by Ian McDonald
“Clear that gunk away from me.” Everett thought move into the power armor. Thryn mechanisms strained, but the Nahn stuff was plastered thick around him.
“No, I don't think so, Everett. I've seen what those EM pulse weapons can do—and I've felt it too. Anything, everything done to me or any part of me, we all feel. I feel. Do you know what it feels like? Like a part of yourself being ripped out. Again and again and again. It burns, Everett. It burns.”
“What do you want from me?”
The Nahn double shrugged.
“You puzzle us. Your technology resists us. It's all through you. We can't assimilate it. We thought we understood your technology. You evolve a technology to exterminate us, we use the knowledge we've collected to find a way around it. This is something we haven't seen before. There's nothing in our Consciousness about this. Who are you? Where are you from?”
Again, another tiny edge of advantage. It doesn't know about the Thryn. It doesn't know about Earth 4. It doesn't know that I'm not from this world at all. But it can just wait, puzzling all this out, until I starve to death. I need to take a risk.
“I'm Everett M. Singh. I'm not from this world. I'm from Earth 4.”
The Nahn double blinked its insect eyes twice.
“I'm communicating this to the Nahn Consciousness. Earth 4. Yes. We have a memory of that. We have the collected memories of the six billion humans we have assimilated, but there is a lot of knowledge still to be connected. Ah, yes. Parallel universes. One moment…” The Nahn double cocked its head, as if trying to listen in to an interesting conversation across a busy room. “The Thryn Sentiency. This is not human biology. This is why we can't assimilate it.”
Assimilate me, Everett M thought. Melt me into six billion others. Give me evil insect eyes. And that's my third advantage: I'm from another universe.
The Nahn double was studying him. Everett M could look back at it without horror and could see the differences, the details where the double wasn't quite perfect. The eyes, of course, and the battle-suit liner was clearly part of the double's skin: the feet were dyed grey rather than grey from melted snow. The hair didn't quite move right. It looked like the hair of CG characters in movies, like it was moving underwater. As he had scanned the Nahn, with his sensors, it must have scanned him from the outside in. Again he tried to will the battle suit to move. No. But how did it know his DNA? Unless…
This time, Everett M kept the cry down. And he realized a thing about bravery. Bravery needs an audience. It's for other people. When it's just you, on another world, with the collected nanotech mass and knowledge of six billion entities that used to be people—that used to be you, in some way or other—there is no brave. There's smarts, and there is survival. And as Everett M realized that, he understood that fear was the same. Fear also needs an audience. No one alone can be afraid.
The airship is ten minutes out, the battle armor said.
“You might like to know, I just got an estimate of the time it will take us to evolve a way to assimilate the Thryn technology,” the Nahn double said. “Somewhere in the region of six months.”
“I've a better idea,” Everett M said.
“We'd like to hear it.”
“I need you to release the suit.”
Again, the Nahn Everett M cocked its head like an inquisitive bird.
“The Consciousness…”
“There's six billion of you! There's only one of me!”
The Nahn clone blinked twice. Everett M felt his neck suddenly free to move, as well as his shoulders, his arms. He looked down and saw Nahn stuff sheeting from him in a black flood. Upper body, hips, legs. The Nahn flowed away and left him standing in a circle of trampled snow and weeds.
We are no longer restricted, the suit said.
“Yeah,” Everett M said. “Give me the private circuit.”
We are private now, the battle suit whispered. The airship will arrive in seven minutes.
“Gives me time to do this,” Everett M said on the private circuit. “Blue. Lambda. Oryx. Buttercup.” The four code words for the override. Charles Villiers had drummed them into him, again and again and again, right up to the ramp to the Heisenberg Gate that had sent him and the Madam Moon/battle suit to Earth 1.
Without a word, the Thryn battle suit split along a seam from forehead to groin. Panels retracted and the suit opened. Everett M Singh stepped unarmed, unprotected, and alone into the battlefield of dead Nahn. He looked his double in his nanotech insect eyes.
“Let's deal.”
Sen brought Everness in silent as a ghost over Hyde Park, over the wreck of the Albert Hall, across the dead faculty buildings and libraries and laboratories and lecture halls of Imperial University, to a dead stop nose-in to the top of the bell tower that stood at the heart of the campus. She pulled back the thrust levers and swung the impeller pods into hover.
To Everett it seemed that Earth 1 was his world—Earth 10 but with the volume turned up. The great buildings of this dead London were taller, bigger, bolder. The colleges of Fortress Oxford were more medieval, their cloisters gloomier, their gargoyles more lean and menacing. In this Imperial College—Imperial University, Everett kept reminding himself—the tower that stood at the center of snowy Queen's Lawn was a Victorian Gothic monster, taller even than Big Ben in Earth 10 London. In his world, Queen's Tower did not have four huge stone lions crouching at its base, or four angels, each bearing a different symbol of learning—a book, a triangle, a telescope, a pair of scales—at the point where the tower was capped with a dome. And that dome was not so high, and it had never been crowned with a flying angel coming down from heaven, blowing a golden trumpet, wings upraised, one foot lightly touching the summit of the dome. The same, but different. Very, very different.
“It's not if the Nahn come, it's when,” Lieutenant Kastinidis had said. Her troops were up in the out dock, armored and powered up. The Brigadier had set up a command post on the bridge. He would be controlling the mission from a distance.
“Some commander, as doesn't go into action with his sharpies,” Sharkey muttered to Everett as Sen trimmed the controls to hold Everness steady against the snow-filled gusts that swirled around the Queen's Tower.
“Bring us into boarding distance,” Captain Anastasia said. The tiniest nudge of the thrust levers brought the huge airship within range of the access bridge. “Full stop.” Everness hung motionless over the ruins of the great university. The Agister of Caiaphas College nodded her approval. For her status, but more, Everett thought, for her admiration of the ship and the crew who flew her, Captain Anastasia had allowed her the honored place by the great window. “Mr. Mchynlyth, run out the ramp.”
The bridge trembled as the machinery in the out dock rumbled into life.
“Are you ready, Dr. Singh?” the Agister asked. Tejendra nodded his head. Everett saw fear in his face and more: acceptance and peace. Tejendra Singh had always known he must face the Nahn.
“And you, Mr. Singh?” Captain Anastasia asked.
Everett took a deep breath.
“Bona.”
“Just one damn moment.” Sharkey's voice boomed across the bridge. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’” He slipped a shotgun from his coattail and threw it to Everett. “Everyone does the 23rd Psalm in the end. Here's some dry shell.”
Everett caught the gun and the ammunition that followed. He had already pulled on his old North Face jacket with the glow tubes tied to it. Visibility would be important in the lightless halls and corridors. Now he was complete.
“‘Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone…. You'll never walk alone,’” Everett said.
“I don't recognize your verse, sir, and I am conversant with the word of the Dear, Old Testament and New.”
“It's a song. In my world it's like the anthem for a football team. Liverpool F. C.”
“Th
ere's wisdom in some of them worldly songs,” Sharkey said. He tipped his hat with the muzzle of his shotgun, a salute to the Brigadier, and quit the bridge. See, a Lafayette-Sharkey is unafraid to walk the valley of death with his crewmate.
“Bona air, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said.
“Captain, can I have a word with Sen? Alone?”
“Make it quick, Mr. Singh.”
The stair foot was deserted. Everyone was above in the out dock, preparing each in his or her way. Sen threw herself on Everett like some over-affectionate animal, all hair and limbs. He almost went backward over the railing, down to the power deck below. She pushed her head hard against his chest. Her strange, warm, musky perfume was strong. It tugged at Everett's heart.
“Everett Singh, Everett Singh, don't go, don't go.” She banged her head against Everett's chest.
“I have to. I'm the only one who'll know if they find the one that'll work.”
“Everett Singh, no. Not again. ‘Sen mind the hedgehopper, Sen mind the ship.’ Sen gets told to stay behind but Sen saves your dish, Everett Singh, again and again and again. For you, it's always being on the run, for Sen it's, ‘Sen you're the pilot, Sen you're captain now.’ Don't go. This time, I can't save you.”
Sen was as wiry as a dog, but there was the strength of steel hawsers in her grip. She was built like Everness: light but stronger than any storm.
“Sen, I've, uh, I've got a loaded shotgun in my hand.”
“Well, let me help you with that.” Her fingers were so fast. She slipped the shotgun free from Everett's grasp with the same deft touch she'd used to try to steal Dr. Quantum from him on the night train to Hackney Great Port when they'd first met. Resistance was futile.
She kissed him. She kissed like she had kissed him the last time he had gone into desperate battle, against his alter from another universe. It was full and without restraint. And it was much more intense than a girl her age should kiss. She was all energy and passion and contradiction. She went up on her toes. The shotgun fell from her fingers.
“Sen, parlamo palari.”
“Of course, omi.”
“The meese sharpie…”
“That cod fruit in the naff sharpie clobber.”
“He's aunt nelling, but he don't cackle palari. Sen, if I don't troll back from this barney…”
“Nante parlamo that Everett Singh. Nante.”
“Sen, I need a blag.”
“Blag me anything, Everett Singh.”
“I need to blag an amriya.”
“Oh, Everett Singh, an amriya is a big blag.”
“It's a bijou ask. The comptator. I've zhooshed up a code. If I nante troll back again, zhoosh it. It'll scarper you back home again. Then, Sen, do this. Remember when you told me about the Polone-queen, trolling the shush to Deutschland for the Iddler, when the lillies came? She dumped the shush in the big blue buvare and scarpered. Sabi?”
“Sabi, Everett Singh.”
“If I nante the comptator, nante everyone. And Dona Villiers, she's no reason to ogle for you, not without the comptator. Jump, dump, Sen. Sabi?”
Sen lifted Everett's right hand to her lips and kissed the second knuckles of his fingers.
“I promises, Everett Singh. An amriya is made.”
“Bonaroo, Sen. Fantabulosa.”
He was halfway up to the out dock when Sen called his name.
“Hey. Your shooter.” She threw the shotgun up to him. Everett caught it and slung it over his shoulder. “Hey, Everett Singh! Alamo!”
Everett M stepped out of the open battle armor. He looked the Nahn double straight in the insect eye.
“What could you possibly have to offer us?” the Nahn Everett said.
“A way out.”
The Nahn double was still and silent long enough for the cold and wet to seep in from the outside to join the cold at Everett M's heart. The wind cut through the thin single layer of the Thryn skin suit. Everett M shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, jiggling for warmth. The last time he had been this cold was the morning of the end-of-term football game on the Bourne Green playing fields. The morning everything changed.
“The Nahn Consciousness will hear your offer,” the double said. It didn't feel the cold. It didn't feel anything.
“I've got a mission,” Everett M said. “I work for the Plenitude.”
“The so-called government of the Known Worlds,” the Nahn Everett said. “We're aware of it. It will be assimilated into a more efficient form.”
“There's an airship coming,” Everett M said.
“We're also aware of that.”
“Four minutes,” the battle armor said in the communications plug in Everett M's ear.
“It's from Oxford,” the Nahn double continued. “The Agistry has an advance outpost there. We are surveying it. It, too, will be assimilated in time.”
“I have to plant a tracking device on the airship,” Everett M said. “That's what all this is for. I plant the device, then they open a Heisenberg Gate and take me home again.”
“The quantum gateways from this universe have all been sealed. They've been set to transport anything that uses them into the heart of the sun in another universe. It's an effective quarantine.”
You sound like a mathematics teacher, Everett M thought and almost giggled. It was so stupid and inappropriate and yet right.
“I'm here, aren't I?”
“Can't deny that, Everett,” the Nahn double said.
“Here's the deal. I'm your way off this world. You let me plant the tracker. I call in the Heisenberg Gate. When I leave, I take a bit of you with me. Just a teeny tiny bit—nothing that would get noticed. I'm safe because you can't touch my Thryn tech, and you get…somewhere else.”
Again the Nahn Everett was still and silent. Everett M could see the airship now, coming in from the northeast, riding on the edge of the snow. God, it was big. Bigger than he had ever imagined. It was like a cloud, or a storm, or a natural feature. And he was a big fat target out here: the bull's eye at the center of rings of dead Nahn stuff. Come on, do you have to get the agreement of every one of the six billion you assimilated?
“It would have to be hard for you to remove. Once back in your home universe, what's to stop you from zapping it with your EM guns? Any attempt to remove or destroy it would have to result in catastrophic damage to you.”
“But it would leave my body,” Everett M said.
“Of course.”
“I can agree to that.”
He glanced at the sky. The airship was maneuvering over Kensington Gardens. Everett M could see the impeller pods and steering surfaces swivel and flex. You're there, he thought at his alter. But you don't know I'm here. He had only moments to make the deal. It was a dreadful deal. He was letting the Nahn loose in the Plenitude. Something worse than the worst disease. A virus with a mission to rule the universe. Had anyone ever contemplated a worse deed? But it was the only way he could save his life.
“We have a deal,” the Nahn Everett said. He raised his right forefinger. The tip unfolded and refolded into a tiny black butterfly. “This may sting a little.”
“What…”
The butterfly had too many wings. It fluttered in Everett M's face, then went around the back of his neck. Everett M turned his head and felt a sharp stabbing pain at his hairline. When he touched it he could feel nothing there. Inside. He didn't need his enhanced Thryn sense to tell him where it was. He could feel it, like a little ball of badness, wadded up tight, nestling against his spine. What have I done? Everett M thought. You did what you had to do. You made a deal to survive, he told himself.
The airship hung over the Albert Memorial and the Albert Hall, nose-in to the Imperial College tower. Queen's Tower was bigger and more Gothy in this universe than in Everett M's. But there was a Queen's Tower, and an Imperial, and there must be—or have been—a Tejendra Singh who worked there, who had discovered something that pulled people across parallel universes. The same people, the places
like echoes across all the universes. He was part of it. He hadn't asked to be. He wanted no part of this. He had been the slightly geeky kid at school who could stop almost any ball when he was between the posts of a football goal. Other lives in other worlds had dragged him into a multiverse-spanning conspiracy. They had forced him to this terrible decision to save his life by betraying humanity.
He felt the Nahn thing scratch in through his flesh and sink hooks into his spine. He wanted to throw up.
“It's in me.”
The Nahn Everett did not speak. Its face softened like melting ice cream; its eyes and mouth and nose and cheeks slumped and flowed. For a second it held the memory of Everett M's face, then it collapsed into a mound of Nahn stuff that merged with the mass of Nahn surrounding Everett. Like early snow vanishing under the sun, the Nahn stuff seeped into the ground. Gone. He was alone.
There was his backpack with the relay, his clothes, the hedgehopper still tethered to the lamp post. One last thing. The Nahn Everett had said they could hack Thryn technology, in time.
“Can you still hear me?” Everett M asked the battle suit.
“I am receiving you.”
Charles Villiers had drummed another set of instructions into Everett M at the Heisenberg Gate: the self-destruct code. “Pray you'll never need it,” Charles Villiers had said.
“Set timer for one hour. Peregrine lamp post ultramarine harp.”
“Very good, Everett M. Singh.”
It was only an empty suit of battle armor, but Everett M felt he was betraying a friend. If it had still been in its Madam Moon form, he was not sure he would have been able to speak the four words of the self-destruct code.
Everett M pulled the hedgehopper down from its hover. The other would remain bobbing on its safety line until its batteries ran out and it fell to earth. Everett M strapped on the backpack. The clothes would have offered some warmth, but it would have taken too long to pull them on, so he left them on the snow. No. The goggles. He had to take the goggles. Everett M slipped them over his eyes and buckled himself into the hedgehopper harness. The steering bar was so cold that it felt like it was burning his fingers. He could barely get a grip on the thrust lever. The ducted fans swiveled, one step, two, and Everett M took to the sky with treachery in his backpack and curled up next to his spine.
