by Ian McDonald
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter. It matters to me. And, Sen, you remember when I asked you if you’d take your rugby shirt off? I shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t good.’
‘I’s not good?’ Sen said, pretending to be outraged.
‘No, that’s not what I mean. In my world, girls your age, guys my age … we shouldn’t.’
‘Everett Singh, remember, it was me said no, but you did no. No should or shouldn’t about it. Do or don’t do. No word for should in palari, Everett Singh.’
‘I’m not the good guy.’
‘No one is. We’re good and bad, young and old, heroes and villains. That’s the way of the Dear.’
‘Not where I come from.’
‘Not in most places here neither, but where I comes from, we’re all those things. Black and white. Come on.’
Everett shook his head. ‘I got stuff to think about.’
‘All-alonio on a big cold airship? No. That’s not right. You come out with me, Everett Singh. Even if we just do this little thing I need to do.’
‘Little thing?’
With a flourish of her hand Sen conjured an Everness tarot card. She flipped it face up. The Sun Empress. Empress of the Sun. The cheerful plump woman on the throne with two wands.
‘I’s retiring this card. I wants her out of my deck. All the stuff the Genequeens put in my head, I put them into this card.’
Everett could not begin to imagine how that could work in any real, physical way, but it was vital to Sen. It was how she saw the world, with added colours and shades.
‘When she’s gone, the cards will speak again. True. I’s going to drop her in the Floating Harbour. You coming, Everett Singh?’
Everett shook his head.
‘Well, I can sends her to the water meself. I just thought … Nah … Everett, hug. I’s not leaving this latty until you get one.’
Everett stood up. He ached, inside and out. He let Sen wrap her arms around him. She was small and skin and bone and wire like an airship, but she was warm and sweet and fierce and most of all there. He slipped his arms around her. She held him long and tight and close and without saying a word. He knew she would stay there as long as he needed. He breathed in her sweet, musky Sen scent. Everett tried to imagine the cityships of the Sunlords scattered across a billion random parallel universes. There might be people in those parallel universes. He had just sent them an alien invasion. There was no right solution. Only a choice of evils. He had chosen for his own people at the price of strangers. He had done what he had to do. The Empress of the Sun had been the villain, the Big Evil. Everything he had done, he had done because of her.
You didn’t exterminate your civilisation, Everett Singh. You didn’t commit the genocide – ecocide, panicide. You didn’t invade the Ten Worlds with a billion cityships.
Kax …
He buried his face in Sen’s hair.
‘Hey! Don’t muss the riah,’ Sen murmured.
‘Yes,’ Everett said.
‘What?’
‘Go out. Yes, I will, yes.’
‘Yes!’ Sen slipped from his embrace and skipped into the corridor. ‘It’ll be fun, Everett; the bars and the music clubs, and the prizefighting …’
‘Maybe not the prizefighting …’
‘What’s wrong with prizefighting? Big men hitting each other. Bona. You’ll love it. Now, stand back.’ Sen pushed Everett aside and went to the cubby where he kept his clothes. She rooted through ship shorts and shirts, socks and leggings and T-shirts. ‘I’m gonna dress you up proper so.’
‘Sen.’
The tone in his voice made her look up, startled.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Just. This.’ Very quickly, very lightly, soft as morning mist, he kissed Sen on her ice-green lips. Her eyes widened; then she shook her head and laughed.
‘Nah, Everett Singh. Zhoosh up. Let’s go: Bristol-fashion.’
44
Paul McCabe was the last to leave. Long after the rest of the committee had departed, he lingered in Charlotte Villiers’s apartment, commenting on her view of the Thames, on the lights of the airships moving slowly over London, the quality of her porcelain.
‘Ming?’
‘Qing. Kangxi.’ He knew nothing about Middle Kingdom china.
Even after Charlotte Villiers had thanked him for his contribution to the meeting, making it clear that business was finished and he was intruding on her own time, Paul McCabe found a sudden interest in the etchings in her lobby.
‘They’re from Earth 5,’ Charlotte Villiers said, and immediately regretted making any comment as he began to intently study the street scenes of an alien London.
‘I do like the way the artist has caricatured the people into different types,’ he said.
‘It has nothing to do with caricature,’ Charlotte Villiers said brusquely. ‘E5 has five different species of humanity.’ If she said any more he would be there all night. Such an intensely dull man. Friends – if he had any – must dread him coming to parties. First to arrive, last to leave. ‘Now, I have private business …’
Lewis brought coat, scarf and gloves, called a cab to take Paul McCabe to the Tyrone Tower, held the door to make sure he left and saw him to the elevator.
‘Lewis, you are a treasure.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
‘I won’t be needing you again tonight.’
She resisted the urge to wipe Paul McCabe’s greasy fingerprints off her porcelain.
She heard Lewis close the front door and waited for the clunk and whirr of the elevator. The meeting of the Order had surpassed her expectations. There was nothing like an alien invasion to concentrate minds. E3 had quickly returned to normality. The papers and television were already calling it the Thirty-Minute Invasion. Cities in the sky – had they been real, or some mass quantum hallucination? Had worlds merely overlapped for a few minutes of uncertainty? Could anyone really be sure what had happened in that insane half-hour? Whatever had happened, it was over now. The electricity was back on, the sky empty and there were January bills to pay and work to be done and the weather was still terrible. From the window of her penthouse apartment, Charlotte Villiers looked down on the traffic of night-time London: the shuttling trains, the people on the streets and in the brightly lit restaurants and theatres and cinemas, the pilot lights of the boats on the Thames, the ever-shifting patterns of the airship lights high above the floodlit angels and gods of London’s towers. Nothing was different, but everything was changed. The worlds would never be the same again. Earth 4 had fought the Jiju. The Thryn Sentiency had opened jump gates into the cityships. A million Madam Moons had battled Sunlord warriors. Charlotte Villiers could not begin to imagine the carnage. E3’s radio and television were filled with speculation about why the Jiju cityships had disappeared. Charlotte Villiers knew, and now so did the Order. Soon the Praesidium would know too.
The clock on the sideboard chimed eleven.
It was almost time.
Charlotte Villiers’s apartment was twelve spacious rooms in a residential block on the Southwark Shore. Double doors, tall windows, high ceilings, filled with light and air. One room, next to the second guest bedroom, was kept shuttered and sealed. No one but Charlotte Villiers was permitted to enter it. Not the cleaner, not even Lewis. Charlotte Villiers took a key from her bag and opened the door. The room was not large, little more than a box room. Most of its space was filled with a metal ring. Three mahogany steps led up to the ring. Before it stood a console, beautifully crafted from the same dark mahogany. It was inlaid with a brass panel and an ivory keypad. Charlotte Villiers took out a handkerchief and wiped dust from the controls. Her gloved fingers pressed out a sequence of keystrokes. And the metal ring filled with blinding light. Charlotte Villiers slipped on a pair of dark glasses. More keys. The light cleared to open a window on to an elegant drawing room, heavily furnished and draped, lamp-lit and warm.
Charlotte Villiers walked up the
steps into the living room. The Heisenberg Gate closed behind her.
She stepped down from the gate and looked around her. The warmth of a coal fire. Light glinting from cut-glass decanters. Ancestors glowering in smoke-darkened portraits. Tree branches thrashing in winter wind beyond stained-glass windows. Perfumes of beeswax, old wood, wood smoke and books.
A butler in striped trousers and a frock coat peered into the living room, saw Charlotte Villiers and entered formally.
‘I thought I saw the light. Welcome home, Madam Villiers. It’s been too long.’
‘Thank you, Baines. It certainly has.’
‘I trust your business was successful.’
‘If you count fighting off an invasion of the Ten Worlds by intelligent dinosaurs a success, then, yes.’
‘Sounds frightful, madam. Thank the Dear nothing like that ever troubles us here. Ours is a quiet plane.’
‘Long may it continue, Baines.’
The grandfather clock struck the quarter bell. Charlotte Villiers slipped her dark glasses into her purse.
‘Have to hurry, Baines.’
‘I’ll have tea ready for your return.’
‘Whatever would I do without you, Baines? I do have the most marvellous hot chocolate recipe. I must give it to you.’
*
Eight minutes. Charlotte Villiers opened the door to the servants’ stairs and went down the spiral to the old kitchens. Plenitude business had kept her away from the last two Manifestations and she hardly thought of the house in Cambridge as home any more. Home was her Southwark apartment, warm and comfortably furnished to her taste. Home was London. Home was Earth 3. This plane, this world on which she was born and from which she had ventured, taking her father’s theorems and making them real, she now thought of as Earth 3a.
The laboratory occupied the old kitchen, butler’s pantry and wine cellars. Lights flickered: the Manifestation was building, drawing power into the rift between universes. Charlotte Villiers knew that her neighbours in this leafy academic suburb had complained repeatedly about the intermittent electrical supply and wondered why it always failed at twenty-three minutes past eleven at night, every six weeks two days.
Baines kept the equipment scrupulously clean but never touched the big, velvet-draped object in the centre of the floor. Charlotte Villiers whipped off the covering cloth. The portal was an empty frame, two uprights, two cross pieces, tangled with cables and power conduits. A doorway to nowhere. A doorway to everywhere. Comptator screens blinked behind magnifier lenses and went dark. Around the house light bulbs would be dimming in the chandeliers. Old dusty candles, dripping and black-wicked, stood in heavy brass holders on the desk. Charlotte Villiers lit them one by one. She could sense the gathering energies in the air. Dust rose into the air. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stir.
‘Make it work,’ had been her father’s last words to her, as he lay dying in the gloomy four-poster bed upstairs. ‘All I’ve done is glimpsed. Shadows of shadows. Glimpses! You must go. Go and see.’
I’ve done more than just seen and gone, Daddy, Charlotte Villiers thought. I’ve seen wonders. I’ve seen terrors. I’ve seen worlds beyond imagining and power beyond believing. I’ve seen all power. Ultimate power. I’ve seen the power hidden inside those equations that allowed you to open up your magic lantern and show me those faint, haunted images of life on another Earth, I’ve seen the Pleroma.
One minute.
Candles were the only light now. Their flames were drawn towards the gateway, which shone a ghostly blue.
‘Oh my love,’ Charlotte Villiers whispered. ‘I’ve been away so long. Forgive me.’
The clocks all stood at twenty-three minutes past eleven.
Charlotte Villiers put on her dark glasses.
And the gateway blazed with boiling blue light.
Charlotte Villiers came closer to the gate until her face was centimetres from the plane of warped blue. Blue lit her face. The blue lightning of the place between the planes crackled in the lenses of her glasses. A wind from beyond the universe streamed her hair back from her face.
The Rift. A hole torn between worlds, between all worlds. A wound in reality where all the planes touched and bled into each other. And down there, in there, at the heart of the Rift, the Pleroma, the heart from which all reality flowed. And in there, in the heart of the heart of everything, Langdon Hayne.
Charlotte Villiers remembered the night they had opened the gate. Her father’s life work, left incomplete by the cancer that had eaten his bones and dreams, made real. Years of study, research, dedication, work work work; she the finest mathematician her college had produced in a century, he the engineer who could turn those ideas into metal and electricity and fundamental physical forces. One flick of the switch would open the gateway to that other Earth her father had shown her on his Quantic Lantern, a world so very like this one that it took long and careful study of the recorded images to see that they were different. One flick of the switch and that world was a single step away through the Villiers Gate.
She remembered the excitement, the trembling rush as they looked at the switch and asked each other, Shall we, shall we? And then decided to do it together, two hands on the lever. But they could not go through the gate together. Someone had to operate the controls.
You go, she had said.
No, you go, he insisted. It’s your idea.
They had tossed a coin. Leave it to indeterminacy. He had stepped into the rippling light.
The clocks had all stood at twenty-three minutes past eleven.
‘Langdon?’
And he was there, a face buried in the folds of endless blue, like a man coming up from deep water or a child wrapped in warm blankets on a cold night. Colder than any night out there, trapped between worlds. So close she could touch him; faces millimetres apart. But she never could touch him. To cross the threshold would be to fall under the pull of the Rift, to be scattered among the Panoply of worlds, without even the tiny comfort of this one moment, every few weeks, at the precise time Langdon Hayne had stepped into the open gate. And Langdon Hayne had fused with the Pleroma, the quantum reality that was the fundamental structure of the multiverse. Nowhere and everywhere.
Her fingers hovered over his face.
‘My love,’ she said. He smiled. He could not have heard her, but he could read her lips, her eyes. His lips formed words: I love you too. And then the blue light folded over him and whirled him away and he was gone, whirled off to another random universe, a ghost gibbering in the walls of the world.
‘I will bring you back, my love,’ Charlotte Villiers said. She knew her mistake now, and how to make it right. Her father’s calculations had been out by whole orders of magnitude. The worlds were brought into contact not by force ripping apart the fabric of reality, but by the subtle matching of energies, like musical instruments coming into tune with each other. The first gate had punched a hole clear into the Pleroma itself. But the Pleroma, the very stuff of reality, could be manipulated. Everything was mathematics ultimately. The Infundibulum was a tool for tuning the multiverse itself. Everett Singh and his father had not realised the implications of their machine: jumping from any point in any universe to any other was only possible because the Infundibulum could access the Pleroma. A tool that could chisel Langdon Hayne free from the Pleroma was a tool for the control of reality itself.
The candles gusted and blew out in the wind from beyond as the gateway blinked out and closed. The lights flickered and came back on, the laboratory hummed to the sound of comptators rebooting.
Twenty-five minutes past eleven.
Charlotte Villiers drew the heavy velvet covering back over the gateway.
Work first. The Plenitude had come close to disaster. In the disaster was her opportunity. The Order was unified and strong. There had never been a better time to make a bid for power. Ibrim Hoj Kerrim knew too much. She would neutralise him, in time. And Everett Singh was now a hunted enemy across all the
known Worlds. There was much to do, opportunities to be taken quickly. She would return to Earth 3 this night. After Baines’s tea. Next time she would have him prepare the Blond Bear Cafe’s hot-chocolate recipe. The Earth 7 cuisine was quite exceptional.
‘I will bring you back,’ Charlotte Villiers said to the rectangle of rich fabric. ‘I promise.’
Light!
Light: all around him, enfolding him, shining through him so hard and so long he could feel it bleaching the organs inside his body. Embedded in light. Being light.
The primal light, the light that shines between universes. How long had he been here? Meaningless question. There was no time here. No space. He was everywhere, he was nowhere; he was everything, he was nothing.
And then the light splintered, like a window in a bomb blast, and darkness burst through. He fell into darkness. And the darkness was good. It was great and soft and endless.
This is what death is like, he thought.
Is he alive?
So, not dead then.
Vital signs are all good, First Minister. Of course, there’s no guarantee there’s anything in there.
I can hear you! I’m trying to talk to you! I’m trying to speak, listen to me, listen to me, can you hear me?
How long was he in there?
Technically, in the Planck state neither time nor space exist. It’s not really a meaningful question.
For me, please, Professor. I’m not a scientist.
Nine days after solstice. We weren’t even sure what it was. Certainly not a human. All we had was a weak resonance. We locked on to it and abstracted the pattern. It took us until now to entangle it with our universe.
The pattern … And he comes from?
Another universe.
Another universe. How can I tell you the chill those words strike into me? Wait. I saw his lips move.
‘I can hear you.’
Nurse, bathe his eyes.
‘Who are you?’
Soft sweet wetness dabbing at his eyes, wiping away crusted scales and scabs.
I am First Minister Esva Dariensis of the United Isles. You are in a hospital.
