by Ian McDonald
“It was the Nahn. It didn't need pigeons or rats anymore. It had learned everything it needed from them and had discarded them. They were just fuel.”
“We saw flying things around the tower,” Everett said. “That's when we pulled out.”
“It was the last thing anyone saw,” Dr. Singh said. “Black flapping wings coming out of the sky. Attacking anything that moved. Falling like black snow, the soldier said. They saw the Nahn fall on people and take them. The eyes are the last to go, human eyes in the blackness. They had early EMP guns and were able to clear the lift zone for the evac. They just barely got out. Laura didn't. She was two months pregnant.”
Beyond the diamond windowpanes, the snow was piling up, flake on flake.
“With me?” Everett said.
“Yes.”
Your fear was wrong, Sen, Everett thought. It's not you in that black tower. It's me. You never even came to be in this universe. Perhaps you are what you feel yourself to be: unique. The one and only Sen Sixsmyth. All alone in the multiverse.
Sen lay flat on the wooden balcony, pressed as close as she dared to the rail, focusing all her concentration, all her attention, on the voices in the chamber below. Perhaps they felt self-conscious of speaking loudly in such a large space. Perhaps it was the natural sense of conspiracy when two high-ranking officials talk in private. Whatever the reason, the Brigadier and the Agister dropped their voices and Sen had to strain to catch their words. Even her breathing sounded loud enough to cause her to drop a phrase or miss a syllable.
“You know who the boy is?” the Brigadier said. He stood on the other side of the table from the Agister of Caiaphas, hands on the oak surface, leaning forward in her face. His stance was close and intimidating. The elderly woman refused to be intimidated. The Brigadier did not wait for an answer. “Dr. Singh's son.”
“Ah!” Sen gasped, then clamped both hands to her mouth.
“Dr. Singh's son was never—”
“Not in this world.” The Brigadier touched his wrist. A window of light appeared on the tabletop. From her painful angle Sen could not see what was in it, but from the expression on the Master's face she could guess it was Lieutenant Kastinidis's security report on the crew.
“Bastarding sharpies,” she whispered, then bit down sharp on her knuckle. Hush up your screech, polone.
“He even looks like him,” the Brigadier said. “There can be no doubt. Everett Singh.”
“His alter found the Manifold,” the Agister said. “Does our Dr. Singh know?”
“No. I'm happy for it to remain that way for the time being.”
But he does but he does but he does! Sen shouted to herself.
“Master, does it not seem scarcely credible that the Manifold—the key to the multiverse we have been looking for for over forty years—arrives in our world in a solitary E3 tramp airship?”
“What is your argument, Brigadier?”
“This, Master. If it were a genuine, Plenitude-wide break-through, the sky would be full of E3 airships and E2 tilt jets and E4 Thryn spiderships and God knows what else. In other words, Master, there is one Manifold and only one.”
“The Infundibulum. He calls it the Infundibulum.”
“And this Infundibulum is tucked into the hand baggage of the fourteen-year-old son of Dr. Tejendra Singh's alter. The E3 captain obfuscates. You wouldn't give the most valuable and unique object in the Plenitude to a teenager unless you had a very good reason for doing it.”
“Dr. Singh's alter needed to keep it out of someone else's hands.”
“He is in trouble. He may even be dead. Mr. Singh Junior has the only example and he is on the run from the same forces that threatened his father.”
The Agister's face tightened.
“We may have been cut off from the Plenitude for the last fifteen years, but it is inconceivable that it could change beyond our recognition.”
“With respect, Agister, everything has changed beyond our recognition.”
“Explain please, Brigadier.”
“We are not cut off from the Plenitude, or even the Panoply. We have a way through the quarantine. We can open a Heisenberg Gate and it won't drop us into the heart of the sun. We can get out. This world is finished, Agister. We can't beat the Nahn. It's too big, too smart. There are too few of us, and we're too divided. Clinging to our islands, huddling in our little bubbles, puffing ourselves up on brave stories that we will launch some grand reconquest and take back our world. Won't happen. Can't happen. The Nahn hasn't finished us because it doesn't need to. It knows we are the final generation. We will dwindle and depart and humanity will be extinct in this universe. We erected the quarantine to protect the rest of the Plenitude from the Nahn. What we did was lock ourselves in the cage with the tiger. We have the key to the cage, Agister.”
“We cannot take that risk, Brigadier. If even one replicator—”
“You think I don't know the risk?” The Brigadier leaned into the Agister's face. She did not flinch even at breath-close quarters. “I live with the risk every day, every hour, every minute of my life. It's the thought I wake to. It's the thought in my head when I fall asleep—if I'm able to sleep. I see a squad come back from patrol, I wonder, when they open the helmet, will there only be black nanotech behind the eyes?”
“Oh the Dear,” Sen muttered. “It was true, it was true! The nano assassins behind the eyes! I always knew it!”
“I see a fox on the streets at night,” continued the Brigadier, “and I think, is that a Nahn infiltrator? Have they found a way through the defense grid? Is the invasion about to break over us like a black wave? I see a bird circling up there above the grid, I think, is that a Nahn spy? My every waking thought is about that single replicator blowing on the wind like dust, blowing out between the worlds. What keeps that thought in my head is something I see in my mind's eye. My eyes see eyes, Master. My wife's eyes. Have you ever seen anyone taken by the Nahn? Up close? So close you can see the look in their eyes as the blackness consumes them? The eyes are the last thing to hold any trace of humanity, any memory of what the victims had been, and the terrible knowledge of what they are about to become. My wife's eyes, Master.”
“We've all lost someone,” the Agister said darkly.
“Get the children to safety,” the Brigadier went on. “That was the last thing she said. She sacrificed herself so they could escape. Get the children to safety. And I never could, not on this world, not even here, behind the defense grid. One day, the Nahn will find a way through it, and it will be like London. It will be like Birmingham. It'll be like every city in the world all over again. We'll retreat to our islands and we'll imagine the children are safe there. And one day the Nahn will come for the islands, and they'll turn the sky dark, and the black snow will fall again. Get the children to safety, Agister. We can do that.”
“It would have to be just Oxford,” the Agister said.
“Just us. The defense shield makes us clean. We could get out and maintain nanosecurity at the same time.”
“We would have to go beyond the Plenitude,” the Agister mused. “If the Praesidium found what we had done, it would hunt us across all the universes. We would need a world of our own.”
“The 1969 Imperial University Survey found hundreds of worlds.”
“Thousands,” the Agister said. “But you could hardly call it a survey. The probe had less than five minutes on each world before making another random jump.”
“What?” Sen murmured. “Oh…I get it. Like the jumpguns. Must have been the same kind of thing. Random jumps.”
“We just need one world, Agister. The archive must still exist somewhere.”
“We lost almost all the Heisenberg Gate research when we abandoned Imperial.”
And you worked on it, Sen thought, pressing her face against the wooden banister to better see the look on the Agister's face. On that face Sen could read disappointment, anger, resignation, endless patience, and not a little hope under the most extreme
pressure. She tried to imagine what it must be like to live in a world where everything and everyone had been taken away and all that was left was ashes. “I know,” she whispered. She was back in the soft, padded bubble of the escape pod, swinging beneath the parachute as the storm winds buffeted it. Above, fixed in her sight at the center of the porthole and forever in her memory, the Fairchild hung burning in the sky, moment by moment turning to soot that was whipped away on the wind. Captain Anastasia's arms were around her. “Oh, I so know, dona.”
“If you can obtain the data from the survey, I will take steps to secure the device,” the Brigadier said. “Under its current ownership it must be considered a security risk of the highest level. If the Nahn were to get hold—”
“We confiscate the Infundibulum?”
“You meese…” Sen squeaked. She caught her breath. The Brigadier had left so long a pause before speaking again that Sen became sure she'd been overheard.
“Their options are limited. And they are civilians. Of course, we could eliminate the threat entirely.”
“I abhor the use of violence,” the Agister said.
“Violence is occasionally necessary,” the Brigadier said.
Sen had heard enough. Sharkey knew she was spying—he had the card she'd dropped to him—but she must get word to Captain Anastasia fast. Captain Annie would think of something. Sen crept back from the railing to the window and opened it stealthily. The end of the drop line lay coiled in the snow at the foot of the tower. Footprints, filling slowly with powder snow, led away from it. Sen could have climbed it easy, but why get your hands frozen on those cold stones? She hunted inside her jacket for a device and slipped it on to her wrist: a drop-line controller. A touch and the line uncurled from the drifting snow. “Never give them your only one,” she said to herself with fierce satisfaction. She slipped hand and foot into the loops. “I'll show you locked in a cage with a tiger.”
“Infundibulum,” Dr. Tejendra Singh said. He turned the word over in his mouth, tasting its syllables, feeling the weight of its rhythms on his tongue. In. Fun. Di. Bew. Lum. His dad had come to English as a second language and liked the sound of English words, how some words were so familiar you forgot how silly they sounded. Platoon. Cartoon. Dragoon. Anything with the oon sound in it made him smile. Oon. Oons and Ips. Snip. Parsnip. Ipswich. Some sounds were naturally funny. Everett saw that same small smile on Tejendra's face. “That's a good word. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. What is it, a seven-dimensional manifold?”
“I saw how a simple transform could decompose the dataset to a series of prime knots in seven…”
“You did this?”
Everett almost bit his tongue. This is not your dad. It is Tejendra Singh, but it is not your Tejendra Singh. Be careful what you tell him. You trust him because you trust his face, his voice, his smile at the sounds of English words. He probably supported Tottenham Hotspur as well, when there was a Tottenham Hotspur. But Spurs was taken, and his wife was taken, and his friends and colleagues were taken, and he has lived through things you can't even begin to imagine. And it can happen that all those Tejendra things, those Dad qualities, can lie so long in the shadow cast by the Nahn over every part of this world that everyone left here takes on some of that darkness themselves.
But I have to trust him, Everett thought. What I tell this Tejendra Singh can open the way to where the real Tejendra Singh might be. Everett caught that thought. The real Tejendra Singh. They're both real.
“Yes, I did,” Everett answered. At the kitchen table at my best friend's house, on a dark night before Christmas, drinking grapefruit juice from the fridge to keep myself awake. It felt like years ago. It felt like another person. This Everett Singh had spent all his life among the gas cells and walkways and latties and hidden cubbies and staircases of Everness.
“If you did this, then you would be—”
“The greatest physicist of my generation.”
Dr. Singh stared at Everett.
“Someone said that to me once. If you understand quantum physics, you would be the greatest physicist of this or any other generation.”
“Was it…” Dr. Singh hesitated over the word. “Me?”
“No,” Everett said. “It wasn't you.”
“It was what I was going to say,” Dr. Singh said. “I dedicated my life—my professional life—to looking for that: the manifold, your Infundibulum. I was a kid in Bathwala when they opened the first Heisenberg Gate—even there, we heard about it, even if no one knew what it meant. Other worlds, parallel universes? I was five years old, running around, and all I understood was that there was another me, in another Bathwala, running around, closer to me than my own skin, yet further away than the most distant star in the sky. And that made me feel strange and cold and yet wonderful all at the same time. I started to think about that Tejendra Singh, how like me he was, how different. If I was at school I would wonder what his school was like. If I was in bed, I would wonder where he was sleeping, what he was doing, what he was experiencing and feeling, and whether that was the same as what I was feeling. I set up a JusConnek site for him, like an imaginary friend.”
“JusConnek, is that like some kind of social networking site?” Everett interrupted.
“Yes, it was.”
“We have this thing called Facebook, but we didn't get it until 2004,” Everett said.
“Facebook,” Dr. Singh said, and Everett could see him tasting the word. “Horrible name.”
“It's only really in my dad's lifetime that we've had personal computers,” Everett continued.
“I think I see where our histories differ. Our first practical general-purpose computer was the Babbage-Bose Analytical Engine, in 1850.”
Everett's mind reeled.
“We never built the Analytical Engine,” he said. “It was only ever a design. Babbage couldn't get the government to fund it.” For a few months, Everett and Ryun had been part of an online steampunk ARG, stalking werewolves and battling vampires and foiling sinister cabals, and yes, flying improbable airships in an alternate Victorian London. Their crime-fighting efforts had been bolstered with the aid of Mr. Babbage, an artificial intelligence housed in a massive steam-powered Analytical Engine. It had been fun for a season, but Everett had dropped out when it turned out that the other ARGers were less interested in computer-science speculation and playing with history than they were in dressing up in goggles and stupidly small top hats. Here was the real, alternate, computer-assisted nineteenth century.
“Your Mr. Babbage should have gone to the Bengal,” Tejendra said. “Kolkata was a center for computational research. Nawab Siraj Ud Daula had introduced the Jacquard loom to the textile industry. It's a short step from punch cards for looms to punch-card programs for calculating mills.”
“In my world, the British destroyed the Bengal textile industry,” Everett said. “The Raj was built on the bones of Bengal weavers. My dad told me that.” Everett was North London born and bred, but he had always been interested in his Indian heritage and history.
“In this world, the East India Company lost the Battle of Plassey, and after dispatching the British, the Nawab didn't waste any time expelling his French former allies. For a hundred years Kolkata was a bright and brilliant jewel of learning and science and commerce.”
“Dr. Singh, you know that strange, cold, wonderful feeling you talked about?” Everett said. “I'm getting it now.” And this was the point where he could roll all these worlds of wonder and science and alternate history over into the important questions, the ones that required trust. “Dr. Singh, do you want to know about that other Tejendra Singh? I can tell you. I think I should tell you. He grew up in that same village, Bathwala. His family emigrated in 1974. He was always expected to shine.”
Dr. Singh smiled. Yeah, Everett thought. Punjabi parents, Punjabi grandparents. I have much expected of me, too.
“Like you, he went into science, into quantum physics. I think his mum and dad would have liked
it better if he'd been a surgeon. I don't know why he chose that field of physics. Maybe because it asks the really big questions about what reality is like. Maybe because the answers it comes up with aren't comfortable. Maybe, I don't know, is this possible? Maybe the walls between the worlds aren't as solid as we think they are and sometimes things leak through. Maybe dreams and visions and having a flash of the future, maybe they're moments when you brush past your other you. Like when sometimes you stroke a cat's fur and you can feel and see the static electricity? They're like static between the worlds. But sometimes I think we can never know why anyone does anything. Really know. He named me after the man who came up with the Many Worlds Theory—well, he did in our world—Hugh Everett.”
“I had thought of doing the same,” Dr. Singh said. “I apologize on behalf of my alter.”
“Well, there's me, and there's my kid sister Victory-Rose—she's very young. There were problems. I think she was an accident, when they were making up after a fight or something. You know how they do. My mum and dad split up last year. They're doing all right. I'm with my mum, but I see my dad a lot. I'm getting on better with him now than when he was at home.”
