by Ian McDonald
“What is that?” Everett asked.
“That's the Oxford defense field,” the Lieutenant said. “So far the Nahn haven't found a way around it. I don't think they're even trying anymore. It's been over a year since the last massed assault.”
“Nahn. I heard you say that word before.”
“You did, son. And you'll hear it a lot more.” Lieutenant Kastinidis touched a communications panel on the chest plate of her armor. “Unit 27 to Oxford defense grid. We're on approach. You should have us on visuals.” A pause. “Yes, it's an airship.”
Now Everett could see the city behind the shivering walls, the low light catching the college towers, the chapel spires, the cloisters and quadrangles and gardens, the parks and the glitter of the two rivers running toward their meeting.
“Ahead slow,” Captain Anastasia said, as if to remind herself that she could still give orders. Sen pulled back on the throttles. Everness drifted slowly over suburbs and streets as empty and decaying as any in London. The airship was coming in from the southeast, over the Thames and the water meadows around Christchurch College. Ahead, the defense grid shivered like oil on water. Outside were buildings like snapped, rotted teeth, pieces of skull, and dead bones. Inside was movement, life: wind turbines standing taller than the trees across Christchurch meadow, with cows grazing at the rushy thin winter grass around their foundations; vehicles and pedestrians and even some bicycles; early lights in windows. And along the line where the defense field touched the ground, Everett saw a ring of black. Glossy, liquid black, frozen into drips and splashes. It was the same black liquid that Everett had seen earlier in the day, splattered all over the driveway of a middle-class country retreat.
“It's an EM field,” he said.
“Explain, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said. Everness drew closer to the flickering lightning.
“An electromagnetic field. It scrambles compu…comptator circuitry. It'll fry—” Everett almost bit his tongue.
“Fry what, son?” Lieutenant Kastinidis said. She nodded. One soldier moved between Everett and Dr. Quantum. The other deftly unplugged the Infundibulum.
“No!” Everett yelled. The soldier restrained him. Sharkey was out of his seat. Click click click. Weapons drawn. Lieutenant Kastinidis turned Dr. Quantum over in her hands. She spoke into the back of her hand. “We're coming in, drop the field.”
The wall of soft lighting flickered and went out. Looking down, Everett could see more soldiers in power armor spilling out of troop carriers to take up positions along the inside of the black zone. Everness slid slowly over the colleges of Oxford. The city had always seemed to Everett like the board for some complex intellectual game, the squares and cloisters and walls of the colleges. The architecture was similar to the Oxford of Everett's world—the spires a little taller, the quadrangles a bit bigger, the cloisters somewhat darker—but the arrangement was different. There were colleges here unknown in Everett's world. Sen maneuvered Everness in over the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and Broad Street, descending over peaceful college gardens to the designated mooring at Museum Road.
“Clear,” Sharkey said. Lieutenant Kastinidis touched the back of her hand. Behind the ship, the defense grid sprang to life again, a ghostly wall cutting across the pastures and bare winter trees of the college meadows.
Everett went to Sharkey's rearview monitor and pulled it down on its swivel arm. He dialed up the magnification as far as it would go, zooming in on the blackness splashed up like dark winter slush against the shimmering defense grid. The splatter zone; the hellwolf blown into black ooze by what must have been a focused version of this defense field; the black, seething, boiling mass crawling across the docks and wharves of Docklands, drawn by an evil tide toward that terrible dark tower. The patterns came together in his mind.
“Nahn,” he whispered. “Of course. Nanotechnology.”
The light was almost gone now. Everness's navigation lights flashed beyond the chapel roof, moored over Museum Green. Those lights flickered against the aurora glow of the defense field. The darkening sky behind the skyline of towers and spires and college rooftops looked as if it burned with cold fire. Even in this empty, dark-haunted world, the university city was beautiful, like a last flame in a storm or a lone voice singing in darkness. Cambridge was the best science university, but Tejendra had been sent to Oxford. He had been the pride of the family. Look, our son, our boy at the greatest university! A Singh! A Bathwala boy! An Oxford physicist! It did not matter that they didn't understand what Tejendra did there; it was where he did it. Even if his path in time led away from that city, to London and a different university, Oxford was a thing about which Bebe Ajeet and her sisters could boast. If the family was disappointed that Tejendra had not made it to be a fellow there, the edge had been taken off of that disappointment by the certain expectation that Everett would. Two Singhs at Oxford! That would ring around the rafters of the Tottenham Punjabi Community Association until the end of time.
And here he was, the second Singh. In a medieval room, in a college, looking out over a quadrangle. But this quadrangle, this college were not of Tejendra's Oxford, and the door and windows of this medieval room were locked. Everett went to the door. He rattled it. Ancient oak, firmly bolted on the outside. “We're going to have to hold you until the prefect has a chance to speak with you,” Lieutenant Kastinidis had said. The old college room was comfortable, if a bit studenty. Comfortable and very secure. Everett would have kicked the door, but five-hundred-year-old timber would have done more damage to him than he could have done to it.
A noise, behind him. A tap on window glass. He whirled. Sen hung upside down outside his window, framed by the twin arches. Her legs were twined around a drop line. Everett mimed puzzlement—how did you get out?—then helplessness—can't you see it's locked? Sen grinned upside down, fished inside the flap of her jacket and pulled out a thin, flat, finger-length paddle. She slipped it through the wooden casement, just above the lock. Everett knew what to do. He went to the window and carefully slid the paddle back to the outside. The monofilament line was almost invisible in the medieval gloom. One mistake could cost fingers. Sen took the handle, locked it to the other, and tugged sharply. The monofilament sheared clean through the metal lock. Everett swung the casement open. Sen made an elegant, slow somersault off her drop line and landed upright on her feet.
“Fantabulosa or what, Everett Singh?”
“Did you steal Mchynlyth's lock-pick?”
“Steal?” Sen looked offended. “Airish never steals off each other. T’ain't so. Borrowed. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
“That's Marx,” Everett said.
“No, Mchynlyth's,” Sen insisted, mishearing. “Aincha glad I did though?” She put a foot up on the windowsill. “Come on then, Everett Singh.” She slipped a hand into the drop-line wrist loop.
“Where?”
“Up and out. I saw the sharpies taking Ma and Sharkey across the gardens. Come on before they see us.” She touched her wrist control and shot upward. Everett barely had time to slip his hand into the foot loop and step off the window ledge before the winch whisked him up two floors to the roof. Sen had fixed the line around one of the medieval stone chimneys and clipped a pulley to the end of an iron lamp bracket. How had she made it up here in the first place? The uppermost line of windows was a good four meters below him, and there was a tricky roof overhang. Sen saw Everett checking out the drop and the precarious state of the guttering as she stowed the gear in her shush-bag.
“Climbed it,” she said proudly. “You're pretty fit, but you couldn't do it. Come on, Everett Singh.”
She was off, running so light and lithe that she hardly seemed to touch the roof stones at all. The shivering glow of the defense field made her look like a silver ghost, a sky fairy. Everett's footing was less sure. The flickering light made the steeply pitched roof treacherous. Everett was sure he felt the slate move under his foot. He froze. Sen was a
whole roof ahead of him by now. She stopped to look back at him, one foot on the sloping roof, the other on the ridge of a dormer window, tapping impatiently. Come on, Everett Singh. Trust your body. Goalkeeper instincts. It's just a different way of using them. Everett took a deep breath. Don't look down, that was always Sen's advice. He looked ahead at Sen, hands on her hips. And he ran. His body felt out the different slopes and structures and slipperinesses of the roofs. Just like a real-life version of the Assassin's Creed video game. Sen grinned, then turned and ran, and Everett ran after her. She stopped where a nineteenth-century tower butted up against an eighteenth-century roof.
“I saw them take her in here.” Sen slid down the side of a dormer window, grabbed the little ornament on the peak, and leaned out as far as she could to scan the front of the tower. “There's a balcony down there. I think I can make it from here. By the way, don't try and do this, Everett Singh.” Before Everett could snark a reply, Sen was halfway up the tower, quick as a pale spider. Victorian Gothic architecture was rich in hand- and toeholds, but Everett's heart kicked in dread as Sen hauled herself up by her fingertips onto a ledge so narrow that only her toes rested on it.
“Why are you going up?” Everett whispered to himself as Sen pulled herself over the stone balustrade that ran around the top of the tower. She grinned, waved, struck a triumphant pose. Then he saw her strategy. Sen unpacked the drop line, looped it around the balustrade, and locked it. She slipped foot and wrist into the loops and rode the line down the face of the tower to land lightly on the little stone balcony. “And what about…” Everett whispered. Sen had done all this just for him. She connected the end of the drop line with her shush-bag, swung it a couple of times to give it momentum, and lobbed the bag to Everett. He caught it, untied the drop line, slipped his hand into the line's wrist loop and one boot into the foot loop, and cast off. The corner of the tower loomed with terrifying speed. Everett grazed past it, swung over the crouching Sen, and pendulumed back and forth while she worked the wrist control with delicate precision to drop him on to the stonework beside her.
“There must be an easier way of doing this,” Everett said.
“Maybe, but it wouldn't be as much fun. Look.” Window and balcony were a Gothic ornament, built purely for decoration. The window was high in the upper level of a great double-height hall, all roof timbers and coats of arms and portraits of former students gone on to greatness: the Victorian notion of what the Middle Ages looked like. Through the glass Everett could see a table set along a raised platform and figures sitting in chairs behind it. In front of the table, down on the floor, were two seats. There was no mistaking the close crop of Captain Anastasia's dark head, and that hat, set on a side table, could only belong to Miles O'Rahilly Lafayette Sharkey. “Mind your fingers,” Sen said. She slipped Mchynlyth's lock cutter from inside her jacket and slid one end through the gap between the window frames.
“How did you get all this stuff off the ship?” Everett asked. Lieutenant Kastinidis had been as thorough with the rest of Everness's crew as she had been with strip-searching him and Sharkey. Down to the skin, and head-to-toe body scan, close and very personal. Everett had an idea now of what they were looking for.
“Airish got ways of hiding stuff sharpies know nanti about,” Sen said, pulling back on the monofilament. The metal parted with a musical clink. “Nor ground-pounders neither—no offense, Everett Singh.”
They gingerly opened the window. Inside was a narrow wooden gallery that seemed to have been built there for no other purpose than to make the place look the maximum in mock medieval. The gallery floor was thick with dust and the sun-dried corpses of dead flies—no one had been up here to clean for a very, very long time. Everett and Sen crept forward and crouched down behind the wooden railing. On the far left was Lieutenant Kastinidis, no longer armored but still looking the soldier in a close-fitting one-piece suit. Combat camouflage patterns flowed across it like water. The effect made her look as if she were constantly fading in to and out of reality. They had phased in from invisibility at the farmhouse, Everett remembered. Light glinted from circuitry at hand and ankle, neck and chest. This was what they wore under their bronze battle armor, Everett thought.
Beside Lieutenant Kastinidis was an axe-faced man with thinning hair and the most skeletal hands Everett had ever seen. He too wore military dress: a sharply tailored uniform, nipped at the waist, and pants neatly pleated, in a style that to Everett looked old-fashioned and at the same time futuristic and alien. A beret was tucked under his shoulder strap. A badge on the beret and flashes on his chest displayed three stars with a crown above them. Everett was no expert on military signs of rank, but from the crown and the upright way the man sat at the table and folded his bony hands, Everett guessed he was Lieutenant Kastinidis's commanding officer. At his side was a middle-aged woman. She wore silk robes with high collars, wide sleeves, and broad sashes. She was dressed like some fantasy empress, but she looked weary, endlessly weary. All attention was turned to her. Of the fourth person at the high table, Everett could only see a pair of hands. Dark hands. Everett moved to get a better look.
“Oh my God,” he breathed.
Tejendra.
“Six billion people, Captain Sixsmyth.” The robed woman's voice was soft and husky in the spaces of the great hall. Her words were clear and terrible. “Eighty percent of humanity is…no, not dead. It's much worse than that. Transformed. ‘More than human,’ the Nahn says—as much as it has ever said anything to us. All those people changed. Lost to us. We were bright and we were brilliant, Captain Sixsmyth. We shone. Our culture, our technology, our achievements, they were the envy of the Nine Worlds, even Earth 4—because they were our own achievements. Perhaps we were arrogant. Perhaps we were dazzled by what our Heisenberg Gates showed us of how different those other worlds could be. Perhaps it was because we were Earth 1, the first world to develop the Heisenberg jump—in this very college, Captain Sixsmyth. And we were the founders of the Plenitude of Known Worlds. We had to lead by example. Or perhaps we saw how huge the Panoply was—all those billions of other Earths—and knew we could never explore them all. There would always be another Earth beyond, and another, and another. For whatever reason, we turned away from the unimaginably vast to focus instead on the very small. It would be the final industrial revolution, the one that would give us command of all matter.”
“Nanotechnology,” Everett breathed in Sen's ear. They crouched close to the wooden railing at the edge of the tiny balcony, up in the shadows. “It's engineering things at the smallest scale, engines made of single atoms, smart molecules, machines smaller even than the tiniest virus.”
“Everett.”
“There's an idea in nanotechnology—a thing called a replicator. It's a kind of nanosized Von Neumann machine—sorry, you don't know what that is. Anyway, a replicator is a nanomachine that builds a copy of itself, and those copies build copies, and all those copies build copies. Pretty soon, you've got billions and trillions of copies, doubling every few seconds. It's slow at first, but it gets faster and faster. The replicators can eventually eat up an entire planet. Exponential growth. Powers of two are pretty scary math in the real world—”
“Everett, shut up. I wants to hear the dona.”
“We developed a prototype nanotechnology replicator,” Empress Woman said. “We modeled it on the most successful micro-scale replicator we'd yet discovered, a virus. You don't need to know the details. What you need to know is that it was brilliant. It was more successful than we ever dreamed, but we lost control of it. It turned on us. No, that's wrong. That's giving it some kind of will, some evil intelligence. It's only purpose is to duplicate itself and to find material to convert into more replicators. And because we had designed it from a virus, an organic thing, it looked for organic matter to feed from. Us, Captain Sixsmyth. We lost six billion humans. You've seen the dark spire on Canary Wharf. That is what remains of the population of London. Paris, New York, Beijing, Lagos, Cairo: all the
same, all over the world.”
“I've seen it,” Captain Anastasia said.
Lieutenant Kastinidis spoke suddenly, her voice full of passion.
“You haven't seen it. Not really seen it. Did you look at the faces? Really look at the faces? Everyone has someone in there. Most of the people we knew and cared about are in there. I was a kid when the Nahn came, fourteen years old. My mum, my dad, my big sister, all my family—everyone I knew and cared about and loved—they're all in there. You've seen nothing. Nothing.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the thin officer said. Captain Skinny, Everett thought. He had always made up his own names for people. “We were hit hard. We were pushed to the edge. We looked extinction in the face. But we're fighting, Captain Sixsmyth. We're fighting an enemy too small to see. We're fighting an enemy that blows on the wind like dust. We're fighting an enemy that can infect a living body and eat it from the inside out. We're fighting an enemy that can take any shape it wants. We've developed new technologies, new weapons, new defenses. It's not certain we'll win yet. There are so few of us left. We're scattered, divided, pushed to the edges, to the islands and the remote places we can defend. Oxford is our advance base, our invasion headquarters. It's where we come close to the enemy, where we watch what it's doing, what it's changing into, where we try to guess its plans and strategies.”
“Of course,” Everett whispered up on the gallery. “All those people—it absorbed all their memories, all their experiences. When the complexity gets to a certain level, bang! It wakes up.”
“Is you getting off on this, chicken?” Sen said.
“We have communicated with the Nahn once,” the woman said. “Or, rather, the Nahn communicated with us once, only once, a message broadcast to every surviving human outpost. ‘It is the Nahn. It is the future of intelligence on this planet. It is what comes after humanity. Humanity's time is over. You are to consider yourselves the last generation of a dying species. The age of the Nahn has come and it will last forever. You are to accept this and be joyful for the part you have played in allowing the Nahn to come into being. Its purpose is to spread itself throughout this and every other universe, incorporating all life to make itself the ultimate intelligence.’ Ninety words. Twenty seconds. Nothing since. Only silence…and the Nahn slowly assimilating all biological life. What did you hear about us, Captain Sixsmyth? What legends do you tell about us on your world? Environmental ravagement, technological meltdown, machine uprising, plagues of zombies?”
