘Impressed, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Mr Sharkey, a rebel tune, if you will. Rouse us – all that carbohydrate has made us lethargic.’

  Sharkey got to his feet. His eyes bulged. His face went grey. He reached for the edge of the table to steady himself. He swallowed hard, trying not to throw up. His face contorted, he bent double, stabbed by stomach pain.

  ‘Permission … to be … excused
, ma’am,’ he said and ran out of the galley.

  ‘Mr Mchynlyth, maybe one of those pibrochs now,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘And play it loud.’

  Mchynlyth indeed played loud, but it was still not enough to mask the groans and retching and other more liquid noises from the ship’s jax. Sharkey returned pale and sweating. Everett tried not to giggle.

  ‘Both ends,’ he said. ‘“The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words,” Proverbs 23:8. Meat is definitely off the menu.’

  *

  Everett woke in his latty; eyes wide, every sense electric, his body alert and awake and ready for activity. Pitch blackness. He looked at his clock. Seven thirty – half an hour later than his usual waking time. The day on this flat world was six hours longer than on the round worlds. The sun would not rise for another two and a half hours.

  Diskworld, he thought, and giggled in his hammock at the joke. Everett was a big Terry Pratchett fan. His dad had hovered impatiently, waiting for Everett to finish each book so he could pounce and snatch it, whisk it away into his study and read it in a single evening, giggling away. No one else on the ship would get the joke. That was all right. It was a thing between Everett and Tejendra. Wherever he was, out there among the worlds.

  He had been almost sick with relief when he found out that the corpse in the forest had not been his Dad. He had been both glad and sad that it had been ’Appening Ed, someone he had seen, almost known. Disappointed but hopeful, because the search would have to go on. Scared and tired, because stumbling into what was left of ’Appening Ed had reminded Everett that there was no guarantee that his dad was alive. Lying in his hammock in the creaking dark, Everett saw his dad vanish, taken out of the universe by Charlotte Villiers’s jumpgun. The last thing he remembered was the look of surprise.

  He saw that other Tejendra Singh from Earth 1, who had lost everything he had ever loved to the Nahn. He saw the look on his face as the Nahn took him, a few short steps from the top of the Imperial College bell tower and safety. Peace.

  He saw his mum, that day that seemed so long ago but was only just over a month, when he had gone out to school, but taken that other turn that led him to Charlotte Villiers and the Heisenberg Gate, and all the worlds beyond it. That tired but strong smile. Take care, love.