by Ian McDonald
“No I's not.”
Sen had wrapped herself in the quilts from her hammock. She looked very small and pale in the dim cabin lights. Her eyes were wide and scared. Sen's latty was the usual mess of dumped clothing, discarded equipment, ropes and lines and pieces of paper with ideas for tarot cards. She clutched the precious deck in a hand like a claw. Her beloved bare-chested rugby players looked down from the posters tacked to the walls. Everett smelled stale air, girl sweat, underwashed bed sheets, strange musks, and Sen scents.
“What is it?” She looked tiny in the faint glow of the nightlights. Everett wanted to hug her to him, but he knew she would have hated that. She was so fierce, so defiant, so independent.
“I had a dream, right? Meese dream.” Sen shivered. And not because of the winter cold stealing from Everness's huge empty spaces into the warm little latty. “I don't want to go back in there, no no. I don't want to go back to sleep, not ever again, no. Come with me, Everett Singh. Sit with me. Keep me from sleeping.” She swept her quilt around her like a monarch's robes. Everett ducked into his latty to gather quilts from his bed and a little paper bag of his latest batch of semolina halva. With his signature dish of hot chocolate with a hint of chili heat, it never failed to lift Captain Anastasia's mood. It might do the same with her adopted daughter.
Sen led him down to the cargo deck. Everett's breath steamed. Condensation dripped from every rail and upright. Sen turned the dial on her wrist control. The loading platform lurched, then descended smoothly. The cold almost took Everett's breath away. The night was absolute, pure dark without a single light. The sky was clear, and it seemed to Everett, riding the platform down, that he was surrounded by a halo of stars. Sen stopped the platform.
“Come on, Everett Singh.” She sat on the edge, her legs dangling into the dark. She pulled the quilts and sheets tight around her. “Does you have a place, Everett Singh?”
“What do you mean?”
Sen patted the deck beside her. Everett sat down. He gingerly extended his legs over the gulf. The stars were magnificent. Everett had never seen skies so dark, not even in the Punjab, when Tejendra had taken him to visit his extended family in India.
“A you place.”
“I do, but it's not on the ship. It's…” The word almost choked him. The shower, under the warm water, where all the best ideas and clearest thoughts came together; the quiet sunny corner of the garden, where he could sit all summer long in shorts and nothing else and drink in the heat; the desk by the window in his room, where he could look out over the street. Gone. Not just gone, taken away by someone who looked like him, talked like him, smelled like him, sounded like him, liked the things he liked, laughed at the things he laughed at, knew the things he knew. But who wasn't him.
“Home?”
“Yes.” He tried to keep his answer flat, unemotional, cool. But you can't lose your home, your family, your world to an evil double without emotion creeping into your voice and cracking it.
Sen swung her legs. “I loves it here. It's good to have nothing under you. Disconnected, like. Gravity free. I gets things clear up here. I heard them, Everett Singh. The people in the tower. I heard. They were right in my room, oh and they were calling my name and there was one voice, one among all them zillions on the tower, and when I heard it, I knew how they knew my name.”
“We're miles away, Sen. It's gone.”
Captain Anastasia had not ordered the impellers off Full Ahead until the black tower of faces was far below the horizon. Even then, she had driven the ship on over the empty land. They had only stopped because Mchynlyth had spotted a line of old wind turbines striding along a chalk ridgeline and had demanded that Captain Anastasia moor where he might steal some power. The land far below Everett's feet was what remained of the county of Oxfordshire.
“I'm in there, Everett. That's how it knew me. That's how it knew my name. I know it. Remember when you told me that there were many mes, out there in all them worlds. And I argued back and said that there's only one of me, I's unique. That's not true. I knows it. I heard her, Everett. She's in there with all the rest of them, and she can't get out, and coz she can't get out, she wants to die. But she can't die either.”
“It was a dream, Sen.”
“No it weren't. You saw those faces. You heard them. I heard her. She was there. She was me.” Sen swung her legs over the darkness. She chewed her lip. Everett slipped the bag of halva out from under his quilts and covers.
“Have some. I made it. Pistachio and cardamom. Your favorite.” He rattled the bag. The rustle of paper was the most ordinary, silly sound in all the universes. The madness and the darkness drew back a little. “Everett's halva…” He waggled the bag, trying to entice her. Sen took a piece but did not eat it.
“I heard more, Everett. I heard you.”
Then Everett felt the chill that was not night or winter, the chill of something terrible and monstrous and completely beyond his explanation.
“That's why they closed this world, ain't it?” Sen said. “Do you think there's anyone left at all? I's scared if we stay too long, we end up in that big black tower, me right next to me, screaming together.”
“Don't say that, Sen.”
“Why did you bring us here, Everett Singh?” The anger cracked in her voice like a whip. Everett knew he would never get used to how suddenly and sharply Sen's moods changed. “I hates this world and it scares me. Why are we here?”
“We won't stay here a second longer than we have to. That's a promise.”
“Whatever you's looking for, whatever you think you going to find here, it ain't here. There's nothing here.”
Sen was saying everything Everett feared.
“It is. It has to be.”
“Nothing ‘has to be,’ Everett Singh.” Sen took a bite from her cube of halva. She chewed a couple of times, pulled a face. “Don't taste right.”
“It's the same as I always make it.”
“Don't think so, Everett Singh. Tastes like an omi with stuff in his head made it. Like you mixed in all the things that scare you and make you uptight and make you feel like you can't do anything, and sad and dark. Things that don't taste good. Bitter things.” She lobbed the remains of the halva out into the night. “Sorry Everett.”
“He's with my family. He's with my mum and Victory-Rose.”
Sen said nothing. The condensation that had settled on the loading platform was beginning to freeze.
“He was me,” Everett said. “And they did something to him to make him my worst enemy. What did they tell him, how did they get him to have all that done to him? There's no world in the Plenitude where people are born like that. And my mum, and Victory-Rose, and all my relatives, and everyone at school, and all my friends, they think he's me. They think I came back. He just walks in and takes over my life. Every single bit of it. And he beat me.”
“Nah, you fooled him. That was a bona trick. I didn't know you could do that, open up a gate thingy right onto the bridge. Fantabulosa.”
“He beat me, Sen. I went to get my mum and my sister. He knew I was coming. How did he know? Because he's me. He'd do exactly the same thing. I went to rescue them and I failed. And because of that, they're worse off now. They'll be expecting me to try again. They won't let them out of their sight. And you know? He wasn't even half trying. He has enough firepower to blast Stokie to slag. He could have cut us to pieces. He gave us a kicking and he wasn't even trying.”
Everett felt Sen's weight and warmth against him. Her hair tickled his face.
“I never thought about that. Not really. What it's like to be you. Planesrunner, all that. You hear it and you go, wow, that's dead exciting and all, but, well…I still has all this. The ship, Ma, the omis. Family.”
“I'll get them back.” Everett's voice was fierce with determination. “All of them. Mum, Dad, everyone. You asked me why I brought us here? Because here's where it changes. Here's where we stop running. Enough running, enough being chased by navy airsh
ips and hovercraft and aeroplanes and by Charlotte Villiers and my evil assassin twin. Here's where we stop, and we find what I know is here, and when we find that, we don't run away any more. We take it to them. We fight back.”
“Any more of them halva things, Everett Singh?” Sen asked. Everett presented the bag. Sen took one, bit into it. She nodded in approval.
“Maybe it was just bad in bits. This one tastes bona.” She stood up and pulled her quilts around her. “I'd get up if I's you, Everett Singh. Don't want to lose your dally legs.” Everett swung his legs up as the hatch began to close. It sealed out the stars and the night and the cold with a solid clunk.
“You coming Sen?” he called from the spiral staircase back up to the accommodation deck.
“I's going to stay here a bit, Everett Singh,” Sen called up.
“It was only a dream,” Everett said.
“No it weren't. I don't want to dream it again. Sometimes, I sleeps down here, right at the bottom of the ship, with the air beneath me. Sometimes, if it's like Amexica, you wakes up with the hull plate warm under your cheek and you can smell all the green growing things and the ocean in the air. Stay with me, Everett Singh.”
“What?”
“It's all right, I's not going to charver you nor nothing. Just sleep. Don't want to go back to that latty, not tonight. Don't want to be on my own.” She curled up on the nanocarbon hull like a cat in winter curled up on itself. “I's cold, Everett Singh.”
Everett gingerly settled down beside Sen, pulling his quilts tight around him. Sen was right; two were warmer and cozier than one. He curled up around her, all the while wondering if this was right, if this was wrong, and what made right or wrong in the world of Everness, an Airish airship lost on a hostile alien Earth. Right here, right now was all the world there was, and its rules were in front of him. He folded an arm over Sen, bundled up in night things.
“Everett Singh?”
“What?” He pulled back his arm as if a snake had lunged at it.
“When you knocked me door.”
“Yes.”
“When you heard…”
“Yes, you—”
“Shut up. Listen, Everett Singh, you never hears that again. Never ever never.”
Everett woke stiff and sore on the hard cargo deck. For one moment he couldn't think where he was. For the second moment, he couldn't remember how he had got there. Memories raced back. Sen, her feet dangling over empty space, lobbing halva out into the darkness. Sen's cry in the night. Sen warm against him, like a kitten curled up in the corner of a sofa. Sen was gone, and he was very cold. Everett got to his feet. Every bone creaked. He had a headache. He never had a headache. He tried to knuckle bad sleep from his eyes and saw Mchynlyth, watching him with amusement over the top of his mug of tea. He poured a second mug and nodded for Everett to join him.
“How long have you been here?” The tea was very strong and very hot. Everett cupped his hands around the mug—Tottenham Trojans—and let the warmth seep into his joints.
“Long enough,” Mchynlyth said.
“She had a bad dream,” Everett said. “She needed someone to be with her. She didn't want to go back to her latty.”
“Oh, I dinnae doubt it for a moment. She's gets her own way a little too much, that polone, and because we're crew, not family, she thinks she's a lot more grown-up than she is. She thinks she don't need anyone to look after her, but she does. We all do. Sabi, Mr. Singh?” Mchynlyth slid a wrench across the workbench to Everett, huddled in his quilt and blankets. “When you've that down ye, you can give me a wee hand getting that big mill working so we can grind out some electricity. Make yourself useful.”
But Everett had been too thick with drowsiness to be anything other than useless. The day was bright, but he was dumb; the sky was clear, but his head was not; the cold was sharp, but he was dull. Then he had dropped the wrench for the third time. When he went down the tall white shaft of the wind turbine, Mchynlyth shouted down at him.
“And where do you think you're going wee lad? Send the wrench up on the line, you keep yer lally tappers firmly planted on terra firma. You're as much use to me today as willets on a boar.”
A new figure was descending from Everness's open charging hatch, riding the line down, coattails fluttering and the slipstream tugging at the feather in his hat: Miles O’Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey.
“You can hunt up something decent for dinner,” Mchynlyth shouted. “I'm getting a wee bit weary of saag channa, nae offense.”
Sharkey touched ground lightly, snapped off his drop harness, whipped a shotgun out of the coattails, and threw it to Everett. “Ever handled one of these before?”
Everett caught the gun cleanly—damn sure he wouldn't let Sharkey make him look like a handless middle-class idiot. He broke it, like he'd seen Vinnie Jones do in that old gangster movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and hung it over the crook of his arm. Sharkey touched the brim of his hat.
“You're mighty spry around the kitchen, sir. ‘And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers,’ in the words of the Dear. But in my philosophy you ain't no real cook until you've cooked what you've killed yourself. Man cooking. Let's go hunting.”
The wind turbines stood along a ridgeline. The short turf of the ridge was pockmarked white with the chalky debris from rabbit holes. Sheep, wild and scraggy, fled from Sharkey's approach. The wind that the turbines had been designed to catch was finally blowing the fog from Everett's head. The day was gloriously clear, and he could see for miles and miles. The land fell off the long ridge into scrubby valleys. To the south were further parallel ridges; to the north was open, flat farmland—or what had once been farmland. The land carried the patterns of fields, but hedgerows had grown into tangles of thorn and beech and the open spaces were rank with winter-brown weeds and scrubby growth. Roofs and chimneystacks rose from overgrown gardens. Some roofs had collapsed altogether, leaving the timber joists exposed to the air like the broken ribs of a decaying animal. Everett saw light glint from the glass of distant windows. There was not a sound. No rumble of traffic from the highway Everett could see cutting through the chalk downs. No chug of tractors or SUVs. Not even the bellowing of cows in the overgrown fields. No sound but the whistle of wind in the turbine blades high over Everett's head and the croak of rooks.
“Rabbit,” Everett called. Twenty yards away, a lookout for a warren dug under the concrete footing of a wind turbine twitched its nose.
“I've a hankering for something a little more toothsome,” Sharkey said. “This way.” He turned off the ridge and followed a sheep path down into a narrow valley. Within twenty paces, scrub elder and sycamore saplings had closed overhead. The branches were bare and stark against the clear January sky. Sharkey held up a hand. Everett stopped dead. Sharkey motioned for Everett to stay where he was. He had seen something through the tangled branches. Everett could see nothing. Sharkey raised his shotgun and walked forward. Something exploded out of the undergrowth in front of him. Everett saw a dark object flash into the air and whirl over his head. Then he heard Sharkey's gun fire twice and saw the thing tumble from the air in a shower of feathers. Sharkey grinned. Smoke still leaked from both gun barrels.
“Now that's fine manjarry,” Sharkey said. “Bring her back, Mr. Singh.”
Everett found the bird in a bracken brake where the dense valley vegetation gave way to the poor grazing of the water-starved ridge top. It was a cock pheasant, its breast shattered with lead shot, limp and dead but still warm, still oozing blood. Sharkey inspected the bird, looked pleased, and tucked it into a pocket of his great coat.
“My daddy had this theory…more a philosophy, a rule of living, really. When we were growing up, we never ate fur, fowl, or fish he hadn't killed; he either butchered it or hunted it. And when we got bigger, that we'd killed ourselves. I reckon each of us Lafayette Sharkeys was born with a fishing rod in his hand, and when we got old enough to handle a piece without blow
ing our own feet off, we'd hunt most days. Must have killed and cooked near every darn thing flies or crawls or swims. You see, my daddy believed that if you eat meat, which is a critter's life, then you must be prepared to take that life yourself. To buy a piece of meat from the store, that wasn't just a dishonor to the dumb beast whose life was given for you, it was an act of cowardice.”
“I used to cook with my dad,” Everett said.
“Every man should know how to feed himself, or a passel of coves.”
“I've cooked mussels.” Chop the shallot fine and sauté them in the butter, add garlic and a glass of wine and, while it's still steaming, throw in the mussels, alive alive-o. When all the shells are open, they're done.
Sharkey smiled.
“Then you understand the principle.”
“But I also think that if you do kill something, then you must eat it. It's just as big a dishonor to kill for the sake of killing.”
“There's plenty of critters kill for the sake of killing,” Sharkey said. He reloaded his shotgun.
The sun rose toward its full winter height and Sharkey and Everett worked down the valley into the flat lands beneath. Three times Sharkey stopped and lifted his hand when he sensed some movement, some presence, some thing in the scrub that Everett could not. He lifted his gun but did not fire again.
“Sharkey, back in your world, when we were trying to make the run to Germany, would you really have handed me over to the sharpies?”
“Yes, I would have, Mr. Singh. And I believe I owe you an explanation for my action. I am not a good man. Never have been, never will be, despite the word of the Dear on my lips and in my heart. I've done bad things, Mr. Singh. Shameful things, terrible things. Miles O’Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey, weighmaster, soldier of fortune, adventurer, gentleman. I've been all those things, and in every one of them I was sinful and faithless. I was a damned soul, cursed to wander the Earth without hope or home. ‘Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.’”
